Euthyphro and Omnipotence part 1

I recently came across a response to my October post on the Euthyphro Dilemma, which I thought it worth responding to. The response, written by philosopher Brian Zamulinski, was itself written in October, but I missed it until just a few days ago. In it Zamulinski says that my arguments defending the strength of the Euthyphro objection to the divine command theory are unsuccessful:

To repeat, Adam’s reformulated divine command theory is that morality is constituted by the commands of an essentially loving God.  Now, if E (for “entity”) essentially possesses P (for “property”), then E possesses P in all possible worlds in which E exists.  So, by hypothesis, God is loving in every world in which He exists.  God is not just contingently loving, that is, loving in at least one possible world in which He exists

On the basis of an analogy, Thibodeau claims that “we may know with certainty that an all-loving being will not issue a command to torture children, but, given that he is omnipotent, it remains the case that he can issue such a command.”  The analogy is to someone who will not but who could jump from the Empire State Building.  The analogy is irrelevant because the possible jumper is only a contingent jumper.  For the parallel to hold, it must be possible for an essentially non-jumping person to jump.  Thus, Thibodeau equivocates between an essentially loving being and a contingently loving being.  Thibodeau has a second objection that also fails:  it begs the question in that it presupposes that a non-loving being can create morality.

In my original post, I gave two arguments for the conclusion that the Euthyphro Dilemma defeats to the divine command theory (DCT) because it shows that the DCT implies that morality is arbitrary and contingent. My first argument was supposed to show that even an all-loving being is able to make cruel commands, and thus that the DCT implies that it is metaphysically possible that a cruel act such as torturing a child is morally obligatory. The second says, essentially, that even if we thought that an all-loving being cannot command torture, this does not help the DCT since it is possible that there exists a divine commander who enjoys (and commands) cruelty for its own sake. If it is possible that such a being (whom I called Asura) exists, then it is possible that torturing children is morally obligatory. Zamulinski says that both of these arguments fail; the first because I have misunderstood or misinterpreted Adams version of the divine command theory, the second because I have begged the question. In this post I will respond to the second of Zamulinski’s criticisms and I will follow up with a later post that will address his first criticism.

For now what I am particularly interested in is the following statement:

Thibodeau has a second objection that also fails:  it begs the question in that it presupposes that a non-loving being can create morality.

This claim strikes me as incredibly odd. Why, if Adams is permitted to assume that an all-loving being can create morality, am I not permitted to assume that a non-loving being can do the same thing? Now, it is true that I actually don’t believe that a non-loving being can create morality, I am assuming it only for the sake of creating a reductio of the divine command theory. But I cannot see that there is any problem with this assumption.

Adams version of the divine command theory assumes something that I believe is false: that an all-loving being can create morality. I believe this is false because I believe that no person, loving or otherwise, could have control over moral facts (that is, have the capacity to change moral facts or to bring them into existence). But I am not and was not trying to make this point. My point was only to draw out the absurd consequences of the divine command theory. My tack was to say that if we are permitted to assume that an all-loving being can create morality, then surely we are permitted to assume that a non-loving being can create morality. Zamulinski has not shown that this is an unreasonable argumentative move.

If we knew how God is able to create morality, then maybe we would be in a position to say that a non-loving being cannot do it (or at least that we are not warranted in supposing that he can). Maybe being all-loving endows God with some special capabilities that a non-all-loving being would not have. But has Adams actually shown how God creates morality? Well, the divine command theory says that God does it by issuing commands. But a non-loving omnipotent being can certainly issue commands. Then is there some reason to believe that the commands of a non-loving being would be ineffective, that they wouldn’t actually create morality even though God’s commands can? If this is what Adams or Zamulinski or anyone else believes, then we need an argument for it. We need to know why it is that being all-loving endows God with the capacity to create morality; we need to know how it works. There is no such argument that I am aware of. As it stands, given that Asura (the evil Creator from my example) is at least as powerful as God, it is reasonable to think that if there is something that God can do, then Asura can do it as well.

The structure of my argument, to which Zamulinski objects, is as follows:

(1)    If God can create morality, then so can Asura.

(2)    There is some possible world in which Asura commands the torture of children

Thus, (3) In that world, the torture of children is morally obligatory.

Thus, (4) There is some world in which the torture of children is morally obligatory.

Therefore, (5) It is metaphysically possible that the torture of children is morally obligatory.

I cannot see how premise (1) begs the question. The question is not, “Can a non-loving deity create morality?” but “Does the divine command theory have the consequence that morality is arbitrary and contingent?” Remember, Adams modification of the divine command theory was motivated by a need for a reply to the Euthyphro Dilemma, not because it is somehow difficult to believe that a being who is not all loving can create moral properties.

Again, my working assumption is that if there is some feat that God, assuming he exists, can accomplish, than, absent any obvious reason to think otherwise, we are justified in believing that any being that is omnipotent will be able to accomplish the same task. It is worth pointing out, however, that Adams’ God is limited in the things that he can do. According to Zamulinski, God cannot command the torture of children, for example. Thus, a being who is not essentially limited, in the way that Zamulinski, Adams, and Matthew Flannagan all agree that God is, can do more than God can do.

With this in mind, I will now reformulate my argument to explicitly refer to a being who is essentially unlimited rather than to the non-loving being Asura:

Conisder the supernatural being who we’ll call Yod: Yod is the omniscient, omnipotent, all-loving creator. In fact the only way in which Yod differs from God is that Yod is not essentially all-loving. There are worlds in which Yod is all-loving, but there are also worlds in which he is not. Yod is not essentially all-loving because he is omnipotent. Being omnipotent, it is possible for him to do anything, including issue cruel commands, such as that children be tortured. Issuing such a command may entail changing his character traits, but being omnipotent means being unlimited, which in turn entails not being limited by one’s own character traits. Since Yod is omnipotent, he can change his own character. Thus there is no problem in supposing that Yod, even though he is actually all-loving (and thus has not actually commanded the torture of children), can command the torture of children. Since Yod can command torture, there is some possible world in which he does command torture and thus, if the divine command theory is true, there is some possible world in which torturing children is morally obligatory.

Notice that this version of the argument does not assume that a non-loving being can create morality, it assumes that an all-loving being who is not essentially loving can create morality. This is not so far from Adams’ presupposition that an essentially loving being can create morality. And until we have some argument that shows why only an essentially loving being can create morality, if Adams’ presupposition is allowable, mine must be as well.

Notice also that I have claimed that Yod’s being omnipotent requires that he not be essentially loving. This observation, which is the basis of my claim that an omnipotent being is able to command torture, will be expanded and defended in my next post.

Maybe Andrew Sullivan is an Atheist

Andrew Sullivan recently linked to an article by Jennifer Fulwiler in which she argues that her atheism and her belief that life is meaningful were in irreconcilable conflict and that the only way to resolve the conflict was to renounce atheism (she converted  to Catholicism). The best criticism of her implicit argument, that atheism implies that life is meaningless, that I have come across is from Will Wilkinson. Sullivan also published some of his readers’ comments, a few of which took the opportunity to express disagreement with Fulwiler about what makes life meaningful. In response to one reader’s comment, Sullivan said something that I found rather odd. I’ll quote the relevant portion of the reader response, followed by Sullivan’s rejoinder:

“We have a constant explosion of love and sadness through the enormous sweep of the cosmos and it makes us feel without meaning? If the Universe is anything, it is proof that meaning can be found in the smallest of existence, from atoms to neutrinos and down beneath it. It can be found in a virus if one has to look. The lesson of the Universe is not insignificance, the lesson of it is our mutual enormity. The Universe is loud with it.”

But this is God. It is certainly what I understand as God. Nonbelievers need to let go of anthropocentric, grey-bearded beings in the sky for God itself, the highest consciousness of all, and the force that gives this staggering beauty, available to us all, love.

It is very odd that nonbelievers are being admonished to let go of something that they explicitly don’t believe in. But what Sullivan thinks he means is that nonbelievers are confused about the real nature of God and that if they understood what God really is, then they (or at least many of them) would realize that they do believe in God. But this is deeply confused. Atheists have let go of the anthropomorphic sky deity because that is what an atheist is: someone who thinks that there is no such thing. Whatever else he may believe about the source of meaning, and whatever he may want to call that source, what the disbeliever disbelieves in is a personal creator.

Theism is the belief that there is an almighty person who created and sustains the universe. And thus atheism is the belief that there is no such almighty person.

Now, if Sullivan himself has let go of the anthropomorphic conception of God, and if he means by “letting go of” that he believes that this conception is false, then Sullivan is an atheist. Atheism is just the rejection of theism, and theism, to repeat, really is the belief that the world was created by an almighty person.  And so if Sullivan thinks there is no such almighty person, then he is an atheist (despite his repeated assertions that he is a Catholic). If he does believe that there is an almighty person, then it is very peculiar that he is admonishing atheists to give up the anthropocentric being.

But actually the above quote suggests that Sullivan has not completely let go of the anthropocentric being, for he tells us that God is “the highest consciousness of all.” This is an enigmatic phrase, to say the least, and its occurrence in this sentence is highly ambiguous. Is he saying that God is that consciousness that is highest of all, that is, higher than any other consciousness? Or is he saying that God is the highest consciousness of everyone; asserting that there is some kind of collective consciousness? Well, he doesn’t make this clear. But if he is claiming that there is some kind of highest consciousness, higher than any other, then it is pretty obvious that he has not completely let go of the anthropocentric bearded guy. For Sullivan is, on this interpretation, asserting that there is some kind of greatest conscious being, which is really not far from claiming that there is an almighty person.

But suppose he really does want to assert the proposition that there is some kind of collective or underlying consciousness of all of us. It is not at all clear why Sullivan would call that God. Did this consciousness create the universe? Did it send its only son to die for the sins of humanity? Did it die on the cross? And if he does want to say that this consciousness did all of these things, then he is most definitely conceiving of it as a kind of person.

Here is the upshot: Atheists deny that there is an almighty conscious creator. (They also, by the way, generally want to add that the supposition that there is such a conscious being does not at all help us account for any of the important aspects of life, including that life is meaningful). Theists assert that there is such a being. I don’t really know whether Sullivan is an atheist or a theist, and it doesn’t really matter. But when anyone asks questions such as, “Can life be meaningful on the assumption that there is no God?” or “Can atheism account for the fact that life has meaning?” we need to be clear about what we are talking about. When an atheist claims that life is meaningful even if there is no God, what this means is that the existence of an almighty person is not required for life to have meaning.

The Euthyphro Objection is Robust

I came across this article by Matt Flannagan criticizing a recent article by Jerry Coyne about secular morality (thanks to Jeffery Jay Lowder at the Secular Outpost). Coyne seems to want to make two distinct points: One, that atheists have a well-developed moral sense and thus you don’t need God to be a good person; and two, that morality cannot come from God. Flannagan makes some good observations about the relevance of the distinction between having a moral sense and being under a genuine moral obligation and shows that Coyne doesn’t always acknowledge this distinction. However, Flannagan himself is guilty of misunderstanding Coyne’s argument about the Euthyphro dilemma and he wants to downplay some of the serious problems that the dilemma creates for God-based moral theories. I’ll quote the relevant portion of Flannagan’s article:

The only time Coyne is remotely on point is when he argues that if moral obligations are constituted by God’s commands then morality becomes arbitrary; anything at all could be deemed ‘right’ as long as God has commanded it – even stealing or infanticide. Coyne suggests this argument is devastating and has known to be so by philosophers for hundreds of years.

In fact, since Adams’ publication, this argument has been subject to extensive criticism in the philosophical literature. So much so that today even Adams’ leading critics grant that it fails. Adams contended that moral obligations are, in fact, the commands of a loving and just God; therefore, it is possible for infanticide or theft to be right only if a fully informed, loving and just person could command things like infanticide and stealing. The assumption that this is possible seems dubious. The very reason Coyne cites examples such as infanticide and theft is because he considers them to be paradigms of conduct that no morally good person could ever knowingly entertain or endorse.

Coyne seems vaguely aware of the response, stating “Of course, you can argue that God would never sanction something like that because he’s a completely moral being, but then you’re still using some idea of morality that is independent of God.” Here he again falls into confusion. What his response shows is that people can have ideas about and recognise what counts as loving and just independently of their beliefs about God and his commands. Now this is true but this does not show that moral obligations can exist independently of the commands of a loving and just God. Coyne again fails to grasp the basic distinctions involved in discussions of God and morality.

I think Flannagan is wrong in his interpretation of Coyne’s argument. And I know that he is wrong about what Adam’s leading critics say about the validity of the arbitrariness objection that stems from the Euthyprho Dilemma. (One need only consult the work of Michael Martin, Erik Wielenberg, Mark C. Murphy, or even Richard Swinburne, to see that this is so). Regardless of what the academic consensus is, it is fairly easy to show that the arbitrariness objection is very powerful. But first, I want to address Flannagan’s misinterpretation of Coyne’s argument.

Coyne does not make the mistake that Flannagan accuses him of; he is not just saying that in order to judge God’s commands as moral or immoral we would have to have a moral sense that is independent of God. Rather, he is saying that we would need a standard of moral obligation that is independent of God. What Coyne has done is condense a bit of argumentative interaction between the purveyor of the Euthyphro objection and the defender of the divine command theory (DCT). One aspect of the Euthyphro objection is that, if the DCT is true, then morality is arbitrary. If the DCT is true, God can make any action (even something universally regarded as horrendous such as torturing small children) morally right just by commanding that we do it. But this conflicts strongly with our moral intuitions: it seems natural to believe that something as awful as torturing children could not possibly be morally right. But the DCT implies that this action, along with any act that causes unwarranted and horrendous suffering, could possibly be right (Note: the notion of possibility at use here is metaphysical possibility, not epistemic; more on this below.) One divine command theorist response to this is to say that a loving and moral God would never issue commands the require us to needlessly cause people to suffer (this is the response that Coyne mentions).

There are a few problems with this response. The most important (and the one that I think that Coyne had in mind) is that if we are to understand the reply to mean that a moral God would not issue immoral commands, then this in essence capitulates to the Euthyphro objection. That is to say, the response implies that there is a standard of morality that is independent of God against which he and his commands can be judged. But if morality is independent of God, then the DCT is false.

Consider: If God’s commands are the standard of right and wrong, then it makes no sense to say that one of his commands is immoral. Say he commands that every person kills at least one dog in their lifetime just for fun. If his commands establish the moral facts, that, e.g., an action is morally right (or wrong, as the case may be), then his command that we kill a dog establishes that killing dogs is obligatory. And it makes no sense to say that this command is immoral because killing dogs is morally wrong. On the DCT, under this scenario, killing dogs would be morally obligatory, full stop, just because God commanded that we do it. Thus, if the DCT is true, it is logically impossible for God to command us to do something that it would be morally wrong for us to do. The fact that God commanded us to do it establishes that it is morally right. The very important upshot of this for the purposes of the current discussion is that, on the DCT it is a logically necessary fact that every action that God commands us to do is a morally right action.

So now, if we say that God is a morally good being and that therefore he won’t issue immoral commands, we are assuming that there is a standard of morality that is independent of God. For according to what standard are God’s commands to be judged? We just saw that on the DCT, it is logically impossible for God to command us to perform an action that is immoral; but that is just because an action is morally right just in virtue of God’s commanding it. And this means that no matter what commands God issues, including that we kill dogs or torture children, those things would be morally right. So, if we want to say that God won’t issue those kinds of commands because he is moral, then we have to assume some standard, independent of God, according to which an act can be judged as moral or immoral. And this means that we would have to reject the DCT.

This is the point that Coyne was making when he said, “you can argue that God would never sanction something like that because he’s a completely moral being, but then you’re still using some idea of morality that is independent of God.”

Notice that this has nothing to do with appealing to a moral sense that is independent of God. The point is a logical one and does not depend on us having a moral sense or on there actually being genuine moral value. So I think Flannagan just misinterprets the gist of Coyne’s objection in the above quoted passage.

In any event, as Flannagan indicated, the debate does not end here because the divine command theorist may concede the point but still insist that all he needs is that God is all-loving, and he will get the same consequence (or at least one that is close enough); namely that God will not issue commands that require us to cause horrible pain and suffering (or do anything that we all agree would be horrendous). If developed in the appropriate direction, this reply can lead to a fully developed response to the arbitrariness objection. That response goes something like this: “God is necessarily an all-loving being. The commands that he issues flow naturally from his essential nature. Thus it would be impossible for an all-loving being to issue commands to kill, maim, or unjustly harm. So, in fact, it is not possible, on the DCT, that torturing children is morally right because, on the DCT, it is not possible for God to issue a command that we torture children.”

There are two problems with this response. The first problem is that when we are talking about what is metaphysically possible, we are talking about what can happen, not what will happen. So, if I want to know whether it is possible (in the relevant sense) for my friend to jump off of the Empire State building, I need to know only whether he can do it. It is irrelevant to this question whether or not my friend will do it. He may be an unusually content, satisfied, and happy person by nature who has absolutely no inclination toward suicide. I may conclude therefore, that he will not jump from the Empire State building. But it remains the case that he can do it. Similarly, we may know with certainty that an all-loving being will not issue a command to torture children, but, given that he is omnipotent, it remains the case that he can issue such a command. And if he can do it, then it is possible for him to do it. So, it is possible for an all-loving God to command that we torture kids and thus, on the DCT, it is possible that torturing kids is right.

But even if we could somehow respond to this concern, there is still a second problem. This problem stems not from a concern about what it is possible for God to do, but what is possible period. Consider:

The following is possible:

        (A) There exists an all-powerful creator that enjoys watching sentient beings suffer.

As I’ve done in the past, let’s call this horrible deity, ‘Asura.’

Given that (A) is possible, the following is also possible:

                (T) Asura commands that parents torture their babies.

To translate this into possible world semantics, we’ll say that there is a possible world (call it W_A) in which (A) and (T) are true. If the DCT is true, it follows that in W_A the following is true:

                (O) Torturing babies is morally obligatory for parents.

What all of this means is that it is possible that it is obligatory to torture babies.  And it’s important to note that I am not saying that it is epistemically possible, that for all we know torturing babies is obligatory (on the contrary, I think we know that torturing babies is wrong). Rather, I am saying that, if the DCT is true, then it follows that it is metaphysically possible that torturing babies is the right thing to do.

There are two relevant conclusions to draw from this: First, it shows that the arbitrariness objection cannot be answered via the claim that God is necessarily a loving being. Second, it demonstrates once again that the DCT has consequences that are fundamentally contrary to our moral intuitions. We cannot imagine that torturing babies could be right.  Torturing babies is wrong everywhere, every time, in all possible worlds. That is to say, torturing babies is necessarily wrong. Since it implies that it is possible for torturing babies to be obligatory, the DCT conflicts strongly with our moral intuitions.

So, contrary to Flannagan’s dismissal of it, the arbitrariness objection to the divine command theory is very much alive.

A bit of confusion in Owen Flanagan’s latest

I’ve been reading Owen Flanagan’s new book, The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized, and I’ve come across a passage that I am afraid might be hopelessly confused. Flanagan’s overall project is to articulate a version of Buddhism that is naturalistic (i.e., consistent with what science tells us about the world), hence the subtitle. The passage in question concerns the reduction of the mental to the physical and the possibility (defended by some Buddhists) that there might be special states of consciousness that do not correlate with (and thus are not reducible to) states of the brain. Flanagan articulates two different theories about mental states that guide brain research. The first is the identity theory according to which, in Flanagan’s words, “all mental states are in fact brain states.” It is in describing the second, a view that he calls the neural correlate view (NCV), that things get a little fishy:

The second view . . . can be understood as quietistic or agnostic as far as commitment to metaphysical physicalism goes (the view that what there is, and all that there is, is “physical,” that is, matter and energy transfers). Although NCV claims that each and every mental state has certain distinctive neural correlates, it need neither endorse nor condemn the view that the subjective properties of every experience are reducible to or exhausted by the neural underpinnings of that experience. Perhaps subjectively experienced mental states have sui generis properties that are nonphysical.

Although proponents of the neural correlate view usually assume, as do proponents of the identity theory, that there will be neural property correlates for all the features of mental states as detected first-personally, the view doesn’t actually entail this. Since identity is not claimed, it is possible that mental states might be caused by or correlated with brain states, but that the neural correlates do not contain specific matches (correlates) for each and every property revealed at the mental level. (52, emphasis added)

The idea seems to be that proponents of NCV want to admit the possibility that there are at least some non-physical mental properties.  The claim that there are mental properties (or properties of mental states) that are not reducible to neural properties sounds an awful lot like property dualism. Property dualism, at least as I understand it, is the view that the mental realm (or at least part of it) is characterized by properties that are not the same as nor reducible to any physical properties. Property dualism is a rejection of the identity theory. While a property dualist will agree that all mental states are correlated with a physical state of the brain, they insist that mental states have properties that are not reducible (or identical with) physical states of the brain.

One way to describe NCV might be as follows: NCV is metaphysically open while the identity theory is metaphysically closed. The identity theory says that the world is composed only of physical states and so it does not allow into its worldview any state or property that is not physical. NCV says that it is possible that there are non-physical mental properties; it is open to the existence of such properties but not committed to it. Another way of saying this is that NCV is the view that property dualism might be true. I’m not certain that this is how Flanagan understands NCV but, in any event, this understanding gets rather problematic given the sentence immediately following the above passage: “It is even possible on NCV that there are no neural correlates for some rare and special mental states.” (52)

Flanagan here appears to allow that NCV admits the possibility of free-floating mental states that have no brain state correlates. There are a few problems with this. First, it belies the name, neural correlate view. Second, it admits the possibility of a kind of dualism more akin to substance dualism. Property dualism insists that every mental state is correlated with a brain state, but that mental states are characterized by properties that are not physical. If there are mental states without neural correlates, this suggests that the mental is a different kind of substance. And this would imply that NCV is even more metaphysically open than indicated above: it is open to the existence not just of non-physical properties, but non-physical substance. This is something that I doubt a naturalist and materialist such as Flanagan would be happy to accept as consistent with materialism.  Finally, it directly contradicts what Flanagan says about NCV is the passage above: “NCV claims that each and every mental state has certain distinctive neural correlates.”

So there are two potential renderings of NCV: (1) There are possibly non-physical mental properties. (2) There are possibly mental states that have no brain state correlates (which implies, does it not, that there are possibly non-physical mental states?).

This might be written off as just a bit of sloppy editing were it not for the fact that Flanagan goes on to employ the mental states reading of NVC in a brief discussion of the Dalai Lama’s claim that some states of consciousness induced by Buddhist meditation are unlikely to have neural correlates. Now Flanagan does not say whether he regards NCV as a materialist theory, but he does express disdain for those that would use the metaphysical openness of NCV to promote dualism: “NCV can be used in this way to reintroduce various mental will-o’-the-wisps that will please those with dualist hopes, aspirations, or tendencies.” (52)

The Dalai Lama, apparently, is such a person. Flanagan continues, “the Dalai Lama expressed doubt that, at least in the case of states of “luminous consciousness” (on some interpretations identical to achieving nirvana in this life), any neural correlates will be found for this extraspecial type of conscious mental state.” (53) But Flanagan has no sympathy for this view and, after briefly recounting the Dalai Lama’s argument, declares the position to be inconsistent with naturalism: “This sort of expansive use of NCV is driven purely by antecedent commitment to a view that is antimaterialist, not by any features of the evidence; as such it is nonnaturalist.” (53)

Notice also that it is not NCV itself that is allegedly nonnaturalist, but the Dalai Lama’s use of it. If a view is consistent with naturalism, then how is that a particular use of the view can be nonnaturalist? It appears that what is worrisome to Flanagan is not that the Dalai Lama is committed to a view with peculiar metaphysical commitments, but that the Dalai Lama only accepts that view because it allows him to articulate and defend his own position which he has a prior commitment to. So, the Dalai Lama’s error, it seems, is that his commitment to his metaphysical view of the mind is driven not by the evidence, but by his religion. That’s a legitimate criticism, but it does not make the Dalai Lama’s view nonaturalist. It may be contrary to the methods of scientific inquiry, as believing, despite a lack of evidence, that there was an ancient alien civilization on Mars is contrary to the methods of scientific inquiry. But that a theory is believed on non-scientific grounds does not make it nonnaturalist.

But is the Dalai Lama’s position inconsistent with naturalism? I think that would be a difficult case to make. I’m reminded of Galen Strawson’s version of physicalism as defended in his “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism.” But let’s put that argument aside. A great deal might depend on whether the Dalai Lama understands his position as a version of substance dualism or property dualism. If he is a substance dualist, then the case that he is a nonnaturalist could potentially be stronger (but see Strawson). But if he is a property dualist, then the case will be weaker. Usually property dualists (I’m thinking of John Searle and Thomas Nagel in particular) will describe their views as non-physicalist or non-materialist; but they are also very insistent that they are completely naturalistic. Property dualists typically conceive of mental properties as distinct from physical properties and yet through and through natural.

The main problem, as far as Flanagan’s position goes, is that he does not say whether NCV is consistent with naturalism (at least not at this point of the book). He articulates two different versions of it (the first, that all mental states have neural correlates; the second, the some mental states might not have neural correlates), but he does not say whether either or both is inconsistent with naturalism. My point about the Dalai Lama’s argument is that there is no reason to ascribe nonnaturalism to him if his views are consistent with a naturalist position, even if he adopts his beliefs for non-scientific reasons.

Sam Harris on Taxing the Rich

Sam Harris has apparently ignited some controversy by writing a post agreeing with Warren Buffet’s position that the extremely wealthy should be paying more in taxes. Harris says that he has received quite a bit of feedback, much of it negative. The general thrust of much of the negative criticism concerns the very legitimacy of taxation itself, with many people claiming that taxation is a form of theft. This is something you sometimes hear from the more libertarian-minded, but I rarely see anyone asked to defend this claim, which is, after all, fairly startling, strongly counterintuitive to many people, and deeply important if true. Thinking about this issue has prompted me to write a fairly lengthy examination of it and the parallel claim that a person is entitled to keep everything that he or she earns.

Harris, I think, errs when he says,

I agree that everyone should be entitled to the fruits of his or her labors and that taxation, in the State of Nature, is a form of theft.

This is almost definitely wrong because, taken literally, it is nonsensical. In a state of nature there is no government, hence there is no institution whereby a government can take a portion of a person’s income. So in a state of nature taxation cannot be theft because there is no such thing as taxation. This is a fairly minor point, but it does make me wonder exactly what Harris meant to concede here. Some have taken him to be conceding that taxation is a form of theft, full stop. But, as I hope to show below, that is a very strong claim that requires considerable argument. So this, coupled with his attempt to qualify his concession by referring the state of nature, makes me think that Harris really did not mean to concede that taxation is a form of theft (period).

Regardless of what Harris meant to say, I think the topic is worth considering. First we need to ask why anyone would believe that taxation is theft to begin with. Well, fairly obviously taxation is the forced confiscation of part of a person’s income. But this alone doesn’t justify the claim that it constitutes theft since theft is the unjust (or illegal) taking of property belonging to another individual. So the claim that taxation equals theft boils down to the claim that it is the unjust confiscation of another person’s money. So why should we think that the government taking a portion of one’s income is unjust? One common justification is that it is wrong to take money that a person has earned. I want to consider this justification, but once again, we need to begin with a question: What does it mean to say that a person has earned his income? What does earning consist in? Let’s consider some examples:

Suppose I am the beneficiary of a large inheritance, say half a million dollars. Did I earn that money? Arguably, no.  I just happen to be lucky enough to be related to the person who possessed it.

Suppose I buy a $5 lottery ticket and win $2 million. Did I earn that money? At least to me, the notion of earning does not apply to money that is acquired through random chance. If I and another person each take the same or sufficiently analogous steps in an effort to acquire some amount of money, only one of us can get the money, and the winner of the money is chosen completely randomly, it is at least highly questionable to claim that the winner earned the money.

Let’s think about the issue of taxation in these two cases. Would it be wrong for the government to confiscate a percentage of the money in either of them? If you say yes, then your justification must be something other than that it is wrong to take money that a person has earned. What is this justification?

Let’s flesh out the details of these examples a bit more. Suppose that each of the individuals in the two scenarios lives in a democracy with a functioning government that engages in many sorts of activities, all of which require money. One of the things that the government does is provide security for investments in the form of regulations of financial institutions, insurance on bank deposits, etc. The government also provides an ample defense force protecting its citizens and the country as a whole from financially devastating invasions (including those from powers who may seek to confiscate and redistribute the assets of wealthy citizens). Thus, to some non-negligible but unquantifiable extent, the value of the assets of the two individuals in the above scenarios depends upon the costly activities of the government. It is entirely accurate to say that the activities of the government are responsible for some portion of the assets’ value. Why would we not think that these two individuals indeed owe the government some of the value of their assets? Regardless of how you answer that question, you must at least concede that the government taking a portion of the income of either of these two individuals is an importantly different kind of thing than a person breaking into your home and taking your laptop. So if we are going to assimilate these two activities (robbery and taxation) under the concept of theft, we are going to need a very strong argument.

Something that might seem to follow from the claim that a person has earned his or her income is that she deserves what she has been paid. Undoubtedly the notions of earning and deserving are distinct, but I want to expand the discussion here and think in terms of what people deserve. I think that the appeal of the notion that a person is entitled to keep all of the money that she earns stems, at least in part from the parallel notion that a person deserves the money they are paid. But I think it is highly questionable that every person deserves all of the money that they are paid.

Some more examples:

Suppose I am a songwriter who writes a catchy tune that, even though it is not a particularly good song, becomes wildly popular because it is used in the soundtrack of a successful and popular film. I sell millions of copies of the song, taking in nearly a million dollars in one year. Have I earned this money?

Compare this example to that of a physician who spends years of her life and tens of thousands of dollars to earn her MD and medical license, and obtains a position in private practice where she earns $200,000/year. She has worked tremendously hard and is well-rewarded, but she makes only a fraction of what the songwriter has managed to acquire. Given the discrepancy in the amount of effort, talent, skill, etc. between the physician and the songwriter, I think that we may legitimately balk at the claim that the songwriter deserves what he has been paid. It is unclear what notion of dessert you would have to be using in order to believe that the songwriter deserves more money than the doctor.

The songwriter owes his wealth, to a large extent, to two factors, neither of which he has any control over nor responsibility for. First, the cost of producing copies of his work is negligible and thus there are few disincentives to scaling his product. He can cheaply produce as many copies as he can sell (or, more accurately, he can contract with a company that can cheaply produce and distribute the copies and share the profits with him). This feature of the songwriter’s reality is a result of a number of inventions, including sound recording devices and sound reproduction devices that the songwriter played no part in creating. Before the twentieth century, it would not have been possible for a musician to produce and distribute multiple copies of recordings of his music.

The second factor that contributes to the wealth of the songwriter that he has no responsibility for is the size of the population to which he is selling his product. A large population entails a larger potential for huge sales. Again, this has nothing to do with the inherent worth of the music that is produced. Brittany Spears could accumulate vastly larger sums of money than JS Bach because she was born at a time that allowed for her to produce and sell recordings of her product to a very large population. Is it reasonable to think that Spears is more deserving of the fortune that she acquired than Bach? Arguably, Bach was more talented, more responsible, and worked harder to produce better music. If anything, it would seem that he would be more deserving than Brittany Spears of the millions of dollars Spears “earned.”

Another example: Suppose I am the owner of a paper company that distributes paper to organizations all over America. I own a large fleet of delivery vehicles that operate on publically built and maintained roads and bridges. Without that infrastructure, my company would be unable to deliver our product in a timely manner. Would it not be reasonable to conclude that some non-negligible but unquantifiable portion of the value of my company is a direct result of the activities of my government? When you add the fact, discussed above, that the government also maintains a defense force that protects public infrastructure from the devastation of war and also provides for the kind of persistent peace that is conducive to a strong economy, it becomes even more problematic to assume that the money that my business takes in is money that I (or my business) have earned of my own accord and that thus it would be wrong for the government to take any of it.

Consider now the extremely high salaries of some CEOs and other executives. Does a person who makes $3 million a year really deserve so much more than a physician who earns only a couple hundred thousand? Does a CEO really earn his multi-million dollar salary? I don’t think that any CEO works harder, is more talented, or bears so much more responsibility than a physician that the CEO’s efforts are worth 10 times as much. And here we are comparing such an extreme salary to one that is already very large. Does the effort of a CEO (any CEO) entitle him to make 100 times more than the average teacher? I’m not suggesting that there is anything morally questionable about paying a CEO such a salary; that is a separate issue. The question I am asking is really about whether it makes sense to say of a person who gets paid so much money that she earned it or that she deserves it? To say that she deserves it is to suggest, at least to my mind, that her work is so valuable that it is worth 10 times what a well-paid physician makes or 100 times what some teachers make. And I just don’t see how to make that case.

Again, I want to be very clear here that I am not trying to suggest that CEOs shouldn’t be paid millions of dollars per year. That is not the point. Companies should be free to pay their CEOs whatever amount they think they can afford and is necessary to retain the CEO’s services. The question is whether the CEO earns that money, or, comparably, whether they deserve it. I have tried to bring up certain problems with suggesting that a person earns whatever they are paid (in the sense of deserving it or that they’re work is worth it) or whatever they acquire by legal means. But I certainly don’t have some well-worked out theory about how much work is worth a given amount of compensation. I just have the sense that at some monetary amounts, we are no longer talking about money that is earned (in the appropriate sense). Thus, saying that a person is entitled to retain everything that he has earned doesn’t really get you anywhere. Arguably, some people are rewarded with an income much of the value of which is not really earned in the requisite sense. Now maybe we can still make the case that it is wrong for the government to take any portion of any person’s income, whether that income is deserved (or earned) or not. But this, if it can be defended, must be defended in some way other than talking about people’s right to what they have earned.

So, I think it is very questionable to describe taxation as a form of theft. More appropriate seems Oliver Wendell Holme’s statement that “taxes are the price we pay for civilization.”  All of this is to suggest that the person who wants to claim that taxation is a form of theft has a very big task on his hands to defend this claim. It is not obvious and nobody should concede it.

On Interpreting Messages from God

Michele Bachman suggested (apparently in jest) that Hurricane Irene was a message from God. And what, exactly, was God trying to tell us?

 We need to cut spending:

I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’ Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we’ve got to rein in the spending.

So, knowing that a hurricane is likely to cause extensive damage to property and government maintained infrastructure, infrastructure that we are going to want to repair, can the All-Knowing really believe that causing a hurricane is the best way to send a message that we need to cut spending?

My wife adds one more nice wrinkle: Suppose God wanted to show his support for same-sex marriage. Where would he send the hurricane?

Kevin Williamson on Politicians and Science

Kevin Williamson at the National Review Online has written a post on the scientific beliefs of politicians that has gotten a lot of attention from other bloggers (including Jonathan Chait, Kevin Drum, and Patrick Appel (at Andrew Sullivan’s blog)). Williamson argues that a politicians scientific beliefs are irrelevant and that progressives are interested in the views on Rick Perry, Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, and others not because they care about science (according to Williamson, progressives don’t care at all about science) but merely as a convenient ploy to attack politicians whose policies they disagree with. I don’t have a lot to add to the discussion, but I thought I would point out something very odd about Williamson’s argument that others haven’t directly commented on. Here is the part of Williamson’s post that I find the most peculiar:

Progressives like to cloak their policy preferences in the mantle of science, but they do not in fact give a fig about science, which for them is only a vehicle to be ridden to the precise extent that it is convenient. This is why they will ask what makes Rick Perry qualified to disagree with the scientific establishment, but never ask the equally relevant question of what makes Jon Huntsman qualified to agree with it. So long as they are getting the policies they want, they don’t care. (my emphasis)

In the highlighted sentence, Williamson seems to be arguing that, in order to accept a scientific theory, one must be a qualified authority on the subject matter in question. But is that correct? What undoubtedly is correct is that neither Rick Perry nor Jon Hunstman is an expert on climate change science, and thus if you wanted to know about the state of the evidence concerning the extent and causes of climate change, neither of these politicians is someone you ought to consult. The corollary that Williamson seems to accept is that if we want to know the state of climate change science, then we ought to consult experts. But it most certainly does not follow from this that every non-expert is not qualified to agree with the expert consensus.

The suggestion that Hunstman should be asked what makes him qualified to agree with the scientific community’s consensus on climate change implies that there is something questionable about a non-expert basing his or her own beliefs on the testimony of experts. And this cannot be right. When I was an undergraduate, I was taking a class in the philosophy of mind with John Searle; in lecture one day, a student asked him how we know things that we have no direct experience of, such as that the Earth is round, that there are nine planets, etc. His response was very simple: “We read it in books.” This struck the class (including me) as very funny. But essentially, at least about a large swath of our knowledge, this is correct.

How do I know that Cyrus the Great defeated the Babylonian empire under Nabonidus in 539 BC? I read it in a book. History of the Persian Empire, by A.T. Olmstead, to be exact. I am not an historian of any kind, so everything I know about history I have learned from reading what experts have to say. Am I qualified to disagree with the historical establishment about Cyrus? I am certainly no more qualified for this than Rick Perry is qualified to disagree with the scientific consensus on global warming. Suppose I thought that maybe the conquest was led by some other Persian king and that later history attached the name of Cyrus to this conquest. If I was going to reasonably disagree with Olmstead and other historians of ancient Persia, I would have to have done a lot of research and found some pretty convincing evidence; and I certainly don’t have it. Much the same should be said about Perry’s disagreement with the scientific consensus on climate change.  But am I qualified to agree with the historical consensus on Cyrus? I’m not even sure what that question means. As a non-expert, I have no choice but to base my own beliefs about ancient history on the testimony of experts; and the most reasonable position for me to adopt is to accept the consensus view of the experts. I don’t have to have any historical qualifications to know that, in questions of history, I ought to bring my beliefs in line with expert consensus.

So Williamson’s suggestion that it would be just as reasonable to ask how Hunstman is qualified to agree with the scientific establishment’s consensus on climate change as it is to ask Rick Perry what makes him qualified to disagree with that consensus is very, very odd. In areas where we are not experts, the most reasonable position to adopt is to accept the consensus of the experts (assuming that there is one). You don’t need any special qualifications to do that.

UPDATE: David Roberts has an excellent analysis of Williamson’s post. Roberts’ point (though he doesn’t frame in exactly this way) concerns what conclusion’s non-experts should draw from the existence of experts who disagree with the expert consensus. Does the fact that there is a climate change expert who dismisses the scientific consensus on climate change imply that Rick Perry (or anyfof us non-expert) is entitled to reject the scientific consensus? Roberts convincingly argues that we are not.

Spirituality

I just started reading, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek. Literally just started, I’ve read just a few pages, and already I’ve found quite a lot that is problematic, as might be expected. One thing that might not strike many as terribly problematic concerns the following sentence:

I (Frank) enrolled in that class [a university course on the Old Testament] because I was in the midst of a spiritual search. I didn’t want any religious party line. I just wanted to know if there was a God or not.

Well, the search for the answer to the question “Is there a God?” is one kind of spiritual search but it is hardly the only kind. In our culture, dominated as it is by monotheistic religious conceptions, it is naturally to assume that a spiritual search entails searching for God. (Some might even assume that these are the same quest.) You can find some such presupposition in the common view that to be an atheist is to be non-religious or non-spiritual. But these assumptions are misguided as any study of non-monotheistic religions will reveal.

In fact, if we read early buddhist texts, such as the Cala-Malunkya Sutta or the Tevijja Sutta, we find the Buddha claiming that excessive concern with speculative metaphysical issues (of which the question of the existence of a transcendent god is most certainly an example) is a hindrance to progress on any spiritual journey. For Buddhism, the spiritual quest is the search for a path to relieve the sense of dissatisfaction with life. Relieving this dissatisfaction, for a Buddhist, will have nothing to do with finding out whether God exists.

One of the problems with recent discourse about religion and atheism is that atheists have often been presented (and often present both themselves and atheists more broadly) as hostile to religion and spirituality more generally. This is wrong. Atheism is just the belief that there is no all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving creator. There have been many atheists, e.g., Camus, Sartre (and other existentialists), Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and others who are very much interested in something that, while obviously very different than most mainstream religious thought, is still recognizably connected to what is called religion and/or spirituality.

A Reply to Rabbi Adam Jacobs’ Reasonable Argument for God’s Existence

There are many ways for an argument in favor of theism to go wrong. The most common problem, though one that frequently goes unrecognized, has to do with the ambiguity of the term ‘God.’ To demonstrate this problem consider the following: Suppose that scientists, after years of trying to discover a mechanism that explains the origins of life on Earth, finally throw up their hands and conclude that we are never going to find a naturalistic explanation. We can even suppose, though it may be difficult to imagine what such evidence would look like, that they have positive evidence that life cannot have originated on Earth via the known chemical and physical processes.

Would this conclusion be reason to believe that God must have had something to do with life’s origins? Well, it depends on what you mean by ‘God.’ If ‘God’ simply refers to that process that gave rise to life on Earth, then the answer is yes. But, of course, this is not what anyone means by ‘God.’ The conclusion of the above imagined scenario is, properly stated, that we shouldn’t expect a naturalistic explanation for the origins of life. But this negative conclusion tells us next to nothing about the actual explanation (assuming there is one). It does not tell us that that which gave rise to life is a being, a conscious being, a loving being, an all-loving being, an all-powerful being, an all-knowing being, inspired the Bible, created the universe, created the planet Earth, spoke the universe into existence, cares about human life, or has any of the other myriad features that those who believe in God believe that he possesses. All that this imagined scenario would license us to conclude is that that which gave rise to life is of an unknown and probably non-natural process. And even if (a very big if) we had evidence that there was a conscious entity involved in the creation of life, this still would not be evidence that God exists, because, for all that we would know, this conscious entity could be less than all-powerful, not the creator of the universe, not all-loving (may not even be loving at all), less than all-knowing, and have nothing whatsoever to do with the Bible or any other religious text. So, to put it mildly, it would be a huge leap from the conclusion of the above imagined (and not very plausible) scenario to the further conclusion that God exists.

At the Huffington Post, Rabbi Adam Jacobs has posted an article, “A Reasonable Argument for God’s Existence” that contains a version of the teleological argument and which he thinks establishes that belief in God is more reasonable than disbelief. He argues that since there is currently no viable naturalistic explanation for how life originated on Earth, and since there is reason to doubt that we are anywhere close to finding such an explanation, we ought to conclude that life is the result of the intervention of some non-natural conscious intelligence. Jacobs sums up:

I posit to you that all the evidence points, in an obvious and inextricable way, to a supernatural explanation for the origin of life. If there are no known naturalistic explanations and the likelihood that “chance” played any role is wildly minute, then it is a perfectly reasonable position to take that a conscious super-intelligence (that some of us call God) was the architect of life on this planet. Everyone agrees to the appearance of design. It is illogical to assume its non-design in the absence of evidence to the contrary.

This argument suffers from the exact flaw I mentioned above. Notice, first, an interesting move: Jacobs says that some of us call the super-intelligent being who created life on Earth God. Fair enough. But I would venture to say that if it turned out that the super-intelligent creator was also uncaring, not omniscient, not omni-benevolent, not the inspiration for the Bible or any other religious text, and not even very interested in humanity, that very few would continue to call this being God. That some of us call the supernatural intelligence responsible for creating life “God” is really quite irrelevant to the question of whether Jacob’s argument proves that God exists. What we choose to call that force(s) through which life originated on this planet is neither here nor there with respect to the question of whether there is a all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful creator.

On the traditional monotheistic understanding, God is a being that is

• transcendent (this would include being non-physical and non-natural)
• the creator of everything (except Himself)
• all-powerful
• all-knowing
• concerned with human life (i.e., takes an active interest in human affairs)
• loving (perhaps even omni-benevolent)

We could add to this list, but let’s leave it at that. By way of contrast we’ll compare this notion to a related one of my own invention, that of a being who I have previously called Asura:

Asura is

• transcendent (this would include being non-physical and non-natural)
• the creator of everything (except Himself)
• all-powerful
• all-knowing
• concerned with human life (i.e., takes an active interest in human affairs)
• evil, nearly omni-malevolent (that is he despises almost everyone)

What Rabbi Jacobs’ does is take the first two characteristics of this list and argues that there is something that satisfies certain aspects of these characteristics. Jacobs’ argues, in effect, that there is a non-natural creator of life. But being non-natural is not the same as being transcendent and being the creator of life is not the same as being the creator of everything. So, his conclusion, if it were true, would not even establish that there is a being that satisfies the first two items of the list of God’s characteristics. Despite this, Jacobs takes this to be an argument for the existence of God. This is completely unwarranted. If it were warranted, then, since Asura is just as capable as God of creating life, it would also be an argument for the existence of Asura, and I doubt that he would be willing to grant that.

We can put this in the form of a dilemma. Either Jacob’s argument makes belief in God reasonable or else it does not. If it does make belief in God reasonable, then it also makes belief in Asura (an evil deity) reasonable. And, since belief in Asura entails the belief that God does not exist, Jacobs’ argument would also make disbelief in God reasonable. If it does not make belief in God reasonable, then it is not relevant to arguments concerning the rationality of belief in God.

There are other problems with his argument. I am sure that there are scientists who would strongly disagree with Jacobs’ assessment of the prospects of discovering a naturalistic explanation for the origins of life. However, I am not an expert and will not offer an opinion on this matter. But I would like to point out one more philosophical flaw with the argument. To simplify, we can boil  Jacobs’ argument down to the following: There is no naturalistic explanation for life’s origins. Thus, the only viable explanation is that God is responsible.

This argument suffers from a pernicious double standard. Scientists have been at work trying to explain how life originated but, says Jacobs, “the few hypotheses they do have are shredded to ribbons by their colleagues within the scientific community.” Again, I’m not an expert so I am not qualified to determine whether this is an accurate depiction of the state of the scientific investigation. However, I would like to note that theologians have not really offered much of an explanation of their own. Rabbi Jacobs explanation seems to be little more the claim that God did it. But perplexing phenomena are not made less perplexing merely through the supposition that God did it.

The theological explanation offered by Jacobs is nowhere near as rigorous as he expects the naturalistic explanation to be. And there are at least as many gaping holes in his explanation as any naturalistic one. For example, How, exactly, did God create life? What did He do? When did He do it? Was there a process involved? If so, what was it?

Perhaps it is meaningless to ask such questions of a non-naturalistic explanation. But, if so, then how does it qualify as an explanation? Explanations are supposed to shed light on some heretofore inexplicable phenomena. But “God did it” sheds no more light on the origins of life than the claim that is was magic.

The distorting effects of theism

My concern with Theism is not so much that it is false. It is false, but so is the belief in Bigfoot. The problem with Theism is that it distorts our perception of reality, it blinds us to deeply important aspects of our world and ourselves.

In this post I’ll explore an example of what I am getting at. And while it is true that not all theists fall victim to the distortion that I will describe, the example is illustrative nonetheless.

The example concerns theistic ethics, in particular the epistemological problem with the divine command theory. Briefly, the problem is that if the divine command theory is true, then given some plausible assumptions, we can never (or very rarely) have knowledge of what is right and wrong. If what is right is constituted by what God commands, then we cannot know what we ought to do unless we know what God has commanded. But how can we know this? We don’t hear a voice from the heavens saying, “don’t hurt one another” and even if we did, how would we know that it is God’s voice? Perhaps the guidelines written in some religious text are indicative of God’s commands. But it is equally (actually more) likely that these texts are culturally conditioned. Whether or not we believe that it is reasonable to believe that God inspired the Bible, it is at least as reasonable to doubt that He did. And if we can’t be sure, then we can’t be sure what God expects of us.

So this is the first distorting effect: Instead of proceeding rationally into an inquiry concerning morality, the divine command theory says that we need to consult an unseen supernatural deity. Now, without the divine commander, how can we proceed? Without God we can only rely on our own intuition, our reason, and the insights and arguments of thoughtful and insightful people from across the ages. But this actually gets us pretty far. Whatever you may think of his account of morality, Kant’s investigation into the concept of absolute duty is extremely insightful. An appreciation of the works of people from such diverse philosophical perspective as Buddhism, Utilitarianism, Judaism, Kantianism, (too name just a few) agree that morality is specifically concerned with how we treat others. The Buddha, Gandhi, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Mill, Confucius, and many more all agreed that morality requires that we treat the interests of others as in some sense equal to our own.

So we can gain important insight into the requirements of morality without worrying about God. Or so it would be if the divine command theory is false. Because the divine command theory tells us that we cannot know anything about what is morally required until we know what God has commanded. It is this idea that involves the distortion of reality I am talking about.

The truth is that we don’t need to know what God commands to know, for example, that hurting others just for fun is wrong. Indeed, out natural moral commitments are so strong that if any one of us (even a divine command theorist) found himself in the position of believing that God has commanded him to kill someone who does not deserve it, the only reasonable response would be to doubt that God had really issued this command.

Abraham, for example, should have told God (or, rather, the being who claimed to be God) that since God is a just being and since it is wrong to kill a young boy who does not deserve it, the fact that He has commanded him to kill Isaac is actually evidence that He is not God.

Philip Quinn disagrees with this conclusion. In a paper called “God and Morality,” Quinn argues that

It is therefore within God’s power to give Abraham a sign that would make him certain that he has been commanded to kill his son. Suppose, for example, that one night, in the twinkling of an eye, the stars in the sky are rearranged to spell out the sentence “ABRAHAM, SACRIFICE ISAAC!” Abraham observes this transformation of the heavens. Observers all over the world, some of whom do not even know English, testify that they now see this patter in the night sky, and Abraham learns of this testimony and uses it to rule out the possibility that he is hallucinating. . . In such circumstances, it seems to me, Abraham would be crazy not to believe that he had been divinely commanded to kill his son.

This argument suffers what I have previously called a stunning failure of imagination. Surely Quinn must admit the possibility that other very powerful beings exist that might want to get us to commit horrible acts. It would be reasonable for Abraham to believe that someone (someone very powerful) wants him to kill his son, but there is no way for Abraham to know that God has so commanded him. Consider the following four explanations for Abraham’s experience:

Explanation (G): God wants me to kill Isaac so He has rearranged the stars to spell out “Abraham, kill your son. –From God”

Explanation (S): Satan wants me to believe that God wants me to kill Isaac and so he has rearranged the stars to make it look like God is telling me to do so.

Explanation (E): Some other sadistic supernatural and very powerful entity wants me to believe that God wants me to kill Isaac and so he has rearranged the stars to make it look like God is telling me to do so.

Explanation (A): An omnipotent evil deity (who I have previously called Asura) wants me to kill my son and so He has rearranged the stars to spell out “Abraham, kill your son.—From God.”

There is no means to adjudicate between explanations G, S, E, or A. Given the evidence, all four are equally likely. So it is just false that if Abraham saw the stars rearrange and spell out, “Abraham, kill your son.—God” that he would be foolish not to conclude that God wants him to kill Isaac. It would be just as reasonable to conclude that Satan or some very powerful deity is trying to fool him. So how is Abraham to decide? He can just decide to believe, on faith that none of S, E, A or any other alternative to G is true, and that he has been commanded by God to kill his son. But this will be a leap over his natural moral inclinations. Alternatively, he could decide the issue in just the way that a non-theist would: he could conclude that he is so committed to the notion that it would be wrong to kill Isaac that the being who is commanding him to do so is not worth worshipping or obeying. But this would be to acknowledge the failure of the divine command theory to guide our actions.

And this is the key point: A non-theist can rest on his/her own experience of reality (including moral reality) and insist that it could not possible be morally acceptable to kill a young boy who does not deserve it. But a theist who accepts the divine command theory cannot give this kind of priority to his/her own experience. Such a person must be willing to subvert her own deeply held moral commitments to the will of God (in whatever way the will of that being reveals itself).