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57. Jesus Philosopher · Undeceptions with John Dickson

• TRANSCRIPT SAM HARRIS YOUTUBE CLIP So, I think we want our beliefs to be true in some basic sense and therefore we want to be open to new evidence and better arguments, perpetually because if you close yourself off, if you say, "Well, listen, I'm done. I'm done thinking about reality and I know what's true," then again, when more data comes in, when something is surprising, when one of your intuitions true to be faulty, if you can't error correct, again, you're just going to fall out of alignment with what's going on in the world a with what other people think is true as well … JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL You may recognize the voice of Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and hugely popular author and podcaster. He's one of the most read and listened to atheists in the world today. SAM HARRIS YOUTUBE CLIP CONTINUES We have to be continually open to the possibility that we might be wrong and in fact, we're very likely to be wrong a lot of the time. So then hence the virtue of getting educated and surrounding yourself with smart people and reading good books and just exposing yourself to the kinds of lessons that other people have learned over thousands of years in are learning in real time right now. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL So far. So good. Sam Harris is sensible, rational and wise. The poignant music certainly adds to that vibe. But then... SAM HARRIS YOUTUBE CLIP CONTINUES So given the conversation and an openness to the intrusions of other people's thinking is really the best game in town for understanding what reality is and how to navigate within it, then you can see how non-optimal and ultimately dangerous dogmatism is. Dogmatism is just holding to an idea no matter what else comes into view. So, there's nothing you can say to challenge... "I'll talk to you about all this stuff, but over here, there's something that I care about, some proposition, some assertion that something is true that I care about so much, I'm so emotionally attached to it that not only is it non-negotiable, if you continue to push over here, I'm going to get angrier and angrier. I'm going to threaten you with violence," right? That is the default state of organized religion. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL Ah, yes. Atheism the intelligent, open-minded choice as opposed to Christianity, which is clearly all that stuff of blind faith. It's all dogma beliefs we hold without evidence, without reason and without a shadow of doubt. The cliche is faith is the antithesis of knowledge, the antithesis of wisdom, and therefore Christian philosophy is an oxymoron, kind of like referring to virtual reality. It's either virtual or it's reality. Well, our guests today have a bone to pick with the likes of Sam Harris. As professional philosophers they reckon that while Christians could do with a healthy dose of philosophy, so good skeptics. We all need to think deeply about what we believe and why we believe it. And if you think as Sam Harris and plenty of others seem to, that skepticism or atheism doesn't involve mere beliefs, well, you probably especially need to think this through. Philosophy is the friend we all need. I'm John Dickson. And this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan's 10th anniversary edition of Seven Days That Divide The World by our friend, John Lennox. Each episode we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, culture, or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. DOLORES MORRIS DEMO TRACK – MUSIC INTERLUDE JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL That's Dr. Dolores Morris, one of our guests today. That's her track, Tell Me Why off her demo. Dolores is actually a full-time philosopher at the University of South Florida, but she hasn't been able to shake off her musical longings and ambitions. I love her already. Dolores's new book is Believing Philosophy. It offers an introduction of sorts to how philosophy and Christianity work together. INTERVIEW BEGINS John Dickson: But I want to ask you, how did you become a philosopher? Dolores Morris: A great question. I was always only going to be a singer songwriter, that was my goal. John Dickson: All right! Dolores Morris: I know we have this in common. John Dickson: I feel like grabbing my Taylor guitar off the wall there and playing a tune with you. Dolores Morris: Oh, I left my Taylor at home, but I am a Taylor girl as well. I was really in a sort of crisis through a lot of college. I experienced an enormous amount of loss during what are typically carefree years for people. So, beginning around 15 through 19 or 20, just quite a lot of people that I loved died too young and in bad ways, and as a Christian who had always a sunny optimist by nature, this was just devastating. Dolores Morris: So, philosophy was a lifeline for me because these were people who were willing to talk about these hard questions and who didn't run away from them. I also was fortunate. I came from a family and I went to a high school full of smart Christians who were not afraid of these questions. So, for me to find a discipline where these questions were on the table. Part of what I love about philosophy as a Christian is you don't get to just assume a worldview, theistic or atheistic. The worldview itself is the topic of conversation. So, for me, just thinking what makes sense of the world? If I believe in this God that I have had so much experience with and that I believe in on the basis of my prayer life and my childhood and what I've been taught, how do I make sense of the awfulness of life sometimes? So that's how I became a philosopher. John Dickson: So, you found the consolation of philosophy. Dolores Morris: Indeed. John Dickson: You did a Boethius. Dolores Morris: Absolutely. That is exactly right and at the same time, I just loved it. [crosstalk 00:07:48] JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL Boethius was a Roman orator and scholar and devout Christian. In the late 400s and early 500s AD. He fell out of favor with the emperor and was imprisoned, awaiting execution. It was there he wrote his most famous work, The Consolation of Philosophy, where he outlines how throughout our trials, we can attain to the highest thoughts by careful philosophy. INTERVIEW CONTINUES Many would see Christianity and philosophy as at odds, because as a Christian, obviously you've got some confirmed convictions already, whereas philosophy is about puzzling and reasoning things through. So, are those two things clashing for you? Dolores Morris: That's a great question. For me they're not and I also think the way that you stated it is exactly the way this often comes up. Well, Christians have these things that they believe really firmly and so they can never be proper philosophers because they have certain things that they'll never really put on the table for evaluation, but so do quite a lot of atheists. So do all of us. I don't know, a single philosopher, for example, who would be persuaded by good argument, that it is okay to kill somebody for fun, right? That's a moral conviction that they hold and no matter how clever and careful the arguments to the contrary, certain moral convictions people feel so committed to, that they're not really ever on the table. Likewise, with the atheistic philosophers. I don't believe that every time that Richard Dawkins reads something written by atheist, he thinks, "Well, okay, let me set aside my atheism and just consider the arguments and see what I come to conclude." But I also don't think that philosophy ought to really be construed as duking it out. I just don't think we should see this as a tension. I think we should see philosophy as the goal of seeking to understand why we believe... Well, first of all, what we believe, get clear on what we believe. Second of all, we willing to ask ourselves why we believe it and to go a little further and ask ourselves, are those good reasons for that belief? I think these are incredibly important questions, and if we believe that God is the truth, and if we believe Christianity, then I don't think we should be afraid to seek answers to these kinds of questions because I think the answers are there to be found. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL Evidence that the church shunned philosophy from its earliest days is sometimes put forward by those with just enough knowledge to be dangerous. They mentioned Saint Jerome, one of the most influential Christian teachers of the 4th and 5th centuries, Jerome was raised with the best pagan Roman education money could buy, only to then reject all classical learning in his 30s, after having a dream in which an angel yelled at him, “Ciceronianus es non Christianus," basically, "You're no Christian. You're a follower of Cicero," who was the great Roman writer and philosopher. For the next 15 years Jerome was so freaked out by the dream he refused to read pagan authors. He devoted himself fully to Bible translation and to writing commentaries and Christian essays. People have put this forward to me as proof that the greatest Christian leaders turned their back on classical philosophy and turned instead to Bible study. Sort off, not really. The fact is Jerome returned to the classics around the year 389 until his death, 30 years later in 420 and you can see it throughout his letters of this period, which deftly interact with Cicero, Horace, Virgil and the rest. Once he learned not to love philosophy too much, he loved it. Is there something anti philosophical in Christian history? INTERVIEW CONTINUES Dolores Morris: Yeah, I think not at all. I think actually you understand Paul better when you've read some of the philosophy that he was steeped in. I think that … JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL Think that's the apostle Paul, by the way, we did a whole episode on him this season it's called Paulos Apostolos. Dolores Morris: So, in, in Romans 10, when he says that Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes, when you learn that the end there is the word Talos and then philosophy fills in for you what that means, this is the ultimate fulfillment, this is the goal at which we're all directed. So, if it's the end of the law, it's the goal at which the law is directed. I think Paul's writings are so philosophically informed. Also … JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL Talos is a term used by the ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle among others, to refer to the proper end or full potential of a thing or a person. It's sort of like the term raison d'êtra. Dolores Morris: Also, the church fathers, many of them just were philosophers. The history of philosophy overlaps with the history of the church in really substantial and significant ways. MUSICAL INTERLUDE JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL Woo hoo! I'm outdoors, arriving at the University of Notre Dame and I'm just so excited to be out of the house, doing a real live interview with a human I just thought I'd record the moment. In fact, I think I've found him. Associate Professor Angus Brook. Angus. I see that philosophical glow. We're going to pause here with Dolores and take a deep dive into ancient philosophy with Dr. Angus Brook, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame here in Sydney or Notre Dame for my U.S. friends. Angus has a particular interest in metaphysics and Thomas Aquinas. So, he is going to give us the grounding we need to head further into philosophy and back to Dolores, who is specialized more in contemporary philosophy. Before we get to Thomas Aquinas, I asked Angus to give me a brief rundown of the project of ancient philosophy. INTERVIEW BEGINS Angus Brook: I have a feeling that for the ancient Greeks philosophy is a way of life. They wanted to know what it is to flourish as a human, they wanted to know what it is to be happy, and in a certain respect, I think the ancient Greeks were the first that we really know of to become aware of the fact that they were thinking and thinking in an abstract way, and that perhaps abstract thinking could provide answers to these sorts of fundamental questions. John Dickson: What's your take on the ancient Christians engagement with philosophy? Angus Brook: The ancient Christians had available to them almost two separate conceptions of philosophy. One is a kind of worldly philosophy of the hellistic schools, they were ways of life that in effect were competing with Christianity. So, if you think about the Stoics or Epicureans, in effect those schools and Christianity was often seen as a school of philosophy in the early days, so they were in effect rejecting schools of philosophy often. When you look at people like Justin Martyr or Augustine, they clearly take on Neoplatonic philosophy. Augustine talks about how much he loves Cicero and in fact, modeled a lot of his own writing on Cicero … JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL Augustine was probably the most important Christian philosopher in the ancient world and before my Eastern Orthodox friends cry out, "No, it was Gregory of Nyssa," let me qualify, perhaps the most important Christian philosopher of the ancient west. Augustine became a Christian in a pretty cool spooky way, actually, and I think that's a story for another day. Anyway, he immediately said about to show that Christianity stands up to the best critical thinking of his day. This was usually thought to be what's called Neoplatonic philosophy, a system of thought ultimately deriving from Plato centuries earlier, that saw reality as hierarchical. Down on earth are the simplest least important things, earth, food, body, and so on and from these base things, we go up a ladder of sophistication and importance to the highest things like reasoning, morality, the contemplation of the one principle that rules and gives meaning to what all the lower things. Now, the cool thing is Neoplatonism was usually thought of as the pinnacle of the classical philosophical tradition because it combined and modified Plato, Aristotle, and even a little bit of stoicism, but Augustine found a way to show how Christianity is the fulfillment and extension of even Neoplatonism. "In Christ," he said, "all of reality can be joined in fellowship to the one ultimate reality of God, and this comes not through aesthetic rigor or intellectual sophistication, but through divine gift, grace." Augustine was quite something. INTERVIEW CONTINUES Angus Brook: They had a deep connection to the philosophical quest for truth and yet at the same time thought there's a human constructed world, and there's a human constructed way of coming up with the answer to the meaning of life or what human happiness is or what good is. I think my sense is they were really cautious about being open to that or being confused with just another human school, if that makes sense. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL Yeah. If Plato had his powerful Christian interpreter in Augustine in the 5th century, Aristotle had his Christian champion in Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. Many see Aquinas as the equal of, and even superior two Augustine, but I don't want to start a fight. You may have heard that the writings of Aristotle reemerged in Europe, in the 1100s. The Western church was wary of the reemergence of Aristotle. Why? Because in the renditions that came back into the West, Aristotle was interpreted as separating reason from religion, scientific thinking from spiritual thinking and the church didn't like that formulation. So, for about 50 years, they were opposed to the reading and teaching of Aristotle. That is until Thomas Aquinas. He came to age exactly in this period, and when he turned his attention to Aristotle, he ended up showing that in fact, the philosopher, which is what Aquinas called Aristotle, was totally consistent with notions of divine revelation. Religion may contain more than what pure reason can demonstrate, but it doesn't contain less than pure reason, but that's true of much of life when you think about it. Every time someone truthfully reports something to you about what they saw or experienced, that truth isn't something you could arrive at philosophically, rationally, but that doesn't mean it isn't true, it's just beyond the reach of philosophical reflection. "In the same way," Aquinas said, "true religion will be consistent with philosophy, but because it also includes things God himself has revealed, it will contain truths that are beyond mere rational reflection." INTERVIEW CONTINUES Angus Brook: So, Thomas Aquinas's position, in the simplest sense, is the argument that in fact you need both faith and reason working together. A core argument of his is basically this, that faith perfects reason so that inasmuch as reason only gets you there, faith will get you to the next steps. But he also argues in a way that some Christians historically have found uncomfortable, but he also says, "But faith can't contradict reason either." I think it's really important, he basically says the truths of faith cannot be interpreted to contradict the fundamental principles of natural reason. It's funny. Some of Thomas's most profound, I think, reflections on faith are actually him reflecting on what Cicero says about faith because famously Cicero in On Duties says that faith is the basis of a just society, faith is the basis of justice. And Thomas takes this, in a way, to not only apply to a just society, a good society, a good person, but also to our quest for truth, that all of our efforts to use reason to get to the truth depend on trusting something, but also our goal in reason actually ends up by completing that faith. It completes that trust in a way. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL Famously, Thomas Aquin has offered five ways to show rationally that God exists, but if all you've heard about these five proofs comes from Richard Dawkins chapter on them in The God Delusion, it's possible you have no idea what they really are because... no offense, Richard Dawkins is a brilliant scientist... nor did professor Dawkins have any idea what he was talking about. I've read atheist philosophers who were embarrassed by Dawkin's account of the five ways. I think we should do a whole episode on the proofs of God. I do actually think God's existence is proven, but let me just say the briefest thing about Aquinas's arguments here. They are, one, the argument from motion, basically in a universe of constant change or motion, something has to be the original mover that isn't itself moved by something else and that we call God Aquinas said. Second, the argument from efficient causes, things that are caused must have their source in a first cause that isn't itself caused and that we call God basically is what Aquinas said. Thirdly, the argument from contingency. Basically, this one says, unless there was one thing that exists necessarily, nothing would've begun to exist because existence can't pop out of non-existence. Then four: the argument from degrees of perfection. I'm not really a fan of this, but Aquinas took it seriously, so I'm probably wrong. He basically said that if there are gradations in the goodness of different things, there must be thing that is maximally or perfectly good from which they derive their grade of goodness and that we call God. And five, the fifth argument is the argument from final causes. That's often called the teleological argument. This is my favorite of Aquinas's arguments, but it's also the easiest to get wrong as Dawkins did, so I got Angus to help explain it. INTERVIEW CONTINUES Angus Brook: I want to be really careful here because Thomas Aquinas's teleology is very different from William Paley's teleology. John Dickson: Yes, and intelligent design today. Angus Brook: Yeah. So, think of it this way. William Paley was operating on a notion that nature is mechanical and so he thought that you could, in effect, draw an analogy between a watch and nature … JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL William Paley was an 18th century theologian whose seminal work natural theology argues for the existence of God because of the intricate, intelligent design of human beings. So, if you found a watch, you'd assume such a sophisticated piece of machinery had a design and therefore a designer. So, to with the sophisticated organisms on earth, they must have an intelligent designer. Now, that's not what Thomas Aquinas was saying. Angus Brook: Thomas is not working within that analogy. He actually thinks that everything by nature has a teleology and that we can see that in the fact that everything moves and changes towards the completion of ends. So, when he's putting forward a teleological argument, he's basically saying, "Well, things move and we can actually see before our very eyes that if I look out the window and I look at a tree, I know that that tree has grown from a seed to a sapling to a tree because that sits the nature to move in that way, it moves towards the fulfillment of a purpose." For that reason, he'd say that we see that kind of teleological framework in everything that exists. So, the question is, if there is teleological causality, if things move and change towards the completion of goals or ends, then there must be a unifying overarching end that everything aims at. and again, he's going to say that's what we all call God. John Dickson: I think it's fantastic. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL I really do think it's fantastic. Aquinas isn't marveling at how complex, say, the human eye is and saying, "Ooh, that must be God." He's noting that everything in the universe from the tiniest particle to the outer reaches of the cosmos operates according to elegant laws, there is mathematics built into of the whole show, and that's what points to the great mathematician, the mind behind the universe. We'll put some links in the show notes for where I think you can read the most sophisticated accounts of the true teleological argument. Dolores Morris has her own favorite Aquinas argument. INTERVIEW CONTINUES Dolores Morris: Probably the cosmological argument, this why is there something rather than nothing and there not being able to be an infinite series of causes. Although again, I really do love the moral argument, that is the one that resonates with me at this stage of my life. I will say when I was younger, this notion of the untenability of an infinite series of causes, that was what grabbed me 20 years ago. So, I think that says something, that Aquinas has more than one very powerful argument. [crosstalk 00:27:18] JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL The cosmological argument, also known as the first cause argument, is often misunderstood. The argument isn't that everything has a cause and so the universe must have a cause and therefore God must be the cause of the universe. That's how you often hear it, even from really smart atheists, like Daniel Dennett, who then turn around and say, "Well, if everything has a cause who caused God?" Aha right? No. The first cause argument says that whatever is caused is caused by something else and since it is logically impossible for there to be an infinite series of causes, because if there's not a first in the series, there's not a second or third or fourth, and therefore no series, there must be a first core cause that isn't caused by something else. It's just logical and that's what we call God, Aquinas says. The only way out of this little dilemma is to say, as the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides actually said, that nothing in the universe is caused or even changes, then there's no first cause, right, because no causes, no changes. Aquinas developed this further with the argument from contingency I mentioned earlier. That's the argument that says the things that exist in nature are contingent. It's possible, in other words, for these things not to have existed, they're not necessary things. Now, if it's possible for them not to have existed, there must have been a point in time when all these things did not exist and since it is impossible for non-existent things to bring themselves into existence, there must be something that necessarily exists and thus grants other things their existence. INTERVIEW CONTINUES Dolores Morris: We live in a world where we, we find value beyond what we observe and I do think God is the best explanation for that. I also think that we live in a world that exists and I think that this question, why is there something rather than nothing, one of the oldest philosophical questions, still needs an answer. I don't actually think that the Big Bang is an answer to that question. Whether you are poor or against the science behind it, even fully embracing it scientifically, it does not answer the question, why is there something rather than nothing. It maybe gives an account of how, but not really of the why. It's fascinating how much we take on faith from the scientists. Science explains a great deal of things and that is wonderful, I'm a big fan of science, I'm thankful to live in a time when science has made so much progress in so many things that are of value to our lives, but science hasn't scratched the surface of explaining everything, and there are still some questions that you need to step out of science to consider. The truth is it used to be that scientists did this themselves, right? Philosophy did not used to be its own discipline. If you look at the history of philosophy, the earlier, the historical great philosophers, were also scientists because they recognized that in studying reality, you had to also stop and ask these bigger picture questions. John Dickson: Okay. But what, what hasn't science explained? Give me an example. Dolores Morris: Okay. Consciousness, for example. There's a sense in which our study of the human body and the human brain is light years ahead of a thousand years ago, right? Incomparable. We have tremendous grasp on what the brain does, but there is still this question and there is a sense in which it's the same question that the Stoics were asking, it's the same question that we've been asking for the history of philosophy, which is why is there also consciousness? Why is there also experience? So, we know what the brain does and we know what we do with our bodies, how we act in the world, but why is it like something for us? There's a philosophical thought experiment from Frank Jackson. You imagine a woman, Mary, locked in a room and you have to suppose that Mary is in incredibly intelligent, and she's given all of the knowledge that can be given objectively, everything that can be given from a third person perspective through something like a textbook, about human perception and color vision. So, she knows that people stop at red stop signs, she knows where the light is on a spectrum when it's going trigger their red response, all of that. But it's not until she's allowed to leave the black and white room that she learns that all along, there was something else going on as well. They were having these reddish experiences, she learns what it was like for them to see red. That jump from what the brain is doing, what the eyes are doing, to what it is like for the perceiver to have a perception is still a mystery to us. We can make progress on maybe what the brain has to be like in order to rethink, have these kinds of experiences, but how we get that jump from what's going on in the observable world to what is going on in this private realm of consciousness is still very much a mystery. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL Existence, origins, necessity, consciousness. These are all the things Christianity has pondered from the beginning and with a philosophical energy that is often forgotten by skeptics and believers alike. And that's before we even ponder what Dolores reckons is one of Christianity's strongest suits, the so-called moral argument for God. More on that after the break, but here's Dolores Morris, the musician, again, to take us out to the break. I love this one. DOLORES MORRIS SINGING – MUSICAL INTERLUDE SPONSOR AD: ZONDERVAN This episode of under deceptions is brought to you by Zondervan’s book, Seven Days That Divide the World by John Lennox. This is the 10th anniversary edition of John Lennox's claimed method of reading and interpreting the first chapters of Genesis without discounting either science or scripture. It's now updated and revised to reflect the ongoing discussion about the creation narrative in the Bible. We love John Lennox here on the podcast and it's high time we had him back. With this book, Lennox offers a careful and accessible introduction to a scientifically savvy, theologically astute and scripturally faithful interpretation of the book of Genesis. The book deals with some of the biggest questions Christians and doubters grapple with and over which sometimes they argue. Questions like other seven days in Genesis one, a literal week or a series of time periods? Or if I believe the earth is 4.5 billion years old as cosmologists believe, am I denying the authority of scripture? John Lennox is an internationally renowned writer and speaker on the interface of science and Christianity, and he's also professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Oxford. His arguments are at once gentle and piercing. This is must read. You can find the 10th anniversary edition of Seven Days That Divide the World by John Lennox on Amazon, of course, or go Zondervan.com for more. SPONSOR AD: ANGLICAN AID There are over three million people living in slavery in Pakistan. The practice of bonded slavery is widespread. When families borrow money from their employer to pay for essentials, often in times of crisis, and then they spend years, sometimes decades paying it off by working as a slave. Brick kilns are the primary place you'll find these indebted families in Pakistan, caked in mud and working for as little as $4 a day. 70% of the bonded laborers in Pakistan are children. Anglican Aid is trying to break this cycle poverty in Pakistan, helping families who have spent generations in bonded labor to break free. This Christmas they have partnered with Miracle School Ministries in Lahore, the capital of Pakistan's Punjab province, to offer free quality education to 800 children enslaved in the local brick kiln. Miracle has set up a sewing facility to provide alternative employment for women in particular, increasing how much they can earn and teaching a marketable skill that might see their families get out of the brick kilns for good. This Christmas, please consider these guys I trust, Anglican Aid, as they continue to work to establish long-term assistance for women and their families. Just go to Anglicanaid.org.au. Anglicanaid.org.au to give today. EPISODE CONTINUES SAM HARRIS, TED TALK CLIP I'm going to speak today about the relationship between science and human values. Now it's generally understood that that questions of morality, questions of good and evil and right and wrong are questions about which science officially has no opinion. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL That's Sam Harris again, and you can hear he's got this really considered intelligent tone, and that's partly why he's so popular and why he seems to be convincing lots of people that religion is obsolete, but his arguments really aren't strong. Before I run all this by Dolores Morris, here's a bit more from his famous 2010 Ted Talk, arguing that science, not religion or metaphysics, science can answer our deepest moral questions. TED TALK CLIP CONTINUES Now it's often said that science cannot give us a foundation for morality and human values because science deals with facts and facts and values seem to belong to different spheres. It's often thought that that there's no description of the way the world is that can tell us how the world ought to be, but I think this is quite clearly untrue. Dolores Morris: One of the reasons why I wrote this book, in all truth, is because of Sam Harris, because people are getting his books and they find him so persuasive and academic philosophers who are also atheists largely find him embarrassing because the arguments are not good. In particular, he's convinced that there is no problem getting an ought from an is. So as Hume first said, "You just cannot derive an ought claim from an is claim." You could look at a complete description of some situation and from those descriptive facts, from the facts about what things are like, you will never, using those facts alone, generate a claim that somebody ought to do one thing rather than another. To get to an ought claim you need another ought claim. The example that I use in the book is a silly example where you show up at lunch and you don't have a sandwich, you realize you have forgotten your sandwich. And the person you're sitting with, your friend, has two sandwiches and she only ever eats one, but she likes to have one as a backup, and you ask if you can have her second, and she says, "Well, no, it's mine and I don't really like to share," and you go through this dialogue. It's a little bit silly, but here's the point of it. The two of you can agree 100% on the descriptive facts. She has two sandwiches, she is only hungry enough for one sandwich, you are very hungry and have nothing to eat. If she gave you one of hers, you would both have one sandwich. All of these descriptive facts you can agree on, but if she doesn't believe that you should share with a person when you're able, nothing in the description of that scenario is going to persuade her. You need a should claim. Harris thinks you don't. There is an addendum in later additions of his book, where he responds to otherwise sympathetic philosophers who come back at him saying, "You're just wrong about this one part." I think I know where he goes wrong. I think that Harris is 100% correct that a properly functioning human being can find the ought claims in observable reality. I think that when you live in community with other people and when you encounter people who are doing well, thriving, flourishing with people who are suffering, it's very easy to see that the people who are thriving ought to help the people who are suffering. I think that's obvious. John Dickson: So these are moral facts. They are sitting there staring you in the face. Dolores Morris: That's exactly right. I think Sam Harris is 100% right, that there are objective moral values. The question is where they come from. He's right that they're there, he is right that we are, I would say, designed to find them, but he's wrong that they can be found in observable reality alone. He thinks they can because he is assuming, like all properly functioning human people, that there are these moral facts and that we are obligated to follow them, but that's different from saying that they're just in observable reality. I think that we find them there again, because we have something like a sensus divinitas because we have been created to see God's goodness in reality, but making sense of these moral facts in a world without God is a great deal more difficult than making sense of it in a world with God. You need to have a moral law without a moral law giver. You need to have a standard of goodness without any standard bearer. I think a much better attempt is Eric Wielenberg, is his name and he has a book called Robust Ethics. He also is an atheistic moral realist. He believes that there are just objective moral facts in the world in which there is no God, but he ends up positing them as just brute facts. He thinks these are just features of reality that not only are unexplained, but that can't be explained, they're unexplainable. I think that is at least a better attempt than Harris, who frankly, just seems a little bit confused about what it means to get an ought from an is. I don't think he quite... Harris himself says that he finds reading philosophy boring. So I think it would help him if he read a little bit more of this material to see just where things are going wrong there. John Dickson: So just to tail off that discussion, put very simply for my listeners, what the moral argument for God's existence is and why you find it so compelling. Dolores Morris: Absolutely. So the moral argument says that there are objective moral facts and that my preferred version of the moral argument says there are objective moral facts, the best explanation for that is the existence of God, therefore, it's very likely that God exists. Other people give this as a deductive argument where they actually want to go further and say, if there are objective moral facts, then God exists. This argument claims that it is impossible to have objective moral facts without God, but there are objective moral facts, therefore God exists. Both of them proceed first by saying that objective morality is a real feature of the world that we live in, and second by saying that that cries out for God, either necessarily or just probabilistically, that the reality of moral values is evidence for the existence of God. Why do I like this argument? Well, I am fully convinced that there are objective moral facts, even Peter Singer, another famous atheistic philosopher, who really tried to do work without objective moral facts for very long time, has now come around and he also is a moral realist. So what is the alternative to objective moral facts? If moral facts are objective, then they're true or false, regardless of what we think about them or how we feel about them. I'm drawing from Robert Adams' definition here. He's right, moral facts are objectives if what they tell us has nothing to do with how we feel about them and their moral if they tell us how we should act, how we should live … JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL Robert Adams is an American analytic philosopher, specializing in metaphysics and philosophy of religion. Dolores Morris: The alternative to objective morality is something like subjective morality, where it is up to us to determine how we ought to live and what we ought to do. This is a very, very popular view among a certain age group, a certain demographic. You hear it a lot in college classrooms. Why am I so convinced that relativism is untenable? Well, I don't think that anybody actually believes it, at least at the level of the individual. If you had a friend who told you that they had developed a recent habit of murder, but don't worry, they don't actually believe that murder is wrong, and so they know that there's some legal risk here and they're being very careful not to get caught, but because they don't actually believe that murder is wrong, murder isn't actually wrong for them and so they are not doing anything wrong. Nobody believes this. Nobody actually believes this. More people believe a kind of a close cousin, what we might call cultural relativism that says, well, of course individuals can't form these views on their own. You don't just get to make up morality, but cultures are responsible for their own moral code and we could never judge another culture morally because again, we have our morals and that's what's right for our community and our culture and they just have theirs. If cultural relativism is correct, then cultures as a whole will get to decide what's right and what's wrong, but that's just a fancy way of saying the majority rules. But then it follows by definition that the minority voice is wrong. If the majority rules, the minority voice is wrong, and this makes it impossible for there to be a moral reformer, internal to a community because the moral reformer has to speak against the voice of the majority. So if we embrace cultural relativism for morality, then we have to say that the abolitionists were wrong and the slave catchers were right. The moral argument says... really, you could even say it, there is at least one objective moral value. Really we believe there are more than that, but then the question is, where does it come from? I want to be clear. The moral argument does not say you have to believe in God, be a good person and it does not say people who believe in God are better than the atheist. That is a non-starter, that's nonsense. The question is, what can we say about reality to make sense of the fact that there seems to be something like objective moral values? As Dawkins says, "DNA neither know nor cares. DNA just is." The world of blind forces seems just a very unlikely candidate to have generated brute independently existing facts about how human beings ought to live. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL It's worth pausing there for a second and soaking up this point. The moral argument does not suggest you need God to be good. That may be how Christians have sometimes put it and it certainly is how sometimes skeptics hear the argument, but the argument is actually philosophical, not pragmatic. The point is what could possibly account for the fact of anything being morally right or wrong? A universal accident can't account for that fact, evolution can't. These are just descriptions of the conditions in which we have to make our moral judgments. Science can't help either. Despite what Samara says, science provides insight into our conditions, of course, it can also test what things might change those conditions, but it can't even begin to tell us which conditions are the most morally valuable. It can't tell us why we should act for one outcome rather than another, and it can't tell us for whose benefit we should be making these kinds of moral choices. One way out of this, of course, is to say that there are no moral facts, no true right, or true wrong and a lot of people resort to that, especially amongst philosophers who can see where this is going. But if you happen to be someone who thinks that there are moral facts in the world, that it is right to act in some ways and wrong to act in other ways, then the problem remains, what are the logical grounds of these moral facts? The Christian answer is that there's a creator whose own good character is imprinted on the universe. Those moral facts are there because they correspond to ultimate reality, to the character of God. Okay, I've probably taken my eye off the ball a bit here. This is not really meant to be an episode about proofs of God, though that one is coming. I really do think it is possible to demonstrate God's existence. This is really just an episode about the nature and value of philosophy and how Christianity has always, at least in its best forms, had important things to say about all three major branches of philosophy. We've talked a bit about metaphysics, but there's also epistemology and what's called practical philosophy. INTERVIEW CONTINUES John Dickson: I want you to explain for, for my listeners the distinction between three branches of philosophy. Okay. So first explain for me metaphysics. It's not physics, right? Dolores Morris: It's not physics, no. No, metaphysics is often the study of... It's funny as a metaphysician to realize it's difficult to define metaphysics, but you can't do it without the word ontology … JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL From the Greek word ontos, being, ontology is the rational discussion of, well, being, existence, reality. Dolores Morris: The science of being. Metaphysics asks what there is in the world and how we ought to characterize the world. So if physics is the science of ultimate reality, metaphysics is just taking a meta level approach to that science and it's asking, how should we understand the world that we live in? How should we make sense of... Well, what should we believe there is? So, for example, I teach a class at my university, basically every semester called The Philosophy of Mind. You can teach philosophy of mind and make it more of a cognitive science kind of class, but I'm a metaphysician. So metaphysics as applied to questions of the mind asks, what is the mind, is it just the brain? It's clearly related to the body, it's clearly related to the brain, but is it just the brain or is there something else? Is there something more like a soul, an irreducibly mental actual substance, a thing that is existent and that can survive the death of the body? Or instead is the right way to understand the mind as something that's not wholly separable from the body, but still somehow brings something new, either an emergent property or maybe even an emergent substance? These are all questions of metaphysics because they ask of the mind, what kind of a thing is it? How should we understand it? John Dickson: Okay. Epistemology then. Dolores Morris: Okay, good. That one's easier. It's just the study of knowledge, of how we get knowledge, what knowledge is, how it's different from just having a belief that happens to be true. It's really easy to think that you know something, if you believe it and you're right, but it's entirely possible to believe something and be right about it, but not know it because you believed it for bad reasons, on the basis of bad testimony or unreliable evidence. You can luck into a true belief, but you can't luck into knowledge. So epistemology asks these kinds of questions about how we come to know. John Dickson: What about practical philosophy? I'm assuming this is where a lot of people are going to be more comfortable because it's got the word practical in it. Dolores Morris: That's right. Yes, practical philosophy is typically ethics. How ought we to act, how ought we to behave, also, very important. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL As we said earlier, Sam Harris has tried his hand at some practical philosophy using science as a guide to moral choices. His mistake though, as Dolores pointed out, is that he didn't consider the higher order, metaphysical and epistemological questions. You can have an awesome practical thought. Awesome in the sense that it sounds reasonable if you don't take notice of your assumptions, that is completely incoherent in the end, when you to ask things like how do you know that and what view of reality are you assuming? FIVE MINUTE JESUS Let's press pause. I've got a five minute Jesus for you. There is a typical way of talking about Jesus. He's the Lord or savior, Christ, maybe even Jesus, my healer or teacher, but what about philosopher? I doubt that would wash in any contemporary church, but in ancient times it was a thing. From the start Christianity was seen as a philosophy started by Jesus and it was in competition with the other major philosophical schools, like the Stoics who believed in fate and an ultimate God, and in the importance of controlling all your emotions to who live a self-controlled life or the Epicureans, who believed in God or the gods, but believed they weren't really interested in us or affected by us and that the goal of life was just to get on, minimizing the experience of pain through the pursuit of earthly enjoyments like friendships and banqueting and contemplating. The Apostle Paul clashed with precisely these two philosophical groups in the Book of Acts. He's in Athens and we read, "So Paul reasoned in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there." That's exactly the work of a philosopher. And then it goes on, "A group of Epicureans and Stoic philosophers began to debate with him. Some of them asked, 'What is this babbler trying to say?' others remarked, 'He seems to be advocating foreign gods.' They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection." Paul's teaching was seen as a direct challenge to the two biggest philosophical schools a of his day. In Athens he looked like a philosopher, with a philosophy derived from Jesus. A couple of generations after Paul, the greatest evangelist in the ancient world was a guy called Justin Martyr. Justin, who ended up being martyred, so we called him Justin Martyr, and he too described Christianity as the greatest philosophy. Justin wandered around dressed in the easily identifiable philosopher's robe, with the short cropped hair of the philosopher, taking on anyone who would debate with him concerning the big questions of philosophy. What is ultimate reality? How could we know and how do we live in accordance with it? That's really what philosophy is about. That's metaphysics, epistemology and practical philosophy. Justin's answer in the three writings he left us was basically the creator is ultimate reality, the mind behind the logic of the universe, and while we can know God through reason, he said, we can only know God personally if he discloses himself to us, and that's what's happened in Jesus Christ. And when we live in accordance with his revealed wisdom, his philosophy, we find ourselves living in harmony with ultimate reality. This is how many Christians in ancient times, if not today, thought about Christianity and Jesus, as a philosophy from the greatest philosopher ever. One of the oldest churches ever uncovered is in Dura-Europos in Syria. It's basically a house converted into a church and it has these marvelous frescos still visible on the walls, and on one of them, Jesus is depicted, you guessed it, wearing the philosopher's robe with the philosopher's distinctive short haircut. This isn't because they downplayed Jesus's death as savior or resurrection as the Lord, it's just that they also knew that a huge part of his mission throughout all of the gospels was to teach God's comprehensive wisdom for life, to teach a philosophy. It's something noted in one of our early non-Christian references to Jesus by Mara bar Serapion, who was himself a philosopher. He explicitly describes Jesus as a philosopher. He compares Jesus to Pythagoras and Socrates, two of the greatest philosophers of ancient Greece and then he says that following Jesus execution, "The wise king," that's Jesus, "did not die out all together. He lives on in the new law he laid down." Jesus frequently cast his teaching as wisdom, that is the truth about what is real in the world and how we live in the light of it. That's the work of a philosopher. I count more than 20 references in the gospels to Jesus as wise or his teaching as wisdom, that's the Greek term Sophia from which of course we get philosophy, the love of wisdom. There's a really good book about all of this by Jonathan Pennington. It's called Jesus The Great Philosopher, it was published in 2020. The book certainly convinced me that the idea of Jesus as a philosopher really was part of the ancient understanding of Jesus. In any case, for my money, the wisdom of Jesus the philosopher is nowhere more succinctly put than in a line from Luke chapter six, "Be merciful just as your father is merciful." For Jesus the most basic metaphysic is that there is a God of love and mercy. That's the animating principle of the universe and the wise life, the authentic life, the life in sync with ultimate reality, is a life of love and mercy toward others. Ancient Christians spotted this as a philosophy and they thought of Jesus as the greatest philosopher. You can press play now. INTERVIEW CONTINUES John Dickson: I wonder if you would close us out by giving us a quick positive pitch for why you reckon Christianity stacks up philosophically. Dolores Morris: I really believe that the more of our energy we dedicate to our own happiness, the less successful we are. When we seek out what we believe will make us happy, not always, but very often, it leads to more unhappiness, right? We expect fulfillment and we get unfulfillment. I think Christianity is the best explanation of that, that we were in fact created for something more than this, that we are in fact, eternal beings in finite mortal bodies, that we were in fact designed for communion with the divine and we are now alienated from the divine. So that is what continues to persuade me as I get older and philosophically, how do we defend Christianity? I think that there are a lot of, of good arguments for the existence of God and I think that there is a lot of good history around the person of Jesus. Given that we have this one person from a tiny little tribe who has been so pivotal in human history, I think whether you believe or not, you want to be curious about the life of that person who has so transformed Western society. We very often bring our Christian values to the table as if they had nothing to do with Christianity and want to keep them without any recognition of where they came from. This is, again, one of the main reasons I wrote this book is to bridge this gap. You have Christians encountering new atheists online and then trying to talk to their friends about it and maybe trying to talk to their pastor about it and they just don't even know that there is this body of working Christian philosophers who are both Orthodox Christian believers and rigorous academic philosophers. So I think the best case can be found there, in the work of academic Christian philosophy. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL You can help us get the truth out by heading to Apple podcasts and giving us a rating and review. You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Undeceptions, and you can grab your Undeceptions T-shirt from Undeceptions.com/shop or if you really like us, why not consider becoming a regular show sponsor via the donate button on our website. Thanks so much. While you're there feel free to send us a question and we'll try and answer it in the upcoming Q&A episode. Next episode is this season's Q&A episode, where you get to challenge me with all your questions about our previous episodes and a few curve balls thrown in as well. Questions like what's with all the violence in the Bible? Can men and women be friends after our lovely friendship episode earlier in the season? And can someone else's religion harm another, much more. See ya. CREDITS Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kaley Payne and directed by Socrates Hadley. Editing by Richard Hamwi. Special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan, for making this Undeception possible. Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com, letting the truth out. An Undeceptions podcast. OUTTAKE Director Mark: Episode 57, editorial seven in three, two... John Dickson: I'll put some links in the show notes for where I think... I'll put some links in the show notes... Actually, Producer Kaley will put some links in the show notes. Producer Kaley: Ah, yeah! John Dickson: One of us will put some links in the show notes. What should I say? We'll put some links in the show notes, it sounds so disingenuous. We'll put some links in... We'll put... Producer Kaley: I'm sorry. Pull it together. John Dickson: Do it for Aquinas.