ESSAYS

ON FREE WILL, NATURE,

MORALITY AND THE PROBLEM
OF EVIL
BY
CHRISTIAN THEOLOGIANS WHO ARE
BRINGING APOLOGETICS
ON STONE TABLETS DOWN

FROM MOUNT OLYMPUS

TO MOUNT RUSHMORE

Edited by jeffperado
BNOresearch Press

Big Picture Enterprises

2017
 Contents

Part I. What if Truth Meant No God? How Would Reality

Change?
The absurdity of life without God
J van Popta
In Defense of the Argument for God from Logic
James N. Anderson
Can We Know Anything if Naturalism is True? Or: A Plea for
Creativity with Theistic Arguments
Paul Gould
God and the Meaning of Life: Some Remarks on Toby Betenson's
Criticism of William Lane Craig
Roberto Di Ceglie
Is God a delusion?
by Clifford Goldstein

Part II. Morality; Relative or Natural?

Relativism (AND Expressivism) And The Problem Of Disagreement
by James Dreier
Some Remarks on Neo-Molinism, Infinite Intelligence, and
Providence
by Elijah Hess
Moral Relativism in Context
James R. Beebe
Absolute Morality and Absolute Truth and What it means to you
Neil Mammen
Christ-Shaped Moral Philosophy and The Triviality of 20th Century
‘Christian Ethics’
Harry Bunting
The Revenge of Berkeley, Kant and Husserl: An assessment of R.
Scott Smith’s Naturalism and Our Knowledge of Reality
Angus J. L. Menuge
The Ethics of Childrearing and A Theory of Justice
Michael T. McFall

Part III. Problem of Evil and Free Will… How Free, and From
What?
The problem of evil
AD Strange
How Can God Be Just And Ordain Evil?
John A. Battle, Th.D.
God, Heavenly Freedom, and Evil: A Further Response To Pawl and
Timpe
Steven B. Cowan
God and Good and Bad and the Problem of the Origin of Evil
Neil Mammen
Necessity, Univocism, and the Triune God: A Response to
Anderson and Welty
Nathan D. Shannon
The Knowledge of Good and Evil
Mark Hapanowicz

Part IV. Moral Law, Civil Law, and Christ’s Atonement: Sense,
A-Sense or Non-Sense?
The Judgment of God: The Problem of the Canaanites
By J. P. U. Lilley
Swinburnian Atonement And The Doctrine Of Penal Substitution
By Steven L. Porter
Is God Just? Why Christ had to die and Why God must punish Sin
Neil Mammen
Christ's Atonement As The Model For Civil Justice
Jeffrey C. Tuomala
Part V. Divine Action: Moral or Miracle?
Divine action and the problem of miracles
Mark W Worthing
Are Propositions Divine Thoughts?
Alexander Paul Bozzo
Analytic Moral Theology as Christ-Shaped Philosophy
Michael W. Austin
Miracles? Can they happen?
J van Popta
 PART I.
WHAT IF
TRUTH MEANT NO GOD?
HOW WOULD
REALITY CHANGE?
 The absurdity of life without
God
J van Popta
For a more developed presentation of this discussion see
Craig, W.L Apologetics: An Introduction. Chicago: Moody
Press, 1984. Chapter 2, "The Absurdity of Life Without God."

Many of you may have been asked, "How can you believe that
God exists?" Many people today simply deny that God exists at
all. They usually also deny that there is any existence for man
after death. There is no God, and there is no life after death.
One way you can respond to this is to show the absurdity of
life without God. From the beginning, however, realize that this
is but a stepping stone on the way to bring the Gospel. This will
not prove that Christianity is true. This can only show the
atheist, the unbeliever, that he has no foundation for the
meaning, value and purpose of his life.

Without God, life has no meaning

All of life, for the atheist, becomes a theatre of the absurd.
Science tells us that we are but accidental, chance products of
an evolutionary process, for our modern society has gotten rid
of God. But by getting rid of God, Western society has rejected
all hope. Like all other living things, man must die. Every man,
woman and child is but a spark in the blackness. Each person's
life is but a tiny moment in the endless stretch of time. Every
man must die and so cease to exist. If God does not exist then
when they die they will no longer be. Everything has appeared
out of nothing and sooner or later will disappear into a void.
But if a man ceases to exist at death what meaning is there to
his life? He can only hope that he will be remembered for a
short while. His contribution to the human race is without
significance for the human race is doomed. If God does not exist
then there is no meaning to anything.
 We see this in the hopelessness of our society. It shows in the
art and music of our day. It appears in the philosophy and
science. Everywhere there is hopelessness. A hopelessness that
only the Gospel of Jesus Christ can cure. Some try to bring
meaning to this lost world but the best they can do is say, "Let's
pretend that life has meaning". For without God each person
needs to bring his own meaning to life. But who is right? The
Marxist? The Humanist? The Socialist? They cannot all be right!
In order to have hope the atheist pretends that life has meaning
and so he pretends that he has joy.

Without God, life has no value

When our society pushes God aside then the value of life
disappears. Our debate with the pro-abortion faction in our
society is a debate about values, but values that are founded on
different beliefs. If God does not exist and death is the end then
why should we protest the death of millions of babies? Why
should we be horrified at the Holocaust? If God does not exist
then the lives of men and babies are not really any different
than the lives of the bugs which we kill with insecticide.
Without God there are no absolutes. Who can say what is right
or wrong? There are no moral values that can be applied
universally. We do not apply the question of moral right and
wrong when a lion pulls down and kills a gazelle, or when a frog
catches a dragonfly, do we? If God does not exist then how can
we apply moral values to anything that man does? He is simply
an animal among animals.
We see this to be true when babies are killed and seal pups are
saved; when old folks and handicapped people are quietly killed
but fur-bearing animals cannot be trapped. Without God all
value in life is distorted and confused. Though men try to
create standards of behaviour that must be maintained, the
atheist must admit that he has no foundation for doing so. He
builds his house of values on the sand. This is what man does
when he cuts himself off from God. The atheist philosophers of
our day cannot escape this.

Without God, life has no purpose

What's the point of life? If there is no goal, no destiny, no
purpose then human existence is a cruel and humourless joke.
"Life is hard, then you die". The writer of Ecclesiastes said,

"The fate of the sons of men and the fate of

beasts is the same. As one dies so dies the
other, indeed, they all have the same breath
and there is no advantage for man over beast,
for all is vanity" (3:19-20).
Without God there is no hope at all. If God does not exist then
what purpose can there be to human existence? The human
race simply exists and is hurtling through time to an unknown
but certain oblivion.
This perspective is one that few men can face and none can
really face happily. A universe that is but an accident; life
evolving by random chance; a world without purpose; these are
prospects too grim to face. Those who deny the existence of
God begin to speak of Mother Nature of Mother Earth. The
Omnimax theatre has a film about volcanoes and earthquakes
called, "The Ring of Fire". This film after examining and
explaining the latest scientific theories concerning earthquakes
and volcanoes, openly declares that, "the earth is alive". In that
film there is a new mix of science and neo-paganism. Geology
and pantheism meet. Science can no longer present itself in a
non-spiritual way. Everyone needs to create his own God in
order to face the oblivion of death. The world, the earth itself
becomes God, or perhaps Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" replaces God.

Atheism fails
Atheism fails to bring meaning, value or purpose to human
existence. Atheism simply leads to despair and the absurdity of
life without God can be shown. When someone asks you, "How
can you believe that God exists?" turn the tables on him and
ask, "How can you believe that God does not exist?" Show him
that his position is absurd. Show him that the atheist's position
is inconsistent and that atheism as a belief is a failure. This
approach can prepare the unbeliever to lower his hostile
attitude toward the Gospel and so allow you to bring the Gospel
of Jesus Christ in a non-confrontational way.

The next step

This argument is not a thoroughgoing proof nor is it a final
goal. Rather, it only prepares the ground for bringing the
Gospel. People generally want to be consistent. If you can show
that their position is inconsistent they may be willing to listen
to what you have to say. If you can show that their position is
not valid they may be willing to hear and examine an
alternative.
You then can show that Biblical Christianity does not fail. You
can show that the Reformed faith teaches that God brings
meaning, value and purpose to human existence. We may even
agree with some of the values of the people around us but we
believe that God gives us a foundation for these values in the
Bible. This is what this argument can do. It can show the
unbeliever that though he holds to some absolutes (he has
given meaning, purpose and value to life) yet he has no
foundation for doing this. Christians can show that there is only
one foundation to build on. This foundation is Jesus Christ and
obedience to Him.
From this point you can go on to show how all men are
sinners and that Jesus Christ came to save sinners. It is through
His work that meaning, value and purpose are restored to the
lives of sinners.

© 2011
www.christianstudylibrary.org
In Defense of the Argument
for God from Logic
James N. Anderson
Theology and Philosophy Department
Reformed Theological Seminary
Charlotte, NC
Greg Welty
Philosophy Department
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary
Wake Forest, NC

Abstract: This article interacts with critiques (Tony Lloyd,

Alexander Paul Bozzo, and Nathan Shannon) of some of the
more salient and recent criticisms to our 2011 Philosophia
Christi article, “The Lord of Noncontradiction: An Argument
for God from Logic.” Yet even by taking seriously such
interesting criticisms, we continue to be persuaded by the
defense of our original thesis and argument. For example,
we are not persuaded that Shannon has identified any false
premises or fallacious inferences in our argument, or that he
has demonstrated our conclusion to have theologically
problematic entailments. Contrary to Lloyd, the laws of logic
are “contingent on God” only in the sense that they are
metaphysically dependent on God’s existence, in precisely
the way that God’s thoughts are metaphysically dependent
on God’s existence. Moreover, in response to Bozzo, we
deny that human thoughts are numerically identical to God’s
thoughts, because we deny that human thoughts are
identical to the propositions expressed or contained by those
thoughts. But we do affirm that the propositions expressed
or contained by human thoughts should be identified with
divine thoughts.
 We are grateful to Tony Lloyd, Alexander Paul Bozzo, and
Nathan Shannon for their critical responses to our paper,
“The Lord of Noncontradiction: An Argument for God from
Logic,” because it affords us the opportunity to clarify and
elaborate on some of the features of our argument. 1 For all
the familiar reasons, we cannot respond to every point
raised by our critics, but we address what we take to be the
most salient and interesting points.

Reply to Lloyd
Tony Lloyd believes he has identified “an equivocation in the
2
argument revealed in a key lemma.” He claims there is a
logical ambiguity in the following statement: “Since [the laws of
logic] are true in every possible world, they must exist in every
3
possible world.” Lloyd considers several different ways of
understanding the logical connection between “true in every
possible world” and “exist in every possible world,” and argues
that the argument fails on all of the interpretations he
considers.
We assumed it would be sufficiently clear to our readers that
statements of the form Since P, Q are logically equivalent to If P
then Q. In any event, that reading of our statement was
indicated by the actualist argument we offered in
support of it: only existents can bear properties, thus if a
proposition bears the property of truth in every possible world
4
then it exists in every possible world. (Lloyd doesn’t identify
any flaw in this argument; indeed, he doesn’t even mention it.)
So why does Lloyd think our overall argument fails on this
interpretation of the “key lemma”? His criticism rests on this
premise: “That the laws of logic are necessarily true entails that
they are true whether or not God exists.” But there are two
problems here. First, he makes no argument for this
counterpossible claim, and the claim itself is questionable. The
laws of logic being necessarily true does not entail that they are
true no matter what; being true in all possible worlds is not
 5
equivalent to being true in all impossible worlds. The second
problem is that Lloyd’s claim clearly begs the question against
our true then it is true whether or not God exists.” Or this one: “If
the proposition 2+2=4 is necessarily true then it is true whether or
not 1+1=2.” Such claims are like the one on which Lloyd’s
objection hangs: highly questionable counterpossibles that need
supporting argument.

1
James N. Anderson and Greg Welty, “The Lord of
Noncontradiction: An Argument for God from Logic,”
Philosophia Christi 13:2 (2011), 321-338. Noted philosopher
William Vallicella has also briefly responded to our argument (
http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosoph
er/2013/05/from-the-laws-of-logic-to-the-existence-of-
god.html ) and we have replied to his criticisms
(http://www.proginosko.com/2013/07/vallicella-on-the-
argument-for-god-from-logic/).
2
Tony Lloyd, “An Equivocation in Anderson and Welty’s
Argument for God from Logic,” 1.
3
Anderson and Welty, 336.
4
Ibid., 332.
5
Compare this counter-possible claim: “If the proposition
God exists is necessarily

argument because it presupposes that the laws of

logic are not ontologically dependent on God.6
In his closing section Lloyd raises what seems to
be a different objection,
not only to our argument, but to any argument from
logic to God. As he writes:
Anderson and Welty must establish that the laws
of logic are capable of being contingent in order
to argue that they are contingent on God. Thus
 the laws of logic are characterized as thoughts.
Thoughts require a mind and, thus, are
contingent on minds. … In short it appears that
any argument for God from logic needs to assert
both the contingency and the necessity of the
laws of logic.7
But here it is Lloyd who is guilty of equivocation. The
laws of logic are “contingent on God” only in the
sense that they are metaphysically dependent on
God’s existence, in precisely the way that God’s
thoughts are metaphysically dependent on God’s
existence. This doesn’t entail that the laws of logic
exist contingently or are true contingently (where
contingently is a modal operator equivalent to not
necessarily). By way of comparison: being even is
contingent on being a number, but it doesn’t follow
that being even is a contingent property.

Reply to Bozzo
After summarizing our argument Alexander Paul
Bozzo states that his focus “solely concerns the third
premise [in his summary of the argument]: that is,
the assertion that something is intrinsically
intentional only if it is a thought.”8
Oddly, however, most of his article is devoted not to
this point but to arguing that the conclusion of our
argument has a theological unorthodox entailment,
viz., “that human beings literally partake of the divine
mind.” (Indeed, he later refers to this as his “primary
objection.”) In what follows we address both
criticisms.
Objection #1: Propositions can be
Intentional but Non-Mental.
 6
This question-begging rears its head in other contexts.
Lloyd insists that “being true and being thought are wholly
independent properties of propositions,” but he gives no
argument for this assumption. If in fact the laws of logic are true
if and only if God thinks them, and vice versa, then they’re not
“wholly independent properties of propositions.”
7
Lloyd, 3.
8
Alexander Paul Bozzo, “Are Propositions Divine
Thoughts?” 2.

Bozzo seeks to undermine our claim that

propositions are best understood as thoughts. He
begins by charging us with an inconsistency:
Anderson and Welty repeatedly characterize
propositions—specifically, the laws of logic—
themselves as thoughts, suggesting there is
nothing more to thoughts than the propositions
themselves. … It seems then that propositions
just are thoughts. But, in other places, the authors
refer to thoughts as beliefs, desires, hopes, and so
forth. … It should be obvious that we have some
inconsistency here. Thoughts cannot both be
identical to propositions and propositional
attitudes plus some proposition…9
This perceived inconsistency arises only because
Bozzo has mischaracterized our claim. In our paper we
consistently used the term thought to refer to mental
items in general.10 Moreover, we do not claim that
thoughts as such are identical to propositions, as
though the terms are coextensive (i.e., all thoughts are
propositions and all propositions are thoughts). Our
claim is only that propositions are thoughts;
specifically, divine thoughts. This is entirely consistent
with some thoughts not being propositions. Indeed, our
position entails that no non-divine thought is a
proposition.
 To further undermine our claim about
propositions, Bozzo attempts to show that a
proposition can be intrinsically (i.e., non-derivatively)
intentional without being mental:
If it can be shown that something—like a
proposition—can be intentional without
someone’s mind doing the directing, then
perhaps this opens the way for something’s being
intentional despite its being non-mental.11
He proposes the following counterexample to our
claim. Romulus asserts that “The explorer who
discovered the Pacific Ocean was adventurous.” This
proposition is about Balboa and thus refers to him. Yet
Romulus (we are told) is ignorant of which explorer
discovered the Pacific Ocean; thus the proposition is
directed towards Balboa, but not by any mental activity
or direction on Romulus’s part.

9
Ibid., 9.
10
See, e.g., Anderson and Welty, 334.
11
Bozzo, 4.

We see three reasons why this counterexample

fails. First, why couldn’t we say the assertion is about
Balboa in virtue of Romulus’s mental activity? After
all, Romulus intends to make a claim about “the
explorer who discovered the Pacific Ocean.” Without
that intention, his thought has no hope of being about
Balboa. As long as such mental activity is a necessary
(albeit not sufficient) condition for the proposition’s
aboutness and aspectual shape, our argument goes
through. So the definite description refers despite
Romulus’s ignorance, but it doesn’t refer apart from
Romulus’s intentional activity.12 In
sum, the description “the explorer who discovered the
Pacific Ocean” is also “about Balboa” because
Romulus is using it to refer to whoever has the
property of being the explorer who discovered the
Pacific Ocean. Just because
the description doesn’t refer solely in virtue of
Romulus’s intentions or mental activity doesn’t mean
that it can refer independently of Romulus’s intentions
or mental activity. Bozzo has implausibly abstracted
away Romulus’s intentions from the referential
properties of his assertion.
Secondly, Bozzo equivocates on the term
about. It is true that the proposition expressed by
Romulus’s assertion refers indirectly to Balboa, since
Balboa uniquely satisfies the definite description in
the assertion. But the proposition itself is not about
Balboa, since that designator (‘Balboa’) does not
constitute part of the semantic content of the
proposition. “The explorer who discovered the Pacific
Ocean was adventurous” expresses a different
proposition than “Balboa was adventurous,” even
though the two propositions are logically
equivalent.
Thirdly, even if Bozzo were right that the
proposition in question possesses intentionality
independently of Romulus’s mind or mental activity,
that would be entirely consistent with our argument.
For our argument does not depend on the claim that if
a mind entertains a proposition then the intentionality
of that proposition derives solely (or even partly) from
that mind. What Bozzo needs to show is that the
proposition could have intentionality in the absence of
any minds or mental activity. But he has given us no
reason to accept that stronger claim.

12
Keith Donnellan’s “Reference and Definite
Descriptions” famously distinguishes different uses of definite
descriptions, and there could hardly be such uses apart from the
intentional activity of agents.
Objection #2: The Argument’s Conclusion is
Theologically
Unorthodox.
Bozzo’s “primary objection” is formulated in
several ways. It’s important to note at the outset that
this objection doesn’t identify a fault with any of the
premises of the argument, or with any of its
inferences, but only with its conclusion. Bozzo’s
first formulation of the objection runs thus (where
‘=’ denotes numerical identity):
(1) Thoughts just are propositions. [assumed
arguendo]
(2) Therefore, (God’s thought that A) = A and
(Romulus’s thought that A)
= A.
(3) Therefore, (God’s thought that A) = (Romulus’s
thought that A).
According to this objection then, our argument
implies that some divine thoughts are numerically
identical to some human thoughts, and this “violates
the fundamental division between creator and
creature.”13 As we explained above, however, we do
not claim that all thoughts are propositions, nor does
our argument depend on that claim. So this first
formulation of the objection fails.
The second formulation of the objection can be
summarized as follows. Suppose that thoughts are the
conjunction of a propositional attitude (e.g., believing)
with some proposition. We argue that propositions are
divine
thoughts. But then it follows that “Romulus’s thought
[that A] contains as a constituent an element internal to
God’s mind. … Romulus’s thinking that A entails that
Romulus has within his mind an item internal to God’s
mental life— namely, A itself.”14 And this also appears
to violate the Creator-creature division.
It’s hard to make out the precise objection here,
because the key phrase “has within his mind” is left
vague and ambiguous. Depending on how it is
understood, the claim that Romulus “has within his
mind” a divine thought is
either false or theologically benign. Let us
consider three plausible interpretations.
(A) The phrase means “entertains in his mind.”
On this interpretation, there’s
no problem to be found here. Suppose that Romulus
“has within his mind”
Remus in that specific sense (i.e., Romulus is thinking
about Remus). Does it
follow that there’s some sort of ontological overlap
between Romulus and

13
Bozzo, 6.
14
Ibid., 6-7.

Remus? Of course not. Remus isn’t somehow located

in the mind of Romulus, and neither are propositions
(whether understood as divine thoughts or not)
somehow located in the mind that takes up some
propositional attitude toward them.
(B) The phrase means “has as a proper part of
his mind or one of his thoughts.” On this interpretation,
our conclusion would indeed have theologically
objectionable entailments. But why think that
Romulus’s taking up some
propositional attitude toward a proposition (believing,
asserting, etc.) entails that the proposition is a proper
part of his mind or one of his thoughts? Bozzo gives us
no reason to think that this must be the case.
(C) The phrase means “has as a (non-
mereological) constituent of his mind or one of
his thoughts.” (This reading is suggested by Bozzo’s
statement that, on our view, “Romulus’s thought
contains as a constituent an element internal to God’s
mind.”) On this interpretation, it isn’t at all obvious
how our position would violate the Creator-creature
distinction. There are different ways to construe the
constituency relation, and Bozzo doesn’t indicate
which (if any) he has in mind—or why we should be
committed to any particular construal. If this is what
Bozzo means by “within his mind” then at the very
least he owes us a more precise formulation of the
objection.
It’s important to recognize that Bozzo’s
objection, if it were cogent, would actually furnish
us with a quick-and-easy refutation of propositional
realism in general (i.e., the view that propositions
are real, necessarily existing, non-spatiotemporal
abstract entities). Here’s the argument:
(1) Propositional attitudes are attitudes toward
necessarily existing, non- spatiotemporal
abstract entities.
(2) Therefore, human thoughts “contain as a
constituent” necessarily
existing, non-spatiotemporal abstract entities.
(3) Therefore, human minds are partly constituted
 by necessarily existing, non-spatiotemporal
abstract objects. These are objects “within”
human minds.
(4) Since human minds are contingently existing
spatiotemporal concrete objects, (3) is false
and by reductio (1) is false as well.
Any propositional realist worth his salt will deny (2).
Adopting some propositional attitude toward A
doesn’t require A to be a constituent of the mind
adopting that attitude, such that A is ontologically
“within” that mind. Once we see the weakness in this
argument against propositional realism, we can
thereby see the weakness in Bozzo’s objection to the
conclusion of our argument.
Since we believe Bozzo’s objection to our
argument is ill-conceived at the outset, we need say
little about the second section of his critique in which
he reviews various possible responses to his objection.
We do find here, however, what appears to be a more
precise statement of the objection. According to our
position, if Romulus and God are “thinking the same
thing”
(i.e., the same proposition) then “an element of
Romulus’s thought [specifically, its propositional
content] … is numerically identical to God’s thought …
or
numerically identical to a part or feature of God’s
thought.”
Once again, the criticism suffers from a
debilitating vagueness and ambiguity. What does it
mean for a proposition to be an “element of” a human
thought? Consider again three plausible interpretations:
(A) “Element of” means “proper part of.” In
that case, we reject the premise, along with most other
propositional realists. Propositions are not proper
parts of the thoughts that contain or express them.
(B) “Element of” means “non-
mereological constituent of.” In that case,
we
simply repeat our earlier response. Bozzo needs to be
more specific about this constituency relation and how
it would violate the Creator-creature distinction. (C)
“Element of” means “referential object of.” In that
case, there is no
violation of the Creator-creature distinction. A thought
can have a referential
object without violating the ontological division
between the thought and its object.
Moreover, as we pointed out, if propositions being
“elements of” human thoughts were a problem for
our position then it wouldn’t be one distinctive to our
position. It would one that afflicts any version of
propositional realism.
Bozzo’s central concern is to honor the Creator-
creature distinction—a concern we share, of course.
At one point, however, he seems to suggest a
quite different problem with our argument: “Thus,
Romulus’s thoughts get at aspects internal to God’s
mind, rendering them publicly accessible.”
Unfortunately Bozzo doesn’t elaborate on this alleged
problem. Why would it be objectionable for “aspects
internal to God’s mind” to become “publicly
accessible”? Isn’t that precisely what divine
revelation does? If humans learn some truth, doesn’t
that obviously entail that they have accessed the
contents
of God’s mind (assuming divine omniscience)? We
confess we are at a loss to
see what is theologically suspect about any of this.
 Bozzo summarizes his critique
in his closing paragraph:
The suggestion that propositions are divine
thoughts (or constituents of divine thoughts)
leads to undesirable conclusions. I have shown
that this contention entails that human thoughts
are either numerically identical
to God’s thoughts, or that human thoughts
contain elements numerically identical to
elements internal to God’s mind. Either
alternative is unacceptable for the orthodox
theist.15
Our response to his critique can be summarized in three
points:
1. We deny that human thoughts are numerically
identical to God’s thoughts, because we deny
that human thoughts are identical to the
propositions expressed or contained by those
thoughts. Contrary to Bozzo’s claim, we
have not argued that all thoughts are
propositions.
2. We affirm that the propositions expressed or
contained by human thoughts should be
identified with divine thoughts. Bozzo hasn’t
provided a clear argument as to why that is
metaphysically or theologically problematic. He
needs to be more specific about how the key
terms element and constituent in his argument
should be understood, and why we must concede
that propositions are elements or constituents of
human thoughts in those senses.
3. With respect to the concerns Bozzo expresses,
our position—that propositions are divine
 thoughts—ought to be no more metaphysically
or theologically problematic than traditional
propositional realism (according to which
propositions are abstract entities existing
independently of any minds). What does it mean
for a human thought to “contain” a proposition?
What does it mean for a proposition to be
“within” a human mind? Take any senses of
these terms that would be agreeable to a
propositional realist, apply them to our position,
and it
should be clear that no tenets of Christian
orthodoxy have been violated. Indeed, our
position is more theologically orthodox than
traditional propositional realism because it
preserves divine aseity in a way that the latter
does not.
Reply to Shannon
Responding to Nathan Shannon’s lengthy critique of
our paper presents a considerable challenge, not
only because of the many and varied criticisms it
makes (and the rather obscure way in which some of
those criticisms are expressed) but also because of
the many and varied mischaracterizations and

15
Ibid., 11.
philosophical confusions it contains. To deal with
each one would require a response longer than our
original paper. In what follows therefore we will
content ourselves with addressing what appear to be
the most salient and least opaque objections.
 Objection #1: The Argument Confuses De
Dicto and De Re Necessity.
In the first section of his critique, Shannon
considers our argument for the necessary existence
of the laws of logic. He writes:
The reasoning is this: If a proposition is
necessarily true, and propositions exist, a
necessarily true proposition exists necessarily.
Note the equivocation: the metaphysical
property, existing necessarily, replaces the
propositional property, being necessarily true; de
dicto necessity is swapped for de re necessity, but
these are not the same thing at all. AW offer no
argument for the de re necessity of the laws of
logic or necessarily true propositions. Benefiting
from this ambiguity, AW's argument slips
smoothly from the realm of contingent being to
the realm of necessary being; but the transition is
spurious.16
Shannon has apparently missed or misunderstood our
arguments on this point. The core argument is
grounded in the actualist thesis that only existents can
bear properties. As we wrote:
If only existents can bear properties, and the laws
of logic are propositions that bear the property of
truth in every possible world, then we can only
conclude that the laws of logic exist in every
possible world, as the bearers of that property.17

To spell out the

argument more
 explicitly: (1)

The laws of logic

are necessarily

true.
(2) Therefore, the laws of logic are true in every
possible world.
(3) Therefore, the laws of logic bear the property
of truth in every possible world.
(4) Necessarily, something can bear the property of
truth only if it exists.
16
Nathan D. Shannon, “Necessity, Univocism, and the
Triune God: A Response to
Anderson and Welty,” 3.
17
Anderson and Welty, 332.

(5) Therefore, the laws of logic exist

in every possible world. (6)
Therefore, the laws of logic exist
necessarily.
The only transition from de dicto to de re necessity (if
it can be considered that) lies in the deduction of (3)
from (2). We assume, reasonably enough, that if a
proposition is true then it bears the property of truth.
In section IV of our paper we defended this
assumption against deflationary accounts of truth, and
Shannon has given no reason to doubt it.18 So he is
quite mistaken to claim that we have offered no
argument on this point.
Shannon tries to reinforce his criticism by
charging us with failure to distinguish truth in a
possible world from truth of or at a possible world:
To be true in a possible world, a proposition must
exist in that world; to be true of or at a possible
world, the proposition need only describe that
world. A proposition can be true of a possible
world without existing in it. AW blur this
distinction… To be true in a possible world, a
proposition must exist in that world; to be true of
a possible world, the proposition need only
describe that world, but need not exist in it.19
The claim that a proposition can be true of a possible
world (as a description of that world) without being
true in that possible world (as an existent proposition
within that world) is a controversial one. Indeed, it is
hard to make sense of the idea that some proposition P
could be true-of-w without also being true-in-w. If P is
true-of-w—that is to say, if P describes w truly—it
surely follows that P would be true if w were the actual
world. (What else would it mean for P to be true-of-
w?) But if P does not exist in w, then P would not be
true even if w were the actual world; for as we have
argued, a proposition cannot be true if it doesn’t exist.
Think of it this way. Take any possible world
w and ask this question: Would the laws of logic be
true if w were the actual world? Surely they would.
But if w were the actual world, the laws of logic
would also have to exist, for
there can be no truths without truth-bearers. And that is
just to say that for any possible world w, if w were the
actual world then the laws of logic would
exist—which is equivalent to saying that the laws of
logic exist in every possible world.

18
Ibid., 329-330.
19
Shannon, 4.
 Objection #2: The Argument Uses Terms
Univocally.
Shannon’s second objection is that our argument uses
key terms such as ‘mind’,
‘thought’, and ‘necessity’ univocally. This is a
remarkable objection, since an argument would
normally be criticized for not using terms
univocally!
Underlying this criticism, however, is a serious
theological concern about
honoring the Creator-creature distinction. As Shannon
puts it, “Univocal terms imply unitarian ontology.”20
While he doesn’t define the term “unitarian ontology,”
we assume it refers to the notion that there is only one
kind of being or existence, and that one kind is
exemplified by both God and his creation.
Shannon states his objection thus:
In their argument, all of these terms, familiar to
us in the created realm, in the context of our
knowledge and familiarity, are applied
univocally to the mind and being of the
uncreated God. When we say “a thought requires
a mind,” what do we mean by mind? If no
distinction appears, the use of the term suggests
that there is one kind of mind; and of that kind,
[Anderson and Welty] argue, there must be at
least one which exists in all possible worlds, but
that “necessarily existing” mind is essentially of
a kind with minds that exist in only some
possible worlds.21
It seems to us, however, that the objection is based on
a non sequitur. To say, for example, that orangutans
have legs and fireflies have legs does not imply that
orangutans and fireflies have the same kind of legs,
still less that there is only one kind of leg. It implies
only that orangutans and fireflies have a particular
feature in common, a feature that can be described at
a certain level of abstraction.
Likewise, to say that humans have thoughts and
God has thoughts does not imply that humans have the
same kinds of thoughts as God.22 Nor does it imply
that there is only one kind of thought. All our
argument requires is that the terms in question can be
truthfully predicated of God. If Shannon wishes to
argue that in principle no terms “familiar to us in the
created realm” can be

20
Ibid., 6.
21
Ibid., 6.
22
Indeed, our position implies the very opposite: God’s
thoughts are original and
necessary while our thoughts are derivative and contingent.
It is only because of the fundamental difference between
divine thoughts and human thoughts that our argument
works; rather than violating the Creator-creature distinction, the
argument actually
presupposes and accentuates it.

truthfully predicated of God, he is free to do so—

assuming he is willing to embrace radical
apophaticism and its self-referential pitfalls.
It’s important to note that Shannon’s second
objection doesn’t
specifically target our argument. If it were cogent it
would rule out all theistic arguments, since every
such argument relies on premises with terms
“familiar to us in the created realm.” If this is his
position—if he rejects all theistic arguments in
principle—he should come clean and concede that
his criticism doesn’t identify any problem distinctive
to our argument.
Shannon devotes several pages to “the problem
of a univocal notion of necessity.” Our argument, he
suggests, commits the mistake of assuming that
“notions of logical relations and of logical necessity
… apply equally to man
and to God.” In fact, we make no such assumption.
We assume only that the notion of (broad) logical
necessity can be meaningfully applied to matters of
God’s existence and God’s thoughts; specifically,
that God exists in every possible world and thinks
certain thoughts in every possible world.
If Shannon could show that such modal
concepts should never be applied to God, his
criticism would have some bite. But in that case he
wouldn’t be practicing what he preaches, because
he himself applies modal concepts to God
throughout his paper.23 In short, he wishes to deny
us the
right to make the modal claims about God that we
do, all the while making similar modal claims
about God.
In sum, the univocity objection can be interpreted
either weakly, as the
claim that terms applied to the creation do not apply
to God in exactly the same way, or strongly, as the
claim that terms applied to the creation do not
apply to God at all. On the weak interpretation, our
argument escapes
unscathed, while on the strong interpretation,
Shannon falls under the condemnation of his
own strictures.
 Objection #3: The Argument’s Conclusion
Raises Theological Problems.
In the third section of his critique, Shannon discusses
what he takes to be three theological problems that
emerge from our argument. The first of these arises
from our claim that the laws of logic are “nothing other
than what God thinks about his thoughts qua
thoughts.”24 Shannon thinks there is something
incoherent about the idea of “second order thoughts in
the divine mind” (i.e.,

23
See, for instance, the paragraph beginning
“According to the doctrines of divine simplicity and aseity,”
in which Shannon applies the notion of logical necessity to
both God’s existence and God’s thoughts. Shannon, 5.
24
Anderson and Welty, 337.

divine thoughts about divine thoughts). Despite several

readings of his argument, we confess we cannot make
sufficient sense of his objection to address it. We are
content to leave it up to other readers to judge whether
there is a cogent criticism here.
The second alleged problem appears to be that
our argument fails to prove the existence of the
Christian God: its conclusion doesn’t entail that God
is triune, that God became incarnate in Jesus Christ,
that God had revealed
himself in the Bible, and so forth. This we admit. But
since our conclusion is consistent with Christian
theism, this observation does nothing to show that the
argument is unsound (given the truth of Christian
theism). Moreover, if our argument is theologically
deficient because it fails to prove all the distinctive
claims of Christian theism then every theistic argument
that we know of (and that Shannon knows of) must be
theologically deficient for the same reason. Once again
we’re presented with a criticism that isn’t targeting our
argument in particular, but rather applies to all theistic
arguments.
In the fact that our argument doesn’t prove full-
blown Christian theism Shannon somehow finds
confirmation that the argument depends on univocal
terms and a “unitarian ontology,” and from this he
draws the further conclusion that “the god(s) this
argument purports to prove simply cannot be the
Christian God.” We have already rebutted the charge of
univocism. In any case,
surely it is obvious that not proving P doesn’t amount to
proving not-P.
Shannon’s third theological concern is less than
fully perspicuous, so we will quote it here rather than
paraphrase:
According to the doctrine of divine simplicity,
God’s thoughts are identical to his being. Indeed,
AW think this much is true of any mind: “. . .
thoughts belong essentially to the minds that
produce them” (336 n.31). So if we think
thoughts that are essential to God’s being—
exactly those thoughts that God thinks about his
own thoughts as thoughts— are we not
participating in the divine essence? The same
thoughts— univocal thoughts—belong
essentially to our minds and to God’s mind.
Given simplicity, in other words, unless we deny
that our thoughts are ever identical to God’s, we
flirt with pantheism or apotheosis. Or, hoping to
maintain simplicity and the ontological
distinction between God and creation, we may
say that the laws of logic are abstract objects
existing independently of both God and man.25
 25
Shannon, 12.
As best we can tell, the objection amounts to this: if
propositions are divine thoughts and God’s thoughts
are identical to his being (as the doctrine of divine
simplicity implies) then propositions are identical to
God’s being. Thus, on our view, when we think
certain propositions our thoughts must be identical to
God’s thoughts. But that would violate the ontological
Creator-creature distinction. If this is indeed the
objection, it is based on a confusion between human
thoughts and the propositional content of those
thoughts. We do not identify human thoughts with
divine thoughts. Rather, we identify the propositions
expressed or contained by human thoughts with
divine thoughts. If Shannon believes that even this
claim raises the specters of pantheism and apotheosis,
we would simply direct him to our response to Bozzo.
In sum, we are not persuaded that Shannon has
identified any false premises or fallacious inferences
in our argument, or that he has demonstrated our
conclusion to have theologically problematic
entailments.
As a postscript we would note that in the course
of his critique Shannon asserts or implies all of the
following:
 If the word “God” isn’t used in a sense
synonymous with “the God of Christianity,”
and all that entails, then it isn’t a proper
noun and should be spelled with a lower-
case ‘g’.26
 Propositions are “essentially parasitic” on
their referents in such a way that if their
referents do not exist then the propositions
have no meaning and cannot bear truth-
values.27
 There are possible worlds in which God
 does not think that if all men are mortal,
and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is
mortal.28
 If a necessarily true proposition exists
necessarily and is necessarily about
something, whatever that proposition is
about must also exist necessarily.29
 Only “God’s speaking” has de re necessity.30
 Having a property essentially is logically
equivalent to having that property in
every possible world.31 (If this were so,
anything with essential properties would
exist necessarily.)
 The truth-value of A=A must be
determined “on a case by case basis.”32
 A floating iron axe-head violates the laws of
logic.33
 The very idea that God has thoughts about his
own thoughts is incoherent.34 (One wonders
then how Isaiah 55:8-9 could be a divine
revelation.)
We will be the first to concede that anyone who
looks favorably upon claims such as these will be
unlikely to find our original argument cogent.

James Anderson is Associate Professor of Theology and

Philosophy at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte,
NC.
Greg Welty is Associate Professor of Philosophy at
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest,
NC.

Endnotes
26
Ibid., 2, fn. 2.
27
Ibid., 4.
28
Ibid., 5.
29
Ibid., 6. Counterexample: “If Moses exists then Moses is
identical to himself.”
30
Ibid., 6.
31
Ibid., 7.
32
Ibid., 8.
33
Ibid., 9.
34
Ibid., 11.
Can We Know Anything if
Naturalism is True? Or: A Plea
for Creativity with Theistic
Arguments
Paul Gould
Southeastern College
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary
Wake Forest, North Carolina
www.paul-gould.com
All Rights Reserved
© Evangelical Philosophical Society
www.epsociety.org

Abstract: This brief essay considers the ontological

implication of Scott Smith’s central thesis in Naturalism and
our Knowledge of Reality, by focusing on one mental
phenomenon, the phenomenon of intentionality, in order to
see whether an argument to God from intentionality can be
generated. In his book, Smith offers a bold and sustained
attack of naturalism and its ability to deliver us knowledge.
His master argument is a kind of transcendental argument: If
philosophical naturalism is true, then we do not have
knowledge of reality. We do have knowledge of reality,
therefore it is not the case that philosophical naturalism is
true. This essay concludes with a particular challenge: We
need more work that advances the following kind of
argument: if, as the theist claims, God exists and is the
source of all reality distinct from Himself, then any existent
phenomena that is not God, ought (in principle, at least) be
able to figure into a premise of a philosophical argument with
a theological conclusion.
 John Calvin famously claimed that we cannot know God
unless we know ourselves and (conversely), we cannot know
ourselves unless we know God. Calvin thinks there is a tight
relationship between the knowledge of God and the knowledge
of man. Scott Smith’s new book, Naturalism and Our Knowledge of
Reality1, seeks an even tighter relationship between God and
knowledge: we cannot have knowledge of anything unless God
exists.
Scott’s book is a bold and sustained attack of naturalism and
its ability to deliver us knowledge. His master argument is a
kind of transcendental argument: If philosophical naturalism is
true, then we do not have knowledge of reality. We do have knowledge
of reality, therefore it is not the case that philosophical naturalism is
true.
The bulk of Scott’s book (in fact, Chapters 1-8) is concerned
with showing the inability of naturalism to ground knowledge
(he engages with the Direct Realism of D.M. Armstrong, the
Representationalism of Dretske, Tye, and Lycan, Searle’s
Naturalism, Papineau’s naturalized epistemology, Dennett’s
neurophilosophy, the Churchland’s eliminativism, and Kim’s
physicalism). Finally, in Chapter 9, Scott begins to build a
positive case for the kind of ontology required for knowledge.
Mental properties are sui generis, irreducible to the physical;
knowledge requires substance dualism; and the “natural
affinity” exhibited between mind and world is best explained
via a divine mind. Thus, the reality of knowledge entails theism
and a decidedly theistic world.
If correct, Smith’s thesis has huge implications. For, we
clearly do know things. Thus, we find an argument, or probably
a family of arguments, from the reality of knowledge to the
existence of God. And, if God exists, this is as it should be—if
God is the creator of all things, that means that all knowledge
(that is, all truths discovered) as well as knowledge itself—
somehow connects to and illuminates the divine.
In this brief essay, I propose to consider in greater detail the
ontological implication of Scott’s central thesis by focusing on
one mental phenomenon, the phenomenon of intentionality, to
see whether an argument to God from intentionality can be
generated.
 The Phenomenon of Intentionality
Let’s call platonism the view that there are abstract objects.
Such a platonism is neutral with respect to “where” such
abstracta are located (that is, Plato’s Heaven or God’s mind),
their modal status, and whether or not they exist in virtue of
their own nature or through another. The reality of intentional
facts, as articulated by Scott, seems to establish platonism.
Mental entities are intentional objects; they are of or about
things. A
question that quickly arises is this. In virtue of what does a
mental entity (or state) possess intentionality at all? Scott’s
answer is that intentionality is a property of mental states: “if
intentionality itself were a relation, then any time it is
represented in an experience, the object it is of would have to
exist” (49). But, we can and do think of non-existent objects,
such as the unicorn Pegasus, and we can and do have
hallucinations and other kinds of conceptual errors. Thus,
Scott’s road to platonism begins with a claim about the nature
of intentionality:
Fact 1: Intentionality is a property.2
A second observation, following Franz Brentano, is that
intentionality is the distinctive mark of the mental. Mental states
are intrinsically intentional, hence:
Fact 2: Intentionality is an essential property of mental
states.3
Further, it seems that intentionality is multiply-instantiated:
A mental representation of a double-stuffed Oreo cookie can be
possessed by me variously in acts of thinking, liking, and
desiring. Further, distinct individuals can be thinking about the
same thing—say Socrates or Socrates wisdom. It seems that the
intentional property had by these mental states exactly
resemble. Plug this resemblance fact into an One Over Many
Argument and we have good reason to think that the
resemblance of intentional properties is grounded in their
identity, that is, intentionality is a universal. Hence,
Fact 3: Intentional properties are universals.
Scott argues that the above Facts 1-3 are best explained given
platonism, hence it is not just naturalism that fails to deliver
knowledge, is it nominalism as well.

An Argument for God from Intentionality

Scott argues that the incredibly high degree of correlation
between a mental representation and the object represented,
indeed, the information present within mental acts is best
explained if there is a non-natural designer (201-204). The fact
of intentionality fits best within a broadly theistic framework. I
think Scott is right; there is a designer argument in the
neighborhood that can be generated from the phenomenon of
intentionality. I also think we can figure the phenomenon of
intentionality into other kinds of theistic arguments for God.
Here is a new kind of conceptualist argument. First we supply
a plausible premise that follows from Scott’s internalism and
atomism regarding mental representations:
(1) Mental representations have intrinsic intentionality (that
is, intentional properties essentially belong (are had/possessed)
by minds.) [conjunction of internalism & atomism]
Next, we add a modally charged platonist premise,
(2) Some (if not all) intentional properties (understood as
abstract objects) exist necessarily.
From which it follows:
(3) In every possible world, there is some (necessarily
existing) mind that possesses intentional properties.
Supplemented with an auxiliary premise such as (4) and we
have found our Anselmian conclusion (5).
(4) It is impossible that there exists an x such that x is a
necessarily existent mind and different than God.4
(5) God exists in every possible world [that is, Anselmian
Theism is true].
This argument is not unassailable, but its premises can be
independently motivated. Premise (1) is entailed by Scott’s
internalism and atomism, defended throughout his book. 5 What
about the platonist premise? One could deny premise (2) by
arguing that intentional properties are contingent; they obtain
only in worlds where contingent minds obtain. But it seems
that there are some intentional objects, namely, necessarily
true propositions that are true in every possible world. If so,
then there are some necessarily existing intentional properties.
Thus, I conclude that if Scott Smith has established his case
regarding intentionality, the theistic philosopher finds herself
with new resources for engaging the question of God’s
existence, and submit the above as but one example of how a
new argument for God might run from the phenomenon of
intentionality.
In closing, I offer a challenge. I think that we need to see more
books, articles, and arguments like Scott’s advanced in the
academic and popular presses—if, as the theist claims, God
exists and is the source of all reality distinct from Himself, then
any existent phenomena that is not God, ought (in principle, at
least) be able to figure into a premise of a philosophical
argument with a theological conclusion. Robert Adam’s article
“Flavors, Colors, and God,” and Alvin Plantinga’s widely cited
“Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments” are suggestive of this
kind of thinking. Scott Smith’s book is a sustained argument
from knowledge to God, motivated by paying attention to the
necessary ontology required for knowledge. And now a
challenge for theists: pick any existent phenomena of our
world. I submit that in investigating the ground or cause of the
phenomenon, we will be led, if we follow the dialectic carefully,
to a divine source. Let’s begin to construct and articulate these
philosophical arguments—ours is a magical world, an
ontologically haunted world, where the immaterial constantly
is breaking into the material, the abstract into the concrete, the
mental into the physical, and non-natural into the natural, and
evidence of such breaches are everywhere.

Paul Gould is an adjunct professor teaching the History of

Ideas at the College of Southeastern, the undergraduate
college of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in
Wake Forest, North Carolina. More about his work can be
found at www.Paul-Gould.com.
 Endnotes
1
R. Scott Smith, Naturalism and Our Knowledge of Reality
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012). Subsequent references will
be provided in the main text.
2
At this point, all I mean by ‘property’ is “a monadic abstract
object capable of being had or possessed by another.” I do
not take a stand on whether such objects admit of their own
ontological category or are reducible to an entity in some
other category.
3
Or of many, if not all. Even if, as some contemporary
philosophers of mind argue, intentionality is not the mark of
all mental states, that is, if it is a sufficient but not necessary
condition of the mental, the above fact would still stand,
suitably restricted to mental states such as beliefs, likings,
desires, intentions, and the like.
4
This premise is supplied from Quentin Smith’s, “The
Conceptualist Argument for God’s Existence,” Faith and
Philosophy vol. 11 (1984): 38-49.
5
Scott has more in mind that the mere directedness of mental
acts when he talks about their intrinsic intentionality. Mental
acts are representations of some determinate object. My
thought of a cat does not, along with the cat, exemplify the
universal cathood—my concept of cathood is a
representation, not the object itself. In his explication of how
a thought is about its object, Scott endorses internalism
(instead of externalism) and atomism (instead of holism).
According to internalism, mental representations possess
their intentional properties independently of how things
stand in the external environment, that is, the content or
intentionality of representational states is determined solely
by properties intrinsic to the subjects of such states. Further,
according to atomism, the intentional properties of a given
mental representation are determined independently of any
relation it bears to other representations; in principle,
therefore, it is possible for the mind to think about an object
(say, Socrates), even if it possesses no other mental
representations whatsoever. As Scott states, in summarizing
Husserl: “therefore, the mental act’s own intrinsic parts and
properties alone determine what its object is and how that
object is presented before the act” (188).
 God and the Meaning of Life:
Some Remarks on Toby
Betenson's Criticism of William
Lane Craig
Roberto Di Ceglie
Pontifical Lateran University
Vatican City, Rome
All Rights Reserved
© Evangelical Philosophical Society
www.epsociety.org

Abstract: In a very recent essay, Toby Betenson reflects on

some statements made by William Lane Craig about God,
immortality, and the meaning of life. As a Christian, Craig
holds that God and immortality are essential to make life
meaningful or not-futile. Betenson tries to demonstrate that
Craig falls into contradiction— namely, Craig’s statements
end up supporting the idea that life is futile if God exists.
Here I intend to further explore the way Betenson interprets
Craig’s statements and develops his own thesis. Whether or
not Craig would agree with my remarks, I think that they (my
remarks) ultimately take the debate a step further. They
show that Betenson’s criticism fails, since its logic falls short
and the reading of the Christian doctrines it implies is
inadequate.

In an intellectually penetrating essay,1 Toby Betenson (hereafter

also ‘the author’) reflects on some statements made by William
Lane Craig about God, immortality, and the meaning of life. As a
Christian, Craig holds that God and immortality are essential to
make life meaningful or not-futile.
For the sake of argument Betenson assumes the position
maintained by Craig, and tries to demonstrate that Craig falls into
contradiction—namely, Craig’s statements end up supporting the
idea that life is futile if God exists. Here I intend to further explore
the way the author interprets Craig’s statements and develops his
own thesis. Of course, I do not intend to defend Craig’s position in
lieu of the American philosopher, which would be utterly
inappropriate. Whether or not Craig would agree with my remarks,
I think that they (my remarks) ultimately take the debate a step
further. They show that Betenson’s criticism fails, since its logic
falls short and the reading of the Christian doctrines it implies is
inadequate.2
Following Betenson’s line of reasoning, I intend to examine
first the arguments and conclusions advanced by the author in
the first part of his article, where he presents and develops
some working definitions of ‘futile life’ and argues that Craig’s
view turns into its negation. Then, I shall take into
consideration the way Betenson discusses four possible
objections to his own position.

Does Craig's view turn into its negation?

Betenson starts his analysis by proposing a definition of ‘futile
life’ consistent with Craig’s statements under consideration.
(The author is using audio recordings, and since they do not
include the definition at hand, he tries to construct one which
Craig might agree on.) The reason for this is that, as I have
already said, Betenson’s objective is to show the inherent
contradiction in the American philosopher’s position. Thus, he
proposes the following working definition:
(WD): Life is futile unless our actions are causally relevant to
3
events that are ultimately significant.
From this, Betenson reasonably derives two more definitions,
which will prove especially relevant to his objective:
(WDa): Life is futile if our actions are causally relevant to
something that is ultimately insignificant.
 (WDb): Life is futile if our actions are causally irrelevant to
4
something that is ultimately significant.
My aim is only to argue that Betenson’s claims fail to
demonstrate that the American philosopher’s stance is
internally inconsistent.
In all three definitions, ‘our actions’ stand for acts that,
however exemplary they may be, are not considered by Craig to
have enough in themselves to render life meaningful or not-
futile. The American philosopher mentions “the contribution of
the scientists to the advance of human knowledge, the
researches of the doctor to alleviate pain and suffering, the
efforts of the diplomat to secure peace in the world, the efforts
of good people everywhere to benefit the lot of the human
5
race.” Craig believes that, if God exists, these actions do
contribute to render life meaningful, while if God does not
exist, they “come to nothing; in the end, they don’t make one
bit of difference.” In other words, if God does not exist, then life
is futile, because the actions in question are not ‘ultimately
significant’ (more precisely, they “are causally relevant to
something that is ultimately insignificant” [WDa], and “are
causally irrelevant to something that is ultimately significant”
[WDb]). Given God’s existence, on the contrary, life is
meaningful and not-futile, because human actions are
‘ultimately significant’ (more precisely, they “are causally
relevant to events that are ultimately significant” [WD]). On
this view, it is manifest that the notion of ‘ultimate significance’
plays a crucial role and that it clearly depends upon the
existence of God. As Betenson points out, the notion in question
can be appreciated only from “the point of view of the
universe,” that is, a perspective which Betenson thinks of as
6
“more ‘objective’ than our subjective perspective.” But in
what exactly does the ‘objective’ perspective at hand—and the
connected ‘ultimate significance’ of life—consist according to
Betenson’s reading of the stance maintained by Craig? The
author refers to the typically theistic conviction that God
provides the universe with ultimate justice. As Craig says, “God
holds all persons morally accountable for their actions. Evil and
wrong will be punished; righteousness will be vindicated.” This
is the ‘Good’ that makes the universe ultimately fair and our life
ultimately significant. The objective moral values established
by God are the source of the ultimate significance, which
therefore coincides with the attainment of ‘ultimate justice,’
the satisfaction of the Good, the fact that everyone gets what
they deserve. As a consequence, our actions are not-futile. They
acquire an eternal value because of their causal relevance to
everlasting life. In conclusion, this is the ‘objective’ perspective
and the connected ultimate significance of our actions
according to Betenson’s reading of Craig’s view.
I agree with this reading. I also concur with Betenson on the
following statement he makes that, given the truth of theism
and the fact that the universe is ultimately fair, then “the
7
satisfaction of the ‘Good’ cannot fail to be achieved.” But I no
longer agree with the author when he claims that from this it
follows that

…nothing I do can affect this outcome. My

actions do not “make a difference in bringing
about the good”; my actions are utterly causally
irrelevant to the satisfaction of the ‘Good,’ and
as such my life is rendered futile in a (WDb)
8
sense.
With this thesis Betenson intends to contrast Craig’s view. For
the author, the idea that “life is futile if God does not exist” is
to be replaced with “life is futile if God does exist.” However,
the way in which Betenson comes to the conclusion just
mentioned is not convincing. He says that “the satisfaction of
the ‘Good’ cannot fail to be achieved” (and from this he derives
that our actions do not make any difference and our life is
consequently futile). But he overlooks that ‘the Good’ in
question coincides with nothing but the fact that everyone gets
what they deserve. By definition, this implies that some of us
deserve eternal life while others deserve eternal damnation. And
this obviously presupposes that our actions—and our life—are
ultimately significant.
 On Betenson's discussion of four possible
objections
After having argued his (alleged) confutation of Craig’s
statements, Betenson moves on to explore four possible
objections to this confutation.
Here I intend to show that both the objections and the
answers provided by the author are often implausible if not
internally inconsistent. According to the first objection,

…perhaps the ultimate satisfaction of the Good is

beyond our control—it is in God’s hands, so to
speak—but that does not mean that our actions
fail to causally relate to less significant, yet still
significant events. For surely that there is a
Good, means that our actions can be ‘good’ or
‘bad,’ and as such it is significant whether we do
good things or bad things; it ‘makes a difference’
whether we do good things or bad things, not to
the overall satisfaction of the Good, but to the
satisfaction of the Good here and now. 9
According to the author the objection fails because, while it is
intended to defend Craig’s position (like any other objection
discussed in this section), it ends up being inconsistent with the
American philosopher’s view. For Betenson, Objection 1 is
based on the idea that good or bad actions done here and now
matter, while according to Craig “all that matters, from the
point of view of the Good, is that the Good, as a whole, is
satisfied.”10 But the satisfaction of the Good as a whole, as I have
already pointed out in the previous section, is the satisfaction
of the ‘ultimate justice,’ and the ultimate justice is precisely the
fact that, given God’s existence, we get what we deserve for
good or bad actions done here and now. Craig’s idea that such
satisfaction of the Good is ‘all that matters’ is therefore fully
consistent with the emphasis that the objection at hand places
on the significance of the good done here and now. In addition,
Betenson does not see that, contrary to what he believes,
Craig’s statements ascribe even more importance to actions
done here and now than the objection does. In fact, while the
objection distinguishes the whole Good from the actions just
mentioned, and openly stresses that such actions are ‘less
significant,’ Craig’s view implies the idea that the distinction at
issue, given God’s existence, does not make sense at all—
namely, for Craig the satisfaction of the whole Good is not
simply ‘in God’s hands’ but depends also on us, and this grants
meaning to our life.11
The second possible objection to Betenson’s thesis that life is
futile if God exists runs as follows:

Our actions become significant because of the

everlasting nature of their repercussions. Put
simply, the good go to heaven and the bad go to
12
hell.
For Betenson, this objection fails because it relies “upon
13
something of merely relative significance” that does not
matter from the universal point of view held by Craig.
According to the author, the objection at issue mistakenly
“assumes that it is an ultimately significant event whether you
14
get to heaven or not.” More poignantly, “it matters a lot to
us whether we get to go to heaven, but when it comes to other
people, particularly people we do not like, we just want justice
15
to be done.” I find that there are two problems here. First,
these remarks are caused by an evident confusion between the
theistic stance on which the objection is based and the possible
or even frequent, but at any rate not theistically-inspired,
shortcomings that can spoil our personal conducts. We might
certainly be hostile to other people, and even go so far as
wanting them to be eternally damned. But this does not have
anything to do with the theistic stance from which the
objection moves. Secondly, Betenson looks at the objection at
issue as “relying upon something of merely relative
significance,” and accordingly ends up ascribing to those who
advance this objection, as I have just shown, an egoistic interest
in their own salvation. But there is no reason for considering
the belief that our actions have everlasting repercussions as
merely subjective. As Betenson himself points out in his reading
of Craig, the fact that the good go to heaven and the bad go to
hell is precisely the ultimate and ‘objective’ satisfaction of the
Good. Looking at the belief that our actions have everlasting
repercussions as merely subjective is acceptable only to the
extent that the personal pronouns used by Betenson (our
actions, you get to heaven, etc.), instead of referring to us or
you as humans, are intended to exclude anyone except us or
you. As a matter of fact, this reading of the way Betenson makes
use of the personal pronouns is not ungrounded, since the
author does add emphasis to them (emphases in the above
quotations from pp. 8 and 9 of Betenson’s essay are his). But it
is certainly groundless to believe that, according to the
Christian perspective that inspires Craig’s statements, the use
of personal pronouns does not have universal meaning, and
that consequently Craig refers to the life, the free choices and
the eternal destiny of only some of us in passages like the
following:

It [theism] invests our lives with eternal

significance: by our free choices we determine
our eternal destiny. Moreover, we come into
personal relation with the supreme good, God
Himself.
The third objection Betenson advances reads as follows:
“what matters is that good is done, irrespective of any potential
reward in heaven or relative satisfaction of the Good here and
16
now.” As far as I can see, this objection relies on the idea that
our life and our actions are not-futile because they contribute
to the satisfaction of the Good through a disposition that
amounts—as the author says—“to a statement of ‘duty for
17
duty’s sake.’”
Accordingly, such a disposition does not have anything to do
with the wish to be rewarded afterlife. For this reason—so I
think the objection may proceed—our actions are meaningful
although they are not intended to let us achieve any reward
afterlife. The author argues in reply that “if all that matters is
that good is done—or, rather, if this is sufficient to grant our
actions ultimate significance—then there is no need for
immortality at all.” In conclusion, “if Objection 3 is correct,
then Craig will lose his claim that immortality is a necessary
18
precondition for life’s having meaning.” I find that Objection
3 is caused by a misunderstanding of the Christian theism that
is behind Craig’s view—and if so, it cannot consistently be
raised in defence of Craig’s point of view. In fact, contrary to
the way the objection runs, for Christians there is a strict
connection between the Good that is to be done and “any
potential reward in heaven or relative satisfaction of the Good
here and now.” At least according to the great creeds of the
main branches of the Christian tradition, to do the good should
itself be considered a reward, since Christians believe that it is
19
God himself who grants them the ability to act well. They
believe that God grants them love for him, and that this love
leads them to behave in conformity with the ultimate justice
God has established. On this view, if they do the good, this
depends on their wish to be in full communion with him, not
only here and now but also in the afterlife.
Objection 4 is intended to strengthen objection 3 which,
according to the author, “fails to reinforce Craig’s argument
20
because it loses the requirement for personal immortality.”
Objection 4 states that the objective Good might involve our
immortality, and this “would save the requirement for personal
21
immortality.” According to Betenson, “if the only way Craig’s
arguments can be saved” is by claiming that it is objectively good
that we live forever, then “there is no longer any consideration
of heaven or hell, morally good action, just reward, etc., and
there is absolutely no significance granted to our daily lives by
22
these ultimately significant events.” While I agree on the
way Betenson argues such a response, I find that the objection
is completely unreasonable. As I said in the first section, if the
‘Good’ which Betenson takes into consideration in the course of
his article is the ultimate justice, namely, the fact that everyone
will get what they deserve, then I do not see how this can be
compatible with the idea that the ‘Good’ excludes the morality
of our actions and the eternal reward they might lead us to
23
achieve.
 Roberto Di Ceglie teaches Philosophy of Religion at
Pontifical Lateran University (Vatican City), and has been
Visiting Scholar at Notre Dame University.

Endnotes
1
Toby Betenson, “Fairness and Futility,” International Journal
for Philosophy of Religion, 2015, DOI: 10.1007/s11153-015-
9519-0. Hereafter: FF.
2
In so doing, I shall not argue that Craig’s position is true. This
would be—as Alvin Plantinga says— “to show that theism and
Christianity are true; and I don’t know how to do something
one can sensibly call ‘showing’ that either of these is true”
(Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000), p. 170).
3
FF, p. 2.
4
FF, p. 3.
5
All quotations from Craig are those that Betenson extracted
from the audio recordings above mentioned, the list of which
was enumerated in FF, footnote 2.
6
FF, p. 4.
7
FF, p. 6.
8
Ibid., 6ff.
9
FF, p. 7
10
FF, p. 8
11
Christians generally maintain that—in John Paul II’s words
—“God’s plan poses no threat to man’s genuine freedom; on
the contrary, the acceptance of God’s plan is the only way to
affirm that freedom” (Encyclical letter Veritatis Splendor,
August 6, 1993, n. 45).
12
FF, p. 8.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid.
15
FF, p. 9.
16
Ibid.
17
FF, p. 10.
18
Ibid.
19
The merit of faith, for example, can be thought of as due to
charity. For more
on this, see R. Di Ceglie, “Faith, Reason, and Charity in Thomas
Aquinas’s Thought,”
International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 2015, DOI:
10.1007/s11153-015-9513-6.
20
FF, p. 10.
21
Ibid.
22
FF, p. 11.
23
Warm thanks to two anonymous reviewers for EPS who gave
comments on an earlier draft.
Is God a delusion?
by Clifford Goldstein

Out of the carnage of 9/11 arose a

phenomenon known as the New
Atheists. Enraged by the mass murder
of the terror attack—all done in the
name of God—these New Atheists
declared intellectual war on all theistic
faith and assumptions. For them, religion
itself was “the great scourge” of human life,
an irrational and dangerous force, and the
sooner humanity shed it the better.
Of course, many, if not most, religious
people around the world were as appalled
by the 9/11 attacks as the atheists and
condemned them just as severely. Most
people who believe in God would never
have done such a thing, especially in God’s
name. Thus, attacking all religious faith
because of 9/11 is equivalent to
condemning all atheists because of the
crimes done in Joseph Stalin’s atheistic Soviet
Union.

Nevertheless, this hasn’t stopped the New

Atheists. Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, the late
Christopher Hitchens, and Richard
Dawkins have been the names most
publicly associated with this New Atheism,
a kind of full frontal assault on religion and the
supernatural in general. “I am not attacking any
particular version of God,” wrote Richard
Dawkins, “I am attacking God, all gods,
anything and everything supernatural,
whenever or wherever they have been or will
be invented.”

Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and

 writer, has become the most well- known
voice and public figure of the New Atheists.
He’s the author of numerous books including
The God Delusion, from which the above
quote was taken, and which has become an
international bestseller. It’s a must-read for
atheists today.

Nothing is really new or innovative about

Richard Dawkins’s book. It reiterates the
same arguments that have been used for
centuries. Dawkins simply puts them in a
contemporary setting. For instance, things
that religious people have sometimes said
or done can make faith an easy target for
critics. Dawkins used one example from the
attempt to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981.
The pope credited the intervention of Our
Lady of Fatima for saving his life from an
assassin, saying that a “maternal hand” had
guided the bullet. “One cannot help wondering,”
Richard Dawkins mused, “why she didn’t guide
it to miss him altogether.” Though this
account does raise fair questions about
belief in saints, it adds nothing relevant to the
debate over God’s existence.

The design argument

Dawkins spends part of his book on the various
arguments for the existence of God and why, in
his estimation, none work. One of the most
powerful arguments in favor of God’s existence is the
design that’s evident in nature. As we look around
at the world, we see both stunning beauty and
incredible complexity in even the simplest forms
of life, and it’s certainly logical to conclude that they
were designed. Everything, from the dazzling
complexity of a fish cell to the amazing function
of the human heart and brain, cries out, Design!
And design, of course, implies a Designer. The
ancient sage said as much: “But now ask the
beasts, and they will teach you; and the birds of the
air, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth,
and it will teach you; and the fish of the sea will
explain to you. Who among all these does not
know that the hand of the LORD has done this, in
whose hand is the life of every living thing, and the
breath of all mankind?” (Job 12:7–10, NKJV).

A fervent evolutionist, Dawkins argues that the

question of design has been rendered moot,
because Darwin’s theory of evolution explains it all
without the need of God. Things that look
designed, Dawkins assures us, really aren’t. “We
can now safely say,” he wrote, “that the illusion of
design in living creatures really is just that—an
illusion.” The problem is that Dawkins presents us
with that conclusion simply as his opinion, his
belief.

Who made God?

Though many scientists are not as dogmatic as
Dawkins about just how well the Darwinian
theory actually explains design and the beauty
behind it, Dawkins finally gets to one of his chief
arguments behind the notion that God is a
delusion. “A designer God,” he asserts, “cannot be
used to explain organized complexity, because
any God capable of designing anything would
have to be complex enough to demand the same
kind of explanation in his own right.”

In other words, if something is so complicated

that only a conscious designer could explain it,
then obviously God—who theists believe
created the world and all that’s in it—must be
very complicated as well. Thus, for the
argument from design to be consistent,
something as complicated as God Himself also
needed a designer.

In short, Dawkins’s argument can be boiled down to

one question: Who made God?

But that argument misses the whole point. An

eternal God, by definition, doesn’t have a Creator.
He is the Creator. Nothing created Him because
He has always existed. Thus the question, “Who
created the eternally existing Creator?” is like asking
what’s north of the North Pole. An eternally
existing Creator was never created; He always
was.

A universe from nothing

These days most scientists believe that the
universe has been created— that it once did not
exist, but then it came into existence. Hence, the
universe needs an explanation for how it got
here to begin with. And, contrary to atheistic
conclusions, a Creator God remains by far the
most logical explanation, especially in contrast to
the newest alternative to God as the Creator—
that nothing created the universe. Even if one
believed in the atheists’ materialistic and atheistic
evolutionary scenario, Darwinian evolution does
not explain how matter itself came into
existence. A lot of scientific investigation has
gone into explaining how the universe, according
to the big bang theory, suddenly exploded into
existence. But the logical question is: Where did
all the scientific laws and principles needed for
the big bang to happen come from?
The answer that the New Atheists have
suggested is that it all came from nothing.
Dawkins is one of many who argue that,
according to quantum physics, the universe
did arise from nothing.

Atheist Bill Bryson wrote, “It seems impossible that

you could get something from nothing, but the fact
that once there was nothing but now there is a
universe is evident proof that you can.” Or, as
Oxford professor Peter Atkins wrote, “If we are to be
honest, then we have to accept that science will
be able to claim complete success only if it
achieves what many might think impossible:
accounting for the emergence of everything from
absolutely nothing.”

Thus, we see the two logical contenders for the

existence of the universe: An eternally existing
Creator God—or nothing. But if God is a
delusion, then the only option that remains is
that the universe somehow inspired and created
itself. But is that really more believable than the
idea that the universe was designed and created
by God?

Who believes a delusion? The one who

thinks that an all-powerful, eternally existing
God created the universe or the one who
thinks that nothing did?

Illusions and delusions

Despite Dawkins’s certainty about his views, in
his book The God Delusion he does hedge his
bets a bit. He has a chapter titled “Why There
Almost Certainly Is No God.” Almost certainly
no God? Why almost? For someone so sure of
his attack on “God, all gods, anything and
everything supernatural,” he has given himself
an “out” here. Paul explained Dawkins’s slight
uncertainty when he wrote that enough about
God’s existence can be seen “by the things that
are made” that people will be “without excuse”
on judgment day (Romans 1:20).
In other words, Dawkins isn’t fully convinced of his
position, because the witness from the things “that are
made” is too powerful. For all the certainty of
Richard Dawkins and other New Atheists, logic in
fact does suggest that the real illusion is the
delusion that God does not exist.
From the February 2015 Signs
Psychology: The Trojan Horse

Copyright 1995
Published by Indian Hills Community Church,
Systematically Teaching the Word
1000 South 84th Street, Lincoln, Nebraska 68510-4499

First Printing: 1995—1500 copies printed

Second Printing: 1996—1500 copies printed

Third Printing: 1997—3000 copies printed

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be

reproduced in any form without permission
in writing from the publisher, except in the case of
brief quotations embodied in critical ar-
ticles or reviews.

Scripture quotations are from the New American

Standard Bible, Lockman Foundation 1960,
1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977. All
quotations used by permission.

CONTENTS

Introduction ........................................
................................. 7
Chapter 1
Sanctification Abandoned by the
Church ............................ 9
Chapter 2
God’s Way of Dealing With
Sin ........................................ 17
Conclusion ..........................................
............................... 27

INTRODUCTION

Over three thousand years ago, the Greeks and the

inhabitants
of Troy fought the Trojan War. The most significant
and interesting
feature of this war was not that the Greeks
eventually conquered
Troy. What was significant was how they conquered the
city. To fool
the people of Troy, the Greeks built a wooden horse
and presented
it to them as a gift. Hiding inside the horse,
however, were several
Greek soldiers. When the people of Troy pulled the
wooden horse
into the city, they had no idea that this gift was
soon to be their
destruction. During the night, the soldiers in the
wooden horse came
out and let the Greek army into the city. They then
sacked and burned
Troy. Destruction came from an enemy invited into the
camp.

In a real sense, the Evangelical Church today has

opened its
gates to a Trojan horse. This Trojan horse is not a
literal wooden
horse but the teachings of modern psychology. Beyond
doubt, one
of the greatest issues facing the Church of Jesus
Christ today is the
integration of modern psychology with the Bible. As
one medical
doctor stated, ”No greater issue faces the modern,
true Church than
this Trojan horse of psychology. It has a
stranglehold that will not
be easily loosened.”1 This statement has proven true.
In fact, I do
not believe psychology will loosen its grip on the
Church any time
soon.

Psychology has so infiltrated the Evangelical Church

that tak-
ing a stand for the purity of the Word of God often
brings division
among Evangelicals. The few voices who speak out
against inte-
grating psychology with the Bible are often
criticized. They are ac-
cused of being unloving and divisive. The focus has
become their

personalities rather than whether they are

doctrinally correct or not.
As a result, there has been a blurring of the true
doctrinal issues.

On the other hand, many Christian psychologists have

become
so popular that to criticize their teaching is almost
like attacking the
Bible. Undoubtedly, most Christian psychologists are
well-
intentioned people with a desire to help others. Good
intentions,
however, are not the issue. Nowhere in the Bible do
we find God
accepting of people with good intentions who put
aside the clear
teaching of the Word. Much damage can be done with
good inten-
tions. Therefore, intentions, sincerity and
earnestness are not the issues in
this debate. The issue is whether today's Christian
psychologists are mix—
ing men's ideas with the Bible. When I analyze the
doctrine of these
men, I am convinced they are promoting doctrine that
is contrary to
the Bible and are addressing man’s spiritual problems
from an
unbiblical viewpoint.

CHAPTER ONE

Sanctification
Abandoned by the Church

One night, as I was driving back to Lincoln from

Kansas City, I
was listening to a well-known Christian psychology
program on
the radio. On this program, a lady called and told
how the Lord was
using her. However, she was also a little discouraged
because she
did not have much Christian support. I was thinking
to myself, surely
with a little encouragement from the Word they could
help and edify
her. By the time the two Christian counselors were
done with her,
however, they had her convinced she belonged in a
clinic. They told
her she had underlying difficulties that required
professional coun-
seling. I could not believe what I heard. What also
struck me was
that these men, Christian counselors, were not
instructing people
from Scripture, instead they primarily were using
theories of psy-
chology.

On another occasion, I heard two other popular

Christian psy-
chologists on the radio discussing the importance of
Christian young
people pursuing education in psychology. They said
young people
needed to learn psychology, because if they did not,
who would be
around to help people with their problems in the
future? Oddly,
when I grew up, young people were often encouraged to
learn their
Bibles so they could help people. Why this change?
The problem is
that the Church has abandoned the doctrine of
sanctification (the

process of growing as a Christian) and has given it

over to the psy-
chologists and psychiatrists. Dr. Ed Payne wisely
observes:

Psychologists who are Christians are not primarily at

fault.
Church leaders must bear the guilt of the invasion of
psychol-
ogy into the Church. These are the people who are
ordained of
God to guard the minds of their sheep. Instead, they
have in-
vited wolves into the fold.2

There was a day when pastors saw themselves as the

ones
trained to deal with people’s spiritual problems. But
many Church
leaders have handed this area over to the
professionals trained in psy-
chology.

In some ways, Christian psychologists have become

unofficial
authorities in the Church. For example, James
Dobson’s Focus on the
Family and Frank Minirth and Paul Meier’s Minirth and
Meier Clinic
are two of the most listened to programs in Christian
radio today.
Many Christians look to these men and other Christian
psycholo-
gists for answers on Christian living. But how many
people who
listen to Christian psychologists know the
theological background
and training of these men? How many know what
churches they
belong to or if they are qualified to be elders? I
have examined the
doctrine of some of these men. Many would not be
qualified to preach
or be elders in some churches. Yet since these men
have the title
”Christian psychologist,” believers accept them as
authorities on
Christian living. Many believers live on the words of
these men. Yet
how many know what they are teaching or if what they
say agrees
with Scripture? The Bible calls us to be discerning
and to ”examine
everything carefully” (1 Thes. 5:21). We should be
alarmed when
someone’s authority comes from psychological rather
than theologi-
cal training.
This turning over of sanctification to the Christian
psycholo-
gists is also evident in Christian literature. When I
go to Christian
bookstores looking for books on Christian living
written by Bible
teachers, I find very few. When I look in the
Christian living section,
however, I see many books written by psychologists
and psychia-
trists. Why has this happened? Christians now
perceive the psy-
chologists and psychiatrists as the experts for help
in living. These
days, few people consider going to Bible teachers to
learn how to
grow in their Christian walk. I know of one Bible
college that charged

$50 for a person to talk with someone trained in

psychology. No
charge existed, however, if a person at this school
wanted to talk
with a Bible teacher. What does this say? It says if
someone wants
spiritual direction they can go to a Bible teacher,
but if they want
real help they need to pay money and go to a
Christian psycholo-
gist. The Church has, indeed, handed over
sanctification to the psy-
chologists.

Mixing Truth with Error

Since most Christian psychologists quote Scripture,

many think
their teachings must be biblical. Use of Scripture,
however, is not
always an accurate indicator that someone is
theologically sound.
The cults use much Scripture. Most of us have had an
encounter
with a Mormon or Jehovah Witness who ran us ragged
through our
Bibles. That does not mean they are correct, however,
simply be-
cause they quote the Bible. Although they use
Scripture, they mix
human ideas with it. The result is a perversion of
God’s Word. Most
Christians clearly see this with the cults, but they
do not as readily
see this with psychology. Yet Christian psychologists
are also guilty
of diluting the Bible with ideas from secular
psychology.

According to 1 Peter 2:2, Christians are to ”long for

the pure
milk of the word, that by it you may grow in respect
to salvation.”
The ”pure milk of the word” causes Christians to
grow. When the
milk of the Word is diluted with men’s ideas,
however, it loses any
effectiveness for developing growth. If someone took
a gallon of
pure milk, for example, and added a drop of cyanide
poison, what
would the result be? The result would not be 99.9%
pure milk. The
result would be poisoned milk. One of Satan’s
greatest tactics is to
combine error with truth. That is why Christians need
to be discern-
ing of people who use the Bible but also say we need
to use the
findings of men as well. Today’s Christian
psychologists often use
the Bible, but they also add men’s ideas to it. When
the ideas of men
are added to the Bible, however, the ”pure milk of
the word” be-
comes polluted.

Can Psychology be Christian?

Is there such a thing as ”Christian psychology?” Many

Chris-
tians believe there is a brand of psychology that is
distinctly ”Chris-

tian.” Christian psychology, however, does not even

exist. If some-
one were to check a standard text book on psychology,
they would
see that there is no category of psychology that is
”Christian.” As
Jim Owen has stated:

The term Christian psychology is a misnomer. There

are Chris-
tians who are trained psychologists but there is no
discipline
as such that can be designated Christian psychology,
contrasted
with, say, secular psychology . . . it is a mistake
to speak of
”Christian psychology” as if it were substantively
different than
humanistic psychology.3

Modern psychology is rooted in the teachings of such

godless
men as Sigmund Freud, Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers.
A pro-
fessor at Yale once wrote a book on Sigmund Freud
called, The God—
less ]ew. The author used this title because Freud
called himself the
godless Jew who founded psychotherapy. Certainly, not
all Chris-
tian psychologists openly identify with Freud. Still,
in using psy-
chology, they are looking to the teachings of a man
who, by his own
admission, was a ”godless Jew.”4

The founders of modern psychology were outspoken

critics of
Christianity. They wanted to provide a man-centered
alternative to
the Bible for dealing with man’s problems.
Remarkably, Christians
have become absorbed with a system that is inherently
anti-Chris-
tian. What Paul told the Colossians is equally
applicable to the
Church today:

See to it that no one takes you captive through

philosophy and
empty deception, according to the tradition of men,
according
to the elementary principles of the world, rather
than accord-
ing to Christ (Col. 2:8).

The Church is to avoid the philosophies and

deceptions of men,
not embrace them. When will the Church see the
seriousness of this
issue? Satan has been effective in deluding the
Church into thinking
we need to mix men’s ideas with the Word of God. In 1
Timothy
3:15, Paul called the Church of the living God ”the
pillar and sup-
port of the truth.” The Church exists in the world to
promote the
truth of God’s Word. But now the Church has taken His
Word and
has added the ideas of men to it.

Is All Truth God’s Truth?

Some Christians wonder what could be wrong with

taking in-
formation from psychology and using it to help people
with their
problems. After all, if truth is truth, why not use
it? Thus the state-
ment, ”All truth is God’s truth,” is often used in
this debate. By this
statement, some mean that wherever truth is found, in
any area, we
should be willing to use and benefit from it. This
truth can suppos-
edly be applied to Christian growth. But is this
legitimate? Certainly,
we have learned things not found in the Bible. For
example, we did
not learn to add and subtract from the Bible. It is
not true, however,
that experiential truth can be compared with the
truth revealed in
God’s Word. The Bible alone provides hope for the
soul. Only re-
vealed biblical truth addresses the issues of sin,
salvation, and Chris-
tian living. Jesus prayed, ”Sanctify them in the
truth; Thy word is
truth” (John 17:17). Christian growth takes place in
the realm of bib-
lical truth. Though truth may be found in other areas
such as math
and science, they are of no value in promoting
sanctification. Like-
wise, what truth there may be in psychology does not
with validity
address man’s relationship to God. Only the Bible can
sufficiently
do this.

Theological schools have also been guilty of trying

to use psy-
chology in spiritual matters. In the past,
conservative seminaries
normally hired their faculty based on their
theological training. Now
some seminaries will hire men trained in psychology
even when
they have no formal theological training. Why would
conservative
schools hire men whose training is primarily in
psychology? After
all, no seminary would hire professors who only had
degrees in
mathematics. Why? Although truth exists in
mathematics, math-
ematics does not contribute to our understanding of
sin, salvation,
and Christian growth. Many today, however, accept the
idea that
psychology gives helpful insights into the nature of
man and sin.
However, psychology has even less validity than
mathematics when
it comes to life and godliness.

Sin or Disease?

Modern psychology has greatly affected our society’s

view of
sin. Today, sin is no longer considered sin but a
”problem” or a ”dis-
ease.” This type of thinking can be seen in the
following example:

When District of Columbia Mayor Marian Barry

tearfully an-
nounced that he had ’weaknesses’ and entered a
Florida treat-
ment program last week, he and his aides were also
launching
a political and legal strategy to portray his
addiction problems
as a disease—something beyond his control and thus
politi-
cally less damaging.5

Years ago, when I went to college in Philadelphia,

Iwould walk
by people who had passed out because they had been
drinking. My
natural reaction was to say ”There’s a drunk.” Today,
however,
drunkenness and other sins are considered diseases. A
disease is
something a person cannot control and is not
responsible for.6 It was
not long ago, however, when many of the excesses now
labeled as
diseases and addictions were considered moral
behavior problems.7

The Source of Sin

One day I saw a commercial in which a man was

promoting
his clinic to help those who were alcoholics. This
man, a former al-
coholic himself, claimed that when he was young his
parents taught
him that alcoholism was a sin. With training,
however, he came to
understand that alcoholism was a disease.
Unfortunately, Christians
have bought into that type of thinking. The Bible is
clear, however,
that sinful behavior is directly traceable to men’s
evil hearts:

For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the

evil thoughts
and fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds
of coveting
and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy,
slander,
pride and foolishness. All these evil things proceed
from within
and defile the man (Mark 7:21—23; emphasis mine).

Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are:

immorality,
impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities,
strife, jealousy,
outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions,
envyings,
drunkenness, carousings, and things like these (Gal.
5:19—21; em-
phasis mine).

When a person is involved in sinful behavior, the

cause is a
sinful and depraved heart. If we tell a person
involved in such be-
havior that he has a disease, we are excusing him
from being re-
sponsible for his actions. One researcher at the
University of Cali-
fornia at Santa Barbara concluded that the disease
model being pro-
moted today excuses responsibility and ”indoctrinates
them (the ad-
dicted) with the idea that they are helpless and
sick.”8

People have asked me if I believe in addictions.

Certainly ad-
dictions exist, but people have addictions because
sin is addictive.
Jesus said, ”Everyone who commits sin is the slave of
sin” (John
8:34). Therefore, many people are addicted to
alcohol, immorality,
gambling and many other vices. But the Bible calls
all these things

11 - II

Sll’l.

CHAPTER TWO

God’s Way of Dealing With Sin

The world refuses to understand the concept of sin.

It also does
not accept what God’s Word has to say on this issue.
As a result, the
world’s methods for dealing with sin will never bring
about true
biblical righteousness. But believers should not be
confused on this

issue. Our answers for dealing with sin are found in

the Word of
God.

The Bible claims to be absolutely sufficient for

instructing us in
life and godliness. The Church does not have to turn
to the theories
of psychology. Second Timothy 3:16,17 states:

All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for

teaching, for
reproof, for correction, for training in
righteousness; that the
man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good
work.

If the Bible can make us ”adequate” and ”equipped for

every
good work,” why do we need to add the wisdom of men?
Psalm
19:7 tells us, ”The law of the Lord is perfect,
restoring the soul.” If
the ”law of the Lord” is perfect for my soul, why do
I need to look
for answers elsewhere? Peter says, ”His divine power
has granted
to us everything pertaining to life and godliness
through the true
knowledge of Him” (2 Pet. 1:3; emphasis mine.) If the
Word of God
is true (and it is) we will find all the truth we
need for our Christian
walk in the pages of Scripture. The Bible has the
answers!

The Romans 6 Way

How then does a person deal with sin? Psychology has

its theo-
ries, but Romans 6 makes clear God’s way. In this
passage, the apostle
Paul clearly shows the freedom from sin that
salvation in Christ
brings to the believer.

The Power of Sin Is Broken

0 Or do you not know that all of us who have been

baptized into
Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death?
Therefore we
have been buried with Him through baptism into death,
in or-
der that as Christ was raised from the dead through
the glory
of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of
life. For if we
have become united with Him in the likeness of His
death, cer-
tainly we shall be also in the likeness of His
resurrection, know-
ing this, that our old self was crucified with Him,
that our body
of sin might be done away with, that we should no
longer be
slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin
(Rom. 6:3—7).

Believers are identified with Christ in His death,

burial and
resurrection. A radical spiritual transformation has
taken place. As
a result, we are now able to ”walk in newness of
life.” The baggage
of our unsaved life was left behind at the cross. If
when we became
saved, we were still in bondage to sin, we would not
be walking in
newness of life. But our old self was crucified so
that we no longer
have to be ”slaves of sin.” The ”old self” is
everything we were in
Adam—sinful, depraved beings. That ”old self” was
crucified with
Christ. In other words, all that we were in Adam,
including all the
depravity associated with our old self, was nailed to
the cross. That
is how God dealt with sin in our lives.

When God says that our old self ”was crucified with
Him, that
our body of sin might be done away with,” this does
not mean our
old self was destroyed in the sense of becoming
nonexistent. The
meaning is that the power of sin was broken or made
powerless.
The word for ”done away with” (katargeo) means ”to
render power-
less.” This word is used in Hebrews 2:14, where it
says that Christ,
through His death, ”might render powerless him who
had the power
of death, that is the devil” (emphasis mine). We know
that Satan
has not ceased to exist, but his power over believers
has been bro-

ken. Therefore, the control that our old man once had
over us has
been done away with. We could say our addiction to
sin has been
broken. Because of our identification with Christ, we
are no longer
under its power. We no longer are ”slaves to sin” but
we are ”freed
from sin.”
This truth does not mean believers are perfect, ”For
we all
stumble in many ways” (James 3:2). But now we do not
have to sin. As
unbelievers we were slaves to sin and that was all we
could do.
Now we are freed from its power. Whenever we sin we
are running
back to and obeying a master who no longer has
control over us. We
would consider foolish someone who had been legally
freed from a
cruel and oppressive master yet still insisted on
obeying that old
master. We would say, ”You don't belong to that old
master. Quit
obeying him. If you obey him it is not because you
have to, it is
because you are foolishly choosing to do so.” The
same principle is
true for believers. Believers have been delivered
from the slavery of
sin. When we sin, it is not because we have to, it is
because we
choose to.

I am concerned when believers claim they are still in

bondage
to sin. I have heard people say, ”I am a Christian,
but I am still an
alcoholic.” Or ”I am saved, but I am also a
practicing homosexual.”
This type of thinking is not biblical. First
Corinthians 6:9—10 states:

Or do you not know that the unrighteous shall not

inherit the
kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither
fornicators, nor
idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor
homosexuals, nor
thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor
revilers, nor swin-
dlers, shall inherit the kingdom of God.

A man in our church once wanted to give testimony

that he
was a saved homosexual. I explained to him that if
Christ truly saved
him he could not be a practicing homosexual because
homosexuals
cannot enter God’s kingdom. When a person becomes a
believer, he
is no longer characterized by a particular sin.

After listing the types of people who would not

inherit the king-
dom, Paul said, ”And such were some of you; but you
were washed,
but you were sanctified, but you were justified in
the name of the
Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God” ( 1
Cor. 6:11; empha-
sis mine). The Corinthians, to whom Paul wrote, used
to be charac-

terized by those sins. Because of God’s work in their

lives, however,
they no longer were those things. As 2 Corinthians
5:17 states, ”There-
fore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature;
the old things
passed away; behold, new things have come.” That old,
sinful
lifestyle is in the past for the believer. Christians
may sin, but sin
will not characterize their lifestyle.
Dead to Sin—Alive to God

0 Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we

shall also
live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been
raised from
the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is
master over
Him. . . . Even so consider yourselves to be dead to
sin, but
alive to God in Christ Jesus (Rom. 6:8—11).

When we were in Adam we were alive to sin. But now we

have
died with Christ. That death is final and is just as
real, spiritually, as
His death. Therefore, when we trusted Christ we died
to sin. Now
we are called to live in light of that reality. That
is God’s provision.
At the cross, Christ delivered us from sin’s power.
Therefore, when
we are tempted to sin, we can resist because we are
dead to its con-
trol. If a temptation toward adultery, homosexuality,
bulimia, an-
ger, or any other sin arises, we are to call to mind
that we are dead to
those things and alive to God. Paul also said in
Colossians, ”There-
fore consider the members of your earthly body as
dead to immo-
rality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed,
which amounts to
idolatry” (Col. 3:5). Being dead to those things
means we are to have
nothing to do with them.

What, then, is the answer for the man who does not
treat his
family right or gets drunk? Stop the sinful, selfish
behavior. It can
be done right away. Multiple counseling sessions to
determine the
motivation for these acts are not needed. People who
blame their
behavior on anything other than themselves are
looking to excuse
their sin.

Digging Up the Past

Much of modern psychological counseling involves

digging up
the past to find out why people act the way they do.
But do we have
to delve into the past to be able to solve our
problems? I heard a
popular Bible teacher say that it is necessary to go
back to one’s

childhood to find answers for the present. That

approach, however,
is not biblical. I know of people who have grown
children who will
not speak to their own parents because some Christian
counselor
revealed to them that their problems were the result
of the treat-
ment they supposedly got from their parents.

On the other hand, when the Bible takes people to the

past, it
takes them to the cross, not to their childhood. The
cross is where
the answer for sin is found. Some people want to
discuss how awful
their childhood was. They want to blame their
problems on bad
parents and bad circumstances. We certainly do not
want to make
light of those who experienced true child abuse. Yet
going back to
our childhood and blaming parents for the way we are
now is not
the answer. Surely, many people have had awful,
wretched child-
hoods. After all, sinful descendants of Adam raised
us. Yet the solu-
tion is not digging in the garbage piles of our past—
the answer is at
the cross. At the cross, there is more than just
salvation from hell;
there is the power to overcome the past. We are given
a new start on
life. No matter how awful our past was, the rich
resources of Christ
allow us to forgive any wrongs done to us. Sometimes
people will
carry bitterness toward someone who harmed them. But
as we are
forgiven by God, we are now able to forgive those who
have harmed
us.

The Counseling Model

Psychological counseling often involves ongoing

meetings with
a counselor. As a result, helping people is often
treated as a process.
The Church has also bought into the idea that to help
people we
must personally meet with them in a professional
counseling for-
mat. This professional counseling model, however, is
flawed. Cer-
tainly, there is nothing wrong with counseling people
from Scrip-
ture. At times we need to meet with other believers
and show them
from God’s Word what they need to do (see Gal. 6:1).
However, the
professional counseling format of ongoing meetings
with a counse-
lor is not taken from the Bible. The biblical pattern
for spiritual
growth is submitting to the Word of God and obeying
it. The Church
should not adopt the world's model of professional
counseling to
deal with people’s problems. Why should dealing with
sin be a pro-
cess if the crucifixion of Christ took care of the
sin issue? When we
talk to people, we need to show them from Scripture
why they are

in sin and what God expects them to do. They are then
to obey God’s
Word by immediately ceasing their sin. Yet often,
people want time
in dealing with sin because they cherish it and do
not want to quit.
The Puritans called these types of sins ”bosom sins”—
those sins
that we cherish and tightly grip. The only sins we
have problems
with, however, are the ones we choose to be involved
in. According
to the Bible, however, no sin is so controlling that
the believer can-
not do anything about it. If there were, Romans 6
either is wrong or
does not apply to that person.

Once a lady who had been to several psychiatrists and

psy-
chologists from all over the country came to see me.
She had re-
ceived many hours of counseling and was given
medication. She
asked me how long I could meet with her. When I told
her an hour,
she then instructed me to cancel all my appointments
for the day
because that was how long it would take to discuss
her problems. I
told her we would start with an hour. She then went
on to tell me
her problems. After ten minutes of listening to her,
I stopped and
told her I knew what her problem was. ”You are
consumed with
yourself,” I said. ”All you have talked about is how
bad off you
are.” Her husband, who was also there exclaimed,
”It’s about time
somebody told her that.” This woman did not need
continual coun-
seling to reaffirm that she had a right to be
consumed with herself.
She needed to know that as a Christian, her focus was
to be on serv-
ing God and others (see Phil. 2:341). If she were a
believer, the Holy
Spirit would enable her to do that. It was her
responsibility to obey
God’s Word. It is interesting that in all her
meetings with Christian
psychologists, no one told her what was expected of
her according
to the Bible. I found out later that when this woman
went for coun-
seling at the Christian psychology clinics, her cost
was about $5,000
a week. If a pastor offered counseling for that
price, he would be
considered a huckster. Yet someone can charge that
type of fee if he
is a ”Christian psychologist.”

Categorizing Sin

The world has been categorizing sin for years. Now

the Church
has also adopted this approach. Some churches have
self-help groups
for alcoholics, wife abusers and others. Implied is
that every sin is
unique and must be dealt with in a special way. But
where in the
Bible is any sin ever dealt with on that basis? We
have fallen into the

trap that there are sins that are especially

complicated. I have had
people say to me, ”Where in the Bible does it address
bulimia?” Or
”How can the Bible help someone who is anorexic if it
does not
even address this disease?” But in His Word, God does
not establish
a different pattern for dealing with each sin. There
is not one plan
for bulimia and another plan for adultery. He deals
with all sin the
same way. The Church should not complicate the issue
by catego-
rizing sin the way the world does.

Sometimes people will justify the use of psychology

because
they believe the problems of today are more severe
and call for more
indepth treatment than what the Bible can offer. What
they fail to
understand is that today’s sins are not new to us.
For example, the
Roman women invented forced vomiting after eating.
Drunkenness
and immorality were issues back then too. Corinth was
a city known
for vast immorality. The people in those days were
just as sinful as
people are today. Yet Paul told the Christians of
that time ”to present
your bodies a living and holy sacrifice to God” (Rom.
12:1). Chris-
tians then did not have the teachings of Freud or
other psycholo-
gists to help them, but they were still responsible
to God for living
holy lives. Were they lacking anything? The answer is
obviously no.
They had all they needed for godly living; they had
God’s resources.
If psychology is so important for living, how have
Christians lived
without it for all these years?

Even when I was still in seminary, I remember being

told that
when people were involved in complicated behavior we
should di-
rect them to professional counseling. The implication
was that God’s
Word is good for the not-so-tough problems, but when
more severe
problems arise then we must turn to the professional
counselor. Yet
if the Bible cannot deal with the severest of
problems, it is not a
sufficient Scripture. If the Bible cannot deal with
sin, what good is
it? Somehow the Church has come to believe that using
the Bible
alone in spiritual matters is simplistic. Yet Paul
said the Gospel ”is
the power of God for salvation” (Rom. 1:16). That
salvation includes
freedom from the power of sin.

We have invented many categories for sin, but the

Bible treats it
all the same way. Either the Bible is sufficient for
dealing with sin or it
is not. Some may believe that the Bible alone is not
adequate to deal
with every sin, but in doing so they deny the very
purpose of the Bible
and the Gospel—to liberate man from his fallen,
sinful condition.

Do not Let Sin Reign

° Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body

that you
should obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting
the mem-
bers of your body to sin as instruments of
unrighteousness; but
present yourselves to God as those alive from the
dead, and
your members as instruments of righteousness to God.
For sin
shall not be master over you, for you are not under
law, but
under grace (Rom. 6:12—14).

Because of his identification with Christ, the

believer should
not allow sin to control him. While the unbeliever is
never com-
manded to stop sinning because he is a slave to sin,
the believer
does not have to obey the lusts of the body. The
believer still struggles
with the flesh (see Rom. 7:14—25), but because of his
new life in Christ
he can say, ”Though I have temptation, I do not have
to sin. My
body will be used as an instrument for
righteousness.”

Our bodies belong to God. We are to use them to

accomplish
His purposes. Since we are now God’s property, we
have no right to
use our bodies for anything other than righteousness.

0 But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of

sin, you
became obedient from the heart to that form of
teaching to which
you were committed, and having been freed from sin,
you be-
came slaves of righteousness (Rom. 6:17,18).

Notice that believers ”were slaves to sin” but now

they have
become ”slaves of righteousness.” To claim sin can
still enslave a
believer is to deny the heart of the Gospel.

0 For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in

regard to
righteousness. . . . But now having been freed from
sin and
enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting
in sanctifi-
cation, and the outcome, eternal life (Rom. 620,22).
We used to be slaves to sin. But now, since we are
enslaved to
God, we can live sanctified lives. It is that simple!
The Christian,
now freed from sin, can live for God. By God’s power
he can say: ”I
am not going to be a drunk”; ”I am not going to be an
alcoholic”; ”I
am going to be a good father and husband.” Someone
may say, ”But
you don’t know how much I struggle with this certain
problem.” I
may not know. But I do know that God’s Word is true
and the Spirit

of God can make you live right. The issue is whether

we are willing
to let go of our sin. Often, we develop an attachment
to sin, and if
we can excuse it, we feel comfortable in continuing
with it. But sin
no longer has control over us. When we died with
Christ, He broke
its power. We are now to do righteousness.

Romans 6 gives us the foundation for Christian

living. It is the
once and for all death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ. When a per-
son believes in Christ he becomes a new person and
sin's authority
is taken away. As believers, we are to live in light
of that truth. What
then is the answer for homosexuality, bulimia,
adultery or any other
sin? Romans 6 is the answer. It is abominable that
some in the Church
can throw out Romans 6 and tell Christians they need
the help of
professionals trained in psychology.
CONCLUSION

The battle for the truth goes on. It is tempting to

give up be-
cause standing for the truth often means conflict.
Yet the Church is
called to be ”the pillar and support of the truth” (1
Tim. 3:15). As
believers we are to stand for the truth. What then
should be our
response to the infiltration of psychology into the
Church?

Be Aware

Paul warned Timothy that days would come when people

would not want to follow sound doctrine:

I solemnly charge you . . . preach the word; be ready

in season
and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with
great patience
and instruction. For the time will come when they
will not en-
dure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears
tickled,
they will accumulate for themselves teachers in
accordance to
their own desires; and will turn away their ears from
the truth,
and will turn aside to myths (2 Tim. 4:14).

Paul tells us that taking a stand for the purity of

the Word is not
always easy. People will not always want to hear the
truth. Instead,
they will find teachers who will tell them what they
want to hear.

Contend for the Faith

Taking a stand on an issue like this is often

difficult. Some-
times we may wonder if the pain and division are
worth it. We must

be careful, however, that we remain faithful to the

truth. As Jude
said:

Beloved, while I was making every effort to write you

about
our common salvation, I felt the necessity to write
to you ap-
pealing that you contend earnestly for the faith
which was
once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3).

The word for ”contend earnestly” in the Greek is

agonizo, which
means ”to agonize.” Jude has called Christians to
enter strenuous
and difficult struggles for the true faith. The
reason for this is, ”For
certain persons have crept in unnoticed” (Jude 4).
Contending ear-
nestly for the faith is necessary because there are
people in the Church
who will promote false doctrine.

Come to the Word of God

What is the place of psychology in Christianity?

Psychology
does not belong in Christianity and has nothing to
add to salvation
and living the Christian life. Instead it destroys
the basis of our help.
The Church, therefore, must abandon any attempt to
integrate psy-
chology with the Bible.

The solution to the psychology issue is this: Come to

the Word
of God and obey it! As newborn babes we are to ”long
for the pure
milk of the word” (1 Pet. 2:2). We have His Word and
His Spirit.
Praise God that He has given us all we need.

NOTES

Martin and Deidre Bobgan, (Ed Payne), Prophets of

Psychoheresy I,
EastGate Publishers, Santa Barbara, 1989, p.14.

Ibid, p.14.

Jim Owen, Christian Psychology’s War on God's Word,

EastGate Publish-
ers, Santa Barbara, 1993, pp. 12—13.

For more on the relationship between Christian

psychology and Freud
see Prophets of Psychoheresy I by Martin and Deidre
Bobgan (EastGate),
pp. 223—334.

Art Levine, ”America's Addiction to Addictions," US.

News, Feb. 5,
1990, p. 62.
Jim Owen discusses this changing of terminology that
psychology has
brought us, "Let me list a few of these substitute
words. Disease is one
of the most common. It replaces the ideas of a sin
nature and being in
bondage to lust. Addiction is another replacement
word. People don't
lust anymore, or give themselves over to lusting
continually as de-
scribed in Ephesians 4:19. No—now they are addicted
(implying
thereby haplessness as well as helplessness). . . .
Dysfunctional is an-
other word substitute for sin" (Christian Psychology
's War on God 's Word,
p. 13).

Art Levine makes the comment, "Most medical experts

today View al-
coholism and drug addiction as chronic diseases with
biological, and
perhaps genetic, underpinnings. But it was not that
long ago that even
these excesses were seen as evidence of moral
turpitude rather than
medical conditions." (”America's Addiction to
Addictions," U. 5. News,
Feb. 5, 1990.)

Herbert Fingarette made this comment in Art Levine's

article,
”America's Addiction to Addictions," p. 62.

Other Books by Gil Rugh

Assurance: Our Seal and Pledge

Baptism: Truth or Tradition

Bible Study Tools for the Layman

(The) Bible Workbook: What Is It All About?

By Faith: Abraham

By Faith: Noah

Calvinism & Arminianism

(The) Church: God’s Program for Ministry

Church Discipline—An Evidence of Christian Love

Deliverance Workbook

Demonization of the Believer: An Unbiblical Teaching

Exposed
(A) Different Gospel: An Evaluation of the Teachings
of Robert Schuller
Division & Diversion

Divorce on Trial

Election: Whose Choice?

Endurance: Standing Firm in a Throw—Away World

Evangelism: Treading the Roman Road

Freedom From Addiction

Giving: A Result of Grace

Homosexuality: A Biblical Perspective

Instruction to Husbands, Fathers & Their Wives

Instruction to Wives, Mothers & Their Husbands

Living the Life

Marks of the True Believer

Prayer

Promise Keepers and the Rising Tide of Ecumenism

Prophecy Update 1996

Provision or Penalty

Psychology: The Trojan Horse

Rendering to Caesar

Reversing the Reformation

Revival and Revival Meetings

Spiritual Gifts

Statement of Faith and Constitution

To Earth With Love: A Study of the Person and Work of

Jesus Christ
To Tie the Knot or Not: A Biblical Study of Marriage
and the Single Life
When the Bible Doesn’t Say

Willing to Pay the Price

Tracts and Brochures by Gil Rugh

How To Study Your Bible

Lordship Question: What Does a True Believer Believe?

Pare! Y Piense A Donde Va (Spanish tract)

Statement of Faith

Stop! And Think About Where You Are Going

What About Tongues?

 PART II
MORALITY; RELATIVE OR NATURAL?
 Relativism (AND Expressivism)
And The Problem Of
Disagreement
James Dreier
Brown University
Philosophical Perspectives, 23, Ethics, 2009

Many philosophers, in different areas, are tempted by what

variously goes under the name of Contextualism, Speaker
Relativism, Indexical Relativism. (I’ll just use Indexical
Relativism in this paper.) Thinking of certain problematic
expressions as deriving their content from elements of the
context of use solves some problems. But it faces some
problems of its own, and in this paper I’m interested in one in
particular, namely, the problem of disagreement. Two
alternative theories, tempting for just the same kinds of
expressions as Indexical Relativism is meant to handle, promise
to solve the problem of disagreement. I’ll argue that they do not
live up to their promise. At the end of the paper, I’ll ask what
exactly disagreement amounts to, and I’ll canvass some
purported solutions.

1. Indexical Relativism and the Problem of

Disagreement The View
Indexical Relativism is the view that moral expressions are
indexicals. The property picked out by a predicate like ‘wrong’
is determined by the context of utterance; likewise, the facts
stated by declarative moral sentences. The relevant feature of
the context, according to the simplest version, 1 is the speaker’s
moral system. Here ‘moral system’ is a technical term. We can
think of it as a formal object: a moral system will assign an
intension (that is, an extension in each possible world) to each
moral predicate.2 If we focus on the meanings of the moral
expressions, we can say likewise that they are functions taking
contexts to intensions, or contents; they are Kaplanian
characters.3 The particular feature of the context that the moral
characters operate on is the speaker’s moral sensibility or
outlook.
Before I get to the objection, let me make explicit a couple of features of
Indexical Relativism that I’ll be discussing later.
First, the main motivation for the view is to explain Internalism, or the
Practicality Requirement. Moral judgment has an intimate, conceptual or ‘internal’
connection to motivation, or at least so it seems to many. One good explanation
for this connection would be that each person’s moral judgments are logically
attached to that person’s motivational emotions. Suppose, as Indexical Relativism
claims, your use of ‘wrong’ picks out, by its very semantics, a property of actions
of which you disapprove (or would disapprove under idealized cognitive
conditions). This seems like the right kind of connection to motivation.4
Second, according to Indexical Relativism there are no moral properties or
moral facts. It’s true (according to Indexical Relativism) that each use of a
moral predicate picks out a property, and each assertion of a moral sentence
purports to state a fact, but there is nothing particularly moral about the
properties or facts that get picked out. They are, presumably, ordinary natural
or artificial properties and facts, a bit cumbersome to state in plain descriptive
language but with no whiff of anything especially moral. Compare: when I say
that it rained yesterday, my assertion picks out a perfectly good fact (or
falsehood), but the fact is not an indexical fact. It is the same fact I could pick
out by means of yesterday’s date. It is the way of stating the fact, rather than
the fact, that is indexical. And we could say the same thing about the thought I
sincerely expressed when I said that it rained yesterday; I was thinking about
some rain on a certain date, but I was thinking about it in a particularly
indexical way (from the point of view of now, maybe). All of this is received
wisdom about indexicals. Indexical Relativism applies it to moral language and
thought. Take Alastair, a committed utilitarian (and let’s suppose that he would
be a utilitarian in light of all the natural facts, too, and in reflective
equilibrium). When he says that imprisoning a person we know to be innocent
is sometimes morally permissible, the property he is attributing to the
imprisonment of the innocent is a natural property, one we could denote by
purely descriptive language, namely, the property of being among the
happiness-maximizing alternatives. The moral quality attaches to the way he
said it and the way he was thinking about it, not to the property or fact.

Apparatus
The technical machinery used by Indexical Relativism is familiar enough.
The semantic values for moral expressions are characters, a la Kaplan, which
means they are functions from contexts to contents. The content of a sentence is a
proposition. The content of a predicate is a property. Sentences and predicates
have contents on any given occasion of use, but the linguistic items have no fixed
content of their own. There is no fixed content of ‘wrong’ or “Cannibalism is
wrong”, just as there is no fixed content of “I live in New York”. But on each
occasion of use, given a context, those things do get contents. The content is
what is said when someone asserts the sentence and what is believed when
someone’s belief can be naturally expressed by the sentence.
The character is the semantic value of the expression; it is what you have to
know in order to know what the expression means. The content is what the
expression says. These are technical terms, and what I have just said about them
is said in ordinary language, and is no doubt a bit vague and squishy; it will
serve well enough for now.
But all of this is familiar enough from Kaplan.

The Problem of Disagreement

Suppose I say

Withdrawing from Iraq is not wrong.

and Alastair says

Withdrawing from Iraq is wrong.

Then we are disagreeing. This fact, that we are disagreeing, is a piece of data. At
least, by saying what we have said we are intending to disagree; I will assume
here that it is not plausible for a theorist to say that we have failed to disagree
even though we intended to do so.
But Indexical Relativism gets this wrong. It says we are not disagreeing.
For according to Indexical Relativism, I have attributed a certain property to
withdrawing from Iraq, and Alistair has denied that withdrawing from Iraq has
some different property. Alistair’s moral system and mine are not the same, and
the properties assigned to ‘wrong’ by its character are different in the different
contexts. So Indexical Relativism has a false implication.
Compare a case of genuine, uncontroversial indexical sentences. I say
I do not live in

Colorado. and Alistair says

I live in Colorado.

We do not disagree. The character of ‘I’ assigns to its pronoun a different

content in each context. The person I say does not live in Colorado is not the
person Alistair says lives in Colorado. So there is no disagreement; the contents
of what we say are consistent. This is the way indexicals work.
I think there are some defenses available for an Indexical Relativist. 5 For
instance, it seems clear that sometimes an indexical will pick out a content that
comes from the overlap of the contexts of speakers engaged in a conversation.
You and I can disagree about where something is when you say “It’s here” and I
say “It’s not here”, even though we do not share a location, so long as there is an
overlapping area determined by the conversational context. However, I am not
here concerned to defend Indexical Relativism, and in any case once all the
defenses have been mounted I think there is some residual Problem of
Disagreement left unanswered.
This problem is an old one. It was identified by G. E. Moore, for example. 6
Insofar as Indexical Relativism is a theory about what we say, how our language
(and thought) works, it is subject to the Problem of Disagreement.7

2. Expressivism
Expressivism is a well-known theory of moral (and in general normative)
language, so I won’t need to explain it in detail. I will be focusing on Allan
Gibbard’s version in Thinking How to Live.8 There is one complication that I
have to deal with up front. Gibbard’s theory of moral language is complicated;
he explains it in terms of more basic normative vocabulary, and then the basic
normative vocabulary gets the directly Expressivist treatment. So to be (even
approximately) true to Gibbard, I have to use examples of normative judgment
that aren’t moral. So let’s use this one.

Anthony ought to give battle.

Famously, Expressivists decline to say what this means by giving truth

conditions, content, or character. Instead they tell us what someone, say Cleo, is
doing when she says “Anthony ought to give battle.” What she does is to express
a certain state of mind: a planning state, according to Gibbard. Planning states are
a bit like intentions, a bit like preferences; they are in that conative category,
‘ready for action’; they are plans for what to do. In general, when somebody tells
you that in a circumstance, C, you ought to , she is expressing her plan to
in C.
Expressivism is supposed to have a large advantage over Indexical Rela-
tivism: it solves the Disagreement Problem. Let me mention four features of
Expressivism briefly, and then turn to the solution.

1. Why, if it is her plan to in C, does she say that you ought to in C?

Because whatever it is about you that is relevant to whether you are to
in C gets built into C. Features of you that we would not ordinarily
count as part of your ‘circumstance’ are still part of C; for instance,
the fact that you are in an angry mood is a part of C, or your being an
only child. So the plans, the elements of the planning state, are like
conditional preferences. They are what get expressed by the basic
ought statements.
0. Expressed, and not reported, notice. In saying that Anthony ought to
give battle, Cleo does not say that she is in a certain planning state. She
rather expresses that state. Her normative assertion bears to the state the
relation that an assertion of descriptive fact bears to the speaker’s belief
in that fact. It is the sincerity condition, not the truth condition. It is
important to Expressivism that we do not understand it to be assigning
to normative statements some truth conditions that involve the speaker’s
 state of mind. Sincerity conditions are not contents.
I. So what are the contents of normative statements, according to
Gibbard? There is a quick answer and a longer answer; I can give the
quick answer now and defer the longer answer to the next subsection.
Expressivists think that nothing helpful can be said in the way of truth
conditions for normative statements. One can just repeat the statements
when asked for the truth conditions; a deflationary answer is always
available.9 But the helpful way of explaining the meanings of normative
statements, according to Expressivism, is to tell you what people do by
using them, not what in the world would make them true.
II. Expressivism is well designed to explain Internalism, the Practicality
Requirement.10 For a plan is, ordinarily, a motivational state; conation is
a psychological plan’s primary function. The internal connection
between normative thought and motivation, then, is found in the
Expressivist account of meaning: the internally connected state just is
the state expressed when the judgment is sincere.

Now to Disagreement. When Cleo says, “Anthony ought to give battle,” and
Brutus says “Anthony ought not to give battle,” they disagree. The Expressivist
explanation is that they disagree in attitude, as Stevenson put it; they disagree
over what to do. (Stevenson says that a normative disagreement is like the
disagreement between two friends when one says “Let’s go to the cinema tonight”
and the other says “No, let’s go to the symphony.”) This is disagreement in plan. It
is not spelled out in terms of contrary truth conditions, but in terms of clashing
psychological states or conflicting advice. Normative statements have no truth
conditions but for the deflationary kind, and contrary deflationary truth conditions
do not explain disagreement but merely record it.

The Expressivist Problem of Embedding

There is a famous problem for Expressivist theories, called the problem of
embedding. I’ll outline this problem and Gibbard’s solution, with some focus on
the formal apparatus he uses. Then I’ll explain why I think the solution is not
complete, and what it would take to complete it. It turns out that the obstacle to
completion is a new Disagreement Problem. The problem is to say what
disagreement is.
Expressivism tells us what a normative sentence means by telling us what
state of mind a person expresses by sincerely asserting the sentence. But that is
not enough. For sentences can be used legitimately in other ways than by
asserting them (even when the speaker is entirely sincere). A normative sentence
can occur as the antecedent or consequent of a conditional, as a disjunct, in an
indirect discourse, and in all sorts of other ways, embedded in a larger semantic
matrix. Expressivism has to tell us how the normative sentence contributes to
the larger meaning in such cases, if it is to tell us what the sentence means. And
it does not have available the most traditional resource for doing so, since it
denies that truth conditions play any explanatory role in the theory of meaning
(of normative sentences, at least).
 Now, some people think that far too much has been made of this problem. 11
They think, for example, that once we know what ‘if’ means, and what the
antecedent and consequent of a conditional mean on their own, then we’ll have
no problem understanding the conditional, and that this has nothing much to do
with truth conditions. For instance, when you understand what it is to accept
“Anthony ought to give battle”, you can understand a conditional of the form,

If P, then Anthony ought to give battle.

as an inference ticket. To accept it, the conditional, is be prepared to infer

“Anthony ought to give battle” from P.
I’m somewhat sympathetic to this line. But for now, I am going to take the
Embedding Problem seriously. I’ll now sketch Allan Gibbard’s solution.

Apparatus
The basic idea is to assign formal objects to normative sentences that can
play the role that more familiar formal objects play in the more familiar
semantics of descriptive sentences. In place of sets of possible worlds, we can
use sets of hyperplans. Suppose someone had a complete view about how the
world is; then her belief could be represented by a possible world. But nobody is
like that. Even philosophers are not so opinionated. So, our doxastic states are
instead represented by sets of possible worlds. As we become more opinionated,
the set shrinks.
A hyperplan is to human plans as a possible world is to human beliefs. It is
an unimaginably detailed contingency plan, with a course of action planned out
for every possible circumstance.12 Since real people are undecided about what to
do in most possible situations (just as we are undecided about most details of
what is the case, which world is ours), our planning states can be represented by
sets of hyperplans.
As we know, sets of worlds are also good candidates for (representations of)
truth conditions, so they can be semantic values of sentences. When sentences are
combined by truth functional connectives, their semantic values can be combined
by set theoretic operations to yield the value for the new sentences. And logical
validity can be represented by set theoretic relations, too: an inference from a set
of sentences to a conclusion is valid just in case the intersection of the semantic
values of those sentences is a subset of the value of the conclusion.
In the same way, sets of hyperplans can function as the semantic values of
normative sentences. Then complex sentences can have values compounded
from the values of their atomic parts in just the way complex descriptive
sentences do, by set theoretic operations. And validity can be characterized for
normative arguments just as it is for descriptive ones.13
There is something elegant about Gibbard’s apparatus. Descriptive
sentences are answers to questions about what the world is like; they get
represented by sets of incredibly specific ways the world could be. Normative
sentences are answers to questions about what to do; they get represented by
sets of incredibly specific plans for what to do. What is the world like? One of
these! What should I do? One of those! How natural.
We can think of the sets of hyperplans as normative contents. They are
contents of sentences and propositional attitudes, alike (which is a good thing,
since we attribute propositional attitudes by means of sentences that are supposed
to give the content of the attitudes). So, now I have given the longer answer I
mentioned above, on p. 83, to the question of what are the contents of normative
statements. Instead of just giving deflationary truth conditions, we can mention
these formal objects. I think this is somewhat helpful. But, let me assert without
much defense that this answer is entirely consistent with a deflationary answer.
In effect, the formal objects position their sentences in the web of inference.
When you know which sets the sentences have as their semantic values, what
you know is which things can be inferred from which. Or do you know more
than that? I’ll return to this difficult question later.
There is one last twist. Gibbard needs a way to combine normative contents
with descriptive contents. For one thing, some sentences are conjunctions with
one normative conjunct and one descriptive one. The semantic values of these
had better not be the intersection of a set of worlds with a set of hyperplans; that
intersection would, of course, be empty, so a normative/descriptive conjunction
would have the semantic value of a contradiction. But anyway, lots of what we
say and think is laden with both plan and belief, with advice and description. I
could tell you that Nell is guilty of wrongful killing, or that Joseph is an evil
dictator. Fortunately, the combination is easy enough. We can assign to every
sentence a set of ordered pairs, <w, p>, with w a world and p a hyperplan. Take
a purely descriptive statement: Mars is red. Its set will be the set of all <w, p>
such that Mars is red at w. No restriction on p, of course. So the Mars-is-red
worlds each get paired up with every hyperplan. Likewise for purely normative
statements. The content of the sentence, “Everyone ought to give battle when
the prospect promises a greater chance of personal happiness,” will pair every
hyperplan that includes giving battle under those circumstances as a subplan,
with every possible world. But the statement, that Nell ought not to do what
John has just done, will get a set of ordered pairs including each world in which
John has done something (and Nell exists) with a plan not to do that something
when in Nell’s circumstances.
I hope this sketch is clear enough. I have omitted many details, and I am
counting on the general scheme being somewhat familiar. To sum up:
Expressivism solves the Disagreement Problem; it has its own distinctive
problem, the Embedding Problem; Allan Gibbard’s solution to the Embedding
Problem involves an apparatus of formal objects, sets of ordered pairs, that play
the formal semantic role that sets of worlds play in possible world semantics.
I have a bunch more to say about Expressivism and its apparatus, but before
I say it I will introduce a second alternative. I’ll explain how this alternative
shares a foundation with Expressivism and Indexical Relativism; I’ll sketch how
it is supposed to solve the Disagreement Problem; I will introduce its formal
apparatus. Once that’s done, we can get to the hard part.
 3. Genuine Relativism
I take the term ‘Genuine Relativism’ from Max Kölbel.14

The main claim for which I want to argue is the claim that there is a significant
difference between two broad forms a relativist thesis can take: that of
indexical relativism and that of genuine relativism.
Indexical relativists locate all relativity at the level of sentences, while genuine
relativists claim that there is relativity also at the level of utterances and the contents
or thoughts thereby expressed. Indexical relativists about, say, morality will hold
that moral relativity is essentially a matter of moral sentences expressing different
contents on different occasions of use. Moral sentences are thus very similar to
indexical sentences in that the context of utterance determines which content is
expressed by any utterance of them. Thus the same moral sentence can express one
content and be true in one context of utterance, while it may express a different
content and be false in another context.. . Genuine moral relativists do not claim
that moral sentences behave generally like indexical sentences. They say that moral
sentences express the same contents in all contexts of utterance (unless they are
indexical for the usual reasons), but that these contents have their truth-values
relatively, i.e. vary in truth-value with parameter of evaluation.

The idea that contents have truth values relatively sounds pretty strange. We
often think of contents as truth conditions, after all, and if a theory insists that
they are something other than truth conditions, we are apt to feel a bit lost.
But Genuine Relativism has gained quite a bit of popularity. John MacFarlane
and Andy Egan each apply it to some philosophically interesting areas of
thought and talk, and they (and Kölbel) say enough in support to make the
view worth a close look. 15
According to Kölbel, moral statements are true or false only relative to a
perspective, which for our purposes means they are only true or false relative to
a moral system. So far, Kölbel’s view doesn’t differ from Indexical Relativism.
But the Genuine Relativist doesn’t say that the moral system (perspective,
context) in the context of use determines a particular proposition, which is then
simply true or false. Instead, he lets the relativity, the context sensitivity,
continue into the proposition expressed by the sentence. Suppose Smart and
Kant (to use one of Kölbel’s examples) each assert

Punishing an innocent person to prevent great public harm is wrong.

Since Smart and Kant (we suppose) have different moral systems, Indexical
Relativism tells us that they have expressed different propositions; Smart has
attributed one property to punishing an innocent, Kant has attributed a different
one. Genuine Relativism, on the other hand, tells us that they have expressed the
same proposition. That proposition may be true relative to Kant’s system and
false relative to Smart’s.
This view is, initially at least, hard to understand. We are tempted (at least I
am) to think that for a proposition to be true relative to you and false relative to
me couldn’t mean anything if it didn’t mean that you believe it is true and I
 believe it is false. This is definitely not what Genuine Relativism is saying. To
see what it is saying, let me turn to John MacFarlane.
MacFarlane points out that we are familiar with a couple of kinds of
Genuine relativity already. First, we all accept that there is evaluator-relativity
with respect to worlds. Suppose Jane says

The earth has exactly one moon.

Now imagine a merely possible world in which the earth has two moons, and in
which June says

The earth has two moons.

Jane and June each expressed a proposition, and their propositions are
contraries: they cannot both be true. But what Jane says is true in the actual
world and false in June’s merely possible world; what June says, on the
contrary, is false in the actual world and true in June’s world. Which world is
the right one? That’s a silly question. So, Jane’s proposition is true at our actual
world and false at June’s possible world; is it true, or is it false? Again, it’s silly
to insist that it be one or the other. A proposition can be true at one world and
false at another.
A second kind of relativity, though slightly more controversial, is familiar
enough not to be written off as bizarre and incomprehensible. It is relativity to
time. Suppose I say,
The United States has a black President.

And suppose Dolly Madison once said,

The United States has never had a black President.

It is plausible that we have expressed contrary propositions, and that Dolly’s was
true-at-her-time while mine is true-at-my-time. We can certainly say comfortably,

What Dolly said used to be true, but it isn’t any longer.

Compare this to June’s proposition. I can comfortably say,

That would have been true in June’s situation, but in fact it isn’t true.

That is, I can quite happily say of these propositions that they are true at some
Do we disagree? An Indexical Relativist about the funny would, of course, have
to say we don’t. But a Genuine Relativist can say that we do. For I accept, and

context other than mine, and then say that they aren’t true, where I’m using my
own context to fill in the missing relatum (in one case a world, in the other a
time).
MacFarlane:
 Taking this line of thought a little farther, the relativist might envision contents
that are “sense-of-humor neutral” or “standard-of-taste neutral” or “epistemic-
state neutral,” and circumstances of evaluation that include parameters for a
sense of humor, a standard of taste, or an epistemic state. This move would open
up room for the truth value of a proposition to vary with these “subjective”
factors in much the same way that it varies with the world of evaluation. The
very same proposition say, that apples are delicious could be true with

respect to one standard of taste, false with respect to another. 16

Suppose we agree that this makes sense. What is the advantage of Genuine
Relativism over Indexical Relativism? Genuine Relativism is supposed to solve
the Problem of Disagreement. Take MacFarlane’s example of judgments about
what is funny. These are Genuinely Relative to a sense of humor; what’s funny
relative to one sense of humor may not be funny relative to another, and there is
no absolute funniness. Suppose we both hear a rather tasteless joke, and I say,

Tasteless, no doubt, but at least it’s funny.

You say,

It’s not even funny.

you reject, the proposition that the joke is funny. And this seems to be sufficient for
disagreement: one of us accepts and the other rejects the very same proposition.17
There is quite a bit more to be said about disagreement a la Genuine
Relativism. Before I start to say it, I want to set up the formal apparatus of
Genuine Relativism. Then, in the following section of the paper, I’ll muse over the
similarities of the three sets of apparatus: one for Indexical Relativism, one for
Expressivism, one for Genuine Relativism. To peek ahead: the upshot of the
musings is going to be that the formal structures of the three semantics are similar,
indeed isomorphic, and to appreciate the differences among the views we have to
look elsewhere. After that, I’ll return to Expressivism for one section, explaining a
new problem that pops up in the wake of Gibbard’s Expressivist semantics. And
then, finally, I’ll return to the Genuine Relativist account of disagreement, arguing
that its shortcomings mirror those of Expressivist semantics.

Apparatus
As a starting point, the simplest apparatus for Genuine Relativists is the one
used by Andy Egan.18 Recalling David Lewis’s account of belief de se, Egan
suggests that the values of some predicates are not properties but what he calls
‘centering features’. Centering features combine with objects of predication to
form centered propositions, which are the objects of self-locating beliefs.
Centered propositions first. Just as propositions can be thought of as sets of
possible worlds, centered propositions are sets of centered worlds. Centered
worlds are to possible worlds what maps containing a “You are here” arrow are
to ordinary maps you’d find in an atlas. Formally, they are just worlds together
with a context, which might be just an <individual, time> pair. Sets of them are
(or represent) centered propositions. Some beliefs, Egan thinks, are attitudes
toward centered propositions rather than toward centerless ones (Lewis thought
so, too). For instance, the belief I might articulate by saying “It’s late afternoon
and the air is getting colder” is an attitude toward the set of centered worlds
whose center is at a spot in space and time where (and when) it is late afternoon
and the weather is getting colder. It contains some centerings of the actual world,
of course, and lacks others. And it contains some centerings of many merely
possible worlds, and lacks other centerings of those same worlds.
We can add moral systems into the contexts (the ordered tuples that get
paired with worlds to form centered worlds), if we like; or we can just let the
individual in the context supply his or her own moral system. Then we have
formal objects for MacFarlane’s relativism, and Köbel’s. A moral sentence like
“It is wrong to punish an innocent” has a truth value only relative to a world —
this much is already familiar; but more, it has a truth value only relative to a
centered world. It contains all and only those centered worlds centered on moral
systems according to which punishing innocents in that world is wrong.
Let me sum up this section. Genuine Relativism agrees with Indexical
Relativism on the claim that the semantic values of moral sentences have an extra
parameter: they need a moral system along with a possible world to determine a
truth-value. It disagrees with Indexical Relativism about how and where the
extra element is supplied. Indexical Relativism says that a moral sentence has a
character, and that on an occasion of use it will express a plain vanilla
proposition, perhaps a set of possible worlds, which can be simply true or false
(at a world). Genuine Relativism says that the content the sentence delivers on
an occasion of use is still relative. That content is not a plain vanilla proposition
(set of worlds), but rather a centered proposition (set of centered worlds). The
content itself is true or false only relative to a context (in particular the moral
system in the context).
When you and I each assert an indexical sentence, we (often) say different
things; when the assertions are sincere we (often) believe different things (I
believe that I am the tallest philosopher in the room, while you believe that you
are). Indexical Relativism extends this idea to moral sentences. So it runs into
the Problem of Disagreement: we say different things by assertion of the same
sentence, and likewise I can deny something different from what you assert,
when I assert the syntactic negation of the sentence you assert. Genuine
Relativism claims that in certain areas of language, besides indexicality we have
another form of extra indexing, one that gets carried into the things said and the
things believed. These are the centered propositions. When I negate the sentence
you assert, I am denying what you said, and so we disagree.

4. Three Formal Apparatus

Here are the three models, the formal semantics for the three accounts of
moral language.
Indexical Relativism assigns to each moral sentence a Kaplanian character,
namely, a function from contexts to contents. The important feature of the
context is a moral system. To a sentence that predicates ‘wrong’ of a subject, for
example, the function assigns a proposition saying that the subject has a certain
property, P: and P is the property the moral system in the context assigns to
‘wrong’. A person (in a context) has a moral system that is determined by the
person’s moral attitudes, possibly in some idealized form.
Expressivism assigns to each moral sentence a set of <world, hyperplan>
pairs. When a sentence says that a person in a circumstance ought to act a
certain way, its semantic values includes the set of all pairs for which the
hyperplan includes a plan to act in that way in those circumstances in that
world. These ‘factual-normative contents’ then play the role that sets of possible
worlds play in possible world semantics.
Genuine Relativism assigns to each moral sentence a centered proposition,
namely, a set of centered worlds (or <context, world> pairs). Moral predicates
contribute centering features, which are formally represented as functions from
contexts to properties.
These formal models are so similar that they can appear to be almost trivial
variants of one another. Even my description so far is enough to make out a
certain similarity. But, as I will now explain, they are even more similar than
they appear so far.
The model for Expressivist content and the model for Genuine Relativism
rely on collections of worlds, and they are beholden to possible world semantics.
The model for Indexical Relativism includes nothing (said here) about possible
worlds, and is independent of possible world semantics. Indeed, Kaplan semantics
is an alternative to possible world semantics; its propositions are Russellian
structured objects (though I have made no use of this fact in the presentation).
What if possible world semantics is defective? For some purposes, it is too
‘coarse grained’. Possible world semantics models every necessary proposition
with the same formal object, and also assigns the same formal object to every
impossible proposition, and to every pair of propositions true at the same world.
I will not worry about whether this is a serious defect. For some purposes it is a
definite disadvantage (I believe that 2 + 3 = 5, but I do not believe that there is
any even number greater than two that isn’t the sum of two primes, and I don’t
believe that every even number greater than two is the sum of two primes). So,
for some purposes we want some other objects to represent contents, not sets of
possible worlds.
Whatever the defects of possible world semantics, the models that adopt its
apparatus (by using sets of <world, hyperplan> pairs or sets of centered worlds)
will inherit those defects. Fortunately, this is easy to fix.
Expressivist content first.19 We note first that the family of sets of <world,
hyperplan> pairs is isomorphic to the family of functions from hyperplans to
sets of worlds. Indeed, for mathematical purposes a set of <world, hyperplan>
pairs is a function from hyperplans to sets of worlds. Take some such set; we
construct for it a function. The function takes hyperplans as arguments, and for
each hyperplan the value of the function is the set of all worlds that hyperplan
is paired with in the set. (The set doesn’t determine any particular function
from hyperplans to worlds, because each hyperplan is paired with many
worlds. Gather those worlds together into a set; this is the value of the function
at that hyperplan.)
This scheme matches Gibbard’s sets of pairs onto functions from hyperplans
to sets of worlds. And the re-interpretation is natural enough. Take the sentence,

Anthony ought to give battle.

We are assigning to this sentence a function from hyperplans to sets of worlds.

The function will take a given hyperplan to the set of worlds in which Anthony
is in one of the circumstances the hyperplan says to give battle in.
A set of worlds is, in possible world semantics, a proposition. If for some
purpose we aren’t satisfied with possible world semantics, we can substitute
whatever conception of a proposition we like. Suppose we like Russellian
propositions. Then we can assign to each normative sentence a function from
hyperplans to Russellian propositions. There is nothing special, from the point
of view of the general semantic scheme, about sets of worlds. The only reason
to pair hyperplans with worlds, in Gibbard’s semantics, is to draw on the
framework of possible world semantics. But if some other framework is better,
we can simply adjust Gibbard’s scheme to that framework.20
Now the semantics assigns to each sentence a function from hyperplans to
propositions. And this is in effect a Kaplanian character, so long as a hyperplan
is a feature of a context. Indexical Relativism takes moral systems as the
relevant feature of the context; hyperplans are so close, formally speaking, to
moral systems that the difference seems to make no difference.
As to the Genuine Relativism model: sets of centered worlds are
(isomorphic to) functions from centers to sets of worlds, and the centers are
contexts. So again, the semantic values of the kinds of sentences in question are
really Kaplanian characters; that is, they are the same formal objects.21
MacFarlane doesn’t say much about what formal objects propositions
(relative or absolute) are. Instead he focuses on their truth and assertibility. But
it is clear that for him, some propositions are true (or false) only relative to a
context of use and a context of assessment. It is the context of assessment, for
MacFarlane, that gives Genuine Relativism its punch. Without it, the
proposition won’t give us truth conditions (thought of as functions from worlds
to truth values). So Genuine Relativist propositions, the values assigned to
sentences, are truth conditions minus contexts; each proposition will yield truth
conditions when provided with a context (of evaluation). So they are (well
represented by) functions from contexts to truth conditions.
The three kinds of metaethical theories, then, assign (more or less) the same
formal objects as semantic values of moral sentences. Of course, the objects are
called different things by the three theories (‘characters’; ‘factual-normative
contents’; ‘centered propositions’), but that’s not a substantive difference. If
there is a substantive difference it has to show up in what work the theories do
with their formal objects.
Notice that all three theories agree that the objects assigned to sentences as
semantic values are also appropriately connected to belief states that a person
might express by uttering the sentence assertively. Good thing! Indexical
Relativism will not allow that the semantic value is the content of the belief so
expressed. Contents are derived from characters by means of contexts. The
other theories do call the objects ‘contents’. But what difference does this
make? Objects that have their place in a formal structure are useful to index
states of mind. We identify a type of psychological state by tagging it with an
index. And Indexical Relativism does agree with the other two theories on this
score: there is an interesting taxonomy of psychological states according to
which two states (two of yours over time, perhaps, or one of yours and one of
mine) belong to the same taxon when we express them by means of sentences
with the same character. No difference there.
Below I’ll give some details of Genuine Relativism to draw out the
distinctive role it gives to its formal objects. For now I’ll focus on two purported
differences between Genuine Relativism and Expressivism, on the one hand,
and Indexical Relativism on the other.

First Difference: Indirect Discourse

As I said, Genuine Relativism and Expressivism call the function-from-
contexts-to-propositions, ‘contents’, while Indexical Relativism doesn’t. The
name doesn’t matter. But our ordinary, intuitive grasp on contents, I think, is via
indirect discourse. I can tell you what someone said and what she believes, and
when I do this the content of the sentence I use is supposed to be the same as the
content of the saying or belief. This is what’s behind calling some things
‘contents’ in a theory. So we can get some traction by looking at indirect
discourse.
But discussion of the accounts the various views give of indirect discourse
would take us too far afield. One difference comes out immediately in the
accounts of disagreement. Aside from that one, I want to stipulate that there may
be interesting differences among the theories on this score, and leave it at that.

Second Difference: Disagreement

It is one of the stated aims of Genuine Relativism that it improve on
Indexical Relativism’s handling of disagreement.

The relativist’s central objection to contextualism is that it fails to account for

the possibility of disagreement in subjective discourse—for our sense that when
I say that carrots are delicious and you deny this, we are genuinely disagreeing
with each other, and not making compatible claims about our respective tastes.
If we are to adjudicate between contextualism and relativism, then, we must
first get clear about what it is for two people to disagree.22

We know what the Problem of Disagreement is: there is no proposition,

according to Indexical Relativism, which you believe and I disbelieve when you
sincerely express your belief by saying that something is, say, ‘wrong’, and I
express mine by saying the same thing is ‘not wrong’. Note that the quotation
marks are necessary. I, your author, cannot (according to Indexical Relativism)
describe the doxastic and conversational clash by saying,

I think the invasion was wrong, but he thinks it is not wrong.

For by saying that I would be reporting you as believing that the invasion lacks
the property that ‘wrong’ is assigned by my moral system, my context. Indexicals
can’t be used that way. Suppose I phone my wife and ask where her W2 form is.
She: I’m sure it’s not here.
I: Okay, it must be
here.

Plainly I cannot summarize by saying, “I think the W2 form is here but Johanna
thinks it is not here.” Johanna and I do not disagree.
Genuine Relativists claim that they have a solution. There is something for
us to disagree about, they say, only it isn’t a set of worlds (it’s not the question
of which world we are in). Andy Egan writes:

I am partial to a picture of mental and linguistic content according to which the

role of mental states and linguistic representations is to distinguish between
possibilities. My beliefs distinguish between the possibilities that I take to be
candidates for actuality and the ones that I rule out, my desires distinguish
between the possibilities that I hope for and those that I dread, and my
assertions distinguish between (roughly) those possibilities that I’m asking you
to rule out and those that you’re free to leave open.
If we like this possibility-sorting picture of content, then it’s very natural
to represent contents as sets of possible worlds. The content of a belief, desire,
or assertion is the set of worlds where things are as they’re believed, desired, or
asserted to be.
My beliefs, desires, etc. with possible-worlds content draw distinctions
between ways the world might be, while my beliefs, desires, etc. with centered-
worlds content draw distinctions between situations that I might be in. 23

So, in a moral disagreement, you can believe what I disbelieve, you assert
what I deny: a centered proposition. Max Kölbel agrees:

[E]very thinker possesses a perspective, and moreover everyone ought not to

believe contents that are not true in relation to their own perspective. On this
basis, it is clear why I can’t come to believe what you said without needing to
change my mind: what you have said and what I have said cannot both be true
in relation to the same perspective. Thus, given that I ought not to believe
something that is not true in relation to my perspective, I should not come to
believe what you have said without changing my mind.24

The objects of belief, in Kölbel’s picture, are not truth-conditions; they are
truth-conditions minus a ‘perspective’. Sets of centered worlds (with the centers
singling out the perspective) or whatever centered propositions one prefers will
do the trick. And we disagree, Kölbel says, because there is an object you believe
which I cannot (or anyway should not) believe, since I believe something that is
incompatible with it: both cannot be true in the same perspective.
Formally speaking, Gibbard’s Expressivism works out similarly. Take a
simple case in which the sentence you use to express your planning state is the
syntactic contradictory of the one I use to express mine. The contents of our
respective judgments, then, will be sets of factual-normative world pairs, and
the two sets are complements; so they are related just as ordinary descriptive
contradictions are related. It is incoherent to accept both of these propositions.
As Gibbard puts it, each planning state ‘rules out’ some combinations of
descriptive fact and normative planning. Contradictories will together rule out
all factual-normative possibilities, leaving me in the unhappy state of having
ruled out every contingency plan (indeed, any pair of contraries will have a
null intersection in Gibbard’s scheme, so all such pairs leave me in the
unhappy state). Disagreement is recaptured in Gibbard’s semantics by the same
sorts of formal objects as we see at work in Genuine Relativism’s maneuver.
The contents of the two statements and beliefs are contradictories, which
cannot be coherently accepted together.
In the following sections, I will argue for what I hope has occurred to the
reader: the formal moves do not really solve the problem. My argument will
proceed as follows. In the next section, I will point out that there is a
deficiency in Expressivist semantics: it does not have an adequate semantics
of negation. It turns out, I argue, that in order to make good on this defect
Expressivism has to give an independent account of what it is for one state of
mind to disagree with another. The semantic model, therefore, has not solved
the disagreement problem so much as presupposed that it has an answer. Then
I’ll argue in the section after that, that Genuine Relativism has just the same
problem. And in the last section I’ll look at some suggested solutions to this
problem and assess their prospects.

5. Expressivism and Negation: the new

Disagreement Problem
I said that Expressivists claim an advantage for their view over Indexical
Relativism: that they have a plausible account of disagreement. And, in
simplistic terms, their account is supposed to be this: that when you and I have a
normative disagreement, we disagree not in belief but in some other attitude. We
disagree in what we plan, or, in other versions, in our attitudes toward various
possibilities. We disagree over what to do.
The semantic model, in which the disagreers believe or assert
contradictory contents (in the form of factual-normative propositions, centered
ones) is not a substitute for the main explanation, it is important to see.
Expressivists recognize that just giving us a bunch of formal objects, assigned
to the various sentences, doesn’t do the explanatory work that needs to be
done. The real explanation comes in their story about the attitudes: planning,
emotive, motivational.
There is, I think, some intuitive sense in what Expressivism says here. To
put it crudely, when you shout “Booo!” for the Yankees and I shout “Hooray!”,
that seems like a kind of disagreement. Is it the right kind?
The situation is somewhat complicated. To expose the complication, let’s
look at the Expressivist story about the following sentences.
Judith thinks you ought to write the invitation by hand.
Now consider three ways of adding negation.
 It is not the case that Judith thinks you ought to write the invitation by hand.
Judith thinks it is not the case that you ought to write the invitation by hand.
Judith thinks you ought not to write the invitation by hand.

To see the difference: the first is true if Judith has no view whatsoever about
invitations; the others aren’t. The second is true if Judith has the considered view
that it doesn’t matter whether you write the invitation by hand; the third is not.
The problem is that there aren’t three planning states for the three
‘negations’ to ascribe to Judith. Maybe she simply has no plan for how to write
invitations (in your circumstances); maybe she has a definite plan not to write
them by hand. These, I think, must be what are ascribed by the second and third
negations. But what is ascribed by the second? This is the Negation Problem.25
One way to see the root of the problem is to focus on the fact that there are
(intuitively) three deontic statuses for a brand of invitation-writing to have. It
could be required; this is the status Judith takes it to have according to the
negation-free attribution. It could be forbidden; that’s what Judith thinks
according to the last of the attributions. Or it could be merely permitted or
optional — permitted without being required. That’s what Judith thinks
according to the middle negation option. And according to the first negation
option, she has no view, and note that this is not the same as having the view
that hand-writing invitations is optional. Someone who has never heard of
etiquette or invitations doesn’t have the view that handwritten invitations are
permissible. So, leaving aside the situation in which Judith has no view, there
are three statuses but only two sorts of planning states: planning to write them,
and planning not to write them.
What sort of state is represented by a set of factual-normative worlds, some
of which include the plan to write invitations by hand (in your circumstance) and
others of which include the plan to print them on your laser printer? This might
seem to be a ‘permissive’ state. But it isn’t. It’s an undecided state. Compare the
belief represented by a set of worlds, in some of which our galaxy has an odd
number of stars and in others of which it has an even number of stars. A person in
such a state has no definite view about how many stars are in our galaxy. She is
agnostic. The analogous planning state is also agnostic. Again, suppose someone
is in the pure doxastic state (about the stars), and then learns more (implausibly!)
and decides that the number of stars in the galaxy is odd. She has not changed her
mind, but only resolved an indecision. Similarly, when a planner changes from the
state represented by a set of plans, some planning to write by hand and some
planning to print, and moves to a state whose representation includes only plans to
write by hand, she has come to a decision and not changed her mind. This shows
that she has not switched from regarding the printed invites as permitted to
regarding them as forbidden (since that would be a change in view, not a
resolution of indecision).26
Later I’ll sketch out some proposed solutions. For now, though I note that
the hitch in the semantics points directly at a problem about disagreement. An
Expressivist might say, “Well, what’s happening when someone thinks it is
permissible to print out the invitations is that she is disagreeing with everyone
who thinks it is required to write them by hand. And this disagreement is
revealed in the wording: she believes it is not the case that one ought to write
them by hand; the not signals disagreement. Whereas when we say only that she
does not believe that one ought to write the invitations by hand, we are signaling
only our own disagreement with someone who has a different view about
Judith’s state of mind.”
This would be a good answer, but only if we could be given an
explanation of what it means for Judith to disagree with a plan. We had a
suggestion on the table: to disagree with a plan is to have an incompatible
plan. (Whether this can be properly thought of as disagreement remains to be
seen; I have been assuming that it can.) But that cannot be the suggestion at
this stage. For the incompatible planning state is expressed by the last
attribution, and we are now to suppose that the second also attributes to Judith
a planning state that disagrees with one that the unnegated attribution assigns
to her. So the problem is that we have no explanation of what it is for one state
of mind to disagree with another.
To be clear: the problem is not with the formal apparatus. It’s true that
Gibbard’s sets of factual-normative pairs cannot represent all three normative
statuses, but presumably some other formal objects could be wheeled in, with
more structure and so better able to distinguish statuses. The question is about
what states of mind the representations would be mapped onto. And my point is
that to find enough, we need an answer to the question, what is it for two states
of mind to be in disagreement? If we knew that, we could just suppose that the
state of believing it is not the case that one ought to is the state of disagreeing
(and no more) with the state of believing that one ought to . This is the new
problem of disagreement.

6. Genuine Relativism and the New Problem

Genuine Relativism offers up some formal objects for you to accept and me
to reject, and it says that in such cases we disagree. But that is not enough. Just
as Expressivism’s collections of factual-normative pairs cannot answer the
explanatory question, neither can Genuine Relativism’s centered propositions.
According to Andy Egan, the contents of our judgments are often sets of
centered worlds (the sets themselves are centered propositions, awaiting a center
to deliver a proposition assessable for truth). These sets, as he puts it, “draw
distinctions between situations that I might be in” (and he could have added,
“or that you might be in”). Our centered beliefs may draw such distinctions —
each of us taking himself to be in a particular sort of situation — even if we
agree exactly about what the world is like. And he thinks believing that Sydney
is nearby has a content of this type, since it represents to the believer which kind
of situation he is in.27 Egan writes,

[I]f I am in Canberra and you are in Boston, and we are both to be maximally
well-informed, we must both agree that Sydney is near Egan. We ought not to
agree about whether Sydney is nearby.28

But this example illustrates my point. Suppose that collections of centered

worlds are a good way of capturing the ‘content’, in some reasonable technical
sense, of a person’s state of mind, and also ‘what is said’ in asserting a sentence
that might also be used to express the state of mind. This supposition leaves it
open whether two believers whose sets of centered worlds stand in some formal
relation of exclusion to one another can be thought of as disagreeing. And his
own example shows that the question about disagreement isn’t settled by the
model. For when Andy thinks, Sydney is nearby, and you think, Sydney is not
nearby, you and he most definitely do not disagree. The plain facts of the matter,
stated in centerless terms, are that Andy is near Sydney and you are not, and
once this is understood there is no residual ‘proposition’, centered or otherwise,
that can be the nexus of your disagreement.
John MacFarlane recognizes that a semantic object you accept and I reject
cannot be the criterion of disagreement, even when the object is called a
proposition. He considers this criterion for when two parties disagree:

Accept/Reject: There is a proposition that one party accepts and the other
rejects.

But he rejects the criterion.

This can be seen most clearly when we relativize propositional truth to pa-
rameters besides just worlds. Consider, for example, tensed propositions,
which have truth values relative to world/time pairs. One such proposition is
the proposition that Joe is sitting. (Do not confuse this with the proposition
that Joe is sitting now, or at any other time: the tensed proposition is, in
Kaplan’s terms, “temporally neutral.”) If you asserted this proposition at 2
p.m. and I denied it at 3 p.m., we have not in any real sense disagreed. Your
assertion concerned Joe’s position at 2 p.m., while my denial concerned his
position at 3 p.m.4 So accepting and rejecting the same proposition cannot be
sufficient for genuine disagreement.
Lest anyone be tempted to save Accept/Reject by denying that propositions
can be “temporally neutral,” the point can be made just as well with eternal
propositions (with truth values relative to worlds but not times). Just as
Accept/Reject can serve as a criterion for disagreement about tensed propositions
only when the acceptance and rejection take place at the same time, so it can
serve as a criterion for disagreement about eternal propositions only when the
acceptance and rejection take place in the same world.
Consider Jane (who inhabits this world, the actual world) and June, her
counterpart in another possible world. Jane asserts that Mars has two moons,
and June denies this very proposition. Do they disagree? Not in any real way.
Jane’s assertion concerns our world, while June’s concerns hers. If June lives in
a world where Mars has three moons, her denial may be just as correct as Jane’s
assertion.29

On the other hand, Max Kölbel does claim that Genuine Relativism
accounts for disagreement.
Another difficulty of indexical relativism was the fact that it had to give a
counterintuitive account of moral disagreements. According to [Indexical
Relativism], when I sincerely utter [‘Blair ought to go to war’] and you
sincerely utter ‘It’s not the case that Blair ought to go to war’, what I said is not
incompatible (in the right way) with what you said. I can just come to believe
 what you said without needing to change my mind. There is no such problem in
the case of genuine relativism. However, I shall need to introduce one further,
normative aspect of this theory in order to show how this works: every thinker
possesses a perspective, and moreover everyone ought not to believe contents
that are not true in relation to their own perspective. On this basis, it is clear
why I can’t come to believe what you said without needing to change my mind:
what you have said and what I have said cannot both be true in relation to the
same perspective. Thus, given that I ought not to believe something that is not
true in relation to my perspective, I should not come to believe what you have
said without changing my mind.30

Ragnar Francén has explained nicely why Kölbel’s explanation is

unsatisfactory.
Kölbel is right that on his view, when Kant says that punishing innocent Irwin
is wrong and Smart says that that this is not so, the propositions they assert
cannot both be true at any one circumstance of evaluation (moral perspective).
But this does not mean that they disagree. In analogy with Jane’s and June’s
assertions, Smart’s and Kant’s assertions concern different circumstances of
evaluation, different moral perspectives. It might very well be that they agree
that punishing innocent Irwin is wrong at Kant’s moral perspective and that
punishing innocent Irwin is not wrong at Smart’s moral perspective.31

Francén adds (using ‘speaker relativism’ for our ‘Indexical Relativism’),

This is very similar to the problem speaker relativism has with disagreements.
The problem for moral speaker relativism is that it makes moral assertions
made by speaker’s with different moralities be about different things (express
different propositions), and that they therefore do not disagree in the intuitive
sense when they are involved in moral disputes. Kölbel’s variant of relativism
makes moral assertions made by speakers with different moralities concern
different moralities.32
The idea of a proposition’s ‘concerning’ one circumstance or another is not
spelled out rigorously, but MacFarlane’s use of it, adopted by Francén, seems
fairly intuitive. A temporally neutral proposition asserted at a time concerns that
time, in a sense I can’t spell out myself but feel I can grasp pretty well; somewhat
less clearly I understand a sense in which June and Jane make assertions each
concerning her own world. Maybe the simplest way to make the point is that we
are completely comfortable with the idea that each of them is quite correct and
each speaks truly.33
If we like the way Francén describes things, we might say the new problem
isn’t new after all. But the focus has changed. Instead of a phenomenon of the
semantic model, the problem now seems to have to do with saying why the
cases that the model counts as disagreements should be thought of as something
robustly in conflict. That was the problem for Expressivism, too: say why a pair
of attitudes toward the world should count as disagreement, rather than just
difference.
In the last section, I’ll look at how an account of disagreement might go. I
warn the reader that this last section is fairly negative. I am more confident
about what won’t work than I am about what will or even might.
 7. Explaining Disagreement
My claim is that neither Genuine Relativism nor Expressivism really has a
better answer to the disagreement problem than Indexical Relativism, and that
the difficulty is revealed to be one of what exactly disagreement is. John
MacFarlane more or less agrees:

The relativist’s central objection to contextualism is that it fails to account for

the possibility of disagreement in subjective discourse — for our sense that
when I say that carrots are delicious and you deny this, we are genuinely
disagreeing with each other, and not making compatible claims about our
respective tastes. If we are to adjudicate between contextualism and relativism,
then, we must first get clear about what it is for two people to disagree. This
question turns out to be surprisingly difficult to answer. Although the answer
given below will be incomplete, I think it does shed a little light on what the
relativist must say if she is to do better than the contextualist in securing
genuine disagreement.34

Here is his formal account of disagreement.

[T]wo parties disagree (as assessed from context C) if

Can’t Both Be Accurate (Relative to C). (a) There is a proposition that one
party accepts and the other rejects, and (b) the acceptance and the rejection
cannot both be accurate (as assessed from C).
He then adds:

Perspectival Accuracy An acceptance (rejection) of a proposition p at a context

CU is accurate (as assessed from a context C A) iff p is true (false) at the
circumstance (WCU, SCA), where WCU = the world of CU and SCA = the standard of
taste of the assessor at CA.

These together provide an account of disagreement. Perspectival Accuracy

is a necessary component since otherwise we would not understand “accurate
(as assessed from C)” in Can’t Both Be Accurate.
But MacFarlane is not satisfied with this explanation.

But what does it mean to say that a speech act or mental state is accurate “from
a perspective” or “relative to a context of assessment”? The relativist needs to
say something about the practical significance of claims of assessment-relative
accuracy. How does it matter in practice whether a speech act or mental state is
accurate relative to one context of assessment rather than another? What turns
on this?

I would put things this way. From Egan, we know that centered
propositions can represent contents of judgments about what is nearby. We can
then define Perspectival Accuracy for propositions like the proposition that
Sydney is nearby. It would turn out that Egan’s acceptance of the proposition
that Sydney is nearby is inaccurate as assessed by me today, even though I know
he accepted it when he was in Canberra (so it was accurate as assessed by him
then). That’s no problem; Perspectival Accuracy is, after all, a purely technical
notion, a defined term. Now, my judgment that Sydney is not nearby and Egan’s
judgment that Sydney is nearby Can’t Both Be Accurate, in the technical sense.
So the criterion says we disagree. But we do not.
It is pretty clear what MacFarlane has to say about this example. He has to
say that our actual practice does not support relativist semantics (and the
relativist account of disagreement) for ‘nearby’ sentences. And this shows that
the real question about disagreement has to do with the stuff, the ‘practice’, that
makes the formalism relevant and helpful (in some cases and unhelpful and
irrelevant in others).
One approach, famously employed by Brandom, is to characterize the
practice in terms of conversational norms. MacFarlane suggests something like
this.

This, then, is the practical significance of the classification of assertions into

accurate and inaccurate:
Accuracy and Challenges. Accuracy is the property we must show assertions
to have in order to vindicate them in the face of challenges, and it is the
property we must show others’ assertions not to have if our challenges are to
be justified.
And here is how the account works when accuracy is relativized.

Making the relativitization explicit, we can see that there is work for a
relativized notion of accuracy to do:
V. one is entitled to challenge an assertion when one has good grounds for
thinking that the assertion was not accurate (relative to the context of
assessment one occupies in issuing the challenge), and
VI. a successful response to such a challenge consists in a
demonstration that the assertion was, in fact, accurate (relative to the
context of assessment one occupies in giving the response).35

I have no fundamental objection to this sort of explanation, but what I want to

say is that it is pretty radically incomplete. Take the rules of some Brandomian
challenge/response games, and see what kinds of tokens can intelligibly play the
roles of assertions. (I don’t mean what kinds of sounds or shapes of symbols, of
course, but what kinds of speech acts, as it were, conceived independently of the
rules.) Empirical statements can apparently fill the role just fine — the game in
which I make some observationally testable hypotheses and someone challenges
me, is perfectly intelligible. Now let an expression of pain sit in the spot that
assertions occupy. Suppose we introduce a sentence allowed to be asserted when
the speaker has a headache. Well, we could play this game. I shout, “It is throbby
in here”, and you challenge. You assess “It is throbby in here” from your own
perspective and, pain free, find it badly defective (inaccurate); you find you were
entitled to your challenge. I now roll my eyes, place my head in my hands, grope
around for Ibuprofen, thus demonstrating that from my perspective my assertion
was entirely accurate; I have successfully (from my perspective) met the
challenge. We could play this game. But it would be a bad game.
Again, MacFarlane is apparently worried about almost the same thing:
 This can look like a pretty silly game. Why do we play it? Assuming we do
have assessment-sensitive expressions in our languages, why do we have them?
What would we be missing if we did not? 36

But this is not quite my point. The game as we were playing it seems not to
make any kind of conversational sense at all. In this way it is quite different from
other kinds of pointless conversational games we might play. For example, some
people think that quite a lot of philosophy is a pointless game; people sometimes
point out that thinking about what would have happened had Al Gore been
declared President by the U. S. Supreme Court is a pointless exercise; and so on.
But these games are conversationally intelligible even if their critics are right
about their pointlessness. When you say that human beings are four-dimensional
and I say we are three dimensional, this at least makes sense as a disagreement
even if there isn’t anything either of us can say to budge the other from his
position (and we know it in advance). If I insist that America would have been
the victim of six deadly terrorist attacks had Al Gore been declared President and
you opine that we would have had eight years of peace and prosperity, this is
intelligible even though we quickly see that there is no prospect of convincing one
another and no sufficient agreement even in what we’ll count as evidence. But
when I insist that it is throbby in here and you reply that it isn’t the least bit
throbby, all that is happening is that I have a headache, and you do not, and we
both know this. . . and there is no intelligible sense in which we disagree.37
So I want to say that there are preconditions that have to be met before a
game of challenge and response can be thought of as a conversation in which
the assertions are (for want of a better word) propositions. And one
precondition, maybe the only one, is that the state of mind expressed (as an
Expressivist likes to put it) is the kind of thing that we can disagree with.38

Solutions
MacFarlane’s explanation goes roughly like this. The
challenge/reply game has as its point to produce a feeling of
controversy (by comparison with a conversation in which each
of us merely reports our own attitudes). The feeling of
controversy is uncomfortable, so conversations that produce it
will make each of us take some interest in removing its cause.
And in practice this will mean reaching some kind of
coordination of our attitudes, so that they converge toward a
single outlook. Of course, this point could not possibly be had
by a
I am sympathetic to the following suggestion of Allan Gibbard’s. When someone
genuinely accepts something and someone else accepts its negation there is a
challenge/reply game in which we seem to dispute questions of
which cities really are nearby — we could not coordinate our
locations conversationally, even if there were some reason to
want to do so.
This story is remarkably close to C. L. Stevenson’s account of
the use of moral language.39 In ethical discussion, according to
Stevenson, we express our moral attitudes, but we also attempt
to get others to share them (thus his paraphrase, so easy to
mock, of “This is good”: I approve of this, do so as well!).
Stevenson had no persuasive account of how on earth my
saying such things could ever influence you to change your
moral outlook.40 Maybe if the challenge and the controversial
feel are uncomfortable, I’d consider adapting just to remove the
discomfort.
But somehow this story seems to get the cart before the
horse. What we want to know is why my state of mind, when I
think roller coasters are fun, disagrees with yours when you
think they aren’t fun. The answer cannot be the controversial
and challenged feel I get when I learn that your state of mind is
different. I will feel challenged only if I can think of your state
as in disagreement with mine. And why am I supposed to do
that?
Paul Horwich wonders, too.
sense of substantive (“not merely verbal”) disagreement; there is conflict, a
clash, a feeling that the other person is somehow in bad shape ...
This seems right as far as it goes; but one might hope for a somewhat deeper
understanding. What is the nature of the clash that is manifested in contradictory
beliefs but absent in [cases where psychological states merely differ]? Clearly it
won’t do to say that it consists simply in one person believing something and the
other denying it. For we are trying to explain why the states are taken to qualify
as beliefs in terms of their being seen as linked with some deeper conflict, or in
terms of our sense that others would be better-off sharing our own such states.41
I wonder about that, too. That is, it seems to me that once we
start getting worried about why certain kinds of differences
between your state of mind and mine count as disagreement
while others are ‘mere differences’, it is easy to wonder the
same about paradigmatic beliefs. Horwich has a suggestion.
Here’s a sketch of a possible answer (— again, it’s close to
Gibbard’s). An essential property of our faculty of belief — its
raison d’etre — is the role it plays in determining how we are
inclined to act. And the conflict associated with contradictory
beliefs consists in their potential, through inference, to
engender conflicting desires and decisions. If I disagree with
you about the truth of some empirical proposition, <T>, then
that can easily result (via theoretical reasoning and given
other premises) in our disagreeing about the truth of some
more directly action-guiding belief, <If A is done then X will
occur>. And if we both want X to occur then one of us will, on
 that account, be in favor of A being done, and the other won’t.
We might even come to blows! So can one see how divergent
empirical beliefs might correlate with a practical tension.42

The point here is to see whether Expressivism can make out a helpful sense
in which differences in attitude — or plan — are to count as disagreements;
once that sense is made out, Horwich suspects (as do I), the infamous
difficulties that are supposed to arise in making sense of logic, inference,
embedding, will be soluble.
Suppose that this story is along the right lines. What are its
implications for emotivism? If the fundamental function of
basic “ought” sentences is to express the speaker’s desires, will
that imply that “ought” pronouncements could not articulate
states relevant to decision and could never reflect genuine
clashes — and so can’t qualify as expressions of belief? The
answer would appear to be no. On the contrary, insofar as
normative pronouncements tend to be associated with desires
and decisions, then they manifest, in a peculiarly immediate
way. . ., the feature that marks certain declarative
pronouncements as expressions of belief.43
Plans (to update the reference to Gibbard) do not even need
the aid of fundamental or universal desires to lead to
differences in action, of course. And if the aim of normative
conversation is to coordinate actions, the ‘clash’ between plans
that differ will strike us as in need of ironing out. By contrast,
there is no urgency to coordinating our “views about whether
it’s throbby in here,” that is to say, our headaches (and lacks
thereof).
But there is a problem with this suggestion. To see what it is,
let’s spell out how the ‘clash’ works in a typical example of
normative disagreement a la Gibbard. Here’s the Good Case:
You judge that saving the whales is what we ought to do while I
judge that it is not worth doing and our resources ought to be
directed elsewhere. So my aims are thwarted to the extent that
you succeed, and conversely. This is a practical conflict of the
clearest sort. But here is the Bad Case. There is only one dose
of painkiller left and we each have a headache. You judge that
people ought to foreswear pharmaceutical relief from pain and
tough it out, while I think you are mistaken — people ought to
embrace the pain relief offered by medically tested drugs. Now
my aims are met to the extent that you manage to act on yours.
There is no practical clash. And indeed the clash would come
precisely if we agreed that each of us ought to try to grab the
Ibuprofen. Why, then, do we disagree in the first situation and
agree in the second? The Practical Clash test gets the wrong
answer (or at least risks getting it wrong) whenever the norms
about which we could disagree are agent-centered norms; it is
guaranteed to match our intuitive judgment about
disagreement only when the subject is agent-neutral
normativity.44

Toward a solution?
So what is disagreement?
I can only point in a general direction. Start with some
attitudes that we are comfortable thinking about as in
disagreement with one another. Maybe we can only go so far in
saying why they count as in disagreement; that’s acceptable,
I’m suggesting, so long as we aren’t in serious doubt that they
are. If we can identify some, then we’re off and running; our job
will be to explain the puzzle cases in terms of the comfortable
ones.
Here’s my paradigm: preference. Preference, as we ordinarily
think of it, is unlike desire in an important way: your
preferences can be incoherent, while your desires can be only
conflicted. For instance, you might desire to present your views
in front of a large and critical audience, but at the same time be
terrified of doing so; you may want to drive across the country
but want also to stay out of nauseous situations; and so on.
When we are conflicted like this, we have to work out how to
balance conflicting desires, but there is no necessity to be rid of
any of them. On the other hand, suppose you prefer taking the
last Thai dumpling off the plate to leaving it for someone else,
but also prefer maintaining a polite status to acting rudely, and
then you realize that the only way to maintain a polite status is
to leave the remaining dumpling for someone else. This won’t
do; your preferences (together with your beliefs) are incoherent.
And there are many other, fancier ways of having incoherent
preferences (they might fail to be transitive, or you could run
afoul of a dominance constraint, for example). When someone’s
preferences are incoherent, and she notices that they are,
something’s gone wrong. She ‘has to change’, in something like
the sense that a believer ‘has to change’ her beliefs when she
notices that they are inconsistent.
I don’t have a satisfying explanation of why preference is
subject to coherence constraints. It seems to me to have
something to do with the fact that preference is a kind of model
of choice or intention. It’s too simple to say that preferences
are dispositions to choose, since we have preferences that
could not possibly be alternatives of our choices (like our
preferences about the weather, for instance, or some
alternatives that would be spoiled if we chose them, like the
preference I have that someone throws a surprise party for
me). But preferences seem to be in the same general family as
choices, so that the constraints that limit coherent choice are
inherited by choice’s relative. This is nowhere near a theory, I
know.
Now for the second stage. Maybe normative statements
express preferences (or some other attitude similarly
connected to choice). Then they could be subject to coherence
constraints, too. And a pair of attitudes could be in
disagreement if holding them together is incoherent. Of course,
there is no incoherence in your preferring soup to salad and my
preferring the converse; the idea is rather that I’ll find your
attitude unacceptable just in that I could not add it to my own
without changing my mind about something or other.
This approach promises to help solve the Negation Problem. 45
You can have a settled view and still prefer neither writing
invitations by hand nor printing them out; you could be
indifferent. So indifference is a good candidate for Judith’s
attitude when she denies that you ought to write by hand but
also that you ought not to write by hand. And being indifferent
between a pair of alternatives is not the same as having no
settled view about them at all (compare being indifferent
between two brands of cola, on the one hand, with being
undecided between having a soft drink and drinking plain
water on a hot day), so there is no difficulty in distinguishing
the attitude reported by “Judith thinks it is not the case. . .” and
“It is not the case that Judith thinks. ..”
The kind of solution I’m trying out promises to carry over fairly
well to the Relativisms. The idea is that disagreement resides not
in the contents by themselves, but in the conditions under which
it is appropriate to assert the sentences in question. For an
Indexical Relativist, the analogy would be with John Perry’s
meander through the supermarket with a leaky bag of sugar:
when he’s in a position to assert, “I’m the one with the leaky
bag,” his new state of mind makes a substantial different to his
plan of action, even though he hasn’t come to believe a new
content, because the assertibility conditions of first-person
sentences is different from those of third-person sentences that
express the same proposition.46 And similarly, the kinds of states
that Expressivism claims to be expressed by normative
sentences will be said by Indexical Relativists to be among the
conditions of sincere assertion for those same sentences. The
superficial conflict in assertions when you deny what I have
asserted, then, counts as genuine disagreement because of what
it shows about our attitudes (if we are sincere). In short, the
account of conflict of attitudes can be adopted by Indexical
Relativism. (I don’t have enough of a grip on Genuine
Relativism to see how to generalize the solution. I imagine the
story would connect disagreement in states of mind that
constitute acceptance of a (centered) proposition, to
disagreement between the acceptances.)

The Threat
Suppose we can’t find any solution that satisfies. What would
be wrong, in that case, with taking disagreement as our
primitive? We could just stipulate that for certain kinds of
beliefs and assertions, one person’s rejecting what another
accepts will count as disagreement; for others, not. After all,
we are not in any real doubt that there is such a notion.
The problem is that if we cannot say anything by way of
explanation, then we are hostage to the possibility that the
intuitive notion of disagreement that we rely on, that we are
taking for our purpose as primitive, is not friendly to the kinds
of theories I am considering. Maybe the intuitive notion is this:
when we can see, by our native grasp of our language, that
your rejection and my acceptance of this certain sentence
counts as disagreement, that is because we have a prior grasp
on the idea that some sentence really express real propositions,
while others ‘merely’ express our attitudes, or pick out our
individual position (not necessarily shared by others) in some
kind of logical space of ‘outlook’. And this will spoil the projects
of Relativism and Expressivism alike. If we can say nothing
independently about disagreement, we have no assurance that
the correct account is compatible with the explanatory priority
that these theories give to planning or sensibility. That is a real
possibility — at least for all I have shown. And it is reason
enough to keep looking, even if the best attempts so far to
explain what disagreement amounts to, are failures.
Notes
VIII. I describe a more complicated version, intended
to fit more closely to our actual use and in large part
designed to meet some of the Disagreement Problem, in
“Internalism and Speaker Relativism”, Ethics 101.1
(1990): 6–26.
IX. The point is that a moral system in this sense is not a
state of mind; of course, which moral system is yours is
determined by your intentional states. To keep things
close and parallel with Expressivism, we could say that
your moral system takes ‘wrong’ to the class of things
that you disapprove of in their various possible
circumstances; a more plausible view would complicate
matters but follow the same rough idea.
X. “Demonstratives”, in Themes From Kaplan, Almog, et
al., eds., Oxford (1989).
XI. The truth in Internalism, I think, is more complicated.
And the best version of Indexical Relativism will design a
character for moral terms to match up with the
complications of Internalism. I take some first steps in
“Internalism and Speaker Relativism”, and add some
further thoughts in “Relativism and Nihilism”, Oxford
Handbook of Ethical Theory, D. Copp (ed.), Oxford
(2005).
1. See my “Internalism and Speaker Relativism”.
2. Ethics, London: Library of Modern Knowledge (1912). No
doubt it’s a lot older than Moore.
3. There is a second problem that seems to be related: the
problem of Indirect Reports. I’ll mention this issue below,
but I cannot address it in this paper.
4. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (2003).
5. Of course, Indexical Relativism does not endorse the
most straightforward deflationary answer to the truth
condition question. When you ask me for the truth
conditions of Alistair’s assertion of the sentence
“Cannibalism is wrong”, I cannot tell you that it is true
just in case cannibalism is wrong, according to Indexical
Relativism, because when I assert the sentence it has
different truth conditions. This is obvious enough;
compare other indexical sentences. When asked for the
truth conditions of Churchill’s sentence, “I cannot
forecast to you the action of Russia”, I had better not tell
you that it was true iff I cannot forecast to you the action
 of Russia.
However, a deflationary answer is still available; see, e.g.,
Hartry Field’s “Deflationism about Meaning and Content”,
esp. §10 (pp. 134–6 in Truth and the Absence of Fact).
6. See W. D. Falk, “‘Ought’ and Motivation”, Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, 48 (1947): 492–510 for the
Internalist idea; M. Smith The Moral Problem, Blackwell
1994, for its transformation into the Practicality
Requirement.
7. Horwich, “The Motive Power of Evaluative Concepts”,
forthcoming in his collection, Truth Meaning Reality. R.
M. Hare makes just the same point in “Meaning and
Speech Acts,” The Philosophical Review 79 (January
1970): 3–24.
8. Note that a hyperplan is a formal object; the
psychological state of planning is represented by a set
of hyperplans, just as the psychological state of
believing is represented by a set of possible worlds. In
both cases there can be ambiguity: when I ask what
Cynthia’s plan is, you can cite the formal objects, saying
things like in case of rain she will take a cab, and it
would sound like a joke if I replied, No, Cynthia’s plan is
a state of her brain. The same ambiguity lurks in talk of
belief. Cynthia’s belief is that it will rain; Cynthia’s belief
is a state of her brain; but that it will rain is not a state
of Cynthia’s brain.
9. In “Expressivist Embeddings and Minimalist Truth”,
Philosophical Studies 83:1, 29–51, I called Gibbard’s
solution the NutraSweet solution, because it was
designed to fit into ready-made apparatus, namely
possible world semantics, in a way reminiscent of the
way NutraSweet was designed to fit into our ready-made
apparatus, namely our taste buds.
10. “Indexical Relativism versus Genuine Relativism”,
International Journal of Philosophical Studies 12 (2004):
297–313.
11. Neither MacFarlane nor Egan endorses a Genuine
Relativist view of metaethics. Still, both of them think
that Genuine Relativism helps to solve the Problem of
Disagreement, so the remainder of my discussion is
relevant to their views even though I’m talking about
ethics and MacFarlane and Egan are more interested in,
e.g., predicates of taste and epistemic modals.
MacFarlane doesn’t consider all the “Genuine
 Relativisms” discussed here to be Genuine. For
MacFarlane, a theory is Genuine Relativist only if it
includes assessor relativity; see below in section
“Relativism and Disagreement” pp. 21–2.
8. It seems so; according to MacFarlane’s view, though,
that you accept the proposition I reject does not entail
that we disagree. See section 6, below.
9. Egan uses the elements of this formal semantics for
analysis of talk of secondary qualities, of predicates of
taste, and of epistemic modals; see his “Secondary
Qualities and Self-Location”, Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 72.1 (2006): 97–119. I think
Egan does not endorse Genuine Relativism for moral
thought and talk.
10. See my “Transforming Expressivism”, Noâs 33.4 (1999) :
558–572 for details.
11. For further development, including the explanation of
how the functions work in composition and inference,
see my “Transforming Expressivism”.
12. Egan notes:
It’s important to notice the difference between centering
features and predicates with hidden indexicals. When I
attribute a property to something using a predicate with a
hidden indexical, I’m still attributing a property, and so I’m
still expressing a possible-worlds proposition. It’s just that
which property I attribute to things with a use of the
predicate varies from context to context. If we had a
predicate that expressed a centering feature, sentences in
which it occurred (in the usual way) would express centered-
worlds propositions. (“Secondary Qualities and Self-
Location”, n. 31, p. 109)
But this is not a difference between formal objects; it is a
difference in how they are used in the theory. I’ll return to this
point shortly.
13. MacFarlane, “Relativism and Disagreement”,
Philosophical Studies 132 (2007), 17–31.
14. Egan, “Secondary Qualities”, fn 31, p. 109.
15. “Indexical Relativism versus Genuine Relativism”, 307.
16. See my “Negation for Expressivists” in Oxford Studies in
Metaethics, R. Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford (2006), for a
fuller development of the Negation Problem.
17. Thanks to Terry Horgan for some discussions that made
 me see that I needed to clarify this point.
18. Egan’s model builds on Lewis’s model for attitudes de
se; the formal resemblance will be obvious to those
familiar with Lewis.
19. “Secondary Qualities” p. 114.
20. “Relativism and Disagreement”, pp. 22–3.
21. “Indexical Relativism versus Genuine Relativism”, p.
307.
22. Ragnar Francén, “Metaethical Relativism: Against the
Single Analysis Assumption”, Acta Universitatis
Gothoburgensis (PhD. dissertation), Gothenburg,
Sweden (2008): 112.
23. Ibid., p. 112.
24. It is tempting to put it this way: what Jane said is true and
so is what June said. But this is a tricky issue — what June
said, after all, is not actually true, and so I can’t really say
that it’s true. It would be true if the world were like the
world in the story of June. Likewise, what you said about
Joe at 2:00 is not true, though it was at the time you said
it. I don’t insist on this way of talking, but it does seem
fairly natural to me.
21. “Relativism and Disagreement”, p. 18.
22. Ibid., pp. 28–9.
23. Ibid., p. 29.
24. Related: suppose that whenever I have an occurrent
belief that there is no recursive and complete
axiomatization of arithmetic, I get a headache. Noticing
this disposition, shall I conclude, “If arithmetic is
incomplete then it is throbby in here”?
25. See Gibbard’s Thinking How to Live, Harvard University
Press (2003), especially Chapter Four, for development
of the idea that disagreement in states of mind is the
hook on which to hang a full blown semantic theory.
26. “The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms”, originally in
Mind 1937; reprinted in Stevenson, C. L., Facts and
Values, Yale University Press (1963).
27. His best try, I think, was to point out the parallel of a
‘persuasive declaration’, as when a parent tells a child,
“We do not approve of lying.” But moral discussion
among peers is in this way unlike the didactic
declarations of parents to their children.
28. “The Motive Power of Evaluative Concepts”, op cit.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. A similar problem arises for MacFarlane’s suggestion, I
think, though I won’t rerun the argument in detail.
MacFarlane suggests that we’ll find disagreement when
we have an interest in coordinating attitudes; attitudes
that won’t coordinate well count as being in
disagreement. But this simply isn’t right when the
attitudes are centered preferences, desires, and so on.
32. I show how in “Negation for Expressivists”.
33. See John Perry, “The Problem of the Essential Indexical”,
Nous 13 (1979): 3–21.
 TWEAKING DALLAS WILLARD’S ONTOLOGY
OF THE HUMAN PERSON
J. P. MORELAND
Talbot School of Theology
Journal of Spiritual Formation & Soul Care 2015, Vol. 8, No. 2, 187–202 Copyright 2015
by Institute for Spiritual Formation Biola University, 1939-7909

Abstract. While my own philosophical views are largely in keeping with my mentor, Dallas
Willard, nevertheless, I find his conception of the human person puzzling, hard to specify
precisely, and prima facie contradictory in a few places. Dallas’s central goal in
formulating his anthropology was to develop a model that shed light on, allowed for
deeper insight into, and fostered interest in spiritual formation, especially the role of the
body in spiritual maturation. I share this goal, and agree with most of his model. But in
what follows, I will make more precise what his views were, try to clear up what, prima
facie, seem to be contradictions in his theory, and, finally, recommend an alternative that
captures the central concerns Dallas had for his own position. Thus, I will lay out a few
general points of Dallas’s ontology (points with which I agree), provide a description of his
philosophical/theological anthropology, along with two problems that seem to be present,
and offer a slightly adjusted alternative to his position that accomplishes his main goal
(regarding spiritual formation) in a way with which I believe he would be satisfied.

I had the privilege of doing my PhD under Dallas—he was my dissertation

supervisor—and, subsequently, along with my wife, Hope, of being close friends
of Dallas and Jane from 1985 until the time of his departure. When church
history looks back on this time period, the movements in philosophy and
spiritual formation he generated will, no doubt, place him among a very small
handful of influential names for the Kingdom.
My own philosophical views are largely in keeping with his. But I find his
views of the human person puzzling, hard to specify precisely, and prima facie
contradictory in a few places. This is an odd situation in which to be since Dallas
was a deep philosophical genius and a standout wordsmith in his manner of
presentation. I tell my students that at places where I disagree with Thomas
Aquinas, I must be wrong so do not trust my teaching. I feel the same way about
Dallas’s teaching. Yet I cannot escape the sense that my observations are correct.
Dallas had two goals in formulating his anthropology. First, he wanted to
get at the truth of the matter. Consequently, he used reason and Scrip ture very
carefully in developing his views to increase the odds that his
position was a set of justified true assertions. Second, he wanted his model to shed light on, allow for deeper insight
into, and foster interest in spiritual formation, especially the role of the body in spiritual maturation. I share these
goals and, in fact, I actually agree with most of his model. But in what follows, I will make more precise what his
views were, I shall try to clear up what, prima facie , seem to be contradictions in his theory, and, finally, recommend
an alteration that captures the central concerns Dallas had for his own model. So, in what follows, I will, first, lay out
a few general points of Dallas’s ontology (points with which I agree), then offer a description of his
philosophical/theological anthropology, along with two problems that seem to be present in his system, and, finally,
offer a slightly adjusted alternative to his that accomplishes his second goal (regarding spiritual forma tion) in a way
with which I believe he would be satisfied.

GENERAL CONTOURS OF WILLARD’S ONTOLOGY RELEVANT TO HIS ANTHROPOLOGY

Dallas was smart enough to know that you do not sit down and de velop an ontology ex nihilo without relying on
the sages of the past. Now Dallas was definitely a fan of Plato, but in my view, two streams of thought influenced his
ontology the most: the works of Edmund Husserl and the metaphysics of Aristotle and the late Medieval Aristotelians,
including Thomas Aquinas. 1

1. Substance. In the Categories, Aristotle clarified two different senses of “substance”: primary substance (e.g.,
Socrates, a particular dog) and secondary substance (humanness, doghood). Dallas follows Ar istotle in this
distinction and, accordingly, there are two very different ways of using the term. 2 First, a substance is an
individual thing that has properties and dispositions natural to it (i.e., as part of its essence), endures through
time and change, and receives and exercises causal influence on other things. 3 The paradigm case of a
substance in this sense is a living thing, e.g., a human person. Second, substance can refer to a thing’s
essence, a range of actual and potential properties (i) such that the thing could not exist if it lost one of these
properties; (ii) that answer the most fundamental

1
Dallas was, of course, an expert on and admirer of Husserl, and in Spirit of the Disciplines (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 82, he
explicitly makes reference to phenomenological writers and their influence. In the same book, 88, he also mentions the importance of Aristotelian
thought for his own views.
2
In her otherwise excellent work, A Dallas Willard Dictionary (Soul Training Publications, 2013) by Elane O’Rourke, the entry
“Substance” is quite confused.
3
Dallas Willard, The Great Omission (New York: New York: 2006), 138.
 question: What kind of thing is this? Here, “fundamental” means that the essence characterizes what kind
of thing something is as long as it exists. Thus, Joe is a teenage kind of thing and a human-person kind of
thing, but being a teenager will not characterize Joe throughout his existence while human-person does.
Thus, the latter and not the former is an essence.
III. Properties. A property (attribute, quality) is a universal (something that can be non-spatially in, exemplified,
possessed by many things at the same time.) Thus, redness or humanity can be had by more than one thing
simultaneously. Also, properties are abstract objects (they are not in space and time). Finally, Dallas
accepted constituent realism regarding properties (and relations). According to constitu ent realism,
properties (and relations) are universals that, when ex emplified (and they need not be to exist), become
constituents of the ordinary particulars that have them. Thus, if the mind exemplifies a mental property, say,
the property of being a thought of London, then that property enters into the very being of the mind as a
metaphysical constituent. 4
IV. Relations. Dallas also held that relations (being larger than, being sweeter than, being brighter than) were
universals and abstract objects. He divided relations into internal and external. If something, A (say the color
yellow) stands in an internal relation (brighter than) to B (say the color purple), then anything that did not
stand in that relation to B could not be A. So if any color was not brighter than purple, it could not be the
color yellow. If a thing X stands in an internal relation to another thing Y, then part of what makes X the
very thing it is, is that it stands in that relation to Y. X could not exist if it did not stand in that relation to Y.
External relations are those that are not internal, that is, if A (a ball) stands in the external relation “on-top-
of” to B (a table), then A (the ball) could cease to stand in that relation to B (by, say, falling on the floor and,
thus, being in the lower-than relation to B, the table) and still exist.
V. Parts. There are two kinds of parts relevant to our discussion—sep-arable and inseparable.
p is a separable part of some whole W =def. p is a particular, p is a part of W and p can exist if it is not a part of W.
p is an inseparable part of some whole W =def. p is a particular, p is a part of W and p cannot exist if it is not a part of W.
Inseparable parts get their existence and identity from the whole of which they are parts. The paradigm case of an
inseparable part in this tradition is a (monadic) property-instance or relation-instance.

4
See Dallas Willard, “How Concepts Relate the Mind to its Objects: The ‘God’s Eye View,’” Philosophia Christi 1 (Spring): 5–20.
 Thus, if substance s has property P, the-having-of-P-by-s is (1) a property-instance of P; (2) an inseparable
part of s which we may also call a mode of s. For example, let s be a chunk of clay, P be the property of
being round, and the-having-of-P-by-s be the clay’s being round. The clay could exist without being round,
and the property of being round could exist without there being clay (e.g., a baseball could have that
property), but the clay’s being round could not exist without the clay. The clay’s being round is a mode or
inseparable part of the clay.
5. Faculties. The human person has literally thousands of capacities within its structure, most of which that
person is not currently actualizing or using. But the human person is not just a collection of isolated, discrete,
randomly related capacities. Rather, the various capacities within the human person fall into natural
groupings called faculties of the human person. In order to get hold of this, think for a moment about this list
of capacities: the ability to see red, see orange, hear a dog bark, hear a tune, think about math, think about
God, desire lunch, desire a family. The ability to see red is more closely related to the ability to see orange
than it is to the ability to think about math. We express this insight by saying that the abilities to see red or
orange are parts of the same faculty—the faculty of sight. The ability to think about math is a capacity within
the thinking faculty, viz., the mind. In general, a faculty is an inseparable part/mode of the human person
that contains a natural family of related capacities.

In sum, these metaphysical notions formed the core of Dallas’s ontology, and they were constantly in his mind as he
regularly used them to work on specific issues in philosophy, e.g., what is an atom, what is time, what is a human person. 5

DALLAS’S VIEW OF THE HUMAN PERSON

It is clear that Dallas was a substance dualist in the sense that the per son or self is a spiritual or personal
substance not identical to his body. 6

5
To my knowledge, there is no single place that Dallas spelled out his general ontology in summary fashion. But if the reader is
interested in seeing where Dallas stated and used these philosophical notions, then go to www.dwillard.org and look at his
philosophical articles, especially the ones involving Husserl. See also, Willard, Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge (Athens,
OH: Ohio University Press, 1984).
6
See Dallas Willard, “Intentionality and the Substance of the Self,” (presented paper, Society of Christian Philosophers, APA,
San Francisco, CA, April 4, 2007), esp. page 1.
However, although Dallas does say in one place, “You are a nonphysi cal reality with a physical body,” 7 nevertheless,
he was not a Cartesian dualist. He expresses agreement with phenomenological and existentialist writings in “denying
that the body is ‘just physical,’ just some more or less mechanical device incidentally associated with a purely
spiritual mind or self.” 8 Speaking of the (Platonic and Cartesian) dichotomy between the non-physical part (the soul,
spirit, self) and the purely physical part (the body) of the person, Elane O’Rourke flatly states, “Dallas did not accept
this dichotomy...This means that we are not essentially spirits or souls who happen to be lodged in bodies...” 9
Dallas is a bit unclear as to what he thinks we are, sometimes calling us humans, sometimes persons, and
sometimes, human persons. The reason this is important is because some thinkers, e.g., John Locke, believed one
could be a human without being a person, and in the intermediate state one was a person and not a human. And
Thomas Aquinas believed that when, say, Peter died, he did not survive into the afterlife; rather, his soul did. But his
soul was capable of sustaining Peter’s identity such that when his soul was reunited with his resurrection body, he
was a human person again. 10 But I think the corpus of Dallas’s work would favor calling us hu man persons
(hereafter, just persons). The person is the fundamental unit of analysis in that the person is a substance and the
other dimensions/aspects are seated in or dependent upon the person. 11
In addition, Dallas clarifies five features (dimensions, aspects, elements) of the person: soul, social context, body,
mind (thoughts and feelings), spirit (heart or will). 12 These five constitute the essence of human nature. 13 The terms
“features,” “dimensions,” or “aspects,” are not very precise, but fortunately, Dallas clarifies things when he claims that
these five are inseparable from every human life. 14 From this statement and knowledge of his general ontology, it is safe
to say that these five are faculties of the person understood as inseparable parts or modes of the person. Thus, for
example, a body that is not a mode of a person is not a body; it is a corpse. And when the human person is living, the
body is actually a faculty of the soul, a set of powers and capacities for developing and structuring the body. I

7
Dallas Willard, Living in Christ’s Presence (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 117.
8
Willard, Spirit of the Disciplines , 82.
9
O’Rourke, A Dallas Willard Dictionary, 29.
10
Cf. Christopher Brown, Aquinas and the Ship of Theseus (New York: Continuum, 2005).
11
Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2002), 30–39.
12
Willard, Renovation of the Heart , chap. 2.
13
Gary Black Jr., The Theology of Dallas Willard (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013), 100.
14
Willard, Renovation of the Heart , 30.
will touch more on this below when I clarify my own view of the human person.
While all five of these modes of a person are crucial, there are two of them that, in my view, require special mention: the
body and the soul.
Dallas’s treatment of the nature of the body and its role in spiritual for mation may well have been his most
important contribution to reflections on sanctification. When Spirit of the Disciplines burst on the scene in 1988, it
forever changed how many of us view spiritual growth. For Dallas, the body is a part of the image of God in us, and
it is a power pack, a source of independent power by way of which we can interact with the world and make a
difference in it. 15 Human personal relations cannot be separated from the body. 16
In a few places, Dallas says something that, prima facie , is quite shocking. He says, “In an important sense to be
explained, a person is his or her body.” 17 Again, “The union of spirituality with the fullness of human life finds its deepest
ground in the identification of the person with his or her body.” 18 Finally, “ Human personality is not separable in our
consciousness from the human body. And that fact is expressed by asserting the IDEN TITY of the person as his or
her body. ”19
Below, I will provide reasons for not taking these statements as literal assertions of the identity of a human
person and his or her body. For pres ent purposes, it seems best to understand Dallas as saying that the body is not a
mere container in which we live. No, we are far more intimately related to the body than that and, according to
Dallas, it is not an exaggeration to say that the spiritual formation of the body is crucial to our growth as disciples.
To explain how Dallas conceives of this, it may be wise to note a statement he makes in the midst of these identity
assertions. He claims that phenomenological and existential writers of the recent past have argued that the body is
not simply a “physical thing”; in fact, there is far more to a living body than matter. 20
For Dallas, different parts/regions of the body contained two things relevant to spiritual health. The first are
meanings and sensations that occupy specific parts of the body. 21 For example, upon meeting someone of whom you
are jealous, there might arise a sensation of a certain sort in your stomach or shoulders. This sensation would have a
specific texture and location, and it may be associated with the meaning, “I am such a looser.

Willard, Spirit of the Disciplines , 52–53.

15

16
Willard, Renovation of the Heart , 35.
Willard, Spirit of the Disciplines , 76.
17

Willard, Spirit of the Disciplines , 82.

18

Willard, Spirit of the Disciplines , 84. Italics original.

19

Willard, Spirit of the Disciplines , 82.

20

21
The first person to develop an entire approach to therapy based on this insight was Eugene T. Gendlin, Focusing (New York: Bantam
Books, 1987).
Why can’t I be like him?” Brute physical matter—the kind that can be com pletely described in the language of physics,
chemistry, neuroscience and biology—is not capable of having sensations and meanings in it. It is only if there is more to
the body than its physicality that it can have sensations and meanings. From personal conversations with Dallas and from
his general metaphysical views, the following is beyond reasonable doubt for Dallas: It is because the body is informed
and diffused by the immaterial, substantial person that the body can have these things.
Second, Dallas noted that various parts of the body contain grooves, ingrained habits formed through repeated
practice of some sort to consti tute character. Thus, spiritual growth requires the repeated practice of vari ous
disciplines in order to replace the old groove with a new one in keeping with the nature of the Kingdom. In this way,
the body is literally formed in a new way by obtaining a new character consisting of habits stored as grooves in
various body parts. 22
Finally, we turn to Dallas’s teaching on the soul. In my opinion, this area of his anthropology is the most
puzzling. The best thing to say at this point is that for Dallas, the soul is a mode or inseparable part of the person,
taken as an unanalyzable primitive entity, just like the other four modes, except that the soul is the deepest aspect
of the person. Moreover, it is a non-physical mode that resides in the person (and in this sense, the person is the
seat of the soul), yet the soul, while an aspect of the per son, functions to bring together and unify into one life the
activities of all the other dimensions. In this way, the soul is the source and coordinating principle of the person’s
life. Dallas’s favorite illustration of the soul was to liken it to a computer that quietly runs a business or
manufacturing operation and only comes to our attention when it malfunctions. Without the soul, the other modes
of the person would fragment and go their own way. 23

22
Steve Porter has pointed out that elsewhere [see Hearing God (1984; repr., Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2009)] Dallas
says our old routines of feeling, thought, belief, and so forth are stored in the heart/mind. In my view, in Hearing God , Dallas was
not attempting to provide a full explanation for how these things are stored in the heart and mind. He simply wanted to state the fact
that they are and that Christ can and does replace them. But in Spirit of the Disciplines , Dallas does give a fuller picture of how
these mental states are stored, namely, as dispositions of, say, the mind, and the dispositions to think certain ways are groves in the
brain that are or ground these mental dispositions.
23
The information in this paragraph is repeated by Dallas in a number of places: Renovation of the Heart, 37–38; 199–216; “The Texture
and Substance of the Human Soul,” (presented paper Biola Philosophy Group, Biola University, November 22, 1994); “Grey Matter and the
Soul,” Christianity Today, November 18, 2002; “Spiritual Disciplines, Spiritual Formation, and the Restoration of the Soul,” Journal of
Psychology and Theology 26 (Spring 1998): 101–109; O’Rourke, A Dallas Willard Dictionary , 243–246; Black, The Theology of Dallas
Willard, 107.
 Dallas said so much about these matters that it would take an entire book to do him justice. Still, I think this précis of
his thought is accurate and adequate for my purposes. If there are places where I have misunderstood Dallas’s thought, I
would love to have that pointed out to me. I now turn to two possible difficulties in his philosophical/theological
anthropology.

TwO POSSIBLE DIFFICULTIES IN DALLAS’S PHILOSOPHICAL/ THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

A Person’s Relationship to His Body. As I said above, Dallas made the claim that we are to be identified with our
bodies. 24 But this cannot be what he meant because he identified four other modes, alongside the body, that constitute
the human self. I think this alleged problem is capable of a fairly easy resolution. When Dallas said this, he meant the
following: (1) The human body is more than physical, so in a real sense, I am more closely related to my body than in
the container model, i.e., the body is purely a physical container into which my soul has been inserted. 25 (2) My body is
essential to my identity. 26 In fact, it is a part of the image of God in me. 27 (3) Human personal relations cannot be
separated from my body, and human personality is not separable in our consciousness from the human body. 28
To sum up, Dallas is emphasizing the closeness we have to our (more than physical) bodies and how
crucial the body is to our development. But the way he puts all this raises a difficulty: If we take these
statements at face value, then it means that there is no disembodied intermediate state at death. If we continue
to survive between death and final resurrection, we will need to be given a temporary body, which implies that,
contrary to Dallas’s teaching, my current body is not, in fact, essential to me, and I can continue to engage in
personal relationships without my current body.
Moreover, there are reasons to believe that Dallas did believe in a disembodied intermediate state between death and final
resurrection.29

Willard, Spirit of the Disciplines , 76, 82, 84.

24

Willard, Spirit of the Disciplines , 82; Grey Matter and the Soul.
25

Willard, Renovation of the Heart , 161.

26

Willard, Spirit of the Disciplines , 52–53.

27

Willard, Renovation of the Heart , 35; Spirit of the Disciplines , 84.

28

29
Though, as Gary Black has told me, sometimes Dallas talked about the pos sibility of having a sort of ethereal, glowing body
that was made out of light; now, some Near Death Experiencers report something like this, but such a body is so different than the
one we have now, that it becomes hard to see how our current body, with its particular makeup to serve as a dimension, along with all
the other dimensions making up human personhood, is as essential to the tasks Dallas assigns it, since these tasks can be
accomplished with a radically different body, one, in fact, that is more like light than a more substantial body.
 For one thing, Dallas explicitly says, “When we pass through the stage normally called ‘death,’ we will not lose
anything but the limitations and powers that specifically correspond to our present mastery over our body, and to our
availability and vulnerability to and through it. We will no lon ger be able to act and be acted upon by means of it.” 30
Later, he says, “Our experience will be much clearer, richer, and deeper, of course, because it will be unstrained by
the limitations now imposed upon us by our dependence upon our body.” 31
For another thing, Dallas was a believer in the general truthfulness of many, if not most, Near Death
Experiences. 32 In fact, he regularly taught a course on life after death at USC, and one of his regular texts—one he
told me he agreed with—was Jeffrey Long’s Evidence of the Afterlife (New York, New York: HarperOne, 2010). As
Long points out, while some NDE experiences report receiving some sort of heavenly body, the majority claim that
during the experience they existed without any body; this is true for almost every NDE experiencer while they are
still in the room with their dead corpse watching what is going on. However, if one exists after death in a
disembodied state, and if the body is part of the image of God, then the disembodied human person will not
exemplify the full image of God dur ing that time, and this result seems troubling. Disembodied existence also shows
that human personal relationships do, indeed, take place without a body and consciousness and human personality
can function quite nicely with no body at all.
But maybe there is a further way out here. It may be that Dallas is speaking in these sources like a pastor and not
like a philosopher. Now it seems to be rare for Dallas to divide these, but in these sources he may have been less than
precise in some of his word usage in order to communicate. So when he says that my body is essential to my identity
and part of the image of God in me, perhaps he meant to say that, while embodied, my body is crucial to my identity,
and that while I can be in the image of God with out my body, nevertheless, the body is an important part of that
image. I do

30
Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy (New York: HarperCollins, 1998),
394.
Willard, The Divine Conspiracy , 395. To be sure, on page 396 of the same book, Dallas does interpret 2 Corinthians 5:1–8 as saying
31

that when we die and our “earthly tent is torn down,” we are not thereby deprived of a body because “we will be clothed with a dwell ing
place of the heavenly sort” (a new body) and, thus, will not be “left naked” (disembodied). Since Dallas was such a careful scholar, I am not
clear as to exactly what he is saying here. Why? Because most commentators who take this text in an ontological sense as does Dallas, claim
that Paul is expressing his desire to be around at the second coming of Christ so his new body will be given to him immediately and he will
not have to go through a period of disembodiment, a possibility that Paul clearly affirms in this text (cf. vs. 3, 4). The real possibility of
disembodiment in this text seems clear and surely Dallas recognized that the text taught this.
Willard, Divine Conspiracy, 397.
32
not know what else to say, so I leave it to the reader to ponder the issues I have surfaced. 33 But if there are ways to
clarify alleged problematic aspects of Dallas’s view of the body, I think that two difficulties with his teaching on the
soul will be much harder to dismiss.

The Person and His Soul . It is clear that Dallas taught that the soul was a mode of the person just like the other four
in his diagram in Renovation of the Heart , though it was for him a special mode. The soul is the deepest “aspect” of
the person, seated in that person, and the integrator and unifier of the different components of the person.
On the other hand, Dallas clearly states in some places that the soul is an individual substance in its own right.
As O’Rourke points out, for Dallas, unlike the other aspects of the person, the soul “has independent life and
substance: souls can exist without the body, mind, will, or interac-tion.” 34 Elsewhere, Dallas says, “The soul is, as
professor Moreland indicates, a substance, in the sense that it is an individual entity that has prop erties and
dispositions natural to it, endures through time and change, and receives and exercises causal influence on other
things, most notably the person of which it is the most fundamental part.” 35
Here, Dallas is approvingly citing an article I wrote in the same issue of The Journal of Psychology and
Theology in which I explicitly define the classic definition of a substance (one Dallas accepted), claim that the
soul is such a substance, and identify the person with the soul. 36 From Aristotle to the present, there is a
fundamental axiom for those who accept the classic understanding of substance: No substance contains another
substance within its being. As Aristotle put it, “No substance is composed of substances.” 37 From this, it follows
that substances cannot have separable

33
Steve Porter suggests that, perhaps, Dallas was distinguishing minimal per-sonhood, which continues to exist apart from the
body, and full-fledged personhood, which requires a body. So we are still minimally persons in a disembodied state, but we are not
full-fledged or fully-operational persons. As Porter rightly points out, there is a long tradition that there is something
lacking/unnatural about the disembodied state. That may be what Dallas is after. And he is highlighting it because of the tendency
Christians have to denigrate the role of the body. This may be right, but it is a stretch that I do not think matches Dallas’s language.
He knew very well what it means to say something (the body) is essential to something else (the person, the image of God): a thing
cannot exist without those things that are essential to its existence. So I suspect that Dallas did not intend this gloss on his
statements.
34
O’Rourke, A Dallas Willard Dictionary , 243.
35
Willard, “Spiritual Disciplines, Spiritual Formation, and the Restoration of the Soul,” 101.
36
J. P. Moreland, “Restoring the Substance to the Soul of Psychology,” Journal of Psychology and Theology 26 (March 1998): 29–43.
37
Aristotle, Metaphysics VII.16, 1041a4–5. Cf. Metaphysics VII.13, 1039a7–8. See also, Robert Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes:
1274–1671 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2011), 607–610; Brown, Aquinas and the Ship of Theseus , 53–57, 72–73, 87–90.
parts because such are substances. When Dallas says here that the soul is a part of the human person, he cannot
mean here “inseparable part” or “mode” as he does elsewhere because he has already called the soul a sub stance in
this citation and not a mode. By the way, the reason that a sub stance cannot have another substance as a constituent
is that such entities that do have substances as separable parts are not substances but ordered aggregates like a car
or house. Such entities do not have the unity required of a real substance (e.g., if an ordered aggregate gains or
loses a part it is literally a different thing). If the soul is a substance, the unity of the person is lost because one
substance (the person) contains another substance (the soul) as a substantial, separable part. Instead, the person
becomes an ordered aggregate.
There is a second difficulty with the soul in Dallas’s teaching: in the Ar istotelian tradition, the integrative,
unifying role of the soul is given to the constituting individuated essence or species of the living organism—e.g., the
human person—not to some mode among other modes within the living thing. Thus, the human person is the soul and
the various faculties—mind, volition, emotion, body, etc.—are seated in and unified by the individuated essence. If
this is true, there is no unifying work left for a mode of the sub stance (the human person) to perform.
It is interesting to note that Dallas seemed to identify the underlying unifier of an individual substance with its
(individuated) essence. In an advanced class I took with Dallas at USC in the Fall of 1982 entitled “The Metaphysics
of Substance,” Dallas gave out (an unpublished) handout he had written for the class entitled “Nominalism and the
Theory of Substance.” In it, he says that the substance (here he means essence or species) of a thing stands under the
individual substance constituted by that essence. He then goes on to say, “It is better to follow Aristotle in taking the
substance (ousia) of a thing to be that within it which governs its career of existing, and thus supports or stands
under it. The substance (Note: essence) in this sense was taken by Aristotle to be its species , a special sub-set of its
properties which provides the framework for all of the other properties which it may, must, or cannot have.”
I hope these issues will become clearer as I try to develop an alterna tive model of the human person that is
very similar to Dallas’s and that accomplishes the things of concern to him as he developed his own model. There
seem to be three such concerns: (1) The human person is an immate rial substance with a deep unity beyond that of
an ordered aggregate or mere collection of atoms and molecules. (2) The various modes of the hu man person
(mind, will, etc.) can become fragmented and, yet, they were meant to function in a deep unity and this can be
achieved through various practices. (3) The body is not just a physical container for the human person; no, it is
more than just physical such that meanings, feelings, and habituated dispositions reside in it and it is deeply
integrated with the human person. I turn, now, to my own model to see if I can capture these concerns.
A THOMISTIc-LIKE TWEAKING OF DALLAS’S ANTHROPOLOGY

The Soul. The human soul (hereafter, simply soul) is a simple (containing no separable parts), spatially unextended
substance that contains the capacities for consciousness and for animating, enlivening, and developing te leologically its
body. The essence of the soul is constituted by determinate/ determinable properties, viz., human personhood. Thus,
being a human is a sufficient condition for being a person. The faculties of the soul (e.g., the mind, will, spirit,
emotions, powers to produce and enliven a body) are inseparable parts/modes of the soul containing a group of
naturally resembling powers/capacities. The essence of the soul grounds membership in a thing’s natural kind and it
should be understood in terms of Aristotelian essentialism. Thus, it is because Joe has the essence “human personhood”
that he is classified in the class of human persons instead of, say, penguins.
The late Medieval Aristotelians (1225–1671) drew a distinction be tween a thick particular (the entire concrete
organism including the body; the thin particular plus accidents) and the thin particular (the essence/form, the nexus
of exemplification, and an individuator, in their case, prime mat-ter). 38 In my view, the human person is identical to
his soul (the thin particular) and his soul contains three metaphysical constituents—a human essence,
exemplification, and a bare particular. 39 The individuated essence of the soul is the ground, developer, unifier, and
coordinator of the various modes that are seated as faculties (natural groupings of potentialities/ dispositions) within
it.

The Body and the Body/Soul Relationship. In this section I will offer an analysis of Aristotelian-style dualism that
provides an understanding of the body and the body/soul relationship. I shall call the view Metaphysical Aristotelianism
(MA), and while it does not reflect the views of Thomas Aquinas in all its details, it is close enough to be viewed as a
Thomistic-like Dualism.
According to MA, living organisms are not mereological aggregates/ systems composed of separable parts,
bundles of properties, or concrete organisms construed as some sort of whole. Rather, the consensus during this
period was that the living organism is a thin particular, viz., an essence exemplified by an individuator (usually
prime matter) that stands under (sub-stands) the accidental features of the organism, including its body. 40 The thin
particular is identical to the organism’s soul, it is mereologically simple (not composed of separable parts) and
metaphysically complex

38
Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes , 99–114.
39
J. P. Moreland, “Theories of Individuation: A Reconsideration of Bare Particulars,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 79 (1998): 251–63.
Dallas was a huge advocate of bare particulars as a crucial part of his ontology.
40
Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes , 99–134.
(containing a complex essence, exemplification, and an individuator), and it is holenmerically present throughout
the organism’s body (fully present to the body as a whole and fully present at each part of the body.) In this way,
according to some models of omnipresence, spatially speaking, the soul is to the body as God is to space in
general.
There were four central metaphysical roles played by the thin partic ular: (1) It grounded the special sort of
deep, synchronic unity of living things, especially in comparison to mereological aggregates/systems. (2) It
grounded a living thing’s ability to be a continuant, sustaining strict, ab solute identity through certain changes
(including part replacement in the organism’s body). (3) It provided the ontological ground for placing the organism
in its natural kind and unifying that kind. (4) It unified and devel oped over time in a law-like way the various modes
of the substantial soul.
Another feature of MA, is the central importance of the body for the functioning of the thin particular’s (soul’s)
powers in the normal course of things and the actualization of its various capacities. Speaking of the hu man soul, Des
Chene observes that, “The human soul is not merely joined with the body in fact. It is the kind of soul which, though
capable of separate existence...nevertheless by its nature presupposes union with a body, and moreover with a particular
kind of body, a body with organs, in order to exercise all its powers—even reason...” 41 Elsewhere, Des Chene notes:
“Even the intellect requires, so long as the soul is joined with a body, a certain disposition of the brain.” 42
Thus, the search for specific neurological causal/functional/dependency conditions associated with the
actualization of the soul’s capacities for consciousness is not only consistent with, but is entailed by MA. Such a
search would not provide information about the intrinsic nature of the capacity or the property it actualizes (e.g., pain)
nor about the possessor of that capacity (the soul, not the brain). But it would provide information about the bodily
conditions required for its actualization. This form of dualism is quite at home with the existence of contemporary
neurological findings.
As Pasnau notes, a further feature of MA is the view that the soul “plays a straightforwardly causal role,
explaining both the behavior and the physical structure of an animal’s body.” 43 In this sense, the soul is not only
the formal/essential cause of the body, but it also becomes (1) an in ternal efficient first-moving cause of the
development and structure of the body (2) and the teleological guide for that development and structure (thus,
function determines form).
Here, the soul is a substance with an essence or inner nature that con tains, as a primitive unity, a complicated,
structural arrangement of capaci-

41
Dennis Des Chene, Life’s Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 71.
42
Des Chene, Life’s Form, 96.
43
Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes, 558. Cf., 549, 560–65.
ties/dispositions for developing a body (and, of course, the other faculties or modes). Taken collectively this entire
ordered structure is unextended, holenmerically present throughout the body, and constitutes the soul’s principle of
activity that governs the precise, ordered sequence of changes that the substance will (normally) go through in the
process of growth and development. The various physical/chemical parts and processes (including DNA) are tools—
instrumental causes—employed by higher-order biological activities in order to sustain the various functions grounded
in the soul. Thus, the soul is the first efficient cause of the body’s development as well as the final cause of its
functions and structure, which are internally related to the soul’s essence. 44 The functional demands of the soul’s
essence determine the character of the tools, but they, in turn, constrain and direct the various chemical processes that
take place in the body as a whole. In this way, MA implies that the organism as a whole (the soul) is ontologically prior
to its bodily parts. This understanding of the soul’s essence, along with the soul’s holenmeric presence in and to the
body, makes such an essence very similar to the notion of information as it is used in biology today.
Moreover, an organism’s parts are inseparable parts that stand in in ternal relations to other parts and to the soul’s
individuated essence; they are literally functional entities constituted by their role in the organism as a whole. The
body is developed and grows in a teleological way by means of a series of law-like developmental events, rooted in
the internal essence of the soul. The first-efficient cause of the characteristics of an organism’s body is its soul (which
contains a blueprint or information in its individuated essence); the various body parts, including DNA and genes, are
important instrumental causes the soul uses to produce the traits that arise. This sort of view, along with the holism
with which it is associated is also gaining ascendency in biology. 45
In summary, according to the classic Aristotelian view of substance expressed in MA: 1) the organism as a
whole (the soul) is ontologically prior to its inseparable parts/modes; 2) the parts of the organism’s body stand in
internal relations to other parts and to the soul’s essence; they are literally functional entities (the heart functions
literally to pump blood); 3) the operational functions of the body are rooted in the internal struc ture of the soul; in
this way, the internal structure or essence is the blue print, the information that is responsible for the body’s
structure and functions; 4) the body is developed and grows teleologically as a series of

44
Cf. Tom Kaiser, “Is DNA the Soul?” (presented paper, West Coast Meeting of the Society for Aristotelian and Thomistic Studies, June 14,
2014). The paper is posted at www.aristotle-aquinas.org.
45
See Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994); Michael Denton, Govindasamy
Kumaramanickavel, and Michael Legge, “Cells as Irreducible Wholes: The Failure of Mechanism and the Possibility of an Organicist Revival,”
Biology and Philosophy 28 (2013): 31–52.
developmental events that occur in a law-like way rooted in the internal essence of the human soul; 5) the first efficient
cause of the characteristics of the human body is the soul, and various body parts, including DNA and genes, are
important instrumental causes the soul uses to produce the traits that arise; 6) the body is a mode of the soul (the soul
could exist without the body but not conversely; a body without a soul is a corpse), and as such it is an ensouled
physical structure; thus, there are two aspects to the body—a soulish, immaterial and a physical aspect.
I now turn to two final reflections. First, I want to explain how con scious states—e.g., thoughts, memories,
sensations—are and are not in the body. To begin with, it is important to say that here, as usual, the methods and
findings of neuroscience are unable to address the question and, in gen eral, are largely irrelevant to the central
questions that constitute philosophy of mind. 46 To see this, consider the discovery that if one’s mirror neu rons are
damaged, then one cannot feel empathy for another. How are we to explain this? Three empirically equivalent solutions
come to mind: (1) strict physicalism (a feeling of empathy is identical to the firings of mirror neurons); (2) mere
property dualism (a feeling of empathy is an irreducible state of consciousness in the brain whose obtaining depends on
the firing of mirror neurons); (3) substance dualism [a feeling of empathy is an irre ducible state of consciousness in the
soul whose obtaining depends (while embodied) on the firing of mirror neurons]. No empirical datum can pick out
which of these three is correct, nor does an appeal to epistemic simplic ity help. Epistemic simplicity is a tie-breaker,
and the substance dualist will insist that the arguments and evidence for substance dualism are better than those for the
other two options mentioned above.
Now consider a music CD (it would be more technically accurate to employ one of those old, black vinyl records;
but for communication purposes, I will stick with a CD). Strictly speaking, there is no music in the CD; there are only
grooves. But if the CD is not damaged, when placed in the right retrieval system, the grooves trigger musical sounds.
According to my Thomistic-like view, the body is an ensouled physical structure. The soul is fully present at each point
of the body, and its essence informs the body and gives it its nature as living human body. Thus, for a current human
body to be a body, it must have a soulish and a physical dimension to it.
Now certain grooves associated with memories, thoughts, sensations, and so forth are formed and stored in
the physical dimension of the body (since the physical aspect of the body is brute matter and a complex ag gregate
according to physical theory, it cannot literally store conscious

46
J. P. Moreland, “A Christian Perspective on the Impact of Modern Science on Philosophy of Mind,” Perspectives on Science and
Christian Faith 55 (March 2003): 2–12. It is important to note that Dallas thought the same thing. See http://www.
dwillard.org/articles/artview.asp?artID=117. Dallas also makes clear in this article that he has no penchant for non-reductive physicalism.
states. Brute matter is just the wrong type of thing to possess consciousness. Moreover, whatever the physical aspect
of the body stores is spatially extended, but most, if not all, mental states are unextended). But when these are
triggered, whether spontaneously by getting hit in the knee or by the mind searching to bring back a memory, the
conscious state will obtain in the soulish aspect of the body. Since the soulish aspect of the body is just the soul being
holenmerically present to and in the body, it is the soul that exemplifies conscious properties, not the physical body.
Thus, MA explains and entails the things in Dallas’s model that were important to him: (1) The human person is an
immaterial substance, viz., the thin particular or soul. (2) The unifying, developing, coordinating en tity is the essence
of the soul. It contains and organizes/coordinates its vari ous faculties/modes (e.g., mind, emotions), and the body is a
mode of the soul like the other faculties. So in my view, there is a unifying factor to the aspects of the human person; it
is the essence of the soul, not the soul per se. (3) The body is not just physical. The physical aspect of the body
contains habitually formed grooves that must be replaced through bodily practices that shape the body’s grooves more
in accordance with the nature of the Kingdom. The soulish aspect of the body contains meanings, sensations, and other
conscious states since the soul is fully present at the place of, say, the sensation, and the body qua soul contains the
conscious state.
Dallas’s model of the human person is rich and deep. And it has many practical implications for life in the
Kingdom. I have tried to clarify certain features of his model that seemed to need such clarification, to surface and
provide answers while staying within his model to some problems in need of solution. But certain difficulties regarding
his view of the nature and role of the soul seem problematic, at least to me, so I have offered a slightly different model
that, I hope, is in the spirit of Dallas’s views and that accomplishes the goals he thought to be important. 47

Author: J. P. Moreland. Title: Distinguished Professor of Philosophy; Fellow. Affiliation: Talbot School of Theology, Biola
University (La Mirada, CA); Martin Institute & Dallas Willard Center at Westmont College (Santa Barbara, CA). Highest Degree: PhD,
University of Southern California. Areas of Interest/specialization: metaphysics, philosophy of mind, spiritual formation.

47
I want to thank Steve Porter and Greg Jesson for a number of very insightful, valuable comments they made on an earlier draft of this
article.
 Some Remarks on Neo-
Molinism, Infinite Intelligence,
and Providence
Elijah Hess
Department of Philosophy
University of Arkansas
Fayetteville, AR
All Rights Reserved
© Evangelical Philosophical Society
www.epsociety.org

Abstract: In this article, I argue that the alleged providential

utility of the neo-Molinist account of divine providence (via
Gregory Boyd’s infinite intelligence argument) doesn’t work.
Contrary to what Boyd avers it is not the case that God,
given openness assumptions, can prepare for every
possibility as effectively as if he were certain such
possibilities were going to occur. Nor is it the case that he
could be guaranteed, even in principle, that his ultimate
purposes for creation would be fulfilled when those purposes
depend on the decisions of libertarian free creatures. I
conclude, therefore, that a God who has infallible
foreknowledge of what his creatures will freely do—as would
be the case on a Molinist or a simple-foreknowledge account
—has a clear advantage and is preferable, providentially
speaking, to the God of neo-Molinism.

Introduction
In recent years, a debate has been rekindled among
theologians and philosophers of religion over the question of
whether God could, in principle, know what a free agent would
or would not do on any particular occasion. Among those who
1
answer this question affirmatively are Molinists. Specifically,
Molinists claim that for any possible agent S and circumstance
C that God might choose to instantiate, God knew, logically
prior to his decision to create, that were S in C, S would freely do
act A (or, as the case may be, would not do A). That God has
“middle knowledge” of such counterfactuals of creaturely
freedom—or, for brevity, CCFs—is an assumption upon which
2
the entire Molinist theory of providence depends.
Others, however, don’t share this assumption. One problem in
particular with the Molinist conception of CCFs, they say, is
that it is not altogether clear how God could know these
subjunctive conditionals given the kind of freedom they
presuppose. After all, conditionals of this sort are supposed to
be about the libertarian, and therefore indeterministic, free
actions of persons. But if the circumstances in which S chooses
to do A are non- determining—as they must be if S’s choice is to
be considered free—then nothing about the laws of nature or
the state of the world leading up to the moment of S’s decision
will be sufficient to guarantee that S chooses A rather than not-
A. As Anthony Kenny notes, “for an indeterminist, points in any
story where a free choice is made are precisely points where
the story has two different and equally coherent
3
continuations.” Thus a question naturally arises: What
indication could God have, prior to S’s actual decision, that S
4
would choose this way rather than that way? While not
absolutely decisive against the Molinist position, worries like
this have proven serious enough that it has seemed to a
growing number of philosophers that what is true (and hence
knowable) prior to God’s creative decree is not that S would or
would not do A in C but, rather, that S might or might not do A in
C.
One of the more interesting proposals to emerge along these
5
lines has been a version of open theism called neo-Molinism.
According to the neo- Molinist, when it comes to the free
actions of agents, God’s middle knowledge cannot be assumed
to pertain solely to what these agents would or would not do
since such propositions—being contraries rather than
contradictories—do not exhaust the range of possibilities. As
6
I’ve discussed elsewhere, on the standard counterfactual
semantics employed by many Molinists, the contradictory of “S
would do A in C" is not “S would not do A in C" but “S might not
do A in C." Similarly, “S would not do A in C" is contradicted by
“S might do A in C." Upon this basis the neo-Molinist goes on to
insist that there is a logically distinct class of conjointly true
“might and might not" propositions among the content of God’s
middle knowledge. That is, if it is true that S might do A in C and
it is also true that S might not do A in C, then it is false that S
would do A in C and, likewise, false that S would not do A in C. In
other words, if S is genuinely free with respect to doing A under
the circumstances in question, then there is a conjointly true
“might and might not" conditional that represents this state of
affairs (i.e., “If S were in C, S might and might not do A"), a
conditional that negates both corresponding “would" and “would not"
conditionals with the same antecedent. Supposing that God actualizes
a world with persons capable of free choice, then, the resultant
indeterminacy that obtains in God’s middle knowledge from granting
such a capacity would carry over into God’s free knowledge as well.
Among other things, the neo-Molinist argues, this would mean that
7
the future is epistemically open for God. In contrast to what the
majority of Christian theists have supposed, therefore, given the neo-
Molinist’s framework, God would not know whether S is going to do A
or not-A in advance of S’s decision-he would only know that S might
or might not do A.
But here we come to an obvious worry: If God doesn’t
infallibly know what we are going to do on certain occasions,
isn’t his ability to act providentially in the world diminished?
Indeed critics of the open view often worry that, were the
future open in the way that neo-Molinists and other open
theists suppose, God’s ultimate purposes for the cosmos could
potentially be thwarted. As William Lane Craig puts it,
“Knowledge of mere ‘might’ counterfactuals is insufficient to
give God the sort of specific providential control described in
the Bible. Nor is it clear that such knowledge is sufficient to
 8
bring about God’s desired ends." Similarly, Bruce Ware
wonders whether, given openness presuppositions, “a believer
[can] know that God will triumph in the future just as he
9
promised he will."
Gregory Boyd, however, demurs. As a prominent open theist-and the
foremost advocate of neo-Molinism today-Boyd has vigorously sought
to blunt the force of such critiques. He writes,

I believe that this criticism is completely without

merit-at least if we grant that God is infinitely
intelligent. If God's intelligence has no limit, then
he can perfectly anticipate, from all eternity,
each and every possible decision free agents
might ever make. Indeed, an infinitely intelligent
God is as prepared for every one of any number
of possible future events as he would be for a
single future event that was certain to take
10
place.
"With no limit to his intelligence," Boyd goes on to say, "God
can anticipate and prepare for each and every possibility as
effective!y as if it were a certainty…It is evident, then, that the God
of open theism knows the future just as effectively as the God of
11
classical theism, who faces an eternally settled future."

Is Infinite Intelligence Enough?

Though I was once sympathetic to the gesture, I've come to
believe that the neo-Molinist's case has been overstated here.
Without further argument, the claim that there is no
distinction to be made between possibilities and certainties in
terms of providential advantage for the God of open theism is
false. For while it's true to say that God can perfectly envision
any possibility, the problem is that Boyd goes further and says
that God can be "as prepared for" any possible future event as
he is for any certain future event. Here's why that claim won't
work.
Suppose there are two possible indeterministic outcomes, A
and B. Given openness assumptions, God does not know ahead
of time which of these two outcomes will obtain. The neo-
Molinist wants to say that God can nevertheless anticipate and
be as prepared for A as he is for B. Moreover, Boyd thinks that
"because of God's infinite intelligence, it is irrelevant ‘when'
God knows what free agents would do in various situations…
whether or not God is certain of what agents will do before they
actually do it does not affect the perfection of God's
12
preparedness in response to what they do." On the neo-
Molinist view, then, God is supposed to be thought of as being
able to treat A as if it were certainly going to occur (and
similarly for B). But a moment's reflection will reveal that this
can't be right. Contrary to what Boyd suggests, the time when
God discovers which of these outcomes is going to obtain is not
at all irrelevant to his level of providential preparedness. For it
may be that the optimistic response to each of these outcomes
would require an element of activity that God would need to
providentially implement in advance of their actual
13
occurrence. And, what's more, these responses might be
mutually incompatible. The optimistic response in preparation
for A, say, might be X. But, arguably, the optimistic response in
preparation for B could be not-X. Thus, while God could
confidently do X in anticipation of A if he were certain that A
was going to occur, he cannot prepare an optimal response to
the mere possibility of A's occurrence if he's uncertain about
whether B will occur instead. In other words, he cannot act as if
A and B were each the on!y outcome he had to worry about since
he cannot implement both X and not-X.
To illustrate the point, I borrow an example from David Hunt.
Imagine God is engaged in a game of rock-paper-scissors with
Satan. He knows it's possible that Satan might play rock, paper,
or scissors. Can God be as prepared for any of these options as if
they were the only option God had to worry about? No. For
suppose God wants to win this game against Satan. If he acts as
if it is certain that Satan will play rock, then God-if he is going
to act optimally-will play paper. But he can't treat the
possibility of Satan playing rock as a certainty and treat the
possibility of Satan playing scissors (or paper) as a certainty as
well for the simple reason that he can't play both paper and
rock. The optimific responses are mutually exclusive.
Now in the game just imagined there are, of course, three
possible moves available to Satan. Thus God can't be
guaranteed a win in this scenario since it is a genuine
possibility that his move, whatever it happens to be, will be
defeated. Hence, in addition to serving as a counterexample to
Boyd's claim that, with respect to providential planning, God
can treat possibilities as if they were certainties, hypothetical
situations such as this also show that the time at which God
comes to know what a free choice is going to be can serve as a
relevant factor in assessing the overall utility of his
providential activity; whether God knows ahead of time what
the result of an indeterministic process will be, therefore, may
bear directly on the level of effectiveness with which he can
respond.
What can be said in response? Well, as I pointed out in my
14
earlier paper on behalf of the neo-Molinist, if we suppose
that God is not willing to risk losing such a game then it may be
that, from eternity past, he has opted to leave only two options
open to Satan on this occasion. Such a response is in keeping
with Boyd's idea that the parameters of creaturely freedom are
15
set by God.
By allowing Satan to play just rock or scissors for instance,
God could have set things up in such a way so as to preserve
Satan's freedom, on the one hand, while at the same time
16
guaranteeing that he never actually loses. But, alas, what I
realize now-and what I should have realized then-is that such
an amendment is still inadequate to deliver the sorts of goods
neo-Molinists like Boyd believe they can have on an infinite
intelligence model of providence, namely, a guarantee that God
will win in the end. Indeed Boyd is emphatic that God can
guarantee, for example, that there will be a group of people
who freely choose to enter into a loving relationship with him,
for, as he rightly notes, "Scripture unequivocally depicts God as
17
certain that he will have a people for himself, a bride."
Quickly anticipating the inevitable objection, however, Boyd
immediately writes "But if God did not predestine or at least
foreknow that anyone in particular would accept his invitation,
then, it might be argued, he simply could not be certain of this.
It seems that God's goal for world history could fail and that
18
Satan could win this conflict after all." Boyd offers two lines
of response to this objection, both of which I believe can be
seen to fail.
The first response Boyd gives to the objector who holds that
the God of open theism cannot be certain that anyone will
freely come to him involves the idea that, though God cannot
be certain that any one specific individual will accept his love,
he can nevertheless be statistically guaranteed at the macro
level that a group of unspecified individuals will come to be
saved. As he puts it,

"As Creator, [God] knows humans exhaustively,

infinitely better than any human could ever know
them. Now, if sociologists, advertisers, and
insurance companies can accurately predict the
behavior of large groups of people under certain
conditions, though they are unable to predict the
behavior of any particular individual within these
groups, how much more should we assume that
God is able to predict the behavior of large
groups of people over long periods of time, that
is, the whole human race throughout the whole
l9
of world history?"
Boyd goes on to clarify that,

[W]e need not suppose that God had an exact or

fixed knowledge of the percentage of people who
would and would not respond to his offer of
grace in the event that humans fell. That is, his
knowledge of this group behavior may be a wave
probability, and this wave probability might
fluctuate due to various contingencies over time.
The objection we are considering, however, is
avoided so long as this fluctuating wave
 20
probability could never include zero.
The first problem with this line of response is that the ability
to predict a group's behavior with a great deal of accuracy is
not equivalent to being infallibly certain that such behavior will
occur. Sociologists, advertisers, and insurance companies
sometimes make mistakes precisely because they, unlike God,
are fallible knowers. Second, and more to the point, Boyd's last
sentence is simply false. The objection we are considering, after
all, is that God-given openness assumptions-cannot be certain
that he will win against Satan. That is, God cannot be
guaranteed that some people will ultimately resist the devil's
deceptions and come to accept Christ. For suppose that Satan's
"winning" of the rock-paper-scissors match represents the
possibility that Satan succeeds in preventing any individuals
from coming to the Lord. In other words, if Satan wins, no one
is ultimately saved-if God wins, however, then some are saved.
As mentioned above, if God is unwilling to accept the grim
prospect that no one ultimately comes to him, he can ensure
that he never actually loses to Satan by deciding to enter into a
2x2 game (two players, two options) rather than the 2x3 game
(two players, three options) represented by the original rock-
paper-scissors scenario. Again, by only leaving open to Satan
the options of rock or scissors, God, in choosing to play rock,
could guarantee that he won't lose. But here's the rub, being
guaranteed that one will not lose the game just described does not
imply that one has thereby been guaranteed a win. On the contrary,
it may be that God, in choosing to play rock, simply "draws." So
even if he can guarantee that Satan never ultimately wins, it
does not follow that God will emerge victorious in the sense
advocated by Boyd. Indeed, God could be stuck in a tied match
throughout eternity with Satan if the Prince of Darkness
happened to freely choose rock every time they faced off.
This last point serves to rebut Boyd's second response to the
objection that God could not be certain that he will, in the end,
have secured a people for himself if open theism is true. In
addition to his claim that God can be statistically assured that
at least some will be saved, Boyd suggests that, "the Lord could
know from the start that he would certainly have a bride on the
21
basis of his perfect knowledge of his own character and ability."
He argues,

As the biblical narrative testifies, [God] is the

Lord of love who refuses to give up! Even if it
were possible for entire generations completely
to rebel against him, the Lord knew before he
entered into this plan that he was willing to do
whatever it took and to work for however long it
might take to see his creation bear the fruit he
was seeking. If he must delay consummating his
plan to allow more people to enter into his
eternal kingdom, he is willing to do this (see 2
Pet. 3: 9-10).22
At best, however, all the open theist can say here is that God
is willing to grant an indefinite amount of opportunities for
people to make salvation decisions should humanity have
fallen. It may be thought that, given enough time, the
likelihood that some will turn and be saved becomes
increasingly great as we approach infinity. Still, even granting
such an assumption, God could not infallibly know that some will
eventually turn to him. For as Johannes Grössl and Leigh Vicens
23
have recently argued, if for every person S and salvation
opportunity O that is afforded S, it is metaphysically possible
that S either chooses to resist or submit to the Holy Spirit's call
(given libertarian freedom), then it is metaphysically possible
(however unlikely) that for every S and O, S chooses to resist the
Holy Spirit. It therefore remains the case that God's purposes
for the cosmos-to have a people for himself-could never be
realized.
The openness proponent may object that this is a problem for
every free-will theist, whether one is an open theist, Molinist,
or simple- foreknowledge Arminian. On Molinism, for instance,
the CCFs could have turned out such that no person in any
circumstances in which they might be placed would freely
accept Christ. If such a scenario obtained, there would be no
feasible worlds for God to create in which his purposes are
achieved. More radically, on the simple-foreknowledge view,
God runs the risk of not knowing whether anyone will freely
accept his offer of salvation until after he decides to create a
world.
In response, I think it is important to note the following
distinction. While it is true that God cannot himself guarantee
that anyone freely chooses to repent and accept the gift of life
on libertarian conceptions of salvation, in contrast to the open
view, God can-at least theoretically-be guaranteed that some
will be saved on both the Molinist and simple-foreknowledge
scheme. If, for example, there are true CCFs that indicate some
persons would accept Christ, then the Molinist God, in
actualizing the circumstances specified in the relevant
counterfactual's antecedent, could come to know immediately
upon his creative decree that he will have a people for himself.
Similarly, on the simple- foreknowledge view, if upon creating
the world it turns out to be true that some will freely accept his
offer, God could come to know this immediately consequent to
his creation and, thus, infallibly know all who will be saved
ahead of time. Molinists and simple-foreknowledge Arminians
can both affirm with confidence, then, that when John wrote of
those who would one day come to worship before the Lord-
individuals from every nation, tribe, people and language-the
divine source of John's vision was capable of knowing this (Rev.
7:9). God, who is essentially omniscient, was able to infallibly
know that all these people were eventually going to come to a
saving knowledge of him because, apparently, this is what was
true at the time of John's writing (Rev. 22:6). Since this sort of
infallible foreknowledge is not even a theoretical possibility
within open theism, it is difficult to see how Boyd's neo-
Molinist position can account for passages such as this.

Conclusion
Though I remain convinced that the nature of libertarian
freedom would likely preclude a traditional Molinist conception
of middle knowledge, I've come to believe that the supposed
providential utility the neo-Molinist view is often advertised to
provide via the infinite intelligence argument doesn't work.
Given openness assumptions, it is not the case that God can
prepare for every possibility as effectively as if he were certain
it was going to happen. Nor is it the case that he could be
guaranteed, even in principle, that his ultimate purposes for
creation would be fulfilled when those purposes depend on the
decisions of libertarian free agents. It seems to me, therefore,
that a God who has infallible foreknowledge of what his
creatures will freely do has a clear advantage and is preferable,
providentially speaking, to the God of neo- Molinism.

Elijah Hess is a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at

the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, AR.

Endnotes
1 So named after the sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit
theologian, Luis de Molina (1535-1600).
2 More specifically, Molina’s theory was that, in addition to
God’s natural knowledge of everything that could be, and his
free knowledge of all contingent truths that will be, God
possesses “middle knowledge”—i.e., hypothetical knowledge
of what, if he were to actualize a particular world, would be.
On this picture, such knowledge is thought to be pre-
volitional since, like God’s natural knowledge, it occurs
logically prior to his decision to create. But unlike his natural
knowledge, which includes within its scope all necessary
truths, the content of God’s middle knowledge is contingent.
Indeed, it was the great theological innovation of Molina to
locate facts about what creatures would freely do in any
circumstance—so-called counterfactuals of freedom—among
the set of contingent truths that combine to comprise God’s
middle knowledge. Though he has no control over what
counterfactual conditionals are true, the idea was that, by
conceiving of God’s hypothetical knowledge of creaturely free
decisions as being explanatorily prior to his creative decree,
God would be in a position to plan and thereby meticulously
govern a world that is, nevertheless, populated by libertarian
free agents.
3 Anthony Kenny, The God of the Philosophers (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1979), 68.
4 A related worry has always been the question of what could
explain or ground the truth of these conditionals. Such truths
cannot be accounted for by appealing to God’s will, for
instance, since to do so would amount to theological
determinism, something Molinists want to avoid. Nor would it
seem that they could be made true by the actual decisions of
the agents themselves; for CCFs are about non-actual
 persons, persons who do not yet exist (and in many cases will
never exist). In the absence of any other candidates,
however, it looks as if we are left with an unappealing
conclusion, namely that nothing grounds these truths. This is,
of course, the (in)famous “grounding problem." For a detailed
and more formal articulation of this particular objection, see
Alexander Zambrano, “Truthmaker and the Grounding
Objection to Middle Knowledge," Aporia 21 (2011): 19-34;
and William Hasker, “Counterfactuals and Evil: A Final Reply
to R. Douglas Geivett," Phi!osophia Christi 5 (2003): 237-40.
For a sampling of Molinist responses to the grounding
objection, see especially Thomas Flint, Divine Providence:
The Mo!inist Account (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1998), chap. 5; William Lane Craig, “Middle Knowledge, Truth-
Makers, and the Grounding Objection," Faith and Phi!osophy
18 (2001): 337-52; and Edward Wierenga, “Providence,
Middle Knowledge, and the Grounding Objection," Phi!
osophia Christi 3 (2001): 447-57.
5 The primary architect of this view (and the one responsible
for its title) is Gregory A. Boyd. See Boyd, “Neo-Molinism and
the Infinite Intelligence of God," Phi!osophia Christi 5 (2003):
187-204.
6 Elijah Hess, “Arguing from Molinism to Neo-Molinism," Phi!
osophia Christi 17 (2015): 331-51.
7 As Alan Rhoda defines it, the future is epistemica!!y open at
time t if and only if for some state of affairs X and some
future time t* neither “X will obtain at t*" nor “X will not
obtain at t*" (nor their tense-neutral counterparts) is infallibly
known either (i) at t or (ii) timelessly. See Rhoda, “The
Fivefold Openness of the Future," in God in an Open
Universe: Science, Metaphysics, and Open Theism, ed.
William Hasker, Thomas Jay Oord, and Dean Zimmerman
(Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011), 75.
8 William Lane Craig, “God Directs All Things: On Behalf of a
Molinist View of Providence," in Four Views on Divine
Providence, ed. Dennis W. Jowers (Grand Rapids, MI:
Zondervan, 2011), 90-1.
9 Bruce Ware, God’s Lesser G!ory: The Diminished God of Open
Theism (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2000), 216.
10 Boyd, "God Limits His Control," in Four Views on Divine
Providence, 206.
11 Ibid., 206-7 (my emphasis).
12 Boyd, "Neo-Molinism and the Infinite Intelligence of God,"
199.
13 The practice of so-called "past-directed prayer" (PDP) serves
as just one example where this may be the case. James
Anderson defines a PDP as a prayer that petitions God either
(i) to have brought about some state of affairs at some time
in the past or (ii) to bring about some state of affairs (now or
in the future) that would require God to have brought about
some (other) state of affairs at some time in the past
(http://www.proginosko.com/2014/10/open-theism-and-past-
directed-prayers/). For a moving account of how at least one
PDP appears to have been answered, see Helen Roseveare,
Living Faith: Wi!!ing to be Stirred as a Pot of Paint (Scotland,
UK: Christian Focus Publications, 2007), 56-8.
14 Hess, "Arguing from Molinism to Neo-Molinism."

15 Boyd, Satan and the Prob!em of Evi!: Constructing a

Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity,
2001), 156.
16 Hess, "Arguing from Molinism to Neo-Molinism," 336-7n13.

17 Boyd, Satan and the Prob!em of Evi!, 155.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., l56.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid., 156-7.

23 See Grössl and Vicens, "Closing the Door on Limited-Risk

Open Theism," Faith and Philosophy 31 (2014): 475-85.
 Moral Relativism in Context
James R. Beebe
SUNY, Buffalo
NOUS 44:4 (2010) 691–724
2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Consider the following facts about the average,

philosophically untrained moral relativist:

(1.1) The average moral relativist denies the existence of “absolute moral
truths.”
(1.2) The average moral relativist often expresses her commitment to moral
relativism with slogans like ‘What’s true (or right) for you may not be
what’s true (or right) for me’ or ‘What’s true (or right) for your culture
may not be what’s true (or right) for my culture.’
(1.3) The average moral relativist endorses relativistic views of morality
without endorsing relativistic views about science or mathematics.
(1.4) The average moral relativist takes moral relativism to be non-relatively
true and does not think there is anything contradictory about doing so.
(1.5) The average moral relativist adopts an egalitarian attitude toward a
wide range of moral values, practices and beliefs, claiming they are all
equally legitimate or correct.
(1.6) The average moral relativist often admonishes others to be more
tolerant of those who engage in alternative ethical practices and to
refrain from making negative moral judgments about them.
(1.7) The average moral relativist sometimes makes negative moral judgments
about the behavior of others—e.g., by harshly judging moral absolutists to
be intolerant—but is less inclined to do so when the relativist’s
metaethical views are salient in a context of moral judgment.
(1.8) The average moral relativist takes anthropological evidence concerning
the worldwide diversity of ethical views and practices to support moral
relativism.

While most philosophers agree that the metaethical views of the average
relativist are mistaken, there is considerably less agreement as to what those
views amount to.
 According to a common, uncharitable interpretation of ordinary moral relativism, relativists contradict
themselves both when they take moral relativism to be non-relatively true and when they make negative moral
judgments about the behavior of others.1 The second contradiction is said to stem from the incompatibility
between the relativists’ egalitarian attitude toward alternative moral practices and the making of negative moral
judgments about some of them. The uncharitable interpretation also claims that the reason why relativists are
more likely to make negative moral judgments when their metaethical views are not salient is simply that they
forget or perhaps fail to properly understand that such judgments are ruled out by their metaethical
commitments. Relativists are also accused of committing a naïve logical error in thinking that purely descriptive
facts about the diversity of ethical opinions and practices could ever establish normative facts about what is
really right or wrong. Proponents of this kind of uncharitable interpretation often attribute a substantial degree
of irrationality to ordinary relativists because of the allegedly obvious nature of the logical errors that are said to
characterize relativistic thinking. While it is often possible to explain why subjects engage in certain irrational
behaviors, the mere attribution of irrationality does not itself constitute such an explanation. Indeed, in the
present case the charge of irrationality seems to indicate that the interpretation is simply unable to explain the
relativistic behaviors in question. Such an interpretation should be accepted only if there are no others that can
provide more satisfying explanations of the relevant data.
In what follows I canvass a series of more promising interpretations of garden variety moral relativism and
evaluate them in light of how well they explain the phenomena described in (1.1) through (1.8). Many of the in-
terpretative models I consider are derived from the work of philosophers who defend relativism as the correct
view of the nature of morality rather than as the best interpretation of ordinary relativism (e.g., Harman 1975;
1977; 1978a; 1978b; 1996; Dreier 1990; 1992). Other models are drawn from defenses of relativism in other
domains (e.g., Cohen 1988; DeRose 1992; 1995; Lewis 1996; MacFarlane 2003; 2005a; 2005b; 2007; 2008;
forthcom-ing)2. In sections I through III I consider interpretations of ordinary moral relativism that ascribe to
relativists the view that ethical terms are (perhaps hidden) indexicals. Section I lays out some of the basic
commitments of indexical moral relativism, while the following two sections examine in further detail the
agent-centered indexical relativism proposed by Gilbert Harman (section II) and the attributor-centered version
defended by James Dreier (section III). In section IV I consider the nonindexical relativism of John MacFarlane.
After singling out the versions of indexical and nonin-dexical relativism that serve as the best models for
understanding ordinary moral relativism, I offer a relevant alternatives account of moral judgment that
reconstructs relativistic thinking about how changes in ethical standards affect the correctness of moral
judgments (section V). I conclude
that the best interpretations of ordinary relativism satisfy the following constraints:

(2.1) Theories that adequately model the linguistic behavior of the average relativist do not take the ethical
standards of moral agents to be the sole determinants of the truth values of moral judgments.
(2.2) Theories that adequately model the linguistic behavior of the average relativist take the ethical standards of
those who attribute moral praise or blame or who assess attributions of praise or blame for truth or falsity to be
the primary determinants of the truth values of moral judgments.
(2.3) Theories that adequately model the linguistic behavior of the average relativist allow an agent’s practical
reasons to affect the truth values of moral judgments when those reasons are sufficiently salient in an
attributor’s or an assessor’s context.
(2.4) Theories that adequately model the linguistic behavior of the average relativist explain the ways in which
relativists take the truth values of moral judgments to vary in terms of the conversational mechanisms
responsible for changes in the ethical standards in place in contexts of attribution or contexts of assessment.

Each of these constraints and their relevance will be explained in the sections that follow.

I
The family of indexicalist interpretations of moral relativism is characterized by the common attribution of the
following metaethical theses:

VI. The central normative terms of normative ethical judgments—e.g., ‘right,’ ‘wrong,’ ‘good,’ ‘bad,’
‘permissible,’ ‘impermissible’—are in-dexicals.3
VII. The contents that get expressed by ethically normative terms are determined by the ethical standards in
place at the contexts in which those terms are used.

Call the conjunction of these theses ‘IMR.’ According to the view that IMR captures the heart of ordinary
moral relativism, relativists take the contents expressed by ethical terms to vary from context to context in
ways that are analogous to more familiar indexical expressions like ‘I,’ ‘here,’ ‘now,’ ‘he,’ ‘she’ and ‘that.’ Just
as the content of distinct utterances of ‘I am a philosopher’ and ‘It is warm and sunny here’ vary as the values
of ‘I’ and ‘here’ (and perhaps other contextual features) change, distinct utterances of ‘Infanticide is morally
wrong’ express different propositions in different contexts. 4 Indexical relativists take moral sentences like
‘Infanticide is morally wrong’ to have linguistic meanings (or ‘characters,’ in Kaplan’s
1989 terminology) that remain the same in all contexts. However, when considered in isolation from any
particular occasion of use, proponents of IMR claim these sentences fail to express any proposition. They are
rather like the sentence ‘That man is a philosopher’ when it is divorced from any demonstrative gesture or
communicative intention to refer to someone in particular. In each case, contextual facts about the
communicative intentions of speakers and hearers are needed to supply semantic values that “complete” these
expressions and give them determinate contents.5
Consider the following relativist slogans:

(3.1) What’s true (or right) for you may not be what’s true (or right) for me. (3.2) What’s true (or right) for your
culture may not be what’s true (or right) for my culture.

Let a ‘normative ethical sentence’ be any sentence that can be used to express a normative ethical judgment, and
let a ‘normative ethical proposition’ be the proposition expressed by an assertive utterance of a normative ethical
sentence on a particular occasion of use. According to the IMR interpretation, what garden variety relativists are
trying to communicate with these slogans is something like the following:

(3.1') Normative ethical sentences that express true normative ethical propositions when asserted by you (in certain
contexts) may express false normative ethical propositions when asserted by me (in other contexts).
(3.2') Normative ethical sentences that express true normative ethical propositions when asserted by members of
your culture (in certain contexts) may express false normative ethical propositions when asserted by members
of my culture (in other contexts).

Strictly speaking, relativists should not assert (3.1) or (3.2) because (i) the first occurrence of ‘right’ in each
sentence depends for its content on a certain kind of context in which the hearer finds herself, (ii) the second
occurrence depends upon a context familiar to the speaker, and (iii) the assertions, as most commonly used, are
intended to convey the idea that the ethical standards in these two contexts may differ. Since the hearer’s use of
‘right’ may be associated with a different content than the speaker’s, anyone who asserts (3.1) or (3.2) is using
‘right’ in two possibly divergent ways in the same sentence, which is akin to committing the fallacy of
equivocation. Because it can be quite difficult to distinguish between sentences and propositions and between
other subtle differences of meaning, proponents of the IMR interpretation can claim it should be unsurprising if
philosophically untrained relativists do not articulate these ideas about semantic relativity as perspicuously as
they might.6
 As a general model for understanding ordinary moral relativism, IMR can underwrite plausible
explanations of most of the phenomena described in (1.1) through (1.8). Since IMR claims that the contents
expressed by ethical terms vary with context, it offers a straightforward explanation of the relativist notion
that there are no normative ethical sentences that are absolutely or non-relatively true. Furthermore, because
the metaethical theses that comprise IMR apply only to ethical terms, they do not require moral relativists to
endorse relativistic theses about the claims of physics, chemistry, biology or mathematics. IMR also explains
how relativists can take their views to be non-relatively true. Since (MR1) and (MR2) are metaethical theses
about normative ethical judgments and posit semantic relativity only in the domain of such judgments, there
is no chance for these metaethical claims to undermine their own non-relative truth. Furthermore, there is
nothing in IMR that prohibits the making of negative ethical judgments. (MR1) and (MR2) simply entail that
when such judgments are made, the contents they expressed will be fixed by the ethical standards in place in
their respective contexts of use. 7 A further consequence of the IMR model is that it readily explains the
relativist’s egalitarian attitude toward ethical judgments that are made in different contexts. (MR1) and (MR2)
imply that, of all the contexts in which ethical judgments are made, none has any greater privilege than any
other and thus that the true ethical judgments made in one context are not any more or less correct than the
true ethical judgments made in another context.
The family of IMR interpretations subdivides according to whether they are (a) agent- or attributor-
centered, (b) sensitive or insensitive to the practical reasons of agents, (c) individualistic or intersubjective or
(d) able or unable to account for changes in ethical standards that affect the truth val ues of moral judgments.
In section II I examine two agent-centered versions of IMR that are suggested by the work of Harman and
argue that neither of them can serve as an adequate model of ordinary relativism. In the fol lowing section I
critique the individualistic, attributor-centered version of IMR proposed by Dreier and argue that the versions
of IMR that serve as the best interpretations are attributor-centered, sensitive to the practical reasons of
agents, and able to account for the semantic relativity engendered by shifts in ethical standards, regardless of
whether they are individualistic or intersubjective.

II
In a substantial body of work Harman (1975; 1977; 1978a; 1978b; 1996) offers what is perhaps the most famous
philosophical defense of moral relativism. Although he does not explicitly appeal to the indexicalist framework,
his position is best understood from within that framework because he takes normative ethical sentences to be
semantically incomplete and to depend
upon facts about their occasions of use to fix their designation. 8 In Harman’s (1975) original foray into moral
relativism, he formulated his relativist theory only as an account of what he calls ‘inner judgments’—viz.,
judgments of the following form:

(4.1) Sought to do A.

Harman (1975, 11) suggested that judgments like (4.1) have the same content as:

(4.1') Given S’s motivational attitudes (e.g., goals, desires and intentions) and relevant nonmoral facts about S, A is
the course of action for S that is supported by the best reasons.9

Harman (1975, 4) claims that ethical judgments only make sense in relation to implicit agreements of intention
among speakers and hearers and that such agreements obtain when “each of a number of people intends to
adhere to some schedule, plan, or set of principles, intending to do this on the understanding that the others
similarly intend.” Harman also claims that unless some indication is given to the contrary, an assertion of (4.1)
will be appropriate only if S’s reasons are endorsed by both the speaker and the hearer(s). Given Harman’s
view of practical reasoning, endorsing S’s reasons means sharing a relevant subset of S’s motivational
attitudes.
However, despite the strong initial emphasis given to agreement between speakers, hearers and agents,
Harman ultimately assigns agreement no role to play in the semantics of moral judgments, relegating it to the
realm of pragmatics. Thus, according to Harman, if I assertively utter ‘ S ought to do A,’ my assertion
generates something like the pragmatic implicature that I endorse S’s reasons for doing A.10 At bottom,
however, the truth value of my utterance has nothing to do with my endorsement or rejection of S’s reasons.
Only facts about S’s ends and motivational attitudes determine the content and truth value of the assertion.
On the Humean view of practical reason Harman (1975, 9) endorses, practical reason can only tell us what
means would best serve our ends but cannot choose those ends or even rank them, except in light of their
ability to promote further ends. This means that “the best reasons” in (4.1 ') should be understood as “the best in
light of the ends S has chosen,” where there is no expectation that reason will lead everyone to adopt the same
ultimate ends. According to the particular version of ethical internalism that Harman (1978b, 152) endorses—
viz., ‘existence internalism’—moral demands apply to a person only if that person either accepts those
demands or fails to accept them because of (i) ignorance of the relevant nonmoral facts, (ii) a failure to reason
something through, or (iii) some sort of nonmoral defect like irrationality, stupidity, confusion or mental
illness.11 In short, a moral
demand applies to someone only if it is rational for that person to accept the demand. Harman (1978b, 154) also
argues that for any moral demand it is possible there is someone who does not accept this demand, where this
nonacceptance is not the result of ignorance, failure to reason something through, irrationality, stupidity,
confusion or mental illness. In other words, it can be rational for different people to accept different basic moral
demands.
Employing Harman’s agent-centered IMR as a model of ordinary relativism allows us to explain some
important facts about relativist behavior. For example, relativists often claim that, while they would consider a
particular practice to be wrong for them or wrong for someone in their society, they do not want to pass
judgment on those who engage in it. In these cases relativists remove their own values (and perhaps those of
their surrounding cultures as well) from the sets of facts that determine whether the practices in question are
morally permissible. Agent-centered IMR can plausibly explain these facts because it implies that judgments
about moral rightness or wrongness should be made only in light of morally relevant facts about the agents in
question.
Unfortunately, however, a thoroughly agent-centered IMR cannot underwrite explanations of all the
relativist behaviors described in (1.1) through (1.8). In particular, it is unable to account for the fact that—at
least some of the time—ordinary relativists are not willing to let the values, ends and attitudes of moral agents
be the sole determinants of the truth values of moral judgments. Most relativists, for example, do not want to
judge the actions of Hitler, hitmen or intolerant absolutists solely in light of the values or ethical standards
these agents endorse. One consequence of Harman’s agent-centered semantics for moral judgments, however,
is that an assertion of the following sentence will be true in every context:

(4.2) Hitler ought to have ordered the murder of millions of Jews.

Regardless of what anyone else thinks about Hitler’s actions, inner judgments such as (4.2) should take into
account only the values, ends, standards and attitudes that Hitler adopted. The problem with (4.2) that I want to
focus on is not the intrinsic implausibility of supposing that (4.2) could ever be true. Rather, the difficulty is
that ordinary moral relativists believe they can correctly assert ‘Hitler ought not to have ordered the murder of
millions of Jews,’ even if this judgment is only relatively true.
In subsequent work Harman extended his relativist theory to encompass ‘non-inner’ judgments like the
following:

(4.3) S’s action was wrong.

(4.4) Actions of type T are wrong.
Although Harman never provides a detailed semantics for non-inner judgments, he does tell us that the content
of such judgments is determined by agreements of intention between speakers and hearers but that the agree -
ment of the agents whose actions are being judged is not required. 12 Thus, it seems likely that Harman
understands the contents of (4.3) and (4.4) to be approximated by something like the following:

(4.3') Given our motivational attitudes (e.g., goals, desires and intentions) and relevant nonmoral facts about S’s
action, refraining from that action is supported by the best reasons.
(4.4') Given our motivational attitudes (e.g., goals, desires and intentions) and relevant nonmoral facts about
actions of type T, refraining from T actions is supported by the best reasons.

In neither case is there any assumption that the reasons mentioned are available to anyone other than the
speaker and hearers.
This development of Harman’s theory, however, only leads to deeper problems. On the one hand, Harman
(1975; 1977; 1996) insists that because certain agents—e.g., Hitler, Stalin, hitmen for the mob—are beyond the
motivational reach of considerations that lead us to think murder is immoral, they are not bound by the
prohibition against murder that we endorse. At the same time, however, Harman (1978a, 116) maintains, “One
can judge that certain outsiders are good or bad or evil from the point of view of one’s morality even if they do
not share that morality, just as one can judge that outsiders are friends or enemies.” Harman (1975, 6–7; 1978a,
116; 1996, 59– 60) makes it clear that his metaethical view allows certain agents to use the following sentences
to express true normative ethical propositions:

(5.1) Hitler (Stalin, the hitman, etc.) is evil.

(5.2) Hitler’s (Stalin’s, the hitman’s, etc.) actions were morally wrong.

This curious combination of views, however, means that Harman’s account allows for the following
“abominable conjunctions” to be true13:

(5.3) Hitler’s murder of millions of Jews was morally wrong, but no moral prohibition against murder applies to
Hitler.
(5.4) The hitman’s murder of the bank manager was morally wrong, but murder is not morally wrong for the
hitman.

According to Harman, the second conjunct of each of these claims is true because the moral considerations we
take to speak against murder carry no weight with agents like Hitler or hitmen who are “beyond the pale.” At
the same time, however, Harman wants to permit us to make correct negative moral judgments about their
actions and characters. It is far from clear how these seemingly conflicting commitments can fit together.
The most obvious way to be a consistent agent-centered relativist is to disallow criticism of agents on the
basis of values other than those of the agents themselves. Such a view, however, implies that relativists can
morally criticize Hitler, Stalin and the hitman only if these unsavory agents are not being true to their own
values or principles. Harman recognizes that this kind of consistency is purchased at too high a price and thus
is motivated to allow for judgments such as (5.1) and (5.2). However, this move lands him in inconsistency or
at least in the bad company of abominable conjunctions like (5.3) and (5.4). Because ordinary relativists
sometimes want to make judgments such as (5.1) and (5.2) but never want to countenance abominable
conjunctions like (5.3) and (5.4), none of the views suggested by Harman seems able to provide an adequate
interpretative model for understanding ordinary moral relativism.

III
A. The key to avoiding the problems that plague agent-centered versions of IMR is to adopt an attributor-
centered model of the view instead. On attributor-centered IMR, the motivational attitudes of the agents whose
actions are being judged have no essential role to play in determining the contents of moral judgments.
Attributors are thus free to make moral judgments about agents whose moral systems differ greatly from their
own. Attributor-centered IMR also prevents assertions of abominable conjunctions from being true. Harman’s
difficulty with abominable conjunctions arose because he allowed the situation of the speaker— qua agent
subject to certain moral demands—to determine the content of the first conjunct in either (5.3) or (5.4) and the
situation of the agent being judged— qua agent subject to different moral demands—to determine the content
of the second conjunct. However, because an assertion of either (5.3) or (5.4) will take place within a single
context of utterance, attributor-centered IMR dictates that the affective and motivational attitudes of the
speaker in that context will determine the content of both conjuncts of the assertion. Thus, if it is correct in a
context for a speaker to assert that the murder of millions of Jews by Hitler was morally reprehensible, it will
not be correct for the speaker in that same context to assert that no moral prohibition against murder applies to
Hitler. Conversely, if the latter assertion is correct, the former assertion will not be.
Let ‘extreme attributor-centered IMR’ denote the view that only the values, ends and attitudes of attributors
are relevant to determining the contents of moral judgments and that agent-centered considerations are relevant
only when agents and attributors are identical. Like extreme agent-centered IMR (which takes moral
judgments to be based solely on facts about the values and attitudes of moral agents), the extreme attributor-
centered model fails to
explain the full range of moral judgments that relativists wish to make. Some of the time relativists caution
against making negative moral judgments about the behavior of others who endorse different sets of ethical
values, while at other times relativists make such judgments themselves. The key to accommodating this
variability is to modify the attributor-centered model so that an agent’s practical reasons can affect an
attributor’s moral judgments when those reasons are sufficiently salient in the attributor’s context. Call the
resulting view ‘agent-sensitive, attributor-centered IMR.’ Thus, if the deliberative processes and motivational
attitudes of an agent are salient in a context of attribution, judgments about what is right or wrong for that agent
may be constrained by those factors. If, on the other hand, the practical reasons of an agent are not salient and
the attributor’s focus is simply on the action itself, they may play no role in constraining moral judgments. The
agent-sensitive approach allows relativists in certain contexts to make judgments about agents whose moral
understandings are quite different from their own, but it also allows them in certain other contexts to say that
judgments about agents with different moral understandings may be inappropriate precisely because of those
differences.14
B. Dreier (1990; 1992) has articulated one of the more well known versions of attributor-centered versions
of IMR.15 Unfortunately, however, he takes on theoretical commitments that prevent his version from serving
as a fully adequate model of ordinary moral relativism. Dreier (1992, 27) offers the following statement of his
metaethical position:

[E]ach speaker has what we may call a ‘moral system,’ comprising the sorts of moral attitudes and affective states
which anti-realists generally say exhaust the semantic content of moral utterances. When a person with a moral
system, M, says ‘x is morally good,’ according to this view, she is asserting that x has a certain natural property, P.
Which natural property? P is the property of being rated highly by M. It follows, of course, that when different
speakers say ‘x is morally good’ they may be asserting of x that it has different natural properties, each determined
by the speaker’s own moral system.16

The motivational attitudes of speakers determine the content of their moral judgments, regardless of whether
there is any agreement in attitude between speakers and their hearers. Thus, Dreier endorses an individualistic,
attributor-centered IMR. On such a view, each conversational participant has a ‘semantic scoreboard’ (in Lewis’
1979b sense) which reflects the set of things taken for granted by that participant at any point in the conversation
and which imposes requirements on the truth conditions of her utterances. On the multiple, personal scoreboards
view, a speaker’s utterances are not subject to requirements imposed by the scores on anyone else’s scoreboard. 17
By contrast, on an intersubjective or single scoreboard semantics there exists only one (or at least one privileged)
conversational record, which contains a
set of background assumptions that are shared by conversational participants and that they recognize each
other as sharing. Because these shared assumptions impose the same requirements on all conversational
participants, the truth conditions for a speaker’s use of moral terms will not be particular to that speaker.
Dreier’s individualistic semantics for moral terms leads to some difficulties. When a multiple scoreboard
semantics is applied to subjects keeping roughly (but not fully) equivalent conversational scores, no serious
interpretive problems immediately arise because subjects with slightly different conversational scores will often
be able to interact well enough for a variety of practical purposes. If the subjects have widely divergent scores,
problems may be kept to a minimum if we never imagine the subjects interacting with one another. That is, it
does not seem to be a clearly fatal objection to individualistic attributor-centered IMR that it allows subjects
separated by great spatial, temporal and cultural distances to fail to express contradictory propositions when one
utters ‘x is wrong’ and another utters ‘x is not wrong.’ However, once we begin to consider subjects with
dissimilar scores participating in the same conversation, individualistic or multiple scoreboard semantics has the
potential to deliver highly counterintuitive results.
If, for example, Seymour and Edna have different scores on their personal scoreboards, and Seymour
looks into Edna’s eyes and says, ‘x is wrong’ and Edna replies, ‘x is not wrong,’ multiple scoreboard
semantics seems to imply that Seymour and Edna will be speaking past each other instead of disagreeing.
That a theory allows people to speak past each other is not especially noteworthy. A classic criticism of
moral relativism, however, is that it does not allow for genuine moral disagreement in a sufficiently wide
range of cases (cf. Stevenson 1963, ch. 5; Lyons 1976). The central question for an individualistic
relativism, then, is whether it implies that speakers with divergent scores will always (or at least in general)
talk past one another.
Perhaps despite initial appearances, there are ways an individualistic or multiple scoreboard semantics can be
developed so that genuine disagreement becomes generally achievable. For instance, by appealing to the
Lewisian theory of accommodation proponents of multiple scoreboard semantics can argue that conversational
participants can adjust their individual scores in order to facilitate successful communication. Consider the
following analogy, employed by David Lewis (1969, 24) in another context:

Suppose you and I are rowing a boat together. If we row in rhythm, the boat goes smoothly forward; otherwise the
boat goes slowly and erratically, we waste effort, and we risk hitting things. We are always choosing whether to row
faster or slower; it matters little to either of us at what rate we row, provided we row in rhythm. So each is constantly
adjusting his rate to match the rate he expects the other to maintain.
Like rowers who coordinate their movements to achieve a common purpose, speakers can often adjust the
scores on the personal scoreboards in order to accommodate their interlocutors’ assertions and to smooth the
progress of communicative interaction. Full accommodation, of course, does not always take place. The key,
however, is that if subjects are sufficiently accommodating and their scoreboards sufficiently flexible, a
multiple scoreboard semantics can make genuine moral disagreement possible between subjects with initially
divergent scores in a wide range of cases.18
It is precisely the issue of scoreboard flexibility, however, that poses a problem for Dreier’s account.
Dreier appears to endorse an inflexible individualistic semantics that permits changes in conversational
score only when there are fundamental changes in a subject’s moral system. 19 Such an account does not
allow conversational partners to adjust their personal scores within a given conversational context to
accommodate the assertions of others. This means that conversational participants with divergent scores will
almost always talk past one another. 20 Furthermore, as (1.6) through (1.8) illustrate (and as I will argue in
detail below), there is wide variation in the ethical standards that are in force in different contexts and,
consequently, in the moral judgments that relativists make and take to be true. Since Dreier’s account does
not appear to allow speakers to accommodate such variation, it seems unfit to serve as an interpretation of
ordinary moral relativism.
Single scoreboard semantics has the virtue of being consistent with the general tendency among semantic
theorists to eschew individualistic frameworks in favor of intersubjective ones. However, even when there is one
privileged conversational record that imposes the same requirements on all conversational participants, a
significant degree of scoreboard flexibility will still be required. The single scoreboard view requires scoreboard
agreement among conversational participants for any propositions to be expressed at all by context-sensitive
sentences, whereas the multiple scoreboard view requires agreement in order for the context-sensitive sentences
that conversational partners use to express propositions with the same content. On neither view is it desirable for
interlocutors to keep different scores and for them to be unwilling or unable to accommodate the assertions and
pragmatic presuppositions of others. Because there are both individualistic (i.e., multiple scoreboard) and
intersubjective (i.e., single scoreboard) versions of agent-sensitive attributor-centered IMR that can provide
plausible explanations of the relativistic behaviors identified in (1.1) through (1.8), in what follows I will not try
to decide between the two. In the explanations that follow, however, I will often employ a single scoreboard
view for the sake of simplicity.
C. Although affirming and denying moral judgments with the same content is an important component of
genuine moral disagreement, it may be helpful to note that speakers can express disagreement in a variety of
ways that do not involve shared contents. For example, when Seymour asserts, ‘x is
wrong’ and Edna asserts, ‘x is not wrong,’ Seymour and Edna are clearly disagreeing in the attitudes they
express toward x. Seymour is expressing a con-attitude, whereas Edna is expressing a pro-attitude. Harman
(1996, 35) suggests that in asserting ‘x is wrong’ Seymour is expressing approval of standards that prohibit x,
while in asserting ‘x is right’ Edna is expressing approval of standards that do not prohibit it. They are thus
disagreeing about which values are to be adopted and which standards they take to be authoritative.
Furthermore, because assenting to a judgment involves undertaking a practical commitment to act in a particular
way, Seymour is expressing a commitment to act in one way, while Edna is expressing a commitment to act in a
conflicting way. These commitments conflict in the sense that no one could act in accordance with both of them
at the same time.21 Seymour and Edna also disagree in a sense that concerns the meaning of ‘ x is wrong.’
Because indexicals have the same linguistic meaning in every context, Seymour is assenting to a sentence
whose meaning contradicts the meaning of a sentence to which Edna assents. The meanings of the sentences
contradict each other in the sense that they can never have the same truth value when evaluated at the same
contexts of use. There are, then, several kinds of disagreement that speakers can express that do not require
shared propositional contents for their utterances. Other things being equal, however, it is clearly preferable for
an interpretation of ordinary moral relativism to make disagreement concerning shared contents possible as
well.

IV
MacFarlane (2003; 2005a; 2005b; 2007; forthcoming; 2008) has recently developed a semantic framework that
might be used as an interpretive model for understanding ordinary moral relativism. According to the indexical
forms of relativism considered above, the contents of normative ethical sentences are relative to contexts of
utterance. An ethical sentence can express one proposition in one context and another proposition in a different
context. However, once a context of use has determined which proposition gets expressed, no further
relativization of the moral judgment is hypothesized. Thus, while the truth value of the sentence ‘Lying is morally
wrong’ may vary across contexts of utterance, the truth value of the proposition expressed by a par ticular
utterance of that sentence cannot. IMR, then, is a form of relativism about the contents of normative ethical
sentences but not about the truth of normative ethical propositions. The non-indexical form of moral relativism
derived from MacFarlane’s work (hereafter ‘NMR’), however, is a form of relativism about propositional truth.
According to NMR, ethical terms express the same contents in all contexts of use, but the truth values of the
normative ethical propositions they are used to express can vary across different contexts of assessment. A
context of assessment is a setting in which a proposition is being assessed for truth or
falsity. MacFarlane (2003, 329) notes that it is already customary in semantic theory to define the truth of
propositions at points of evaluation that include parameters for worlds and times. 22 Thus, a contingent
proposition will be true at one possible world while false at another, and it may be true at one time but false at
another. Nonindexical moral relativists suggest, in a somewhat analogous fashion, that propositional truth
should be relativized to contexts of assessment that include an ethical standards parameter. On this view, the
ethical standards in place at a given context of use do not contribute to determining which proposition gets
expressed by an assertive utterance of ‘Lying is wrong.’ Rather, the ethical standards in contexts of assessment
determine whether the proposition expressed is true.
Suppose, for example, that Selma assertively utters ‘Lying is wrong’ in a context where the ethical standards
in place make lying morally impermissible. And suppose that Patty assertively utters ‘Lying is not wrong’ in a
context in which the relevant standards do not make lying morally impermissible. If some version of IMR were
true, Selma’s and Patty’s assertions would not involve contradictory propositions. According to NMR,
however, they do. Furthermore, on NMR, in order to know the truth value of a nor mative ethical proposition,
one needs to know what standards are in place at the context at which the proposition is being assessed.
Suppose that Selma’s utterance is evaluated from the perspective of her own context of use. From that
standpoint, Selma’s assertion is true. However, from the perspective of Patty’s context of use (understood as a
context of assessment), the proposition expressed by Selma’s assertion is false. Thus, unlike IMR, NMR
implies that the truth values of normative ethical judgments depend upon who is asking about them. 23
How well does NMR model the behavior of ordinary moral relativists? Obviously, NMR can easily
accommodate the ordinary relativist’s denial of absolute (i.e., non-relative) moral truths because the truth of
normative ethical propositions is relative to contextually varying ethical standards. NMR can also provide the
following explications of the relativist slogans that appear in (3.1) and (3.2):

(6.1) Normative ethical propositions that are true when assessed by you (in certain contexts) may be false when
assessed by me (in other contexts).
(6.2) Normative ethical propositions that are true when assessed by members of your culture (in certain contexts)
may be false when assessed by members of my culture (in other contexts).

Because no context of assessment enjoys more privilege than any other, NMR also underwrites a
thoroughgoing egalitarianism with respect to normative ethical judgments.
Can the NMR model account for the allegedly non-relative truth of moral relativism? On the one hand,
NMR implies that the truth value of every proposition is relativized to contexts of assessment. On the other,
NMR implies that only some propositions are assessment-sensitive—i.e., not every proposition varies in truth
value as contexts of assessment vary (keeping the context of use fixed). 24 Thus, although every context of
assessment includes parameters for ethical (and perhaps also epistemic and aesthetic) standards, these
parameters only have an effect on certain kinds of propositions. Since the theses that comprise NMR are
metaethical and allege only that normative ethical claims are assessment-sensitive, NMR can thus allow for its
own assessment-insensitive truth.25 The fact that parameters for ethical standards have no affect on the truth
values of most propositions can also help to explain why moral relativists tend not to defend relativistic theses
about scientific or mathematical claims. The latter are simply not assessment-sensitive.
MacFarlane (2005a; 2007) contends that his semantic framework can account for various phenomena
involving disagreement that indexical relativists cannot explain. Above we considered the case of Selma, who
found herself in a context in which the ethical standards in place made lying morally impermissible. Suppose
that Selma’s assertive utterance of ‘Lying is wrong’ occurred on Monday and that on Wednesday Selma found
herself—for whatever reason—in a context where the relevant ethical standards do not prohibit lying. On
Wednesday how should Selma assess the truth value of her prior assertion? According to IMR, she should say
that the assertion was correct. IMR also dictates that it would be correct for her to assert on Wednesday both
that ‘Lying is wrong’ is false and that this assertion does not con tradict her previous one. According to NMR,
however, the assertions do conflict because the proposition expressed by ‘Lying is wrong’ on each occasion is
the same. MacFarlane claims that this feature of NMR enables it to better account for the sense in which
Selma is disagreeing with her earlier self.
However, the “truth” of Selma’s assertion on Monday (as assessed by her on Monday) is merely truth-
relative-to-Monday’s-context-of-assessment, whereas the “falsity” of her Monday assertion (as assessed on
Wednesday) is falsity-relative-to-Wednesday’s-context-of-assessment. Importantly, the extensions of these two
notions are not complementary. So, although the proposition expressed by ‘Lying is wrong’ remains the same
in each case, truth and falsity do not. According to NMR, then, the propositions that are expressed are the same
but the notions of truth and falsity are different; whereas according to IMR the propositions that are expressed
are different but the notions of truth and falsity remain the same. In order to provide a framework within which
ordinary moral relativism can be understood, each theory must relativize some aspect of the semantics of moral
judgments. It is not clear, however, that relativizing truth while preserving sameness of propositions is
explanatorily superior to relativizing content while preserving sameness of extension of ‘truth’ and ‘falsity.’ 26
At one point MacFarlane (2007, 26) proposes that two parties genuinely disagree about a subjective matter
if (a) there is an assessment-sensitive proposition that one party accepts as true and the other rejects as false
and (b) the acceptance and the rejection cannot both be accurate when both are assessed from the same context
of assessment. According to MacFarlane (2007, 17–18), a claim is subjective if its truth depends not just on
how things are with respect to the things it is about, but also on how things are with some subject (or perhaps
some larger group) who is not part of the subject matter. It seems that an indexical relativist could equally well
claim that two parties genuinely disagree about a subjective matter if (a) there is a context-sensitive sentence
that one party accepts as expressing a truth and the other rejects as expressing a falsehood and (b) the
acceptance and the rejection cannot both be accurate when the expressions of acceptance and rejection are
uttered in the same context of use. NMR and IMR, then, each have their preferred extension-determining
contexts. Proponents of NMR claim that the ethical standards at contexts of assessment determine the
extensions of ethical terms, whereas proponents of IMR claim that ethical standards at contexts of use
determine their extensions.
For present purposes I do not ultimately need to decide whether IMR or NMR does a better job of
explaining the phenomenon of disagreement because both models agree in the following, important respects.
NMR and the best versions of IMR reject the view that agent-centered considerations determine the truth
values of moral judgments, maintaining instead that the ethical standards of those who assertively utter
normative ethical sentences or assess such utterances for truth and falsity determine the truth values of the
propositions expressed. For reasons similar to those given above, the most defensible versions of NMR
should also be agent-sensitive—i.e., an agent’s practical reasons must be allowed to affect the truth values of
moral judgments when those reasons are sufficiently salient in the asses-sor’s context. In order to explain
the phenomena described in (1.6) through (1.8), proponents of the NMR interpretive model should also
explain how differences in the ethical standards in place at contexts of assessment differentially affect the
truth values of moral judgments. MacFarlane (2005a, §2.1) acknowledges both the existence and the
relevance of such variation but offers no explanation of the mechanisms underlying it. Without fur ther
supplementation, then, MacFarlane’s NMR is unable to explain the data in (1.6) through (1.8). In the
following section I develop a relevant alternatives account of moral judgments that provides the requisite
explanation. The account, which is strongly analogous to the relevant alterna tives account of knowledge
offered by Lewis (1996), is compatible with both indexical and nonindexical interpretations of ordinary
relativism—and doubtless other models as well—and enables each kind of model to ex plain a wider range
of relativist behavior than it would otherwise be able to explain.

V
A. We have seen how certain versions of IMR and NMR can explain how ordinary moral relativists can think it
is permissible for them to make the following claims about the truth of normative ethical judgments and their
own metaethical views:

(1.1') There are no absolute moral truths.

(1.2') What’s right for your culture may not be what’s right for my culture. (1.3') There are absolute truths in
science and mathematics.
(1.4') Moral relativism is true for everyone at all times and at all places. (1.5') No set of moral values, practices or
beliefs is any better than any other.

What is more difficult to explain, however, is how relativists can issue the following value judgments without
contradicting fundamental tenets of their view:

(1.6') We should treat those who engage in alternative ethical practices with tolerance.
(1.6'') None of us has the right to pass judgment on those who engage in alternative ethical practices.
 (1.7') It is wrong for moral absolutists to display intolerance toward those who engage in alternative ethical
practices.
(1.8') While it might have been permissible (or at least excusable) for past cultures to think that their ethical
practices were the only right way of doing things, it is no longer permissible for us to think this in light of
the tremendous diversity in ethical practices that we know exists in the world.

Underlying the charge that relativists contradict themselves when asserting (1.6 ') through (1.8') is the widely
shared assumption that relativists must embrace at least one of the following theses:

(7.1) If moral rightness or wrongness is determined by an individual’s values, ends and attitudes, then if an
assertion of ‘x is F’ is true in one conversational context in which an individual finds herself, then an
assertion of ‘x is F’ will be true in every context in which that individual finds herself.
(7.2) If moral rightness or wrongness is determined by a culture’s shared values, ends and attitudes, then if an
assertion of ‘x is F’ is true in one conversational context in a culture, then an assertion of ‘ x is F’ will be
true in every context in that culture.
The idea is that while morally relevant conversational scores can change across cultures or individuals, they cannot
change within them. I contend that the attribution of these theses to ordinary moral relativists results in
interpretations that fail to do justice to their metaethical views.
The present section offers a relevant alternatives account of moral judgments that aims to provide a
charitable interpretation of how relativists can reasonably assert (1.6 ') through (1.8') in conjunction with (1.1')
through (1.5'). This framework is intended to be supplementary to the general semantic frameworks provided
by IMR and NMR. Like IMR and NMR, the relevant alternatives theory is intended not as an accurate account
of the nature of moral judgment but only as an interpretive model of the thought and behavior of ordinary
moral relativists.
There are two main parts to the relevant alternatives account of moral judgments. The first is a model of
how the truth values of moral judgments can vary across conversational contexts when different sets of
relevant alternatives are salient in those contexts. The second part consists in a set of rules that characterize
many of the factors responsible for changes in the sets of alternatives that are relevant in conversational
contexts. The central thesis of the relevant alternatives theory is that in order for a moral judgment of the form
‘X is F’ to be true, the moral attitudes of conversational participants must render an assertion of ‘Y 1 is G1’
false, for every relevant alternative to X’s being F of the form ‘Y n’s being Gn.’ Allow me to introduce the key
notions here by way of example.27
Suppose that Jimbo, Dolph and Kearney are talking about the fact that a burglar named ‘Molloy’ recently stole
a valuable cubic zirconia, and suppose that Jimbo asserts, ‘Stealing is wrong.’ Suppose that there is sufficient
agreement in the values, ends and attitudes of Jimbo and his conversational partners to make this assertion true
(according to either IMR or NMR). Consider, however, the normative state of affairs of it’s being morally per-
missible for someone in dire financial circumstances to steal food in order to feed his/her starving family.
Because an unqualified assertion of ‘Stealing is wrong’ and an assertion of ‘Stealing in order to feed one’s
starving family is morally permissible’ cannot both be true in the same context, the normative state of affairs
underlying the former assertion would be an alternative (in my sense) to the normative state of affairs underlying
the latter. If the alternative of stealing’s being permissible when it is done to feed one’s starving family were to be
made salient in Jimbo’s conversational context, it would become a relevant alternative. As a relevant alternative,
the motivational attitudes of Jimbo and his interlocutors would need to make an assertion of ‘Stealing food in
order to feed one’s starving family is morally permissible’ false (even if this sentence is never, in fact, asserted) in
order for Jimbo’s original assertion to be true. However, as long as this alternative lacks salience, it counts as an
irrelevant alternative and the motivational attitudes of the conversational participants do not need to make an
assertion of ‘Stealing food in order to feed one’s starving family is morally permissible’ false. The conversational
score thus determines both which alternatives are relevant and whether or not they are ruled out in a given
context.
Normative states of affairs can also fail to be relevant alternatives when they are salient in a context without
satisfying the requirements for being genuine alternatives. If the conversation between Jimbo, Dolph and
Kearney is an ordinary one, making salient the putative impermissibility of torturing cats for the fun of it will
not make this normative state of affairs an alternative to stealing’s being wrong. The reason is that under normal
circumstances bringing up the wrongness of torturing cats has no power to affect the truth values of moral
judgments about stealing. Salient non-alternatives will be especially common features of contexts in which
judgments of goodness or permissibility are being made. If it is correct to assert ‘ X is good’ or ‘Y is
permissible,’ it will typically be correct to assert that many other things are good or permissible as well. It is
only when an assertion of the goodness or permissibility of these other things conflicts with the original moral
judgment that the normative states of affairs in question become alternatives to X’s being good or Y’s being
permissible.
Because the relevant alternatives theory is intended to be embedded within a broader semantic framework
such as IMR and NMR, it is premised on the idea that the values, ends and attitudes of conversational
participants contribute to the determination of the truth values of moral judgments. Because the values and
attitudes of the participants in one conversation will often differ from those in another, it will be possible for
there to be two contexts in which (i) the same normative ethical sentence is asserted in each context, (ii) the
same sets of alternatives are relevant, but (iii) the asserted ethical sentence expresses a true moral judgment in
one context but not in the other. Consider, for example, the well-known example of the Persian king Darius
entertaining the Greeks and Callatians. Knowing that the Greeks customarily burned their dead, Darius asked a
group of Greeks how much money he would have to pay them in order for them to eat the bodies of their dead
fathers. The Greeks replied that no amount of money could get them to do such a thing. Darius then asked a
group of Indians, known as ‘Callatians,’ how much money would be required to get them to burn the bodies of
their dead. The Callatians, who eat their dead ancestors, reacted with horror and asked Darius not to speak of
such a thing. If we suppose (i) that the same set of alternatives concerning what to do with the bodies of one’s
dead relatives was relevant for both the Greeks and the Callatians while appearing before King Darius, (ii) that
an assertion of ‘Burning our dead fathers is permissible’ would be true in a characteristically Greek context,
and (iii) that an assertion of ‘Burning our dead fathers is permissible’ would be false in a characteristically
Callatian context, we get the result that sameness of relevant alternatives does not guarantee sameness of truth
value for one’s moral judgments.28
In summary, where ‘X’ ranges over actions, events, persons and other targets of normative ethical
judgments, the following represent the central theses of the relevant alternatives account of moral judgment:

VII. ‘X’s being F’ denotes a ‘normative state of affairs’ iff ‘F’ is a normative term.
VIII. Y’s being G (where Y and X are not necessarily distinct) is an alternative to X’s being F iff an assertion of
‘X is F’ and an assertion of ‘Y is G’ cannot both be true in the same context.
IX. An alternative is relevant in a context C iff the alternative is salient in C.
X. In order for an assertion of ‘ X is F’ to be true in C, the moral attitudes and affective states of the speakers
and hearers in C must make an assertion of ‘ Y1 is G1’ false in C, for each relevant alternative to X’s being F
of the form ‘Yn’s being Gn.’
XI. What counts as a relevant alternative can vary across contexts. 29

A normative state of affairs may or may not be an alternative to X’s being F. If it is an alternative, it may or may not
be relevant. And if it is relevant, it may or may not be ruled out by the motivational attitudes of the conversational
participants.30
The relevant alternatives theory of moral judgment clearly entails the falsity of (7.1) and (7.2). Because
different alternatives can be relevant for a speaker in different contexts, it is false that if an assertion of ‘ x is F’ is
true in one conversational context in which an individual finds herself, an assertion of ‘ x is F’ will be true in
every context in which that individual finds herself. The variation in truth value of moral judgments across
contexts allowed by the relevant alternatives theory enables it to explain how an average moral relativist can, at
one time, admonish others to refrain from making negative moral judgments about others and, at other times,
make harsh moral judgments about moral absolutists who display intolerance toward others. If different sets of
alternatives are salient in the two contexts, different moral judgments may well be called for.
B. Another key to explaining (1.6) through (1.8) and (1.6 ') through (1.8') is to supplement the general
framework provided by the relevant alternatives theory with an account of the factors that cause some alternatives
to be relevant in one context but not in another. Both IMR and NMR agree that the truth value of a normative
ethical judgment in a context is determined by the moral attitudes and affective states of the speakers and hearers
in that context. According to IMR, the relevant contexts will be contexts of use, whereas according to NMR they
will be contexts of assessment. On both views, variations in motivational attitudes can result in changes that are
semantic and not merely pragmatic. According to IMR, for example, differences in the moral attitudes and
affective states of conversational partners can lead to different propositions being expressed by normative
ethical sentences, while according to NMR such changes can result in different truth values being assigned to
the same propositions. Thus, any account of the mechanisms responsible for shifts in the relevant sets of
motivational attitudes will be an account with semantic import.
Above we noted the importance of ‘agent-sensitivity,’ whereby an agent’s practical reasons can affect an
attributor’s moral judgments when—but only when—those reasons are sufficiently salient in the attributor’s
context. Agent-sensitivity allows relativists in some contexts to make judgments about agents whose moral
understandings are very different from their own and also allows them in other contexts to say that judgments
about agents with different moral understandings may be inappropriate precisely because of those differences.
We also noted that any theoretical model of ordinary moral relativism must recognize that the relevant set of
motivational attitudes can change from context to context. Such changes can occur when conversational part-
ners adjust the set of presuppositions they take to be relevant to determining the meanings and truth values of
assertions made by their conversational partners.
On the relevant alternatives account, the most basic rules governing context change are Lewisian rules of
accommodation. If, for example, a speaker asserts that a certain action is morally impermissible, then if the
other conversational participants acquiesce in the presuppositions and implications of that assertion, the
boundary specifying what actions are permissible in that context shrinks (if necessary) so that the speaker’s
assertion will be true. If a speaker asserts that a certain action is permissible, the boundary may expand. 31
Drawing upon Stalnaker’s (1972; 1973; 1974) work on presupposition, Lewis (1979b, 340) formulates the
following fundamental rule of accommodation:

Rule of Accommodation for Presupposition If at time t something is said that requires presupposition P to be acceptable,
and if P is not presupposed just before t, then—ceteris paribus and within certain limits—presupposition P comes into
existence at t.32

Believing that hearers are generally willing to be accommodating, speakers can make statements whose
presuppositional requirements they know are not already satisfied by the existing conversational record.
Whenever the content of these requirements is recognizable and has some chance of being accepted by their
hearers, speakers believe they can rely upon hearers to accommodate their statements by adding their
presuppositions to the shared conversational scoreboard. In this way, speakers can change the conversational
score in a context simply by making certain assertive utterances. 33 Lewis (1979b, 339) famously suggests:
[I]t’s not as easy as you might think to say something that will be unacceptable for lack of required presuppositions.
Say something that requires a missing presupposition, and straightway that presupposition springs into existence,
making what you said acceptable after all. (Or at least, that is what happens if your conversational partners tacitly
acquiesce...)

Of course, accommodation does not always occur, and if it does, it does not always occur quite as easily as these
comments suggest. Nevertheless, presupposition accommodation is a fundamental factor in changing conversational
scores.34
According to the relevant alternatives theory of moral judgment, the boundary specifying what actions are
morally permissible in a context is sensitive to the particular comparison or contrast classes pragmatically pre -
supposed by speakers’ assertions. These classes can influence the relevant standards in a context by restricting
the range of cases to which a target of judgment may be compared. If, for example, a salient comparison class
includes only Nazi soldiers, a Nazi guard who treats Jewish prisoners with some degree of kindness may be
judged somewhat positively, whereas if the comparison class includes a wider range of subjects that same
guard would likely be judged more negatively. These considerations suggest the following rule:

Rule of Comparison When a comparison class is salient in a context and a target of moral judgment clearly belongs to
that class, differences between the target and other members of the class tend to become more salient but differences
between the target and members of the complement of the comparison class tend to become less salient.

Comparison classes can perform a converse function when the target action clearly does not belong to the
relevant class. For example, if one compares a white lie to acts of genocide, the lie will likely appear fairly
innocent. However, if one compares the lie to some standard of moral perfection, it will appear to fall short.
Thus, we have:

Rule of Contrast When a comparison class is salient in a context and a target of moral judgment clearly does not belong
to that class, differences between the target and members of the comparison class tend to become more salient and
 differences between the target and other members of the most salient class to which it belongs tend to become less
salient.

On the relevant alternatives theory, contrastive foci can also play a role in determining which comparison or
contrast class is relevant for a given moral judgment (cf. Dretske 1972; 1981). For example, the focus of an
assertion of ‘It was morally wrong for Mr. Burns to accept money from the lobbyist’ might be on the fact that it
was wrong for Mr. Burns (as opposed to someone else) to accept money from the lobbyist. Or it might be on the
fact that it was wrong for Mr. Burns to accept money (as opposed to some other type of gift) from the lobbyist.
Or it might be that it was wrong for Mr. Burns to accept money from that lobbyist, where it might not have
been wrong for him to accept money from someone else.
Just as skeptical hypotheses about the external world are designed to neutralize the evidence we have for
believing various empirical propositions, relativists often take relevant practical alternatives to neutralize the
moral considerations that underwrite certain moral judgments. Regarding the skeptic, Lewis (1979b, 355)
writes:

The commonsensical epistemologist says: “I know the cat is in the carton—there he is before my eyes—I just can’t be
wrong about that!” The sceptic replies: “You might be the victim of a deceiving demon.” Thereby he brings into
consideration possibilities hitherto ignored, else what he says would be false. The boundary shifts outward so that what he
says is true. Once the boundary is shifted, the commonsensical epistemologist must concede defeat. And yet he was not in
any way wrong when he laid claim to infallible knowledge. What he said was true with respect to the score as it then was.

In a similar fashion, suppose that Nelson makes a negative moral judgment about Waylon’s sexual lifestyle. And
suppose that one of Nelson’s interlocutors, Milhouse, responds by describing cultures in which Waylon’s lifestyle
is embraced and treated as normal. Suppose that Milhouse also argues that if Nelson lived in one of these cultures,
he would have very different views about Waylon’s lifestyle. By making salient certain alternatives and suggesting
that Nelson’s moral considerations do nothing to rule out their moral permissibility, Milhouse—at least according
to the relevant alternatives account—may succeed in changing the conversational score so that Nelson’s moral
judgment no longer counts as true.35
The relevant alternatives account also provides a ready explanation of (1.8)—i.e., of how relativists can
reasonably think that anthropological evidence concerning ethical diversity supports the claims of relativism.
Ethnographic studies make salient practical alternatives than are not ordinarily salient in contexts of moral
judgment. When these alternatives become salient, relativists (and perhaps even some of their conversational
participants who do not self-identify as relativists) have a tendency to make different judgments than they are
inclined to make when such alternatives are not salient. It is also significant that the ethnographic reports of moral
diversity cited by early twentieth-century defenders of moral relativism—e.g., Benedict (1934; 1946) and Sumner
(1906)—concerned actual groups of people. Facts about real people who abandon their elderly parents to death
by starvation or throw their infants to wild animals have far more context-changing power than any philosopher’s
fanciful thought experiments. In other words:
Rule of Actuality If an alternative is part of the entrenched practices of an actual group of people, it will more easily
become salient than alternatives that are merely hypothetical.

The fact that some of these people may have sensible reasons for engaging in such practices also seems to have
an impact on how they are treated in contexts of moral debate:

Rule of Reasonableness The degree to which subjects who embrace an alternative are portrayed as being reasonable
tends to affect the ease with which an alternative becomes salient and how strong a subject’s moral considerations
must be to rule it out.

If a practical alternative is described as being a traditional rite of passage or an identity-defining practice,

relativists (and, in my experience, other subjects who do not self-identify as relativists as well) are less likely
to think negative moral judgments based about those practices are warranted:

Rule of Centrality The degree to which an alternative is portrayed as being integral to the fabric of a society or to an
individual’s identity will affect the ease with which the alternative becomes salient and how strong a subject’s moral
considerations must be to rule it out.
 Students in my introductory courses sometimes confess to being gay, Catholic, on Prozac, or to have had an
abortion. In addition to making for some rather uncomfortable social situations, these confessions also have the
effect of softening the stances of hard-liners in the classroom. Relativists can claim these behaviors are
governed by the following rule:

Rule of Future Interaction The more likely it is that an attributor will have a face-to-face encounter with someone
engaging in an alternative practice, the easier it will be for the alternative to become salient and the stronger a
subject’s moral considerations will have to be to rule it out.

It is one thing to pass judgment on faceless, nameless people. It is another thing to pass judgment on someone
directly in front of you. The Rule of Future Interactions is thus a rule of social proximity, with greater
proximity strengthening the context-changing and standards-raising power of practical alternatives. 36
When the question of the moral permissibility of some action is raised in a university classroom, invariably
there are some students who reply that they don’t think it would be right for us to pass laws that would prevent
people from performing these actions or to undertake political or military action to keep people from doing so
on the other side of the world. Philosophy professors are often dismayed at the way students seemingly
conflate the question of whether we should judge an action to be right or wrong with the question of what, if
anything, should be done about it. 37 While there is certainly a distinction to be made here, the relevant
alternatives account can explain how these professors fail to give students sufficient credit for appre ciating the
important connection between endorsing a moral judgment and being willing to act on that judgment. On the
relevant alternatives account of moral judgment, students who are disinclined to make certain kinds of moral
judgments are often sensitive to the following factors:

Rule of Stakes The more that appears to be at stake in making a moral judgment, the higher the standards will tend to be
for the correctness of that judgment.
Rule of Intrusion The more likely it is that a negative moral judgment will lead to some kind of intrusion into the lives
of others, the higher the standards will tend to be for the correctness of that judgment.
Rule of Publicity The more public or formal a context of moral judgment is, the higher the standards will tend to be for
the correctness of judgments made within that context.

The Rules of Stakes, Intrusion and Publicity show how it can reasonable for subjects to be reluctant to make
negative moral judgments in public discourses when they have practical reasons for wanting to avoid certain
courses of action—particularly those involving intervention or force.
Peter Unger (1995) argues that ordinary moral standards for what counts as morally acceptable behavior can be
replaced with uncommonly high standards for acceptable behavior, with the help of a few thought experiments
and some plausible formulations of ethical principles. In the light of the higher standards, our behavior will be
judged quite harshly, even if, in light of ordinary, undemanding standards, our behavior will be deemed morally
acceptable. The strategies Unger (1995, 9–11) describes for effectively raising moral standards in a context can be
reformulated as the following rules:

Rule of Attention If several behaviorally demanding but intuitively appealing ethical principles are brought before one’s
attention, the standards for morally acceptable behavior will tend to be raised.
Rule of Life and Death Appealing to ethically demanding standards that concern the saving of people’s lives tends to
make those standards more salient than ordinary moral standards which do not directly concern the saving of lives.
Rule of Gradualism Attempts to raise the moral standards in a context will generally encounter less resistance if the
attempts proceed by a series of small steps rather than large jumps.
Rule of Future Focus Attempts to raise the moral standards in a context will generally encounter less resistance if the
attempts focus on possible, future behavior rather than actual, past behavior.
Rule of Self-Application By willingly applying ethically demanding standards to one’s own behavior, one will tend to
raise the standards for morally acceptable behavior in that context.
Rule of Specificity By including highly specific information about what certain ethically demanding courses of action
would involve, one blocks certain kinds of excuses that could be raised to the following of those courses of action
and it becomes more difficult for one’s interlocutors to claim they do not need to follow them.
Rule of Pathos Making vivid certain kinds of horrible scenarios—e.g., the impending suffering and death of innocent
 little children—tends to raise the standards for morally acceptable behavior in a context.

Unger (1995, 14) argues that contexts determine not only what the relevant moral standards are but also what
sort of behavior counts as close enough to complete conformity to those standards.
According to the relevant alternatives account, a moral judgment will be correct only when the ethical
standards in place rule out all relevant alternatives. This means that the more alternatives there are on the table,
the more difficult it can be to make correct moral judgments. When too many alternatives are relevant, the
norms, values, attitudes and commitments that underwrite many ordinary moral judgments may be unable to
retain their force. This situation is analogous to one in which the extended discussion of skeptical hypotheses
makes almost any knowledge claim about the external world seem unwarranted. Lewis (1996, 550) writes:

Maybe epistemology is the culprit. Maybe this extraordinary pastime robs us of our knowledge. Maybe we do know
a lot in daily life; but maybe when we look hard at our knowledge, it goes away. But only when we look at it harder
than the sane ever do in daily life; only when we let our paranoid fantasies rip. That is when we are forced to admit
that there always are uneliminated possibilities of error, so that we have fallible knowledge or none.

Metaethical reflection may have a similar tendency to deprive us of the ability to make certain kinds of moral
judgment in certain contexts.38 Call a context in which the range of moral judgments that subjects can correctly
make has significantly shrunk a ‘neutral context.’
The notion of a neutral context can help to explain why relativists feel entitled to make cross-cultural
judgments in some contexts but not in others. In other words, it can explain (1.7). When relativistic metaethical
theses are salient in a context, the perceived fact that the truth of a judgment made in one’s “home” (or default)
context does not transfer to all other possible contexts will also be salient. It is easy to see how the salience of
this fact might blunt the force of one’s “home” values, particularly if the qualitative distance between oneself
and others is also made salient.39 Relativists, then, can admit there is a kernel of truth in the objection that
relativistic metaeth-ical views undermine the legitimacy of many normative ethical judgments they wish to
make (cf. Postow 1979). Relativists often cannot at the same time attend to certain features of their metaethical
positions and correctly assert certain kinds of moral judgments. However, relativists can also claim that the
objection errs in assuming that relativists can never make normative ethical judgments. 40 They can do so as
long as they are not in contexts that prevent the standards, norms and values that underwrite such judgments
from being in force.41
The aforementioned rules do not exhaustively characterize the factors responsible for changes in the sets of
alternatives that are relevant in conversational contexts. However, in conjunction with the general framework
provided by relevant alternatives account of moral judgment, they can be seen to model—down to a fine-
grained level of detail—the ways in which the linguistic behavior of ordinary relativists is sensitive to subtle
differences in the normative states of affairs that are salient in a conversational context. Without the relevant
alternatives theory, extant versions of IMR and NMR will be unable to explain many aspects of relativist
behavior, such as the phenomena described in (1.6) through (1.8). However, combining the relevant alternatives
account with an agent-sensitive, attributor-centered IMR or an agent-sensitive, assessor-centered NMR results in
a powerful explanatory model for understanding ordinary relativism.

IV
There are no doubt many other formulations of relativism and related notions (e.g., expressivism) that could be
used to construct alternative interpretive models of ordinary moral relativism but that I have not had space to
consider here (cf., e.g., Barker 2000; Copp 2001; Richard 2004; Finlay 2004; 2005; 2006; 2008; Brogaard
2008; MacFarlane 2009).42 And, indeed, since I do not claim to have shown in any comprehensive fashion
what model of the semantic and pragmatic features of moral judgments best captures the views of ordinary
moral relativists, some of these theories might well be superior to any suitably supplemented version of IMR
or NMR. However, I hope that my discussion has shed important light on the general constraints that any
adequate interpretation of ordinary relativism must satisfy. Neither a completely agent-centered nor an entirely
attributor- or assessor-centered perspective will do. Nor will any account that cannot explain the ways in which
relativists’ moral judgments are sensitive to changes in the changing salience of certain possibilities across
contexts. I also hope that the relevant alternatives account of moral judgment reveals how much explanatory
work can be done within both the IMR and NMR frameworks and that this will positively contribute to the
debate about relativism in general and moral relativism in particular. 43

E ndno tes

1 Charges of self-defeat have been leveled by Singer (1961, 332), Williams (1972, 20ff.), Lyons (1976), Postow (1979), Carson &
Moser (2001) and in a qualified form by Pojman (1999, ch. 2), among others.
2 Epistemic contextualists count as indexical epistemic relativists (cf. section I below).
3 (MR1) is intended to generalize beyond sentences and their utterances to the realm of unspoken thoughts. For ease of
exposition, however, I will focus only upon sentences and their utterances. I also think that (MR1) can be extended to cover the
ethically normative components of partially descriptive terms like ‘murder.’ However, extending the present anal ysis to such “thick
concepts” introduces complexities that I do not have space to address here.
4 In Kaplan’s (1989) terminology, ethical terms are ‘true demonstratives’ rather than ‘pure indexicals’ because their references are
determined in part by facts about speakers and their contexts that go beyond the most basic features of contexts, such as the time, place
and identity of the speaker. The references of pure indexicals (e.g., ‘I,’ ‘today’), by contrast, are determined more or less automatically,
given ordinary linguistic conventions and public facts about the context of utterance. No recourse to the actions or mental states of
speakers is needed to determine their referents.
5 IMR counts as a form of moral cognitivism because it takes normative ethical judgments to have truth conditions (realistically
understood) and thus to be apt for objective truth or falsity. Proponents of IMR can argue that, just as the semantic variability of utterances of
‘It is warm and sunny here’ does not undermine the objectivity of this claim, the variability of ‘Lying for personal gain is wrong’ and ‘Adult
children have a moral duty to care for their aging parents’ does not rob them of theirs. In one sense of ‘realism,’ IMR also counts as a form of
moral realism because it seems to imply there are moral facts in light of which moral judgments are true or false. However, since moral facts
are not determined by mind-independent facts, IMR may fail to count as a form of realism in another sense of the term. If there weren’t
particular sets of ethical standards that are endorsed by particular groups of people, there would be no truthmakers for ethical judgments.
Dreier (1992, 33) also claims that if one takes the existence of one correct moral scheme to be central to moral realism, IMR will count as
antirealist. Cf. Sayre-McCord (1991; 2006) and Copp (2001) for further discussion of these issues.
6 None of the interpretive models to be considered assumes that ordinary relativists ex plicitly represent any of the complex details
about the semantics of moral judgments that they posit. Rather, the models seek to reconstruct the tacit knowledge of ordinary relativists
in much the same way that a linguist’s reconstruction of the grammar of a natural language attempts to model the linguistic competence
of average speakers without supposing that the latter possess explicit representations of the model.
7 Whether IMR undermines the motivation for making negative judgments about the behavior of others is something I address in
more detail in section V below.
8 Wright (2001), Kölbel (2004), Brogaard (2008) and MacFarlane (unpublished) also interpret Harman as an indexical moral
relativist.
9 In order to fit Harman’s account properly into the mold of indexical relativism, we should say that (4.1) has the same content
but not the same character as (4.1 '). Roughly, meaning or character is primarily a property of types of expressions (rather than tokens
or utterances) and is fixed by linguistic conventions, whereas content is a property of individual utterances and is tied to truth
conditions and cognitive significance. Cf. Braun (2001) and Perry (1997) for more on the distinction between content and linguistic
meaning as it pertains to indexicals.
10 It is not completely clear what sort of communicative act Harman thinks would be involved in the expression of a speaker’s
endorsement. Cf. Barker (2000), Copp (2001) and Finlay (2004) for some recent theoretical models of how endorsement may be
expressed.
11 The term ‘existence internalism’ was coined by Darwall (1983, 54).
12 Harman (1975; 1977; 1996) allows that there are limiting cases in which speakers can make contentful moral judgments without
there being any agreement in motivational attitudes between speakers and hearers because the relevant “group” contains only one person.
13 The term is due to DeRose (1995).
14 Despite of his official commitment to the universal applicability of existence internalism, Harman (1975, 18; 1996, 59–60, 63)
occasionally comes close to suggesting such a salience-based treatment of an agent’s practical reasons.
15 Cf. also the views of Barker (2000) and Finlay (2004; 2005; 2006; 2008). Copp (2001) defends a view he calls ‘realist-
expressivism,’ which bears a great deal of similarity to IMR. Indeed, on certain ways of developing the views, they might well be
equivalent.
16 Although Dreier thinks that utterances of ‘x is good’ have the same content as ‘x is highly evaluated by standards of system M,’ he
claims that in making moral judgments subjects are doing something more like expressing beliefs by asserting them than talking directly
about those beliefs. Moral standards get expressed in moral judgments, but talking about them is not the point. Dreier (1992, 27) notes
that this version of IMR is “simple, and too crude,” but the simplicity and crudeness he has in mind have nothing to do with the problems
I raise for the account.
17 The terms ‘single scoreboard semantics’ and ‘multiple scoreboard semantics’ are due to DeRose (2004). The notion of a ‘conversational
scoreboard’ comes from Lewis’s (1979b) account of scorekeeping in a language game. Although Lewis originally appeared to take
accommodation to be a pragmatic phenomenon that did not affect the truth conditions of utterances, in later work (1980) he clearly took it to be
a semantic phenomenon, and it is this later picture that has been taken up by various relativists.
18 Cf. Finlay (2006) for another account of how moral discourse involves presupposition accommodation.
19 If Dreier intends to allow for semantic flexibility, he never makes it clear that he intends to do so. Cf. Finlay (2005, 7–8) for
analogous criticisms of the indexicalist theories of Dreier and Barker (2000).
20 At one point Dreier (1990, 6) claims that moral judgments depend upon the most salient moral systems in contexts of use, but a
social or intersubjective notion of salience plays no role in his theory.
21 This point is due to Scanlon (1995, 222).
22 Kaplan’s (1989) semantic theory, for example, includes a time parameter among the circumstances of evaluation for propositions.
23 Like IMR, NMR also comes in both individualistic and intersubjective varieties, but again I will not try to decide between the two
variations.
24 Cf. MacFarlane (2005b, 326).
25 Alternatively, nonindexical relativists can follow MacFarlane (2005b, 338, n. 19) in taking themselves to be describing a
relativistic language in a metalanguage that is devoid of assessment-sensitivity.
26 MacFarlane acknowledges that the existence of genuine disagreement between two subjects concerning the truth value of an
assertive utterance does not always require sameness of the proposition expressed. MacFarlane (2007, 24) allows that genuine
disagreement can occur between a subject who accepts a certain proposition and another who rejects a different but suitably related
proposition. The example MacFarlane uses involves Mary accepting at noon the tensed proposition that Socrates is sitting and Peter
rejecting at midnight the tensed proposition that Socrates was sitting twelve hours ago. Relevantly similar examples could be multiplied.
Cf. also the considerations offered in section III.C.
27 Thanks to Stephen Finlay for offering many helpful suggestions that greatly improved the discussion in this section.
28 Thanks to Stephen Finlay for bringing this example to my attention for purposes of the present discussion.

29 Although (RA1) through (RA5) are focused primarily on singular moral judgments, the relevant alternatives approach can be
generalized to cover categorical moral judgments as well. For example, most of the time ordinary relativists—and indeed ordinary subjects in
general—are willing to treat assertions of ‘Lying is wrong’ as straightforwardly true, and their natural inclination is to treat the implicit
quantifier as universal. However, when alternatives are presented in which lying seems morally permissible—e.g., when confronted by Nazi
soldiers asking whether you are hiding Jews in your cellar—subjects often no longer take ‘Lying is wrong’ to be true without qualification.
According to the relevant alternatives account, when subjects initially agree to the unqualified truth of the judgment, practical alternatives
involving Nazi soldiers are not relevant. Instead, more common alternatives involving lying for personal gain, etc. are relevant. In light of
these alternatives, it is wrong to lie—full stop. In light of different sets of alternatives, however, it may not be wrong. Alternative
explanations of the variability of categorical moral judgments must claim either that the implicit quantifiers are generalized quantifiers like
“most” or that subjects are speaking loosely, but strictly speaking falsely, when they agree to their truth. By contrast, the relevant alternatives
account can easily preserve the commonsense intuition that the quantifiers in categorical judgments are universal and that subjects can
sometimes speak truly when uttering them in an unqualified form.
30 Cf. Finlay (2009) for a different, but related, relevant alternatives account of normativity and the meaning of ‘ought.’
31 Cf. Lewis (1979a) for further details and complications concerning the kinematics of permissibility assertions.
32 Stalnaker (1974, 200) offers the following initial characterization of a pragmatic presup position: “A proposition P is a pragmatic
presupposition of a speaker in a given context just in case the speaker assumes or believes that P, assumes or believes that his addressee
assumes or believes that P, and assumes or believes that his addressee recognizes that he is making these assumptions, or has these
beliefs.” He modifies this definition to allow presuppositions that involve subjects merely acting as if they take certain things for granted.
Stalnaker (1974, 202) also claims, “Presupposing is thus not a mental attitude like believing, but is rather a linguistic disposition—a
disposition to behave in one’s use of language as if one had certain beliefs, or were making certain assumptions.”
33 MacFarlane (unpublished, §7; 2005a, §5.1) argues that the Lewisian theory of accommodation can be incorporated into his
relativist framework; in fact, he contends that Lewis’ theory presupposes the kind of assessment-sensitivity he defends.
34 What happens when two conversational participants are executing maneuvers that have a tendency to push the conversational
score in different directions and neither sufficiently accommodates the other? Will either of them be speaking the truth? Lewis (1979b;
1996) appears to think that when one of the subjects is a skeptic and the other is a Moorean, the skeptic wins. Many scholars believe
there is something about the skeptic’s challenge that make his scoreboard-changing maneuvers more powerful than the Moorean’s.
Because many of the relativist’s strategies parallel those of the skeptic, the former might be taken to have the power to trump an
absolutist’s maneuvers. DeRose (2004, 15) suggests that if a belief counts as knowledge according to both of the “personally indicated
standards” of two disagreeing subjects, it is correct in that context to call it ‘knowledge.’ If it does not count as knowledge on either set
of standards, it is not knowledge. However, if it counts as knowledge on one but not on the other, DeRose suggests that ‘ S knows that p’
will be neither true nor false in that context. The deeper the disagreement between them, the larger the gap region will be. Similar
considerations could apply to subjects who disagree about moral matters. Cf. DeRose (2004) for valuable, detailed discussion of this
issue.
35 Cf. Brogaard (2003) for another recent comparison between the issues surrounding moral relativism and those concerning
epistemological skepticism.
36 Because familiarity is roughly equivalent to a kind of continuing or commonplace salience, it is somewhat trivial that the
judgments of ordinary relativists are sensitive to the Rule of Familiarity: The more familiar a practical alternative is, the more easily it
will become and remain salient.
37 Cf., e.g., Rachels (1999, 33).
38 Theoretical discussions of ethical issues also seem to have the power to give rise to neutral contexts because such discussions
often call for some degree of impartiality or neutrality on the part of conversational participants. Scanlon (1995, 232), for example,
writes:
The reasons that a person has to follow the traditions that are part of his or her way of life depend on the particular meaning that those
actions and that history have for that person. They need not derive this importance from any beliefs about the value of ‘tradition’ in
general. In fact, once one reaches that level of abstraction reasons of the kind in question largely lose their force. (When people start
talking in general terms about ‘the value of traditions’ they are usually on the edge of ceasing to care about their own.)
Thus, there may be something about the abstract and penetrating nature of theoretical reflection itself that tends to bring about neutral
contexts.
39 Just as it seems to be easier to raise ethical standards than it is to lower them as long as one remains in the same conversation, it may
also be easier to move from a non-neutral context to a neutral one than it is to go in the other direction. Lewis (1979b, 352), for example,
writes, “I take it that the rule of accommodation can go both ways. But for some reason raising of standards goes more smoothly than
lowering.” Unger (1995, 15) suggests that explicitly discussing the semantics of moral terms or talking about the rules or strategies one has
used for raising standards has the effect of lowering standards in a context. Otherwise, the gradual passage of time seems to be the most
common way that standards become lowered. One thing that seems capable of bringing one immediately out of a neutral context is an
urgent circumstance that seems to call for immediate action. If, for example, one is having a leisurely metaethical discussion and one’s
interlocutor begins to have a heart attack or suffers a gunshot wound, whatever theoretical distance may have been generated between
oneself and one’s convictions will rapidly be closed. I have doubts about the old saying that there are no atheists in foxholes, but foxholes
certainly seem to be no place for serious metaethical reflection.
40 Some critics (e.g., Williams 1972, 20–21) erroneously contend that relativists cannot assert ‘One should respect the privacy of others’ or
‘Murder is wrong’ because such assertions would have to make use of a nonrelative sense of ‘wrong.’ Clearly, however, moral relativists can
make these assertions—‘should’ and ‘wrong’ will simply express different contents in different contexts. Pojman (1999, 34) asserts, “If, as
seems to be the case, valid criticism supposes an objective or impartial standard, then relativists cannot morally criticize anyone outside their
own culture.” Since relativists challenge the assumption that valid criticism presupposes a non-relativist standard, Pojman’s objection is
question-begging in the present context.
41 The fact that ordinary relativists balk at the idea that there might be contexts in which ‘It is wrong to torture infants for the fun of it’ or
‘Serial murder and serial rape are morally abhorrent’ are false suggests they tacitly accept some limits on the range of relevant practical
alternatives. Critics of relativism contend that relativists contradict themselves when they refuse to countenance the possible truth (i.e., the
truth in some context) of these examples. However, there are various ways that relativists can account for the existence of limits to the degree
to which they can accommodate differences in the conversational scores of their interlocutors and the degree to which they can distance
themselves from their deepest moral convictions in neutral contexts. If, for example, what is asserted or presupposed runs contrary to deeply
held values, goals, desires, commitments or intentions, subjects may be unable to accommodate the assertion. Strongly held convictions will
also be more likely to retain their salience in neutral contexts. Williams (1975) proposes an account of when the norms and practices of one
group count as real options for members of another group. This account suggests an interesting constraint on what kinds of practical
alternatives may become relevant. According to Williams (1975, 222), a practice is a real option for a group of subjects if it possible for those
subjects to begin engaging in the practice while at the same time “retain[ing] their hold on reality” and making rational sense of their
transition to the new practice. Williams (1975, 224) claims, “In this sense many [moral systems] which have been held are not real options
now. The life of a Greek Bronze Age chief, or a mediaeval Samurai, and the outlooks that go with those, are not real options for us: there is
no way of living them.” Options that are not real may be incapable of becoming relevant alternatives and thus may have no tendency to
change the conversational score—even when they are salient in a context of judgment. Although Williams (1975, 223) claims it is an
objective matter whether an option is real or not, relativists might want to argue that the context-changing power of an option is a function
of the degree to which it is plausible to think the option is real. Other conceptions of real options are of course compatible with the general
framework adopted here. (The notion of a real option might even help to explain why some are more attracted to moral relativism than
others. Individuals for whom more alternative practices are real options might be more inclined to accept moral relativism, whereas
individuals for whom few alternatives are real options might be drawn to absolutism.)
42 The relevant alternatives account of moral judgment is consistent with the nonindexical contextualism of MacFarlane (2009) and
Brogaard (2008) and many other interpretive models as well.
43 I would like to thank Stephen Finlay, audience members at the Spring 2008 Eastern Regional Meeting of the Society of Christian
Philosophers, and participants in my Spring 2008 graduate epistemology seminar for helpful comments on previous versions of this article.

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 Absolute Morality and
Absolute Truth and What it
means to you.
Neil Mammen
09/26/04
www.neilmammen.com 1/17

If there is no absolute Morality, why was Hitler Wrong?

If there is an absolute Morality,
why do YOU get to decide what it is and NOT Hitler?

Here are some common statements that we

Christians are going to run across
regarding truth and morality:
1. There is no absolute truth.

2. That maybe true for you but it’s not true for me.

3. I think all religions are true.

4. So many people disagree about Morality that there can’t be an absolute

Morality (or there is no absolute Morality).

5. Who are you to say other people’s cultural values are wrong?

6. You have the right to choose your own values.

7. It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you are sincere.

8. Christians are intolerant.

9. Who are you to judge others? The Bible says: Judge Not.

10. It is wrong to force your morality on others!

11. You can’t legislate Morality!

You will run into these statements are school, at work and maybe even at
home. You will hear these statements by characters in movies, by reporters in
the papers and by news anchors in the news. Your teachers may say these
things, your friends may say these things, even your family may say these
things, and if you aren’t ready for them, you may accept them blindly
yourself.

Now I’m not going to give you responses to these questions right away, why,
because I want to lead you through the logic behind the response before I
give you the response. I do think it is critical that we are able to respond to
these questions rationally and logically. Because we believe that we serve a
rational and logical God. Why do we believe that? Partly because rationality
and logic are part of the nature of the mighty God we serve. We don’t have
time to go into that in this talk but we will at some point in the future.

Absolute Morality

First let’s talk about Absolute Morality. I believe that there IS an Absolute
Morality.

But you may validly ask how can I make such a statement. After all, don’t
different cultures have different moral values? For instance a friend of mine
named Howard gave me an example where in certain jungle tribes, ankles are
considered very sexual. When the missionaries first went out there the
tribeswomen wore no tops. So to avoid staring at their breasts the men would
cast their eyes down. Well this caused a lot of trouble because the tribesmen
got angry that these men were staring at their wives ankles. Ankles were
considered sexual, while breasts weren't. So doesn’t that indicate that
morality changes from one culture to another?

Today in our culture we presume that everybody will have sex before they are
married. Our culture thinks that sex before, after and outside marriage is an
acceptable standard and that the only reason that people weren't to have sex
outside of marriage is because all the religious old coots who made up the old
rules were prudes. Or they feel that these religious zealots didn't want grown
adults to have any fun. So what was wrong 40 years ago is no longer wrong
now it seems. And this we are told is an example of morality that moves with
the times.

Furthermore, we run into situational ethics, for instance another friend called
Spencer was telling me the case of a man who'd broken into a church and
stolen food. His lawyer was arguing that the church planned to hand out that
same food the next day anyway and so he didn't really steal, he just took his
food early because he was hungry. Was the man really a thief?

So we are asked: doesn’t morality depend on the situation? If so, how can I
say that there is indeed an absolute right and an absolute wrong?

The consequences of no “Absolute Morality”

But before we get to that answer I want to ask you this: What are the
logical and real consequences if there wasn’t an absolute morality?

The immediate consequence of that is that there is no right and no wrong. It

becomes one of those: What is right for you may not be right for me sort of
things. Or who am I to judge you? And this may be very appealing. It's
especially appealing today with the whole concept of tolerance.

But there are some real consequences to this. Let me give you an example.
The philosopher Frederick Coplestone and the atheist Bertrand Russell
were involved in a debate. And at this point those folk in my Biblestudy
group will know what comes next. At one point in the debate, Coplestone
said, "Mr. Russell, you do believe in good and bad, don't you?" Russell

answered, "Yes, I do." "How do you differentiate between them?" challenged

Coplestone. Russell shrugged his shoulders and said, "The same way I
differentiate between yellow and blue." Coplestone graciously responded and
said, "But Mr. Russell, you differentiate between yellow and blue by seeing,
don't you? How do you differentiate between good and bad?" Russell said
"On the basis of feeling-what else?" Now Coplestone decided not to do so,
but the next question could have been. "Mr. Russell, in some cultures they
feel like they should love their neighbors, in other cultures they feel they
should eat their neighbors. Do you have any preference?

You see the minute you take away the absolutes from the equation and make
the issue arbitrary you end up with the question of who decides? If there is
no absolute morality, is there a difference between Mother Teresa and
Hitler?

You see if morality is not absolute then what right do you have to make any
distinction between the two, it becomes simply a matter of preference?

I like to put it this way: If there is no absolute morality, why was Hitler
wrong? If there is an absolute morality, why do YOU

get to decide what it is and not Hitler?

The fundamental problem with not having an absolute morality is that you
then have no basis to judge Hitler. Because as far as he was concerned, it was
moral to kill the Jews. Why? Because they were not human according to Him.
How do we deal with that issue? Well one answer you’ll get, which I found
out from an atheist friend is: Because there is no absolute morality we base
our morality on what best for mankind. You see he knew that he couldn't say
you do what is best for your society or your family because… why? Because
then he'd be forced to say that what Hitler did was OK, because Hitler was
doing what was best for his own German society. OK so he said do the best
for mankind. But still, doing what is best for mankind doesn't really answer
the question. It doesn’t answer the question because all it does is push the
responsibility to other questions that we must still decide on.

Can you figure out what those problems

are? What are the problems with that

answer? They are: 1. Who decides what is

best for mankind? And 2. Who decides

who is mankind?

After all one could well argue, perhaps what Hitler did was best for
mankind. If you kill all the week and sickly won't that improve the gene
pool? Just like the wolves that cull the sick deer from the fold ensure that
deer will always be healthy. And any deer with bad genes never survive to
pass on their bad genes. A healthy species will last longer. Wasn’t Hitler
trying to do just this when he tried to create Friederich Nietzsche’s superman
and super race?

Secondly, Hitler decided that the Jews did not qualify as mankind. Just like
the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court back in the 1800s when they
decided that African Americans were not considered persons. So who
decides what is right and what is wrong? Who decides who is human and
who is not? Breathe deep the gathering gloom, we decide what is grey and
what is white? (Sorry that’s a reference to the Moody Blues’ theology).

Thirdly, if there is no absolute morality then doing what “is right” is merely a
preference. Hitler preferred killing Jews, Corrie Ten Boom (who hid them)
preferred saving Jews. I prefer Passion Fruit Sorbet, you prefer Mocha
Almond Fudge Ice Cream. How can you say one is right and one is wrong?
As we said before how can you say Mother Teresa is a saint and Hitler is a
demon?
Now before we go into the details of why there is an absolute morality
and what it is and how we can prove it exists and whether we can
legislate it; let us understand why people abandon the concept of there
being an absolute morality.

Why people abandon the concept of an Absolute Moral Law

I think that there are four reasons why people abandon the concept that there is
an absolute morality.

1. They want to be loving and understanding

You see we have to understand, that when people say that they don’t
believe in absolute morality, it doesn’t mean that they are part of a plot to
destroy the world by dumbing down our ability to reason between right
and wrong.

I believe we need to reach out to these folks, not by attacking them

because then we’ll just create an enemy, but by coming alongside them
and befriending them and then help them think through this logically.

Most people come to this conclusion because they really want to be loving
and understanding. And it is exactly because they want to show compassion
that they come to this point. You see, if you say there is an absolute morality
then you come back to the statement I made before.

If there is no absolute morality, why was Hitler wrong? If there is an

absolute morality, why do YOU get to decide what it is and not Hitler?

The problem is: if there is an absolute morality, then who gets to decide it.
And most people don’t want to decide it. They realize that their own morality
would pale in comparison to others; they realize that if they went to another
culture it would seem very pigheaded of them to try and impose their morals
on those people. It’s just that they want to be loving and understanding and
they feel that by judging people they are not being loving or understanding.
So in the interests of being fair and honest, they opt for a standard that says
there is no moral standard. But the problem is that this is similar to a parent

never punishing their child for beating up the next-door neighbor’s kid. At
some point that child is going to become a bully in school and maybe
eventually a criminal. It is actually more loving to say No, what you are
doing is wrong and will hurt you and others if you keep doing it. That’s one
reason why some people choose to believe that there is no absolute Morality.

2. They really want to do those things that God seems to say is wrong.
The other reason that people don’t want to accept that there is a moral
standard is because they are involved in an activity that would be condemned
by this perceived moral standard; and thus they want to break the shackles of
this ancient morality and want to be free to do what they want to do. On that
level it’s very selfish. Sometimes people feel that moral standards in the past
were too strict and caused problems and the only way the human race can
evolve and move forward is to get rid of some of these restrictions.

Remember how we talked about how people want to say that Sex outside of
Marriage is OK and all those rules are old fashioned and unnecessary. What
they don’t realize is that God gives us all these rules for our protection. Not
because He’s a killjoy. The real reason for the Biblical laws about Sex is that
there are long term consequences to sex before marriage, that aren’t apparent
right away. And as we’ve seen in our lifetimes, sex outside of marriage
destroys the family, and this in turn can cause dysfunctional people, loners,
sex maniacs, depressed kids, unmotivated kids, kids who join gangs and
what not. Sure there are other things that cause them, but we know that
dysfunctional families add to it. In fact there is a study called the “Leading
Index of Cultural Values” published by Bill Bennet that show how crime and
drugs and gangs and even our

grades have started getting worse right after the “Sexual Revolution” of the
sixties and the seventies. If you have the time this is a very worthy study. By
the way we haven’t even touched on the STDs and HIV all consequences
precisely of sex outside of marriage. Imagine how long an STD would last if
only 1 person had it and he only had sex with one other person who also only
had sex with him?

3. They’ve seen situations where one moral law seems to conflict with
another moral law.

The third reason I’ve come across is that too many people have abandoned
the principle of Moral Absolutes because they ran into a Moral dilemma
where two Moral Laws seemed to collide. So rather than realize that
whenever two Moral Laws collide you simply apply the higher law, they
abandoned the entire principle. Thus throwing the baby out with the bathtub.
One shouldn’t abandon the entire principle just because we didn’t understand
the right methodology.

For
exampl
e, is it
OK to
run a
red
light?
Of
course
not! So
we
have a
law:

1. Don’t run a red light.

But hopefully you said: Well there are exceptions to that rule. Then
the question is: are the exceptions to the rule less important than the
original rule?

For instance, if you were to run a red light just because you were impatient,
would that be OK? Obviously not, we’d say that was wrong. But that’s not
the example you were thinking of, was it? You were thinking that it’s OK to
run a red light for instance when you have a medical emergency and need to
get someone to an emergency room? Right? So the valid exceptions to the
original rule have to be more important than the reason for the original rule.
So let’s say there’s someone in your passenger seat that needs medical
attention immediately.

So to simplify, we have here two laws, the second overriding the first:
1. Don’t run a red light.

2. Do what it takes to save a person who is dying (you can rephrase this
anyway you wish).

So hopefully you agree that it would be silly to abandon all traffic laws in
every case, simply because we have identified a condition when a higher
law applied that superceded a traffic law?

The second thing we must realize is that, just because an issue is complex it
doesn’t mean that the entire principle should be abandoned. For instance we
can show that the above decision to run a red light can be complicated and
require an even higher moral principle that overrides the first two.

Should we run a red light if we have a medical emergency but if we ran the
red light we’d kill someone else who was currently the crosswalk in front
of us. Now an even higher law supercedes the “medical emergency” law.
That is the law of don’t kill.

In simple terms we now have

1. Don’t run a red light.

2. Do what it takes to save a person who is dying (you can rephrase this
anyway you wish).
 3. Don’t kill anyone

Again despite the complexity I see no sane people clamoring that we

should abandon Traffic Laws. And again we don’t eliminate traffic laws
because the occasional exception to the rule.

Do you want to complicate it even more? Add another caveat. Let’s say that
there’s a man standing in front of your car in the crosswalk about to shoot at
you. He just shot your friend in the passenger seat, (which is why you need
to get him to the hospital). The intersection is crowded, and the light is red.
How do you make your decision?

Obviously you if you can think fast you try to figure out which laws work first.

1. Don’t run a red light.

2. Do what it takes to save a person who is dying (you can rephrase this
anyway you wish).

3. Don’t kill anyone

4. It’s OK to kill someone in self-defense or the defense of others by hitting

them with a car.

So you hit the fool with the gun, you cautiously negotiate the
intersection, and then you run the red light and drive to the hospital.

As you can see the list grows. The Moral Absolutes still stand, but the
Lower Moral Laws give way to Moral Laws that superceded them.

In conclusion: no one abandons the law of gravity or disbelieves it

just because we know that there are complicated exceptions that
override it in certain cases (like the principles of aerodynamics).

Similarly we shouldn’t abandon Moral Absolutes just because it is

complicated and just because some supercede others. We just need to figure
out the principles and apply them. That’s what the Wright Brothers did when
they figured out how to fly a plane.

Now some people may argue that this is situational ethics. But call it what
you may, the real issue that we need to understand here is: Is there a higher
moral law that kicks in, and if there isn’t one, then we can’t justify the action.
Note that we also have to be careful how we apply the hierarchy of laws. For
instance the law of Love does not supercede the law of “don’t have sex
before you are married”. As much as the movies tell us that it does. In fact the
law of love actually enforces the law of don’t have sex before you are
married, if you think about it.
We can and should debate the hierarchy of laws – and I am all for that

but we must recognize that there is a hierarchy. Now coming back to

why people abandon the concept of an absolute moral law. Point 4.

4. Different Cultures seem to have different moral values

This example is the example I discussed in the beginning. Where one tribe
in Africa felt it was OK to show your breasts but not your ankles. Now
here’s the issue in those situations.

First it is possible for a culture to be wrong, isn’t it. This is very easy to
prove isn’t it. Any guesses? How can I prove that an entire culture can be
wrong? Exactly… the German Culture during the early 40s. The
discriminatory culture of the 1950’s in the US.

Secondly it turns out that even in various cultures many times the underlying
principles still stand. It’s how the principles are interpreted. You see in the
African tribe example it’s not really that the breasts are wrong or the ankles
are wrong. Neither breasts nor ankles are morally wrong are they? It’s never
wrong for the husbands to see them is it? You see it’s the underlying
principle behind the laws. Here’s the basic issue. Both cultures felt that sex
was reserved between a man and his wife. So whatever was considered
sexual was to be respected. In their culture breasts were not considered
sexual so it was

fine. But ankles, now those were to be respected. (Of course you may ask
what about those cultures that feel that sex is not to be reserved between a
single man and single woman? Well perhaps they fall under the first instance?
Could it be that they are wrong? It is possible isn’t it? When we talk about
how laws should be derived later on, we’ll show you in that section about
how to determine if a culture’s morals are wrong. Also numerous
anthropological studies have shown that the vast majority

of indigenous cultures reserved sex to between one man and his wife
or wives. We can argue about the immorality or morality of multiple
wives separately). But the point is there was a fundamental moral
value here.

Similarly in the middle ages it was considered to be OK to kill witches.

Nowadays we don’t kill witches. Have our morals changed? Absolutely not!
You see what has changed is that we realize that witches do not have the
power to put evil curses and make us sick or kill us. We realized that witches
do not kidnap our children and boil them alive and eat them. In fact if a
witch (or anyone) were really to kidnap your kids and kill them, wouldn’t
you be the first to insist that we hunt the felon down and kill them or at the
least put them behind bars for the rest of their lives. The moral value: It’s
OK to stop people from killing others, didn’t change. In fact we do hunt
down serial murderers and depending on the current laws put them to death
or imprison them for life.

Of course some people could argue that witches do indeed kill and eat
people, but since we do also believe strongly that you are innocent until
proven guilty (another moral value), we’d have to prove that first before we
could do anything to that witch. You see our morals didn’t change, what
changed was our understanding of the situation; it became clearer and more
logical.

I’m sure there are other reasons. But these should give you an understanding
of where most people come from and why they believe these things.

Can we Legislate Morality:

We now come to the next important issue.

Can we legislate Morality, and if we do

1. Is it constitutional?

2. Is it enforceable?

3. Is it ethical?

Ok, now one of the statements I’ve heard

many times is this: You can’t legislate

morality! This is the funniest statement

I’ve ever heard. Why do you think this is

funny?

Exactly, because if we don’t legislate morality what on earth are we

legislating most of the time? Platitudes? Fuzzy feelings? What? Cultural
values? How would you like a law that said: It is illegal to eat anything but
Turkey on Thanksgiving day because that’s the American Way. Obviously
we don’t legislate stupid things like that. We legislate things like. Thou shalt
not KILL! Why?

Because it’s what? It’s WRONG to Kill. It’s IMMORAL to kill. We legislate
things like Thou shalt not steal! Isn’t stealing a moral issue? How about the
laws that said that Slavery was illegal? Was that just because it was
economically bad to have slaves? Au contrare mon frere. It was
economically bad NOT to have slaves - for the land owners. After all what
could be better than free labor?

But it was MORALLY wrong to have slaves. That law was solely based on
the concept that slaves are human and have rights and that it was what?
WRONG to take away their rights.

Even when we legislate things like Thou shalt not litter. Why are we
legislating it? Because we think that littering destroys

the environment. And we think that destroying the environment is a what

thing? A bad thing. Would that make destroying the environment an
IMMORAL thing perhaps? Of course it is. Of course it’s also a beauty thing,
but that then moves into the issue of the fact that you are defacing public
property. That’s a moral issue again, because you are spoiling something that

also belongs to other people.

Even Tax laws are based on moral issues. Someone creates the tax code
based on some moral value e.g. it’s good to educate all kids. It’s good to give
single mothers money for food. So to pay for that we create a law that says
“it’s necessary to take money from people and give to these good causes.”
Do you notice a hierarchy of laws there.

So as you can see most of the time our legislation is about moral issues.
Now given, occasionally we do legislate non-moral issues, like we will
celebrate Mother’s day on the second Sunday in May. But is this the same?

Is there really a punishment associated with that? I mean let’s say one
Mother’s day I actually forgot to send my mom a card for being the best
mother in the entire world, which she is by the way.

Will the ATF-MDEs That’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and

Mother’s Day Enforcers, come charging into my door, throw me to the
ground, hog tie and handcuff me, shove me into a police car saying “please
mind your head” and then haul me to off to jail for 3 years until I learn to
respect and love and make my mother a priority and “Call your mother young
man” says the judge as she passes down my sentence?

Absolutely not. Or what if I celebrated it 2 days later. Do I get stuck with a

$15,000 fine for being late? Nonsense. Right.

So when we do legislate non-moral things, we don’t punish them, do we?

We just declare them and recommend people follow them. But if you think
about it - why do we declare Mother’s day in the first place? Because we
think it’s what…it’s

‘Good’ to honor your mother. And it’s what? BAD to ignore her.

We don’t have a Hitler’s day do we? Unless it’s to remember all the BAD
things he did. So that we never forget it and do it ourselves. Again it’s a
moral issue there.

So we do legislate moral things all the time and most of the time and over
and over again, and we punish people who violate those very same Moral
laws.

So in my opinion anybody who says we can’t legislate morality is really

ignorant.

Unless -------- he means that we can legislate morality but we can’t enforce
it. Well we’ll deal with the enforcement part in just a bit.

I want to make a comment about schools here in passing. Many years ago
when I was a junior high counselor at Los Gatos Christian Church, our
junior-highers were invited to a discussion about schools in a cable public
access forum in down town Los Gatos. This was a tiny event, you have to
understand that probably 5 people were watching the show at the time and it
was a tiny studio. It was meant to be something like an Oprah talk show with
the Junior Highers participating. Bad idea. What junior higher has the guts to
discuss things when adults are around? Anyway it ended up with the two
guests doing all the talking. Back then I wasn’t as opinionated as I am
now…..what are you laughing about. Really I wasn’t. I hadn’t read as much
nor had I had as many discussions with friends. And I wasn’t as bold.
Anyway, halfway through the discussion, one of the teachers in the
discussion said: Well, schools aren’t here to teach kids morality!

Well that stuck in my craw and though I didn’t have the boldness to speak
out, after the half hour show was over and after they turned off the camera.
I piped up and I asked the teacher as nicely as I could.

I said, “You said that the schools aren’t meant to teach kids morality. So
are you saying that you don’t think the schools should teach kids not to
cheat on their tests? How about stealing their neighbors’ watches or
books?”

He turned red and to his credit he sheepishly said. “OK I

guess that was a very foolish statement wasn’t it.” You bet it
was a very foolish statement.

Of course schools have to teach morality. What could be worse that us

churning out a school full of intelligent, mastermind criminals, or a bunch
of well educated thieves and rapists and murderers. The sad thing is that
seems to be exactly what we are doing these days. True, schools aren’t
supposed to teach ONLY Morality, but they’d better be teaching kids that
it’s wrong to cheat as well as that 1 plus 1 equals 2.

1. Is Legislating Morality Constitutional?

Anyway enough of that tangent. Let’s talk about if Legislating Morality is

constitutional.

First of all, how many of us have read our Declaration of Independence and
the Constitution lately? I would recommend that we all read these great
documents at least once every two years. Read it from end to end. From the
Declaration of

th
Independence all the way to the 27 amendment passed in 1992. We have a
sacred trust here folks. I was born and grew up in very many strange
countries. And let me tell you the only reason we are where we are today in
the US is because of our constitution. I have lived in countries that have
greater resources than we have, smarter people that we have. Yet their people
are oppressed and starving. And I also want to say, don’t be arrogant. Rome
fell after 1000 years sacked by the Vandals (yes that’s where the word came
from). But it fell first from within, due to apathy. This can happen to our great
nation as well.
This is a sacred trust. Don’t be fooled. It can happen to us. And maybe it will
one day.

So what was the reason for the declaration of Independence in the first place?

Because the people in the colonies felt that they were what? Unjustly treated
by an unjust King. They felt the king was what? Wrong! Immoral! Bad.

What did Jefferson say in the declaration?

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a History of repeated

injuries and usurpation, all having in direct objection the establishment of
absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted
to a candid World.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the
public Good.
It goes on like that including statements like:

He has plundered our Seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our Towns, and
destroyed the Lives of our People. He is, at this Time, transporting large
Armies of foreign Mercenaries to complete the Works of Death, Desolation,
and Tyranny, already begun with the Circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy,
scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous Ages, and totally unworthy the
Head of a civilized Nation.

And so on and on. What were the founding fathers saying? They were saying
that King George was what? That King George was WRONG!!! That he was
immoral, that he was unjust.

The entire declaration of Independence, the entire foundation of our

country was based on the fact that someone was wrong and someone else
was right. In other words they not only decided that there was an absolute
morality,

they also decided that King George was at the wrong end of it! And then
they decided that they were going to found a new country based on those
facts.

They didn’t say King George was right for him and wrong for us. They
said King George is wrong for everyone! And they were submitting the
facts to whom?

Let the facts be submitted to a candid world.

In other words to everybody. They were saying our buddy Georgie is wrong
wrong wrong, even for himself!

So our declaration was based on the concept that there was an absolute
morality that applied to the ENTIRE world.

And as a result of that declaration, we created our constitution. Now could

they then decide that even though their purpose

and incentive for the constitution was based on the idea of morality, that from
then on no moral laws would be constitutional?

Let me rephrase that so you all understand clearly. Does it make sense that
after coming up with the declaration and constitution because of moral
issues that they would then make that very same constitution ban the
concept of all morality?
Obviously not. That would not only be self-

defeating because it would be inane and

incompetent. Now let’s read more of the

declaration:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by …whom?…
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness – That to secure these rights,
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from
the consent of the governed.

First let’s notice. Who gives men their rights? Is it given to them by
Government? Let me ask you that again. Are your rights given to you by the
Government?

Absolutely not.! According to the constitution our rights are given to us by the
Creator.

Remember this Rights are not given to us by the

government. They are given to us by the Creator.
So if you take away the creator, you take away
what? those very same rights.

Let me say that again: If you take away the creator, you take away our
inalienable rights.

If you disagree with that and you are a US citizens, your render the US
1
declaration of Independence a erroneous illogical document.
Yes it is true, my atheist friends whom I love and tease all the time cannot
claim any of the rights in the constitution for

themselves. I always tell them, it’s a good thing we extend it to you…

Well then you may ask. What then is the purpose of Governments? Their
purpose is what? Let’s read:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,

deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

So what is the purpose of the Government? To give us these rights? Not at

all! The government is there to secure these rights that we already have.

You see Governments are instituted among Men to secure these rights that we
what? Already HAVE. Not rights that we were given by the Government. But
rights that we already have. You see the Government’s job is not to give rights
to people but to protect the rights they already have.

Now let’s keep going.

That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving
their just Powers from the Consent of the

Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of

these Ends, it is the what?

The right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new
Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles…

Now why did I bring this up? Because I think it is very important that
we realize that our founding fathers wrote into the declaration that
whenever a Government started doing the WRONG thing - read
IMMORAL thing and violated their inalienable rights. It was then the
right of the people to alter the government, which meant of course the
law. And if that didn’t work it was OK to abolish the government and
start a new one.

So our declaration insists that we use moral judgment to run the

government and alter it if it ever becomes immoral. They then used this
very same declaration as the basis for which to create our constitution.

So in conclusion. To answer the first question: Is it constitutional to legislate

morality?

It is very constitutional to legislate Morality. In fact the declaration tself

makes moral claims to it’s own validity and insists that governments are
tested morally. In fact the constitution is based on the concept that morality
is in fact legislateable.

Now at this time you are going to ask me? Well whose

morality do we legislate? We will get to that later. The

second question may come up. But what about the first
amendment?
Congress shall make no Law respecting an Establishment of Religion, or
prohibiting the free Exercise thereof;

or
abri
dgin
g the
Free
dom
of
Spee
ch,
or of
the
Pres
s, or
of
the
Righ
t of
the
Peo
ple
peac
eabl
y to
asse
mble
,
and to petition the Government for the Redress of Grievances.

Well it’s quite plain here. Congress is not allowed to establish a religion.

And I whole-heartedly agree. Congress is not allowed to establish a religion

and should not.

But wait a minute. Am I contradicting myself? How can it be OK to

legislate Morality but not to establish a religion? Isn’t that the same thing?

And that’s exactly the mistake so many people make. But the
founding fathers’ weren’t confused by this. As you read through the
constitution you see that they did not think that Morality was a
Religion.

Let me say that again: Morality is not a Religion! And the founding fathers did
not think so either.
Yes Religions do suggest Morality, but morality is separate from
Religion. Wow that’s quite a claim. And this is the key here.

1
Remember too the problem with rights being given to you by the government… If the
government is the grantor of your rights, doesn’t that mean that the government can then take
away those rights? Does that mean that the slaves had no inherent rights? Isn’t the truth that the
slaves really had rights all the time (given to them by God), but they were being immorally
oppressed by the government. If the government had been the granter of rights then the slaves got
rights that weren’t really theirs and the whole battle for their rights was a farce. No their rights
were given to them by God and the Government back then tried to violate that.

Let me give you some evidence.

i. Atheists can be and most are Moral people even though their logic of
where those morals come from may be faulty. ii. Many religions have valid
moral laws
iii. (Specially for Christians we know that) Morality will not save you from
separation from God

Morality is usually self-evident. Religion is not.

We’ll talk about this much more, later on.

Now I need to clarify a few things here.

i. First we are not discussing the origin of moral laws.

ii. Second we are not discussing the finer points of moral issues, for
instance it is quite possible that after agreeing on some of the basic
moral issues certain individuals may disagree on ways to
implement them, or details of all the
various situations where they apply

iii. Third we are not saying that without the knowledge of the Holy we will
ever be able to comprehend ALL the moral laws that do exist

iv. Finally we are not even suggesting that anyone can ever keep all the laws
that we even know of.

But the overall issue is Morality is not Religion, our forefathers (OK some
of your forefathers, my and the rest of our adopted forefathers) knew and
understood this and had no problems claiming to hold to morality while not
embracing any particular religion.

So while the First

Amendment clearly forbids
the federal Government
from establishing a
national religion, it does
 not forbid the government
from establishing a
national morality.
Legislating Morality, Geisler & Turek. 1998, Bethany House Publishers,
page 22

In fact, the First Amendment itself claims a morality doesn’t it. Because the
First Amendment says in effect what? That it is what - Wrong for the Federal
Government to establish a national religion. Isn’t that a moral value? Of
course it is. This concept is repeated over and over in the Amendments.
th
Especially when it comes to the 13 amendment about Slavery.

Now remember we still haven’t answered the question of what is morality

or whose morality do we legislate. As I said we will deal with that later.

2. Is Legislated Morality Enforceable?

OK so maybe it is constitutional, but is it enforceable? Can we enforce laws

of Morality?

Now if you recall I said that this is sometimes what people mean when they
say that we can’t legislate morality. They mean that we can legislate it, but
it won’t do us any good because nobody will follow it.

Here are their 3 main excuses:

i. People are going to do it anyway

ii. You
can’t make
people do
good if
they don’t
want to iii.
Laws can’t
change
hearts.

Let’s deal with these one by one.

i
.

P
e
o
p
l
e

a
r
e

g
o
i
n
g

t
o

d
o

i
t

a
n
y
w
a
y
This is the first argument we hear. In fact it’s usually applied to
things like drugs and prostitution. But what’s the immediate
answer to this?

Obviously, it’s fallacious, because does anyone here think we can

ever stop murder completely? Obviously not! But

we don’t see anyone arguing that we should throw out or not

enforce laws against Murder or stealing. We should have laws
against things that are clear violations of the Moral Law and we
do, in most cases.

What people are usually arguing in these cases is that they don’t
think that that particular activity is IMMORAL. Like prostitution
and smoking marijuana. But that’s a different argument. Let them
prove to us that it is moral then
we will accept the legalization of it.

Another aspect of this is that they will point out other immoral acts
that should be illegal but aren’t. Like adultery or smoking. Well this
is a much more complex issue and we’ll deal with it when we get to
the section on what sort of morality we should legislate.
 ii. You can’t make people do good if they don’t want to.

This is partially true. However the issue is deeper than that. You see
we may not be able to make people do good all the time. But you
can influence them to do good by rewarding good actions and
punishing bad actions (Skinner’s

famous experiments). Furthermore, laws implemented today will

influence children who grow up under that law.

We see over and over again that laws influence kids. Kids will
embrace them more often than not, and while it is true that some of
them will rebel, it turns out that more will conform to laws they
grew up with than would conform to the principles if they didn’t
grow up with the same laws. Can anyone think of an example of
this? Let me ask you that again. Can you think of a law that was
implemented and generations after it was implemented most people
started believing it?

I’ll give you an example when I answer the next item. Note by the
way that this is not an excuse to create restrictive meaningless laws.
I believe laws have to be based on a moral value.

iii. Laws can’t change hearts.

Let me answer this by giving you some facts about the alcohol prohibition in
th
early 20 century.

th
In 1919, Congress passed the 18 amendment prohibiting the
manufacture and sale of alcohol. From 1920 to 1933 people claim it was
a big failure and it didn’t stop anyone from drinking, it just made them all
outlaws. But the truth is quite the opposite. Here are the facts:

i. In the 1830’s the average alcohol consumption per

person was 7.1 gallons per year. The problems
were so bad that various states decided to go dry.
By 1910 consumption was down to 2.6 gallons
per person.
ii. While prohibition was active, alcohol
consumption did in fact go down, and by the time
it was

removed, alcohol consumption was only at 1

gallon a year. Down from 2.6. This was counting
all the “illegal” alcohol consumption.

iii. Even after prohibition, it wasn’t until 40 years

 later in 1975 that consumption went up to 2.6
gallons per person again. Those 13 years of
prohibition had an impact for 3 times as many
years.
iv. During prohibition Admission to mental health
institutions for alcohol psychosis dropped 60%.

Arrests for drunk and disorderly conduct went

down 50%. There were less alcoholics on the
street corners. There was less family violence due
to alcohol.
v. And what’s amazing. Even crime dropped.
Despite all the stories we here about the Mob
and everything, homicide actually increased
at a higher rate before Prohibition than
during it.

What this shows us is that laws do change behavior and they can change
hearts.

While discussing the previous point, I asked you to think of an example when
kids who had grown up under a law had embraced it as their morality. Can
anyone think of such an example? What law that was newly enacted changed
the psyche of the nation?

Exactly, the anti slavery and anti discrimination laws. During the time of
slavery, most of the American people had no qualms about being slave
owners and racists. By the early 1950’s most of the American people had
huge qualms about being slave owners but less qualms about being racists.
Today most all of us have qualms about both.

What happened to our national conscience? Why did this happen. Why is it
that I as an Indian (previously known as colored) can not only exist
peacefully here but I can even find and marry a very very gorgeous lovely
intelligent redheaded lady of European origin?

Are we better people today than we were then, is that why I don’t have to
worry that I’m a brown man in a predominately white country? Absolutely
not! In fact in many cases we seem to be worse people. We can see that
with the crime and violence around us. But we all seem to agree that
slavery and racism is bad. Why? Because the laws that we grew up with
have imprinted themselves on our hearts, on our conscience and on our
very identity of whom we are as human individuals.
Laws can and do change hearts, especially if you grow up with them.

Further more as Martin Luther King Jr. said: “It may be true that the law
cannot make a man love me. But it can keep him from lynching me, and I
think that’s pretty important.”

Notice that laws can work both ways too. Prior to 1973 a vast majority of
Americans felt that Abortion was immoral. But in

1973, seven Supreme Court Judges decided to change the law and within
one generation we are where we are today with 50 to 52% of Americans
thinking Abortion is OK. Laws can and do change hearts all the time.

Now remember if anyone argues that laws can’t 100% change hearts, we
agree whole-heartedly. But if we can get 60% of the population to change
their hearts I think that’s a great success.

Now we were if you recall discussing whether Moral Legislation is

Enforceable. And the answer from the Civil Rights movement is yes. It is
enforceable to a large extent. Never to 100%, but certainly to a very
effective extent. Sure we can’t stop all discrimination, but the fact that it is
illegal to discriminate has made my life easier that it would have been. I’m
not complaining. Laws do change things and it does change hearts and
minds. Anyone who argues against that has never studied the facts.

3. Let’s look at if it is ethical to legislate Morality.

Well right off the bat we have a problem. Because we already said that first
of all we almost ONLY legislate Morality. So we’d have a problem if it
were unethical to legislate it. In that case we wouldn’t be able to legislate
anything and we’d have

no laws and all our laws would be unethically legislated (huh?). What kind of
a civilization would that be? One without laws?

So obviously the first problem with that question is that the alternative is
unlivable.

The second problem with the question is that let’s say some one made the
statement that it is unethical to legislate morality. What would they be
saying? What is another word for unethical? How about immoral? So what
they are really saying then is that: It is immoral to legislate morality. Or it’s
wrong to tell someone that they cannot do wrong.

Well that puts us in a fine to-do doesn’t it? Why? Because what they are
saying is that … and I’ll go slow on this because I confuse myself
sometimes when I say this: They are saying that it’s wrong to tell someone
that something is wrong. Whoa…we’ll if it’s wrong to tell someone that
something is wrong, why are YOU telling me that it is wrong? It’s a self-
refuting suicide statement.

This therefore answers one of the questions we raised at the beginning of this
series:

The question was: It is wrong to force your morality on others!

The answer is simply to ask this: If it’s wrong to force your morality on
others why are you trying to force this particular morality on me?

The third problem is that any legislation in any way on any moral issue is a
moral judgment in itself. In other words legalizing something or making
something illegal is still a moral judgment. For instance, Libertarians say
that they don’t want to impose any restrictions on people. Many of them
would legalize Prostitution and Drugs and keep abortion legal and so on
and so forth. But let’s think about this. We already know that the side effect
of Prostitution is that home and families are broken up. We know the
consequences of legalizing drugs will be a huge price in the lives of addicts.
You see when the Libertarian says we don’t want to impose our morals on
Prostitution on anyone, they are in fact doing just the opposite of what they
claim they don’t want to do:

They are imposing their own morals on Prostitution on our families and us.
And they are imposing the effects of Prostitution on our families and us.
This could range from broken families, increased crime, increased drug
addiction (because most prostitutes are addicted to drugs), increased
sexually transmitted diseases and the lot.

Furthermore I am always happy to apply their own moral standards to

them. For instance they always say as long as people aren’t hurting anyone
but themselves we should let them do those activities. OK so if I can show
them that it hurts at least 5 people will they agree with me to ban those
activities? You see it’s not that we disagree that if something doesn’t hurt
someone we should not ban it. We disagree on whether it hurts anyone or
not!

So in conclusion, the question of “Is it ethical to legislate Morality?” is

answered quite simply: It is impossible not to legislate Morality. And in fact
the question is rather meaningless. The real question is only whose morality
and what morality will you legislate?
Whose Morality do we legislate?

If there
is no
absolute
Morality,
why was
Hitler
Wrong?
If there is an absolute Morality, why
do YOU get to decide what it is and
NOT Hitler?

This is a key question and it would seem difficult to answer. However I

believe that answer is straight forward as I hope to prove to you. There are
a few options that we have:

Note we’ve already answered the question of if we should legislate at

all. And the answer was yes. So now we have the following options
a. We should legislate from the Bible

b. We should legislate from the Koran or some other Religion and its book.

c. We should legislate the opposite of any religion i.e. from Secular

Humanism.

Option a. We should legislate from the Bible.

I may shock some of you today. But I’m going to say that I don’t think we
should be legislating from the Bible. Let me

explain myself: The United States has never been a government based on
Biblical Law. It has always been a Government based on Moral Law.
Remember we said that Morals are separate from Religion. Remember
though Religion is not separate from Morals, but Morals are separate from
Religion. In other words people who are atheists can be moral. They may be
illogical in how they come to their morals but they can know morals. How
can I say this? Quite easily. Now this is not an argument you want to use with
non-Christians, but fortunately for one the non religious won’t care that I said
that Morals are separate from Religion. They will in fact agree with me.
(Convincing the Religious non Christians like the Muslims may be a bit more
difficult). But how can I say this? How can I say that you can know morality
without being religious? I’ll give you the Christian answer.

Well, what does Paul tell us in the Bible? He says that every person has within
them the knowledge of good and evil.
14
Romans 2: Even when Gentiles, who do not have God's written law,
instinctively follow what the law says, they show that in their hearts they
 15
know right from wrong. They demonstrate that God's law is written within
them, for their own consciences either accuse them or tell them they are
doing what is right.
So all mankind has in them a sense of Good and Evil

Secondly, the Biblical law of Moses was only given to the Nation of Israel.

Psalm 147:19 He has revealed his word to Jacob, his laws and decrees to
Israel. 20 He has done this for no other nation;

they do not know his laws.

So the Biblical law was not given to any other nation and it was only to be
imposed in Israel when it was under a Theocracy. But the US is not a
theocracy and I don’t think we really want it to be one. We’ve seen the types
of things that can happen under a pseudo theocracy like during the Spanish
Inquisition and worse.

Thirdly while many of the founders of our great Country were Christians,
some like Jefferson were merely deists. Jefferson actually physically cut out
all the miracles from his bible and his ended with Jesus just being buried. A
very tragic tale if you ask me.

Fourthly many of the people who came to America to begin with, came
fleeing religious persecution. They would no more want to be ruled by an
Episcopalian Theocracy than you would. Also remember even when
Christians legislate through religion you get the twisted excesses of the
Spanish Inquisition.

Fifthly while many nations were condemned for the laws they violated that
were written on their hearts, they were never condemned for things like not
keeping the Sabbath or for not sacrificing at the temple. So they were not
held to the Biblical Law.

Sixthly when judgment day comes, each person will be judged according to
what? To whether he has rebelled against God the Son and that will
determine his everlasting state not if he kept every word of the law. We are
no longer under the law when it comes to salvation. (We are still under it
when it comes to the physical consequences on ourselves, our families, our
loved ones, our culture and our world).

So should we legislate the Bible. I think not.

I don’t think we have Constitutional case for it, nor do I think we have a
Biblical case for it. But having said that this does not mean:
 i. That Christians should not be politically active. They should be very
politically active. Why? Because we believe

that of all people, Christians are more in tune with the Moral Law
and the Bible calls us to be Salt and Light to the world. But it calls
us to be able to defend our moral laws with logic and reasoning and
in winsome ways. The Bible does not command us to set up a
Christian America, but a Moral America.

ii. It does not mean that Christians as individuals cannot gain guidance
from the Bible in their roles within the government or their roles
when it comes to voting for moral issues. We believe in an
absolute morality and we believe that God determines it, so it is
natural that we should turn to him to find it. Remember Morality
is not Religion. However we cannot impose that requirement on
non Christians, but we are free to try and convince the majority
that our logical reasons are valid.

Option b. We should legislate from the Koran or some other Religion and
its book.

Well this is quickly answered. Obviously for some of the same reasons as why
we shouldn’t legislate from the Bible, we

shouldn’t legislate from the Koran or any other Holy book. Besides we’ve
seen the effects of legislating from the Koran. It’s known as the Taliban. We
also notice that there are no Democracies who legislate from the Koran. Or
should I say there are no real Muslim Democracies today. Maybe Iraq will
be the first one if we can stay the course and see it through. Maybe it wont.

Option c. We should legislate the opposite of any religion i.e. from Secular
Humanism.
The problem with secular humanism is that it is based on some very faulty
premises.

i
.

I
t

a
s
s
u
m
e
s
t
h
a
t

m
a
n
k
i
n
d

i
s

b
a
s
i
c
a
l
l
y

g
o
o
d
.

i
i
.

I
t

a
s
s
u
m
e
s

t
h
 a
t

y
o
u

c
a
n

a
v
o
i
d

a
b
s
o
l
u
t
e
s
iii. It assumes that mankind gives mankind their value
and their rights.

i. It assumes that mankind is basically good.

This is always the easiest thing to disprove.

First of all if mankind is essentially good, why is the world getting

worse? Why did we kill more people in the last century that we’ve
killed in all the centuries combined till now.

Secondly if mankind is essentially good, why is it that we spend our

time having to teach our kids to what? To share, to obey, to be kind,
to be respectful. How many parents say to their little 2 year old:
Now Sally you need to learn to
be a bit more selfish. What does a 2 year old say when she has
something and another 2 year old wants to share it?

MINE! We have to teach them to share. To be polite. To say thank

you. To not cheat. To not lie. To obey. Why do we have to teach 2
years olds to be good, if they are already inherently good? You tell
me.
 And since we know mankind is not essentially good, we see the
effects of this in any system that makes that faulty assumption. For
instance take communism. The basic idea of communism was great.
Every one works as hard as he can, and takes only what he needs.
What a great idea. But communism failed, why? Because they
found out that human nature worked the opposite. Everybody
worked only as much as they needed and took as much as they
could and the system went bankrupt. People were starving.
Corruption was everywhere. It has failed in Germany, China and
Russia and everywhere else.

ii. It assumes that you can avoid absolutes.

Secular Humanism has traditionally assumed that you can avoid

absolutes. In fact one of the signers of the Humanist

Manifesto II: Joseph Fletcher, also author of the book Situational

Ethics: The new Morality claims that there are no absolutes. Yet the
Humanist Manifesto II that he signed insists that there should be
total sexual freedom for consenting adults, legal abortion and
euthanasia. But aren’t those absolutes? The problem is that you can’t
avoid absolutes. Because the very statement that you should avoid
absolutes is what? It is an absolute statement in itself. This illogic
permeates their philosophy such that everything falls apart.

iii. It assumes that mankind gives mankind their value and their
rights.

I was in a hilarious email debate with a friend of mine even as I was

preparing for this talk. My friend claims that

while he agrees that fetuses are human, he believes that they

have less value than babies. He believes that this is logical and
morally acceptable.

So let me ask you this: What is the problem if mankind gets to

determine the value of other men? Slavery? Racism? The funny

thing is that my friend is African American. So I asked him, if he

thought it was morally acceptable for

the KKK to determine his value? He doesn’t seem to get it. Any time
a human determines the value of another

human and we accept that as moral, we have just gone back to

Hitler’s Eugenics. Hitler decided that the mentally retarded had
less value than the fit people. Then he decided that the Aryan
 race had more value than the Jews.

Mankind’s inherent value has to come from something that is not

Mankind. It has to come from the Creator of Mankind. If it
doesn’t all we get is “Might is Right”. This philosophy exists in
many places, but how can we even claim that this is Morally OK.

This is identical for our rights as we talked about earlier. Humanism

assumes that mankind’s rights come from other men or from the
Government. But what are the consequences if the Government is
the grantor of rights?

Obviously, you’d be stuck saying that it is then morally OK for the

government to take away those very same rights that it granted you.
Then you’d be forced to say that it was morally OK for the slaves
to have no rights back in the

1800’s. Because why? Because it was the government who took those
rights away. I can’t say that it was Morally

OK in 1800 but not now?. I know it was wrong then

and it is wrong now, and it will always be wrong.
Rights have to come from the Creator or they are
fleeting and at the whim of those in power.

So we agree that we cannot use Secular

Humanism from which to legislate

Morality. So from where do we

legislate the Morality that we need to

legislate?
If it’s not from Christianity;

If it’s not from Islam or any other religion;

If it’s not
from the lack
of any
religion i.e.
secular
humanism;
Where is it
from?

Here’s the answer: We should legislate the Moral law that is

written on our hearts. We already talked about how everyone has
the moral law written in their hearts. We must legislate from that.

But how do we know what these moral laws are? How do we know what these
truths are?

Well, the Declaration of Independence answers that quite well, it says

what: We hold these truths to be what? Self-evident. Exactly! We should
legislate the moral law from self-evident truths, just like the Declaration
of Independence does.

You see we as Christians believe there is an absolute morality and that it is

written in on ALL our hearts, even the

non-Christians, even the atheists. But you may say, why do so many people
disagree on what that morality is then. Well we answered that at the
beginning of this series. Do you remember them? They were:

1. They want to be loving and understanding.

2. They really want to do those things that God seems to say is wrong.

3. They’ve seen situations where one moral law seems to conflict with
another moral law.

4. They think that different Cultures have different moral values.

We answered all of these and explained why they were invalid (you may
want to go back to your notes for a review). The point I am trying to make is
that if people would look unemotionally and logically at the consequences
of their opinions they would change their stance and be able to determine a
moral law that is very universal.

Now we come to the big issue. OK given all that how do we determine
the Moral Law in a secular society. Or how does a non Christian
determine moral law? Or to get down to the main issue.

How Do We Come Up With Moral Laws In America?

Taken from Legislating Morality pages 121-125

1. The first and basic principle is quite simple. The moral law should
be decided based on the Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would
2
have them do unto you.

But we have to go a step further. Moral laws should be based on our reactions
to others doing the exact same thing to us.

In other words. Is it OK to cut in line? Well how would we feel if someone

cut in line in front of us. That’s the determination. Not whether we want to
cut in line. But how we would feel if we were in their shoes and we cut in
line.
Same with abortion. We don’t determine abortion based on if we want to
have an abortion. We determine abortion based on if they want to abort us.
How would I vote on abortion if they were aborting ME!

2. Increased incidence of disease and death or pain (emotional or

3
physical) is a good indication that moral principles are being violated.

If an action causes death and disease it’s probably an immoral activity.

3. Lawmakers must legislate according to the natural hierarchy of

absolutes.

What does this mean? It means that we should always be aware of the
hierarchy of laws. Remember the example of the traffic

light?

The Moral Hierarchy

a) Don’t run a red light. But this is overridden by:

b) Do what it takes to save a person who is dying. But this is overridden

by:

c) Don’t kill anyone. But this is overridden by:

d) It’s OK to kill someone in self-defense or the defense of others by

hitting them with a car.

I think most all of us would agree that saving the life of an innocent
person is the highest law, saving the rights of an innocent person
would be lower and so on.

4. Governments must take great care to balance person rights with

personal responsibilities.

Remember that God gives us rights. So when someone comes and says I have
a right to free food, we must sit and ask, is that

an obvious natural right? And the answer is no. That’s a right that the
Government can create. In which case it probably isn’t a real right.
2
This criteria can also apply to other cultures, like the example of a culture where a man can
have multiple wives. We must understand if the man would be happy if the roles were reversed
and he was one of the 4 husbands to one wife?
3
For example certain cultures hold festivals where sex is not reserved to a man and his wife. Does
this result in emotional pain or disease? If it does then it

is immoral regardless of if it is acceptable in that culture.

Here’s an interesting quote. Humanist say that they have a right to
abortions, a right to health care, a right to welfare, a right to paid leave, a
right to arts funding, a right to same sex marriage, a right to a certain wage,
and at the end, a right to die… and then they claim that they don’t believe in
absolutes…who are they kidding?

5. Moral laws cannot be written solely with the extreme exceptions in

mind.

In other words, we can’t write laws to legalize all abortions just because we
can think of some exceptionally rare cases where

an abortion could possibly be justified. This is like arguing that we should not
have speed limit laws because somewhere someone who is allergic to bees
may get stung by a bee while driving and need to drive at 110 miles an hour
to an emergency room.

6. Ambiguity over “where you draw the line” is not an argument for not
drawing any line at all.

For instance just because multiple states disagreed with whether the drinking
age should be 18 or 19 or 21 did not mean that

there should not be a drinking age law. We should draw the line
somewhere while we continue to search for the optimum. Some times I
believe the age for drinking should be under the age of 16. No one above
16 should be allowed to drink. That way you’d never be able to drink and
drive. OK I’m just kidding.

7. Lawmakers who believe and live by the Moral law themselves will be
better legislators of that moral law than those who do not live by the law.

In other words Bill Clinton was a lousy President, why? Because he did not
live under the moral law, but he expected the rest of us to do so. He violated
it and thought that he was above it. Crooked politicians should be ousted,
why, because if they

don’t believe they need to live under the moral code, how can we expect
them to come up with valid moral codes. Remember the best way to
determine a moral code is in our reactions to it. If crooked people never stop
to consider what they would do
if the tables were turned, how can you expect them to come up with true moral
laws?

Remember the fools who said that “Character doesn’t matter; it’s the
economy stupid?” They claimed that a politician’s private morals should
not be used to determine how they would come up with the nations moral
laws? But then why were they all rightly up in arms when a racist like
David Duke a former KKK member tried to run for office?

This is a critical point. Since our understanding of the moral law for a
situation is based on how we “react” to a particular situation, if we elect a
crook, he will react to all the situations incorrectly and thus we will end up
with what - bad moral laws.

Ravi Zacharias says: “One can no more reconcile immorality in private

with a call to public integrity than one can reconcile being a racist in private
with being unprejudiced in public.”

8. Laws with a long history in this country and across cultures should not
be discarded lightly.

One should never remove a fence until one has thought long and hard and
studied why the fence was put there in the first

place. Most of our laws came about for a particular reason. And while some
need to be abandoned, we should understand what all the reasons were for
their existence before abandoning them. Sometimes they needed to be
abandoned because they were immoral laws in the first place, like the laws
that discriminated racially.

9. Laws that promote traditional morality and religion can only be good
for the country.

As long as we don’t legislate Religion, laws that promote it yet separate it and
protect it can only be good for us.

th
10. I’ll add a 10 to them. Christians have to be ready to logically
and rationally defend moral laws and defeat immoral laws. I
think this is self-explanatory.

I’m sure we can come up with more points but this is a good start.

In closing I want to give you the responses to the 11 comments you will hear
in the world.
1. There is no absolute truth.

2. That maybe true for you but it’s not true for me.

3. I think all religions are true.

4. So many people disagree about Morality that there can’t be an absolute

Morality (or there is no absolute Morality).

5. Who are you to say other people’s cultural values are wrong?

6. You have the right to choose your own values.

7. It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you are sincere.

8. Christians are intolerant.

9. Who are you to judge others? The Bible says: Judge Not.

10. It is wrong to force your morality on others!

11. You can’t legislate Morality!

1. There is no absolute truth.

Your response: Is that true?

You can elaborate. “You tell me that there is no absolute truth, but that
statement commits suicide because you are making a statement of absolute
truth when you say that. So there is at least one absolute truth that you know
of. And if there is one then surely there may be others.”

2. That maybe true for you but it’s not true for me.

This is a tougher statement because there are situations when this may be
applied.. E.g. A married man can say to a single man: It may be true that
it is wrong for you to have sex but it isn’t wrong for me. But you need to
go to the root of the

principle and see if it applies. In the above example the moral principle
is that Sex outside of marriage is bad for the individual and society and
fails many of our 10 guidelines. This fact is true regardless of if you are
married or not. It is a

truth.

3. I think all religions are true.

This is easily disproved to us, but to others it may take some doing. The
best way I’ve seen to present it is to use a religion other than Christianity
so you don’t raise any ire. Try saying: Well in some religions like the
Thagee religion in India, it is
considered a duty for the Thagees to kill someone for God Shiva. Do you think
that that is a true and moral religion? Thus

obviously not ALL religions are true. There are some that are not only false,
but also evil.

4. So many people disagree about Morality that there can’t be an absolute

Morality (or there is no absolute

Morality).

See the section specifically on this before hand.

5. Who are you to say other people’s cultural values are wrong?

To respond to this ask this simple question: In Germany in1942 it was

culturally alright to kill Jews. Are you saying that this was not wrong
because it was their cultural value? Obviously cultural values CAN be
wrong. The issue is how do we

determine if they are wrong or not. For that we go back to our 10 guidelines.

6. You have the right to choose your own values.

Ofcourse we have the right to choose our own values. But is it not possible
that people can make immoral or invalid choices? Cannot people have bad
values and make bad decisions? A thief decides that he deserves to own your
stuff. Are you saying

that this is a valid and good moral value? The Nazis chose their own values.
Are you saying that they made a valid choice?

7. It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you are sincere.

Ask: Just like the sincere Nazis?

8. Christians are intolerant.

As Inigo Montoya said: "You keep “usink” that word, I do not think it means
what you think it means."

You say Tolerance, but I think you mean agreement or compliance or

approval. The word Tolerance has been bandied about and misused.

What is the meaning of the word tolerance?

If you tolerating someone it means that you dislike this person but you
allow him to be in your presence and don't hit him over the head.

For example you don't tolerate something you agree with, you don't tolerate
people you like or points of view you agree with. You can ONLY tolerate
something you hate, you can only tolerate people you don't like (or you can
be intolerant of them and kill them). You don't tolerate cookie dough ice-
cream, you enjoy it. You tolerate peppermint pepperoni ice-cream because
your two year old decided to make some. Not because you like it, but
precisely because you dislike it (but like your

daughter).

Tolerance does not mean approval.

9. Who are you to judge others? The Bible says: Judge Not.

For this you’ll have to refer to my forthcoming paper on this. But the quick
answer is: Why are you saying that I am wrong to judge others, aren’t you
judging me when you say that?

10. It is wrong to force your morality on others!

If you say it is wrong to force your morality on others, then you just made a
moral statement, so why are you forcing that morality on me? You see we all
force our morality (bad or good) on others in someway. The thief forces his
bad morality on

me when he steals my belongings. Society forces it’s morals on those living in

that society. It is impossible to avoid.

11. You can’t legislate Morality!

We only legislate Morality, we legislate and enforce with penalties little

else. Show me a law that has a penalty that is not based on a moral
principle. (For a fuller answer refer to the section in this paper that covers
this in great detail.)

12. But you said: : If there is no absolute morality, why was Hitler wrong? If
there is an absolute morality, why do YOU

get to decide what it is and not Hitler? What’s the right answer then?

Well the answer is this:

There IS an absolute morality and neither you nor Hitler gets to decide it. God
decided it.

But the problem then becomes: How do I know what God wants. Some
religions say that God wants us to kill infidels, others say God wants us to
love everyone. How do we know what God really wanted?

Well you have to prove that your religion is from God and you can’t trust
your feelings. If you are a Christian you must be able to prove that the
Bible is God’s word and it is historically accurate and that Jesus was really
God and lived, died and rose from the dead. And you must use physical
and historical proofs. Otherwise you are stuck again. But after you do this,
you still have a problem because most people won’t have done the research
and even if they do they may not agree with you.

So in that case you use the 10 points given earlier under How Do We Come
Up With Moral Laws In America?

References: Legislating Morality,

Geisler & Turek. 1998, Bethany House
Publishers. Neil’s web page:
www.neilmammen.com
Christ-Shaped Moral
Philosophy and The Triviality
of 20th Century ‘Christian
Ethics’
Harry Bunting
Philosophy Division
Tyndale Fellowship
Cambridge, England
Evangelical Philosophical Society
www.epsociety.org

Abstract: I argue that Paul K Moser’s ‘Christ-shaped

philosophy’ has implications not only for the spirit in which
Christians philosophise but also for the subject-matter with
which Christian engage in the different branches of the
subject. I propose an agenda appropriate to Christ-shaped
th
moral philosophy. I go on to argue that late 20 century
preoccupation with divine command ethics and with
normative reductionism is driven by conformity to secular
philosophical ethics rather than ‘Gethsemane union’ with
Christ, that these issues are logically distinct from Christ-
shaped moral philosophy and that they are trivial in
comparison with the cosmic moral importance of Christ-
shaped moral philosophy.

“Jesus Christ is the centre of

everything and the object of
everything; and he who does not know
Him knows nothing of the order of the
world, and nothing of himself.”
 ~ Blaise Pascal

Introduction
In his seminal essay “Christ-shaped Philosophy: Wisdom and
Spirit United” Paul K Moser said a great deal, in the abstract,
about Christian philosophy, about its background assumptions
and about the spirit in which it should be conducted. However,
in two respects he did not make explicit the precise
implications of ‘Christ-shaped philosophy’. Firstly, he discussed
Christ-shaped philosophy in general without allowing that it
may have differing implications for different branches of the
subject; secondly, he said a great deal about the spirit which
should inform Christ-shaped philosophy and very little about
how Christ-shaped philosophy would impact the subject-matter
of philosophy. Whilst broadly sympathetic to Moser’s ideas, I
will try to correct what I take to be these ‘short-comings’ by
focusing on one branch of the subject, namely moral
philosophy, and by focusing on subject-matter rather than - or,
perhaps, in addition to – spirit and method. I will inquire how
Christ-shaped philosophy should impact the subject matter of
moral philosophy and the ways in which such Christ-shaped
moral philosophy would differ from the subject-matter
orthodoxies which have shaped recent ‘Christian ethics’. To
these tasks I shall now turn.
Throughout the twentieth century western theological ethics
has been dominated by two issues, divine command theory and
normative reductionism. The first is an issue in moral
semantics: do moral predicates refer to the property of being
commanded by God? The second is an issue in value theory: can
principles enjoining things such as justice, kindness and
truthfulness be reduced to a single principle such as that
enjoining love or must we recognise the existence of an
irreducible plurality of moral principles? In recent years the
issues have become linked because some have argued that the
basic principle of normative ethics is one which enjoins
obedience to the commands of God. I have called the field
‘theological ethics’ but it also goes under titles such as ‘God and
morality’, ‘Christian ethics’, ‘religion and ethics’ and various
other names which I will treat as roughly synonymous. The
literature in which these issues are addressed is vast, the
discussions have become increasingly technical and there is
little evidence of any emerging consensus concerning the
problems involved.
Preoccupation with these issues is unduly influenced by
developments in secular philosophical ethics; and the literature
which they have spawned has little to do with the moral
teachings of Jesus or an appreciation of the true moral
significance of Jesus’ life and death at Calvary, in comparison
with the cosmic moral importance of which they are really
quite trivial.
Christ-shaped moral philosophy, by contrast, focuses on the
moral purpose for which God became incarnate in Christ; and
on the understanding of a variety of background moral
assumptions – concerning human nature, concerning the
character of a morally ordered universe, concerning the nature
of the human predicament in that morally ordered universe,
concerning the powerlessness of human beings to remedy or
even ameliorate that predicament, and concerning the
significance of the atoning death of Jesus at Calvary - which
make that moral purpose intelligible.

Christ-shaped Moral Philosophy

The central fact which the Christian gospel proclaims is that
God became incarnate in the person of Christ. However,
Scripture informs us not only of the fact of the incarnation but
also, and repeatedly, of the purpose of the incarnation.
Prior to his birth, we read, Joseph was instructed by an angel
to call Mary’s child ‘Jesus’ for this reason: “he shall save his
people from their sins” (Matthew 1:20-21). Now ‘Jesus’ is the
Greek form of a Hebrew word that means ‘Yahweh saves’. As
though for emphasis therefore, and twice over in the course of
a single sentence, we are told that God became incarnate
because human beings are in need of salvation. Repeatedly this
message occurs in Scripture: John tells us that ‘God sent the Son
into the world…that the world might be saved through him’
(John 3:17); Luke tells us that ‘the Son of man came to seek and
to save the lost’ (Luke 19:10); Paul tells us that ‘Christ Jesus
came into the world to save sinners’ (1Timothy 1:15). When
Jesus was being crucified passers-by mocked him in his
sufferings but the precise terms in which the religious leaders
mocked Jesus are very significant. They said: ‘he saved others,
himself he cannot save.’ (Matthew 27:42, Mark 15:31, Luke
23:35) Even from the lips of Jesus’ enemies, therefore, we have
evidence of the prominence which Jesus attached to the
divinely ordained salvation- mission for which he came into the
world.
What is salvation? Why do human beings need to be saved?
From what are they to be saved? Properly understood, these are
all moral questions and the answers we give to them are of
fundamental importance for an understanding of the nature of
Christ-shaped moral philosophy. The questions all concern
moral aspects of what I shall refer to as ‘the human
1
predicament’ and it is by way of an exposition of this human
predicament that I will develop an account of subject matter of
Christ-shaped moral philosophy.

The Human Predicament

What, then, is the human predicament, from which God has
gone to such lengths to rescue human beings? An answer
requires reference to three themes, all of them essentially
moral in character and all at the heart of Christ-shaped moral
philosophy: (i) the radical evil of human nature (ii) the fact that
human beings live – inescapably - in a morally ordered universe
(iii) the powerlessness of human beings to avoid the terrible
consequences of (i) and (ii). I shall briefly elucidate each of
these themes.

i) Radical Moral Evil.

Human beings sometimes perform morally wrong actions and
do things which are morally permissible or right for the wrong
reasons; human beings are notoriously prone to selfishness,
pride, lust, jealousy, malice and a list of other weaknesses
which is too long to contemplate with ease. Scripture teaches
that these shortcomings, serious though they may be, are
merely the symptoms of a deeper problem with human beings:
they are symptoms, not the disease. The real problem with
human beings is that, by nature, they are radically moral evil. It
is in the human ‘heart’, Scripture tells us, that the basic moral
problem with human nature lies (Jeremiah 17:9).

1
For the idea of conceiving of moral theory in this way I am
indebted to G.J. Warnock. See G.J.Warnock, The Object of Morality
(London: Methuen, 1971), ch.2: ‘The Human Predicament’.
The Bible refers to this radical human evil as ‘sin’, indicating
that it involves not merely the performing of wrong actions and
the nurturing of evil dispositions but, more seriously, the
rebellion of the human will against God. This has caused
estrangement between God and human beings and this human
rebellion and estrangement are at the root of the radical evil
which characterises human nature. We can now note, however,
a significant contrast between secular moral assumptions and
Christ-shaped moral philosophy.
We tend to think that some people are good and other people
are evil, or we tend to think of human beings as falling on a
scale somewhere between very good people and very evil
people. Christ-shaped moral philosophy holds that this is
mistaken and that the whole species of human beings is
radically evil, one and all (“There is none that doeth good…”
Psalms 53:1, Romans 3:12). We carry, one and all, what Kant
2
called ‘the debt of sin’.

ii) A Morally Ordered Universe.

The nature of a morally ordered universe is best understood
by contrasting it with a morally disorganised universe, the kind
of universe which is presupposed by secular moral philosophy.
Human beings, individually and through the institutions which
they create, attempt to create moral order; they attempt to
ensure that virtue is rewarded and wrongdoing is punished. To
a very limited degree this ideal is realised. But it is clear that
there are vast discrepancies between virtue which people
possess and the happiness which they deserve: evil men
flourish and good people suffer. Furthermore, luck infects the
moral fabric of the universe; luck of character and luck of
3
circumstances, as Nagel describes it. This is what I mean by
saying that we inhabit a morally disordered world.
A Christ-shaped moral philosophy views this appearance of
‘moral disorder’ as temporary and as being, therefore,
misleading. Human beings, whether they recognise it or not,
are ultimately accountable to God and in the not too distant
future God will ensure that perfect moral order is established.
God’s power, His knowledge and His goodness will ensure that
the universe is, ultimately, a morally ordered universe.
Taken together, however, these two points (i and ii)
constitute what I have called ‘the human predicament’. The
human predicament is that sinful human beings inhabit a
morally ordered universe and that, granted the constitution of
human nature, there is nothing that human beings can do
which will ameliorate this situation.

2
See especially Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries
of Mere Reason (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1960).
3
See Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck,” in Moral Luck, ed. Daniel
Statman (Albany: University of New York, 1993), pp. 57-72.
iii) The Greatest This-Worldly Good:
reconciliation with God.
The good news of the Christian gospel is that God, in His love,
has acted to overcome the human predicament; or, more
accurately, to make it possible for that predicament to be
overcome. A Christ-shaped moral philosophy therefore
recognises that the greatest this-worldly good is for an
individual to be reconciled with God on the basis of the offer of
forgiveness which God, through Christ’s atoning death, makes
available to sinful human beings.
This completes my exposition of Christ-centred moral
philosophy, the themes that are at the foundation of the moral
message which Jesus proclaimed.
I turn now to the central critical point of this paper, namely,
to examine the two theses – ‘divine command ethics’ and
‘normative reductionism’ - that have featured most
prominently in ‘Christian ethics’ in the second half of the
twentieth century. In each case I will argue that the point of
th
view is motivated by developments in 20 century
philosophical ethics which have little to do with Christ-shaped
moral philosophy because they do not entail and are not
entailed by themes in Christ-centred moral philosophy; and I
will argue that divine command ethics and normative
reductionism are trivial in comparison with the themes which
are at the heart of Christ-shaped moral philosophy.

The Divine Command Theory of Ethics

th
The 20 century re- emergence of divine command ethics
has its roots, not in anything connected with Christ-centred
moral philosophy but in two quite independent sources: one is
Greek philosophy, especially one of the options explored in
Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma; the other is the twentieth century
meta-ethical debate between realist and anti-realist construals
of moral predicates. It is the second of these sources which is
the more immediately relevant to an understanding of
contemporary divine command ethics.
Twentieth century moral philosophy was dominated by the
meta- ethical debate between realism and anti-realism.
4
Convinced by the arguments of GE Moore’s Principia Ethica
most moral philosophers believed that meta-ethics is logically
prior to ethics; that before we can state what is good or right
we must be clear about the meaning of these terms. Anti-
realism, classically expressed in the writings of CL Stevenson
and RM

4
See G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press,
1903), ch. 1-3.
Hare, quickly became the dominant mid-twentieth century
meta-ethic but by the 1970s it had been eclipsed by a series of
imaginative realist positions. Divine command ethics re-
emerged in Christian ethics in the wake of this revival in meta-
ethical realism. Drawing on Kripke-Putnam semantics,
especially the claims that there are ‘a posteriori’ necessary
truths which include property identifications, writers who were
sympathetic to theism revived the view that the property
‘rightness’ is one and the same as the property of acting in
accordance with God’s will. The thesis admitted of a wide range
of formulations: some held that divine command theory explain
all value terms, others that it only explains expressions of
obligation; some held that the relationship between God’s will
and moral predicates is a causal relationship, others that it is a
supervenience relationship, yet others that it one of reductive
analysis; sometimes the analysis was expressed in terms of the
commands of God, sometimes in terms of the commands of a
loving God and so on. The literature, in which the writings of
5 6
Robert M Adams and Philip Quinn are most prominent, is
vast.
The second thing to notice about the emergence of divine
command ethics is that there is no necessary connection
between Christ-centred moral philosophy and divine command
ethics or, for that matter, between Christ- centred moral
philosophy and any of the main meta-ethical realist and anti-
realist positions which featured in mid-twentieth century
moral philosophy.
Christ-centred moral philosophy can be expressed in terms of
any of them and so it is logically neutral between them. I shall
develop this point in more detail, taking anti-realism as my
starting point.
RM Hare, the architect of modern anti-realism, held that
7
moral judgments are a species of imperatives. Moral
judgments are not imperatives but they entail imperatives.
Thus for Hare ‘Smith ought to do X’ entails ‘Smith, do X’ and ‘X
is good’ entails ‘If choosing between X and Y choose X’.
Provided that such judgments are characterised by
supervenience, prescriptivity and universalizability then they
are moral judgments. Furthermore, universal prescriptions can
be used to express any moral viewpoint. Therefore, the moral
judgments of Christ-shaped moral philosophy – for example the
judgment that human beings are characterised by radical evil -
can be analysed in terms of the anti-realist framework which I
have just described. Hare defended this compatibility thesis and
Hare was, in fact, a practising Christian. It is possible, therefore,
to combine Christ- shaped moral philosophy with anti-realism.

5
See, for example, Robert M. Adams, “A Modified Divine
Command Theory of Ethical Wrongness” in The Virtue of Faith
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)
6
See, for example, Philip Quinn, Divine Commands and Moral
Requirements (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).
7
See Richard M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1952).
Christ-shaped moral philosophy is consistent with all of the
various forms of meta-ethical realism, those which espouse
divine command ethics and those who reject it. It is, therefore,
consistent with, though not entailed by, all of the various forms
of divine command morality which I described earlier.
However, Christ-shaped moral philosophy is also consistent
with many forms of moral realism which reject divine
command ethics. A Christian might be a utilitarian or might
defend a rights-based approach to ethics; Richard Swinburne
has recently defended the view that moral properties are like
Platonic abstract entities. All of these views are compatible with
the various theses which comprise Christ-shaped moral
philosophy.
In summary, divine command ethics is a form of moral
realism whose emergence has been inspired by late twentieth
century forms of meta-ethical realism, a theory which has no
intrinsic connection with the moral messages of the Christian
faith; and since Christ-shaped moral philosophy can be
expressed in terms of any of the realist and anti-realist points
of view it follows that there is no logical connection between it
and any one of them. Christ-centred moral philosophy and
divine command ethics are logically unrelated points of view.
 Normative Reductionism
The second philosophical project which obscures Christ-
shaped moral philosophy is Christian ‘value reductionism’, a
view that can match divine command theory in a page-for-page
th
count in 20 century scholarly literature even if lacking the
philosophical sophistication. What is value reductionism? Value
reductionism is a program in value theory rather than a set of
philosophical views, the program being to reduce to a single
moral value the apparently great diversity of moral values
which is taken for granted in everyday experience. In uncritical
moments we recognise a plurality of values such as kindness,
gratitude, truthfulness, justice, equality, tolerance and so on.
However, value reductionists hold that these values are all
expressions of, and hence are reducible to, a single value.
Strictly speaking, the program is consistent with there being
more than one basic, irreducible value but most value
reductionists tend to be monists, holding that there is only one
basic value from which, together with subsidiary empirical
premises, all other values can be reduced. Though other
conceptions are possible I will keep the discussion simple by
assuming that the issue is simply between value pluralists and
value monists.
The debate between monism and pluralism has a long and
honoured place in the history of moral philosophy and it has
caused division within both of the great schools of ethical
thought, consequentialism and deontology. Consequentialists
8 9
such as Bentham and Mill are monists, holding that the only
thing that is of intrinsic value is happiness and that all other
values are ultimately reducible to happiness. Other
10
consequentialists such as GE Moore are pluralists, holding
that we must recognise a plurality of moral values and that the
pleasures of friendship and artistic appreciation, for example,
are not reducible to happiness.
Deontologists are equally divided. Some, such as Kant, are
monists holding that all values are ultimately reducible to a
single principle such as reason; other deontologists, such as WD
11
Ross , argue that the troublesome cases of moral conflict
requires us to recognise, in addition to beneficence, the
existence of other irreducible moral values such as non-
maleficence, justice and prudence.
This philosophical controversy has been taken up by writers
in Christian ethics. I will argue that, as in the case of divine
command morality, the Christian arguments shadow arguments
in secular moral philosophy, that Christ-shaped moral
philosophy is neutral with regard to the program and that a
preoccupation with it has deflected attention from the themes
of Christ-shaped moral philosophy which are the proper
concern of Christian moral philosophy.
There has been a steady stream of Christian contributors to
the monism / pluralism debate throughout the twentieth
century, prominent amongst whom have been Reinhold
12 13 14
Niebuhr , Anders Nygren , Paul Ramsey and Joseph
15
Fletcher . Perhaps the most notable of these was Ramsey, who
developed what James Gustafson called a version of ‘love
monism’. The philosopher, William Frankena said that Ramsey
came ‘very close’ to ‘pure act-agapism’. Ramsey replied by
saying that ‘agape is honour bound to figure the angles’ and
elaborated this in the following terms:
It seems to me that if a Christian ethicist is going to be a pure
agapist…there can be no sufficient reason for him
programmatically to exclude the possibility that there may be
rules, principles or precepts whose source is man’s natural
competence to make moral judgments. An inhabitant of
Jerusalem need not rely on messages from Athens, but he
should not refuse them; he might even go to see

8
Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation (New York: Hafner, 1948).
9
John Stewart Mill, Utilitarianism (London: Collins, 1962).
10
G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Ch. 6.
11
W.D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1930).
12
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York:
Charles Scribners, 1944).
13
Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (London: SPCK, 1953).
14
Paul Ramsey, Basic Christian Ethics (London: SCM, 1945).
15
Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics (New York: John Knox
Press, 1966).
if there are any. This would be mixed agapism – a
combination of agape with man’s sense of natural justice or
injustice, which, however, contains an internal asymmetry that
I indicate by the expression ‘love transforming natural
16
justice.
This quote and especially the last sentence (italics mine)
indicate the philosophical quality of the arguments as Christian
writers carried the monism / pluralism debate into the closing
decades of the twentieth century.
Christ-shaped moral philosophy is logically independent of
the debate over value reductionism. That is to say, it is possible
to hold the views - concerning human sinfulness, concerning
the moral predicament which, in a morally ordered universe,
this entails and concerning God’s offer of forgiveness and
reconciliation through Christ’s atoning death – irrespective of
which view you take of moral reductionism. Furthermore, an
ethical monist can subscribe to all of the different aspects of a
Christ-shaped moral philosophy which I have sketched; and it is
possible to be an ethical pluralist and to subscribe to all aspects
of a Christ-shaped moral philosophy. No entailment
relationship exists in either direction. The two views are,
therefore, logically distinct and unrelated.
My impression of the reductionism debate – of course, it can
only be an impression – is that, as in the case of divine
command ethics, a long running argument in academic
Philosophy has simply been carried over into Christian ethics
allowing writers in the field of ‘Christian ethics’ to follow
developments in secular moral philosophy.

Gethsemane Union
In conclusion, at least three points of clarification are in
order: the first defends the triviality charge; the second
concerns the scope of my conception of Christ-shaped moral
philosophy; the third returns, briefly, to my agreement and
disagreement with Moser.

1) The Triviality Charge

Jesus proclaimed the good news of human redemption and he
told his disciples, also, to proclaim that message. So, Christ-
shaped moral philosophy has a distinctive subject matter. As is
well known, a rejection of key aspects of Jesus’ message is at the
heart of many aspects of Enlightenment and contemporary
culture. So a primary responsibility of the Christian
philosopher is to restate Jesus’ message and defend it from its
modern detractors. However, this task of analysis and
proclamation has different implications for different branches
of philosophy – for

16
See the discussion of the issues in M.C. McKenzie: Paul
Ramsey’s Ethics: The
Power of Agape in a Post Modern World (Westport: Praeger, 2001).
metaphysics, for epistemology, for ethics, for philosophy of
science and so on. However, although epistemologists have
recently done a very good job in that apologetic program it is
not clear that moral philosophers have been so successful. I
have argued that Christian moral philosophers should return
from the technicalities of divine command theory and
normative reductionism to a defence of central aspects of Jesus’
moral teaching concerning the human predicament. I do not
deny that conventional themes are intrinsically interesting, nor
that they have a proper place in a study of normative ethics nor
that an understanding of them illuminates debates in practical
ethics. All of these things are probably true. Nor am I saying
that there is anything reprehensible about Christians taking an
interest in debates on these issues. The point is, rather, that
Moser has challenged Christian philosophers to philosophise
from a ‘Gethsemane perspective’ and I maintain that both of
the issues discussed are trivial if seen from that perspective.
Why is this so?
On the night before His crucifixion Jesus went, with his
disciples, across the Kidron Valley to a garden called
‘Gethsemane’. In their accounts of the events on that fateful
night the apostles tell us of Jesus great distress. Matthew tells
us that Jesus was ‘sorrowful and troubled’ (‘My soul is
overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death’ Matthew 26:37-
39); Mark tells us that Jesus was ‘deeply distressed and
troubled’ (Mark 14:33-34); Luke tells us that Jesus was ‘in
anguish’, that an angel came from heaven to strengthen him
and that, as Jesus continued to pray more earnestly, ‘his sweat
was like drops of blood falling to the ground’ (Luke 22:43-45).
The issues with which Jesus wrestled in Gethsemane were
moral issues, and in connection with them I make two claims.
Firstly, the issues most certainly had nothing to do with moral
semantics or normative reductionism. Secondly, the issues
were precisely the ones which I described as being at the heart
of a Christ-shaped moral philosophy: the sinfulness of the
human race, the resulting plight of the human race in a morally
ordered universe, the need to make atonement to God the
Father for the sins of human race so to make possible their
forgiveness and reconciliation to God. Seen in this context,
divine command ethics and normative reductionism appear
trivial.

2) The Scope of Christ-shaped Moral

Philosophy
th
It might seem that my radical critique of 20 century
Christian ethics cuts a very broad swathe through nearly all of
Christian ethics; indeed, far too broad a swathe. Are we really to
think that sin, atonement, forgiveness and reconciliation with
God are the only themes which merit philosophical analysis?
However, this is a misleading interpretation of the Christ-
shaped moral philosophy which I have defended. Issues in
practical ethics play an important role in Christ-shaped moral
philosophy. For example, termination of third-trimester
pregnancies for social reasons is one aspect of the sinfulness of
human nature; failure to respect basic human rights is another;
issues connected with the cancellation of third world debt is
another and so on. Christian critiques of these and a host of
other practical ethical issues are vitally important aspects of
our understanding of human sinfulness and of human
repentance. Did Jesus grieve over aspects of human nature to
which I have alluded? Most certainly, in my view. So the
dismissal of moral semantics and reductionism as trivial (did
Jesus grieve in Gethsemane over the philosophical
technicalities of the realism / anti-realism debate?) does not
rule out quite as much as a hasty encounter with Christ-shaped
moral philosophy might lead one to think.

3) Agreement and Disagreement with

Moser.
Having focused almost exclusively on the subject matter of
Christ-shaped philosophy my approach is open to the charge
that I have missed the main point that Moser was trying to
make: no matter what the subject matter, unless Christian
philosophy is informed by a ‘Gethsemane union’, by obedient
dying and by voluntary co-operation with Christ it leaves
Christian philosophy impotent. Subject matter is secondary to
spirit.
There is much truth in this claim. However, sometimes spirit
without the proper subject matter can also be spiritually
impotent. More so than in other branches of the subject, in
moral philosophy proper spirit focused on proper subject
matter must be the aim of Christian philosophers.
Harry Bunting is chair of the Philosophy of Religion division
at Tyndale Fellowship for Biblical and Theological Research
in Cambridge, England.

Endnotes
 The Revenge of Berkeley, Kant
and Husserl: An assessment of
R. Scott Smith’s Naturalism
and Our Knowledge of Reality
Angus J. L. Menuge
Department of Theology and Philosophy
Concordia University
Wisconsin, Mequon

Abstract: Naturalism presents itself as a world view founded

on scientific knowledge which seeks to reduce or eliminate
various recalcitrant phenomena such as consciousness and
moral values. Most critiques of naturalism focus on its
inability to do justice to these phenomena. By contrast, in
Naturalism and Our Knowledge of Reality (Ashgate, 2012),
R. Scott Smith argues that naturalism fails to account for our
ability to know reality, thereby undercutting its alleged
scientific foundation. Michael Rea and Robert Koons have
argued that, on naturalism, there are no well-defined objects
of knowledge. Smith complements this critique by showing
that, even if such objects exist, subjects will be unable to
know them as they are. His threefold argument can be
understood as the intellectual revenge of Berkeley, Kant and
Husserl on naturalism. At the end of the paper, I suggest a
couple of ways proponents of naturalized epistemology
would likely respond.

How is knowledge possible? For example, how is it possible

for a subject S to know that there is an apple on the counter?
One can distinguish four fundamental requirements for
knowledge, one concerning the object known, the other three
concerning the knowing subject: (1) there is a well-defined
object of knowledge (an apple); (2) S can access this object (the
apple, and not sense data or brain states, is an object of
experience); (3) S can form a valid concept of the object (of an
apple); (4) S can match the concept (of an apple) with the object
1
(the apple given in experience). Concerning (1), Michael Rea
2
and Robert Koons have shown that due to its denial of
essences, naturalism makes it impossible to know physical
objects. This is because, without essences, naturalism is unable
to define the identity and persistence conditions of physical
aggregates: “If there are no facts at all about what sorts of
changes a putative thing X can and cannot survive, then there
3
is no such thing as X.” So there simply are no apples that can
be known, and as a result, there is nothing which could cause a
valid concept of an apple in us.
This may be called an “outside-in” objection to naturalism: if
naturalism is true, there is nothing out there in the world that
could produce knowledge in us. By contrast, R. Scott Smith
focuses his critique of naturalism on requirements (2), (3) and
(4). Smith’s is an “inside-out objection”: even if there is a
potential object of knowledge in the world (an apple), on
naturalism, there is no way for the subject to access that object
(he cannot experience an apple as it is), to acquire a valid
concept of it (of an apple) or to determine whether that object
matches his concept (of an apple).
To demonstrate the inadequacy of naturalistic epistemology,
Smith adopts an exemplary approach. He first argues
inductively, examining the work of a wide variety of the best
naturalistic philosophers in the area and looks for recurring
problems. He then tries to show that this pattern of failure is
(most likely) not a coincidence, but stems from the endemic
deficiencies of naturalism’s underlying ontology. We will first
examine how Smith argues that naturalism fails to account for
each of conditions (2), (3) and (4) for knowledge. Then we will
consider the merits of his proposed alternative ontology for
knowledge. Finally, we will reflect on the overall significance of
his thesis.
 1. Berkeley’s revenge: the inaccessibility of
the object of knowledge.
The most fundamental problem Smith identifies for
naturalistic theories of epistemology is that they make it
difficult to see how the subject could possibly contact a real-
world object.
Following David Armstrong, reliabilists like Fred Dretske,
Mike Tye, Bill Lycan and David Papineau reject internalist
accounts of knowledge (like the old sense data theory), because
they invite skepticism as to whether the experiences with
which we are inwardly acquainted correspond to the real
world. Instead, they argue that so long as the causal chain
between the object and our representation of it is a reliable one
(regardless of whether we can show that it is reliable), we can
know that object.
A classic problem for reliabilist accounts is the “causal chain
argument” which points out that our mental representation of
an object is the last link of a causal chain, and it is hard to see
on naturalistic grounds how we could “traverse, or transcend,
the causal chain…and have epistemic access to the originating,
4
physical object itself in the world.”
Reliabilists typically dismiss this, claiming that so long as it is
the properties of the object which cause the corresponding
properties of our representation of it, we can know the object
directly. But Smith makes several important objections to this
maneuver. The main problem is that on naturalism, there is no
intrinsic intentionality. This means that no experience that we
have is inherently of a particular object, so we cannot simply
say that an experience is of an apple. Rather, a representation is
what it is because of a physical process that modifies the brain,
and that brain state means something only because it is
5
conceptualized a certain way. As a result, on naturalism, we
have no direct nonconceptual access to apples, so we can never
see an apple for what it is. But if we can never see an apple for
what it is, there is no good reason to say that our
conceptualization of an experience tells us about something in
the world outside our brains. Perhaps instead all we ever
perceive are our own brain states, and the concepts we apply to
them are all fictional concerning the real world. Smith’s point
is not that, on naturalism, objects could not be represented in
experience, just that this is not something we could ever claim
to know.
History is repeating itself. When John Locke offered his causal
theory of perception, Berkeley argued that it made it
impossible to know what objects are in themselves. In his
contribution to Smith’s book, Errin Clark draws the connection
explicitly while critiquing the Churchlands’ naturalized
epistemology. For the Churchlands, our brains represent the
world by “synaptic weight configurations prompted by, and
6
hence corresponding to, patterns of external stimuli” . Further,
since all representation is a conceptualization of brain states,
there is no distinction between observation and theory: “Ones
perceptual judgments of x just are theoretical explanations of
7
x.” So again, one has no non-conceptual access to objects of
experience, and since on naturalism, there are no essences, one
also cannot claim that perception is “directly determined by
8
what the object of perception is like” . Thus there is no reason
to think that our experience tells us anything about real-world
objects and, ironically, “we are…thrust into something like
Berkeleyan idealism…. [E]ach of us only has our own
9
experience, our own ‘way of knowing’ we know not what.”
The absurdity for naturalism is that its account of knowledge
undermines our reason to accept its underlying ontology: the
particles and forces that lie at the foundation of reality are not
things we can know to exist. But then, we cannot even know
that brains exist: and so we cannot claim that knowledge
involves conceptualizations of brain states.

2. Kant’s revenge: The inability to form

valid concepts of objects.
Knowledge requires not only access to objects but also
that we can subsume those objects under appropriate
concepts: thus to know x is an apple we must have an
apple concept, and that concept must correspond to
what x is. This is not a trivial requirement, as Kant
realized. In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant pointed
out that we have many fictional concepts (such as fate
or fortune), which do not correspond to anything
demonstrably real. So, in response to Hume’s
skepticism about the categories of substance and
causation, Kant offered a “deduction” of these concepts,
aiming to show that they are valid of the world we
experience. Similarly, Smith challenges naturalism to
provide an account of the origin of our concepts which
makes it reasonable to believe that they have real-world
validity.
According to Smith, in a paradigm case of
forming a concept, one must first be exposed to many
examples (or pictures) of a thing, and there must be
many noticings of their common features.10 The initial
proto-concept thus formed may then need to be
corrected so as to exclude near-misses, but eventually
one has a fairly stable apple concept. Since this process
of concept formation takes time, it is necessary to
compare the evolving concept to various apples and
non-apples one experiences. But Smith points out, this
process makes sense only if one has some independent
non-conceptual access to the objects themselves.
However, as we saw, naturalism is incompatible with
such access since it denies that our experiences are
intrinsically of anything and claims that we are always
conceptualizing or taking our brain states to mean
something else. Thus, on naturalism, to form a concept
of an apple cannot be done by comparing experiences
of apples, but only by comparing conceptualizations of
experience.11 This means, however, that all concept
formation presupposes prior concepts. So, unless
naturalism wishes to assume a sufficiently rich stock of
innate concepts, it cannot account for how concepts are
formed in the first place. But even if it can, the
problem is, without independent access to the real-
world objects, there is no way to tell that the concepts
formed are valid. On naturalism, we may as well be
plugged in to the super-computer of The Matrix, in
which case our conception of what we are
experiencing need not correspond to anything in the
world around us.
To be fair, as Smith points out, unlike Dretske,
Tye and Lycan, David Papineau does offer a
naturalistic account of concept formation, but the
problem is that he too maintains that “experiences
themselves are conceptualizations of brain states”12 so it
seems there is “no room for any direct seeing, only
seeing as or seeing that something is the case.”13 So the
problem again is that concepts cannot be formed in the
first place, and there is no way to independently test
their validity by comparing them to non- conceptual
experience.
The same problem arises for the more
sophisticated accounts of Searle, Dennett and Murphy.
While Searle wants to defend external realism (that
reality is independent of how we represent it), he also
supports conceptual relativism, according to which “all
representations of reality are made relative to some
more or less arbitrarily selected set of concepts.”14 But
this means that since there are many conceptual
schemes and no independent access to reality as it is,
there is no way to argue that a particular scheme, such
as naturalism, carves reality at the joints. So if
someone has a non-naturalistic conceptual scheme
with a non-naturalistic ontology, there is no way for
the naturalist to provide evidence to show that person
that naturalism provides a superior ontology, since
there simply are no facts independent of the rival
conceptual schemes the naturalist can point to.
Similarly, Dennett denies the existence of any original
or intrinsic intentionality, so he also must maintain that
all we can do is to take our brain states to mean
something else. Applied consistently, Dennett would
be forced to embrace the views of Jacques Derrida,
according to whom, we can only access our own
interpretations and so have no means of determining
whether some of these interpretations are closer to
objective reality than others. So like Searle, Dennett
has no way to demonstrate that his materialistic
conception of reality is superior to alternatives.
Despite her non- reductive physicalism, Murphy ends
up in the same place, because she too thinks that “all
contact with reality is a conceptualization, or
interpretation”.15
This, however, is ultimately self-contradictory: there
can be no interpretation of x unless x is something
beyond the interpretation. For if not, we merely have the
imposition of a concept with no object that is being
conceptualized, precisely what Kant thought about fate
and fortune. Naturalism along these lines seems unable
to avoid the embrace of a radical postmodernism which
is unable to distinguish truth and fiction, knowledge and
conjecture.
3. Husserl’s revenge: The inability to verify
that an object matches a concept.
Yet a third problem for the naturalist is that he cannot
give a credible account of how we come to know
something. As Husserl argued, it seems that this
requires a process of verification (e.g. that an object is
an apple). To know something, we must not only have
a concept of it, we must also be able to come
epistemically closer to that object, so that we can see
that it does fall under that concept. Thus, to use one of
Smith’s examples, if I see a distant woman in a
grocery store who looks like my wife, but I am not
sure, I can move myself physically and epistemically
closer to the person until I see that she either does or
does not match up to the conception I have of my wife.
This process seems only to make sense if one has
nonconceptual access to the object of experience so
that one can compare that experience with the concept,
to see if they match. To do this, one must be able to
attend to one’s experiences and notice their features.
To buttress this account, Smith also gives two
examples which appear to require us to notice an
experience for what it is. First, in cognitive therapy for
uncomfortable feelings, one learns to distinguish those
feelings from one’s interpretation of them.16 For
example, in K. N. Oschner’s experiments, patients learn
to identify their own response of sadness to certain
stimuli, and can then downwardly suppress it by
providing a more neutral interpretation of the stimuli.17
For this to make sense, the experience of sadness must
be detachable from a particular interpretation of its
object: it cannot be that to see the stimulus is to see it as
sad, for then I could never adopt a different response to
it. Secondly, I am reliably informed by an expert, Smith
himself, that surf fishing cannot be taught by a set of
rules; rather “the individual fisherman must pay
attention to what is represented in experiences…the
felt-quality of both the bite and the resultant tag on the
line.”18
Yet it seems that naturalism can account for none
of this, since there is no non-conceptual access either to
real-world objects of experience or even to the
experiences themselves. I cannot know if I am getting
epistemically closer to an object that matches my
concept if all my experience is itself a
conceptualization. This would be like saying I am
closer to London because I think of my experience in
increasingly Londonish ways. I must have some way of
accessing the object itself to see if it has the
characteristics of London. Similarly, if I can only
access experiences through my conceptualizations, it
seems I cannot reconceptualize them. For if I cannot
experience certain stimuli except by conceiving them as
sad, I cannot independently access the stimuli and my
response of sadness for what they are, and so I cannot
reconceive a more neutral response, and therefore
cannot downwardly suppress my sadness to those
stimuli. But the fact is we can do all these things.
4. An alternative ontology for knowledge.
Well, if naturalism cannot provide a credible ontology
for knowledge, what is required? For one thing, it seems
clear that an unabashed essentialism is required for both
mental and physical properties. If Rea and Koons are
right, for physical objects to be knowable, they must
have essences so that they have well-defined identities
and persistence conditions. One reason for this is that,
on naturalism, causal powers reduce to those of an
aggregate time slice (a particular configuration of matter
at a time), and even if I can know this time slice, it is
useless knowledge as it is instantly obsolete. But,
following Husserl and Dallas Willard, Smith focuses on
the idea of mental essences. Assuming that there are
potential objects of knowledge, we can know them only
if there is intrinsic intentionality, so that a thought is the
thought it is because of what it is about. Thus the
thought that the Packers suffered from poor refereeing
could not have been the same thought if it were not
about the Packers but about Hurricane Sandy instead.
For knowledge to occur there must be a match between
the intentional properties of the thought (the features it
represents its object as having) and the intensional
properties of the object (the features of the object given
in experience).
 In the ideal case, “every property of the object
present in experience matches the corresponding
properties of the object as it was thought to be.”19
A consequence is that while a simple abstract object
may be fully known, one may have only partial
knowledge of a physical object because it is not fully
given. However, the important point is that on this
account, the concept of an object in no way modifies
the object; indeed the concept does not even
guarantee that the object exists. However, for this
very reason, experiences are detachable from
concepts, and so one can have independent access to
objects and determine whether they match those
concepts. As an analogy, because a glove does not
modify hands, one can determine whether the glove
fits a given hand. Likewise, because the concept of an
apple does not modify apples, one can determine
whether a given object of nonconceptual experience
matches that concept.
More than this however, the process of
acquiring concepts and ultimately presuppose
a radically different ontology from naturalism:
“[K]nowledge of reality involves…following
through on a series of noticings, comparings,
forming concepts; seeing whether what is
represented in experience matches up with one’s
concepts; adjusting or correcting concepts, and
more. There is, that is, an active agent that owns
and possesses these states, and does these
activities…. And it seems the self must somehow
literally retain its personal identity through
change, such that it is the same person who
owns these thoughts and experiences, grows in
20
understanding and learning, and more.”
Indeed, it appears that knowledge of reality requires “a
robust form of dualism (indeed, substance dualism).”21
It is not only objects of knowledge but the knowing
subject which must have a well-defined identity at a
time and over time. There must be a unified self which
can compare its experiences with its concepts, and that
self must persist over the time it takes to determine if
there is a match.

5. Assessment
As I suggested earlier, I think Smith’s book nicely
complements the project of Rea and Koons. While the
latter show that naturalism cannot define objects that
could cause our knowledge (an outside-in objection),
Smith shows that naturalism cannot explain how the
subject can access objects, form valid concepts of them
and come to know that those objects fall under those
concepts (an inside-out objection). I also admire
Smith’s admirable patience in sifting such a wide
variety of naturalist views. In this he is a good model
of virtue epistemology, considering the best replies a
naturalist might make to his view before giving his
final assessment.
I can imagine a couple of replies that naturalists
might make to Smith’s book. The most fundamental
revolves around the so-called “KK-Principle.” It is
widely accepted that accounts of knowledge which
require absolute certainty make the unreasonable
demand that in order to know something, one needs to
know that one knows it. Without access to some self-
evident truths, we are off to the races and one has to
know that one knows that one knows….etc. Now,
Smith’s Husserlian account of knowledge does not
require absolute Cartesian certainty (and it is
compatible with partial knowledge and fallibility). Still,
someone might say that his critique of naturalistic
epistemologies amounts to the claim that they cannot
show that any of their conceptualizations amount to
knowledge of the real world, and so amounts to the
claim that they cannot know that they know that world.
A typical reliabilist response is to say that if, in fact,
my conceptualizations are caused to be the way that
they are by the way some real object is, and if that
causal process is one that transmits information about
the object to that representation with fidelity, then I can
know that object as it is. To be sure, I cannot get
outside of my own mind to see if this is what is
happening, and so I cannot know that I know, but I will
have knowledge if those conditions obtain regardless of
whether I can refute radical skepticism. And whether
they are naturalists or not, most epistemologists dismiss
radical skepticism on the grounds that while radical
doubts might be true, the burden of proof is on the
skeptic to provide evidence that the process of belief
formation is unreliable, not on the non- skeptic to show
that it isn’t.
However, it is not clear to me that Smith does
require one to know that one knows. Indeed, he says
that “I am not so concerned with skepticism to think
that I must refute a skeptic.”22 If this is right, Smith’s
account of concept formation and of matching concepts
with experience is only supposed to show how such
things are possible (he does not offer to prove that this
is what really happens), but his point is that if they do
not happen, it is hard to see how we can know anything,
and that if naturalism is true, they cannot happen. Smith
can surely grant that on naturalism it is logically
possible that our concepts, interpretations or takings do
carve reality at the joints, but argue that this is very
unlikely to be the case, because we have no apparent
means of forming or correcting our concepts on the
basis of the way the world really is. So, as Victor
Reppert says of his famous Argument From Reason
against Naturalism, Smith could say that he is not
giving a Skeptical Threat Argument (since his account
does not exclude that threat either), but rather appeals to
an Inference to the Best Explanation. If this is correct,
then perhaps Smith would say that on naturalism, it
would be an astonishing coincidence if our experiences
and concepts were of real-world objects.
A related point is that, if the argument is an
Inference to the Best Explanation, then it is most likely
that the naturalist will attempt to counter Smith by
offering an account of reliability premised on
naturalistic evolution or the learning history of an
organism (e.g. operant conditioning, or the
reconfiguration of neural networks). Someone might
argue that even though we do not have direct epistemic
access to the way the world is via nonconceptual
experience, still the kinds of concepts we have are
shaped by interaction with a real environment (through
natural selection, operant conditioning, re-weighting
neural networks, or whatever), and so over time, those
concepts have grown closer to the way the world really
is because it is an advantage for surviving (or thriving).
Could it be, therefore, that although we have no
nonconceptual access to the objects of experience, real-
world objects have, as it were, access to us, and these
objects “program” and refine our concepts so that they
are the kinds of things which can match up with reality
under the right conditions? On this view, although there
is no intrinsic ofness in our representations (experiences
or thoughts), could we not still say that a representation
type is of something X because over time, under normal
conditions, only X causes a token of that type? So, for
example, perhaps evolution accounts for some basic
abilities to distinguish shapes, and learning history
accounts for the ability to distinguish apples from pears
and oranges etc., and as a result, there is a type of
representation whose tokens will, under normal
conditions, only be caused by apples. (In this way also,
one can also misrepresent an orange as an apple
because the conditions are not normal: the orange is
moldy or under a green light, the subject is wearing
green-tinted glasses, etc.)
So the naturalist I am imagining grants that we
do not have nonconceptual access to objects of
experience, but claims that all the same, those objects
have access to our experiences and concepts, and
thereby shape them to be of those objects. At least, this
is something we can say with a tolerable degree of
accuracy, realizing that concepts may be fuzzy,
incompletely mastered, etc. Now obviously such an
outside-in objection can be subjected to a skeptical
threat, since there is no way to traverse the causal chain
to show that it really is features of the object (and not,
say a brain state) that cause the corresponding features
of the experience or thought. But if Skeptical Threat
Arguments are off the table, can Smith show that this
scenario makes our paradigmatic knowledge claims (2
+ 2 = 4; that’s an apple; chemotherapy kills cancer
cells) unlikely? That is, can he show that granted that
we do know many things, this is more likely to be true
if his Husserlian account of knowledge is true than if an
evolutionary/learning history account of the formation
of experiences and concepts is true? My impression is
that Smith will point out that what it takes to navigate
life need only be useful, not true, and that contingent
interactions between humans and their environment are
insufficient to account for the tight connection between
concept and object required for knowledge. He says, for
example, “There is an incredibly vast array of complex,
interrelated abilities that seem designed to function
together…it seems that we have been made in such a
way that includes an incredibly sophisticated set of
abilities, and a vast number of instructions, just to know
reality.”23
6. The importance of Smith’s work
As Smith says in the last chapter, if his basic thesis is
correct, the Philosophical and Methodological
Naturalism serving as gatekeepers of our intellectual
and public life are Emperors with serious wardrobe
malfunctions. As already noted, if naturalism makes it
impossible to know the real world (or incredibly
unlikely that we do), then we can have no confidence
in its pronouncements on basic ontology. As a result,
we need to reexamine naturalism’s low views of the
value of human life, and its rejection of morality and
religion as sources of possible knowledge about the
real world. If a credible ontology for knowledge
require substance dualism, then physicalism is false
and we have evidence that humans are ensouled beings
made in the image of God and therefore with
considerably greater value than a sequence of
aggregate time slices. Since naturalism is false, it
would also make sense to consider whether we can
know if God exists, which religion is true, and the basis
for moral values. All of this would make a vast
difference to what is taught in public schools, and to
what counts as “truth in the public square.”24 And it
might provide the foundations for that common good
that seems to elude so many Western democracies
today. At the very least, Smith’s book ought to provoke
a considerable re-assessment of the authority invested
in naturalism throughout public life. I strongly
recommend this powerful and incisive book.

Angus J. L. Menuge is Professor of Philosophy at Concordia

University Wisconsin at Mequon, Wisconsin and the newly
 elected President of the Evangelical Philosophical Society.
He is author of Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the
Rationality of Science, and of many papers on the
philosophy of mind and Christian apologetics.

Endnotes
1
See Michael Rea, World Without Design: The Ontological
Consequences of Naturalism (New York: Clarendon Press,
2002), especially chapter 4, and his “Naturalism and material
objects,” in eds. William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland,
Naturalism: A Critical Analysis (New York: RKP, 2000).
2
Robert C. Koons, “Epistemological Objections to Materialism”
in eds. Robert Koons and George Bealer, The Waning of
Materialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 281-
306.
3
Michael Rea, “Naturalism and material objects,” in eds.
William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, Naturalism: A Critical
Analysis (New York: RKP, 2000), 112.
4
R. Scott Smith, Naturalism and Our Knowledge of Reality:
Testing Religious Truth-claims (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012),
17.
5
Smith, Naturalism and Our Knowledge of Reality, 52.
6
Errin Clark, in R. Scott Smith, Naturalism and Our Knowledge
of Reality, 111.
7
Ibid., 117.
8
Ibid., 123.
9
Ibid., 123.
10
Smith, Naturalism and Our Knowledge of Reality, 44.
11
Ibid., 48-49.
12
Ibid., 84.
13
Ibid., 85.
14
John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York:
The Free Press, 1995), 161, quoted in R. Scott Smith,
Naturalism and Our Knowledge of Reality, 60.
15
Smith, Naturalism and Our Knowledge of Reality, 176-177.
16
Ibid., 47-48.
17
K. N. Oschner et. al., “Re-thinking feelings: and fMRI study of
the cognitive regulation of emotion.” Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience, 14 (2002), 1215-1229.
18
Smith, Naturalism and Our Knowledge of Reality, 186.
19
Ibid., 191.
20
Ibid., 193-194.
21
Ibid., 194.
22
Ibid., 183.
23
Ibid., 203.
24
Ibid., 230.
 The Ethics of Childrearing and
A Theory of Justice
Michael T. McFall
Department of Philosophy
University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley
Menasha, Wisconsin
Evangelical Philosophical Society
www.epsociety.org

Abstract: The ethics of parental childrearing is complicated

in a liberal pluralistic society, and this is made more
complicated when religion is considered. As part of a larger
project, I here examine the ethics of Christian childrearing. I
argue that Christian parents may seek to transmit their
beliefs to their children and examine some boundaries. I first
examine John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice and modify his
veil of ignorance scenario. I then engage Rawls’
developmental moral psychology and how it relates to the
ethics of religious upbringing. After exploring Rawls’s
account of self-respect and how it relates to love, I conclude
by examining the importance of parental love and how this is
tied to intimacy and privacy.

I. The Modifi ed Veil of Ignorance

If there is no way to rear children neutrally within the family,
then it may be fruitful to examine the ethics of childrearing
from one of the most powerful bias-removing thought-projects
ever created: John Rawls’s veil of ignorance. In Rawls’s
hypothetical example, “no one knows his place in society, his
class position or social status; nor does he know his future in
the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence
and strength, and the like. Nor, again, does anyone know his
conception of the good, the particulars of his rational plan of
life, or even the special features of his psychology, such as his
1
aversion to risk or liability to optimism or pessimism.” The
choices made by free and rational persons in such a
hypothetical situation of equal liberty then yield for Rawls the
principles of justice, free of any personal bias.
Yet Rawls also assumes that individuals behind the veil of
ignorance know some general things, even though they know
nothing about themselves individually: “They understand
political affairs and the principles of economic theory; they
know the basis of social organizations and the laws of human
2
psychology.” I thus modify Rawls’s example by asking what
might change if individuals knew whether God existed.
Specifically, what might change if God’s existence was taken to
be a fact in the original position behind the veil of ignorance?
Rawls would reject this, as he notes, “They are to presume that
3
even their spiritual aims may be opposed.” Yet, as a thought
project, this modification is not too unreasonable. After all,
Rawls assumes knowledge of politics, economics, and
psychology and these can be just as contentious as God’s
existence.
What would change? Not much. After all, acknowledging
God’s existence does not necessarily entail following His will or
seeking to cultivate a relationship with Him. And even those
who claim a commitment to following God’s will often fall
short. Most importantly, this would not change the parenting-
style of Christian parents. The reason for this points to the non-
coercive nature of the Christian faith. As John Locke writes,
“true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of
the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God. And
such is the nature of the understanding, that it cannot be
4
compelled to the belief of anything by outward force.” In such
a hypothetical society, parents could, with more justification,
seek to indoctrinate their children coercively into a
relationship with God. And they might, seemingly, be able to do
so without fear of reprisal from others because all in that
society would also recognize that God exists. Yet such coercive
means could not ever force children to have a genuine faith
and, more than likely, would push children further away from
developing a relationship with God. And if Christian parents
cannot justifiably indoctrinate their children coercively in a
society in which there were universal agreement that God
exists, then it follows that Christian parents cannot justifiably
indoctrinate their children coercively in a liberal pluralistic
society in which God’s existence is open for debate.

II. Self-Respect and Love

There is another element from Rawls’s A Theory of Justice,
which is helpful to understand regarding the religious
upbringing of children – primary goods. Primary goods are
“things that every rational man is presumed to want. These
goods normally have a use whatever a person’s rational plan of
5
life.” Even more important than rights or duties, Rawls takes a
concept of the self, self-respect, as “very important,”
“essential,” “main,” and “perhaps the most important” social
6
primary good. Self-respect is important because “it includes a
person’s sense of his own value, his secure conviction that his
conception of his good, his plan of life, is worth carrying out…
[and it] implies a confidence in one’s ability, so far as it is
7
within one’s power, to fulfill one’s intentions. Self- respect
does not, however, develop in a vacuum, as is clear when Rawls
writes: “Their [parents’] love is displayed by their taking
pleasure in his presence and supporting his sense of
competence and self-esteem. They encourage his efforts to
master the tasks of growing up and they welcome his assuming
his own place. In general, to love another means not only to be
concerned for his wants and needs, but to affirm his sense of
8
worth as a person.”
Yet the most important primary good cannot be self-respect.
9
It is, rather, love. Rawls’s own theory of self-respect depends
upon it. Rawlsian individuals with self-respect and a sense of
justice exist only because they successfully progressed
gradually through Rawls’s three stages (or laws or principles) of
morality. And the first law is this: “given that family
institutions express their love by caring for his good, then the
child, recognizing their evident love of him, comes to love
10
them.” Rawls thereby assumes the following psychological
principle: “the child comes to love the parents only if they
11
manifestly first love him.” Love, because it is necessary to
acquire properly in order to develop self-respect, is more
important than self-respect.
The kind of love in question is parental love. More
specifically, Rawls emphasizes the importance of unconditional
parental love by noting that children are “made aware that he
is appreciated for his own sake by what are to him the imposing
and powerful reasons in his world. He experiences parental
12
affection as unconditional love.” Acting justly or morally,
even unconditionally, is insufficient for proper child-rearing.
As Laurence Thomas argues, “From the standpoint of the
development of our soul, parental love is more basic than
13
morality.” One major question that must then be asked in
assessing whether a particular child-rearing practice is
permissible is this: Is the child loved unconditionally?
Presumably, there can be cases of Christian parents teaching
and encouraging their children in the Christian faith while
showering them with unconditional love. Yet some parents
might teach and encourage their children in the Christian faith
but fail in providing love. The latter case would be an
inappropriate form of child-rearing and the former
appropriate, demonstrating that the content of a
comprehensive system taught by parents can sometimes be
irrelevant. Yet there is nothing inherently in Christianity which
would preclude Christian parents from striving to love
unconditionally. In fact, Christianity is well-suited for
promoting love. After all, the core rules of Christianity are, at
least according to Jesus when questioned about what is the
greatest commandment in the Law, “‘Love the Lord your God
with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your
mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the
second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself! All the Law
and the Prophets hang on those two commandments’” (Mt.
 14
22:7).
Jesus recognizes a system built upon love, not on rules or
morality. And because love is the core and love is inherently
relational, the core of Christianity is inherently relational. This
does not mean that morality or rules do not exist in
Christianity, for they surely do and are important. Rather, love
is the foundation and all else stems from love, including
morality. Furthermore, the Bible provides exemplars of genuine
unconditional love, namely God and Jesus. This is important to
have in a comprehensive system to know how to strive towards
true unconditional love. Also, though we casually talk about
unconditional parental love, technically, due to a lack of
perfection, no human, not even parents, can truly love
unconditionally. In addition to demonstrating what
unconditional love looks like in the Bible through God’s
interactions with humans, the Bible is filled with narratives
about failures and successes in love. So, children taught and
encouraged in the Christian faith gain further experience with
genuine unconditional love. And if their parents are faithful,
then children will also receive profound amounts of love as
their parents strive to love God and others, including them,
unconditionally.
I now pause to examine unconditional love more closely. I
believe there are at least four major aspects of unconditional
love, two quantitative and two qualitative. The first
quantitative feature of unconditional love is its omnipresence –
love that is always there. This is comforting to receive from
parents, even when parental love falls short of this ideal. Yet
those encouraged in the Christian faith further understand that
God loves all humans unconditionally in this sense simply
because all humans are His creation and are image-bearers of
God.
The second quantitative feature of unconditional love is that
it is a non- zero-sum good. So, for example, parents can strive to
love their children unconditionally even if they have multiple
children: “Parental love for one child does not entail less
15
parental love for another child.” Their love is not necessarily
watered-down with multiple recipients, though in extreme
cases exhaustion might limit how effectively this is expressed.
Interestingly, some people object to the possibility of God’s
being all-loving due to a concern that such love must be
watered-down. But if it is possible to a high degree with fallible
and mortal human parents, then it is not difficult to imagine it
possible for an all-powerful and all-good Father.
There are two qualitative features of unconditional love. The
first is that it is a gift when given to those who do not merit
16
it. And because no human is perfect, no human, of herself,
deserves unconditional love. So, children need not strive for
their parents’ love when their parents love them
unconditionally. Many children do strive for their parents’ love,
but this indicates a lack of unconditional love or the child’s
failure to understand it. Children raised in the Christian faith
have further powerful examples in this area. The first is that
God loves everyone regardless of who they are or what they do:
“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we
were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Ro. 5:8). A second gift,
eternal salvation, is further given to anyone who puts their
faith in Jesus’s redemptive death, burial, and resurrection.
Christians, in this sense, are adopted and become re-born after
accepting the invitation of a loving Father to join His family
17
based upon the salvific work of His Son. The gift aspect of
religious upbringing is important in childrearing because some
parents may not treat their love as a gift but as something that
must be earned by their children. This would be an
impermissible instance of childrearing, seeking to use one’s
behavior or beliefs on the conditionality of one’s love. Yet the
Christian model of parenting would be to love all, including
one’s children, unconditionally – regardless of their behavior or
beliefs.
The second qualitative aspect of unconditional love is a
cherished sense of uniqueness. Laurence Thomas develops this
point at length and writes, “parental love paves the way for
having the proper appreciation of one’s moral worth. And it
does this by bestowing a sense of cherished uniqueness upon
the child without feelings of superiority. It is equally significant
in this regard that invidiousness is not an inherent feature of
 18
partial love.” To receive the full effect of unconditional love,
it is insufficient to know that love is always there and is there
fully and undeservedly. Those three alone may yield a
profound, yet generic and impartial, love. Unconditional love
also requires an element of partiality, which cherished
uniqueness provides. Parents should recognize and appreciate
the uniqueness in each child. The apostle Paul writes that love
“does not envy” (1 Cor. 13:4), and envying in love indicates a
desire to have the love of another while also willing to take this
love away from a recipient of it if need be. But if one is already
secure that one is loved uniquely then such envy should not
arise. Children reared in the Christian tradition are able to
understand that God also loves perfectly in this manner, for
example, when Jesus says, “Indeed, the very hairs of your head
are numbered” (Lk. 12:7). This can also be witnessed in the
parable of the lost sheep (Lk. 15:1-7), lost coin (Lk. 15:8-10), and
prodigal son (Lk. 15:11-32).

III. Intimacy and Love

If love is important, then there is more reason to respect
privacy within families regarding the religious upbringing of
children because intimacy requires privacy. Not all
relationships require privacy, but intimate loving relationships
do. As Robert S. Gerstein argues, “intimate relationships simply
could not exist if we did not continue to insist on privacy for
19
them.” One species of intimacy is the experience of religious
ecstasy. Gerstein writes,

“…we cannot continue to be immersed in the

experience of intimacy if we begin to observe
ourselves and other things around us…One who
has been lost in the intimate communion of
prayer can, when he becomes self-consciously
aware of what he is doing, continue to
understand what the true prayer is about, just as
the outsider could. But now he is observing,
considering, and appraising his own actions from
the point of view of his understanding of
 20
prayer.”
This brings attention to the relational virtue required in
prayer directly between a human and God. Call this first-order
intimacy.
Second-order intimacy involves sharing elements of one’s
faith. This might entail, for example, teaching a child a
religious paradigm. Yet third-order intimacy involves not
merely teaching about something with another but a joint
intimate encounter. For example, Ferdinand Schoeman writes,
“Ideally the relationship between the parent and infant
involves an awareness of a kind of union between people which
is perhaps more suitably described in poetic- spiritual language
than in analytic moral terminology. We share our selves with
those whom we are intimate and are aware that they do the
21
same with us.”
This third-order intimacy between parent and child in the
Christian tradition is important because the parent is not
merely seeking to transmit a value-system. Doing merely that
might warrant less privacy and justify more exposure to
competing views due to being less intimate. Rather, in third-
order intimacy the parent engages in a relationship with her
child in the context of her seeking to provide her child with the
capability to experience first-order intimacy with God
independently.
Part of the beauty of third-order intimacy is that it requires a
high level of vulnerability. Yet where there is vulnerability,
there exists a risk of harm. Vulnerability can be heightened in
the power dynamic of the parent-child relationship, making
potential harm more worrisome. This, I take it, should be the
foremost concern of those skeptical about the religious
upbringing of children. There is always a risk. Yet risk must be
weighed alongside other considerations. Precluding the
existence of deeply-intimate relationships because they might
go astray seems overly risk-averse given the integral role that
intimate loving relationships play in a meaningfully good life.
The parents also have a perceived duty to God to share, and if
done properly the benefit to children is powerfully positive.
Also, parental flourishing can be minimized if parents are
deprived of intimate aspects of relationships with their
22
children.

Conclusion
It is impossible to provide children with a completely neutral
childrearing. The real questions, then, are who gets to transmit
beliefs and which beliefs. Given that parents have some
justification for their beliefs, it is reasonable that parents
should have a presumptive right to transmit their beliefs.
Unconditional parental love serves as the foundation of the
most important social primary good, self-respect, in A Theory of
Justice. Yet love requires several things. One thing, in intimacy,
is privacy. Another, in order to be genuine, is autonomy.
Consequently, privacy and autonomy must exist in families if
love is to develop and thrive there. But love develops in stages.
Children do not have the developmental capacities to make use
of autonomy fully to their benefit, so it is the responsibility of
parents to increasingly respect their children’s autonomy
appropriate to their maturity. Until granting children complete
autonomy, however, parents should love their children
unconditionally and provide them with what they believe to be
the best framework for beliefs and values. If these are
presented lovingly and respect appropriate boundaries of
23
autonomy, then such parenting practices are justified.
Michael T. McFall is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley in Menasha, Wisconsin.

Endnotes
1
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1999), 118. I do not here examine later
works of Rawls.
2
Rawls, 119.
3
Rawls, 12. Even if Rawls granted this, there would be for him
a second and perhaps more difficult problem – how to
 adjudicate a particular interpretation of religious truth:
“from the stand point of the original position, no particular
interpretation of religious truth can be acknowledged as
binding upon citizens generally; nor can it be agreed that
there should be one authority with the right to settle
questions of theological doctrines,” 191.
4
Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett, 1983), 27.
5
Rawls, 54.
6
Ibid., 79, 91, 477 and 286. See also 54 and 348.
7
Ibid., 386.
8
Ibid., 32.
9
In the Christian context, then, God would most accurately be
the most important primary good because “God is love” (1 Jn.
4:8). All Bible references are to the New International Version,
unless otherwise noted.
10
Ibid., 429.
11
Ibid., 406. Rawls states this formulation is drawn from
Rousseau’s Emilé, but I believe it has a more ancient source:
“We love because he first loved us” (1 Jn. 4:19).
12
Ibid., 32.
13
The Family and the Political Self (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), 19.
14
For more on the primacy of love in Christianity, see: Lk.
6:31, Jn. 3:16, Jn. 13:34-35, Jn. 15:11-18, Ro. 12:9-10, 1 Cor.
13:1-13, 1 Cor. 16:14, Gal. 5:6, Eph. 3:18-19, Col. 3:13-14, 1
Tim. 1:4-5, 1 Pet. 4:8, 1 Jn. 3:11-24, and 1 Jn. 4:7-21.
15
Thomas, 107. See 107-122 for Thomas’s full account.
16
Strictly speaking, it need not be a gift if it were bestowed
from one completely perfect being to another perfect being,
as it would then be deserved. But I leave aside the
metaphysical problems of this. Also, though a gift, parents
still have an obligation to provide this love to children as a
 duty. Contra Kant, I believe one can have a duty to love (and,
likewise, a duty to provide the gift of love). I will not develop
a defense of this here, but the following essays defend this
nicely: Barbara P. Solheim, “The Possibility of a Duty to Love,”
Journal of Social Philosophy 30 (1999); Matthew Liao, “The
Right of Children to Be Loved,” The Journal of Political
Philosophy 14 (2006); Matthew Liao, “The Idea of a Duty to
Love,” Journal of Value Inquiry 40 (2006).
17
See. Ro. 8:14-17, Gal. 4:1-7, Jn. 3:1-21, 2 Cor. 5:17, and 1
Pet. 1:23.
18
Thomas, 36. I am indebted to Thomas’ development of this
account. For the whole account, see Thomas, 19-48. J. David
Velleman objects to this feature in “Love as a Moral Emotion,”
Ethics 109 (1999), but I believe Thomas confronts it
satisfactorily on 20-21. The kind of radical and healthy self-
confidence derived from such affirmation is, in a Christian
context, explained as humility by Robert C. Roberts: “a self-
confidence so deep, a personal integration so strong, that all
comparison with other people, both advantaged and
disadvantaged, slides right off of him,” Spiritual Emotions: A
Psychology of the Christian Virtues (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 2007), 90.
19
“Intimacy and Privacy,” Ethics 89 (1978), 76.
20
Gerstein, 77-78. This intense focus also helps to explain
why, “An intimate relationship is one we value for its own
sake,” 79.
21
“Rights of Children, Rights of Parents, and the Moral Basis of
the Family,” Ethics 91 (1980), 8. This account is influenced by
the work of Martin Buber.
22
For arguments pertaining to the benefits of child-rearing for
parents, parent-focused models, see Harry Brighouse and
Adam Swift, “Legitimate Parental Partiality,” Philosophy &
Public Affairs 37 (2009) and Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift,
Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). The Bible
also notes the value of children to parents, in addition to
parental obligations to children. For example, “Children are a
heritage to the Lord, offspring a reward from him” (Ps.
127:3).
23
I thank Chris Johnson and Naudy Suarez for helpful feedback
on this essay.
 PART III
PROBLEM OF EVIL AND FREE WILL…
HOW FREE, AND FROM WHAT?
 The problem of evil
AD Strange

When dissatisfied with the service or the merchandise

that we have received, many of us ask to speak to the
"person in charge." When we speak of the "sovereignty" of
God, we mean that he is in charge of everything.
Before he fashioned the worlds, he decreed everything that
would come to pass (WCF, 3; Proverbs 16:33; Acts 15:18;
Ephesians 1:11). He brought all that exists into being by the
word of his power and declared it all to be "very good" (WCF,
4.1; Genesis 1; Acts 17:24; Colossians 1:16; Hebrews 11:3).
And our triune God does "uphold, direct, dispose, and govern
all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to
the least" (WCF, 5.1; Psalm 135:6; Daniel 4:34-35; Hebrews
1:3).
But a recognition of God's absolute sovereignty
seemingly compels us to conclude that God is responsible
for everything in his universe. Armed with such
knowledge, we may well feel justified in storming heaven,
demanding to see "the manager" and blaming him for the
evil that is in the world.

The author of sin?

The simple truth is, however, that God is not the author of sin.
The first chapter of James tells us that no one is permitted to
blame God for temptation, "for God cannot be tempted by evil,
nor does He Himself tempt anyone" (vs. 13). In fact, God is the
giver of "every good gift and every perfect gift" (vs. 17). He is not
capable of sinning or of authoring sin, because

"God is light and in Him is no darkness at all" (1 John

1:5).

Clearly, we face several biblical truths that seem to be in conflict:

 God made everything, and made it good — yet evil exists, and
with his universe and is powerless to stop evil, but at least he suffers along with us.
Such a view
was popularized by Rabbi Harold Kuschner in his book When Bad Things Happen to
Good People.God is not the author of it.

The natural, or unbelieving, man will not acknowledge the

sovereignty of a good God and, at the same time, recognize that
evil exists. Given the manifest evil in the world, many unbelievers
conclude either that God must be the author of it (and thus evil
himself) or that he must be powerless to stop it (and thus not
ultimately in charge of this world).

One of the characters in Archibald MacLeish's play J.B. (based

loosely on the book of Job) puts it this way:

"If God is God, He is not good; if God is good, He is not

God."

What this statement means is clear: In the face of evil, God must
yield either his sovereignty or his goodness.

Wrong explanations
Men have developed a number of unbiblical solutions to the
paradox of evil coinciding with a good, sovereign God. One
"solution" is that offered by the process theology of Charles
Hartshorne. Process theology does away with the tension by
denying God's sovereignty: he is evolving along The mainly
Persian religion Zoroastrianism posits another solution: two gods
(Ahriman and Ahura Mazda) in conflict with each other, one good
and the other evil. This makes evil as ultimate as good, since it
finds its source in an evil deity. Most unbelievers have enough
problems affirming the existence of one deity, much less two.

Many people feel that the "problem of pain" (as C.S. Lewis put it)
is best resolved simply by denying the existence of God. This
saves one the embarrassment of positing a God who is either
powerless or tolerant of evil. But atheism has its own problem:
How can there be such a thing as evil apart from some absolute
standard of goodness? No one denies the existence of evil; yet,
apart from the triune God of the Bible, no one can account for it.
Every way of explaining evil other than by the standard that God
himself has established is defective. We wrestle with the problem
of evil only because we know that there is a standard of

Sometimes
very we wonder
circumstances why God
created by itchose to do his
to perfect it this way. Why
people bring evil
and bring many into the to
sons world
glory?
goodness. And that standard exists because there is a good God.

The origin of evil

Christians understand that evil originated on the earth when our
first parents disobeyed God (WCF, 6; Genesis 3:6-7; Ecclesiasts
7:29). It was, of course, Satan who tempted them to sin by calling
into question the truthfulness and goodness of God. In his initial
approach to Eve in Genesis 3:1, Satan impugned the
reasonableness of God's command not to eat the fruit from the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Surely a good God would
not deny his offspring that which would only enrich them (vs. 5).
Satan depicted God as a bully who only needs to be stood up to.
He reasoned with our parents that if they asserted their wills, they
would discover themselves to be as free as God himself to make
the rules. A good God would never deny them this fruit. Satan
urged them to eat it and be their own god. When our first parents
embraced this temptation in their hearts, evil entered Paradise.

And the tactics of Satan have not changed. He tempted Christ in

essentially the same way (Matthew 4:1-11), and he tempts us in
the same way still. The devil continually seeks to call into question
God's veracity and goodness. Whenever pain and suffering come
our way, the devil, the flesh, and the world urge us to murmur as
the children of Israel did when the Lord wanted to bring them into
the Promised Land:

"Because the LORD hates us, He has brought us out of

the land of Egypt to deliver us into the hand of the
Amorites, to destroy us" (Deuteronomy 1:27). We are
tempted in every trial to see God as hating us and to miss
the fact that "It is a good land which the LORD our God is
giving us" (vs. 25).

Paul does not want the lesson of the Israelites to be lost on us. He
tells us in 1 Corinthians 10 that God delivered Israel (vss. 1-4) just
as he has delivered us, and that Israel's failure to trust the Lord
during the time in the wilderness stands as a warning to us (vs.
11). Instead of despairing in our present trials, we should always
understand that the Lord never puts on us more than we can bear
and that every trial has a way of escape (vs. 13) — that is, that
every trial provides another opportunity to trust the Lord.

God's use of suffering

God intends, you see, to use all the pain and suffering, indeed all
the evil in our lives, to purify us and make us holy, grooming us for
the inheritance we are to receive (1 Peter 4:12-19; Hebrews 12:3-
11). It is in our weakness that his strength, is made perfect (2
Corinthians 12:9) and it is in earthen vessels that the excellence
of God's power is made manifest (2 Corinthians 4:7).
answer: So that his power and greatness might be all the more manifest and the full range of his
attributes displayed in both the condemnation of the wicked and the glorification of the elect.
But, ultimately, we say that only God is wise (1 Timothy 1:17) and that it is the height of hubris to
question him (Romans 9:20-21; Job 38-41). It is enough to know that he loves us and works all
things together for good for us (Romans 8:28, 31-39).

I find it more than curious that we have it so much within us to question God's wisdom. I would
challenge you to spend some time pondering God's goodness instead. Think of our first parents
in the Garden. They had everything that they needed: perfect communion, vertically (with God)
and horizontally (with each other). Their every physical need was fully met. They were in a place
of perfect beauty and harmony. They had no reason whatsoever to mistrust God and every
reason to mistrust the serpent who called God's goodness into question. Yet, in the face of all
this wonderful provision and love, they chose to turn to the father of lies and turn their backs on
the one who had made them and cared so very much for them. Why don't we think more about
the horrible incongruity of sin with such abundant goodness in full view?

Final redemption
How wonderful it is, then, that God made that first promise of salvation in Genesis 3:15 right
after the Fall. As revelation progressed and culminated in our Lord Jesus Christ, it became clear
that we have ended up gaining more in the Last Adam than we ever lost in the first.

We know that every natural disaster (earthquake, hurricane, drought, plague, etc.) and every
occasion of human sin is part of the "bondage of corruption" to which the entire creation is
subjected (Romans 8:20-21). Whether it's Hurricane Andrew, famine in Somalia, war in the
former Yugoslavia, or President Clinton making abortion on demand easier to obtain, we
rejoice to know that "the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the
glory which shall be revealed in us" (vs. 18). And we have this hope because our sovereign
God has subjected the creation to suffering in hope, intending at last to bring about its final
redemption (vss. 18-30). Thus we can ever sing to our Maker and Ruler those beautiful words
of Paul used by Handel in his Messiah:

"But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus
Christ" (1 Corinthians 15:57, KJV).

© 2011
www.christianstudylibrary.org
 How Can God Be Just And
Ordain Evil?
John A. Battle, Th.D.
Companion article to WRS Journal 3:1 (February
1996) Western Reformed Seminary (www.wrs.edu)

The Bible says God will punish sinners who disobey his laws.
All Christians assume this. Paul does as he asks a rhetorical
question in Romans 3:6, “Certainly not! If that were so, how
could God judge the world?” That fact is certain! But the issue
that brought forth this strong response is more troubling. Is
God fair to judge the world, if he has made the world like it is?

But if our unrighteousness brings out God’s

righteousness more clearly, what shall we say?
That God is unjust in bringing his wrath on us? (I
am using a human argument.) Certainly not! If
that were so, how could God judge the world?
Someone might argue, “If my falsehood
enhances God’s truthfulness and so increases
his glory, why am I still condemned as a sinner?”
(Rom 3:5-7 NIV)
Paul is upholding God’s sovereignty and almighty plan. God
has ordained all things, including our fall, our sin, and our
salvation. He has done all this to glorify himself, to “bring out
his righteousness more clearly,” to “enhance his truthfulness
and increase his glory.” Yet his opponent complains that such
a plan punishes the sinner unfairly. How can the sinner be
responsible for his sin, if God has ordained it for his own glory?
Paul rejects such logic, yet the question still plagues many
today.
And a related, perhaps more profound, question strikes the
believer: How could God in his goodness and power create and
uphold a world where there is sin, evil, and suffering? Does not
he then share in the responsibility and guilt? The attempt to
answer this question has been given the name theodicy, which
derives from two Greek words theos (God) and dike (justice). The
Oxford English Dictionary defines this word as “the vindication of
the divine attributes, especially justice and holiness, in respect
to the existence of evil; a writing, doctrine, or theory intended
to ‘justify the ways of God to men.’”
Recently C. S. Rood has written of this question, pointing to
the novels The Plague by Albert Camus and The Brothers
Karamazov by Feodor Dostoyevsky as containing “perhaps the
most powerful polemic against belief in a loving God in the
whole of literature.”[1] After dealing with some modern
attempts to reconcile a loving God with suffering and evil in the
world, Rood takes refuge in the mystery of the mind of God:
“Our only resort is to a God who is far beyond all human
thought and imagining. . . . A God who can be fully
comprehended is no God, and we cannot expect to be able to
understand his mind as if we were greater than he.”[2]
As we approach this question, we must do so with humility
and care. Charles Hodge has warned of the two great errors
into which we might fall--denying the reality of evil on one
hand, or denying the power of God to prevent evil on the other.
[3] He suggests a third alternative: “to rest satisfied with the
simple statements of the Bible.”[4]

Augustine’s Solution
Before his conversion Augustine of Hippo struggled with this
problem. He believed that, since evil could not come from God,
evil must exist as a separate, eternal substance apart from God.
[5]

I said, “Who made me? Did not my God, who is

not only good, but goodness itself? Whence then
came I to will evil and nill good? . . . Who set
this in me, and engrafted into me this plant of
bitterness, seeing I was wholly formed by my
most sweet God? If

the devil were the author, whence is that same

 devil? And if he also, by his own perverse will,
of a good angel became a devil, whence, again,
came in him that evil will whereby he became a
devil, seeing the whole nature of angels was
made by that most good Creator?” By these
thoughts I was again sunk down and choked.[6]
Augustine found his answer when he came to the
understanding that sin is not a substance with its own
existence, but rather is only a perversion of a creature’s will
turned aside from God to lower things.[7] Thus, in a phrase
often quoted--and misquoted--later, he could say, “whatsoever
is, is good,”[8] and “Evil has no positive nature; but the loss of
good has received the name ‘evil.’”[9]
For Augustine the other side of the equation was God’s total
sovereignty. Thus even the devil and his demons are
completely under God’s control. Demons can do nothing
“unless where they are permitted by the deep and secret
providence of God, and then only so far as they are permitted”;
God “delegates power” to the demons, to “give expression to
their hostility to the city of God.”[10] The sin arose in their
own hearts, as they turned their attention and desire from the
highest good, God, to a lesser good, themselves. They (and men
as well) were good, but changeable. Augustine eloquently
describes this difference between God and his creatures:

We say that there is no unchangeable good but

the one, true, blessed God; that the things which
he made are indeed good because from him, yet
mutable because made not out of him, but out
of nothing.[11]
What caused the angels to sin at first? Augustine maintains
that God cannot cause sin. What did cause it? There was no
cause at all; their own will made their action bad; “nothing is
the cause of the bad will.”[12] He explains,

I ask at once, what made the first will bad? For

that is not the first which was itself corrupted by
an evil will, but that is the first which was made
evil by no other will. [If caused by a good will,]
 who is so left to himself as to say that a good
will makes a will bad? For in this case a good
will would be the cause of sin; a most absurd
supposition.[13]

Let no one therefore, look for an efficient case of

the evil will; for it is not efficient, but deficient,
as the will itself is not an effecting of something,
but a defect. For defection from that which
supremely is to that which has less of being, this
is to begin to have an evil will.[14]
God allowed sin in order to show his attributes and thus
glorify himself. God did not prevent angels from sinning,
“deeming it to be more befitting his power and goodness to
bring good out of evil than to prevent the evil from coming into
existence.”[15] Augustine viewed our fallen universe as thus
more beautiful than it would be otherwise:

As the beauty of a picture is increased by well-

managed shadows, so, to the eye that has skill
to discern it, the universe is beautified even by
sinners, though, considered by themselves, their
deformity is a sad blemish.[16]
For those who might be perplexed at this sovereign
prerogative of God, Augustine would advise, “Where we are not
so well able to perceive the wisdom of the Creator, we are very
properly enjoined to believe it.”[17]
As Charles Hodge points out,[18] Augustine’s philosophical
wrestlings with the problem of evil have had less of an impact
on subsequent generations than have his biblical and
theological arguments, as those employed in his debates with
the Pelagians. Yet even in the above quotations, we can see his
final resting in the wisdom and sovereign goodness of God.
Definitions of Aquinas
In his Summa Theologica the thirteenth century scholastic
theologian Thomas Aquinas frequently dealt with this question.
To a large extent he agreed with Augustine, and he formulated
much more precisely the terminology used. He clearly
distinguished between the created nature and action of creatures,
which is good and caused by God, and the fault or sin of creatures,
which arises in themselves only.[19] Here is an example of his
approach, with an apt illustration of a limping man:
These passages [Isa 45:5, 7; Amos 3:6] refer to
the evil of penalty, not to the evil of fault.

. . . The evil which consists in the defect of

action is always caused by the defect of the
agent. But in God there is no defect, but the
highest perfection. . . . Hence, the evil which
consists in defect of action, or which is caused
by defect of the agent, is not reduced to God as
to its cause. . . . But the evil which consists in
the corruption of some

things is reduced to God as the cause. And this

appears as regards both natural things and
voluntary things. . . . So God is the author of the
evil which is penalty, but not of the evil which is
fault. . . . Whatever there is of motion in the act
of limping is caused by the moving power,
whereas what is awry in it does not come from
the moving power, but from the curvature of the
leg. And, likewise, whatever there is of being
and action in a bad action is reduced to God as
the cause, whereas whatever defect is in it is
not caused

by God, but by the deficient secondary cause.

[20]
Thomas distinguishes five types of will in God, which fall into
two general categories: his antecedent will (his desire, revealed
in his commands), and his consequent will (his absolute will,
revealed in his providence). His antecedent will is only for
good, while his consequent will includes the evil of penalty, but
never the evil of fault.[21] God willed absolutely that he would
permit sin, yet the sin arose directly not from God’s will, but
the will of the creatures; God willed this in order to achieve a
higher good.[22]
It is interesting to note that Aquinas agreed with Augustine
that God predestined the saved and reprobated the lost for his
own glory. This position would be considered staunchly
Calvinistic today!

But since the very act of free choice is traced to

God as to a cause, it necessarily follows that
everything happening from the exercise of free
choice must be subject to divine providence.
For human providence is included under the
providence of God, as a particular under a
universal cause. . . . God wills all men to be
saved by his antecedent will, which is to will not
absolutely but relatively . . . ; and not by his
consequent will, which is to will absolutely. . . .
God wills to manifest his goodness in men: in
respect to those whom he predestines, by
means of his mercy, in sparing them; and in
respect of others, whom he reprobates, by
means of his justice, in punishing them. This is
the reason why God elects some and rejects
others. . . . Yet why he chooses some for glory
and reprobates others has no reason except the
divine will. . . . God and nature and any other
agent make what is best in the whole, but not
what is best in every single part, except in order
to the whole. . . . Hence many good things
would be taken away if God permitted no evil to
exist.[23]
Thus Aquinas agrees that it “is part of the infinite goodness of
God, that he should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce
good.”[24]
Our Reformed Heritage
Martin Luther, John Calvin, and the other Reformers all
stressed God’s sovereignty, his absolute control over all events,
including sinful and evil events. For this they were criticized
by many, but they sought to keep theology biblical and God-
centered. In a fine passage Calvin plead for a godly reserve in
evaluating God’s purposes:

But we must so cherish moderation that we do

not try to make God render account to us, but so
reverence his secret judgments as to consider
his will the truly just cause of all things. When
dense clouds darken the sky, and a violent
tempest arises, because a gloomy mist is cast
over our eyes, thunder strikes our ears and all
our senses are benumbed with fright, everything
seems to us to be confused and mixed up; but
all the while a constant quiet and serenity ever
remain in heaven. So must we infer that, while
the disturbances in the world deprive us of
judgment, God out of the pure light of his justice
and wisdom tempers and directs these very
movements in the best-conceived order to a
right end. And surely on this point it is sheer
folly that many dare with greater license to call
God’s works to account, and to examine his
secret plans, and to pass as rash a sentence on
matters unknown as they would on the deeds of
mortal men. For what is more absurd than to
use this moderation toward our equals, that we
prefer to suspend judgment rather than be
charged with rashness; yet haughtily revile the
hidden judgments of God, which we ought to
hold in reverence?[25]
Some Protestants sought to “soften the blow” by making
God’s reasonings more clear to men. Such a one was John
Milton, who wrote of the fall of Satan and of Adam and Eve,
placing the blame squarely on their shoulders:

. . . I made him just and right,

Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.

Such I created all th’Eternal Powers
And Spirits, both them who stood and them
who failed; Freely they stood who stood, and
fell who fell.
Not free, what proof could they have giv’n
sincere

Of true allegiance, constant Faith or Love,

Where only what they needs must do,
appeared,
Not what they would? What praise could
they receive? What pleasure I from such
obedience paid,

When Will and Reason (Reason also is choice)

Useless and vain, of freedom both despoiled,
Made passive both, had served necessity,
Not me. They therefore as to right belonged,
So were created, nor can justly accuse

Their maker, of their making, or their Fate; As

if Predestination over-ruled
Their will, disposed by absolute Decree

Or high foreknowledge; they themselves

decreed Their own revolt, not I: if I foreknew,
Foreknowledge had no influence on their
fault, Which had no less proved certain
unforeknown. So without least impulse or
shadow of Fate,
Or aught by me immutable foreseen,

They trespass, Authors to themselves in all

Both what they judge and what they choose;
for I formed them free, and free they must
remain, Till they enthrall themselves: I else
 must change Their nature, and revoke the
high Decree Unchangeable, Eternal, which
ordained
Their freedom, they themselves ordained
their fall.[26]
Note the clauses “I made him just and right,” “freely they
stood who stood, and fell who fell,” “they themselves decreed
their own revolt, not I,” “they themselves ordained their fall.”
It is clear from these statements, and from the entire epic, that
Milton sought to satisfy our sense of justice and reconcile God’s
sovereignty and love with our sin and misery. He expressed
this same desire in the beginning of the work:

. . . What in me is dark

Illumine, what is low raise and support; That

to the height of this great Argument I may
assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.[27]
This twin goal of maintaining God’s sovereignty (“asserting
eternal providence”) and satisfying our human sense of justice
(“justifying the ways of God to men”) has not been easy. Some
would say that Milton may have gone too far favoring the
second goal. However, a careful reading of the section shows
he agreed with Reformed teachings.
Writing at the same time as Milton was the Puritan pastor and
teacher Stephen Charnock, who in his massive work on the
attributes of God, demonstrated that “the goodness of God is
not impaired by suffering sin to enter the world, and man to
fall thereby.”[28] God’s goodness created Satan and Adam with
free wills, the ability to worship and obey God freely and
joyfully. This was a great gift, above anything received by the
animals. Therefore, “as the unbelief of man doth not diminish
the redeeming grace of God (Rom. 3:3), so neither doth the fall
of man lessen the creating goodness of God.” Charnock
counseled his readers to try to see God’s goodness in the
greater good attained (Rom 11:32), or at least to admit their
ignorance and wonder (Rom 11:33).
The Westminster Confession
Those of us in the Presbyterian tradition have a special
heritage in the Westminster Confession of Faith, that great
Puritan document of the seventeenth century. Unlike many of
the more philosophical arguments of the church fathers, this
Confession is thoroughly biblical, and avoids much of the
metaphysical speculation found elsewhere. In three separate
chapters the Confession clearly spells out God’s relation to evil
in this world. In Chapter 3, “Of God’s Eternal Decree,” we read,

God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel
of his own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever
a
comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of
b
sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is
the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but
c
rather established. [29]
This is an important point—that God ordains all things, yet is
not the author of sin, nor does he violate the free will of his
creatures, nor the effectiveness of means.
Especially explicit is Chapter 5, “Of Providence,” which details
God’s relation to sin in his creation:

The almighty power, unsearchable wisdom, and infinite

goodness of God so far manifest themselves in his
providence, that it extendeth itself even to the first fall, and
a
all other sins of angels and men; and that not by a bare
b
permission, but such as hath joined with it a most wise and
c
powerful bounding, and otherwise ordering, and governing
d
of them, in a manifold dispensation, to his own holy ends;
yet so, as the sinfulness thereof proceedeth only from the
creature, and not from God, who, being most holy and
righteous, neither is nor can be the author or approver of
e
sin. [30]
Notice that, while God rules over even sinful actions,
“ordering and governing over” them, yet he does not approve
or originate sin. He does not simply permit sin to arise; he
“bounds” it, so that the sinner expresses his sin in the way God
intends and to the ends he has designed. The Scripture
passages cited by the Assembly divines give clear examples of
God’s governing over and pre-ordaining sinful events; these
include Joseph’s being sold by his brothers, David’s numbering
the Israelites, and especially the trial and crucifixion of Jesus.
In each case sinners were responsible for their own sins, which
arose in their own sinful hearts and were freely willed by them.
Yet all those events were ordained of God in order to bring
about his higher plan.
The third important passage in the Confession is in Chapter 6,
“Of the Fall of Man, of Sin, and of the Punishment Thereof.”

Our first parents, being seduced by the subtilty and

a
temptation of Satan, sinned, in eating the forbidden fruit.
This their sin, God was pleased, according to his wise and

holy counsel, to permit, having purposed to order it to his

b
own glory. [31]
Here the Assembly divines chose the word “permit” for the
first sin of Adam and Eve. We should understand this
permission in the light of the previous citation, as including
God’s powerful governing and bounding, and, as it says here, to
the purpose of “his own glory.”
Why Are We Here?
As in the past, so today many people are bothered by the idea
that God cares more for his own glory than for his creatures’
happiness. Modern theologians are seeking new solutions,
often similar to those used in the past. In the current annual
volume of The Great Ideas Today John Polkinghorne, a
distinguished nuclear physicist, Anglican clergyman, and president
of Queen’s College, Cambridge, has contributed a significant
article seeking to reconcile Christian theology with modern
science.[32] Polkinghorne offers newly available evidence from
the physical sciences that our present universe contains several
basic laws which allow life to exist; the slightest fluctuation in
these laws would have produced a universe hostile to all life. This
is a remarkable evidence of design in the universe. Starting with
this observation, Polkinghorne adapts his theology to the modern
understanding of an evolutionary universe, and sees God’s hand in
the freedom not only of moral agents but of material forces. Moral
and physical evil, in his opinion, are the inevitable by-products of
this freedom:
Theologically, an evolutionary universe can be
understood as a creation which is allowed by its
Creator to make itself. God is neither the
Cosmic Tyrant, causing every event by direct fiat
alone, nor the Indifferent Spectator, just
watching it all happen. The God who is both
loving and faithful has given to creation the twin
gifts of a due regularity (necessity) and a due
independence (chance). Cosmic history is not
the execution of an inexorable divine blueprint,
but the exploration of creaturely potentiality.
This insight--that creation involves God allowing
the created other to be truly itself--is a very
important concept in much twentieth-century
theology. It affords some understanding of the
problem of evil and suffering, for a world
allowed to be itself and to make itself must
necessarily be a world of blind alleys and ragged
edges as well as fruitfulness and fulfillment.
Exactly the same cellular biochemical processes
which enable some cells to mutate and bring
about new forms of life will also permit other
cells to mutate and become cancerous. God
does not bring about the act of a murder nor the
incidence of a cancer, but both are allowed to be
in a creation given the gift of being itself.[33]
This viewpoint, as Charles Hodge pointed out earlier, eases
the difficulty by altering the traditional understanding of both
evil and God’s power to prevent it. Instead of attributing evil to
God’s judgment against the sin of our first parents, it sees it as a
necessary part of a developing creation. It seeks to make us
more comfortable with the existence of sin and evil, and to
make God more acceptable to those don’t like the more harsh
(or robust) theology of Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, or Calvin.
 Why do we experience sin and evil? Although God planned all
these things, yet we cannot lay the blame on him. We sinned
voluntarily; we desired to rebel. Bryan J. Leech put is well in his
hymn “Kind and Merciful God”:

Kind and merciful God, we’ve neglected your

Word
And the truth that would guide us aright;
We have lived in the shade of the dark we have
made, When you willed us to walk in the light.
And why did God ordain this sin? In humility we must rest
satisfied with the simple statements of the Bible. The
Scriptures teach, (1) That the glory of God is the end to which
the promotion of holiness, and the production of happiness,
and all other ends are subordinate. (2) That, therefore, the self-
manifestation of God, the revelation of his infinite perfection,
being the highest conceivable, or possible good, is the ultimate
end of all his works in creation, providence, and redemption.
(3) As sentient creatures are necessary for the manifestation of
God’s benevolence, so there could be no manifestation of his
mercy without misery, or of his grace and justice, if there were
no sin. . . . Sin, therefore, according to the Scriptures, is
permitted, that the justice of God may be known in its
punishment, and his grace in its forgiveness. And the universe,
without the knowledge of these attributes, would be like the
earth without the light of the sun.[34]
We need a perspective change. Christianity asserts that the
highest good is not our happiness; it is not even our holiness; it
is the manifestation of God’s attributes.
The glory of God being the great end of all things, we are not
obliged to assume that this is the best possible world for the
production of happiness, or even for securing the greatest
degree of holiness among rational creatures. It is wisely
adapted for the end for which it was designed, namely, the
manifestation of the manifold perfections of God.

. . . It may, in conclusion, be safely asserted that

a universe constructed for the purpose of
making God known, is a far better universe than
one designed for the production of happiness.
 [35]
With our imperfect knowledge we need to rest in faith. Our
God is sovereign, just, wise, loving, and perfect in all his ways.
The words of A. A. Hodge provide a fitting conclusion to this
subject:

The apparent incongruousness of the facts, and

hence the difficulty of the problem, we admit.
But we have seen God because we have seen
Christ, and we have learned to read all the
course of providence in the light of the Cross.
Since the baptism of Pentecost we have been
convicted of sin and of a guilt we are utterly
unable to gainsay or remove. We have been
convinced that the finite can never measure the
Infinite, and that self-convicted sinners can
never judge the integrity of the All-holy. In the
light of Calvary we have an impregnable
assurance that the Father of our Lord and
Savior Jesus Christ is unlimited in wisdom and in
power, and that he can do no wrong. Bowing
our heads in unquestioning submission to his
sovereign rights, and with confidence in his
absolute perfection, we exclaim, in the face of
all apparent anomalies: “O the depth of the
riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of
God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and
his ways past finding out! For who hath known
the mind of the Lord? Or who hath been his
counselor? Or who hath first given to him and it
shall be recompensed to him again? For of him,
and through him, and to him, are all things: to
whom be glory for ever. Amen” (Rom 11:33-36).
[36]

Endnotes
[1] C. S. Rood, “Questions People Ask: 4. The Problem of Evil
 and Suffering,” The Expository
Times 107:2 (Nov. 1995) 35 n. 1. [2] Ibid., p. 39.
[3] Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (1871; reprinted,
London: James Clarke & Co. Ltd.,
1960), I:430-35. [4] Ibid., p. 435.
[5] Augustine, Confessions, 4:24; 5:20; 7:4. All quotations of
Augustine, Aquinas, and Milton taken from the Great Books of
the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.,
1952); cf. a more recent confrontation of Christianity with
Dualism in C. S. Lewis, “God and Evil,” (1941; reprinted as
Ch. 1 in God in the Dock; Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B.
Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1970), pp. 21-24.
[6] Ibid., 7:5. [7] Ibid., 7:22. [8] Ibid., 7:18.
[9] City of God, 11:9. Note Charles Hodge’s criticism of this
approach, Systematic Theology,
2:158-59.
[10] City of God, 7:25; 10:21.
[11] Ibid., 12:1; see also 14:13.
[12] Ibid., 12:6
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid., 12:7
[15] Ibid., 22:1.
[16] Ibid., 11:23.
[17] Ibid., 12:4.
[18] Systematic Theology, 2:157.
[19] Summa Theologica, 1:8:1; 1:19:9; 1:20:2; 1:49:2; 2/1:79:1,
2, 3; 2/1:80:1; 3:74:1.
[20] Ibid., 1:49:2.
[21] Ibid., 1:19:6, 9, 12; 1:23:4; 1:114:1; 2/1:79:2.
[22] Ibid., 1:8:1; 1:22:2; 1:48:2; 1:93:1
[23] Ibid., 1:22:2, 4, 5; 1:48:2.
[24] Ibid., 1:2:3.
[25] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion; ed. by John
T. McNeill; trans. From 1559 Lat. ed. by Ford Lewis Battles
(Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), 1:211-12.
[26] John Milton, Paradise Lost, 3:98-128.
[27] Ibid., 1:22-26.
[28] Stephen Charnock, Discourses upon the Existence and
Attributes of God (1853 ed.; reprinted Grand Rapids,
Michigan: Baker Book House, 1979), 2:231-32. All references
to Charnock in this paragraph are from these pages.
[29] WCF 3:1; Scripture references cited by the writers of the
Confession are (a) Eph 1:11; Rom 11:71; Heb 6:17; Rom 9:15,
18; (b) Jas 1:13, 17; 1 John 1:5; (c) Acts 2:23; Matt 17:12;
Acts 4:27-28; John 19:11; Prov 16:33.
[30] WCF 5:4; cited Scripture proofs are (a) Rom 11:32-34; 2
Sam 24:1, cf. 1 Chr 21:1; 1 Kgs 22:22-23; 1 Chr 10:4, 13-14;
2 Sam 16:10; Acts 2:23; 4:27-28; (b) Acts 14:16; (c) Ps 76:10;
2 Kgs 19:28; (d) Gen 50:20; Isa 10:6-7, 12; (e) Jas 1:13-14,
17; 1 John 2:16; Ps 50:21.
[31] WCF 6:1; cited Scriptures are (a) Gen 3:13; 2 Cor 11:3; (b)
Rom 11:32.
[32] John Polkinghorne, “The Modern Interaction of Science and
Theology,” in The Great Ideas Today: 1995 (Chicago:
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1995), pp. 34-54.
[33] Ibid., pp. 47-48.
[34] Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:435.
[35] Ibid., p. 436.
[36] A. A. Hodge, Evangelical Theology (1890; reprinted
Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1976), pp. 37-38.
 God, Heavenly Freedom, and
Evil:
A Further Response To Pawl
and Timpe
Steven B. Cowan
Department of Humanities
Lincoln Memorial University
Harrogate, TN
www.epsociety.org
Evangelical Philosophical Society

Abstract: Timothy Pawl and Kevin Timpe have offered a

reply to my criticism of their libertarian solution to the so-
called “Problem of Heavenly Freedom”-the problem of
reconciling the impeccability of the redeemed in heaven and
a libertarian view of freedom. In this paper, I present a
response to the most important points of their rebuttal. I
argue that they have undermined neither my defense of the
compatibilist solution to the Problem of Heavenly Freedom
nor my criticisms of their libertarian solution.

Timothy Pawl and Kevin Timpe have attempted to solve the

so-called “Problem of Heavenly Freedom.” Specifically, they
have sought to explain how it is possible to maintain both (i)
that the redeemed in heaven have libertarian free will, and (ii)
that the redeemed in heaven are incapable of sinning. The basic
idea of their solution is that the redeemed in heaven, though
having perfectly sanctified characters that preclude them from
choosing to do evil, nonetheless can perform morally relevant
actions in that they can make choices between multiple good
options. For example, they may choose between praying for
loved ones on earth or singing in the heavenly choir.
Prior to making their case, however, they reject a
compatibilist solution to the problem, which maintains that the
redeemed in heaven (and prior to heaven) do not have
libertarian freedom. Pawl and Timpe see compatibilism as
inadequate primarily because the compatibilist cannot employ
the free will defense (FWD) against the logical problem of evil
thus making the problem of evil more acute.
2
I criticized Pawl and Timpe’s account on two fronts. First, I
argued that their rejection of the compatibilist solution to the
Problem of Heavenly Freedom was too hasty. This for two
reasons: (1) A compatibilist can employ the FWD so long as one
recognizes that it is a defense and not a theodicy; and (2)
Compatibilism doesn’t really make the problem of evil any
more acute than libertarianism.
Second, I offered two objections to their preferred solution to
the Problem of Heavenly Freedom. The first objection is aimed
3
at their view (following James Sennett ) that the freedom-
limiting characters had by the redeemed in heaven are justified
in virtue of the fact that their characters in this life (prior to
heaven)
were not such that they precluded the ability to sin. My
objection to this view is that God, like the redeemed in heaven,
is incapable of doing evil but the coherence of his current
impeccability does not require that he once had the ability to
sin. I argued that the asymmetry between God’s impeccability
and the redeemed in heaven’s impeccability on this score is
unwarranted and it begs the question against compatibilism.
My second objection to their solution challenges their claim
that supererogatory actions may provide the redeemed in
heaven morally relevant choices. Pawl and Timpe suggest that
the redeemed in heaven will strongly desire (if possible) to be
4
closer to God, “clinging ever more tenaciously to him.” Given
this desire, the redeemed in heaven could freely choose
supererogatory actions that achieve their goal.
I argued, however, that Pawl and Timpe are faced with a
dilemma. On the one hand, insofar as pursuing intimacy with
God is seen as obligatory, the so- called “supererogatory”
actions in view are not supererogatory after all. On the other
hand, granting that pursuing intimacy with God is not
obligatory, and that the actions in view are supererogatory, the
actions will not be libertarianly free actions because, “given his
morally perfect character. . ., [no redeemed person in heaven]
5
could conceivably refrain from doing them.”
6
Pawl and Timpe have offered a reply to my criticisms. In
what follows, I will present a response to what I take to be the
most important points of their rebuttal. I do not believe that
they have undermined either my defense of the compatibilist
solution to the Problem of Heavenly Freedom or my criticisms
of their libertarian solution.

Compatibilism and the Free Will Defense

In response to my contention that a compatibilist can utilize
the FWD, Pawl and Timpe write,

The individual who solves the Problem of

Heavenly Freedom by means of Compatibilism
asserts the truth of compatibilism. In general, if
one solves a problem by means of providing a
solution, then one has to posit the truth of the
solution. . . . And so the compatibilist solution
requires the positing of compatibilism. It is
because of this positing of the truth of
compatibilism that we consider the feasibility of
employing the FWD given the assumption of the
truth of compatibilism. One might ask here: does
Cowan think that the FWD works on the
7
assumption of compatibilism?
Pawl and Timpe go on to note correctly that I give a negative
answer to their question. The FWD requires libertarian freedom
in order to work. Let me also state at this point that I agree
with the statements they make in the above quote. Indeed, in
solving the Problem of Heavenly Freedom by means of
compatibilism, I certainly assert the truth of compatibilism.
And yet, I still maintain that a compatibilist can utilize the
FWD. Our disagreement arises, I suspect, because Pawl and
Timpe and I are talking past each other. Earlier in their
response, they state, “[Cowan] claims that the compatibilist,
8
qua compatibilist, can use the Free Will Defense.” This is what
leads them to write later that “so long as one is positing
compatibilism as a solution [to the Problem of Heavenly
Freedom], one is supposing its truth. And so long as one
supposes its truth, one fails a necessary condition Cowan
9
provides for employing the FWD.” But I never claimed that I or
any other compatibilist, qua compatibilist, could employ the
FWD. All I claimed, and all I intended to claim, was that a
compatibilist could use the FWD. I thought, wrongly it turns
out, that this was clear from my repeated emphasis on the
compatibilist’s employment of the FWD as a defense and not a
theodicy.
Though I believe that compatibilism is true, I do not think
that my justification for that belief provides me with anything
close to absolute certainty. I hold to compatibilism with the
tentativeness with which most philosophers hold their favored
but controversial positions. And though I believe that
compatibilism comports best with what I take to be the correct
reading of Scripture on such topics as divine providence and
salvation by grace alone, I certainly do not believe that
compatibilism rises to the level of a Christian dogma. So, I can
entertain the possibility that I am mistaken about
compatibilism and that the libertarian might be right. Thus, in
my previous response, I wrote,

Still, a compatibilist could either (i) say that the

FWD is successful insofar as one lays aside the
question of whether libertarianism or
compatibilism is the better account of free will,
or (ii) say that, for all we know, libertarianism is
true, and thus the FWD shows that [God and
10
moral evil] are compossible for all we know.
 I think what all this shows is that Pawl and Timpe and I are
presupposing different rhetorical contexts. If the compatibilist
is trying, qua compatibilist, to solve the logical problem of evil,
then he cannot employ the FWD. Likewise, if the compatibilist
provides a compatibilist solution to the Problem of Heavenly
Freedom, then Pawl and Timpe are right that he cannot, in the
same rhetorical context (say as part of a systematic treatment
of problems in the philosophy of religion), employ the FWD—
except perhaps as a purely hypothetical defense as suggested
above.
But there are other rhetorical contexts. Suppose, for example,
that I am engaged in an apologetic discussion with an atheist.
Let’s call her Betty. And, as is common, let’s suppose that the
obstacle that holds Betty back from faith in Christ is the logical
problem of evil. Further, let us suppose that she is a convinced
libertarian. The compatibilist could, qua compatibilist, try to
convince her to reject libertarianism, and then offer her a
compatibilist-friendly greater good defense. Or, recognizing
that compatibilism is not an item of essential Christian
orthodoxy, he could take the stance of the mere Christian and
present the FWD, telling her that if libertarianism is true, then
the FWD should pave the way for her to embrace Christ. The
latter option seems like a perfectly appropriate apologetic
strategy for a compatibilist, though he might hold out hope
that Betty would also embrace compatibilism down the road. If
Pawl and Timpe demur, then here is my question to them: If
Betty were a staunch compatibilist who thought that
libertarianism is highly implausible, would you insist, qua
libertarians, on presenting her the FWD only and require that
she convert to that view of free will which is its necessary
condition, or else be damned? Or would you offer her a
compatibilist-friendly solution?

The Free Will Defense and the Greater

Good Defense
In my earlier response to Pawl and Timpe, I distinguished two
versions of the FWD. According to the strong version, FWDS,
libertarian free will is such a great good that its existence in the
actual world, all by itself, justifies God’s permitting all the evils
that occur. According to the weak version, FWDW, libertarian
free will is merely a necessary condition for other goods that
justify God’s permitting all the evils that occur. I argued that
FWDS is unacceptable because it is clearly false that the
existence of free will by itself justifies all the evils that occur. I
am gratified to know that Pawl and Timpe, in their counter-
response, concede that FWDS is unacceptable, and I
acknowledge that they are correct to point out that I misread
them on this score.
Regarding the FWDW, it was my contention that it is simply a
species of the more generic, and perfectly adequate, Greater
Good Defense (GGD), and that it thus had little, if any,
advantage over the GGD. All that Pawl and Timpe say in
response to my argument is the following:

In response, the FWD is so special because free

will is by far the most common greater good
alluded to for the GGD. It isn’t that there are
multiple standard greater goods, all with equal
esteem, such that taking away the FWD leaves a
bevy of other worthy candidates for a greater
good. Rather, removing the FWD, as we believe
proponents of the compatibilist solution do,
takes away the clear front-runner. This, we
believe, makes the problem of evil more acute.
And so far as we can tell, nothing in Cowan’s
reply changes this fact.11
In what sense is free will the “clear front-runner” among
putative goods that justify God’s permission of evil? Pawl and
Timpe have conceded that FWDS is unacceptable. That is to say,
they agree with me that free will by itself does not and cannot
justify all the evils that occur in the actual world. So, the only
role that libertarian free will can play in solving the problem of
evil is that stipulated in the FWDW—as a necessary condition
(i.e., an instrumental good) for the production of other goods
that are what justifies God’s permission of evil. So, I do not see
why this role makes free will the “front-runner” among goods.
It is, at most, an instrumental good that some philosophers
believe must exist in order to have the goods that really matter
in justifying the existence of evil.
Perhaps what Pawl and Timpe mean is that compatibilism,
because it “takes away” this instrumental good, makes the
further evil-justifying goods impossible. This amounts to an
insistence on the truth of what I called (5W)—the key premise
in the argument for FWDW: Free will is a necessary condition of
certain moral goods that justify the existence of the moral evil that
will occur if it exists. Now, as I claimed in my original response,
even if it turns out that 5W is true, it is hard to see how this
makes FWDW “so much more preferable to, or superior to,
other versions of the GGD (versions perhaps friendly to
compatibilism) so as to warrant a rejection of a compatibilist
12
solution to the Problem of Heavenly Freedom.” The GGD that
I outlined in my original response is neutral on the question of
libertarian freedom. It appeals (or can appeal) to the very same
evil- justifying goods that FWDW does and can be employed
both by those who accept and those who reject 5W. Why, then,
would FWDW be preferable to GGD? Indeed, it seems clear to me
that employing FWDW is nothing more than employing GGD with
the added stipulation that 5W is true. And that stipulation will
be unnecessary in many rhetorical contexts, and controversial
in others.

Compatibilism Vs. Libertarianism on the

Problem of Evil
Far more important, I thought, than arguing that a
compatibilist can use the FWD or that the FWD is a version of
the GGD, was my contention that compatiblism, despite Pawl’s
and Timpe’s contrary claim, does not make the problem of evil
more acute than libertarianism does. The reason, so I argued, is
that there is no moral difference between the view that God
compatibilistically causes humans to do evil acts to bring about
greater goods and the libertarian view that God knowingly
permits humans to do evil acts to bring about greater goods.
 In what is the most surprising aspect of their reply to my
paper, they do not contest my conclusion here. All they write in
response is this:

Even if this is true, and even if Cowan has

shown one aspect in which libertarianism and
compatibilism are equally acute, this doesn’t
show that compatibilism doesn’t make the
problem more acute for the reason we give: that
those who solve the Problem of Heavenly
Freedom by positing the truth of compatibilism
are unable to employ the FWD.13
In response, I have three things to say. First, I would have
thought that what really makes the problem of evil more acute
for the compatibilist (according to libertarians) just is the idea
that the compatibilist makes God “the author of sin.” And I
should mention that my argument to which Pawl and Timpe are
responding here was primarily aimed at an argument that
Timpe had made elsewhere, an argument in which he does
accuse compatiblism of exacerbating the problem of evil by
14
making God the author of sin.
Second, I think my original response anticipated their reply.
Comparing what Pawl and Timpe say here to what they say
about compatibilism in their original paper, what I take them to
be claiming is this: The compatibilist has to admit that on his
view God could actualize a world in which (compatibilistically)
free creatures always do what is right and never do evil. Thus,
the compatibilist, qua compatibilist, cannot employ the FWD. He
has to find some other way to explain why the existence of evil
does not contradict God’s goodness. The libertarian, though,
does not have this liability. On his view, God cannot necessarily
actualize a world containing free creatures who never do evil. It
is in this difference between what possible worlds God can and
cannot actualize, given their respective views on free will, that
compatibilism has a more acute problem of evil than the
libertarian. In my response, I granted these very claims. I
wrote,

I readily grant that God cannot create a world

 containing creatures with libertarian freedom
and guarantee that there be no evil. And it is
this point which allows the defender of the FWD
to make his crucial distinction between possible
and feasible worlds.15
But, I went on to write,

But I deny that the compatibilist cannot make a

similar distinction in response to the problem of
evil. For while it is true that God can make
creatures with compatibilist freedom and at the
same time guarantee that they never do evil, it
is not possible for God to make creatures with
compatibilist freedom, desire to bring about
greater goods that require moral evil as a
precondition, and at the same time guarantee
that they never do evil . . . So, a distinction is
available to the compatibilist (let’s call it the
distinction between possible worlds and goal-
fulfilling worlds) that is analogous to the
distinction between possible worlds and feasible
worlds utilized by the libertarian. And this
distinction between possible worlds and goal-
fulfilling worlds, though a weaker one, can do the
same work vis-à-vis the problem of evil that the
possible worlds/feasible worlds distinction does
for the libertarian. So, it is hard to see how
compatibilism makes the logical problem of evil
16
more acute on that score.
I took (and still take) this to be a more than adequate
response to Pawl’s and Timpe’s challenge regarding the
“acuteness” of the compatibilist’s problem of evil. If they
disagree, they need to say so and say why.
Third, I wish to take back something I granted in my original
response. At the risk of undermining my earlier claim that a
compatibilist can utilize the FWD, I am now convinced that the
crucial assumption of the FWD is false. That is, I believe it is not
the case that God cannot create a world containing creatures
with libertarian freedom and guarantee that there be no evil.
Put positively, God can create a world containing creatures with
libertarian freedom and guarantee that there be no evil.
17
Recently, Greg Welty and I have argued that this is so. I won’t
rehearse all of the details of our argument, but the basic idea is
that God could have created libertarianly free creatures who
are “hardwired” (or who have perfectly formed characters)
such that they never desire to do evil (and thus never do evil),
but they are free to choose among multiple good actions. If we
are right about this, then the FWD, in any form, is a dead letter.

The Alleged Asymmetry between God’s

Freedom and Ours
All parties to this debate agree that the redeemed in heaven
lack the ability to sin. Pawl’s and Timpe’s preferred solution to
the Problem of Heavenly Freedom involves, first, the claim that
this limitation on human freedom in heaven finds its
justification, in part, in virtue of the fact that the redeemed in
heaven once (prior to heaven) had the ability to sin and
participated in the formation of their perfected characters. This
“two-stage” view of human freedom assumes (as Pawl and
Timpe admit) that there is an asymmetry between God’s
freedom and human freedom. God has a perfect moral
character such that he is (and always has been) incapable of
doing evil. Yet, there is nothing untoward or implausible in the
claim that God is free even though, unlike the redeemed in
heaven, his impeccable character was not acquired through a
process that at some earlier stage allowed for the possibility of
his doing evil. In my response, I claimed that the insistence on
this asymmetry is question-begging against compatibilism.
In their response to my criticism, Pawl and Timpe deflect the
charge of question-begging by pointing out that, in the context
in which this asymmetry is assumed, they had already laid
compatibilism aside and were “proceed[ing] under the
18
assumption of the truth of incompatibilism.” Fair enough.
But their defense of the asymmetry leaves much to be desired.
In their reply, they point out rightly that “God has his moral
character essentially and…an agent’s moral character puts
19
constraints on what choices he is capable of freely choosing.”
Moreover, they point out that God’s immutability,
atemporality, and simplicity make it impossible that his
character change over time. This is all well and good. I agree
completely. But why should the creature’s freedom be
different? Why does it necessitate a stage in which there is an
ability to sin? They write, “With respect to creaturely agents, if
we are to have such a character that sinful options are no
longer possible for us to choose, then we must have the time to
20
develop such a character.” But this is mere assertion. They
say, “Insofar as creatures are mutable, temporal, and
metaphysically complex, we should expect our free will to be
21
different than divine freedom in important ways.” Perhaps.
But why must it be different in the specific way they insist it
must be? I contend that the asymmetry Pawl and Timpe claim
22
between God’s freedom and ours is still unmotivated.
But this asymmetry may be less than
unmotivated. For the orthodox Christian who embraces
the impeccability of Christ, it may be downright
undesirable. During his earthly sojourn, Jesus was
incapable of sinning. He did not, and could not, have
experienced a time in his life in which he could choose
evil. Yet, on Pawl’s and Timpe’s view, Jesus could not
be a morally responsible agent because he would not
have experienced the “two-stage” type of freedom they
say is required for an impeccable human being to be
moral responsible for his actions. But surely Jesus was
a morally responsible agent. So, if Jesus, the paradigm
man, the “Second Adam,” did not have to have this
“two-stage” kind of freedom, then neither do we.

The Irrelevance of Libertarian Freedom in

Heaven
The heart of Pawl and Timpe’s solution to the Problem of
Heavenly freedom is their claim that the redeemed in heaven,
despite being incapable of sinning, could nevertheless have
libertarian freedom. They could have such freedom because
they very well might be able to choose between multiple good
options. Of course, this point might not be very satisfying if the
multiple good options were trivial such as choosing between
singing in the heavenly choir or playing the harp. So, Pawl and
Timpe go to some lengths to argue that there could be morally
relevant choices in heaven. They define such choices as follows:
“a choice is morally relevant iff the person is free to choose
among at least two options, and at least two of the options, say,
A and B, are such that either A is better than B or B is better
23
than A.” The better options would be, according to Pawl and
Timpe, supererogatory. They go on to add that morally relevant
(supererogatory) actions “carry moral weight,” which means
that they make the person that does them a better person.
Pawl and Timpe address several objections to their solution.
One of them has to do with whether or not the choices of the
redeemed in heaven can truly have moral weight as they claim.
Since the redeemed in heaven have perfect moral characters,
how can they become better by doing these supererogatory
actions? How can one become “better” than “perfect”? It was
Pawl’s and Timpe’s answer to this objection that I targeted in
my response. They dealt with the objection by claiming that
there is more than one way of being morally perfect. One way is
to possess the virtues which, in Aristotelian terms, is to occupy
the means between the vices. Once one is precisely on the
mean, one cannot get any more on the mean. However, Pawl and
Timpe suggest that it is plausible to think that a person on the
mean of virtue can grow to “cling more tightly to the mean.”
They go on to say that “if we think about clinging to the good
rather than clinging to the mean, we can say that through the
everlasting years that the blessed spend with God, they are
neverendingly coming closer to Him, who is Goodness itself,
24
ever clinging more tenaciously to Him.” In response, I
presented Pawl and Timpe with a dilemma. I wrote,

I think we can take it for granted that every one

of the redeemed in heaven will strongly desire to
 be ever closer to God and cling ever more
tenaciously to him as Pawl and Timpe suggest. . .
. Indeed, assuming that such a pursuit of the
knowledge of God honors and glorifies God, we
might even consider this pursuit obligatory (cf. 1
Cor. 10:31). In either case—whether out of a
sense of obligation or an overriding desire for
beatitude, or both—it would follow that none of
the redeemed in heaven could refrain from
“neverendingly coming closer to Him” by
performing the supererogatory actions that Pawl
and Timpe describe. If this pursuit is obligatory
(as I suggest it might be), then the so-called
“supererogatory” actions turn out not really to be
supererogatory after all. But, even if they are not
obligatory and are truly supererogatory, they
cannot be libertarianly free actions. For no
redeemed person in heaven, given his morally
perfect character (in Pawl’s and Timpe’s first
sense), could conceivably refrain from doing
25
them.
Pawl and Timpe respond to my argument here by claiming
that all I have done is attack the consequent of a conditional—
the conditional that begins with “if we think about clinging to
the good rather than clinging to the mean.” But this does not
show that the conditional itself is false and, in any case, they
need not insist on the antecedent. That is, they do not have to
claim that “clinging to the mean” means clinging to the good,
Goodness, or God. Such a suggestion is a “non-load-bearing
assertion.” Therefore, they write, “we can deny that the
redeemed actually do become closer to God in heaven, which is
26
sufficient to meet Cowan’s second objection.”
I take Pawl and Timpe to be claiming that they can dispense
with the idea that “clinging to the mean” has anything to do
with becoming closer to God (as suggested in the controversial
conditional), but continue to maintain the core of the answer to
the objection they originally addressed, that the redeemed can
become better by increasing the tenacity with which they cling
to the mean. However, I think that all this does is push my
argument to a different level. Now I ask: if it’s possible for the
redeemed to become better by clinging more tenaciously to the
mean by performing supererogatory actions (whether or not
this brings them closer to God), wouldn’t they see this as either
obligatory or eminently choice-worthy? How could a heavenly
redeemed person not want to be “better” in whatever sense
their heavenly state allows, especially if doing what’s better
and being a better person pleases God as surely they must. Put
another way, if a redeemed person sees that doing A is better
than doing B, and his doing A would be more pleasing or
honoring to God than doing B, then the redeemed person must
see doing A as either obligatory or eminently choice- worthy.
My dilemma therefore stands. And the Problem of Heavenly
27
Freedom remains a problem for Pawl and Timpe.
Steven B. Cowan is Associate Professor of Philosophy &
Religion at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, TN.

Endnotes
1
Timothy Pawl and Kevin Timpe, “Incompatiblism, Sin, and Free
Will in Heaven,” Faith and Philosophy 26:4 (October 2009):
398-419.
2
Steven B. Cowan, “Compatibilism and the Sinlessness of the
Redeemed in Heaven,” Faith and Philosophy 28:4 (October
2011): 416-431.
3
See James Sennett, “Is There Freedom in Heaven?” Faith and
Philosophy 16 (1999): 69-
4
Pawl and Timpe, “Incompatiblism, Sin, and Free Will in
Heaven,” 418.
5
Cowan, “Compatibilism and the Sinlessness of the Redeemed
in Heaven,” 431.
6
Timothy Pawl and Kevin Timpe, “Heavenly Freedom: A Reply
to Cowan,” Faith and
Philosophy 30:2 (April 2013): 188-197.
7
Pawl and Timpe, “Heavenly Freedom,” 190.
8
Ibid (emphasis mine).
9
Ibid, 191.
10
Cowan, “Compatibilism and the Sinlessness of the
Redeemed in Heaven,” 419 (emphasis in original).
11
Pawl and Timpe, “Heavenly Freedom,” 192.
12
Cowan, “Compatibilism and the Sinlessness of the
Redeemed in Heaven,” 422.
13
Pawl and Timpe, “Heavenly Freedom,” 192.
14
See Kevin Timpe, “Why Christians Might Be Libertarians: A
Response to Lynne
Rudder Baker,” Philosophia Christi 6:2 (2004): 279-288.
15
Cowan, “Compatibilism and the Sinlessness of the
Redeemed in Heaven,” 424.
16
Ibid., 424-25.
17
Steven B. Cowan and Greg A. Welty, “Pharaoh’s Magicians
Redivivus: A Response to Jerry Walls on Christian
Compatibilism,” Philosophia Christi 17:1 (2015): 151-173. See
also the later exchange between Jerry L. Walls, “Pharaoh’s
Magicians Foiled Again: Reply to Cowan and Welty,”
Philosophia Christi 17:2 (2015): 411-26; and Greg A. Welty
and Steven B. Cowan, “Won’t Get Foiled Again: A Rejoinder to
Jerry Walls,” Philosophia Christi 17:2 (2015): 427-42.
18
Pawl and Timpe, “Heavenly Freedom,” 194.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid. In fairness, maybe they intend the emphasis to fall on
the phrase “no longer possible.” That is, maybe what they
are claiming here is that if we once have the ability to sin,
then that ability cannot simply be eradicated instantaneously.
Our characters require time to develop toward the moral
perfection we will know in heaven. If this is their point, I can
 grant it, but claim that they have missed my point. My point
was that I see no reason why humans can’t be free and
responsible moral agents even if there never is a time in
which they are capable of sinning.
21
Ibid.
22
Timpe alleges to have provided a more detailed defense of
the asymmetry between God’s freedom and ours in his
recent monograph, Free Will in Philosophical Theology (New
York: Bloomsbury, 2014). There he expands on why a human
being, in order to be morally responsible for his moral
character, “must have the time to develop such a character.”
He writes, “Moral freedom [i.e., the freedom to choose
between good and evil alternatives] for creaturely agents is a
necessary condition for creatures to freely form a moral
character” (p. 108). Why is that? Quoting Thomas Talbott,
Timpe answers, “According to libertarians, moral virtues
cannot be imposed upon one person by another and cannot
be instilled, produced, or brought about by a sufficient cause
external to the agent” (Ibid.). In response, I must say that this
just seems again to be mere assertion. In my original
response, I asked, “Are we to imagine that, if God had
decided to not allow moral evil to enter his creation and had
created Adam and Eve in the Garden with perfectly holy
characters (like his own) so that they could not sin but had
the kind of freedom that Pawl and Timpe envision for the
redeemed in heaven, they would not be morally responsible
for their choices? How could they not be morally responsible
for their choices? It appears completely mystifying (to me
anyway) to think that they would not be morally responsible”
(Cowan, “Compatibilism and the Sinlessness of the
Redeemed in Heaven,” 429). Despite Timpe’s assertion to the
contrary, it still seems mystifying to me that they would not
be morally responsible. They may not be morally responsible
for their characters, but I see no reason to think that they
would not be responsible for the actions they perform based
on reasons they deemed sufficient—that is, as long as we
agree that God can act responsibly despite his lack of moral
freedom. But won’t Timpe insist that God, unlike the
hypothetically perfect Adam and Eve, doesn’t have his
character “instilled, produced, or brought about by a
sufficient cause external to [Him]”? Fine, but why is that
morally relevant? I pointed out in a footnote in my original
response that “one may question whether or not the fact that
God’s character doesn’t originate from an external source is
a strong enough point to make a relevant moral difference. It
 would still be the case that God’s character is ‘given’ to him
involuntarily—i.e., he has no choice about what his character
is” (Ibid., 429 n.25). So, if God has the requisite freedom for
responsible action, then why would a perfectly holy Adam
and Eve not have such freedom even though they, like God,
have no choice about what their characters are? Timpe has
said nothing to answer this question.
23
Pawl and Timpe, “Incompatiblism, Sin, and Free Will in
Heaven,” 416.
24
Ibid., 418.
25
Cowan, “Compatibilism and the Sinlessness of the
Redeemed in Heaven,” 430-31.
26
Pawl and Timpe, “Heavenly Freedom,” 197.
27
I want to thank James Sennett, William Lane Craig, Paul
Copan, and Matthew Flannagan for their helpful comments
on earlier drafts of this paper.
 God and Good and Bad and
the Problem of the Origin of
Evil
Neil Mammen
10/20/1999

Abstract: Upon pondering the age-old question of the origin

of evil, I came up with this idea. I could be way off base and I
am not presumptuous enough to assume that I can answer a
question of which even the great Augustine said: I don’t
know. However, it is worthwhile discussing.

The Bible says that God is not the author of evil/sin. Yes it
says that God created everything, and anything that was
created, was created by Him. Now this puts us in a dilemma
when it comes to evil. If God is not the author of evil then
where did it come from? One possible answer to this is that evil
is not the presence of anything, but the absence of God’s grace.
I want to extend that answer into an added dimension -
literally.

Gen 2:18

18 The LORD God said, "It is not good for the

man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable
for him."
It was not good for Adam to be alone.
God had created Adam. What God had created was good. Yet
God himself says: It is not good for Adam to be alone.
Thus this implies that God can create something good but if
he stops in the midst of it, it can be "not good". Or it would be
bad if God stopped. So in other words, bad could be caused if
God did something partially. But since God is “good” he doesn’t
do anything partially. However it could be that we have just
made a decision about good and bad while God was in the midst
of completing something. It doesn’t mean that bad is caused by
God, but that good is not caused until the work is completed.
What this means is that there is a "good" and "bad" associated
with time. There is a morality associated with the temporal
dimension. And since God is omnipresent in Time this morality
disappears for Him. But for us in time, this morality can
manifest itself.
E.g. the earth was void and without form. This is chaos, yet it
does not mean that God creates Chaos, but where did the chaos
come from? It appeared in time as God moved it nothing from
one state to another to its final state of a full creation. So God is
not the creator of chaos, but chaos will appear to us temporal
beings as God moves something to chaos to something of
beauty.
So the question is: Could this then explain where Sin comes
from? God moves in time, he is out of time and above time, so
he does not create sin, but where he stops…or where he stops
his hand, he allows sin. He allows chaos? But he does not create
it.
Who knows…
Now let's take the example of a note. On it's own a note is
pure and it is beautiful. However if we take a sequence of notes
that are pure and string them together we can end up with a
tune that is not beautiful and hurts our senses (I'm not talking
about volume). In the same way is it possible for a tune that is
almost finished but not complete yet to leave us unsatisfied, i.e.
be bad. All that is missing is the completion of that one last
note to make that tune good. Perhaps that's where evil comes
from. The tune is not finished. Each part of the tune is good in
itself, but strung together the tune as long as it is in the process
of being finished it is "not good." When it is done it will be
good. All that it takes now is time and completion.
Add to this that God is outside of time so there is no time for
him. So while he comprehends fully how we view it. The tune is
always completed for him, but we see the incomplete tune and
we experience the "not good" part of it.
Who knows…
 Necessity, Univocism, and the
Triune God: A Response to
Anderson and Welty
Nathan D. Shannon
Department of Philosophy
Saint Joseph's University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
www.epsociety.org
Evangelical Philosophical Society

Abstract: In this paper, a critical response is offered to

James Anderson and Greg Welty’s “The Lord of
Noncontradiction” by drawing attention to oft-neglected
distinctions (e.g. de re and de dicto necessity), the limits of
some explanatory categories (possible worlds) relative to
revealed theology, and the philosophical import of
evangelical theological commitments (for example, that God
is not essentially creator).

Introduction
In a recent article entitled “The Lord of
Noncontradiction,” authors James N. Anderson and Greg
Welty argue that “the very idea of logical laws
presupposes the existence of God.”1 They claim,
therefore, that “one can logically argue against God only
if God exists” (337). They summarize their argument this
way:
In summary, the argument runs as follows. The
 laws of logic are necessary truths about truths;
they are necessarily true propositions.
Propositions are real entities, but cannot be
physical entities; they are essentially thoughts.
So the laws of logic are necessarily true
thoughts. Since they are true in every possible
world, they must exist in every possible world.
But if there are necessarily existent thoughts,
there must be a necessarily existent mind; and if
there is a necessarily existent mind, there must
be a necessarily existent person. A necessarily
existent person must be spiritual in nature,
because no physical entity exists necessarily.
Thus, if there are laws of logic, there must also
be a necessarily existent,

1 James N. Anderson and Greg Welty, “The Lord of

Noncontradiction: An Argument for God from Logic,”
Philosophia Christi 13 no. 2 (2011): 338. Subsequent citations
from this article are given in the text.
personal, spiritual being. The laws of logic imply
the existence of God
(336-7).

And they add this in a footnote: “But not necessarily a

unipersonal God; the conclusion of the argument is
entirely compatible with Trinitarianism. Strictly
speaking, the argument shows that there must be at
least one necessarily existent person; it does not show
that there must be one and only one necessarily
existent person” (337 n.33).
I appreciate what AW do in this article, and I
think their argument has a number of strengths. I
endorse wholeheartedly their conclusion as stated
above, with the caveat that “God” refer only to the a
se, triune, Christian God. AW use the term more
loosely in this article.2 Specifically, I agree that for the
consistency and reliability of the laws of logic, to
account for the necessity of the laws of logic, in other
words, those laws must be understood as consistent
with the nature of a necessary and self-consistent being.
And that's just where I would part ways with AW: the
triune personal creator God is the standard and original
of self-consistency, not the other way around; and AW's
argument does things the other way around. The result
is a vague and spurious and decidedly finite theism.
I will point out a few weak links in their
argument in what follows, but the most prominent
misstep, in my view, is univocism. AW's argument
incorporates a univocal notion of necessity and, by
implication, of being.3
Consequently, whatever god their argument proves is a
correlate of the created
order, not the creator God of Christian theism. “Lord
of Noncontradiction” reaffirms a claim long
uncontested in Christian thought: univocal reason
destroys true theism.
I raise a number of objections here. First I focus
on AW's handling of
the notion of necessity which meets at least two
difficulties before the problem

2 They say “the very idea of logical laws presupposes

the existence of God,” but “not necessarily a unipersonal god”
(338, 337 n.33). The salient fact then is that whatever “God”
means, it does not mean “the God of Christianity.” So “God,”
throughout “The Lord of Noncontradiction,” is not a proper
noun and should be spelled “god” or “god(s),” using the lower-
case g. To use the upper-case is misleading.
3 Christian theology has long rejected the univocal use
of terms on the grounds that it implies a univocal notion of
being. More recently, Vern Poythress has argued that
Aristotelian logic implies a unitarian ontology and that it
therefore stands in a complicated relationship with revealed
theology. See “Reforming Ontology and Logic in Light of the
Trinity: An Application of Van Til's Notion of Analogy,”
Westminster Theological Journal 57 no.1 (1995): 187-219; and
his forthcoming Logic: A God-Centered Approach to the
Foundation of Western Thought (Wheaton: Crossway, 2013).
of univocism is in play. Then I raise a few
theological concerns, focusing on problems that
arise ultimately from univocal reason about God.

AW on Necessity
Ambiguity. AW say that the laws of logic are
necessarily true.4 Then they say that the laws of logic
“really exist,” “that is, they are real entities in the same
sense that the pyramids of Egypt are real entities”
(327), and then, that, since “whatever exists, exists
either contingently or necessarily,” clearly the laws of
logic are of the latter kind: they exist necessarily (331-
2). The reasoning is this: If a proposition is necessarily
true, and propositions exist, a necessarily true
proposition exists necessarily. Note the equivocation:
the metaphysical
property, existing necessarily, replaces the
propositional property, being necessarily true; de dicto
necessity is swapped for de re necessity, but these are
not the same thing at all. AW offer no argument for the
de re necessity of the laws of logic or necessarily true
propositions. Benefiting from this ambiguity, AW's
argument slips smoothly from the realm of contingent
being to the realm of necessary being; but the transition
is spurious. We can see the distinction between de dicto
and de re necessity in a couple of ways directly related
to AW's argument.
One way is by drawing a clear distinction
between propositions and their objects—what
propositions are 'about'—and understanding how a
proposition
and its object are related. We'll see that propositions are
distinct but inseparable
from their objects, and that the modality they attribute,
necessity in this case, is distinct from the modality (or
the necessity) they possess.
Take the law of identity (A=A). Is it necessarily
true? What would make the proposition 'necessarily,
A=A' true? It would have to be the case that,
necessarily, A=A. A's being necessarily identical to A is
the necessary condition of the law of identity's being
necessarily true; and since the latter is essentially
dependent upon the former, the proposition on the state
of affairs, clearly they are distinct. The important
difference between the two is that the law of
identity has de dicto necessity, while A's being identical
to A has de re necessity.
To put it another way, a proposition is essentially
'about' something, as
AW note; propositions are essentially intentional
(333-5). (This quality of intentionality or 'aboutness'
serves AW as the link between propositions and

4 “.. . they are necessary truths. This is just to say that

they are true propositions that could not have been false”
(325). I worry that AW confound the categories of necessary
truth and tautology. That “. . . we cannot imagine any possible
circumstances in which a truth could also be a falsehood” does
not point us in the direction of a state of affairs necessarily
obtaining, but in the direction of tautology (ibid.).

personal minds.5) So a proposition is essentially

parasitic on whatever it is about. Apart from the
thing it is about, a proposition has no referent and no
meaning and thus cannot bear truth-value.6 The law
of identity is an
attribution, a de dicto sort of thing, of de re necessity to
the state of affairs A=A, but the attribution itself—the
law, the proposition—can have only de dicto necessity.
In an attempt to make them more like the sorts
of objects that can have de re necessity, AW affirm that
the laws of logic exist; but this is irrelevant. Real
existence, particularly mental, intentional real
existence, does not change the fact that the modality of
propositions, just like their truth-value, is derivative
and dependent upon a state of affairs distinct from any
proposition 'about' that state of affairs. Quite the
contrary. Affirming the mental existence of
propositions in fact emphasizes the intentional and
thus derivative nature of propositions and confirms
that the modality of a proposition is merely de dicto.
Now a second way. AW also confuse de re and
de dicto necessity by failing to distinguish between a
proposition's being true at a possible world and a
proposition's being true in a possible world. To be true
in a possible world, a proposition must exist in that
world; to be true of or at a possible world, the
proposition need only describe that world. A
proposition can be true of a possible world without
existing in it. AW blur this distinction: “. . . the law of
noncontradiction is true not only in the actual world
but also in every possible world” (325). To say that the
LNC is true in every possible world rather than at
every possible world, is to affirm that it exists in every
possible world (and thus to beg the question); and this
is to affirm both de dicto and de re necessity
without distinguishing the two. The next sentence
reads: “There is no possible world in which that
logical law is false (or fails to be true in any other
way)”
(325-6). Here again, de dicto and de re are
confounded. If there is no possible world in which the
law of noncontradiction is false, it does not follow
necessarily that the LNC is true in all possible worlds.
For to not be false, a proposition does not have to
exist; a proposition might not exist at all and still
be not false. But to not fail to be true, it must exist. A
proposition's not being false does not imply that
proposition's necessarily existing. AW follow this a

5 “There is a good reason to regard intentionality as the

distinctive mark of the mental” (334). It would appear at this
point that AW affirm both that necessarily true propositions are
mind independent and that propositions are essentially “mental.”
From this point of view, their argument begins to sound like
Berkeleyan subjective idealism, leaving us with this
dreary possibility: maybe the created order is only a contingent
thought in the mind of God.
6 “Philosophers typically use the term 'propositions' to
refer to the primary bearers of truth-value. So propositions are
by definition those things that can be true or false . . .” (323).

short time later by saying, “we would simply invite

you to reflect on whether you really can conceive of a
possible world in which contradictions abound” (326).
The challenge has no bite, since the nonexistence of
the proposition— the thought—'about' the non-
contradictoriness of a state of affairs does not imply a
world of contradiction. The best way to think that it
does is to confuse de re and de dicto categories and to
think that true in all possible worlds is the same as true
of all possible worlds. To be true in a possible world, a
proposition must exist in that world; to be true of a
possible world, the proposition need only describe that
world, but need not exist in it.
And now a third way. What about the possible
world at which God chooses not to create, and he
alone exists? To my mind, this possible world is
the test case for any claim to existence or truth in all
possible worlds. At that
possible world, I believe we may grant de dicto
necessity of the laws of logic, maybe, but we are in
no way bound to grant de re necessity.
To see how, take the most difficult case,
conditional propositions—most difficult because they
appear to make no metaphysical investment. Take the
proposition If all men are mortal, and Socrates is a
man, then Socrates is mortal. Is this proposition
necessary de dicto, de re, or both? It appears to be true
that, at all
possible worlds, even worlds in which neither men nor
Socrates exist, if all men were mortal, and Socrates
were a man, he too would be mortal. At, I think, even
the possible world which consists of only God, the
possible world in which God chooses not to create, this
proposition would be necessarily true—
at that world, that is, of it. For certainly God could
bring it about that both components of the
antecedent obtained, and if he did, then the
consequent
would obtain as well.
The same proposition does not have de re
necessity, however, because it
is not the case, necessarily, that God thinks “If all
men are mortal . . .” So it does not exist necessarily,
or in all possible worlds, because it does not exist in
the possible world which is only God.
According to the doctrines of divine simplicity
and aseity, God's mind
and thoughts are identical to his being; the only
necessarily existing thing, because God did not have to
create, is God himself; thus God does not necessarily
think anything other than himself. No thought content
can be imputed to God essentially, in the possible
world which is only God, short of implying that the
thought content is identifiable with the being of God.
Neither the proposition in question, nor any of the laws
of logic, are part of the essential being of God: they are
not God. So we might grant qualified de dicto
necessity of a proposition: the proposition is true in
every world in which it exists, or even at every
possible world; but we are not obligated to grant de re

necessity to a necessarily true proposition. There

appears to be no reason to do so.
I've claimed that this de re-de dicto ambiguity
affords an easy though illegitimate transition from the
contingent order to the necessary, divine order of
being. What I mean is this. AW say (1) that
necessarily true propositions
exist necessarily (and my claim is that they haven't
established this), and (2) that
propositions are essentially thoughts because
essentially intentional or 'about' something. And
since “intentionality is a mark of the mental,” AW
conclude that there must be a necessarily existing
mind (one or more).
But notice that if a necessarily true proposition
exists necessarily and is
necessarily about something, one might also conclude
that everything a necessarily true proposition is about
also exists necessarily. There is no reason that AW have
opted to emphasize the subjective side of the necessary
existence of propositions as thoughts rather than the
objective side of the necessary existence of propositions
as thoughts, and thus as essentially intentional or about
something, and by implication the necessary existence
of their objects— except, perhaps, that it is the best
option for their argument (and helps avoid pantheism).
By de-emphasizing the object of intentionality, a wedge
is driven between the laws of logic and the things they
are necessarily 'about'. By thus popping them loose
from the tangible world, this procedure gives the
obviously false impression that the laws of logic must
exist, world or no world, granting
the laws of logic existence in our test case possible
world, God alone.
I'll add that de dicto necessity is distinct
from de re necessity, and propositions are things
essentially de dicto, with one exception only:
God's speaking has de re necessity. His word is
truth (Jn 17:17) and necessarily accomplishes its
purposes (Isa 55:11).

AW's Univocism: Mind, Thought, and

Necessity
Univocal mind. Univocal terms imply unitarian
ontology. AW use “mind,” “thought,” and
“proposition” univocally. In their argument, all of these
terms, familiar to us in the created realm, in the context
of our knowledge and familiarity, are applied
univocally to the mind and being of the uncreated God.
When we say “a thought requires a mind,” what do we
mean by mind? If no distinction appears, the use of the
term suggests that there is one kind of
mind; and of that kind, AW argue, there must be at
least one which exists in all possible worlds, but that
'necessarily existing' mind is essentially of a kind with
minds that exist in only some possible worlds. The
“necessary existence” of
this mind is no part of its essence, but merely the
coincidence of its not failing to exist in any possible
world. And the fact that we can distinguish between
minds that exist in all possible worlds and minds that
exist in only some does not shake the unitarian
ontology because possible worlds themselves are
defined in terms of conceivability, or more strictly, in
terms of logical consistency; we bounce from one
unitarian assumption to another. The necessarily
existent mind does not actually exist necessarily; it (or
they) exists in every conceivable state of affairs (in the
minds of contingent beings). It comes down to this: on
this way of framing things, the divine mind(s) exist(s)
by
virtue of logical necessity; but Christian thought says
that logic exists by virtue of God's unique necessity.
Univocal thoughts and propositions. The same
can be said for the use of the
word “thought.” Propositions, AW say, are thoughts.
As all introductory logic textbooks do, AW draw a
distinction between sentences and propositions in
order to distinguish propositions from time-space
linguistic instantiations (sentence tokens or
utterances).7 Propositions, though certainly linguistic
in nature, exist independently of any linguistic
instantiations. How AW can remind us that
propositions are independent of utterance, and follow
that by arguing that thoughts are not independent of
thinking, I don't see exactly, but for now notice this:
these thoughts are identical whether God thinks them
or we do.
Univocal necessity. Another problem with the
purported necessary existence of the laws of logic
involves an oversight regarding possible worlds
semantics. Possible worlds semantics have
traditionally been used as a way of
distinguishing essential from non-essential properties:
a property is essential to an entity iff that entity has
that property in every possible world.8 Leverage for
making the distinction between essential and non-
essential properties is afforded by the nature of
possible worlds: they are complete, logically
consistent states of affairs. We say they are logically
consistent so as to keep our metaphysics within the
bounds of intelligibility. For example, there is no
possible world in which a number is a fireman because
it would too obviously violate the laws of logic to
identify them in any significant way. The point is, there
is a reason that possible worlds are defined as logically
consistent or conceivable, and that is to serve our
metaphysical speculations and ensure their
intelligibility.
According to possible worlds semantics, in order
to discover whether an

7 They add that “. . . propositions, as the primary

bearers of truth-value, must be language-independent” (323).
This seems to me misleading, since propositions bear
linguistic structure.
8 To be more accurate, it should be stated the other
way round: an entity has a property in every possible
world iff it has that property essentially.

entity has existence essentially or non-essentially, we

ask whether there is any logically consistent state of
affairs in which that entity does not exist. Since the
divine essence and existence are one, for example, we
say that God exists in every possible world, that he
exists necessarily.
The problem with couching possible worlds in
terms of logical necessity should be obvious: it is
tautologous to say that the the laws of logic are true in
all possible worlds, and it is pure stipulation. It
clearly indicates that we have reached the explanatory
limits of this explanatory category. In other words,
possible worlds delineate, by pure stipulation, the
boundaries for metaphysical speculation. We who use
them for that purpose endorse this surrender to the
laws of logic as the most basic and non-negotiable
principles of intelligibility;
we agree to play by those rules because we can neither
find nor imagine any less controversial ones. So
possible worlds semantics provides a framework for
doing metaphysics. But then to say that everywhere
metaphysics is, behold,
there are the laws of logic, is to say something obvious
and uninformative, even tautologous. It is, in fact,
simply to assert logical necessity for the sake of
practical necessity.
So there are complications here. But where does
that leave the laws of
logic? I do not want to deny their 'obvious truth'.
But, before moving on, we might ask, in what sense
is, say, the law of identity true?
Before we can say much else, we must affirm—
indeed, just assume—
that there is no equivocation of terms.9 A, however we
take it, must have the same referent or mean the same
thing or have the same distribution each time it
makes an appearance. If we do not grant, stipulate, or
assume that it does, all is lost, and we can say nothing
at all about the truth-value of A=A. But this stipulation
is the whole game: we find ourselves bound to assume
that A=A is
true in order for it to serve any purpose whatever—the
graceful entrance of an old friend, begging the
question. Consequently, if we ask whether or in what
sense A=A is true, we have already leaped beyond the
threshold of deductive determination, and we may
now, and in fact now we must, work on a case by
case basis: suppose A is an actual human being, such
as Barack Obama. Is Obama identical to Obama?
Yes and no; and off you go. Suppose A is the triune
personal God of the Bible. Does A=A? And off you
go. Even in the case of the most inconsequential
substitution instance, where A is only itself,
an upper-case instantiation of the first letter of the Latin
alphabet (in this font)
or the 'type' or form of such, there are no simple cases
for the obvious and

9 We will go ahead and assume that 'A' is a variable and

that A=A is not about the identification of two instantiations of
the upper-case, Latin letter 'A', in which case it would be
obviously false.

plain truth of A=A.

The problem of a univocal notion of
necessity comes to the fore in cases of apparent
paradox. In 2 Kings 6 an axehead floats; it rises to
the
surface of the waters of the Jordan river. In John 2 Jesus
changes water to
wine. On a larger scale, there are the problems of
freedom and election and of providence and evil. All
of these are thought to be at least apparently
paradoxical. And the reason for this perception, and for
the tremendous efforts it evokes toward resolution, is
that it is assumed that notions of logical relations and of
logical necessity operate univocally; it is assumed that
they apply equally to man and to God. It is assumed
that the laws of logic, as we articulate them
and have come to understand them, obtain identically
or are equally true in all possible worlds, even in
eternity past, before creation.
If, however, we confess first the unique
ontological self-sufficiency of the triune creator God,
and, indeed, the (moral) authority and
(epistemological
and soteriological) necessity of divine self-disclosure
in Scripture, then we always have ready in hand the
derivative, dependent, and partial nature of the laws
of logic. There is no possible world in which an iron
axehead floats; this one did. This is a true or even
only an apparent contradiction only if it is
assumed that our logical tools exist independently of
God, and apply equally to creator and creature.10
All this raises the suspicion that there is a
philosophical assumption afoot that the theologian's
methodological commitment to the necessity and
authority of Scripture is the product of misplaced
piety or personal disinterest in philosophical
speculation or maybe even the sheer inability to
handle the
rigor and subtly of philosophical discourse. If, on a
case by case basis, any of these applies, it is still the
church's historic position that acknowledging the
authority and necessity of Scripture—the redemptive,
faithful, and sovereign self-disclosure of God—are
both a theologico-epistemological necessity and a
moral-religious imperative.11

Theological Problems Supposing AW's

Argument Holds
I'll discuss three theological problems that
emerge, supposing AW's
 10 I owe much of what I say here to Vern Poythress.
11 K. Scott Oliphint argues that triunity and
inscripturated revelation must be more fundamental in
Christian thought even than identity (A=A) and the laws of
logic. See Oliphint, “Thought Thinking Itself?: Christianity
and Logic,” http://www.reformation21.org/articles/thought-thinking-
itself-christianity-and-logic.php (accessed June

19, 2012).

argument holds.12 One of the deepest issues AW touch

upon is the precise relation between the essential being
of God and the laws of logic, the relation, that is,
between God and the laws of logic in that world which
is God alone (and logic). On such a crucial issue,
particularly for an argument which claims that the laws
of logic exist necessarily in the mind of God, one would
expect to find at least a passing reference to something
of the wealth of historical literature on the knowledge
of God. No such reference appears. Instead we
find a strange and incoherent bit of theological fiction:
AW say that the laws of
logic are “what God thinks about his thoughts qua
thoughts” (337). The laws
of logic are thoughts that God thinks about the form
or structure of his own thoughts.
It's likely that the incentive for positing these
second order thoughts in
the divine mind, distinct from content rich first order
thoughts, is largely the preservation of the purely
formal nature of the laws of logic, which is crucial
to their existing (or being true) necessarily. God
must think the laws of logic because the laws of
logic exist necessarily. So this much is clear: AW
are theologizing by the sheer force of logical
necessity alone.
In an attempt to maintain pure formality and
 sustain the notion of
necessity they've built their argument upon, AW claim
that on some level distinct from his first order
thoughts, God thinks exclusively about the form of his
first order thoughts. That claim depends on the
separability of form and content in God's first order
thoughts, which is to lean on a broken reed. For second
order thoughts to be purely formal, they must have as
their content
only the abstracted logical relations of God's first order
thoughts. And if the content of first and second order
thoughts is distinct, isn't the obvious implication that
there are distinct first and second order divine minds?13
In that case the second order thoughts and the second
order mind, rather than the first order, are more
properly said to exist necessarily, as they only are
purely formal. And so why not say that God essentially
thinks only the laws of logic, and these give form to his
other thoughts, should he have any other thoughts?
What is God at this point anyway—is he not merely
logic thinking itself? Or, put it this way: what now of
God's first order thoughts? What are those thoughts
about? What is the stuff that God subtracts from his
thoughts in order to think about

12 In this section, not only are we supposing that AW's

argument holds, we are also supposing that the “God” of their
conclusion may be the Christian God (if inclusively of other
'gods').
13 We may as well posit a distinct and necessarily
existing mind for each necessarily true and necessarily
existing proposition. If divine simplicity holds, we have either
a single god with many minds or many simple gods.
them qua thoughts? And if only thoughts about
thoughts qua thoughts are necessary, why suppose
that God has first order thoughts at all? Aren't these
thoughts contingent?
The notion of thoughts about thoughts as
thoughts in the divine mind is incoherent. It is also pure
fiction, forced upon AW by their commitment to a
univocal notion of necessity, and standing in the place
where AW should have
been led to consult the riches of historical
theology in which one finds orthodox
protestantism consistently denying that God
thinks discursively, infers one thing from another,
or has propositional knowledge.14
I have two more theological concerns. The first is
as follows. AW say
that “the argument shows that there must be at
least one necessarily existent person,” but not that
“there must be one and only one necessarily
existent person.” The argument, they point out, “is
entirely compatible with Trinitarianism” (337
n.33).
To find in the end that the conclusion is “not
incompatible” with the truth is a bit of a let down. Any
notion at all of one or more necessary or transcendent
mind(s) capable of thinking the laws of logic enjoys
the full support of this argument. AW say, “one can
logically argue against God only if God exists” (337).
This should read, “one can logically argue against X
only if X is true, where X is Deism, any form of
monotheism or any form of polytheism—as many
necessary minds as you like—theistic pluralism,
pantheism, absolute idealism, and maybe even a
theory of religious self- projection.” AW note that
“naturalists eager to evade the force of a theistic
 14 Particularly in terms of knowing and thinking ad
intra, or particularly in terms of God's necessary or essential
knowledge (particularly, that is, at the possible world which is
only God). See Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed
Dogmatics: The Rise and Fall of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca.
1520 to ca. 1725, vol. 3, The Divine Essence and Attributes, 2nd
ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 392-402. A distinction is
often made between God's thoughts ad intra and ad extra. In
the possible world which is only God, God has no thoughts ad
extra,
obviously. And God's thoughts ad intra are only 'about' himself.
See ibid., 287ff., 358ff., and
406-10. One historical example is Francis Turretin: “Concerning
the intellect of God and the disquisition of his knowledge . . .
The mode consists in his knowing all things perfectly,
undividedly, distinctly and immutably. . . perfectly because he
knows all things by himself or by his essence . . . Undividedly,
because he knows all things intuitively and noetically, not
discursively and dianoetically . . . Distinctly . . . because he most
distinctly sees through all things at one glance so that nothing . . .
can escape him . . . Immutably, because with him there is no
shadow of change . . .” Institutes of Elenctic Theology, vol. 1,
trans. George Musgrave Giger ed. James T. Dennison, Jr.
(Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1992), 207. For a
contemporary discussion that benefits from historical sources,
see also K. Scott Oliphint, God With Us: Divine Condescension
and the Attributes of God (Wheaton: Crossway,
2011), 93ff., esp. 94 n.12.

argument will hardly find a comfortable refuge in

Absolute idealism” (336 n.32). But an absolute idealist
sure might. And AW are too modest: even if the
naturalist were eager to evade the force of their
argument, he might not be able; he may well become
an absolute idealist.
I think rather that the deflated conclusion is
indicative of a specific presupposition, univocal
necessity, and by implication, univocal being. To show
how, we might ask how we would go on to argue that
this mind is triune and a se, rather than singular or
plural or just our own (see 336 n.31) or that logic
itself is independently eternal (that it exists necessarily
independently of a personal mind or minds) or
whatever else. Is triunity presupposed by the laws
of logic (univocally conceived), or would that require
revelation? Would we not have to turn to revelation at
that point?—and do the laws of logic imply the
self-revelation of God? Do they presuppose the
voluntary condescension of
the eternal, a se, triune, personal God? Do the laws of
logic even allow for such a God or for divine
condescension and the historical particulars of
salvation in
Christ? The god(s) this argument purports to prove
simply cannot be the
Christian God. Once again, my claim is this: reasoning
univocally strands our
God-talk in the finite order; apart from divine self-
disclosure there is true talk of God.
This leads to a third theological concern.
According to the doctrine of
divine simplicity, God's thoughts are identical to his
being. Indeed, AW think
this much is true of any mind: “. . . thoughts belong
essentially to the minds that produce them” (336
n.31). So if we think thoughts that are essential to
God's being—exactly those thoughts that God thinks
about his own thoughts as thoughts—are we not
participating in the divine essence? The same thoughts
—univocal thoughts—belong essentially to our minds
and to God's
mind. Given simplicity, in other words, unless we deny
that our thoughts are ever identical to God's, we flirt
with pantheism or apotheosis. Or, hoping to maintain
simplicity and the ontological distinction between God
and creation, we may say that the laws of logic are
abstract objects existing independently of
both God and man.15 In that case, perhaps God knows
the laws of logic in all possible worlds because he is
omniscient in all possible worlds and the laws of logic
exist in all possible worlds, not because he essentially
thinks the laws of logic. If that were the case, logic,
existing a se and governing God's thoughts
and actions from without, would be as much God as
God is, perhaps more so.

15 Although the scholarship tends to show that

platonism is no friend to divine simplicity. See James E.
Dolezal, God without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the
Metaphysics of God's Absoluteness (Eugene, OR: Pickwick,
2012), 17-28 (particularly 20-4 and 72-3 n.15 on Plantinga) and
144-7.

Even more troubling is this question: would we be

able to affirm in this case that God's Word is
essentially—necessarily, in all possible worlds—
self- consistent and trustworthy? Or might not
divine self-revelation be in at least one possible
world illogical or inconsistent at points? And what
then of our knowledge of God, if AW's argument
holds in all possible worlds, but the Word of God
does not?

Christian Theistic Analogical Reason and

the Laws of Logic
Traditionally there are three choices in terms of
the meaning of theological language: equivocal,
univocal, and analogical. AW implicitly reject the
thesis that language and concepts are equivocal and
say nothing intelligible
about God. For readers of this journal, this is
uncontroversial. Enjoying equally broad consensus in
the history of Christian theology is a rejection of
univocism: when we say “God is good” and “John is
good,” it is clear that the
predicates are not identical.16
Orthodox protestant thought takes theological
language analogically and grounded in verbal divine
self-revelation, as Westminster Confession 1.6
indicates: “The whole counsel of God, concerning all
things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation,
faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture,
or by good and necessary consequence may be
deduced from Scripture.” Theology, therefore, is
reproductive or imitative of, or obedient to, God's
speech about himself. On the basis of the voluntary
self-revelation of God, we have true knowledge, and
yet, since God is incomprehensible to the creature, our
knowledge is never exhaustive.
Add to this the metaphysics of the Creator-
creature relationship: the creation is a contingent image
of the Creator. All things are from him, to him, and
through him (Rom 11:36, indicating aseity); and
everything that was created
was created by and through the Word (Col 1:6, John
1:3, indicating the triune economy of the act of
creation). So we understand our theological
knowledge and categories as applying to God truly but
incompletely, imitatively and derivatively. So our
concepts are analogical. Not only the nature of the
relation as analogical, but the order figures in as well:
God is the original or the
 16 In a recent text on Aquinas, Brian Davies writes, “We
have 'dog,' as in Fido and Rover: univocal. We have 'bank,' as in
where I put my money and what is alongside a river: equivocal.
And we have, for example, 'good.' When it comes to 'good' as
predicated of God and creatures, Aquinas thinks that the word is
to be understood analogically. Aquinas does not think that
everything we call good is exactly like everything else that we
call good. He does not, as I have said, take 'goodness' to be a
single property had by all good things.” Brian Davies, Thomas
Aquinas on God and Evil (Oxford University Press, 2011), 55.

archetype, and we—and our knowledge—are the

analogue, or the ectype. As in any analogy, there is an
original and there is an analogue, and the order is
irreversible—in the Creator-creature analogy more
than in any other. God is
the original; we and the created order are derivative. In
sum, the irreducible ontological distinction between
Creator and creature, and precisely this arch-ec or
original-analogue order, give us revelationally
grounded, analogical
theological predication. We have true knowledge, so
we reject equivocism; but because of the 'ontological
distance' between the Creator and the creature, our
knowledge is ever partial; so we reject univocism.
Specifically in terms of the laws of logic, a brief
comment is sufficient
to introduce the significance of the creator-creature
analogical relationship. The law of identity, for
example, is true of the Christian God in the sense that
he is self-consistent. But there are complications. While
God is self-identical to God, there are differences
between the persons such that the Father is not identical
to the Son nor to the Holy Spirit and so on. Even the
divine substance they share resists easy A=A
classification: they share the divine substance, but since
each person possesses it in full, we must affirm both
identity and difference.
 So in Christian thought, triunity is more basic
than either threeness or oneness, and more basic
than the law of identity. And thus A=A is not true
of God without qualification.17 Nor ought we to
endorse too easily a unitarian notion of God's
acts. Take salvation, for example. We may speak
of a linear economy: the Son offers propitiatory
sacrifice to the Father, and this work is applied to
the sinner by the Holy Spirit. But salvation is not
only these historical particulars, it is also a
function of the single, triune decree from eternity.
This is a mystery locked to creaturely
understanding; the only key to it is another
impenetrable mystery, the triunity of God.

Nathan Shannon teaches in the philosophy department

at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, and he is a PhD candidate in Theology
at the Free University of Amsterdam. More of his work
can be found at
www.philosophyandtheism.wordpress.com.

Endnotes

17 I say here “without qualification,” but I do not mean

“without limitation or restriction.” In my view, recognizing the
triune foundation of created self-consistency, rather than
limiting or depreciating the law of identity, amplifies and
enriches it.
 The Knowledge of Good and
Evil

Gen. 2; 3
The loss of innocence closed evidently the simple enjoyment
of blessing in thanksgiving. The knowledge of good and evil
being come, God, in saying " the man is become as one of us,"
has declared that man, to be with God, must be with Him as
suited to Himself as knowing good and evil - in a word, in
righteousness. One must (as knowing good and evil) be suited to
what God is according to it.
But there is a certain modification of this to be introduced,
not the diminishing or lowering of required righteousness
(δικαίωμα), so as to allow of any evil (for that is impossible:
God cannot allow evil - He would not be holy if He did); but the
taking the measure of the knowledge of good and evil according
to the real light and moral condition of the position in which he
is. I do not mean as fallen in this position, but according to the
moral elements of the position in which he is with God. If he is
perfect to the level of that position, he may righteously live
there and enjoy God there: man never was; but it was put before
him. It is the law. If as man he loved God with all his heart and
his neighbor as himself, he would righteously as man be happy
with God; because he would meet the mind of God perfectly as
knowing good and evil in the position in which he was
according to the knowledge he had of God; he would be perfect
according to that. Man was never so because he had lusts; but
the case was put; he never de facto could have been so, because
he got the knowledge of good and evil in and by sin. Unfallen
Adam had not a bad conscience; but he had not a good one. The
truth is, there was no such position of man, because he set up to
be like God, knowing good and evil; he made the measure for
himself in desire and would have risen up to God by robbery -
would have been equal with God. He broke through to be with
God; and now he must be with Him or shut out. He cannot of
course be independently equal, which would be absurd; but he
must be morally fit according to God's presence or be excluded
from it. There is no return to innocence, or to the tree of life,
on that ground.
The law, however, never took the ground of introducing into
the presence of God as He is according to the absolute
revelation of His nature: Christianity alone does that. The law
keeps man without, hiding God - " Thou hast said that thou
wouldest dwell in the thick darkness." It gives to man then
without, but from God Himself, a perfect rule of right for the
creature as such, condemning withal all that entered into man's
state contrary to this, and, further, putting man into
relationship with God, on the ground however of natural
creation but assuredly in the rest of it - a thing really
impossible now that evil was entered, and meant to chew this;
but still for this very purpose established on this ground.
The perfect rule was loving God with all the heart and loving
one's neighbor as oneself; sin and lust condemned; and the
sabbath added to all. But for a sinner evidently this had no
reality but to condemn, and it did not profess to bring to God. It
gave a rule to a people outwardly who were already brought
into relationship with God, but with a barrier and a double veil
and a priesthood; but it gave the perfect rule of right and wrong
to the creature who had the sense of it according to his nature
in the creation. But he was a sinner. There could be no rule in
respect of sin save condemning it, but the law contained, as
Christ spewed in extracting it, the perfect positive rule. In this
respect the perfection of the law's bearing is most wonderful.
Only it was the opposite of bringing (an unjust) man to God,
who was concealed. He has been manifested in grace in Christ;
but through His death the veil is rent. Christ suffered the just
for the unjust, that He might bring us to God.
This accordingly is according to good and evil as known of
God Himself; and as walking in the light as He is in the light, we
are to be fit for God as He is, rejoice in hope of His glory; we joy
in Him. Our estimate of good and evil is the divine one; what is
fit for God's presence In view of this Christ has made the
expiation: He is sitting in the full condition belonging to it as
man at the right hand of God. It is an unspeakable blessing but
the necessary result, we may say, of the work being God's
according to His counsels and wrought by Christ; for where
should Christ be as to His person or in desert of His work? Then
the Holy Ghost is come down thence, while Christ is there,
according to infinite love, to bring us in spirit into it, to bring
us through the rent veil into the holiest of all.
Such is our knowledge of good and evil and the fruit of
Christ's work. The darkness passes, the true light now shines.
Our corning to God is renewed according to His image in
righteousness and true holiness. It is an immense blessing.
There never was really any being with God on another ground
than in the light as He is, as brought by grace and power out of
the darkness into the light, knowing good and evil. He cannot,
with this knowledge, do anything short of Himself (i.e. what
was fit for, worthy of, Himself). So that, as when man was
ruined and got into darkness with the knowledge of good and
evil, God only could deliver him, He delivered him necessarily
for His own glory according to His own nature. He put man
provisionally on another ground of perfect creature blessing
(but as a sinner apart from Himself) to bring out where he was
in sin, and which therefore spoke of sin and a positive curse;
but this was by the by for a special end. The only real thing is
innocence, or glory. Innocence in human condition is earthly,
or in an angelic condition sustained is heavenly. Hence, morally
speaking angels could not be brought back because of the
knowledge of good and evil into the light with God (and so man
in the case of Heb. 6) But, innocence lost, with the knowledge of
good and evil the work of God is according to His own glory and
hence necessarily brings into it. The law provisionally spews
the abstract moral perfection of a knowledge of good and evil in
a creature, but was in fact founded relatively on prohibition of
evil which brought in, when really apprehended, the conviction
of sin.
 PART IV
MORAL LAW, CIVIL LAW, AND
CHRIST’S ATONEMENT:
SENSE, A-SENSE OR NON-SENSE?
 The Judgment of God:
The Problem of the Canaanites
By J. P. U. Lilley
THEMELIOS vol 22:2
John Lilley. now retired and living in Norwich, is a long-lime
member of the Tyndale Fellowship Old Testament study
group.

Many today find difficulty. on ostensibly Christian grounds.

with the concept of divine Judgment, and thus find It hard to
accept Judgments in the OT as the work of the Christian God.
The case of the Canaanites causes particular difficulty because
of the Involvement of Israel In carrying out the Judgment.
The Israelite Invasion of Canaan. as described in the
book of Joshua and based on instructions in the
Pentateuch, was like many another barbarian Invasion
In the course of history - at least from the viewpoint of
those who suffered from It. The moral Issues arise from
taking the theological dimension seriously. Le. from
claiming that the OT is revelation of the one true God
and that he directed the invasion. If our outlook Is based
on accepting the NT as a manual of Christian lifestyle,
with principles of forgiveness and service grounded in a
gospel freely available, we may find it difficult to see
how the Invasion of Canaan can be flitted into the same
theological framework. Was Marcion right after all - was
this the work of another and Inferior deity?
To put it another way. If we could see the policy of
exterminating the Canaanites merely its a phase In the
development of religion (whether 'primitive' or
'deuteronomic'). we could attribute it to human
misapprehension of the character of God: but if the
Instructions In the Law came from God. then. regardless of
any debate about their historical context. we have a
theological problem. Stone considers that this problem
already exercised the author of the book of Joshua. and
argues that 'one important, but generally unnoticed, effect
of the Interpretive reshaping of Joshua is a disquiet with
''holy war, directing readers to modes of appropriation
other than martial and territorial'.
We cannot be content to limit our enquiry to an academic
question of understanding the OT historically: we must also
ask how the Scripture applies to Christians as they Interact
with the world. especially with forces that oppose them.
lithe biblical treatment of the Canaanites does not provide a
model, what does It say to us? And how do we explain the
basis on which we determine Its relevance? I propose to
examine the Canaanite question against the background of
other OT examples of Judgment: to make some suggestions
for understanding the biblical text and the situation which
It describes: and to consider briefly the implications for
Christians In pagan (or post-Christian) society.

Judgment in the Old Testament

The idea that God does not Judge Is by no means a
modern one: Zephaniah had to contend with It (Zp. 1:12). As
a proposition it is untenable: If no penalty is enforced, law
becomes ineffective. and the purposes and Ideals of the law
must for ever be frustrated by human self-will. The Bible
witnesses to God's willingness to persuade men: but no
biblical writer describes a 'god' whose will is ultimately
limited to what he can achieve by persuasion. The basic
principles of divine Intervention in conflict situations were
stated by G.E. Wright as follows: (a) God works in this world
mediately through chosen agents, whether they know it or
not: (b) the divine use of an agent confers. no special
righteousness or merit on the agent. God uses people as
they are.
 Judgment on individuals and communities
In human society, judgment attaches responsibility and
blame to individuals. The law may be broken by groups, but
charges can only be brought against Individuals. It is
considered unjust to punish family and friends of the guilty
unless they are themselves accessory to the crime
(although it may be unavoidable that they also suffer
consequences). The pi biopic is endorsed by God in his
revelation to Ezekiel (ch. 18): cf Deuteronomy 24:16, cited
in 2 Kings ' 14:6. The proverb about 'sour grapes' may
have misinterpreted Exodus 20:5. which speaks of the
sins of the fathers being visited on the children 'to the
third and fourth generation of those who hate me'.
In practice, we do experience corporate punishment,
although we tend to interpret it as misfortune rather than
in terms of the operation of law and judgment. The Bible
provides case-studies of such punishment. illustrating three
modes of involvement. Firstly, there is individual sin
prejudicing the welfare of the community: secondly. there is
individual sin leading the community astray: and finally, we
can find the community generally adopting wrong
standards.
From the first class, we may cite Achan's theft of
devoted objects at Jericho. arid David's insistence on
holding a census. In both cases the Immediate
consequences fell on the community. After the 'ban' had
been violated. the attack on Al could not be allowed to
succeed, even though the army as a whole was
innocent. David held leadership and responsibility: his
sin could not be treated as a private matter. Even his
treatment of Uriah led to disasters for Israel: much
more so did his public transgression (2 Sa. 24).
The classic instance in the second class is that of
Jeroboam. He goes down in history as the man 'who caused
Israel to sin' (1 Ki. 14:16 and a further 17 times in Kings). but
clearly his lead was accepted by the community as a whole,
which' suffered the consequences. down to the fall of
Samaria.
In the third mode of involvement, the community
identities itself with evil so' that it passes beyond hope
of redemption. In a sense. the whole world is under
this condemnation, expressed historically in the flood
and prophetically in The ; end of the age' (Mt. 13:40: cp.
24:37111. The charge Iles more particularly against
societies which have abandoned moral restraint,
wallowed in vile religion, or gloried in oppressive
political power. The Canaanites. by thel testimony of the
biblical authors and their own literature, came into this
class.
The involvement of Israel. however, makes the Canaanites
something of a' special case. Before examining this, it may
be useful to review the other principal Instances of
judgment on Gentile societies. I do not include Israel,
because its status as a covenant community raises
additional issues. although at times it is dealt with in the
same way as Gentiles (Amos 4:10-121.

Judgments on Gentile societies

The case of Sodom is the clearest instance of divine
judgment by natural agency-on a community. The setting
and language in Genesis 18 denote a judicial investigation
(vv. 20f.. 'outcry': and Abraham's famous plea that 'the Judge
of ail the earth' could not destroy the righteous with the
wicked). There are strong parallels with the flood: Christ
cited both as types of final judgment (Lk. 17:26-29). There
was a last call to escape, and provision for a remnant. The,
outcome proved. in the light of the interview with Abraham,
that the community was beyond redemption.
With reference to Egypt. the language of judgment.
already used in Genesis. l5: 14. appears in Exodus 7:4
and 12:12. Here 'the gods' are judged, referring perhaps
to the bestial representations of Egyptian divinities.
However, the theme is essentially one of deliverance
from oppression. in a confrontation between the true
God and the powers of darkness: this is clearly echoed
in Psalm 78. Egypt is called to account for its treatment
of Israel rather than for 4 its moral or religious
corruption.
Accusations against Nineveh are spelled out In the
prophecy of Nahum: the Assyrians .plot against the Lord'
(1.9. I I I; Nineveh is a city of blood . lies and +plunder (3:
I): oppression is to fulfil 'the wanton lust of a harlot'
(3:41 - this is made more specific in terms of sorcery
and witchcraft: her 'evil' (NIV 'cruelty') is 'endless'. there
is no hope of her ever being different (3:19). Isaiah (10:5-
14) condemns 'the 'wilful pride . . and the haughty look'
which put the imperial power on a collision course with
God. setting no bounds in space or time to its ambition:
but God will , -punish (v. 12. pqd). exercising his
authority to call the nations to account
It is hardly necessary to document the judgment on
Babylon, which proceeds from, similar charges to a
similar execution. While Nebuchadnezzar contemplated
his achievement. we may be sure that his subjects took
their full share of pride in its glory, and were entirely
committed to the combination of force and idolatry
which ...sustained it. 'That ruthless and Impetuous
people' (Hab. 1:61 stand for all time to represent
Imperial power without responsibility.
Taking these leading principles together. we conclude
that the nations come under judgment because of
arrogance and oppression as well as what we call
'immorality': in fact. 'every pretension that sets itself up
against the knowledge of God' (2 Cor. 10:5). In the earlier
examples. Judgment came largely through natural
agencies: later, as rebellion was expressed increasingly
in political terms. judgment also was often worked out
politically. Judgment is not immediate or continuous.
otherwise no flesh would survive as the Psalmist
pointed out (130:31); It is always linked to the working
out of God's redemptive purposes. Even the case of
Sodom, ripe for Judicial attention. involved the destiny
of Lot (cf. 2 Pet. 2:6-8). However. Sodom and Canaan
had this in common: their iniquity had 'reached its full
measure' (sdOm. Gn. l 5:16). Outrageous evil is purged to
forestall the spread of corruption.

The Canaanite question

This brings us back to the Canaanites and to the
situation in which the Israelites were commissioned to
extirpate them. Being concerned primarily with the
prescriptive material, I shall not discuss the historical
reconstruction of the origins of the state of Israel. This
is not to deny the importance of the subject: but
whether one visualizes peaceful penetration. social
revolution, or any other theory which minimizes or
denies invasion. the attitude to the Canaanites
inculcated by the Law requires not only a historical
setting but also a theological explanation.
To take an extreme example. since Niels Leniche is
persuaded that the Pentateuch is essentially a post-exilic
composition and that It generally misuses the term
'Canaanite' in an unhistorical sense. and since the
pentateuchal emphasis on the exodus from Egypt and the
eviction of the Canaanites Is an anachronism In the post-
exilic context. he is driven to refer the whole construction
to the Jewish dia.spora in Egypt. Thus the practical
application of the doctrine is entirely removed from the
world of war and invasion: but we must still face the
theological and ethical implications of that doctrine.
Similarly, theories of the development of the Pentateuch
will not remove the theological problem. For instance,
writing on the basis that Deuteronomy was compiled in the
latter part of the seventh century BC. S.R. Driver accounts
for its anti-Canaanite polemics 'partly, no doubt, because
they formed an element in the older legislation (Ex. 23:31-33)
. . . hut chiefly because . . . they were a significant protest
against the fashions of the age'. He does not postulate an
anti-Canaanite ' pogrom under Josiah, but senses 'the
intensity of the author's convictions on the subject', and
apparently grants that 'older legislation' would have carried
the same message.
Much more recently. and more radically. A.D.H. Mayes
regards Deuteronomy as representing Mosaic
authorship in order to authorize and legitimize its
teaching, and states that 'this presentatiop as speech of
Moses brought with It the fictional setting of pre-
settlement times. Nevertheless, he goes on to treat 'holy
war' as a reality, even though 'Italy War theory
represents a Deuteronomic interpretation . . . of past
events'. The problem of understanding the theory
therefore remains. even If one supposes that it was
never actually put into practice.
It becomes evident that neither by rewriting the history of
Israel's origins. nor,, by identifying stages In the compilation
of the Pentateuch, can one avoid the need to give an
account of the prescriptions for dealing with the
Canaanites which will enable us to understand their
purpose correctly. I propose therefore', to set aside the
historical and literary questions, and to examine the texts -
primarily the pentateuchal texts - as they stand.
Instructions given in the Pentateuch
The principal texts are Exodus 23:20-33. Exodus 34:11-
16, Deuteronomy 7:1-6 and Deuteronomy 12:1-4, 29-32.
Some phrases recur in Leviticus 18 20, Numbers 33:51-
56. Deuteronomy 18:9-13 and Deuteronomy 20:16-18. The
instructions can be considered under two heads:
dealing with the people, and abolishing their religion.
The second group is fairly simpler in the four main
passages, apart from some minor variations of
expression. Exodus 23:24 and * 34:13f. cover the same
points as Deuteronomy 7:5 and 12:3. 30 (cf.. also Dt. 7:16,
25). The general injunction not to 'follow their
practices' (Ex. 12:24). implied again in Exodus 34:15. is
effectively repeated in Deuteronomy 12:4, 31 as regards
worship. while Leviticus 18:3, 20:23 and Deuteronomy
18:9 carry it into the realm of ethics and particularly of
occultism. The first group of,, Instructions, for dealing
with the people, will repay closer attention.
 The crux of the problem
Common to most of the passages are the phrase 'I will
drive out' (various words used) and a warning not to be
ensnared or led into sin (in Dt. 12. connected directly with
worship). The deuteronomic passages are complementary.
inasmuch as chapter 7 is part of the introduction while
chapter 12 is specific,. law. On the other hand. Exodus 34
recapitulates chapter 23 with some abbreviation. One can
therefore see a very close correspondence between, Exodus
and Deuteronomy. taking each as a whole.
The phrase '1 will drive out' is closely connected with
the oft-repeated assurance: that the Lord had given
Israel the land of Canaan. This theme is especially.
prominent in Deuteronomy 1-6. which is not concerned
with the Idolatry of the Canaanites as such: here the
threat to faithful worship is expected from within. (4:25)
or from abroad (6:14). However, the implication that the
Canaanites must' be 'thrust out' (6:19) is inevitable.
The other phrases which occur in one or both of the
Exodus passages are also! found in Deuteronomy 7,
except for Exodus 23:33: 'Do not let them live in your'
land': on the other hand, Deuteronomy 7:3 adds: 'Do not
intermarry' (implied * In Ex. 34:151.1. In practical terms
this amounts almost to the same thing. but in 7:2 the
point is sharpened into the first application of herem
in this context. The term reappears in Deuteronomy
20:17 1 as epexegetic to the phrase you, shall not leave
alive anything that breathes'. I Both expressions are
common In, Joshua. where we read of these
instructions being put into effect, and it is Important to
understand the meaning of herem.

'Devoted' or 'under the ban'

The essential significance of herem is irrevocable
dedication of an object or person. It is seen clearly In
Leviticus 27:281, where the term (NW 'devote') is
contrasted with 'dedicate' (vv. 14-27, hoqd11): the latter
usage leaves open the: possibility of redemption. This
related to voluntary offerings, but in a few instances
'devotion' was applied to what would normally have
been taken a4 plunder." It was not intended to be
applied to the spoil of Canaanite cities. generally." It had
nothing to do with the standing Instructions to destroy
idolatrous suit-objects. neither was it a hallmark of the so-
called 'holy war'. Failure to observe ,he evidence on these
points has led to widespread misunderstanding and
confusion even in standard commentaries.
With regard to persons, 'irrevocable dedication' implies
that the options of enslavement and of treaty are not
available. This follows from the prohibition of social
intercourse, given in more detailed terms in the texts cited
above. The Canaanites In general would never accept the
Israelite doctrine of God and submit themselves to its
discipline: the exceptional case of Rahab only points the
contrast. 4 whole way of life is at stake. Debased religion
has corrupted Canaanite thought and practice from seed-
time to harvest. and no way will they be persuaded to
abandon it. Their society is ripe for Judgment.

Understanding the judgment

The invasion as judgment
We are presented. then. with a situation which is
practically unparallelled in Scripture: judgment is decreed
on a society. and Israel Is commissioned to execute it. It is
so unusual, and apparently so far outside Christian terms
of reference. that we may have some difficulty in
understanding that this could be the will of God.
As to the Judgment itself, we need to appreciate more fully
the character of Canaanite society as known yi to us from
biblical and extra-biblical sources. The strictures of W.F.
Albright are not universally accepted: for example. Dr J.
Gray attempts to show that Canaanite religion anticipated
many biblical ideals. even if ,'what predominated in Canaan
was in fact the fertility-cult relating to the recurrent
seasonal crises in the agricultural year, man's efforts to
enlist Providence In supplying his primary need, his daily
food and the propagation of his kind'. Dr 'Gray is clearly
seeking to justify or at least excuse the cult, on the very
grounds on which it stands condemned biblically: the God
of grace is not to be 'enlisted by man's efforts'.
Let us illustrate further the style of this defence. Gray
claims that the Canaanites were emotionally involved in
their myths, which were a form of proto-drama: in places
'the whole bawdy, farcical tone is just that of Greek comedy
... Their gods were like the Greek gods. glorified human
beings ... Granted that this intense anthropomorphism is
rather the work of the artist using his poetic licence, the
fact remains that there was iv moral purpose in the
fertility-cult. That is not a reproach; it Is a natural
limitation.'
This Is not the place to examine Gray's attempts to
connect Canaanite and Israelite practice, or to answer his
polemic against the biblical representation of Canaanite
religion. It is enough to remark that his defence can be
made. to our reading public, in terms such as we have
quoted. and that it appears to rest mainly on the prior•
claims of cultural appreciation over moral (let alone
religious) considerations. We have to face the question
whether we believe, and are prepared to maintain, that a
true appreciation of history has room for the possibility of
divine judgment being executed in particular situations,
and that in such judgment, the pretensions of culture might
be set aside.
This position Is taken by W.L. Alexander. commenting on
the policy of extermination:

If Israel had no divine command to this effect,

no-one would pretend to Justify this part of their
policy. (f they had. fi needed no justification ...
when a nation has given way to such nameless
and shameless wickedness that Its land groans
beneath the burden of its-crimes, it is a mercy to
the world when the evil is stamped out ... no
 nation has any absolute right to Itself or Its land.
It holds its existence subject to God's will, and
to that will alone: and If it is mod for the world
that It should give place to others, he will cause
it to pass away.
It is my contention that the invasion of Canaan should be
seen in this light f. rather than as an expression of a
general principle of holy war against sinners and
unbelievers.

Israel as God's agents

This theme of judgment exhibits a relatively low profile
in our texts, and is certainly not to be regarded as
motivating Israel. We read in Genesis 15:16 that a return
from Egypt would be deferred until 'the sin of the
Amorites' had t 'reached its full measure' (sillern). In
Leviticus 18:2411. and 20:22 the land Is said to have been
defiled, so that it 'vomited out its Inhabitants' and (18:25) 'I
punished it for its sin'. Thus in Deuteronomy 9:4, 'it is on
account of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord
is going to drive them out before you'. In both Leviticus
and Deuteronomy the Israelites are warned not to‘ .
congratulate themselves on their own virtue, but to fear
lest they come under the same judgment.
So, when we come to specific Instructions to make no
terms with the Canaanites (e.g. Dt. 20:16-18), the Israelites
are not encouraged to see themselves as God's avenging
angels. Craigie says:

There are two reasons for this total destruction,

only one of which is stated in this context. The
unstated reason is that the Israelites were
instruments of God's Judgment; the conquest
was not only the means by which God granted
his people the promised land, but was also the
means by which he executed his judgment on
the Canaanites for their sinfulness (see 9:4). The
second reason, which is stated. appears in v.18:
 (1 the Canaanites survived, their unholy religion
could turn Israel aside from serving the Lord.

Reasons for the policy

What then can we say about the rationale of the
directions given in the Law for dealing with the
Canaanites?
The Sinai Covenant, modelled as it may have been on
accepted forms of Near Eastern treaty so that Israel could
grasp its purpose, was a very special kind of covenant.
Yahweh would not accept a place in a pantheon to deal on
equal terms with the gods of other nations; much less
would their representatives be allowed in his territory.
Therefore, not only is the worship of other gods' prohibited.
but the idea of treaty with the Canaanites is impossible: for
such a treaty would involve reciprocal invocation of each
other's deities.
Under the covenant which constituted them as God's
people, Israel acquired title to the land. This is explicit in
Exodus and strongly developed in Deuteronomy, and of
course goes back to the covenant with Abraham.'
Possession of the land means control of it and of all that
goes on in it. so that the national life may be developed to
accordance with the covenant. Aliens. as such, are not
excluded - indeed, provision is made for Diem and Israel
is required to see that they are not neglected or
oppressed - but they must conform to the law of the land;
and this includes the first arid second- 2' commandments. 1
Kings 11:71 illustrates the point.
It is easy enough to see that the prohibition of idolatrous
worship involves the destruction of its visual aids: but if the
pagan altars are eliminated, what will the pagans do? After
all, their idolatrous worship Is also a matter of conviction.
not just a pastime which they could regretfully abandon.
The Sinai Covenant° therefore, by Its very nature, requires
the eviction of pagans from Israelite territory, both because
their worship cannot be allowed to co-exist with that of,
Israel, and because there can be no basis for a treaty
relationship with them. On the other hand, they cannot be
deported; Israel is not going to be an imperial power with
the resources and authority to move populations around*
s o . while the primary Intention is 2 :1 tor. youl will drive
them out', this leads inevitably to 'you must devote
them'. 1 am not suggesting that this implication was
avoided in the first place. but I think it important to
establish that the prior obleclive was to possess and
cleanse the land.

Constructive purpose
If the gift of the land was an essential factor
determining the policy to be followed towards the
Canaanites. what has the Law to say about God's
purpose in this gift? it went far beyond the common
Near Eastern theme of conquest promoting the glory of
the conqueror's god: beyond Jephthah's dernarche to
the king of Ammon (Jg. 11:24). 'whatever the Lord our
God has given us. we will possess'.
,
n Deuteronomy 4:3211. Moses declares that Israel's
unique experience of deliverance 'out of another nation'
testifies to the uniqueness of the one true God (vv. 35.
39). 'He loved your forefathers and chose their
descendants' (v. 37) - not to exercise power. but so that
their obedience to the covenant would 'show your
wisdom and understanding to the nations' (v. 6), who
would 'see that you are called by the name of the Lord'
(28:101. One must therefore question the assertion by
A.D.H. Mayes that Deuteronomy expresses no sense of
Israel with a mission to the world'. Israel Is to be
s’gulla h. the Lord's treasure, and goy godoS. a holy
people; Ex. 19:51: cf. also DL 26:181.1: the Lord is glorified
not in mere power, but in wisdom and in the quality of
life which results from keeping his laws.
God called Israel to witness to his power and
uniqueness, by non-Idolatrous worship: to his holiness,
by an appropriate lifestyle: to his justice. by fair laws
protecting the disadvantaged. it would be quite
misleading to express all this in purely negative terms
of prohibitions and restrictions. The stringent rules
against idolatry presuppose that Israel is a worshipping
community, and must be read with the laws governing
the conduct of festivals. The rejection of Canaanite
practices is matched by repeated assurances that God
will ensure the prosperity of his people (e.g. Ex. 23:25).
Divination and necromancy are prohibited because the
Lord Intends to reveal his will through prophecy. as
befits the dignity of his creation (Dt. 18:14111. God's
purpose is to have people reconciled to himself in a
covenant relationship, replacing fear and uncertainty
with love and confidence, people who understand what
the Lord's will is' and enjoy the benefits of obeying it.
Consistent with this is the strong emphasis in
Deuteronomy on responsible self-government and
stewardship of resources.
To fulfil this purpose. Israel needed total control and total
responsibility within its geographical boundaries for three
reasons. Firstly. the theology of worship was so entirely
different from that in paganism, that the two could not be
combined. Secondly, human instincts being what they are. it
was necessary to lake a strong line against 'visual aids'
prejudicial to a right understanding of God. Thirdly. the
personal and social ethics required by the covenant were
incompatible with many practices accepted and deep-
rooted in paganism. Therefore the covenant could not
permit any social intercourse or treaty relationships. or
indeed any co-existence. with the former inhabitants of the
land.
W.L. Alexander puts this in perspective for us: 'When we
come to think of what vast Importance for the world was
the choice of one people who should serve as leverage for
the rest, we discern the reason for the imperative
injunctions ... as to the policy which Israel was to pursue
with reference to the peoples of Canaan.'
 Contemporary relevance
Thus far I have been seeking to understand a
historical situation on the basis of a biblical world-
view, as a study which is important for faith and
worship. There is another dimension of relevance,
which Dr C.J. Wright stressed in his editorial
(Thernellos, January 1994. p. 3): 'these things were
written for our instruction'. What has Deuteronomy.
and in particular its teaching about Canaanites, to say
to us for whom 'the Baalism of Canaan ... is alive and well
in our society'?
We live in a world where sexual licentiousness and
perversion. together with, false worship and outright
idolatry. are as prevalent as they were in Canaan or in NT
Corinth or Rome. We are involved in that society, and we
risk being dragged along by it and failing to maintain the
God-fearing community which the Church ought to be.
What are we to do with our Canaanites? Can the Law of
Moses give us any directions?
Of course. it is obvious that the NT attitude to idolaters is
different. Paul says plainly: 'What business is it of mine to
judge those outside the church?' To dissociate from
idolaters 'you would have to leave this world'' - and then
how' would we fulfil our commission to preach the gospel?
But if we simply say that 'the gospel has made the
difference'. we have no clear basis for applying the Crr'. -
only a kind of filler to strain out what we think has ceased
to be relevant.
I suggest that the key to interpretation lies in identifying
what has changed. and, what has not changed. as between
the status of Israel around 1000 BC and our own. In three
ways. at least, the Church is differently placed. (a) We serve
under a new covenant, in terms set out by Jeremiah 131:33-
341. Our remit is to proclaim a message of renewal and
reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:17-21). Ib) We are not a territorial
people as Israel was. We hold no property otherwise than
under the secular law. (c) We have no political identity or
status. Neither force nor birth can make a Christian. We
cannot implement a Christian state: the attempts which
have been made are proof of that.
As to the unchanged factors. I would stress the following:
(a) God has not changed in himself. He was and is unique.
holy. compassionate and gracious„, slow to anger.
abounding in love and faithfulness. forgiving wickedness
yet maintaining righteousness: life, power and judgment
flow from him alone (ht He requires our exclusive loyalty.
He is not head of a pantheon. neither does Jesus sit on a
committee of mediators. (c) We are still 'a people'. Our social
life and ethics within the Church. and the way we worship.
are essential parts of, our witness to Christ. (d) We are still
vulnerable to temptation: 'the sinful° nature desires what is
contrary to the Spirit' (Gal. 5:17). and we need to be careful
what we hear and see, and how we think.

Conclusions
Having thus reviewed the provisions in the Law for
dealing with the Canaanites and their religion, and having
tried to assess their relevance in a Christian context, I
propose the following:
The biblical directions for the occupation of Canaan and
the eradication of Canaanite religion reflect God's purpose
to establish a holy people with a political identity under the
old covenant.
As members of the body of Christ under the new
covenant, we are not in # position to occupy any territory
or impose any laws against immorality or idolatry. but we
are required to maintain holiness and true worship in th%
Church,
To this end, we ought to avoid cultural links and interests
which would undermine our faith or holiness. and
prejudice our witness to the glory (1 God, and we ought to
be unashamed to say why we avoid them. we have to resist
the trend in our pluralist society which places culture
above criticism*
 Such a policy will meet opposition because it has negative
aspects. We have tit, insist that negatives are necessary in
order to achieve and maintain positives*. Christians cannot
say 'yes' to everything.

Endnotes
1. So L.G. Stone. 'Ethical and apologetic tendencies in the redaction of the
Book of Joshua'. CBQ 53 (1991). pp. 25-36: 'Those looking to Joshua for
an enduring illumination of existence struggle with the book's
violence. of which God is made the author (p. 25).
2. The extermination policy Is usually considered 'deuteronomic', and this Is often
taken to imply that it was promulgated In the late seventh century: for
an extreme view. see A. Role, 'Laws of warfare'. JSOT 32 (1985). pp. 23-
44. Neither step in this argument Is beyond controversy.
3. Stone. op. ca.. p. 28. Stone demonstrates that the Joshua narrative
Is articulated to emphasize that the Canaanites were
destroyed because they resisted the purposes of Yahweh. it
is not clear that this makes any significant difference to the
'mode of appropriation'. He goes on to argue (p. 35) that the
deuteronomistic expansion shifted the emphasis to a call for
Israel to obey the Torah, but the passages cited (Jos. 1:1-9:
8:30-35: 23:1-16) are hardly sufficient to change the thrust of
the narrative.
4. Introduction to R. Boling. Joshua (Anchor Bible: New York: Doubleday. 1982). p. 30.
5. Stone. op. cit.. p. 26. on theories of peaceful penetration: 'While expunging the
moral problem from history, this approach does not remove the problem from
the text.' Again (p. 27). 'the received text of Joshua ... does not depict Israel as ..
engaged In a revolutionary class-struggle'.
6. N.P. Lemche. The Canaanites and their Land (JSOTS 110: Sheffield: JSOT Press.
19911. pp. 167f. It may be rather difficult to explain how such a source
could produce 'literary works which were to become normative for the
whole Jewish community' (p. 169). Lemche acknowledges the problem
and there ends the discussion.
7. S.R. Driver. Deuteronomy (ICC: Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 3rd edn. 1902). p. xxxli.
8. A.D.H. Mayes. Deuteronomy (New Century Bible: London: Oliphants. 19791, p. 57.
9. A.D.H. Mayes. The Story of Israel between Settlement and Exile (London:
SCM. 1983). p. 157 n. 3. The use of the term 'holy war' may be taken to
imply that the invasion was represented as undertaken by God's
command, which is the point under discussion. It is another question
whether the term itself (which is not biblical) describes a biblical
 concept accurately. The practice of war usually had religious aspects,
but the identifi cation of a form of 'holy war' is very dubious: see P.C.
Craigie. The Problem of War In the OT (Grand Rapids. MI: Eerdmans.
1978). p. 49, and K. Lawson Younger. Ancient Conquest Accounts (JSOTS
98: Sheffi eld: Almond. 1990). pp. 258-60. The application of 'the ban'
(berem) is not a distinctive feature as many commentators have
supposed: see below, and note 1 I.
10. Mayes, Deuteronomy. finds an inconsistency between vv. 2 and
3: 'Had (v.21 been carried out. or had It been intended ... the
following verse would be superfluous' (p. 183). It is more
logical to read vv. 2b-3 as spelling out the implications of 2a.
J. Ridderbos. Deuteronomy (Bible Student's Commentary:
Grand Rapids. Ml: Zondervan, 19841, p. 12, explains by
reference to v. 22, but this is less realistic: the application of
h&em could hardly follow a period of shared occupation. so v.
22 implies the gradual extension of boundaries and
reduction of Canaanite cities.
11. kol n'Adrrullh, which 1 take as referring to human life. The word is never
clearly used of animals except In Gn. 7:22. and even this is not certain:.
see T.C. Mitchell, Vetus Testamenturn (V7) II (1961). pp. 177-87. See also
M. Weinfeld. 'The ban on the Canaanites In the biblical codes and Its
historic development', VT Suppl. 50 (1993), pp. 142-60. He finds a shift
of terminology in Deuteronomy as compared with Exodus, prescribing
extirpation rather than eviction. and concludes that the
deuteronomisiic view is 'utopian. although he admits that 'the radical
policy against the old inhabitants of the land characterizes the times
of Saul' (p. 156) and traces an early application of hereem to that
period. It Is not altogether correct that the prescriptive passages in
Deuteronomy tend:: to use 'destroy' rather than the 'drive out' of Exodus (the
term 'dispossess' ; occurs in 12:29 and 18:12). but in any case the distinction
seems somewhat, academic; the option to go quietly was, as Weinfeld points
out (p. 1541. a Rabbinic invention reflecting conditions under the
Hasmonaeans.
12. The principal cases are: (a) Hormah (Nu. 21:21.), where the dedication was 4 made
under a vow Invoking divine assistance: lb) the law of an apostate Israelite
community (Dt. 13:15-171: (c) Jericho (Jos. 6:171. by Joshua's orders: Id) the
Amalekites (I Sa. 15), by Samuel's orders.
13. The Talmud points out in Stfre Deuteronomy (tr. R. Hammer; New Haven. CN:
Yale U.P.. 1986). Piska 201. that Dt. 20:17 might have been read In tilts sense
but that it is stated expressly In 6:101 that the Israelites were to acquire
'houses filled with all kinds of good things'. The text actually refers to the
population.
14. For justification of this view of tiErem, see J.P.U. Utley. 'Understanding the ifirern
% Tyndale Bulletin 44.1 11993). pp. 169-77.
15. I have in mind here the deliberate use of hatl'rot, the verb derived from
bifrem. in its full religious significance (as in Dt. 7:2). to which the
inscription of Mesha*. line 17, provides a parallel: see D. Winton Thomas
(ed.). Documents from Old Testament Times (New York: Harper. 1958), p. 197.
There is clearly a weakened or derived sense meaning simply 'destroy'
(Utley. op. cit.. pp. 1761•).
16. W.F. Albright. Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.
1956). pp. 68-94. Sacred prostitution was apparently an almost invariable
concomitant of the cult lot Anathl' (p. 75).
17. J. Gray. The Canaanites (London: Thames & Hudson. 1964). p. 138.
18. Ibid.. p. 136 (my italics).
19. Fresh debate on this subject arises from the inscriptions recovered at
guntillet 'Ajrud in the Negev which appear to refer to 'Yahweh and
his asherah' (though the reading and interpretation are under discussion).
S.M. Olyan. in 'Asherah and the cull of Yahweh in Israel' (SBL monograph 34;
Atlanta: Scholars Press. 19881. p. 13. has gone so far as to infer that 'the
asherah was a legitimate part of the cult of Yahweh': this could well have been
so. even in Judah. under a king who favoured a pluralist religion. See R. Hess.
'Yahweh and his asherah?', in One God, one Lord, ed. A.D. Clarke and B.W.
Winter (Cambridge: Tyndale House. 1991). pp. 533.
20. W.L. Alexander. Deuteronomy (Pulpit Commentary; London: Funk & Wagnalls.
1906), p. 138.
21. P.C. Craigie. Book of Deuteronomy (NICOT: Grand Rapids. MI: Eerdmans. (1976). p.
276.
22. Thus Mayes. Deuteronomy. p. 183. commenting on Dt. 7:2 'make no treaty'.. See
also Ex. 23:13.
23. Ex. 22:21. and frequently thereafter.
24. The verb haifri,m occurs only once in our leading passages (Dt. 7:2). and is
there expanded In terms of 'no treaty. no mercy': the context of the only other
occurrence in Deuteronomy (20:17) is not dissimilar. See note 11 above.
25. Mayes. Deuteronomy, p. 56.
26. Eph. 5:17.
27. E.g. 16:18: 17:8; 20:19: 22:6: 24:19.
28. Alexander. op. ctt.. p. 138.
29. I Cor. 5:9-13.
30. Compare Ex. 19:51 with 1 Pet. 2:9.
 Swinburnian Atonement And
The Doctrine Of Penal
Substitution
By Steven L. Porter
Faith And Philosophy 21:2 (April 2004) 228-241.

This paper is a philosophical defense of the

doctrine of penal substitution. I begin with a
delineation of Richard Swinburne's satisfaction-
type theory of the atonement, exposing a
weakness of it which motivates a renewed look
at the theory of penal substitution. In explicating
a theory of penal substitution, I contend that: (i)
the execution of retributive punishment is
morally justified in certain cases of deliberate
wrongdoing; (ii) deliberate human sin against
God constitutes such a case; and (iii) the
transfer of the retributive punishment due
sinners to Christ is morally coherent.

Whatever else might be said for and against

such a conception of the doctrine of the
atonement, the plausibility of the theory
presented here should give us pause in the often
hasty rejection of the doctrine of penal
substitution.

Introduction
Throughout the history of Christian doctrine, the cross of
Christ has proved to be a magnet for widespread theological
interpretation. We possess Irenaeus's recapitulation theory,
Gregory of Nyssa's fish-hook theory, Athanasius's mystical
theory, Augustine's ransom theory, Abelard's moral-
influence theory, Anselm's satisfaction theory, Scotus's
acceptilation theory, and Calvin's theory of penal
substitution, to name only a few of the historical stand-
outs.' Since the Reformation, divergent views of the atoning
work of Christ have ballooned all the more, with the typical
battle line drawn between objective and subjective theories. 2
Even philosophers have gotten into the fray. Kant and
Kierkegaard each have extended discussions of the
atonement, and in contemporary, analytic philosophy, the
likes of Philip Quinn, Eleonore Stump, Richard Swinburne,
John Hare, and David Lewis have published on the doctrine
of the atonement.3
While no one theory of the atonement has received the
stamp of orthodoxy within Christendom, amongst many
conservative Christians various versions of the theory of
penal substitution continue to rule the day. 4 And yet, outside
of these conservative circles, the notion of penal
substitution is dismissed out of hand. Keith Ward, for
instance, represents a fairly common stance, "One must
therefore reject those crude accounts of Christian doctrine
which... say that Christ has been justly punished in our
place so that he has taken away our guilt and enabled God
to forgive us. Almost everything is ethically wrong about
these accounts."5 Many of us simply cannot swallow the
idea of a God who is unable to deal with his anger over sin
in any other way than by doling out punishment to sinners
or to the incarnate Christ as a penal substitute.
While I am sympathetic to such sentiments, I am equally
moved by the historical legacy of penal accounts of the
atonement and the corresponding biblical evidence in favor
of such understandings of the cross of Christ. Furthermore,
and more germane to this present paper, the doctrine of
penal substitution offers a rationale for the cross that
appears lacking on rival accounts. There is, of course, much
more to the person and work of Christ as the means of
salvation than merely his death on the cross for human sin,
but this latter notion remains a central biblical and
theological theme that deserves careful delineation. Since
many have found the idea of penal substitution to be
morally suspect, my aim here is to take a further step
towards a contemporary philosophical defense of the
doctrine.6
One of the most recent and most compelling attempts to
put forth a philosophical defense of Christ's atonement is
found in Richard Swinburne's Responsibility and
Atonement. While Swinburne's theory is not a penal view of
the atonement, Swinburne does present Christ's person and
work as a means to satisfy the moral debt sinners owe to
God. In so doing, I will argue that Swinburne prepares the
ground for a plausible understanding of the doctrine of
penal substitution. In the critical part of this paper I lay out
Swinburne's satisfaction-type theory and surface one
central weakness of it—a weakness which provides some
motivation for a renewed look at the doctrine of penal
substitution. This leads to the constructive part of the paper
in which I attempt to harness Swinburne's methodological
approach to atonement theorizing and put it to work in
favor of a theory of penal substitution.

I. Swinburne's Theory
The essential dilemma of the atonement is clearly stated
by St. Anselm in Cur Deus Homo?, "If God could not save
sinners except by condemning a just man, where is his
omnipotence? If, on the other hand, he was capable of
doing so, but did not will it, how shall we defend his
wisdom and justice?"7 Anselm takes the first horn of the
dilemma arguing that despite God's omnipotence it was
morally impossible for him to save sinners without the
satisfaction of Christ. Swinburne takes the second horn. On
his view, God could have forgiven the sins of humanity in
various morally suitable ways, it is simply that the means
utilizing Christ's life and death is one of those suitable
ways.8 God's wisdom and justice are vindicated for while
the requirement of Christ's life and death is not morally
obligatory for the forgiveness of sins, it is a morally fitting
condition for the forgiveness of those sins.
In setting out his case, Swinburne first analyzes the
process of atonement in the human context and he then
applies the resultant understanding to the case of God and
sinners. Through an appeal to common moral intuitions in
cases of intentional and unintentional wrongdoing,
Swinburne contends that wrongdoers owe their victims a
certain kind of response. For instance, if I borrow your car
and I accidentally smash the front end into a concrete wall,
upon returning it to you I cannot merely hand you the keys
and walk away without addressing what has happened. Nor
can I casually mention the damage and attempt to laugh it
off. Of course, I can do either of these things, it is just that I
shouldn't. Something would be morally amiss with either of
these responses. This is because, Swinburne urges, I am
morally indebted to you due to my offense and I owe you
some kind of proper repayment. I am in a state of objective
guilt before you for I have failed in my duty to handle your
property wel1.9
Swinburne suggests that in unintentional wrongdoing
wrongdoers owe the offended party at least an apology and
reparation if possible. In apology I publicly distance myself
from my act by sincerely disowning my wrongdoing to you.
And in reparation I seek to remove the consequences of the
harm as much as is logically possible. If my wrongdoing is
deliberate, then I owe you even more than apology and
reparation. For in deliberate wrongdoing I have a
malevolent attitude and purpose towards you which adds a
deeper offense to my already offensive act. Hence, I must
repent and also perform penance. In repentance I privately
acknowledge the wrongness of my act and I resolve not to
act in such a way again. And in penance I go beyond what
is required in reparation and I give you a costly gift as a
demonstration that my previous steps towards
1°
reconciliation were meant and serious.
Swinburne writes that these four components of
atonement—repentance, apology, reparation, and penance—
are "all contributions to removing as much of the
consequences of the past act as logically can be removed by
the wrongdoer" and by offering them the "wrongdoer has
done what he can towards removing his guilt...towards
making him and the victim at one again." 11 The final act of
'at-one-ment' is the victim's decision whether or not to
forgive the wrongdoer on the basis of his gift of
atonement.12 Forgiveness for Swinburne occurs when the
victim changes his disposition towards the wrongdoer such
that the victim undertakes to treat the wrongdoer as no
longer the originator of the wrong act.13 It is in virtue of the
victim's forgiveness that the wrongdoer's guilt is removed.
Swinburne holds that with serious wrongs, it is bad for a
victim to attempt to forgive without some form of
atonement on the part of the wrongdoer, for this trivializes
human relationships and the importance of right action by
not taking the wrongdoer and the wrong done seriously. 14
So the victim must at least require an apology from the
wrongdoer, and if the act was intentional, repentance as
well. Beyond this, the victim has it within his power to
determine, within limits, how much further atonement is
needed before he forgives. The victim can forgive with just
repentance and apology, or he can insist on some degree of
reparation and penance before granting forgiveness.
Sometimes it is good that the victim require substantive
reparation and penance, for that allows the wrongdoer the
opportunity to take seriously the harm he has done.' 5
Swinburne applies this general view of atonement to the
divine/human relationship. The idea here is that human
sinners have acquired guilt before God in failing to live
their lives well. Just as children owe it to their parents to
do what they say, do what will please them, and make
something worthwhile of their lives, a fortiori, humans
have a duty to God to obey his commands, do what will
please him, and live a virtuous life. 16 For God is our ultimate
benefactor in that our existence and all that we have
depends on him. So when we fail in any duty to our
fellows, we fail to live a good life, and thus, we fail in our
duty to God. Such a failure of one's duty to God is to sin. 17
Moreover, Swinburne assumes that "God seeks man's
eternal well-being in friendship with himself', and that God
has worthwhile tasks with which humans can participate. 18
For instance, we can help God in reconciling others to
himself and to one another, we can grow in the
contemplation of God and his universe, and we can help in
beautifying the universe. Since these great opportunities
are available to us, we do a great wrong to God in failing to
take steps towards fulfilling these ends.
Thus, Swinburne holds that we have failed to fulfil our
duties to God, "badly abusing" the opportunities he has given
us.19 We owe God first-rate lives, though we live second-rate
lives at best. And so, human persons are sinners, they are in
debt to God because of their sins, and they are obligated to
make atonement to God for their wrongdomg. 20 Swinburne
writes, "it is good that if we do wrong, we should take
proper steps to cancel our actions, to pay our debts, as far
as logically can be done."21 To just walk away from God
without addressing our sins is morally inappropriate.
Similarly, it would be morally inappropriate for God to
forgive our sins without at least requiring repentance and
apology.22 But since our actions and their consequences
matter, it is good for God not only to require repentance
and apology, but reparation and penance as well. By doing
so, God takes sin seriously, treats us as responsible moral
agents, and demonstrates the value he places on the
divine/human relationship.
But because of the extent of reparation and penance
needed, sinners are unable to make it. We need help from
the outside. God gives us this help by providing a means of
substantive reparation and penance. Swinburne writes:

If [a] child has broken the parent's window and

does not have the money to pay for a
replacement, the parent may give him the
money wherewith to pay a glazier to put in a
 new window...and thereby make due reparation.
The parent can refuse to accept the apology
until the window is mended. Thereby he allows
the child to take his action and its
consequence...as seriously as he can in the
circumstances of the child's initial inability to
pay. That treats the child as a responsible agent,
and it treats the harm done as a harm. It treats
things as they are.23
Since Christ's life and death are traditionally seen as the
means of atonement for human sins, Swinburne concludes
that God has provided the voluntarily offered life and death
of Christ as a means for sinners to offer substantive
reparation and penance.24 Since the wrongs done were
human lives lived imperfectly, it was fitting for a life lived
perfectly to be offered as reparation and penance. 25 It is
only when sinners combine their repentance and apology
with pleading the atoning work of Christ as a means of
reparation and penance that God forgives them their sins
and their guilt is removed.
Swinburne's theory clearly articulates an intuitively
compelling understanding of atonement. It does seem good
that victims of wrongdoing condition their forgiveness at
times on not only repentance and apology, but also
substantive reparation and penance. Since sinners are
unable to provide this, God in Christ offers them a way to
realize the goods of such reparation and penance. It is not
that it is necessary for God to forgive sinners in this
manner, but it is a fitting way for him to do so amongst
other fitting ways given God's overall intentions for human
salvation.
But this otherwise plausible move generates a weakness.
On Swinburne's theory God could freely choose any
valuable act to serve as reparation and penance.
Swinburne writes:

...it is the victim of wrongdoing—in this case God

—who has a right to choose, up to the limit of
 the equivalent to the harm done and the need
for a little more in penance, how much
reparation and penance to require before he will
forgive. So, despite all of these considerations
about man's inability to make substantial
reparation and penance, God could have chosen
to accept one supererogatory act of an ordinary
man as adequate for the sins of the world. Or he
could have chosen to accept some angel's act
for this purpose.26
In fact, God could have required merely Christ's valuable
life for this purpose without requiring the crucifixion.
Surely all the good acts of Christ's life as well as the
suffering and humility he endured in the incarnation
constitute a substantive gift to offer as reparation and
penance. So, since the goods obtained by Christ offering
reparation and penance on behalf of sinners could be
accomplished without his suffering and death, it is
implausible to think that a good God would require such an
event for forgiveness.27 For a voluntary sacrifice of life is
not a morally valuable act unless there is some good
purpose that can only or best be achieved by means of it.
Since the goods of reparation and penance can be achieved
without Christ's death, it would appear that his voluntary
death was either foolish or suicida1.28
Swinburne does contend that Christ's life and death are a
peculiarly appropriate means for reparation and penance
in that they make up a perfect human life offered up for
persons who led ruinous lives.29 The idea here is that since
the best reparation and penance are closely connected with
the harm done, a perfect human life is apropos when the
harms done were the imperfect lives of human persons.
While this seems right, it is not clear why Christ's death is
an important part of his perfect human life. Would Christ's
life have been less perfect if he had ascended into the
heavens right after, say, the Garden of Gethsemane? If
Christ's death was voluntary, as Swinburne assumes, then I
fail to see how his going to the cross is a part of his living
a perfect human life when the goods of substantive
reparation and penance could be equally well-served by his
life alone. One might think that if Christ had avoided the
cross, then Christ would be seen as having dodged the
inevitable result of the kind of life he led. But dodging
bullets—even inevitable ones—seems a virtue, unless there
is some good purpose to take the bullet. Since Christ's life
alone accomplishes the goods of substantive reparation and
penance, Swinburne's view of the atonement provides no
good reason for Christ to voluntarily go to the cross.
Of course, there might be some other good purpose or
purposes which the cross served which made it a valuable
act, and thus, rendered it capable of being a part of the
reparation and penance offered to God on behalf of sinners.
But Swinburne does not suggest what these other possible
goods may be. And whatever they may be, it will always
seem that they could be achieved equally well without
Christ's death. It appears essential for Swinburne's case that
he spell out some great goods which could only or best be
achieved by the death of Christ, or else there will be no
sufficient reason for Christ going to the cross nor God
requiring it for forgiveness.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that Swinburne does capture
a salient feature of the atonement process, namely, that we
owe God righteous lives and that Christ's righteous life—his
active obedience—serves as a satisfaction of our debt. But I
have contended that such an atonement scheme fails to
make sense of Christ's voluntary death—his passive
obedience. If all we need is Christ's righteous life as
satisfaction for our moral debt to God, then the crucifixion
would be at best inconsequential as regards the forgiveness
of sins and at worse a completely worthless act. What is
needed is an atonement theory more intrinsically related to
Christ's suffering and death on the cross.

II. The Doctrine of Penal Substitution

Given this particular weakness of Swinburne's theory,
there arises some motivation to investigate the doctrine of
penal substitution. For a penal understanding of the cross
of Christ manifests a clear connection between the death of
Christ and the forgiveness of human sin. 30 If moral sense
can be made of the idea that the punishment of sinners is
what God requires for forgiveness and that this
punishment was provided for in the crucifixion of Christ,
then, whatever else this conception of the atonement may
have in its favor, it plainly establishes a lucid rationale for
Christ's voluntary sacrifice. In what follows, I will first
argue for a moral framework that makes sense of the
infliction of penal consequences on wrongdoers, and then
apply this framework to the case of God and sinners. I will
conclude with a defense of the coherence of transferring
punishment from a guilty party to an innocent party.
Victims of wrongdoing (or rightful representatives of
those victims) have a retributive right to punish their
wrongdoers. Perhaps harkening back to the example in
which I borrow your car will helpfully illustrate this
somewhat controversial point. Let us say that this time I
deliberately crash your car because I am jealous of you.
Now all of what Swinburne says would seem to apply. I am
in moral debt to you and I ought to repent, apologize, and
seek to make reparation and penance. I owe this to you and
just as it would be good of me to offer it to you, so too it
would be good of you to require such an atonement
process as a condition of your forgiveness.
But while it seems clear that I owe you this kind of
response, it also seems clear that I deserve more than this.
For even after engaging in the Swinburnian atonement
process, it seems permissible for you to withdraw my car-
borrowing privileges. I certainly don't deserve the privilege
after what I have done, and in fact it appears that I deserve
to lose that privilege—at least for a time. Due to my misuse
of a certain privilege, you have the right to withdraw that
privilege from me. Now, of course, you could let me borrow
your car again after I've engaged in the Swinburnian
atonement process, but when you do so you graciously pass
over what I otherwise rightly deserve.
 As another example, take the unfaithful husband who
comes to his wife repentant, apologetic, and willing to make
reparation and penance for his adultery. It seems
permissible for the wife to accept these steps towards
reconciliation but to nevertheless demand that he move out
of the family home—at least for a time. The wife may say to
her husband, "I will forgive you, but for now, pack your
things and get out of the house." If there was a debate
about whether or not this was fair, I take it that we would
side with the wife. For it appears that the husband
deserves to be treated in such a manner—he deserves to
lose certain rights and privileges of family life due to his
misuse of those rights and privileges.
This analysis seems to suggest that intentional
wrongdoers have a further moral debt to their victims—
what might be called a penal debt. 31 For even after
intentional wrongdoers repent, apologize, and make
reparation and penance in response to what they owe their
victims, they often deserve further loss. Due to the fact that
they have deliberately misused certain rights and/or
privileges, they deserve to have those rights and/or
privileges withdrawn. Thus, it is permissible for victims of
deliberate wrongdoing to demand that the deserved loss be
exacted from their wrongdoers. Retributive punishment,
then, is the forcible withdrawal of certain rights and/or
privileges from a wrongdoer in response to the intentional
misuse of those rights and/or privileges by the wrongdoer.
But what is morally permissible is not always morally
fitting. In other words, while victims of wrongdoing have a
prima facie retributive right to punish, the moral
justification for exercising that right depends on the
ultimate moral worth or fittingness of such punishment. 32
Thankfully, there are times when the withholding of
punishment, and hence the manifestation of mercy, is of
ultimate moral worth. But there are other times in which
great moral worth can be located in executing rightful
punishment. While the potential utilitarian ends of
retributive punishment are well-known (deterrence,
rehabilitation, and prevention), there are also what might
be called intrinsic ends that are secured in all cases of
rightful, retributive punishment. For to demand that a
wrongdoer suffer the loss that he deserves takes the harm
done with due moral seriousness; it treats the wrongdoer
as a responsible moral agent; and it expresses the value of
the victim as well as the value of the personal relationship
involved.33 This in turn provides the wrongdoer the
opportunity to take himself, his act, the victim, and the
relationship involved with due moral seriousness by his
abiding by and perceiving the justice of the enforced
demands. In the case of serious wrongdoing or repeated
offenses, the absence of punishment can trivialize all of
these elements.34
So when the wife demands that her unfaithful husband
moves out of the family home, she takes the harm done
with appropriate seriousness; she treats her husband as
responsible for the consequences of his actions; and she
expresses or vindicates the true value of herself and her
marriage relationship both of which her husband had
devalued in his adultery. Furthermore, she provides the
opportunity for her husband to recognize the moral import
of all of these things. If the wife does not exact some kind
of punishment like that described, she runs risk of
trivializing the importance of right action, responsibility,
and the other moral values involved.
Having argued that there are situations in which
retributive punishment is morally appropriate amongst
human persons, the question now becomes whether God is
in such a situation vis-a-vis sinners. As Swinburne argues,
humans have failed in their duties to God, and are
therefore in debt to him. What we owe God are lives lived
well, rather than the second-rate lives we do live. But more
than simply owing God good lives we cannot produce, we
do not deserve to have the lives that have been given to us.
Assuming that earthly human life is a good and gracious
gift of God and that the opportunity for loving relationship
with himself is the highest good bar none, then to
intentionally abuse the goods and opportunities of earthly
human life, including the spiteful rejection of God's offer of
eternal friendship, is a clear misuse of the rights and
privileges we have been given by God. Granting the above
argumentation, it is permissible for God to forcibly
withdraw the rights and privileges of human life on earth
and the opportunity for relationship with himself. For we
deserve to lose these things due to our misuse of them. If I
come in late from working all day to my wife's welcome
embrace and a well-prepared dinner, only to push her
away and throw the food on the floor in disgust, I certainly
do not deserve such generous treatment again. Just as my
wife would be right to withdraw her good gifts, so too God
would be right to withdraw the good gifts of human life in
friendship with himself from those who abuse and reject
it.35 To put the matter in theological terms, we deserve the
divine punishment of physical and spiritual death. That is,
we deserve to be physically separated from the goods and
opportunities of earthly human life and we deserve to be
spiritually separated from God's loving presence.
At this point I am not prepared to argue that such
punishment is obligatory. In fact, I am prone to agree with
Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin that God could forgive our
sins without exacting such loss.36 Nevertheless, it is morally
permissible for him to exact the loss due us, and there is
great moral worth in him doing so. For, parallel to the
previous cases, such an exaction of loss takes human sin
seriously, it treats sinners as responsible moral agents, and
it vindicates or expresses the appropriate value of both the
Godhead and the divine/human relationship. The result of
this is that the sinner has the opportunity to be morally
educated and formed, and the provision of this opportunity
is good even if sinners are unwilling to recognize the
correct moral values which are expressed in the
punishment.37
So at this point I have attempted to argue that there is a
plausible conception of retributive punishment that makes
punishment permissible in cases of intentional wrongdoing
and that certain intrinsic good ends are involved in the
exercise of such punishment. Granting this theory of
punishment, I have argued that God is in such a position
with sinners. What is left is to show the moral coherence of
transferring such punishment to Christ.
The substitution aspect of penal substitution has been
bothersome to many. As Brian Hebblethwaite declares:

What sort of judge can impose death on another

or even on himself as a substitutory
punishment, thus letting me go free? Such ideas
are morally objectionable in their analogical
base—the purely human context—before ever
they get transferred, by analogy, to the divine-
human context; and a fortiori, they make no
moral sense when predicated of a God of love.38
So, first off, is such a transfer of punishment from a guilty
party to an innocent party right or permissible in the
human context? While it is a fairly trivial objection, it has
been suggested that it is a logical impossibility to punish
the innocent. For instance, Anthony Quinton writes, "For
the necessity of not punishing the innocent is not moral
but logical. It is not, as some retributivists think, that we
may not punish the innocent and ought only to punish the
guilty, but that we cannot punish the innocent and must
only punish the guilty.',3 9 So Quinton is claiming that it is
part of the meaning of the word 'punish' that the one
inflicted must be guilty. But as R.M. Hare points out, even if
we mistakenly punish an innocent person, they were
nevertheless punished.4° This is what makes such a
situation tragic. So the claim that punishment must only be
of the guilty is not a logical claim, contra Quinton, but a
moral one. It is not logically impossible to punish an
innocent person whom we think is guilty, rather it is
morally egregious to do so just because it is logically
possible.
But the case of substitutionary punishment is not of this
kind. The idea here is that someone voluntarily takes the
guilty one's place for the punishment the guilty one
deserves. It would seem that the only possible way such a
transfer of punishment could be just is if the substitute
voluntarily and with sound mind accepts the penalty. But
given that the substitute meets these conditions, I fail to see
what is unjust about such a transfer. Since punishment, on
the view I have sketched, is the exercise of a retributive
right in order to accomplish certain good ends, how one
goes about executing this right appears somewhat flexible.
For on this view, there is no absolute principle of justice
which necessitates punishment in response to wrongdoing.
Punishment is permissible in response to wrongdoing, but
it is ultimately motivated by the moral goods which can be
brought about through it. Hence, the victim, within limits,
has the freedom to decide to what extent and in what
manner to inflict punishment. I do not see how this
freedom would not extend to accepting a voluntary penal
substitute.
Take for instance the football player who is late to team
practice. The coach of the team punishes the late player by
demanding he run 5 laps around the field. The team
captain steps forward and asks the coach if he could run
the 5 laps in the other's stead. If the coach agrees to such
an arrangement, then there does not seem to be anything
unjust about this transfer of penalty. I take it this is
because in the transfer the initial justification for
punishment is still in place—that is, the late player's misuse
of his team-privileges led to the temporary withdrawal of a
team-privilege. Whether the late player or the team captain
serves the punishment, the initial justification is the same.
And the additional good ends that the punishment is likely
to secure (e.g. team unity) are accomplished whether the
late player runs the laps or the team captain runs them.
It is clear in this example that part of what makes a penal
transfer just is that the infliction of punishment is the right
of the one offended and it does not have to be executed.
This opens up logical space for the exercise of punishment
to take on various forms. What motivates the vicarious
form is that the good ends which justify the punishment of
the one who deserves it are also served in the punishment
of the substitute.
But the practice of penal substitution in other scenarios
seems wrong. We do not think it good for the mother of a
convicted rapist to serve his time in prison. I propose that
the reason why such a transfer is morally counter-intuitive
is that while the victim still has the right to transfer the
punishment, the likely good ends of such punishment would
not be served by such a transfer. Given that deterrence
and prevention are the main potential goods of criminal
punishment, it is probably never good that such a penalty
be transferred, for there is little hope of achieving these
goods through a transferal
But the same good ends are not at issue in the
divine/human situation, and so it may be good for Christ to
voluntarily serve the kind of punishment that is due
sinners. Christ's voluntary submission to the crucifixion
coupled with his human experience of alienation from the
Father is the kind of physical and spiritual death sinners
deserve. It seems fair to say that Christ experienced on the
cross the loss of the good gifts and opportunities of human
life in friendship with God. These are the rights and
privileges we abused, and it seems that they are the rights
and privileges Christ gave up on the cross in our stead. On
the view of punishment I have sketched, God as the victim
of wrongdoing can decide to what extent and in what
manner the punishment we deserve should be executed. As
long as Christ voluntarily and with sound mind offers his
death as the punishment we deserve and as long as God
considers it in this way, there does not seem to be any
injustice in this arrangement. In God demanding and Christ
taking on the kind punishment we deserve in our place,
human sin is taken with utter seriousness, sinners are
treated as responsible moral agents, and the high value of
the Godhead and the divine/human relationship is
expressed. Moreover, sinners are provided the opportunity
in the cross to recognize the gravity of their offense, to
realize their responsibility before God, to grasp the great
value of the Godhead and the divine/human relationship,
and in all of this to become aware of the riches of God's
mercy, grace, and love.

Conclusion
What I have attempted to do in this paper is surface a
central weakness in Swinburne's theory of the atonement
which motivates a renewed look at the doctrine of penal
substitution. Given this motivation, I have proposed a moral
framework in which human sinners deserve and God is
morally justified in executing retributive punishment. But
due to the intrinsic ends of such retributive punishment
and God's right to determine the extent and manner in
which the punishment should be executed, I have
maintained that Christ's voluntary death on the cross can be
plausibly understood as the punishment human sinners
deserve. So while Swinburne's satisfaction theory of the
atonement presents a helpful construal of how Christ's
active obedience provides the righteous lives we owe to
God, the theory of penal substitution presents a helpful
construal of how Christ's passive obedience provides the
kind of punishment we deserve to suffer. Whatever else
might be said for and against such a conception of the
doctrine of the atonement, the plausibility of the theory
presented here should give us pause in the often hasty
rejection of the doctrine of penal substitution. 42

Endnotes
1. For a more detailed treatment of these and other
theories see L.W. Grensted, A Short History of the
Doctrine of the Atonement (Manchester: University
Press, 1920) and Robert S. Franks, The Work of
Christ (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd.,
1962).
2. On the objective side we have various versions of
penal substitution (e.g. Wesley, Turretin, Strong,
 Hodge, Barth), various versions of the
governmental theory (e.g. Grotius, Miley,
Campbell), and Gustaf Aulen's Christus Victor
theory. On the subjective side we have just about
everybody else—for instance, Socinus,
Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Bushnell, Rashdall,
Moberly, Dillistone, etc.
3. See Philip Quinn, "Christian Atonement and
Kantian Justification," Faith and Philosophy 3:4
(1986) 440-452; Eleonore Stump, "Atonement and
Justification," in R. Feenstra and C. Plantinga, eds.,
Trinity, Incarnation and Atonement (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame, 1989) 188-206; Richard
Swinburne, Responsibility and Atonement (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989); John E. Hare, The Moral
Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God's
Assistance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); David
Lewis, "Do we believe in penal substitution?," in
Philosophical Papers 26 (1997) 203-209.
4. For example, Donald Bloesch, Jesus Christ: Savior
and Lord (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1997); John Stott,
The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1986);
Millard Erickson, Christian Theology (Grand Rapids:
Baker Books, 1998) 818-840. These theologians do
not limit Christ's salvific work to his crucifixion, it is
just that they find the doctrine of penal substitution
to be the best conception of how it is that Christ's
death accomplishes the forgiveness of human sin. It
is important to remind ourselves that forgiveness of
human sin is only one part of the reconciliation of
God and humans.
5. Keith Ward, Ethics and Christianity (London:
George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1970) 240.
6. The first step was taken in XXXXXXXX, "Rethinking
the Logic of Penal Substitution," in William Lane
Craig, ed., Philosophy of Religion: A Reader and
Guide (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press,
2002) 596-608.
7. Anselm, "Why God Became Man," in Brian Davies
and G.R. Evans, eds., Anselm of Canterbury: The
Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
275/1.8.
8. Swinburne's view is most fully laid out in
Responsibility and Atonement, though an earlier
and more condense treatment of Swinburne's view
of the atonement can be found in his "The Christian
Scheme of Salvation," in Thomas Morris, ed.,
Philosophy and the Christian Faith (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). For a
helpful discussion of Swinburne's view, see Philip L.
Quinn, "Swinburne on Guilt, Atonement, and
Christian Redemption," in Alan G. Padgett, ed.,
Reason and the Christian Religion (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1994) 277-300; and Eleonore
Stump, "Richard Swinburne: Responsibility and
Atonement," Faith and Philosophy XI (1994) 321-
328.
9. Swinburne distinguishes between objective
wrongdoing and subjective wrongdoing, and the
corresponding notions of objective guilt and
subjective guilt. An agent does objective wrong
when he fails to fulfill his obligations, whether or
not he knows he has these obligations. Objective
guilt is the status such an agent acquires. An agent
does subjective wrong when he fails to try to fulfill
his obligations. Subjective guilt is the status such
an agent acquires. See Swinburne, 73-74.
10. Ibid., 80-84.
11. Ibid., 81, 84.
12. Ibid., 84.
13. Ibid., 85.
14. Ibid., 85-86.
15. Ibid., 86.
16. Ibid., 123.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 124.
19. Ibid., 148.
20. Swinburne also maintains that because humans
are involved in the sins of others, they are also
obligated to help their fellow humans make their
atonement. Swinburne, 149.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 148.
23. Ibid., 149.
24. Ibid., 153-154.
25. Ibid., 156-157.
26. Ibid., 160.
27. Quinn makes a similar point in his "Swinburne on
Guilt, Atonement, and Christian Redemption," 290-
291. I press this point in a slightly different manner
in my "Rethinking the Logic of Penal Substitution,"
601-602.
28. If I jump in front of a speeding coach for the sake
of my wife while she is at home safe and sound, my
sacrifice of life is either foolish or suicidal. It is only
when I jump in front of a speeding coach in order to
push her out of the way that my death is morally
valuable.
29. Swinburne writes, "Since what needs atonement
to God is human sin, men living second-rate lives
when they have been given such great
opportunities by their creator, appropriate
reparation and penance would be made by a
perfect human life, given away through being lived
perfectly." Swinburne, 157.
30. While there have been many different
formulations of the doctrine of penal substitution,
the earliest comprehensive statement of the
doctrine is John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian
Religion, 11.12-17. Amongst the Reformers, Luther,
Zwingli, and Melancthon also present the penal
 theory. On the views of these Reformers, see
Grensted, 198-252; and H. D. MacDonald, "Models
of the Atonement in Reformed Theology," in Donald
K. McKim, ed., Major Themes in the Reformed
Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992) 117-131.
31. In favor of such a notion, M.S. Moore writes, "Our
feelings of guilt thus generate a judgment that we
deserve the suffering that is punishment. If the
feelings of guilt are virtuous to possess, we have
reason to believe that this last judgment is correct,
generated as it is by emotions whose epistemic
import is not in question." See M.S. Moore, "The
Moral Worth of Retribution," in F. Schoeman, ed.,
Responsibility, Character and the Emotions
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
178.
32. For further delineation of this view of retributive
punishment, see K.G. Armstrong, "The Retributivist
Hits Back," in H.B. Acton, ed., The Philosophy of
Punishment (London: Macmillan, 1969) 155-157;
and Jonathon Jacobs, "Luck and Retribution,"
Philosophy 74 (1999) 540-555.
33. Various moral theorists have brought to light this
function of retributive punishment, which can be
called the expressive good of punishment. For more
on the expressive theory, see Jean Hampton, "The
Retributive Idea," in Jeffrie G. Murphy and Jean
Hampton, eds., Forgiveness and Mercy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988) 111-161. For an
application of this concept to atonement theory,
see Hare, The Moral Gap, 243-259.
34. Punishment can also serve other extrinsic goods,
such as deterrence, prevention, and reformation,
and the likelihood of these goods might be what
makes punishment obligatory in certain cases. That
is, given that a victim has a prima facie right to
punish, if such punishment is likely to deter other
wrongdoing, and/or prevent the wrongdoer from
 further wrongdoing, and/or rehabilitate the
wrongdoer, then such punishment would be
obligatory.
35. Some might question this idea that sinners
deliberately rebel or reject God's offer of friendship
and a good life. It might seem that some do in fact
do this, while others do not, either because they
choose to live obedient lives or because they are
ignorant of their obligations to God "through no
fault of their own." It seems to me that those who
do have knowledge of God's offer of life in
friendship with himself do at some point or another,
in one way or another, intentionally reject him and
what he has on offer. If we understand life in
friendship with God to be inexorably linked to the
virtuous life, then any intentional wrongdoing is an
intentional rejection of God. Further, if we know that
we are obligated to obey God and do what pleases
him, then any intentional wrongdoing is an
intentional rejection of God. For those who are
purportedly ignorant of all this, they are still failing
to fulfill what would be objectively good, and thus
they fail (though not intentionally) in their
obligations to God. So these people too are in debt
to God. But if they are truly ignorant, then
punishment would not seem justified. So either the
purported ignorance is a result of negligence and
thus they are morally culpable for it and thereby
rightly punished, or these ignorant ones will be
relieved of their ignorance at some point so that
they too can freely choose to either join themselves
to God, repenting and apologizing for their
unintentional wrongdoing against him, or they can
choose to reject life in friendship with God, and
would thereby be rightfully punished.
36. For Augustine, see De Agone Christi, c.xi and De
Trinitate, xiii.10; for Aquinas, see Summa
Theologiae, 3a.46.2 ad 3; and for Calvin see
 Institutes, II, 12.1. For a slightly more detailed
defense of the grounds for rejecting the notion that
Christ's death was necessary for divine forgiveness,
see my "Rethinking the Logic of Penal Substitution,"
602-603. See also Richard Purtill, "Justice, Mercy,
Supererogation, and Atonement," in Thomas Flint,
ed., Christian Philosophy (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame, 1990) 40.
37. It is good that the wife of the unfaithful husband
provide him the opportunity to recognize the
correct moral values, even if the wife knows he is so
hardened that he won't do so.
38. Brian Hebblethwaite, "Does the Doctrine of the
Atonement Make Sense?," in his Ethics and Religion
in a Pluralistic Age (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997) 79.
39. Anthony M. Quinton, "On Punishment," in Acton,
ed., The Philosophy of Punishment, 5859.
40. R.M. Hare, "Punishment and Retributive Justice,"
in R.M. Hare, Essays on Political Morality (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1989) 203.
41. This is part of the answer to Lewis's query in his
"Do we believe in penal substitution?," 203-209.
42. I am grateful to Richard Swinburne, Joseph
Jedwab, Daniel Von Watcher, Greg Welty, and Hugh
Rice for comments and discussion on earlier
versions of this paper.
 Is God Just?
Why Christ had to die and
Why God must punish Sin
Neil Mammen
11/20/2014 1/30
www.NoBlindFaith.com

Why Jesus Had To Die & The Basics Of

Christianity
I had a friend who asked me this: He said: After all if
God is God, why didn’t God just wave his arms and
just say: I forgive you all. Why did Jesus have to go
through all that suffering and pain? That just doesn’t
make sense to me.
He then went on to say this: I have trouble believing
that a Good and Loving God would be so cruel as to
send ANYONE to hell. That’s just unacceptable to me.

Anybody here been told that? Anybody here feel that

way? I had one religious person say: the god I believe
in doesn’t have a hell. Thank you very much!

Let me ask you this: Have you ever wondered why

Christians make such a big deal about Jesus actually
being God? I mean what’s so bad with Jesus being a
Good Moral Teacher or a prophet or just a very loving
guy? Why do Christians make such a big stink about
him having to be God? Why can’t he be like all the
other good teachers? Like Krishna or Mohammed or
Buddha?

How about this: Have you ever wondered how

someone dying for our sins pays for our sins? I mean
how could Jesus pay for our sins by dying? Why all
this blood and gore and death?

I had one gal let’s call her Madison, say to me: I’ve
done so many bad things in my life that I can’t do
enough good things to make up for them and get to
heaven.
H
o
w

d
o

y
o
u

a
n
s
w
e
r
t
h
a
t
?

Today we will focus on these

questions as we answer: Is God
Just!

1. Why death? Why

blood? What is
Spiritual Death?
2. Why does God have to punish sin? Why can't he
just forgive us all and be done with it. He is God
after all!
3. Why would God put someone in
Hell for doing something wrong?
4. How could a good and loving God put someone in
Hell forever and ever just because they did a few
small bad things?
5. Why did Jesus have to die? How did His death
pay for my sin? How did His death pay for ALL our
sin?
6. Why did
Christ have
to rise from
the dead?
7. How
come
Hitler
could
go to
heaven
?
8. But if we have freewill in
Heaven won’t we sin in
Heaven?

9. How
do we
change
to
deserve
heaven?

Now you'll see as we go along , we won’t deal with

them in this exact order and some of the answers we
come up with will create even more questions and so
we'll end up with a few more questions than we started
this. We'll try to answer as many of these as we can
with the finer points being left for a good healthy
personal discussion.

Notice that we are answering the questions with the

Bible as our basis. This is because we are trying to
explain to our friends how the Bible comprehensibly
addresses these issues. We are trying to show the
consistency of the Theology of the Bible. We are not
trying to prove the Bible is true at this point. Just that it
is consistent.

Normally we would have to first and separately prove

the authenticity of the Bible and the accuracy of the
information in it before we can get anyone to accept
what we say. For after all we shouldn’t expect them to
blindly believe the Bible. The Bible can be defended
both as a Historically accurate document and as a
document that has NOT been corrupted over time. But
that we'll have to leave to another time.

T
h
e

O
r
i
g
i
n
a
l

C
o
v
e
n
a
n
t
To answer all the questions,
let's first start with some
background.
Do you remember the story of Adam and Eve? The
story of Adam and Eve shows us the cause of all our
problems.

Genesis, as you know is the first book in the Bible. In

Genesis God creates the Universe, and then creates the
earth and then creates Adam and Eve. He creates them
as beings with freewill and puts them in the Garden of
Eden.

G
e
n
e
s
i
s

C
h
a
p
t
e
r

2
16
…the LORD God gave him this warning: "You may
freely eat any fruit in the garden
17
except fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil. If you eat of its fruit, you will surely die."
But you may ask: Why did God give them the
opportunity to rebel against him and sin. If he hadn’t
given them that option we’d all be fine. Isn’t it God’s
fault that we have sin in the world?

Well if you think that you’d be illogical. Here’s why I

say that. First, did God want beings who freely loved
him? The answer is YES.
Why did he want that? Well because he already had
beings that had no choice but to love him. Like the
Cherubim and Seraphim and many other creatures. He
wanted to create a being that truly loved him. And true
1
love cannot be forced. It has to be freely given . You
know the feeling. Why do you need love, why not
program your Laptop to say sweet things to you. Why
not create a robot that very lifelike to love you?
Because it’s not Love!

So only love that is freely given is true love. So God

created a being that could freely love him. BUT there’s
a problem. If you create a being who truly is free, you
have to give that being an option to rebel against you or
he never had the freedom. For instance, if I say, you are
free to go anywhere you want to in the house, oh but all
the doors are locked. Are you free to go anywhere in
the house? No. You were never free. To be free, you
really have to have the option to go anywhere in the
house. And if I said, I don’t want you to go into the
basement because it can hurt you, to have true freedom
you have to be able to go into that basement if you so
choose.
So the only way God could give Adam the freedom to
love him, was if he also gave Adam the freedom AND
the opportunity to do something that was unloving to
God. God had to give Adam the opportunity to do the
worst possible thing and that was he had to give Adam
the opportunity to completely rebel against God.

Now this is also tied into a number of other things.

When God told Adam not to “sin” by eating of the Tree
of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that law was been
given because it had a real consequence. God is not
capricious. The consequence is actually recursive. In
that by eating of the tree of Knowledge, Adam would
fully understand what he did was evil and what the
difference was and so he chose the evil option that is
rebel against the one and only God and break the bond.

So God says: Don’t rebel against me, don’t eat

of the tree, don’t sin or you’ll die.
But being the geniuses that they were they rebel against
God and sin. Then when God shows up they try to
blame everyone else.

B
u
t

d
o

t
h
e
y

d
i
e

t
h
a
t

d
a
y
?
I mean when sunset came did they
drop over dead? No what happens.

The LORD God made garments of skin for

Adam and his wife and clothed them.
23
So the LORD God banished him from the Garden
of Eden to work the ground from which he had been
taken.
1
Yes, I am reform, and this does not refute that but there’s no space to
discuss this but to say that Reform Theology agrees that Adam had true
freewill.

Then God kicks them out of the Garden of Eden and

Adam has to work hard from then on. This was the first
sin by humans and we inherited that sin nature from our
parents. Now let me ask you this: What was the reason
they were not allowed to eat of the tree of the
knowledge of Good and Evil?

Obviously the right

answer is “Because
God said so.” But
the cause of that
was: “For you will
surely die.”

S
O

w
h
a
t

k
i
n
d

o
f
d
e
a
t
h

w
a
s

i
t
?

Was God lying when he said they’d die? No he wasn’t

because they did die. Do you know what kind of death
they died? Was it physical death?
Physical death is a part of it, but not all of it, because
they didn’t die as soon as they ate
t
h
e

f
r
u
i
t
,

d
i
d
t
h
e
y
?
But the real death
was what? Exactly
Spiritual death.

That day before sunset, they were

banned from the presence of God.

So what is spiritual death?

A
n
y
b
o
d
y

k
n
o
w
?

Exactly,
spiritual death
is separation
from God.
W
h
a
t

i
s

H
e
l
l

t
h
e
n
?

HELL is eternal separation from

God. Eternal Spiritual death is
Hell.

Notice that Adam and Eve were not in Hell right away
because they were still physically alive. But had they
died without making it right with God, they would have
certainly ended up being eternally separated from Him
after their death.
But why would someone
want to be separated
from God?

They would be separated from God if they hated

him, if they purposely rebelled against him. If they
refused to obey him.

So what exactly was God saying to Adam and Eve?

He was saying: if you rebel against me and eat of the
tree, the consequences of that rebellion will be
separation from me. Which is what? Exactly -
Spiritual death.

It’s not God being mean, it’s not God being

unreasonable. It’s God saying: If you rebel against me
because you don’t love me and don’t want to spend
eternity in my presence, I as a just God, am going to
give you what you want. And note that the consequence
of rebelling bears fruit, we get hardened against what
we have rebelled against and we demand our way and
the more we rebel the harder and more demanding we
become.

But you may object: That’s rather heartless; he allows

them to sin then punishes them. No you are missing the
rest of the story. Yes he allows them to sin because he
has to, but then he provides a way for them to be
forgiven of that sin. But we’ll get to that later in this
talk.
OK what else happened after they sinned?

Physical Death came into the world. What

else did God do after they sinned?

He kills animals and clothes them in those
animals. That’s a symbolic gesture.

Now, fast forward to later. What happened later when

Cain and Abel offered sacrifices to God, if you
remember the story, Cain offered fruits and vegetables
(he offered God a salad), God doesn’t want to go to
Fresh Choice! But Abel offered the finest of his sheep,
doing what to it? Killing it.

What happened to Cain? God rejected Cain’s sacrifice

of fruits and vegetables. Because nothing had died
(except perhaps some veggie tale characters).

You see from the beginning, God told us that the

consequence of eating from the Tree was death and
thus God has required a punishment of physical and
spiritual death as the consequence of sin. The
consequence of their eating of the tree i.e. sinning was
death.

Romans 6:23 For the wages of sin is death [what kind

of death? Spiritual death and
Physical Death] but the gift of God is
eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
And the Bible tells us that
there is no man who has not
sinned.

Romans 3:23. For all have sinned

and fallen short of the Glory of God.

Hebrews 9:22 And according to the Law, one may

almost say, all things are cleansed with blood, and
without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness
[of sin].

T
h
e
n

J
e
s
u
s

s
a
y
s

t
h
i
s
Matt 26:28 This is my
blood shed for the
forgiving of sins.
Let's move forward now
to the time of Abraham
in Gen 22

God asks Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac. His

real First Born Son. So Abraham takes Isaac and they
go up to a mountain called Moriah. On their way there
Isaac asks: We have the fire and the wood for the
sacrifice. But where is the lamb?

Gen 22:8 Abraham answered, "God himself will

provide the lamb for the burnt offering, Do you think
Abraham knew that this was a prophecy? Because
about 2000 years later. God did provide the lamb for
the sacrifice for our sins.
Now if you recall the rest of that historical account.
Abraham gets ready to sacrifice Isaac and suddenly the
Angel of the Lord stops him and provides a Ram stuck
in the bushes by its horns. So they sacrifice that Ram
and Abraham calls that place, "The Lord will provide."

About a 1000 years later, Solomon would build his

temple and altar right on that very spot where Isaac had
almost been sacrificed.
22 By the way, lest you think Abraham thought it was
fine to sacrifice his son to a false fake god, this was not
that case. Remember Abraham had seen God face to
face on at least 2 occasions. First during the convent
and second during the visit by the three men.

He knew who God was and had experienced God’s

miracles. In fact in the passage we see that Abraham
fully intended to return back to the camp with Isaac.
You see Abraham knowing God personally had come to
realize that God could easily raise Isaac from the dead
and figured that that’s what God planned all along.

OK Do you remember when Moses was trying

to get Pharaoh to let his people go? Remember
the movie: The prince of Egypt?
Do you remember what
the last plague that hit
Egypt was?

The death of every FIRST born son. What did the Jews
have to do to protect their sons? Their first borns?

They had to sacrifice a pure spotless lamb and paint its

blood across their door posts. Then when the Angel of
the Lord, the Angel of death came by, it "passed over"
their homes.
Their firstborn sons were saved, and God gave his
firstborn son in their place. That blood across the door
was a symbol of the blood of whom? The lamb that
was to come. And that time of year is called what? The
Passover.

Anybody want to guess what time

of the year it was when Jesus died?

Exactly, the Passover.

Who was the lamb that was to come? Exactly Jesus

Christ. Do you see what God was telling the ancient
Israelites?

So you see the original punishment for the very first sin
was death and not only physical death but eventual
spiritual death. Now if you guys remember over the
centuries the Jews kept sacrificing animals for their
sins. Just like Noah and Abraham and Abel. But did
those sacrifices really pay for the sins?

l
u

s
1

3
1
…The sacrifices under the old system were repeated…
year after year, but they were
never
able
to
provid
e
perfec
t
cleans
ing...
2
If they could have … the sacrifices would have
stopped, for the worshipers would have been purified
once for all time…
3
But those yearly sacrifices were there instead to
remind them of their sins year after year.

So did the sacrifices the Jews were making in the

temple good at forgiving their sins? No! Those
sacrifices were merely to what? REMIND
the Jews about their sins and the consequences of their
rebellion. And through the ages God reminds His
people over and over again what is to come and what is
to be. And He did this with the physical death of
animals, spotless lambs.

Now coming back to our

questions. Remember my friend
who asked:

If God is God, why didn’t God just wave his arms and
just say: I forgive you all. Why did
Jesus have to go through all that suffering and pain?
That just doesn’t make sense to me.

S
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4

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h
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e
.

1. Either God is good and he does not punish evil

(which is what my friend’s question is)

2. or God is good and he does punish evil (which is

what we as Christians are trying to prove)
3. or God is not good and he
does punish evil (which is
irrelevant)
4. or God is not good and he does not
punish evil (which will haunt us later)

We’ll toss out the last two for that is not the question
although number 4 will be relevant in a few minutes.
Let's take number 1. God is
good and he does NOT
punish evil.
This sounds good. After all, God we are told is
in the business of forgiving sinners.

But hopefully some of you have already

seen the problem with this option.

Because this would mean that despite whatever you've

done bad in the past you'd be forgiven.

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s
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g
o
o
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y
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a
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.

But that means that if anyone had done

anything bad, they would not be punished.

That means no evil people will be punished. That

means Hitler who killed 13 million people … ….

Whoops! That means that despite everything that a

mass rapist or a murder or a child abuser or the 9-11
attackers had done and never felt sorry for, God would
NOT punish that person or their sin. And in fact Hitler
and those other evil guys would laugh at all the evil
they have done and they would get to live next to us in
Heaven forever and enjoy life and all eternity in the
luxury of heaven. And God would NOT do a single
thing to punish them or what they had done.
Wait just a minute you say. Hitler needs to be
punished. Rapists need to be punished. Child abusers
need to be punished. What sort of God would God be if
he didn't punish someone as evil as Hitler. He wouldn't
be a good God. A good God would make sure justice is
served.

We just changed our tune didn't we. You see it is

precisely because God is JUST AND GOOD that he
has to make sure that justice is served. He does so by
extracting a punishment for evil. All evil is punished.
The price must be paid.

Which is exactly item 4. God is not good and he does

not punish evil. You see if God did not punish evil he'd
end up as item 4. God would be bad if he did not
punish sin.

It is precisely because God

is good that He has to
punish evil.

Imagine if there was a judge and every time someone

brought a murderer or rapist to him and the rapist
didn’t ever care that he’d killed or hurt someone. And
the Judge just said, oh, that’s OK I forgive you. You
can go. Would we think that was a good judge?

No we’d think that was a what judge?

An EVIL judge. A California judge.
OK now that we realize that God has to punish sin.
Let’s see if we can explain why Jesus had to die?
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What we have created by sinning against this Almighty
God is a debt that needs to be paid. Note if we are not
sorry for what we’ve done wrong then even if the debt
is paid, it’s meaningless. But once we are sorry, God
still HAS to punish SIN. Otherwise he wouldn’t be a
good God.

We’ve also seen the punishment for sin i.e. rebellion

against God is for man to die spiritually.

Now imagine this, let’s say that one fine day Adam
here stole half a million dollars and then went on a
shopping spree and wasted all that money. Then… he
got caught.
What would the
first thing he’d
need to be
forgiven?

What we have created by sinning against this Almighty

God is a debt that needs to be paid. Note if we are not
sorry for what we’ve done wrong then even if the debt
is paid, it’s meaningless. But once we are sorry, God
still HAS to punish SIN. Otherwise he wouldn’t be a
good God.
We’ve also seen the punishment for sin i.e. rebellion
against God is for man to die spiritually.

Now imagine this, let’s say that one fine day Adam
here stole half a million dollars and then went on a
shopping spree and wasted all that money. Then… he
got caught.
What would the
first thing he’d
need to be
forgiven?

Repentance
Well he would first have to repent. I mean if you go to
the Judge and the Judge senses
that you don’t give a hoot or think that what you did
was wrong, he’s not going to let you get off without a
long sentence.

So without repentance there can be no

forgiveness. OK but is repentance enough?

No, you may have repented, but you now have to pay
restitution. You have to pay to fix the car, you have to
pay back to society for what you did.

J
u
s
t
i
f
i
c
a
t
i
o
n
is when you or someone has paid
your fines or repaid for your
crimes.

Justification is when you have provided justice with

what it needs and are free from condemnation.

Remember Justification
is only of value after
Repentance.

OK say Adam here has repented, but now he needs to

be justified. To be justified he has to pay restitution.
Let’s say it’s a million dollars in damages and fines.

But it turns out that

Adam does not have a
million dollars.
Yet if Adam did NOT have the million dollars he owes,
someone really nice could offer to pay that fine and the
pay back the money for him.

L
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s

s
a
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t
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a
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i
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J
o
e
.

So Joe offers to pay for Adam, thus Joe would provide

the Substitutionary Atonement for Adam. And if the
price for Adam’s crime was death and Joe offered his
life for it (often done in the ancient days…remember
the Greek story of Damon and Pythias?), then Joe
himself would BE the substitutionary atonement for
Adam.
A Substitutionary Atonement happens when somebody
pays the punishment for you. Instead of you paying it
yourself.

In other words it’s when someone “atones” for you

instead of you atoning for yourself. Their sacrifice,
justifies you.

So the 1 Million dollars would be the substitutionary

atonement from Joe, the person who cared about Adam.

In the same way the wrath of God can be satisfied if

after there is repentance, the debt is paid by someone
else who is willing to pay for it.

Because then Justice is still

served and God is still a
Good God.

However, the first problem is what if I was to sin

again. Then my penalty once paid would have to be
paid again. And what if I sinned again after that.
Since I only have 1 death to pay for my first sin, I
wouldn’t be able to satisfy the second payment.
Unless, I could find a way to pay for all my debt,
past, present and future?

Secondly, if the person himself were guilty of anything

then that person who paid my debt, would now be in a
quandary, simply because someone has to pay HIS
debt.
Hang on a minute Mr.Joe …..Oh no look at this….turns
out that you also drove down the hill, robbed a bank,
stole a Mazaratti and did 1/2M worth of damage. Do
you have another 1M?

Is there anyone here who has a

Million dollars to pay for Mr.
Joe…..

Thank you. And your name is?. Peter. But oh no it turns

out that you Pete ALSO…..owe a Million dollar
penalty. Is there anyone else here who can pay for Pete
so he can pay for Joe so he can pay for Adam? But as
we go on down the line we find that 43everyone has
sinned. We have to find someone who has never sinned
to be able to pay the price.

And if you recall in the old Testament traditions the

Lamb had to be a pure and spotless lamb. So who could
pay this price?

Exactly! Unless you had a sinless man, i.e. Jesus Christ

who had no sin who had never done a crime, who had
never rebelled against God. HE could pay for Pete, who
could pay for Joe who could pay for Adam. And that’s
also why Christ had to become a Man because he had
to take man’s place.
And
that’s
why
Christ
had to
be
sinless!
So there we have the first reason why Christ had to be
pure. Why Christ HAD to be
sinless, why He could not have been a sinner. He could
not just be a good man, a wise man, a prophet. He had
to be a perfect man. Because if he had been a sinner
then he would have had to die to pay for HIS own sins
and would not have been able to pay for us. And that’s
why Christ unlike Mohammed or Buddha or
whomever, didn’t come to
show
us the
way,
he
came
to BE
the
way.

But that really only answers one part of the problem.

You see if Christ was pure, by paying his life for
others, he could have paid for the debt of a single man.
He could have only paid for Pete, who paid for Joe,
who paid for Adam. So they are all going to hell except
for Adam. That’s no fun because it only solves the
problem for one guy.

So how did Christ then pay for all of mankind who

would be saved? And just as important how would he
pay for me when I sin the next time.

(For kids) First do you know what the word Infinite

means? It means having no end. Greater than anything.
Are you infinite? No, none of us are infinite. We are all
finite beings.

Now we all have some value. We are worth something.

What is your value? Now what is God’s value
compared to yours? It’s infinite isn’t it? It’s so much
more than your value; in fact it’s so much more than
ALL our values put together. Correct?

So if Christ was a supernatural infinite being, in other

words if Christ was…. God, then indeed his death
would have been sufficient to pay for all mankind who
would be saved. Because his value is infinite. Thus his
value would not be equal to a single man, but to all
mankind for all eternity. And his value would even be
greater than what I’d owe even if I kept sinning again
and again wouldn’t it?
And that's why the death of Christ was a sufficient
atonement for our sins. The punishment of an infinite
being was sufficient to cover the finite debt of a finite
number of finite beings.
And this is also why Christ had to be Infinite God and
couldn’t have just been a perfect man. He had to be an
Infinite Perfect Being who had never rebelled against
God (himself effectively).

A
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C
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s
But you ask? Jesus only died
physically and he only died for a few
days?.

Our Lord
didn’t pay for
our sins in the
Grave.

Let’s understand what happened at the cross. We know

that Christ died physically. But what else happened?
What did Jesus say on the Cross, besides “I am
thirsty”?
He said: My God, My
God why have you
forsaken me.
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?
Exactly, he was separated from
God the Father and God the
Spirit.

Let me ask you a

question? What is
separation from God? It
is Hell.
You see Jesus was literally experiencing Hell for that
time on the Cross. He was in Hell.
But remember he was back in the
presence of his Father when he died.
Because he said: It is paid for. It is
finished.
Father,
into your
hands I
commend
my spirit.
People talk about dying and going to Hell.
Jesus went to Hell first, then died.

Note that I’m not saying here that Christ went to Hell
after he died where he was reborn as a new man. That
by the way is a heresy preached by Oral Roberts and
Kenneth Copeland and a few others.

What we are saying is that Jesus experienced the pain

of what Hell would be like, because for the first time in
his being of all eternity, God the Son experienced
separation from God the Father. When Peter talks about
Jesus going to free the souls from some sort of Holding
place, this is indicating that Jesus went in victory and
power.

The finite death of an infinite being could pay the

debt for every single finite being!

The finite death of a infinite being could pay the debt

for every single finite being!

Let’s go back because we must see that God had a

dilemma!

God we hear is Just, but God is also merciful, and God

is also love.

Butwhich one to compromise. Should I be just? And

destroy everyone? But then I’m not merciful. Or should
I be merciful.

But if I am merciful or give grace then I destroy justice.

What was the way out of God’s dilemma?
It’s like the legendary story of Arthur and Camelot.

Arthur the king who is the keeper of the law, has a

dilemma - Queen Guinevere has violated the law by
committed adultery. The law says she must die. If the
law is not upheld then it will be unjust for many have
died for their adultery and worse Arthur knows the
damage adultery will bring to his nation.

In some versions of the legend, Arthur’s evil demonic

half-sister Morgana comes to him and laughs saying;
“What do you do Arthur, do you destroy the law or do
you destroy the one you love!” She loves his plight. He
is stuck.

Which ones do you compromise God? Justice or love?

Do you destroy the law or destroy all the humans. For
you were foolish enough to give them the freedom to
love you and they took that freedom and rebelled
against you. So now you will have no love and have no
mercy.

And
God
solves
this,
without
compro
mise.
By sacrificing himself he fulfils all these roles without
compromise. He pays the price, justice is satisfied. He
pays the price love is satisfied. He pays the price and
mercy is granted.

God is not fair. This was never about fairness. It was

about justice and love. If God was fair you’d die to pay
for your sins, not the innocent Lamb of God.

And finally remember how God asked Abraham to

sacrifice HIS true firstborn and only son, well God in
the covenant could not ask Abraham for more than he
would require of himself. So God in return had to
sacrifice HIS firstborn and only son, to pay for the sins
of Abraham, his son and all who would believe. Do you
see the connection there?

OK here’s a question:
who did Jesus die to save
us from?
Who is the judge in this scenario? Is it
Satan as the Church lady says it is?

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.

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J
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G
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.

Jesus died to save us from GOD. Or more accurate He

died to save us from the justified wrath of God.
H
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f
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v
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r
?

OK next question as we wrap up: You have a friend and

he says; Why would God put anyone in Hell forever
just because they said a few white lies. Specially, since
I’m basically a good person.

Remember Madison that gal who said I can’t do

enough good things to make up for the bad things I’ve
done? Well I told her that no one goes to heaven for
doing any bad things anymore and that you can’t make
up for the bad things by doing good things. People go
to hell for rebelling against God and rejecting him.

What these people who are searching need to know is

that it has nothing to do with being good or bad.
Now that Christ has died, it is effectively true that God,
doesn't put people in hell for lying.

Let me say that again. God

doesn’t put anyone in Hell for

lying. God doesn’t put

anyone in Hell for stealing.

God doesn’t
put anyone
in Hell for
murdering.

In fact if we presume that Hitler did not become a

Christian in his last moments, then
Hitler didn’t go to hell
because he murdered so
many people. Hitler didn’t
go to hell because he was a
racist.
Hitler didn’t go to hell because he
hated the children of God (the Jews).

Does anyone here want to guess

why Hitler would have gone
hell?

Exactly, God puts people in Hell for

rebelling against Him. For rejecting Him.
For all the bad things Hitler did, the worst thing Hitler
did and the thing that made him worthy of Hell was
what?

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a
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G
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.

And you know

what – we have all
been guilty of that.
Just like Hitler – we have all been guilty of that
rebellion against God at some point in time. But
through the grace of the almighty God, He has saved
us.

In fact there is an additional very very important point

to this: Just as God doesn’t put anyone in hell for being
bad, he doesn’t put anyone in Heaven for being good
either. You

can’t work your way into heaven. It’s as simple as that.

Heaven is for people who accept and love God, that is,
Jesus Christ, Hell is for those who reject and hate Him
and don’t want to be with Him. It’s very logical.
Especially when you rephrase it as so: Living in the
presence of God’s grace forever is reserved for people
who love him. Living in the absence of God’s grace
forever is reserved for people who hate him and don’t
like him. It’s similar to how you would handle it as a
person inviting friends into your home. There is no
good or bad involved in the consideration.

So I want to give you an answer

to one of the tough statements:

What if someone says: I’m

basically good. I haven’t killed

anyone.
You can answer: It’s not a question of good or bad at
all. Jesus doesn’t put anyone in Hell for being bad or
lying. He doesn’t put people in heaven for being good.
He puts people in Hell for rejecting Him, for rebelling
against Him. That’s all it takes.

Now you may say: But I’m not rebelling against God.
But think about this. God is infinite, you can’t break
him up into little pieces, you can’t have a “little” of
God. Either you have all of God or you are having none
of him and you are then rebelling against him.

Let me ask you a question. Are you rebelling against

God? But more than that. If you rebel against God now,
you will not want to spend eternity in His presence. In
fact heaven would be hell for those who hate God.
Because you’d be in the presence of the almighty God,
daily being reminded about who he is and watching
everyone praising him and yet you’d despise them and
him daily. It would eat you alive.

Let’s say you are standing before God at the judgment

seat and he asks you. Do you want to spend forever in
my presence praising me or do you want to be
separated from me.

Those who do not love God at that point will say. I

want to be separated from you. And separation from
God is what?

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.
The Bible doesn’t teach that we’ll spend eternity in
heaven. It says we’ll spend eternity
on the New Earth. There will be some time in heaven,
but we were made to enjoy God on the New Earth.
Just because you have repented that
doesn’t make you a “Good Person.”
To become “good” the Holy Spirit works in your life to
Sanctify you. This is called
Sa
n
c
t
i
f
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a
t
i
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.

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a
.

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b. Justification
c. Sanctification.
Will we have
freewill in
Heaven/The
New Earth?
Of course we will, but because of the Sanctification,
because of our “boot camp” here on
Earth we will develop a love for Christ such that we
will not want to rebel in Heaven. For instance, when I
was a kid I wanted to just eat candy. I got sick a few
times and decided that too much candy was a bad idea.
I’m never tempted to do so now. When I was in college
I had friends who went partying every weekend, now
when I see them they have
no desire to do so. Why? Because they figured it was a
rather stupid thing to do. So in the same way we mature
and are sanctified, so when we are on the New Earth
we WILL have freewill. But we will have been refined
in the fire and will freely in love with Christ that we
will not desire those things. But had we not had the
chance to rebel we could not have matured in those
ways.

For more details on why God has given us the law see
the book: Jesus Is Involved In
P
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Why wouldn’t someone change

after seeing how bad it is in
hell.

Unfortunately that question will have to be postponed

to another day…not because I don’t have a possible
opinion, but because it may take us a while to go into
it. For now assume that there are explicable reasons
why this does not happen and do some of your own
research into this – think along these lines – this is an
attempt of an example: Let’s say that you hated the US
and believed that you were commanded to destroy it by
your blind faith in your fictitious god. Let’s say we
caught you and put you in prison for life but every day
you watched TV from your cell and saw how well
things were going for the US and how they were being
glorified. After 40 years of this (assuming you didn’t
age and mature) would you feel more kindly to the US
at the end or hate it more? Sure this is a weak example
because it has lots of caveats e.g. did we treat you
nicely during your imprisonment, did we attempt to
befriend you etc. But hopefully you have a gist of some
of the reasons why it is quite possible that after a
million years, those separated from God because of
their hate may hate God more than when they started.

Besides the “wanting to be separate from God, why

would God want to punish anyone eternally?

This can be explained in many ways, but we all agree

that the punishment should fit the crime. For instance if
you were betray me and rebel against me. They
wouldn't execute you today but if you were to betray
the government and rebel against it and become a
traitor. They'd execute you.

You see, the person against whom the crime is

committed decides the seriousness of the crime. In the
old days, if you stole something from a peasant, they
probably didn't even care. If you stole something from
a merchant they'd beat you. If you stole something from
a public official they'd torture you. If you stole
something from a Lord, you'd get hanged. But if you
stole something from the King, you'd first get beaten
then tortured, then hanged then you'd finally have your
head chopped off, and they may even come after your
family. The more important the person against whom
you'd done wrong, the more severe the crime. Now
fortunately we nowadays believe that all mankind are
equal. So we don't have different crimes for different
people unless you live in a Fascist Socialist country
(yes all Fascists were Socialists e.g. Hitler, Mussolini,
the Romans, Saddam Hussein, Khadafy etc.).

But God is not equal to us. So the penalty for a sin

against God is infinitely greater than a penalty against a
fellow human.

Continuing with that, you can shoot a dog and they

won’t give you life in prison (unless you are in San
Francisco of course), but if you shoot a man they give
you life in prison. So who/what you commit the sin
against is also what determines the severity of the
punishment. Now follow me on this as well. A finite sin
against a finite person is punishable only by a finite
punishment.
But would you agree that if it were possible to do, an
infinite sin against a finite person should be punishable
by an infinite punishment.

Now do you see why a finite sin against an infinite God

is punishable by an infinite punishment?

Some people say, why should the fact that someone

sins for 90 years result in a punishment of all infinity.
Well the reality is that the amount of time it takes to
commit a crime does not relate to the amount of time
the punishment should be. For instance, you could take
a gun and shoot a man right here in 30 seconds. That
punishment would be far more severe than if you spent
5 years embezzling money from a bank.

If a sinner were not punished eternally then God would

eternally have to deal with that sinner unless they were
regenerated i.e. they’d repented, been justified and been
fully sanctified.

Why Jesus Had To Die & The Basics Of Christianity Neil Mammen 11/20/2014 18/30
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You see we aren’t sinners because we sin. We sin

because we are sinners. Our very nature before we
were saved was of sin.
And as long as we have that nature we will hate God,
and as long as we hate God we would rather be in Hell
than with Him in Heaven.
W
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Romans 7:8 I know that nothing good lives in me, that

is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what
is good, but I cannot carry it out.
I am UNABLE to do anything good. It is impossible
for me to do anything Good on my own.

Romans 3:10 As it is written: "There is no one

righteous, not even one; 11 there is no one who
understands, no one who seeks God. 12 All have turned
away, they have together become worthless; there is no
one who does good, not even one."
13 "Their throats are open graves; their tongues
practice deceit." "The poison of vipers is on their lips."
14 "Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness." 15
"Their feet are swift to shed blood;
16 ruin and misery mark their ways, 17 and the way of
peace they do not know." 18 "There is no fear of God
before their eyes."

Let me repeat that: We aren’t sinners because we sin.

We sin because we are sinners. Our very nature before
we were saved was of sin. And since all good things
come from God, when we are completely devoid of
God, nothing good can come anymore and we will hate
God more and more each day.

So as long as we have that nature we will hate God, and

as long as we hate God we would rather be in Hell
without him, than in Heaven with Him. And since we
are sinful by nature, if we are separated from God
while we hate him, we will hate him more for it is
purely his Grace that changes our heart of stone to a
heart of flesh. And if we go into eternal separation from
God hating God, the longer we are there the more we
will hate him. Nothing in us will stop the hate. Nothing
in us is capable of turning us around. We will get what
we deserve and we will get what we want.

“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but

unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee;
From hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my
last breath at thee. Ye damned whale.”2

As we’ve said, we don't sin and therefore are sinners.

We sin because we are sinners by nature. That’s what
happened when Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden.
God told them.

A
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D
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K
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The day you eat of it you will die. What was He said,
He was saying we would became infected with the
desire to sin. And Adam and Eve would doom their
entire race to this disease of hating God as Paul tells us
that no one seeks GOD. We all hate him or hated Him
in the past if we are saved. We inherited our father’s sin
nature. Our very nature is to sin and so we sin. Watch a
2 year old and tell me that we don’t have a sin nature.
Everybody around the 2 year old may be giving and
kind. But what’s the first thing a two year old does
when it has to share a toy. She says: “MINE.” It takes
years of training to learn kindness and giving. We
aren’t born with it. We learn to care for others. If God
were to continue to let us exist and do our own thing
we would continue to sin and if we continued to sin,
God would have to continue to punish that sin because
he is a good and a just God as we’ve discussed earlier.

We sin because we are sinners. So any religion that

tells you that to get to heaven you have to be good is
doomed to what? Failure! Why because it is impossible
for us to not sin. We inhabit sin. We are sinful by our
very essence. By our very nature. If you go to a church
or join a religion and they tell you that you can only get
to heaven if you don’t do any bad things. You know
that they are asking you to do something absolutely
impossible. It’s against your very nature. You are
doomed before you walk out that door.

But there is another option, God could just wave his

hand and make us "good". Note that it wouldn’t really
work if God forced us to be good: because even if were
forced to act good but in our minds we really wanted to
rebel against him, that would be sin all over again and
heaven would be hell if there were a bunch of people
who really wanted to sin but couldn't.

Think about it. If you lived in heaven and really wanted

to sin but couldn’t. That would be similar to a prison
full of pathological murderers wouldn't it? All these
people who want to go out and murder people but can't.
Imagine that being heaven. So the only true way this
would work is if God were to change us from the core,
from the very depths of our very being. Make us all
non-sinners. Make us all “Good people”. Change us.
This interesting is also tied to the root word of
“baptism”.

It is because God is good that he has

to punish sin and that too eternally.

You need to be changed from the inside out to be able

to live in Heaven/the New Earth for eternity and that
can only come through salvation and sanctification.

Isn’t it the height of audacity and arrogance to

claiming that Jesus is the only way to
G
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One of the biggest complaints I get

from non-Christ followers is this:
Don’t you think it’s rather arrogant for you to think that
only you Christians know the truth? That only you
Christians know the way to eternal life? Why is it that
Christians are so exclusive that they condemn
everybody else to hell? That is usually followed by the
question: Do you think I am going to hell because I
don’t believe in Jesus.

This question needs to be dealt with

kindly. The answer is simply this:

Our faith is based on 4 fundamental

premises when it relates to this:

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We believe Jesus was telling the truth, the
whole truth and nothing but the truth
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We believe Jesus said He
was the ONLY way to
Salvation.

So now in light of these premises, we have to say that it

is NOT us that are arrogant. We humbly believe Jesus
at this word. If anyone is arrogant in this equation it is
going to be Jesus. Do you see that? So now the person
who’s asking why we are arrogant, can’t say that they
think that we as Christians arrogant, they have to agree
that our exclusive belief system is logically based upon
the 4 premises. They can dispute that what we believe
is correct, but they cannot presume that we are
arrogant. So at the end of the day, the real questions our
non-Christ follower friends have to ask is: Why was
Christ so arrogant as to believe that He was the ONLY
way to God? And our answer and I believe His is
because: He is the ONLY God all the others are frauds.
The truth is not always palatable or fair. As the great
Dread Pirate Roberts said so wisely: Life is unfair
Princess, anyone who tells you otherwise is selling
something. {Actually he said “Life is Pain Princess.”
But I like my version better.)

L
o
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y
But also look at the logical side. If we have all sinned
and owe a debt to God and the only
way to pay it back is by our own eternal separation
from God. Then as we’ve seen only a “god” can pay
that debt besides us. So this is why following Buddha,
or Mohammed or good deeds or any OTHER way
would not work. God has to die for us. Of course
someone might say, what about “another” god. But
logically only 1 omnipotent God could exist. You can’t
have 2 beings with absolute power. Think about it, if
one being has absolute power then the other being
doesn’t. So you can ONLY have one God (this is also
why Christian Theology talks about one God being
with 3 persons, not 3 beings. So this is why either it’s
Jesus or it’s Krishna (a Hindu God) or any one of the
other “gods”. It can’t be both or either.

S
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i
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u
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t

b
e

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P
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a
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H
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B
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h
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o
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G
o
d
.
This is why Jesus has to be the ONLY
way and had to be God. It’s logical.

Now the next logical question from your friend will

be: Do you think I am going to hell, because I don’t
believe in Christ?
And that was our friend Bob’s question wasn’t it. My
answer to that is always: My dear
friend, if you continue to rebel against Jesus, then when
you get to Heaven, you won’t like Him and He’ll give
you exactly what you want at that point. So please do
consider not rebelling against Him.

Why did Jesus have to

come to earth and get
tempted?
Jesus had to suffer all kinds of temptation. Contrary to
popular belief it is the person who
resist temptation who knows how powerful temptation
is because he has had to fight it all the way. The one
who has given into temptation will most probably give
in to it over and over again and really has no
comprehension of how hard it is to resist. Christ in the
flesh had to suffer all types of temptation in order to
prove himself worthy (not to God but to
all the accusers)? Why? Because once he had resisted
all temptations no one could point their finger at him
and say: You do not understand, or you have no right to
judge. Secondly Christ suffered as a result of resisting
those temptations. He did good and suffered. Again so
that no one could point at him and say that Christ did
not go through what they had gone through. Thirdly if
Christ had never been tempted like we were, then he
really wouldn't qualify as having been pure. Because he
never was given a chance to sin. For instance, you
couldn’t really say that you would never ever do
anything bad, if
you’d never been given
an opportunity to do
anything bad.
But having gone through the temptations, having been
given many chances to sin and refusing it. Christ was
now sinless despite having the opportunity to do so.

(Now this of course raises a new question: Was Jesus

capable of sinning given the opportunity….that’s a
debate for a whole different level and more of a
philosophical issue…I’d say no...for God cannot sin.
But then one could argue that Jesus didn’t really have
the opportunity and so on etc….)
Why
Christ
Had
to rise
from
the
dead.

Well as we've know the fundamental crux of

Christianity is that Christ rose from the dead. Without
that we are all fools. But why is that the fundamental
crux of Christianity? We understand why Christ had to
die for us. But did he have to physically rise, couldn’t

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he have just spiritually risen?

God has let Satan duplicate many miracles, but no one

has yet been able to rise from the dead. Sure there are
many close forgeries, like the voodoo zombies and
what not. But no one has been able to raise themselves
from the dead. So one of the first reasons is so that
Jesus could prove that he was God. Note that one of the
signs of the end times will be when Satan duplicates
this when the Anti Christ a public figure dies and
appears to come back to life.

Christ had to rise because that's first how he proved he

was God. That's the first part of it. Secondly Christ rose
because God was showing us what our hope would be.
It was the promise of things to come. The fact that
Christ arose is the promise that we will rise one day. It’s
the promise of eternal life. That’s the multidimensional
body we will have.

Thirdly by rising physically Christ proved that he was

God over Death and the Grave. Christ also had to rise
because his new body was a sort of prototype of our
resurrected bodies. The body that Christ had after his
resurrection will be like the body that we get after we
rise up as well. I say “sort” of prototype because Christ
carries the scars of the price he paid for us. Our bodies
will be brand new, with no deformities, no diseases no
problems.
W
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D
e
f
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s
Now let's define some
words to describe
what we know.

p
r
o
p
i
t
i
a
t
e

(
p
r
u
•
p
i
s
h
'
E
•
A
t
"
)
,
to make favorably inclined; appease;
conciliate. An offering that has been
successfully made to appease God, to turn
His wrath from us. Christ was the
propitiation for us.

i
m
p
u
t
e

(
i
m
•
p
y
O
O
t
'
)
,
1. to attribute or ascribe
2 Theol.to
attribu
te
(righte
ousnes
s,
guilt,
etc.)
to a
person
or
person
s
vicari
ously;
credit
as
derived from another.
Christ's righteousness was imputed to us
sinners.

a
t
o
n
e
m
e
n
t

\
A
*
t
o
n
e
"
m
e
n
t
\
,
1. (Literally, a setting at one.)
Reconciliation; restoration of friendly
relations; agreement; concord.
[Archaic]

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2. Satisfaction or reparation made by

giving an equivalent for an injury, or by
doing of suffering that which will be
received in satisfaction for an offense
or injury; expiation; amends; -- with
for.

Substitutionary Atonement: A substitutionary

payment. Reparation given by one who is
not the offending party.
Christ was the substitutionary atonement
for us. He paid the price for us.

J
u
s
t
i
f
i
c
a
t
i
o
n

\
J
u
s
`
t
i
*
f
i
*
c
a
"
t
i
o
n
\
,
1. a showing or proving to be just such that
the law requires no more from you
2. (Theol.) The act of justifying, or the state
of being justified, in respect to
God's requirements. Such
that God requires no more from
you. Christ substitutionary
atonement for us justified us.

S
a
n
c
t
i
f
i
c
a
t
i
o
n
\
S
a
n
c
`
ti
*
f
i
*
c
a
"
ti
o
n
\,
1. The act of making holy; the state of
being made holy; the act of God's grace by
which the desires and actions of men are
purified,
T
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A
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H
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1
0
:

1
-
2
3

Heb 10:1 The law is only a shadow of the good things

that are coming--not the realities themselves. For this
reason it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated
endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw
near to worship.

2 If it could, would they not have stopped being

offered? For the worshipers would have been cleansed
once for all, and would no longer have felt guilty for
their sins. 3 But those sacrifices are an annual
reminder of sins, 4 because it is impossible for the
blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. 5 Therefore,
when Christ came into the world, he said:
.. 9 "Here I am, I have come to do your will." …. 10
And by that will, we have been made holy through the
sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. 11
Day after day every
priest stands and performs his religious duties; again
and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can
never take away sins. 12 But when this priest (Jesus)
had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat
down at the right hand of God. ….14 because by
one sacrifice he has made perfect
forever those who are being made holy.

Now he starts to talk about

Sanctification- a new concept
for us:

Sanctification: 15 The Holy Spirit also testifies to us

about this. First he says: 16 "This is the covenant I will
make with them after that time, says the Lord. I will put
my laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their
minds."

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Justification: 17 Then he adds: "Their sins and

lawless acts I will remember no more."
18 And where these have been forgiven, there is no
longer any sacrifice for sin. 19
Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter
the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, 20 by a new
and living way opened for us through the curtain, that
is, his body,
21 and since we have a great priest over the house of
God, 22 let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in
full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to
cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our
bodies washed with pure water. 23 Let us hold
unswervingly to the hope we
profess, for he who promised is
faithful.

Repentan
ce,
Justificati
on &
Sanctifica
tion
Now I earlier mentioned that one of the reasons why
God had to punish sin was the
example of Hitler. If God were to universally forgive
all sin then he'd have to forgive
H
i
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r

a
s
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e
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.

But that doesn't let us off the hook because Christians

do believe that Hitler could be forgiven. But wait you
say, if Hitler could be forgiven then God isn't really
punishing sin. No, he is, and that is why Christ had to
die, to pay for that sin. But, you say, “that isn't enough
for Hitler, even if he repents Hitler must pay.” This is
where Christians and non- Christians may disagree.
You see, there is a condition where I believe that it
would be OK to forgive Hitler. What if Hitler were to
realize the “enormosity” of the horrible things he had
done. What if Hitler had changed deep in his very soul
and regretted so terribly what he had done and would
have done anything to go back and fix it? What if
Hitler was not only willing to suffer the physical
penalty of his actions but also before he died did
everything in his power to correct as much of the bad
things he had done? What if he then became a preacher
of non-violence and on his way to prison had an
opportunity to escape but instead gave up his life trying
to save someone? Specially, when you realize that
killing someone is not the worst thing you can do.
Rebelling against God is the worst thing you can do.

At some point you'd have to agree that Hitler had

changed. But the whole time you'd wonder if he had
indeed changed? But you see God would know if Hitler
had really changed. If you posit a God, you have to
agree that that God can’t be fooled.

B
u
t

t
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'
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m
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e

t
o

t
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a
t
.

Peter Malkin was an Israeli Mossad Agent. In 1969 he

was sent to South America to kidnap Adolf Eichman, a
Nazi responsible for the murder of millions of Jews.
While they were hiding out after they'd kidnapped
Eichman waiting for a way to smuggle him out of the
country Malkin got to spend lots of time with Eichman
and talk to him. In his book "Eichman in my Hand"
Peter Malkin describes how one night after talking to
Eichman he breaks down and cries bitterly. Not
because of what had happened during the Holocaust
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but because he realized that Eichman was a normal

man. “He's just like me” said Malkin as he sobbed
bitterly.

Another famous Nazi Criminal Hunter is reputed to

have once said: “The scariest moment in my life was
not the first time I met my Death Camp Doctor, but the
second time when I met him when he was on trial in
Israel. Because as we went through the trial, for the
first time in my life I realized that I too was capable of
the dreadful horrors that he'd done.”
 You see my point is that we are all capable of this
horribleness. We are all inherently capable of sinning
and then sinning some more and then justifying what
we do and then becoming callous to the evil we do,
becoming callous to the pain that we cause, fooling
ourselves into believing that others are human or
deserve death at our hands. It grows slowly. Hitler
didn't start being evil. He was once a sweet little baby
and a nice little boy. Just like you and me. What we do
in secret is only the first step. What we do when no one
can stop us or we believe no one can punish us is the
next step. That’s when the true horrors of our
personalities come out. We are all capable of that if we
do not have Christ.

A lot of times we seem to think that there is so much

difference between Hitler and us that we forget that we
aren't the judge.
Adolf Hitler

Our
View
of
How
bad
Hitle
r is
vs.
 us.

-50

-100

-150

-200

-250

-300
You &Teresa

-350
Milosovic
Me

-400
Mother

You see the difference between us and Hitler is less

than the difference between God and us. It’s like
driving through a city and seeing the skyscrapers and
 comparing the differences in sizes vs. a small house.
But when we compare ourselves to God that’s like
looking down from a plane 30,000 feet up. Everything
looks like a dot. Notice the scales

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on the charts. Our scale is in the 400’s, God’s scale is in

the millions. We can’t be good enough.
Adolf Hitler

God’s View of How bad Hitler is vs. us.

1000000
 800000

600000

400000

200000
You &Teresa

0
Milosovic
Me

-200000
Mother

What am I trying to say? Hitler's story is your story. If

God couldn't forgive Hitler neither could he forgive
you. Remember at the fundamental core Hitler’s crime
was not killing Millions of people. His crime was
rebelling against God that led to killing millions of
people.
So through the payment of the penalty you CAN be
forgiven. But wait....the transformation is just as
critical a requirement isn't it?

But you may say, "Anyone can pretend to be holy; any

one can pretend to be sorry." But that's the beauty of
the Gospel. It does not stop at the sacrifice of Jesus.
You see you are saved from your past sin, but you are
also saved from your future sin. But moreover this
salvation package is not just sin, it includes
TRANSFORMATION. Which is where Sanctification
comes in. Part and parcel of the salvation message is
the transformation of you by the God the Holy Spirit.
You are sanctified daily. Not only do we get the
transformation of righteousness, but also Christ and the
believer become one. You see Christ died to pay for our
sins and then we die. Our old man is put away, buried,
removed and the new man, the new transformation, the
new creature resurrects from those ashes to be not only
saved, but once being transformed, that new man is
imputed righteousness.

In Christ, I died on the cross, and in Him I was

resurrected. Thus, his death is not only in my place but
WITH me. And his resurrection is not only in my place
but with me.

Romans 6:3 Or don't you know that all of us who were

baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his
death? 4 We were therefore buried with him through
baptism into
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death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the

dead through the glory of the
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.

5 If we have been united with him like this in his death,

we will certainly also be united with him in his
resurrection. 6 For we know that our old self was
crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done
away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—

7 because anyone who has died has been freed from

sin. 8 Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we
will also live with him. 9 For we know that since Christ
was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death
no longer has mastery over him.

10 The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but

the life he lives, he lives to God. 11
In the same way, count yourselves dead to
sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
That is the transformation. Now do you agree that this
new creature can be forgiven regardless of what
horrible things the old creature had done? And that is
our story, regardless of what we have done in our past,
our new creature is now redeemed. Of course we all
agree, this had better be a new creature or this is all a
big mockery. I think we can trust God to know the truth
of everyone's heart, don't you?

And now this new creature must learn to live in

righteousness. Not that we will ever achieve it in this
life, but when we rise from the dead to be with God
eternally. And that is exactly what baptism is, we are
buried in the grave of water, to rise again in the life and
with the Life of the Holy Spirit. We are the new man.

And this is the difference between

repentance, justification and sanctification.

Repentance is when you decide that you have sinned

and ask God to save you, Justification is that Christ
died to save us from Hell. Sanctification is what God
does in our lives after we are saved.

Repentance is in our hands. We must initiate it (OK OK

through the prompting of the
H
o
l
y

S
p
i
r
i
t
)
.
Justification
cannot be
earned. Christ
does it all.
Sanctification is the daily walk of you with
God. It's you hand in hand with God.

Remember I said that some Churches teach that you

have to be good to go to heaven. Some churches teach
that you have to accept Christ and then be good. But as
you can see what the Bible says is that the only "Good"
comes from the Holy Spirit who sanctifies you.

W
h
a
t

c
a
n
w
e

c
o
n
c
l
u
d
e
?
a
)

Y
o
u

c
a
n

n
e
v
e
r

b
e

g
o
o
d
e
n
o
u
g
h
b) You die with Christ and rise with Christ,
and after that God sanctifies you.
Why Jesus Had To Die & The Basics Of Christianity Neil Mammen 11/20/2014 28/30
w
w
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.
N
o
B
l
i
n
d
F
a
i
t
h
.
c
o
m

c) He works in you to slowly bring you

to a maturity of that life with Him. d)
We will never be perfect until we get
into heaven.

We have really on just touched the surface. This is a

fascinating topic. I hope this has whetted your appetite
for more meat of Theology.
References:

There are numerous good references I can suggest

some of them are hard reading. But it’s good stuff if
you can work your way through it.

1. Tapes or Videos from RC Sproul of Ligonier

Ministries.
2. Systematic Theology by Millard Erickson
3. Systematic Theology by Berkov
4. Any book on refuting cults that explain
“Justification by Faith.”
5. The Institutes by John Calvin.

To contact Neil Mammen:

neilswebpage@noblindfaith.com
Web page: www.NoBlindFaith.com

N
O
T
E
S
:
Question: God says the wages of sin is death, in
Romans 6:23 Romans 6:23 For the wages of sin is
death.
So how do we then defend the concept that God
doesn’t send anyone to hell for a single sin?

Answer: First, God has to punish sin, and the wages of

sin is indeed Death. So someone has to die. But that
death punishment was paid by Christ. So we know that
justice is served. But now that Christ has died and risen
again, so the second part of that verse kicks in

Romans 6:23 For the wages of sin is death, BUT the

gift of God is eternal life in Christ
J
e
s
u
s

o
u
r

L
o
r
d
.
So while the original wages of sin was death, now
through Christ we can have eternal
Life. In other words, now we have a way to avoid
going to hell for a simple white lie or for that matter
even for murder, simply because Christ bore the
punishment for those sins.
But what then of the person who doesn’t accept?
Aren’t they going to hell for their sins? Actually the
truth is that anyone who sins, sins, only because they
are a sinner, because their nature is to rebel against
God. Thus in effect the punishment of death is due to
their sin nature and rebellion. Basically it’s all tied
together. Find someone who doesn’t sin and they won’t
go to Hell.

Why Jesus Had To Die & The Basics Of Christianity Neil Mammen 11/20/2014 29/30
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N
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a
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c
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Question: But I don’t hate

God. I’m not rebelling
against him.
Answer: You may not “think” you hate God. But
notice what I’m asking you to do: I’m asking you to
humble yourself before the Almighty God (who is the
God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and came in the flesh
as Jesus Christ) and say that He deserves ALL your
honor, praise, love and in fact your life. Are you willing
to do this now and stop living for yourself? If you are
then do it now.
Most times why I say this people start to back off. They
say: OK I agree, I’m not really willing to submit my
entire life to him. Which means they are rebelling
against him. Not an outright rebellion but a quiet, “I’ll
do my own thing” rebellion.

N
O
T
E

F
R
O
M

N
E
I
L
:
Dear Reader, I have made every attempt I can to
ensure that I have not taught any heretical concepts
in this talk. However due to the complex nature of the
topic it is quite possible that some slips maybe made.
If you encounter anything here that is either new or
not in line with the last 20 Centuries of Evangelical
Christian and Biblical doctrine, please let me know so
that I may correct it. It is not my intention to create
any new doctrine but rather teach the original Gospel
as preached by the Apostles who learned it directly
from our Lord and were inspired by the Holy Spirit to
allow them to remember it.
Why Jesus Had To Die & The Basics Of Christianity Neil Mammen 11/20/2014 30/30
 Christ's Atonement As The
Model For Civil Justice
Jeffrey C. Tuomala
Liberty University School of Law:
Faculty Publications and Presentations
Follow this and additional works at:
http://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/lusol_fac_pubs
Recommended Citation:
Tuomala, Jeffrey, "Christ’s Atonement as the Model for Civil Justice" (1993).
Faculty Publications and Presentations. Paper 19.
http://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/lusol_fac_pubs/19

Nothing is more influential with men than

examples of justice.
Valerius Maximus
God presented him [Christ Jesus] as a
sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his
blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice,
because in his forbearance he had left the
sins committed beforehand unpunished[.]
Paul the Apostle

The implications of the various theories of punishment

for sentencing and spending policies are well known. Less
familiar, though more intriguing, is the relationship
these theories bear to basic criminal law doctrines of
legality, mens rea, and defenses. Several current
casebooks start with a section on punishment and
develop this relationship with varying degrees of
success. 3 Tying resolution of substantive law issues to the
basic philosophical questions involved in the theories of
punishment enriches the study of criminal law, 4 but it
increases frustration and breeds cynicism when those
questions remain unanswered. Neither policymaker nor
jurist can confidently make decisions without justifying a
theory of punishment. 5
The critical importance of Christian theology in the
development of Western criminal law is, well
documented. 6 Legal doctrines are justified by, and
maintain coherence as part of, a particular worldview.
What happens when the positive rules of the state lose all
touch with a higher law and come to be seen as nothing more
than the outcomes of a power struggle? Can the ideals of
autonomy and generality in law survive the demise of the
religious beliefs that presided over their birth?7
The doctrine of Christ's atonement is of singular importance
for theories of punishment as it is the judicial archetype of the
way in which God deals with sin and crime. Treatises on the
atonement are rich with illustrations from, and analogies to,
the civil law. Remarkable parallels appear between the four
principal views of Christ's atonement and currently debated
theories of civil justice. The civil magistrate, as "minister of God
for justice," should deal with crime and civil wrongs according
to the same principles by which God deals with sin through the
atonement. The justification of a particular theory of
atonement justifies a corresponding view of civil justice.'

THE MEANING OF ATONEMENT

Because of the centrality of atonement in the Christian faith
its meaning is as varied as theological systems are diverse.
However, all views hold in common that the end of atonement
is the reconciliation of God and man. Properly understood,
atonement establishes the ground of justice for reconciliation
between an offended party and the offender. Similarly, civil
justice should establish the ground of justice for reconciliation
of victim and offender and the restoration of both.
 There are two paramount questions to be answered in
studying the atonement. The first is whether Christ's death was
necessary as the only means of salvation. The second is whether
the primary purpose of Christ's death was to change God's
disposition toward man or man's disposition toward God.
If Christ's death were not a necessary satisfaction of justice in
the divine nature then it was merely an arbitrary product of
divine will subject to change. In such a case Christ's death
would be based simply on its suitability for accomplishing a
particular end, for example, deterring sin or moving man to
repentance. In a world where the archetype of justice is
mutable there is little reason to expect standards of civil justice
to be fixed. Justice as desert would be replaced with the
utilitarian principle that justifies conduct by the test of
expediency.
While the first question relates to means (atonement), the
second relates to the end (reconciliation). Where sin is a
personal offense against God, which elicits a personal response
of judicial displeasure, God's disposition toward man must be
dealt with first. God cannot simply ignore sin, but rather
requires satisfaction of justice. The sinner's reconciliation to
God can only follow upon God's reconciliation to man.
Alternatively, if sin is merely a sickness or impersonal offense
against the good order of God's government, then only man's
disposition toward God need be changed to restore their
relationship. The focus would be on future rather than past
behavior, and justice's only demand would be personal
reformation.
Where crimes are seen as offenses against individuals rather
than against an impersonal state, satisfaction must be made to
the victim and the demands of justice. The criminal's hatred of
his victim may still exist, but the objective ground for
reconciliation has been laid—he has made satisfaction to the
victim, and his own guilt is removed. When the civil justice
system focuses on changing the criminal's behavior or
character, the victim is left with a sense of injustice and the
offender with a burden of guilt. The opportunity for
reconciliation and restoration is lost.
 THE FOUR VIEWS OF ATONEMENT AND
CIVIL JUSTICE
The satisfaction, governmental, moral influence, and mystical
theories of atonement 9 correspond to retribution, deterrence,
rehabilitation, and social justice. 1 ° The satisfaction theory
teaches that justice is an immutable attribute of God's character
demanding full payment of the law's penal and compensatory
sanctions for man's sin. It alone holds that Christ's vicarious death
was necessary to satisfy justice as a condition of salvation, and that
its primary effect was to change God's judicial disposition toward
man. Likewise, only retribution requires punishment based on moral
desert and does not focus on its prospective effect on the offender.

The governmental and moral influence theories concede that

man deserves punishment, but they deny that anything in God's
nature requires it. Christ's work is not a vicarious satisfaction of
justice, but rather the most efficient means of inducing a change
of behavior, either through fear by his exemplary death
(governmental) or through love by his exemplary life and death
(moral influence). Deterrence and rehabilitation similarly justify
sanctions in terms of their utility in promoting the social goal of
behavioral change through fear or treatment.
Christ's death is basically irrelevant in the mystical theory which
teaches that through the incarnation humanity is divinized, thus
effecting an essential oneness of God and man. Social justice
theories parallel this in that moral fault and sanctions are irrelevant
to the goal of promoting community or reconciliation of all within
society.
Atonement theories cannot be viewed in isolation from the
theological systems to which they belong. A particular view of
atonement entails a view of human nature and of the Holy Spirit.
All of the atonement theories except satisfaction confuse the
work of Christ and the Holy Spirit and have a fallacious view of
sin and human nature. This has an important parallel in views of
civil justice which confuse the jurisdictions of church and state.
Christ's work establishes an objective basis for reconciliation by
satisfying justice, while the Holy Spirit makes reconciliation a
subjective reality by revealing truth and transforming lives. The
state is entrusted with the ministry of justice through the power
of the sword," while the church is entrusted the ministry of
reconciliation' 2 through the power of the Spirit. Just as God has
not given the church the sword of steel necessary to exact justice,
he has not given the state the sword of the Spirit's necessary to
transform the sin nature of wrongdoers and reconcile parties.

I. DEONTOLOGICAL THEORIES OF
ATONEMENT AND CIVIL JUSTICE
A. SATISFACTION THEORY OF
ATONEMENT
Anselm's (1033-1109) epic work, Why God Became Man,'4 was
the first thorough and scientific exposition of the atonement.
His most significant contribution was the idea that man's
salvation is conditioned on demands of justice that only
Christ's death could satisfy." Anselm began with the premise
that disobedience robs God of his due and thus dishonors him.' 6
To restore God's honor justice demands punishment or
satisfaction." Since punishment would destroy man, thereby
thwarting God's creation purposes, he looks to satisfaction."
In Roman civil law, satisfaction meant paying the victim for
the wrong done, or returning a stolen item, plus an extra
payment for dishonoring the victim.' 9 For several reasons
man cannot render satisfaction to God. First, he has a
continuing duty of complete obedience so he has nothing to
pay for past wrongs. Second, his sin incurs an infinite debt.
And thirdly, his sin nature renders him impotent to do
good.2° Since only God could make satisfaction, and only man
should, salvation necessitated the incarnation of Jesus Christ,
the God-man, whose death paid our infinite debt thus
restoring God's honor?' His death was not a punishment for
man or in man's place. 22
Anselm drew on three sources of analogy for his theory. Both
Roman law and the church doctrine of penance provided
models for satisfaction (payment) and for punishment. The
punishment model was found in Roman public law and in the
Church doctrine of penance as self-inflicted injury. The
satisfaction model was found in Roman civil law and in penance
as performance of some good or as a gift to God. Anselm based
the justice of Christ's atonement not on vicarious
punishment but on payment as positive performance of
some good. 23 Germanic law focused on lost honor which
could be restored by punishment or payment that was
calculated not on the basis of moral demerit, but rather on
the amount of harm done to, and status of, the victim. For
Anseim it became God's honor rather than his righteousness
that required satisfaction. 24
Anselm's reliance on the private law analogy became a vortex
of criticism. It is generally recognized that private debt may be
forgiven without injustice. It logically follows that Christ's
death was not necessary as God could have simply forgiven
man's debt without payment. To require either payment or
punishment appears to negate God's mercy.
The Protestant Reformers accepted Anselm's premise that
Christ's death was a necessary condition of man's salvation;
however, they believed that punishment is a necessary
component of atonement. Man must be punished, or Christ
must vicariously endure the punishment man deserves. This
view, which John Calvin (1509-1564) set out in the Institutes
of the Christian Religion, 25 became the measure of Protestant
orthodoxy.
The Reformers taught that God created man righteous and
governed their relationship by a covenant of law, rewarding
obedience with life and disobedience with death. 26 All men
were on probation in Adam whose sin brought guilt and a
sentence of death on all mankind. As a result, everyone is
born with a sin nature that inevitably produces specific
sinful acts, both of which deserve punishment. 27 As sin is a
personal offense against God and not against an impersonal
government, His judicial disposition toward sin is one of
wrath and determination to exact justice. 28
Yet even while man chose to be an enemy of God and was
under his wrath, God loved man and sent his son to fulfill all
the demands of justice in man's place by his life and his
death.29 Scripture characterizes Christ's death not only as a
punishment but as a payment. Justice demands both?' An
offender deserves to be punished (retribution) and he owes
payment (restitution) to the offended party. Christ's judicially
imposed death on Calvary as punishment and payment was
typified and prophesied in the Old Testament. 31 While Christ's
death satisfied the negative aspects of the law, his life of
perfect obedience satisfied the positive requirements,
meriting the reward of eternal life. 32
God did not have to save man, but having chosen to, the only
means compatible with justice was Christ's substitutionary
atonement. He could not simply remit punishment nor accept
less than full satisfaction without himself acting unjustly." In so
doing he does not conform to a principle of justice that
exists independently of himself, but rather to the eternal
personal attributes of his own character. Since his very
character is just, all of his laws and ways reflect his justice.
Justice is not the product simply of God's will, but rather of
his unchanging nature. 34
Through Christ's substitutionary death the objective ground
for the expiation (removal) of man's guilt, and thereby the
propitiation (appeasement) of God's wrath, was established.
Christ's work is the objective ground for God's reconciliation to
man and man's to God." As all men enter the world under the
guilt of sin and wrath of God, there remains a need to apply the
benefits of Christ's work experientially to individuals. This
subjective application of the benefits of the atonement is the
work of the Holy Spirit."
Due to the moral corruption inherited from Adam no one is
able to satisfy the terms of the covenant of law. 37 God has
established a new covenant that man might have forgiveness
of sin and eternal life on the condition of faith in Christ's
work.38 But his spiritual condition is so desperate that he is
unable to exercise faith as a meritorious ground of salvation.
The very faith by which he trusts in Christ is a gift from
God.39 Because all men are hopelessly dead in sin, it is only
after a spiritual birth (regeneration) by the work of the Holy
Spirit that one can exercise this gift of faith. 4° Justified by
faith the believer no longer stands under the sentence of
death.° God having been reconciled to man by the work of
Christ, man is now reconciled to God through the work of
the Holy Spirit. But salvation is both a crisis experience
(regeneration and justification) and a growth process
(sanctification) in which the entire nature of man is being
transformed to conform to the image of God in which he
was created. 42 The believer is reconciled to God and is being
reconciled to God through the agency of the Holy Spirit. The
Reformers clearly distinguished the work of Christ
establishing the objective ground for reconciliation
(redemption accomplished) and the work of the Holy Spirit
effecting an actual reconciliation (redemption applied). All
of the other views of atonement denigrate the work of the
Holy Spirit or deny his existence as a distinct person in the
Trinity.

B. RETRIBUTION-RESTITUTION
There are several varieties of retributivism, which, despite
their negative connotation, have had numerous proponents
past and present.° It holds that criminals deserve
punishment proportionate to the moral blameworthiness of
their offense. Punishment is not justified by its usefulness
as a means to attain the ends of reducing crime or
rehabilitating criminals. In its logical and strongest form
the magistrate must punish to the full measure of desert. 44
Retribution has several attractive features which most
utilitarians try to incorporate, only to compromise their own
position. Since law has a necessary moral content it places
limits on what conduct can be criminalized. In fact, the entire
guilt-finding process with its focus on mens rea is premised on
the retributive presupposition that human beings are morally
responsible.45 The state may punish only the guilty, and
punishment is limited by desert.° The retributive position gives
the entire criminal process, from criminalization to
adjudication to punishment, a coherence.
There are two basic approaches to justifying the retributive
theory.
The first is that it is a fundamental moral postulate based in
some theory of ethics, such as natural law or tradition.'" The
second approach attempts to justify retribution as a necessary
correlate of some general political theory, such as social
contract." This approach is fairly well regarded, but it simply
shifts the basic problem to that of justifying the political
theory.
There are three general forms of attack on the retributive
theory. The first is to portray it in pejorative terms as the
unworthy sentiment of vengeance thinly disguised." The
second is to "expose" the underlying ethical theory as little
more than intuitionism.5° The third, and most important
approach, is to level the charge that all varieties of
retributivism ultimately appeal to utilitarian arguments for
justification.5' C.L. Ten's summary and critique of retributive
theories focus on this issue. For example, Nozick's
"nonteleological version" of retribution argues that
punishment reconnects offenders with moral values. Ten asks
why verbal declarations of these values will not do. Nozick's
answer is that only punishment ensures these values will be
properly internalized. Ten argues that this is rehabilitation or
deterrence concealed as retribution.52
This criticism may hold against most varieties of
retributivism but not all. Utilitarianism purports to justify
those means which produce the greatest good for the greatest
number. It benefits from the perception that it is scientific;
however, empiricism is unable to justify a vision of the good
(ends) and proves to be an inadequate methodology for
choosing efficient means. These issues are addressed more
fully below after all the utilitarian views of civil justice have
been presented. The retributivist is just as concerned with
promoting the greatest good but without compromising his
position. A Christian view teaches that both the end (good)
and means (satisfaction of justice) are God-defined. Scripture
teaches that God's glory and man's happiness (end) are the
consequence of obeying God's laws (means)." The
retributivist's assurance that he can know what is truly good,
and that the means are sufficient to that end, is based on the
belief in revealed truth and in a God-governed world. 54
To reflect the satisfaction theory, civil sanctions must include
restitution (payment to the victim) and retribution (payment to
the offender in cases of crime). Most retributivists have come to
equate criminal justice with punishment and are often careful
to distinguish restitution which is seen as a matter exclusively
of tort law .55
Despite this fact, there has been an increased concern for
victims of crime and their role in the justice system. 56 One
aspect of this concern has been to promote compensation and
restitution, but these schemes do not seem to fit under
retribution, deterrence or rehabilitation. Some writers
promote restitution as a subititute for punishment, which is
the same error Anselm made believing justice may be satisfied
simply by payment." Without both restitution and retribution
there is no satisfaction of justice, and therefore, no objective
ground for reconciliation of parties to each other, or offenders
to the community. 58 Because most victims are without means
to pursue civil remedies, or the losses are too small to justify
litigation, there is a cumulation of unsatisfied victims and
unreconciled offenders which leads to disillusionment and
disrespect toward the law. Punishment is also necessary to
satisfy justice from the victim's and society's perspective." The
desire to see criminals punished need not be irrational or
vindictive, and we should be reluctant to call a man good who
does not respond with some indignation toward the
wickedness he sees in the world and satisfaction in seeing it
punished.
Most writers do not address the question of whether the
state has a right to punish; 6° however, it is answered in the
course of showing why Christ's atonement is the model for
civil justice. Romans 1:1832 says that the "wrath of God is
revealed from heaven" against all sin, and that because of
this revelation in nature and the conscience, all men know
they are under judgment. Romans 13:1-7 says that God
established the state with the magistrate as his servant, who
is "an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the
wrongdoer." As an agent exercising delegated authority, the
magistrate must administer justice by the same principles
that God dealt with all sin through Christ's atonement.
The civil magistrate's authority, as delegated from God and
modeled on the atonement, is severely limited when
compared to the- practices of modern states. Contrary to
conventional wisdom, 61 the sphere of activities subject to
state intrusion is limited by connecting law and morality.
First, the state has no authority to criminalize acts that are
not morally wrong. The modern state is a major offender of
this principle. Second, even though God's judgment is
against all sin, including thoughts, the civil magistrate has
authority only over conduct. Third, he has authority to
criminalize only some kinds of immoral conduct. 62 Even
though all crime is sin (immorality) not all sin is to be
punished as crime.

The principle of delegated authority places further strictures

on the state. It has no institutional authority to establish or
administer programs designed to change the character of
offenders or potential offenders." Although retribution-
restitution's focus is essentially backward-looking, by satisfying
the demands of justice it restores victims and expiates guilt
thereby establishing a basis for reconciliation of the offender to
his victim, the community and himself.
As God's agent of grace the church also has an expressly
delegated and limited authority. Its institutional role includes
proclaiming truth, disciplining individuals and nations,
feeding the poor, restoring relationships, and promoting
community.64 To exercise this ministry of reconciliation the
church is entrusted with "the sword of the Spirit," fulfilling its
role as gifted and empowered by the Holy Spirit." Through the
church's ministry the Holy Spirit applies the salvation Christ
secured. The reconciliation of man to God provides the
exclusive basis for the reconciliation of man to man and for
true community." Just as there is a distinction between the
work of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit, there is a
corresponding separation of state and church. The modern
state is notorious for neglecting justice and appropriating the
role of the church, a role for which the state is neither
entrusted nor empowered.

II. UTILITARIAN THEORIES OF

ATONEMENT AND CIVIL JUSTICE
A. MORAL INFLUENCE THEORY OF
ATONEMENT
In his Exposition of the Epistle to the Romansh' Abelard
(10791142) portrayed Christ's death as an exemplary
demonstration of God's love designed to elicit a loving
response from man. 68 He believed that God was willing and
able to remit man's deserved punishment without any
satisfaction to the demands of justice.69 Although Abelard taught
that forgiveness of sin and reconciliation to God are not
conditioned upon Christ's satisfaction of justice, they are
conditioned upon man's moral reformation and obedience of the
law.7° Man is justified by his own righteousness rather than the
imputation of Christ's righteousness. Christ's life, teaching, and
death were not a necessary manifestation of God's love, but they
were the most efficacious means of influencing this moral
change.71

Faustus Socinus (1539-1604) revived the moral influence

theory in De Jesu Christo Servatore (1594)72 engaging in a virulent
polemic against the satisfaction theory. His basic premise was
that punitive justice is not an essential attribute of God's nature;
therefore, punishment may be remitted purely at will. Like
Abelard, Socinus taught that God had determined to remit
punishment, not upon satisfaction of justice, but upon condition
of belief in Christianity and obedience. 73 God pardons those who
are reconciled to him in response to Christ's loving example. 74
Socinus rejected the orthodox doctrines of sin, the divinity
of Christ, and the Trinity. He taught that the only effect of
Adam's sin was to set a bad example. Consequently, man's
moral condition was not nearly as desperate as the Reformers
believed. 75 Since Christ was only a mortal man, though
superior in many ways, he has no exclusive role to play in
salvation. Thus, all men have the potential to exercise the
same quality of saving influence over others through their
teaching and exemplary lives.76 Since moral reformation is
effected by purely natural means as they affect the mind, will,
and affections, there is no need for the supernatural operation of
the Holy Spirit in man's salvation.77 The logical conclusion of
these departures from orthodoxy is that the church, among
other institutions, has no separate jurisdiction nor unique
ministry of reconciliation.

Socinus posed two major criticisms of the satisfaction theory.

The first dealt with the relation of God's justice and mercy; the
second dealt with the justness of vicarious punishment. He
argued that there is no place for forgiveness or mercy if salvation
is conditioned upon a satisfaction of justice. 7s Socinus depicted
God as a sovereign lord and as a private creditor and not as a
judge.79 He granted that a judge may not relax the demands of
justice in civil or criminal cases. However, a sovereign lord may
relax punishment without compromising justice because
punishment is due to the state. Likewise, creditors may forgive
debts without injustice since payment is owed to them.
Therefore, as sovereign lord, God may remit punishment, and as
private creditor, he may forgive debt without injustice. He said
the Reformer's belief that Christ's death is a necessary
satisfaction of justice was sordid and cruel, but he never
explained why the unnecessary suffering of an innocent man was
not sordid and cruel.
Socinus missed the mark. The Reformers did not sacrifice
mercy for justice. They taught that God's love and mercy
were fully operative, moving him to provide his own son as a
substitutionary atonement. Socinus' view of forgiveness and
salvation is in fact the greatest tyranny of conscience, and
cause for despair, as it is conditioned on future habitual
obedience of the law, something no one is able to do.
Socinus' second criticism is the most compelling—it is unjust
to punish the innocent in the place of the guilty. 84 The
Reformers answered this criticism by pointing to the absolutely
unique spiritual union between Christ and believers, which
Socinus was unwilling to recognize. This unique relationship
renders Christ's vicarious punishment compatible with justice.
The Reformers taught that man's union with Christ is parallel
to man's union with Adam. Adam is the federal head of fallen
men, and Christ is the head of redeemed men. Adam's sin is
imputed to all men, and Christ's righteousness is imputed to all
redeemed men." This objective union with Christ exists in
eternity, was secured in history, and is experienced subjectively
through the agency of the Holy Spirit."

There is a mystery involved in the union of Christ and

believers that must be distinguished from the union involved
in the mystical theory of atonement. Although the church
(community) has a ministry of reconciliation, man is not
reconciled to God through prior reconciliation to the church.
Rather, personal union with Christ through the Holy Spirit is
the ground for reconciliation with the community." Because
the mystical theory of atonement denies the essential duality
of God and man, it holds that man's union with God is
effected through his prior union with the community."

B. GOVERNMENTAL THEORY OF
ATONEMENT
Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) formulated a mediating position
between the satisfaction and moral influence theories in A
Defense of the Catholic Faith Concerning the Satisfaction of Christ
Against Faustus Socinus." He portrayed Christ's death not as a
satisfaction of the strict demands of justice but as an exemplary
punishment designed to induce faith and obedience through
fear."
Grotius was especially sensitive to Socinus' criticism that
satisfaction leaves no room for forgiveness, yet he realized
scripture clearly depicts Christ's death as penal. To resolve this
tension, Grotius worked a compromise between justice and mercy
by viewing Christ's death as a lesser substitute for the full
satisfaction of justice. By relaxing the demands of justice God was
able to exercise justice and mercy.

Grotius believed that in matters of justice God holds the

office of ruler not judge, creditor, or sovereign lord. 87 Rulers
have the prerogative of exacting or remitting punishment."
However, it is not a personal prerogative akin to a creditor's in
forgiving debt. He may exercise it only in the best interests of
the community." God chose Christ's death as the most efficient
means of deterring lawlessness, through a demonstration of his
hatred of sin and determination to punish it, without totally
destroying man. Socinus and Grotius shared the critical
premise that justice, being a product of God's will rather than
an essential attribute of his nature, is mutable. 9°
Making an analogy to, and drawing terminology from, the
Roman civil law, Grotius argued that this relaxation of the law
is in fact a "satisfaction." 9' But he meant something very
different than the Reformers meant by that term. Grotius
agreed that justice would be satisfied ipso facto if all were
consigned to eternal punishment as they deserve. But since
God accepted Christ's death in place of man's eternal death, he
was free to place other requirements as a condition of
forgiveness. His condition for salvation is man's meritorious
exercise of faith in God. The fear of punishment invoked by the
specter of Christ's death restrains lawlessness and induces men
to exercise saving faith. 92 For Grotius, salvation is conditioned
upon a meritorious act of man and is not a free gift of God.
Grotius adhered to Arminian theology which teaches that man's
nature is not so corrupted by Adam's sin that he is unable to
exercise some positive spiritual good. 93 All men have the present
natural ability to repent and exercise saving faith without the
immediate supernatural work of the Holy Spirit. 94 Repentance and
faith actually precede regeneration in this view. 95 Man's
meritorious acts are decisive in effecting his salvation, though he
can be powerfully influenced by the example of Christ's suffering
and death. In such a system, the primary effect of Christ's death is
to change man's disposition toward God and not God's toward
man.

In order to answer Socinus' second criticism, that it is unjust

to punish an innocent Christ in the place of guilty man, Grotius
did not appeal to the mystery of a special spiritual union of
Christ and his elect. Quite surprisingly, he argued that there is
nothing in the law of nature or customs of nations that prohibits
such a practice. 96 Scriptural injunctions to the contrary were
mere positive law applicable only to Israel. 97 For the community
good, a ruler may punish an innocent man who bears a special
relationship to the offender, such as father and son, for the
purpose of deterring others."
While Grotius ostensibly sought to defend the satisfaction
theory, he actually embraced the principles of the moral
influence theory. Grotius and Socinus concurred that punitive
justice is merely a matter of God's will remissible without
satisfaction. In Arminian and Socinian theology, Christ's death is
unnecessary for man's salvation, but repentance and faith are a
meritorious condition of forgiveness and remission of
punishment." Both the governmental and moral influence
theories of atonement are essentially utilitarian in nature.
Christ's death was chosen as the most efficient means of
inducing a change in man through natural means of moral
example rather than by the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit.

C. DETERRENCE
Rehabilitation parallels the moral influence theory and
deterrence the governmental theory. Although rehabilitation
has been the favored utilitarian theory of criminologists,
deterrence has enjoyed a certain preeminence in philosophical
discussions. For this reason deterrence is discussed first, and
then rehabilitation. This is a reversal of the order in which
their corresponding theories of atonement were presented.
The deterrence theory holds that persons should be punished,
on the occasion of their conviction, to deter them (special
deterrence) or others (general deterrence) from future crimes
through fear of punishment. 10° Change of behavior, not change
of character, is the focus.
 The deterrence theory finds its modern roots in Jeremy
Bentham's (1849-1832) classic formulation of utilitarianism.
Actions are justified which produce the greatest pleasure for the
greatest number. As man possesses rationality and free will, he
seeks to maximize his pleasure and minimize his pain. The state
can alter behavior of the populace by raising the risk and pain of
exemplary punishment to the point it outweighs the pleasure of
some forbidden act.10' Since punishment is always seen as evil,
even when imposed on the guilty, it is justified only when it
prevents a greater evil.
The chief practical criticism of deterrence is that it has never
proven effective. Of the few scientific studies conducted, most
deal with capital punishment, many are methodologically
flawed, and they draw contradictory conclusions. 02 Andenaes,
perhaps the leading proponent of deterrence, acknowledges
that there is no evidence of special deterrence. However, he
appeals to common sense and experience claiming that
punishment works as a general deterrent even though he
admits there is no way the claim can be proven. 103

The primary theoretical criticism of deterrence is that it

justifies punishing the innocent and places no inherent limit on
the amount of punishment, thus violating the principles of
blameworthiness and proportionality. 1°4 Since all punishment is
evil, whether imposed on the innocent or guilty, it is justified
only if it results in a net maximization of pleasure or
minimization of pain. The evil of punishing an innocent person
could be outweighed by the evil prevented in deterring crime.
Similarly, severely punishing a petty offender is justified if that
evil is outweighed by the cumulative effect of deterring many
petty offenders.
One response to this criticism is that inflicting suffering on
the innocent is not punishment. This leaves the basic moral
issues unresolved. What justifies inflicting suffering on the
innocent?'°5 The second response is to claim that there is never
a utilitarian advantage in punishing the innocent as less
obvious evils will result. The debate takes the form of posing
hypotheticals and counter-hypotheticals designed to show that
the greater good will, or will not, be promoted by punishing the
innocent. The hypotheticals that present seemingly clear
situations in which it is beneficial to punish the innocent are
extremely unlikely to occur. This leads to a third response that
it is only in fantastic situations that it is beneficial to punish
the innocent. Ten's analysis of the debate is rather convincing
in its conclusion that the use of fantastic examples plays a
legitimate role.'° 6
In an attempt to resolve the problems of blameworthiness
and proportionality, several writers have offered compromise
theories incorporating retributive principles. H.L.A. Hart's
theory, distinguishing punishment as a general justifying aim
based on utility from distribution of punishment based on
retributive principles, is the best known. 107 He believes that the
utility of deterrence is the only rational justification for
punishment in general. However, distribution of punishment
in individual cases is limited by blameworthiness and
proportionality. The state may punish only the, guilty, and
only so much as they deserve, regardless of the social gain of
exceeding those limits. At the cost of theoretical inconsistency
Hart disposes of one problem only to acquire the retributivist's
main problem of determining how much punishment is
"deserved" as an upper limit.

These criticisms avoid the most fundamental weakness of

deterrence and all utilitarian approaches—the unsuitability of
empiricism as a viable methodology for social study and
prediction.m

D. REHABILITATION
For nearly a century (1870-1970) the rehabilitation theory held
sway as the "enlightened" rationale for corrections. Crime is
viewed as pathological, requiring treatment based on a medical
model of diagnosis and prescription. 109 A sentence is designed to
"effect changes in the characters, attitudes, and behavior of
convicted offenders, so as to strengthen the social defense
against unwanted behavior, but also to contribute to the welfare
and satisfactions of offenders.,,m Rehabilitation is generally
premised on a deterministic view of behavior found in the
positivist school of criminology. Theories of crime causation
vary from individualistic factors of biology and psychology to
social forces."
Despite a deterministic view of human nature, professionals
engaged in the healing process have acquired the free will
necessary to remold others by means of education, counseling,
psychotherapy, and vocational training."2 More radical
treatment includes electroshock, drug therapy, and
psychosurgery (lobotomies).'" Although socioeconomic factors
are generally considered the major cause of crime, the approach
is not to change society so much as to enable individuals to cope
successfully within the established order." 4 However, because
society is at fault it has a corresponding duty to provide
programmatic cures. Those treatment programs which promote
the greatest reduction in crime at the least cost are justified.

The demise of the rehabilitation theory is due to a loss of faith

in the ability to rehabilitate" 5 and ideological attacks by critical
criminologists of the extreme left." 6 Perhaps the single greatest
blow to the theory was Robert Martinson's research and
conclusions that nothing works." 7
While the layman's perception of rehabilitation is that it is
too soft on criminals, most scholarly criticism focuses on the
fact that in practice it is cruel and arbitrary. 18 Because
diagnosis and treatment is necessarily an ongoing process
based on a cumulation of knowledge about the inmate,
sentences must be indeterminate. The inmate's cooperation in
mandatory programs designed to change his character is the
condition of release. Because sentencing decisions are not
based on culpability there is great disparity in prison terms,
thus violating the principle of proportionality. Convicts
especially hate the process because they deem it unfair.
A consistent application of the rehabilitative premise that
criminals are not morally responsible would work a drastic
change in criminal law and procedure. Every offense would be
strict liability as attention shifts from mens rea to the question
of whether a defendant did certain acts or caused a particular
harm."9 Mental state, if relevant at all, would be determined by
mental health experts as part of a treatment program. Writers
have expended much effort to make the basic doctrines of mens
rea and defenses compatible with the utilitarian ethics of
deterrence and rehabilitation.'"
Likewise, procedural safeguards such as proof beyond a
reasonable doubt and the privilege against self incrimination,
which make it more difficult to identify the sick, make little
sense. Nor would it make sense to initiate proceedings only
after a crime is committed if there is reason to believe a person
will commit a crime. Logically, a comprehensive system of civil
commitment would divest criminal law and procedure.12'
 Deterrists have criticized rehabilitation because its effect
is limited to convicts and has no impact on potential
offenders. The rehabilitationist might respond that a rational
policy would include a preventive program of social hygiene
that encompasses all potential offenders. It is plausibly
argued that this makes more sense than trying to control the
entire population through fear.
The radical left attacks these "mainline" liberals for
betraying those it claims to champion. Rehabilitationists
maintain a system designed to inculcate middle class values
and belief in the neutrality of law. E 22 Worse yet they do. it to
protect their own vested personal and economic interests in
the government bureaucracy. Radicals believe crime is not a
matter of individual pathology, but rather the ability of
dominant groups to define the conduct of dominated groups as
criminal.'" The entire social structure must be altered,
replacing domination with solidarity.
Utilitarian criminal sanctions, just like utilitarian theories
of atonement, are primarily designed to effect a change in the
offender rather than to satisfy justice. Justice and
reconciliation become nearly synonymous with social order,
and law is the immediate instrument to that end. Both
deterrence and rehabilitation sever law from morality, though
in different ways. Deterrence views man as a free and rational
decision-maker who acts on a hedonistic principle of
maximizing pleasure rather than the rationality of ethical
discernment of right and wrong. The state is therefore able to
alter social behavior by manipulating pain and pleasure
through the instrumentality of law. The rehabilitationist views
man as a product of deterministic forces, or as sick rather
than morally blameworthy. Treatment is then little more than
behavioral conditioning designed to enforce social conformity
through the instrumentality of law. The logic of both is
perfectly compatible with the positivist view that law has no
necessary moral content.
Both Grotius and Socinus believed that Christ's death was an
unnecessary, but highly expedient, means to change man and
preserve order. Utilitarian civil sanctions, like Christ's death, are
selected for their expediency to a particular end. These
utilitarian views of atonement were quite compatible with, and
perhaps smoothed the way for, an emerging view of the state
which was becoming less concerned with exaction of perfect
justice in individual cases, and more concerned with law as an
instrument for advancing a particular vision of the common
good.'24

Just as Arminian and Socinian theology confuse the work of

Christ and the Holy Spirit, utilitarian views of civil justice
confuse the roles of state and church. In neither is the
immediate supernatural work of the Holy Spirit crucial for
reconciliation, but rather the exemplary impact of Christ's
death by means of fear and moral suasion is decisive. Both of
these are essentially natural means of reformation, equally
available to the state, undermining the church's institutional
distinctiveness. As the church compromises its ministry of
reconciliation, the state assumes it to the eventual neglect of
its ministry of justice.

III. COMMUNITARIAN THEORIES OF

ATONEMENT AND CIVIL JUSTICE
A. MYSTICAL THEORY OF ATONEMENT
The mystical theory is like the moral influence in that
Christ's death plays no essential role in man's salvation, and
atonement is exclusively a subjective change in man. The
crucial difference is that in the mystical theory this change
occurs because the incarnation effects a mystical union
between God and man that imparts a new principle of life. The
mystical theory has been a recurring one in Church history;' 25
however, until the nineteenth century it found neither
widespread allegiance nor comprehensive development. This
changed dramatically when the "father of modern theology,"
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), articulated a mystical
view of Christ's person and work in The Christian Faith.' 26
Schleiermacher rejected the natural theology of
Enlightenment rationalism and Protestant orthodoxy. He
defined true religion as the sense of absolute dependence
(God-consciousness), which is known immediately through
feeling and contemplation. This feeling of absolute
dependence is the veritable and essential existence of God in
man.'27 Sin is the failure to hold a conscious awareness of one's
unity with God and absolute dependence on him. According to
Schleiermacher, man is both spirit which is inherently God-
conscious, and flesh which lacks God-consciousness.' 28 Because
flesh develops earlier than spirit it retards the development of
God-consciousness.'29 When spirit becomes aware that flesh is
retarding its determinative power, man experiences guilt and
suffering.'"

This condition is man's created nature and is not the penal

consequence of Adam's sin.'31 Adam's sin, like everyone's, was
trivial, but it has a social impact that further encumbers the
individual's struggle for God-consciousness. Schleiermacher
believed that sin "is best represented as the corporate act and
the corporate guilt of the human race." 132 To deny corporate
guilt would throw man upon his individual resources for
salvation."'
Schleiermacher believed that all men are conscious of their
need for a Redeemer. Christ the Redeemer differs from other
men "by the constant potency of his God-consciousness."f 34 By
the incarnation Christ entered into the common life of
humanity, participating in it and communicating his God-
consciousness to it. He assumes man into the power of his God-
consciousness (redemption)135 and into his blessedness,
alleviating the suffering of guilt (reconciliation). 136 Christ
continues to exert a saving influence by an immediate
communication of God-consciousness through the church.
Therefore, it is now through union with the community that
individuals are assumed into Christ's God-consciousness and
experience union with God.137

Because Schleiermacher's salvation is a purely subjective

work in man, accomplished by Christ alone, there is no place for
the distinctive person and work of the Holy Spirit. He uses
standard theological terms such as "regeneration,"
"justification," and "sanctification" to refer to nothing more
than Christ's redeeming activities.'38 There is real doubt as to
whether even Christ and the church play an essential role in
man's salvation since every individual and community has the
potential to develop, and assume others into, God-
consciousness.139 It may be fair to say that man is already
reconciled to God and he need only become consciously aware of
that reality.
Since Schleiermacher, modernism has taken many theological
forms including liberalism140 and neo-orthodoxy.'41 They have in
common a purely subjective effect of the work of Christ.
Although no single school dominates the theological landscape
today, the Latin American form of process theology, known as
liberation theology, is of special interest because of its influence
and explicit relation to civil justice. It teaches that salvation
comes in siding with the oppressed in their struggle for
liberation. Most criticism focuses on its attendant Marxist social,
economic, and political ideology without doing full justice to its
underlying theology. Leonardo Boff's Jesus Christ Liberator,'42 is
the most comprehensive articulation of a liberation Christology.

Boff says that the world is growing in complexity, unity and

consciousness as it proceeds through a series of stages
culminating in the divinization of man and the humanization
of God."' Sin is viewed as a lack of unity, or alienation of one
from another, resulting in the domination of some groups by
others. Although oppressive social structures may reinforce
alienation, the root cause of sin is the fact that mankind has
not progressed past the stage of anthropogenesis to
Christogenesis. There is an animating principle of harmony in
the cosmos which has always worked unconsciously but
apparently teleologically. It is now working with a growing
sense of self-consciousness in man, that enables him to direct
the course of progress toward universal solidarity, and thus,
sinlessness.344 Jesus acts as something of a catalyst permeating
mankind with a sense of community that increases man's self-
conscious directing powers.' 45
Christ is sinless by virtue of the fact that he lived with a
conscious awareness of the harmony of the world, and he works
to liberate victims of sin by establishing a classless solidarity.'"
He is the ultimate human being that all will become."' Having
penetrated the world, Jesus mystically entered the
unconsciousness of mankind and is now present in all reality
"acting and fermenting the goodness, humanity, brotherhood,
communion, and love in all human beings.'" His death was
unnecessary and certainly had no penal significance, yet it
displayed his solidarity with the poor and love for their
oppressors. Because the poor are especially close to God, and he
lies "hidden and anonymous" in them, the most direct access to
God is through union with them. 49 Active participation in the
cause of the poor is the way of salvation, and Christ is present
in those who further their cause.'" The commitment of one's
life to the oppressed results in the formation of "a planetary,
ecumenical, and communal consciousness among people in
search of a new humanism."' 51

Boff gives no specific description of this new order except

that it will be free of domination and alienation, and man
will hold membership in a universal rather than a particular
family. 152 Such a world will not be governed by law but only
a love "that bind[s] human beings with more liberating ties
than those of the law." 3 God does not speak to man revealing
a plan for society or in propositional truths. Only when we
insert ourselves into Christ's life and the cause of the
oppressed can we begin to comprehend the meaning and
unity of the new order of existence." 4

B. SOCIAL JUSTICE
Social justice is an ambiguous term invoked for its emotional
appeal in promoting a vast array of programs designed to make
society just.'" It differs from the other theories in that it uses
state coercion, usually to redistribute property or impair
liberty, without any adjudication of wrongdoing. This
multiplies the rehabilitationist's techniques of social control
and applies them to the entire populace.' 56 Rather than using
the adjudication of wrongs as an occasion to promote some
vision of the good, the state engages in an increasingly
comprehensive, continuous, and purposive intervention in all
social affairs. Regardless of the source of a problem, social
justice demands that the state take corrective action.'"
The first large-scale social justice program was compulsory
schooling with its now flickering hope of curing most social
ills.'" In this century, regulation of the economy gave rise to the
administrative state, redistribution of property gave rise to the
welfare state and institutional care gave rise to the therapeutic
state. The focus of justice has shifted from equality of
opportunity to equality of position.'" At the same time,
criminologists shifted attention to social causes of crime. Since
society is at fault it must redress the problems of illiteracy,
poverty, housing, unemployment, malnutrition, substance
abuse, and broken homes. The state usurps the role of
families,m church, and voluntary associations, which in turn
default on their responsibilities with the ready excuse that only
the state has adequate professional skills and resources to deal
with the problems.' 61

There are two types of attack on social justice theories, the

first being that by every standard of measurement nothing
works. The second type of attack is ideological in nature.
Pervasive state intervention, guided only by the utilitarian goal
of maximizing net social gains, threatens individual liberty.' 62
John Rawls' celebrated treatise, A Theory of Justice,'63 attempts to
resolve the conflict between individual liberty and the
redistributive ethic of utilitarianism.
Rawls distinguishes activities governed by the principle of
liberty which can never be compromised, from economic
rights which may be sacrificed for the common good. 164 He
develops these two principles from an imaginary social
contract which everyone could agree to. The institution of
compulsory education, potentially the greatest threat to
liberty, will presumably play the indispensable role of
ensuring allegiance to the two principles. The extreme
political left is also critical of state-imposed values, however,
their complaint is not so much against imposed values as it is
with the content of the values being imposed.
Utilitarian theories of justice have not worked, and they
conflict with certain shared notions of fairness, yet they enjoy
the continuing perception of being empirically verifiable, and
therefore, scientific.'65 This is based on the pretension that given
time the "social sciences" will make the same types of
evaluations and predictions as the natural sciences. In reality,
there are a seemingly infinite number of variables, most of
which cannot be controlled for purposes of experimentation,
making it impossible to trace cause-effect relations of social
phenomena. Therefore, it is impossible to empirically predict the
effect of social policy decisions. Without proving a theory of
causation, policy-makers set out to treat the entire populace by
prescription. The fact that the entire enterprise is based on
empirically unproven and unprovable assumptions is usually
ignored.

Not only is the utilitarian unable to select an efficient

means to the desired end, he is unable to justify a particular
end as good. Even if there is a shared vision of the good,
there is no assurance that it is "good" indeed and would not
be more painful than pleasurable. This problem becomes
especially critical as social consensus regarding "the good"
breaks down.' 66 Although utilitarian theories have enjoyed
relative immunity to criticism at these fundamental points,
Roberto Unger attests the desperate predicament of the
prevailing methodology:
If he [the historicist] wants to maintain clear lines of
causality, in which cause and effect are neatly matched in
 one-to-one sequences, he has to tear certain events out of
the "seamless web" of history, in which everything seems
to bear on everything else. But in so doing he willfully
disfigures the truth of history which it is his aim to
establish. . . .
Suppose the historicist refuses to sacrifice complex
historical truth on the altar of one-way causation. . . .
Having discovered that all things cause each other in
social life, as in the world at large, he wants to find a way
to represent this insight in what he says about society.
Alas, his eagerness is self-defeating. The more causes he
takes into account, the less he is able to distinguish
discrete relationships of cause and effect. In the end, the
very notion of causality flounders in ambiguity.'67
Unger also rejects rationalism and individual subjectivism, 168
and in his search for a suitable methodology for social study,
concludes with a petition for divine revelation.'" One possible
solution to the problem of knowing anything truly without
knowing everything is that God, the omniscient Creator, has
revealed truth to man, his creation. It does not appear that
Unger's prayer is directed to the God of orthodox Christianity.
Unger believes that in order to solve the knowledge problem we
must resolve the problem of social order, which is the
reconciliation of man.
Perhaps the fundamental problem to be resolved in all
thought is the relationship of universals and particulars. In
political and social discourse it takes the form of the
relationship of the individual to the group. How can you have
community without destroying individual freedom? The
problem appears rooted in the nature of things. Consciousness
is a person's awareness that he (subject) is separate from others
(object). "Otherness" creates two problems. First, another's
freedom places limits on our own freedom. Secondly, there is
no assurance that object and subject share the same
perspective or attribute the same meaning to events. Alienation
is a product of this basic reality of "separateness." Resolving
these problems and working toward "the ideal of a universal
community, is the great political task of modern societies,"° but
"[a]ll moves toward such a community may be compromised by
the separateness of persons."'
Unger writes that the ideology of nineteenth-century liberal
society was one in which men were "governed by self-interest"
and used the "most efficient means to achieve privately chosen
aims."' According to Unger, social cohesion was supposedly
based on impersonal respect, rather than solidarity and a
shared vision of good. The role of law was to ensure individual
rights as a protection against the state, to mediate private
disputes, and to influence private decisions by sanctions. The
rule of law is based on the belief that law is mutually beneficial,
neutral and objective. In such a society there is no true
community, and law merely accentuates and reinforces
separateness. The role of law in the post-liberal welfare-
corporate state has changed. A social order based on private
interest is no longer viewed as natural, and the belief that law
is neutral and objective is questioned. With the rise of policy-
oriented legal reasoning and substantive justice, rights are
less a protection of individuals and more of a justification for
the state's purposive reordering of the social order. Property
and contract rights are no longer seen as neutral, but rather
as political instruments of the established powers. 173
Unger believes that this changing perception of law reflects a
change in social consciousness that is giving expression to a
desire for community. There can be no return to a rule of law
because it is based on an individualistic conception of society.
However, Unger warns that a continuation of the trends of the
welfare-corporate state will be a loss of individual freedom "to
a bureaucratic welfare tyranny that treats all social
arrangements as subjects for governmental manipulation
through regulatory law." 14 Although there is a desire for
community, current social organization and methodologies are
not able to give expression to it.
Unger ties the resolution of the problem of social order to
the problem of methodology. The creation of true
community, based on solidarity, requires a methodology we
do not possess. Yet the development of a new methodology
for social study and predication depends on development of
community. A new methodology must reflect the
interrelatedness of social life, eliminate determinism, and
resolve the problem of objectivity-subjectivity. So we return
to the question—who is the God that Unger asks to speak?
What philosophy states as the union of the
universal and the particular, religion knows as
immanence. What philosophy describes as the
separation of the universal and the particular,
 religion calls transcendence.175

The idea of a union of immanence and

transcendence or of a universal being who
knows and determines all particulars without
destroying their particularity is the idea of
God.176
Unger assumes that the resolution of the problems of
social order and methodology lies in the human
consciousness. It appears that it is not a subjective
individual consciousness, but rather a universal
interpersonal collective consciousness that is God. The
problem of legitimizing a social order, and the resolution of
the problem of meaning, is resolved because object and
subject are one. This new order is governed by solidarity,
which Unger calls the social analogue of love, rather than a
rule of law which is predicated on a lack of community. 177
Solidarity means treating someone as a person and not just a
"bearer of formally equal rights and duties." 78
Unger trusts that there is an existing unity of all things to
which we must be open. He also believes that there is a
correspondence in human nature between being and
goodness that cannot manifest itself in a context of
domination. Man must act in faith upon this belief, and this
faith is expressed through politics. 179 Politics is key to
altering social structure through "transformative praxis" and
altering the consciousness through the "imaginative powers
of the mind." Community then advances through a spiral of
increasing solidarity and decreasing dornination. 180 However,
awareness of unity cannot develop absent face-to-face
relationships with other members of the same group across
the whole spectrum of life's activities.' 8' In such a setting,
"[t]hough the law may be framed to teach men sympathy, all
that may be hoped for in the short run is to force them,
within wider or narrower bounds, to act as if they were
sympathetic.'"" It is not immediately obvious that this is
preferable to a "bureaucratic welfare tyranny." It is also
difficult to see how this resolves the problems of causation
and objectivity-subjectivity without destroying freedom and
the individual.
 Unger's prayer makes it clear that he recognizes the
limitation of thought and action in effecting man's salvation.
What then is to take place in the context of these compulsory
comprehensive face-to-face relationships? He must reject a
view of reconciliation paralleling the moral influence theory of
atonement that would establish reconciliation through
rationalistic devices of teaching and exemplary love. Instead,
Unger's methodology is akin to Schleiermacher's and Boff's,
requiring a setting in which there is an immediate mystical
impartation of the higher consciousness from the spiritual
haves to the have-nots.
In both the mystical and social justice views, issues of
individual sin, and guilt as moral wrongs, are minimized or
eliminated. The focus is on establishing a particular order, or
effecting a change of relationship, without a satisfaction of
justice. In effect, it is reconciliation without atonement and
community without satisfaction of justice. The mystical view of
atonement eliminates the duality between God and man, and in
so doing, eliminates the separateness of individuals. Social
justice, to overcome the problems of the welfare-corporate
state, eliminates the separateness of individuals, and in so
doing creates a new god. In both the mystical and social justice
theories, corporate man and god are one. This would resolve
the legitimacy problem that arises when some individuals or
groups try to impose a particular order on others. However, if
all are one, the problem of maintaining true individuality and
freedom reasserts itself. Neither of the theories offers a
convincing answer to this dilemma.
Both assume that there is a basic unity, either of God and
man, or of all men, and that the alienation they experience is
not so much a moral problem as it is a metaphysical problem. It
seems that the problem of alienation will be resolved when man
becomes fully conscious of this metaphysical unity, and his
oneness, with God and others. While Schleiermacher focuses on
contemplation as the key to the higher consciousness, others
focus on political activity as the key.
The mystical views of atonement not only limit the
importance of Christ's death, they are usually accompanied
by a denial of the existence of the Holy Spirit as a distinct
person in the Trinity. This is paralleled in the social justice
theories in which the state becomes preeminent, consigning
other institutions to irrelevance. In Unger's view, the logical
conclusion would be that state and society are one. Although
Unger suggests that in his new society there would be
multiple organic groups, they appear to be nothing more
than particular expressions of the universal community.' 83
There is no need for a church since the state plays a
redemptive rather than judicial role. In fact, the church
would have to be eliminated as it contends there are two
communities of men—saved and unsaved. Additionally,
orthodox Christianity, which believes there is a duality
between the Creator and creation, would be eliminated
because it provides the theoretical basis for the rule of law
notion that there is an objective and neutral standard.' 84

CONCLUSION
Although my primary aim has not been to offer a
comprehensive case for a particular view of atonement and
civil justice, I have argued that only the satisfaction and
retribution-restitution views are distinctly different and
justifiable in terms of Christian theology and a biblical
woridview. It is a larger and more basic matter still to offer a
defense of one's worldview. Perhaps that is why most writers
do not even try to articulate the basic presuppositions from
which they work. The fact of the matter is that everyone
operates on the basis of certain presuppositions, whether they
do so self-consciously and honestly or not. Recognizing that
these presuppositions are based on faith does not mean that
they must be at odds with knowledge or operate in a separate
realm. Rather we believe that we might know, and there is a
wonderful communion between thought, action and faith that
is properly grounded.
For it is true that the more richly we are nourished in Holy
Scripture by the things that feed us through obedience, the
more accurately we are carried along to the things that satisfy
through knowledge. . . . Certainly this is just what I say: He who
will not believe will not understand. For he who will not believe
will not gain experience, and he who has not had experience
will not know.185
 Endnotes
VIII. Hugo Grotius, A Defence of the Catholic Faith
Concerning the Satisfaction of Christ, against Faustus
Socinus (Frank H. Foster, trans. 1889) (1st ed. 1617,
translated from Amsterdam ed. 1679), p. 98.
IX. Romans 3:25 (all quotations from New International
Version).
X. See, Peter W. Low et aL, Criminal Law (1986), pp. 1-28;
Richard G. Singer and Martin R. Gardner, Crimes and
Punishment (1989), pp. 45-211.
XI. See, H.L.A. Hart, Punishment and Responsibility (litho.
reprint 1970) (1968); C.L. Ten, Crime, Guilt, and
Punishment (1987).
XII. The problem seems no closer to a resolution today than
one hundred years ago when Sir Henry Maine observed:
"All theories on the subject of punishment have more or
less broken down, and we are at sea as to first
principles." J.M. Finnis, "Old and New in Hart's Philosophy
of Punishment," 8 The Oxford Rev. (1968), p. 73.
XIII. See Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The
Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (1983), and
sources cited therein.
XIV. Roberto M. Unger, Law in Modern Society
(1976), p. 83.
XV. A more direct "religious" approach to justifying a theory
of punishment would be to study the civil law sections of
scripture, but there are three distinct advantages to
approaching the issue through the atonement. The
scriptures treat Christ's death much more
comprehensively, as redemption is the central theme of
the Bible. Secondly, the principles of justice as reflected
in the atonement have received far greater attention
than the civil law, so there is more to draw from. Thirdly,
general principles of justice are not as clear from the
biblical case law, and that case law often has the
appearance of being time-bound.
XVI. There are various schemes for categorizing the
theories. This particular scheme, with some variations, is
found in numerous evangelical Calvinist and Arminian
theologies of the past two centuries.
XVII. Although it is common to treat retribution,
deterrence, and rehabilitation as the chief theories of
criminal sanctions, it is not at all usual to list social
justice as a category. I have done this for several
reasons. Critical theories of criminology are a type of
social justice theory and do not fall under the traditional
categories. Also, Christ's atonement has an importance
for civil justice that goes beyond punishment. And
finally, even the issue of punishment, narrowly defined,
cannot be properly addressed and understood except in
a larger context.
XVIII. Romans 13:4: "For he [the civil magistrate] is
God's servant to do you good. But if you do wrong be
afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is
God's servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on
the wrongdoer."
XIX. 2 Corinthians 5:19b-20: "And he has committed
to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore
Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his
appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be
reconciled to God."
XX. Ephesians 6:17.
XXI. Anselm of Canterbury, in A Scholastic Miscellany:
Anselm to Ockham (Eugene R. Fairweather, ed. & trans.
1956), p. 100. The Library of Christian Classics (John
Bailie et al., eds. 1953-69), vol. 10.
XXII. Robert S. Franks, The Work of Christ (1962), p.
128: "Nowhere is his theory more revolutionary."
XXIII. A Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham, bk.
1, ch. xi.
XXIV. Ibid., bk. 1, ch. xix.
XXV. Ibid., bk. 2, ch. iv.
XXVI. Ibid., bk. 1, ch. xi.
XXVII. Ibid., bk. 1, ch. xx; bk. 2, ch. xiv; bk. 1, ch.
xxiv.
XXVIII. Ibid., bk. 2, ch. vi.
XXIX. The Work of Christ, p. 137: "For the remarkable
thing about Anselm's theory is his distinction of
satisfaction from punishment, and his avoidance of the
idea that Christ's satisfaction is the vicarious endurance
of our punishment, whether as self-inflicted or inflicted
by God."
XXX. 23. Ibid., pp. 135-37; See also, Law and
Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal
Tradition. pp. 68-72, 172-73.
XXXI. 24. The Work of Christ, pp. 138-40. See generally
Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal
Tradition, pp. 49-84 (ch. 1).
XXXII. 25. John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian
Religion (Henry Beveridge, trans. 1845,
photolithoprint 1981). Modern works from the
Reformed perspective include Archibald A. Hodge,
The Atonement (reprint 1987) (1867); Benjamin B.
Warfield, The Person and Work of Christ (Samuel G.
Craig, ed. 1980); and John Murray, Redemption
Accomplished and Applied (1955).
XXXIII. 26. The Institutes of the Christian Religion, bk. 1,
ch. xv; Genesis 1:27-29; 2:1517; 3:14-24. See also
Exodus 24 and Deuteronomy 28 (these events were
covenant renewal ceremonies).
XXXIV. 27. The Institutes of the Christian Religion, bk.
2, chs. i-iii and ch. xvi, para. 3; Romans 3:9-23; 5:12-
21; Ephesians 2:3; Psalm 51:5. See also The
Atonement, ch. vii.
XXXV. 28. The Institutes of the Christian Religion, bk.
2, eh, xvi, para. 1; Psalm 51:3-4; Romans 1:18.
XXXVI. The Institutes of the Christian Religion, bk. 2, ch.
xvi, para. 4: For it was not after we were reconciled to
him by the blood of his Son that he began to love us, but
he loved us before the foundation of the world, that with
his only-begotten Son we too might be sons of God
before we were anything at all. Romans 5:9-11;
Ephesians 2:4-5; Colossians 1:21; 1 John 4:7-12.
XXXVII. The Institutes of the Christian Religion, bk. 2, ch.
xii, para. 3: supra note 25, at bk. 2, ch. xii, para. 3:
Therefore our Lord came forth very man, adopted the
person of Adam, and assumed His name, that he might
in his stead obey the Father; that he might present our
flesh as the price of satisfaction to the just judgment of
God, and in the same flesh pay the penalty which we
had incurred.
Isaiah 53:5: "But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that
brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we
are healed." I Peter 2:24: "He himself bore our sins in
 his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and
live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been
healed." Psalm 49:7-9: "No man can redeem the life of
another or give to God a ransom for him—the ransom
for a life is costly, no payment is ever enough—that he
should live on forever and not see decay." I Peter 1:18-
19: "For you know that it was not with perishable things
such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the
empty way of life handed down to you from your
forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a
lamb without blemish or defect."
XXXVIII. The ceremonial law, in particular the sacrificial
system, is typical of Christ's work on the cross (e.g., John
1:29; Hebrews 10:1-7). Redemption was both by
payment (e.g., the temple tax of Exodus 30:12-16,
release of slaves in Leviticus 25:25-28, and cost of
sacrificial offerings) and by substitutionary death (e.g.,
animal sacrifices of Leviticus 1-7). See also The
Atonement, ch. viii.
XXXIX. The Institutes of the Christian Religion, bk. 2,
ch. xvi, para. 5; bk. 2, ch. xvii. Reformed theologians
refer to Christ's death on the cross in satisfaction of
the negative demands of justice as his passive
obedience while his life of sinless perfection in
satisfaction of the positive demands as his active
obedience. By the first he secured man's pardon; by
the second he secured the reward of eternal life.
Romans 5:10; 6:5-7; Galatians 4:7. See also The
Atonement, ch. xviii.
XL. The Institutes of the Christian Religion, bk. 2, ch. xii,
para. 1; Matthew 26:42; Romans 3:25-26; Galatians
2:21; Hebrews 9:22. Romans 3:25-26 is one of the
most important passages on the forensic significance
of Christ's death. The position that Christ's death was
necessary is defended in C.E.B. Cranfield, The Epistle
to the Romans (1975), Vol. 1, pp. 20848; and John
Murray, The Epistle to the Romans (vol. 1 1959, vol. 2
1965), Vol. 1, pp. 116-21.
XLI. Deuteronomy 32:4; Psalm 92:15; Matthew 5:48;
Revelation 4:8. See also The Atonement, ch. xvi.
XLII. The Institutes of the Christian Religion, bk. 2, ch.
xvi, para. 2: "[Christ] with his own blood expiated the
sins which rendered them hateful to God, by this
expiation satisfied and duly propitiated God the Father,
by this intercession appeased his anger, [and] on this
 basis founded peace between God and man .." Romans
3:25; Hebrews 2:17; 1 John 2:1-2; 4:10 (see King James
Version for its rendering of these verses).
XLIII. Romans 8. See also The Atonement, ch. xiv.
XLIV. The Institutes of the Christian Religion, bk. 2, ch.
iv, para. 1; Romans 6:1523; 7:7-25.
XLV. All of the redemptive covenants with man since
the fall have been covenants of grace, including the
Mosaic. The New Covenant is different not because it is
a covenant of grace rather than law, but because the
mediator of that covenant is Jesus Christ, God's own
Son.
XLVI. The Institutes of the Christian Religion, bk. 2,
ch. iii, para. 8; Ephesians 2:8-10.
XLVII. Commenting on 2 Thessalonians 2:13 Calvin
reminds the reader that "faith itself is produced only by
the Spirit." Ibid., bk. 3, ch. i, para. 4. Calvin further
explains that "we require a transformation not only in
external works but in the soul itself." Ibid., bk. 3, ch. iii,
para. 6. John 3:1-21; Ephesians 2:1; Titus 3:5-7.
XLVIII. Romans 8:1; See also Romans 1:17; 3:24; 5:1-9.
XLIX. The Institutes of the Christian Religion, bk. 3, ch:
ii, para. 33: "For the Spirit does not merely originate
faith, but gradually increases it, until by its means he
conducts us into the heavenly kingdom." Ephesians
3:16-21.
L. See Crime, Guilt, and Punishment, ch. 3; John
Cottingham, "Varieties of Retribution," 29 The Phil. Q.
(1979), p. 238.
LI. I. Kant, Rechtslehre, pp. 195-97 (E. Hastie, trans. 1887),
quoted in Edmund L. Pincoffs, The Rationale of Legal
Punishment (1966), pp. 2-3.
LII. Punishment and Responsibility, pp. 28-53.
LIII.Ibid., pp. 1-27; Herbert L. Packer, The Limits of the
Criminal Sanction (1968), pp. 62-70.
LIV.See K. G. Armstrong, "The Retributivist Hits Back," 70
Mind (1961), pp. 471, 476-77; Jeffrie G. Murphy, "Three
Mistakes about Retributivism," 31 Analysis (1971), p.
166.
LV. Jeffrie G. Murphy, "Marxism and Retribution," 2 Phil &
Pub. Aff. (1973), p. 217.
LVI.See Igor Primorac, "Is Retributivism Analytic?" 56 Philo.
 (1981), p. 203; "The Retributivist Hits Back," p. 471.
The criticism frequently refers to, and misconstrues,
the principle of lex talionis, at least as that principle is
found in the Old Testament. The lex talionis is a rule of
proportionality, not revenge. Even a cursory reading of
biblical law (e.g., Exodus 21:18-27) makes it clear that
it does not sanction a simplistic tit-for-tat system of
mutilation or revenge. An example of revenge that is
the antithesis of biblical justice is found in Lamech's
Song (Genesis 4:23-24). It is an example of deterrence
through fear, with no limits of proportionality.
LVII. "Three Mistakes about Retributivism," p. 166;
Lawrence H. Davies, "They Deserve to Suffer", 32
Analysis (1971-72), p. 136; H. J. McCloskey, "Utilitarian
and Retributive Punishment," 64 The J. of Phil. (1967), p.
91.
LVIII. This is the main thrust of Ten's entire
treatment of retributive theories. Crime, Guilt, and
Punishment, chs. 3-4. See also "They Deserve to
Suffer," p. 137, critiquing S. Benn & R. Peters, The
Principles of Political Thought (n.d.).
LIX. Crime, Guilt, and Punishment, pp. 44-46.
LX. E.g., Deuteronomy 28; Romans 8:28-30; Ephesians 6:8.
LXI. A Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham,
bk. 2, ch. i.
LXII. 55: The Limits of the Criminal Sanction, pp. 23-
26; Crime, Guilt, and Punishment, pp. 38-41, 51-52.
LXIII. Herbert W. Titus, "The Restitutionary Purposes
of the Criminal Law," in Crime and Punishment in
Modern America (Patrick McGuigan & Jon S. Pascale,
eds. 1986), p. 273; Offender Restitution in Theory and
Action (Burt Galaway & Joe Hudson, eds. 1978);
Considering the Victim (Joe Hudson & Burt Galaway,
eds. 1975); Restitution in Criminal Justice (Joe Hudson
& Burt Galaway, eds. 1975); Stephen Schafer,
Compensation and Restitution to Victims of Crime (2d
ed. 1970); Assessing the Criminal: Restitution,
Retribution and the Legal Process (Randy E. Barnett &
John Hagel III, eds. 1977); Daniel Van Ness, Crime and
Its Victims (1986).
LXIV. See Assessing the Criminal: Restitution,
Retribution and the Legal Process, p. 357; See also
Richard A. Epstein, "Crime and Tort: Old Wine in Old
Bottles," ibid., p. 231.
LXV. Biblical law implements both restitution (e.g.,
Exodus 22:1-4) and retribution (e.g., Exodus 21:12-17;
Deuteronomy 25:1-3).
LXVI. There are other authors who argue that the
focus should not be primarily on the offender. See
Ronald J. Rychlak, "Society's Moral Right to Punish: A
Further Exploration of the Denunciation Theory of
Punishment," 65 Tul. L. Rev. (1990), p. 299. Rychlak
focuses on the impact of punishment on law abiding
society rather than the victim. See also Richard Burgh,
"Guilt, Punishment, and Desert," in Responsibility,
Character, and the Emotions (Ferdinand Schoeman,
ed. 1987), p. 316.
LXVII. "The Retributivist Hits Back," pp. 473-74; Egon
Bittner & Anthony Platt, "The Right of the State to
Punish," excerpted from "The Meaning of Punishment,"
2 Issues in Criminology (1966), vol. 2, p. 82, in
Contemporary Punishment: Views, Explanations and
Justifications (Rudolph J. Gerber & Patrick D. McAnany,
eds. 1972), p. 24.
LXVIII. J.D. Mabbott, "Punishment," 49 Mind (1939), p.
152, reprinted in Theories of Punishment (Stanley E.
Grupp, ed. 1971), pp_ 41, 43-44.
LXIX. Unlike the first two principles, this principle
cannot be drawn from the Romans 13 passage or the
principles of justice involved in Christ's atonement. It
can only be proven by an appeal more generally to
principles of law and justice found in scripture.
Generally, the state in scripture has a limited subject
matter jurisdiction. As God's agent, with a ministry of
justice, the state may use coercion only in those
situations where there is a delegation of authority.
LXX. Biblically this is the jurisdiction of the family (e.g.,
Deuteronomy 6:4-9; Ephesians 6:4) and the church (e.g.,
Deuteronomy 33:10; Acts 2:42).
LXXI. John 16:5-15; Romans 15:5; 2 Corinthians 5:11-
21.
LXXII. The Institutes of the Christian Religion, bk. 2, ch.
xvi, para. 16; Ephesians 6:17.
LXXIII. Psalm 133; John 17:23; Ephesians 4:1-6.
LXXIV. A Scholastic Miscellany: AnseIm to Ockham, p.
276.
LXXV. Ibid, p. 283:
 Now it seems to us that we have been justified by the
blood of Christ and reconciled to God in this way:
through his unique act of grace manifested to us—in
that his Son has taken upon himself our nature and
preserved therein in teaching us by word and
example even unto death—he has more fully bound
us to himself by love; with the result that our hearts
should be enkindled by such a gift of divine grace,
and true charity should not now shrink from enduring
anything for him.
LXXVI. Ibid., p. 283.
LXXVII. Ibid., p. 279.
LXXVIII. Mid., p. 282.
LXXIX. This work thereinafter De Jesul has never been
translated into English. See The Polish Brethren
(George H. Williams, trans., ed., & interpreter 1980), p.
255. Franks' treatise on the atonement, The Work of
Christ, pp. 362-73, contains portions of De Jesu in
English. The Racovian Catechism (1605) reflects
Socinus' view of the atonement and his theology in
general.
LXXX. Socinus writes that "Islalvation proceeds from
the mere will of God in pardoning sinners, but is made
known by Christ, the only further condition being our
faith and obedience." De Jesu, pt. I, ch. ii; The Work of
Christ, p. 365. See also Racovian Catechism: "But
when it is fitting that God remit sins and punish when
he wishes, it appears that mercy and justice . . . do
not exist by nature, but that it is rather the effect of
his will." The Polish Brethren, p. 224.
LXXXI. Racovian Catechism: "First, nowhere does
Scripture assert that God is reconciled to us by Christ
but rather that by Christ or his death we are
reconciled or reconciled to God . . . Therefore, in no
way from all these passages is that satisfaction to be
inferred." Ibid., p. 226. See also The Work of Christ, p.
366, commenting on De Jesu, pt. II, ch. vi.
LXXXII. Racovian Catechism, The Polish Brethren, p.
229.
LXXXIII. The Work of Christ, p. 363, Quoting Harnack,
D.G., vol. 3, p. 791 (4th ed. n.d.).
LXXXIV. See the answers to Racovian Catechism
questions 7, 8 and 9, The Polish Brethren, pp. 229-30.
LXXXV. Racovian Catechism, ibid., p. 227.
LXXXVI. The Work of Christ, pp. 368-69, summarizing De
Jesu, pt. I, ch. i & pt. III, ch. ii.
LXXXVII. The Work of Christ, p. 369, summarizing De
Jesu, pt. III, ch. iii.
LXXXVIII. The Atonement, ch.
LXXXIX. The Institutes of the Christian Religion, bk. 3,
ch. i, para. 1.
XC. 1 Corinthians 12:12-31; Ephesians 2:11-22; Colossians
1:21-23.
XCI. See infra at 39-46.
XCII. A Defence of the Catholic Faith Concerning the
Satisfaction of Christ, against Faustus Socinus; John
Miley in The Atonement in Christ (1880), gives perhaps
the most systematic and comprehensive defense of the
governmental view by a Wesleyan Arminian. Grotius
identified with the theology of Jacobus Arrninius, which
generally attempts to be a mediating position between
Calvinism and Socin-ianism. Although not all
theologians identified as Arminian hold to the
governmental view, Miley argues that it is the only view
consistent with Arminian theology. Wiley provides a
useful analysis of the atonement views of several
Arminian theologians, some of whom attempt a
mediating position between the satisfaction and
governmental views. H. Orton Wiley, Christian
Theology (1940), pp. 252-59.
XCIII. A Defence of the Catholic Faith Concerning the
Satisfaction of Christ, against Faustus Socinus, pp. 106-
7.
XCIV. Ibid., p. 51.
XCV. Ibid., pp. 55-64.
XCVI. Ibid., p. 64:
[B]ut the right of punishing does not exist for the sake
of him who punishes, but for the sake of the
community. For all punishment has as its object the
common good, viz. the preservation of order, and
giving an example; so that desirable punishment has no
justification except this cause, while the right of
property and debt are desirable in themselves.
XCVII. Ibid., p. 75:
It is a great error to be afraid, as some are, lest in
 making such a concession we do injury to God, as if we
made him mutable. The law is not something internal
within God, or the will of God itself, but only an effect of
that will. It is perfectly certain that the effects of the
divine will are mutable.
But Grotius makes the same application of principle to
Christ's death, quoting approvingly several of the
Church Fathers that Christ's death was not necessary.
Ibid., p. 103.
XCVIII. Ibid., pp. 121-27.
XCIX. Ibid., pp. 127-28.
C. A.A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology (reprint 1972)
(1879), p. 334. Some Arminians believe this is so
because man's nature was only partially corrupted by
the fall. Others believe there was a total corruption
but that the effect of the atonement was to raise all
men to the level of partial corruption. Arminianism
attempts to be a mediating position between
Pelagianism (man is unaffected by Adam's sin) and
Augustinianism (man is totally corrupted by Adam's
sin).
CI. John Miley, Systematic Theology (reprint 1989), vol. 2, p.
244; See also ibid., vol. 1, p. 522.
CII. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 251-52.
CIII. A Defence of the Catholic Faith Concerning the
Satisfaction of Christ, against Faustus Socinus, pp. 81-
101.
CIV. Ibid., pp. 83-84.
CV. Ibid., p. 86.
CVI. Although Grotius charged Socinus with
improperly applying the Roman private law doctrine
of acceptilatio to the atonement, Grotius in principle
does the same thing. See The Polish Brethren, pp.
256, 282-83 n.25, 285 n.80. See also The Work of
Christ, pp. 401, 417. In effect, Arminianism and
Socinianism both reject the chief cornerstone of the
Reformation that “salvation is by grace rather than
works.”
CVII. Johs Andenaes, "General Prevention—Illusion or
Reality?" 43 J. Crim. L., C & P.S. (1952), pp. 176, 179-80.
Andenaes responds to the charge that deterrence is a
shallow theory of punishment based only on fear.
CVIII. J. Bentham, The Rationale of Punishment (1830),
pp. 19-41, quoted in Criminal Law, pp. 8-9.
CIX. Crime, Guilt, and Punishment, pp. 8-12. Ten and
others rely heavily on Deterrence and Incapacitation:
Estimating the Effects of Criminal Sanctions on Crime
Rates (Alfred Blumstein et al., eds. 1978).
CX. Johannes Andenaes, "The General Preventive Effects of
Punishment," 114 U. Pa. L. Rev. (1966), p. 949.
CXI. Crime, Guilt, and Punishment, pp. 13-14, 141;
Punishment and Responsibility, pp. 24-25, 233-37.
CXII. Crime, Guilt, and Punishment, pp. 14-17.
CXIII. Ibid., pp. 17-18.
CXIV. Punishment and Responsibility, pp. 1-27. For
other compromise theories see Crime, Guilt, and
Punishment, pp. 78-81; John Rawls, "Two Concepts of
Rules," Philosophical Review (1955), p. 4, reprinted in
The Philosophy of Punishment (H.B. Acton, ed. 1969), p.
105.
CXV. Infra at 47-50.
CXVI. George B. Vold & Thomas J. Bernard, Theoretical
Criminology (3d ed. 1986), pp. 350-51.
CXVII. Francis A. Allen, The Decline of ,the
Rehabilitative Ideal (1981), p. 2.
CXVIII. Theoretical Criminology, chs. 1, 3-14. Vold deals
with biological causes in chs. 3-6, psychological in ch. 7,
and social in chs. 8-14. See The Decline of the
Rehabilitative Ideal, pp. 40-42.
CXIX. Ibid., pp. 11-16, 43; Crime and Its Victims, pp. 74-
80; Theoretical Criminology, pp. 350-51.
CXX. The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal, p. 25;
Fred Cohen, The Law of Deprivation of Liberty (1980),
pp. 540-47.
CXXI. See Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social
Structure (1957).
CXXII. See The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal, pp.
26-31.
CXXIII. Ibid., pp. 34-40, 64-65; Theoretical Criminology,
chs. 15 & 16; William Chambliss, "Toward a Radical
Criminology," in The Politics of Law (David Kairys, ed.
1982), p. 230.
CXXIV. Robert Martinson, "What Works? Questions and
 Answers About Prison Reform," 35 Pub. Int. (Spring
1974), p. 22. His views were modified in "New Findings,
New Views: A Note of Caution Regarding Sentencing
Reform," 7 Hofstra L. Rev. (1979), p. 243.
CXXV. The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal, pp: 47-54;
C.S. Lewis, "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment," 3
20th Century (Autumn 1948-49), p. 5, reprinted in
Theories of Punishment, p. 301.
CXXVI. Barbara Wootton, Crime and the Criminal Law
(1963). This approach is critiqued in Punishment and
Responsibility, pp. 195-209 and Crime, Guilt, and
Punishment, pp. 110-22.
CXXVII. Crime, Guilt, and Punishment, pp. 86-122;
Punishment and Responsibility, pp. 28-53, 113-57.
CXXVIII. N. Kittrie, "The Divestment of Criminal Law
and the Coming of the Therapeutic State," 1 Suffolk
U. L. Rev. (1967), pp. 43, 44.
CXXIX. See Theoretical Criminology, p. 13; See also
Chambliss, "Toward a Radical Criminology."
CXXX. E.g., Vold & Bernard, supra note 109, at 15.
CXXXI. The Words of Christ, pp. 404-09.
CXXXII. See Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology,
(photolithoprint 1979) (1892) vol. 2, pp. 581-89; The
Institutes of the Christian Religion, bk. 2, ch xii, paras. 5-
7; The Work of Christ, pp. 327-33; 361n.9; 541n.3.
CXXXIII. F. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (D. Bailie
et al., trans. 1928) (1st ed. 1821, 2d ed. 1831).
CXXXIV. Ibid., p. 17.
CXXXV. Schieiermacher believed that there are three
grades of consciousness. The lowest is that of animals
and children. Although this state is unknown to us, it is
generally agreed that while there is consciousness, it is
not the kind that is objective or introspective, or that
makes a distinction between self and others. The
second stage involves a genuine self-consciousness. At
this stage self-consciousness experiences a conflict
between feelings of dependence and freedom.
Schleiermacher's flesh-spirit dichotomy is not a
Manichean dualism of material and non-material, nor
the orthodox Christian view of conflict between the
remaining sin nature and new life in the Spirit. Rather,
it is the inability of the feeling of absolute dependence
or God-consciousness to control. Ibid., pp. 18-20. The
 third grade is absolute dependence or God-
consciousness.
CXXXVI. Ibid., p. 274.
CXXXVII. Ibid., pp. 355-61.
CXXXVIII. Ibid., p. 291.
CXXXIX. Ibid., p. 285. See also Ibid., pp. 287-88:
Now if the sinfulness which is prior to all action
operates in every individual through the sin and
sinfulness of others, and if, again, it is transmitted by
the voluntary actions of every individual to others and
implanted within them, it must be something genuinely
common to all. . . This solidarity means an
interdependence of all places and all times in the
respect we have in view. . . . [A]nd the aggregate power
of the flesh in its conflict with the spirit . . is intelligible
only by reference to the totality of those sharing a
common life, and never fully in any one part. . .
CXL. Ibid., p. 289.
CXLI. Ibid., p. 385.
CXLII. Mid., p. 425.
CXLIII. Ibid., p. 431.
CXLIV. Ibid., p. 363:
[T]he recognition of the sinless perfection in Jesus
Christ, definitely constraining us to the new corporate
life, must in the same way be still His work. But there is
given to us instead of His personal influence, only that
of His fellowship, in so far as even the picture of Him
which is found in the Bible also originated in the
community and is perpetuated in it.
CXLV. Ibid., p. 47'7.
CXLVI. Ibid., p. 563:
The unity of the Spirit is to be understood in , the same
sense as the unity which everyone attributes to the
characteristic form taken by human nature in a nation;
even those who ascribe being only to the separate
individual may still say that each man's personality is
the national character modified by the original basis of
his own nature.
See also Ibid., pp. 34-39, 62-76.
CXLVII. See generally James C. Livingston, Modern
Christian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Vatican II,
 (1971), pp. 251-57, 262-68.
CXLVIII. Cornelius Van Til, Barth's Christology (1977)
(assessment of Karl Barth's Christology as mystical).
CXLIX. Leonardo Boff, Jesus Christ Liberator (trans.,
1978).
CL. Ibid., pp. 185, 197.
CLI. Ibid., pp. 234-35:
Cosmogenesis gave rise to biogenesis, anthropogenesis
emerged from biogenesis, and from anthropogenesis
there emerged Christogenesis. . .. The reality that
surrounds us is not a chaos but a cosmos, a harmony.
The more it progresses the more complex it becomes;
the more complex it becomes the more it is unified, the
more it is unified the more it becomes conscious of
itself....In this perspective, the human being does not
emerge as an error in calculation
.. but as the point where the global process becomes
conscious of itself and begins to direct itself.
CLII. Ibid., p. 24.
CLIII. Ibid., p. 202.
CLIV. Ibid., p. 241.
CLV. Ibid., p. 218.
CLVI. Ibid., pp. 284-85.
CLVII. Ibid., p. 219.
CLVIII. Ibid., p. 236.
CLIX. Ibid., p. 77.
CLX. Ibid., p. 195.
CLXI. Ibid., p. 182.
CLXII. "The absence of a dominant theorist or a single
commanding system of thought endorsing the welfare
state has been documented again and again." Sidney
Hook, "'Welfare State'—a Debate that Isn't," in The
Welfare State (E.1. Schottland, ed. 1967), p. 167,
quoted in Ronald H. Nash, Social Justice and the
Christian Church (1983), p. 59.
CLXIII. Kittrie, "The Divestment of Criminal Law and the
Coming of the Therapeutic State,". pp. 54-55.
CLXIV. F.A. Hayek, New Studies (1978), p. 110.
CLXV. See E.I.F. Williams, Horace Mann: Educational
 Statesman (1937), pp. 24849, quoting from
"Introduction," 3 The Common Sch. J. (Jan. 1, 1841), p.
15.
CLXVI. See Edgar Bodenheimer, Jurisprudence: The
Philosophy and Method of the Law (1974), pp. 229-36.
CLXVII. See The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal, pp.
15, 20-21.
CLXVIII. "The Divestment of Criminal Law and the Coming
of the Therapeutic State," p. 56; A. A. Stone, Mental
Health and Law: A System in Transition (1975), pp. 1-6,
excerpted in The Law of Deprivation of Liberty, pp. 214ff.
CLXIX. The tension that exists between individual liberty
and social justice notions of the common good is
addressed in Jurisprudence: The Philosophy and Method
of the Law, pp. 240-45.
CLXX. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971).
CLXXI. Rawls' two principles are:
First: each person is to have an equal right to the most
extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty
for others.
Second: social and economic inequalities are to be
arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected
to be to everyone's advantage, and (b) attached to
positions and offices open to all. Ibid., p. 60.
CLXXII. See, e.g., Theoretical Criminology, pp. 36, 340-
363; "The Divestment of Criminal Law and the Coming of
the Therapeutic State," pp. 58-60.
CLXXIII. The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideals, pp. 36-
37.
CLXXIV. Law in Modern Society, pp. 12-13.
CLXXV. Ibid., pp. 1-23. Knowledge and Politics
CLXXVI. Roberto M. Unger, Knowledge and Politics
(1984), p. 295:
Desirous of faith, touched by hope, and moved by love,
men look unceasingly for God. Their search for Him
continues where thinking must stop and action fail. And
in their vision of Him they find the beginning and the
end of their knowledge of the world and of their
sympathy for others. So is man's meditation on God a
final union of thought and love—love which is thought
disembodied from language and restored to its source.
 But our days pass, and still we do not know you fully.
Why then do you remain silent? Speak, God.
(170) Law in Modern Society, p. 266.
(171) Ibid., p. 258.
(172) Ibid., p. 24.
(173) Ibid., pp. 192-220.
(174) Ibid., p. 129; see also ibid., pp. 216-23.
(175) Knowledge and Politics, p. 290.
(176) Ibid., p. 291.
(177) Law in Modern Society, pp. 206-07.
(178) Ibid., p. 206. The family is a great inspiration for this
vision of community because in it members relate on the
basis of love. In true community all members would relate in
a similar manner. Yet Unger says the family is a foe that
must be transformed because it competes with the
universal community for the allegiance of its members.
Knowledge and Politics, p. 264.
(179) Law in Modern Society, pp. 247-48.
(180) Knowledge and Politics, p. 239.
(181) Ibid., pp. 262-67.
(182) Law in Modern Society, p. 215.
(183) Knowledge and Politics, pp. 236-77.
(184) See Law in Modern Society, pp. 76-83.
(185) 185. AnseIrn, "Letter of Anselm to Pope Urban II," in A
Scholastic Miscellany: AnseIm to Ockham, pp. 97, 97-98.
 PART V
DIVINE ACTION: MORAL OR MIRACLE?
 Divine action and the problem
of miracles
Mark W Worthing
ISCAST Online Journal 2009
ISCASTChristians in Science & Technology
www.iscast.org
CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVES ON SCIENCE AND
TECHNOLOGY
This paper was presented at the Conference on Science and
Christianity (COSAC) 2003 held at Avondale College,
Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia from 18 to 20 July
2003. It was first published in COSAC2003 Collected
Papers: God, Science and Divine Action: God’s Interaction
with His Creation

Abstract
Miracles may be meaningless within science, but that does
not make them meaningless. A miracle is a manifestation of
divine power, though it need not always transcend physical
laws. However, physical laws may not be so immutable in a
statistical quantum universe. Often a miracle is of a very
personal kind. Does God intervene? He surely can, but how
often does He?

Does science leave room for the

miraculous?
When people learn that I have an interest in both theology
and the physical sciences one of the most common questions
asked - once the obligatory creation-evolution question has
been cleared out of the way - is: 'Does science leave room for
miracles?'. There are really only two ways I can honestly
answer that question: 'No', and 'It depends upon how one
understands science and, more importantly, miracle'.
Science, by virtue of its fundamental assumptions, has no
formal place for the category of miracle. For the Christian, this
may initially sound problematic. But it need not be. By
traditional definition (and we will come back to this) a
miracle is something that cannot be explained by any known
or suspected physical laws or processes. In the face of a
genuine miracle the most science can do is say that we do
not understand how a certain event or phenomenon is
possible. Science is not even in a position to verify a possible
miracle because we can never exclude the possibility that a
physiological explanation might someday be available. For
this reason, the category of miracle is not scientifically
meaningful. This does not, however, mean that the category
of miracle is meaningless. The assumption is made by many
that what is not scientifically meaningful, has no meaning at
all. This line of thinking goes back to an unfortunate but
common informal assumption of science that only what
science can legitimately examine is real and meaningful.
For the Christian thinker, this conclusion is unacceptable for
several reasons. Most importantly, our Christian faith is based
upon the assumption that two foundational miraculous events
actually occurred in human history: the incarnation and the
resurrection. Also, Christian views of God as transcendent
Creator imply that God must at least in theory be able to
intervene within God's creation even if this means a violation or
suspension of the ordinary laws of nature.
This problem now leaves the Christian thinker with a choice.
We might choose to challenge the fact that modern science has
no place for the category of miracle. If we could have a science
that recognised the fact that miracles may and do occur, and
that these could potentially be verified and incorporated into
our total description of reality, then it would seem that our
theological problem would be solved. While this route may
appear attractive to many, I personally believe it to be a
mistake. It would involve not only a radical reinterpretation of
the nature of science - problematic in itself - but even more
worrying, it would necessarily entail a reinterpretation of
miracle and of divine action in which the very concept of divine
transcendence would become difficult to maintain.
The other option is to challenge the popular assumption of
science that only that which is accessible to its methods and
subject to explanation based upon these methods is worthy of
the classification 'real.' Personally, from a scientific standpoint,
I am loath to invoke the miraculous to explain any particular
occurrence. I am even more unwilling to accept that everything
must have a scientific explanation. That is to say, as a Christian,
I remain necessarily always open to the fact that there is more
to the totality of what is real than I am able to comprehend or
explain within the structure and methods of even the best
possible science.
But how does one do this within the context of modern
science and orthodox Christian faith? This is the question that
is of particular relevance to all contemporary Christians. But it
is particularly acute for those of us who, through our training
and in the context of our professional and faith commitments,
have a foot in both worlds. Before I come back to this question,
however, I need to do two things. Firstly, I want to tell you a
story. Secondly, I would like to explore with you some of the
traditional understandings of miracle and divine intervention
within the context of modern science.

Miracles are personal

First the story. Those of you present at COSAC 2001
conference will recall that I asked for prayer regarding a very
difficult ethical decision with which my wife and I were faced. A
routine ultrasound revealed that not all was well with our
expected fourth child. A series of further tests revealed that the
male foetus suffered from a complete congenital diaphragmatic
hernia of the left side. His intestines, kidneys and spleen were
in his chest cavity and his heart had been pushed over into the
right side against the right lung. His left lung would not
develop into more than a nob, and his right lung was greatly
restricted in size and further tests showed that it was also
partially collapsed. The baby was perfectly fine so long as he
remained within the womb but as soon as he was born he would
be unable to breathe to a sufficient extent to sustain life. His
one semifunctional lung was simply too small and would be too
underdeveloped to sustain respiratory assistance long enough
to fully develop. The medical experts gave him at best a 20%
chance of survival, but cautioned that this was probably
optimistic.
 There was, however, something they had tried only a few
times previously that they presented to us as an option that
would increase our baby's chances of survival. They were the
only centre in the world currently trying this procedure of
radical steroid treatment since previous studies indicated that
while increasing the maturity (but not the size) of lungs in such
cases, there was a 100% percent occurrence of brain damage in
non-human test subjects, along with some physical and mental
health risks to the mother.
We read all the literature we could find in the next week or
so, including the studies that had caused this option to be
banned from human testing in the rest of the world.
Scientifically, I found the studies wanting. Proven was that
sheep undergoing this treatment were born with a reduced
brain size of at least 17%. What had not been studied, but was
only assumed, was that humans would experience the same
result, that the brain growth was not simply developmentally
delayed (for no lambs had been allowed to live beyond birth),
and that smaller brain size meant significant mental
impairment.
Our earliest contacts at the hospital had urged us (more
strongly than I felt appropriate) to consider abortion - an
option chosen by two-thirds of all parents with a foetus with
this condition, including, we were told, many who were not as
severe as ours. We worried that those who were eager for us to
try the experimental programme simply needed more hard
data for their on-going science experiment. No one at the
hospital was allowed to tell us what they thought we should do.
At the conclusion of the last COSAC conference we had made
our decision. We agreed to try the experimental programme.
The hospital ethics committee had in the meantime approved
us for the programme on the basis that the baby was not
otherwise expected to live, and if by some chance he did, would
likely suffer brain damage from lack of oxygen in any event.
Therefore there was really nothing to lose.
If you have never experienced anything like this, there are no
words to describe what it is like to go through months of
pregnancy and finally many hours of labour in the knowledge
that as soon as the baby is born it is more likely to die than to
live. Or to choose a name that is more likely to grace a
headstone than to take a child through life. Many friends who
had lost babies shared with us their experiences but there is
nothing like the pain of going through the experience for
oneself.
And of course, we prayed - a lot. We had several
congregational communities, many at the theological college
where I worked, families from school, relatives overseas, all
praying earnestly for our unborn son. Just before midnight on
the 16th of October my wife gave birth to a still unnamed son
who was rushed to a resuscitation room within 30 seconds of
his birth. It was half an hour before we had a second brief look
at him and would be nearly three weeks before we were able to
hold him for the first time. The day after his birth we gave him
the name Caelim Aldrich. Caelim is adapted from the old Irish
for 'skinny and sickly', and Aldrich is old English for 'a strong
fighter'. They were names that his siblings helped us choose
and reflected both our fears and hopes. Thirty-six hours after
his birth he had major surgery to put all his internal organs
back into place and create a diaphragm so that his lungs would
have some space into which to expand. He nearly lost his battle
for life in those first weeks but finally turned the corner. By
Christmas he was home with us.
Today he is 20 months old. He says 'dada' and 'mama', and
knows how to work the television remote and irritate his
brothers and sister. There is no indication of intellectual
impairment, and other than a massive scar and still somewhat
sunken left chest cavity; you would not be able to tell there was
ever any problem. Our friends, family and pastor all proclaimed
it a miracle. But was this a miracle? If not, then what can we
call a miracle? This is an ordinary kind of story of the sort that
most Christian families and congregations will call to mind
when talking about miracles.
Theological and scientific reflections, if they are going to be
of any practical use, must be able to address this kind of real
life experience. But before I suggest whether this and similar
cases can rightly be viewed as a miracle, we need to turn to
some more formal considerations in the discussion.

What is a miracle?
 Stephen Hawking reflected the views of many within the
science community when he wrote:

Science seems to have uncovered a set of laws

that, within the limits set by the uncertainty
principle, tell us how the universe will develop
with time, if we know its state at any one time.
These laws may have originally been decreed by
God, but it appears that he has since left the
universe to evolve according to them and
does not now intervene in it.

Hawking 1988 pp. 122 f.

What Hawking is saying is that the physical laws reign
supreme in the universe and cannot be interrupted or excepted
- even by a God who may have originally created them. This
assertion runs headlong against the traditional Christian belief
in miracles, for a miracle, in the mind of many, is precisely that;
an interruption or exception of the physical laws that govern
our universe. Within this view there would appear no place for
the miraculous. But what, precisely, is a miracle?
I will fall back on a definition of miracle that goes back to the
13th century and Thomas Aquinas. It is today still the
predominant view of what constitutes a miracle. The Thomistic
doctrine of miracles specified three conditions that an
event/occurrence must meet in order to qualify as a miracle.
I. It must deal with a fact that, in principle, can be verified
by the methods of historical investigation (momentum
historicum).
II. Its occurrence must be inexplicable by natural laws. In
other words, it must not only be a highly unlikely or
unusual occurrence but also one that is scientifically
inexplicable (momentum scientificum).
III. Because it is a real event that must have a cause, it can
only be seen as having come from God (momentum
theologicum).
These traditional qualifications of what constitutes a
miracle are of continuing value in the dialogue with
natural science. The last qualification constitutes a
theological judgment that does not come directly into play
in the discussion with the natural sciences. It would
seem, however, that the first two qualifications; the
momentum historicum and the momentum scientificum,
could be agreed upon by scientists and theologians alike.
First, a miracle is in principle a historically verifiable
occurrence. Miracles, therefore, from the very beginning are
seen as taking place within the realm open to scientific
investigation. Second, although there is good theological
reason today for broadening the category of 'miracle,' in the
strictest and mo re traditional sense, miracles are occurrences
that are not explicable within the context of presently known
physical laws. It is precisely here, however, that the issue has
usually come to an impasse between theology and natural
science. Theology has traditionally maintained that such
occurrences have not only taken place in the past, but in
principle, can happen in the future. Natural science has
maintained that the laws of physics that govern the physical
processes of our universe are invariable and, therefore,
miracles are in principle impossible.
David Hume was perhaps the first, in the context of the
emerging, modern scientific worldview, to deny the
occurrence of miracles. Hume agreed, 'a miracle is a
violation of the laws of nature', or more precisely, that a
miracle is 'a transgression of a law of nature by a
particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of
some invisible agent'. It is precisely on the basis of this
definition, however, that Hume sought to disprove the existence
of miracles. He argued that there must be:

a uniform experience against every miraculous

event, otherwise the event would not merit the
appellation. And as a uniform experience
amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and
full proof, from the nature of the fact, against
the existence of any miracle.

Hume 1882 p. 93 and n.1

For Hume, therefore, a miracle is excluded by its very
definition. Modern science, if not individual scientists, has
tended to reject miracles on this same basis.
 What is at stake here is not simply a dispute over
individual 'miraculous' occurrences so much as the
question of God's ability to intervene in the created
order. God's general providence takes place apart from
any interruption or exception of physical laws. God
actively directs and sustains the universe, but within the
context of the specifi c physical laws that God
established to govern it. The traditional Christian
doctrine of divine providence, however, also includes the
possibility of a special providence (providentia
extraordinaria) that posits the freedom of God to
intervene in the normal process or order of the physical
universe in a way that presupposes God's ability to
interrupt or except the physical laws that govern the
universe. The continued aff irmation of this doctrine has
been diff icult for modern theology but continues to be
important. The question is not so much one of whether
the earth actually ceased to rotate in the long day of
Joshua, as it is a question of whether the Creator of the
universe could, in principle, intervene in such a way.
The question of miracles has more to do with the
doctrine of God and his relationship to the physical
cosmos than with particular 'supernatural' occurrences.
Not only is the doctrine of miracles signifi cant for our
understanding of God, but also the Christian religion is
built upon two central miracles: the incarnation of God
through the virginal conception of Jesus, and the
resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Clearly, Christian
theology would have great diff iculty rejecting the
possibility of miracles within the context of God's
special providence and remaining Christian theology.
But to what extent can such a special providence be
maintained in the light of contemporary science?

Miracles and physical laws

Any discussion of miracles is likely to run sooner or later up
against the 'immutable laws of physics', which would seem to
disallow such occurrences in principle. It is the apparent
immutability of such laws that led Hawking and others to claim
that God does not now intervene in the physical world.
The American physicist Richard Feynman has written:

there is ... a rhythm and a pattern between the

 phenomena of nature which is not apparent to
the eye, but only to the eye of analysis; and it is
these rhythms and patterns which we call
Physical Laws.

Feynman 1965 p. 13
It is this rhythm and pattern that exists between the
phenomena of nature that science has generally held to be
'immutable', that is, unvarying in its regularity. But this in no
way implies that science has discovered all the laws of nature
or that those we currently accept may not at some point need
to be adapted to fit new discoveries. In fact, scientists are
constantly seeking new laws of nature and revising their
understanding of existing laws. Natural science at its best, and
most realistic, operates under the assumption that many of its
'laws' may well be only provisional approximations. Feynman
provides an amusing description of this situation when he
writes:

We have these approximate symmetries, which

work something like this. You have an
approximate symmetry, so you calculate a set of
consequences supposing it to be perfect. When
compared with experiment it does not agree. Of
course - the symmetry you are supposed to
expect is approximate, so if the agreement is
pretty good you say, 'Nice!', while if the
agreement is very poor you say, 'Well, this
particular thing must be especially sensitive to
the failure of the symmetry'. Now you may
laugh, but we have to make progress in that
way.

Feynman 1965 p. 159

Finding 'new' laws, then, is a 'process of guessing, computing
consequences, and comparing with experiment'. The bottom
line, however, is that whether we know all of the laws of nature
or not, we believe that such laws do exist and are inviolable.
The inviolable nature of physical law is, as we have seen,
presupposed by the traditional doctrine of miracles. It may well
be, as we shall see later, that this presupposition needs to be
reconsidered. But given this traditional understanding of
miracles, the so-called immutability of the laws of nature
constitutes no proof against miracles. From the perspective of
theology, one might say that miracles are the exceptions that
not only assume but also 'prove' the rule. Yet the difficulty is
not so easily removed. Hume's criticism that miracles, by
definition, cannot happen remains a problem.
Recent changes in the understanding of the nature of physical
law, however, especially in quantum theory, have been seen as
allowing possibilities for a theological affirmation of miracles
over against scientific understandings of natural law that did
not previously exist.
Given the fact that all the laws of nature have not yet been
discovered or are not fully understood, there is a certain
difficulty that arises in saying what they do and do not permit
with reference to the total compass of reality. The laws that
describe individual systems may not be satisfactory when
seeking to describe the whole. It is similar to the old trick of the
mathematics teacher who, using a combination of perfectly
valid
equations and formulas, is able to demonstrate that 1+1=1. All
the equations and formulas used are valid within themselves
but somehow, taken together, they produce the wrong answer.
Ahron Katchalsky, speaking of physical beings and the laws of
physical chemistry, points to a similar difficulty:

Our problem is whether the laws governing the

behaviour of single particles suffices for the
treatment of organized assemblies of particles -
even assuming that our knowledge of the laws
were complete.

Katchalsky 1971 p. 101

In this light it would seem that Hawking's statement that it
appears that God, if indeed a Creator-God exists, has left the
universe to evolve according to the laws of nature land does not
now intervene in it', must be seen as an observation and not
made into a rule. Yet at the same time, theology should also
expect such an observation to generally hold true. After all,
what kind of Creator would find it necessary to continually
make adjustments and corrections to his 'good' creation. Even
if a case of divine intervention (in the sense of a miracle
understood in the traditional sense) were verified, the 'laws' of
nature could almost certainly be revised to take into account
the observation as part of the 'natural' phenomena of the
universe.
Perhaps the most radical development, however, in the
understanding of the nature of physical law has been that
introduced by quantum mechanics, which has replaced the
Newtonian understanding of universal law with a quantum-
statistical approach. Philosopher Richard Swinburne has noted
that natural laws may be either universal in form and state
what must happen (classical physics), or statistical in form and
state what must probably happen (quantum physics).

From the eighteenth to the beginning of the

twentieth century most ... [people] believed that
all natural laws were universal. Yet since the
development of Quantum Theory in this century
many scientists have come to hold that the
fundamental natural laws are statistical.

Swinburne 1970 pp. 2ff.

Erwin Schrodinger, for instance, has written that:

physical laws rest on atomic statistics and are

therefore only approximate.

Schrodinger 1944 p. 10
In the light of such a view of natural law a miracle, it would
seem, would be a violation of statistical probability rather than
of some absolute set of laws. The precise theological and
philosophical implications of such an understanding of
miracles, however, remains to be seen.
 Quantum theory, singularities, and miracles
If one takes seriously the divine postulate, and additionally
contends that the divine being is Creator of the universe, then
the question of miracles (if not their actuality then at least
their potentiality) is unavoidable. The nineteenth century
physicist George G. Stokes was certainly correct when he wrote:

Admit the existence of a God, of a personal God,

and the possibility of miracle follows at once.

Stokes 1891 p. 24
A century after Stokes made this observation it might
reasonably be asked whether there are aspects of contemporary
physics that shed a positive light on the theological affirmation
of miracles. Such aspects of contemporary physics would, of
course, prove nothing concerning miracles. They may,
however, serve to demonstrate that the theological affirmation
of miracles cannot be dismissed out of hand. They may also
provide useful models for explaining the Christian doctrine of
miracles in a way intelligible to modern persons. Two insights
from modern physics are here especially relevant: the
uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics and the existence
of singularities within classical cosmological models.
Hume's argument against miracles (and successive versions of
it) is founded upon a Newtonian understanding of physical law
that is today no longer accepted as valid. The
Newtonian/Laplacian understanding of physical law was an
entirely deterministic one. Today, physical law, within the
context of quantum mechanics, is understood statistically. The
philosopher of science Mary Hesse writes that:

Newtonianism has been replaced in modern

physics by ... quantum theory whose laws are
not deterministic but statistical. ... It is
important to notice that according to quantum
theory this is not merely a question of ignorance
of laws which may after all be fundamentally
deterministic, but of irreducible indeterminism in
the events themselves.
 Hesse 1965 p. 37
To say, as does Hesse, that the quantum, statistical view has
'replaced' the Newtonian view, seems a bit premature,
considering that quantum and classical physics have not yet
been successfully unified. Nevertheless, the existence of the
quantum-mechanical, statistical view of natural law, even if its
precise relationship to the classical view remains uncertain, is
of undoubted metaphysical significance. As long as the
statistical view of natural law holds true at some level, the
'universal' understanding of the classical view loses its
character as absolute, deterministic, and universally applicable.
But does the appearance of the concept of a statistical
understanding of physical law change the standing of the idea
of miracle in light of the physical sciences? On the one hand, as
Hesse points out:

...radical as the transformation from Newtonian

to quantum physics is, ... it does not have any
direct effect on the acceptability of the idea of
miracle.

Hesse 1965 p. 38
The fact that laws are viewed as statistical does not mean that
they cannot be violated and that such violation would not cause
the same logical difficulty as within the strictly classical view.
Statistical laws in science are in fact regarded as violated if
events occur which are excessively improbable. ... There is no
question that most events regarded as scientifically
'miraculous' in religious contexts would, if they violate
Newtonian laws, also be excessively improbable on well-
established quantum laws, and therefore would be regarded as
violations of these also.
There is also a sense, however, in which the

...abandonment of the deterministic world-view

in physics has made it more difficult to regard
the existing state of science as finally legislative
of what is and what is not possible in nature.
 Hesse 1965 p. 38
While it is clear that quantum, statistical laws can also be
'violated', it cannot be said with as much precision as in the
case of Newtonian laws what would constitute such a violation.
Swinburne has written that in the case of quantum, statistical
laws,

...it is not in all cases so clear what counts as a

counter-instance to them.

Swinburne 1970 p. 30
It is this flexibility within the understanding of physical law
that has, though not eliminating the difficulty, created a more
congenial
atmosphere for the concept of miracles. Science, at least to
the extent it is influenced by quantum mechanics, is no longer
so certain as to what can and what cannot happen.
The closest physics comes to providing a working model, or
metaphor for miracles is in the occurrence of singularities. All
Friedmann type universes have at some point in their past
history (and if closed also in their future) a point (Big Bang or
Big Crunch) at which the density and curvature of space-time
would have been (or will be) infinite. As Hawking explains:

Because mathematics cannot really handle

infinite numbers, this means that the general
theory of relativity predicts that there is a point
in the universe where the theory itself breaks
down. Such a point is an example of what
mathematicians call a singularity.

Hawking 1988 p. 46
At such singularities our very ability to make predictions
breaks down, providing an example within classical physics not
just of insufficient information but also of fundamental
unpredictability. Not only are 'events'/conditions at singularities
not subject to prediction, but singularities themselves, as the
name suggests, are unique, non-repeatable states.
There is a sense, then, taken metaphorically, in which
miracles can be compared to singularities. In the case of
miracles, as with singularities, we encounter unique,
non-repeatable events at which our ability to make
predictions, based upon the laws of nature, breaks down.
From a theological perspective, one might even say that in
miracles we encounter the infinity of the transcendent God,
which our human understanding of the physical world is not
able to handle. Singularities, of course, are not miracles; and
neither are miracles singularities in the sense in which the
term is used in physics. The two are not to be literally
identified in any way. Yet the idea of a singularity, which we
find especially in a Big Bang or Big Crunch, demonstrates that
even within the normally deterministic worldview of classical
physics there are instances at which predictability and known
laws simply break down and science can do nothing other
than point to the occurrence and confess its inability to
explain or go beyond it. Theology does essentially the same
thing in the face of miracles. For this reason, if no other, the
concept of singularity has metaphorical value for a theological
concept of miracle.
Regarding the question of miracles in the light of modern
science and the Christian belief in a transcendent and
omnipotent God, we are left with a certain tension and
uncertainty that call for restraint in our talk of miracles. To
claim either too much or too little concerning the potential of
divine, miraculous intervention is to be avoided. Arthur
Peacocke has summarised the matter well, writing:

Given that ultimately God is the Creator of the

world ... we cannot rule out the possibility that
God might 'intervene', in the popular sense of
that word, to bring about events for which there
can never be a naturalistic interpretation. ... But
we have ... cogent reasons for questioning
whether such direct 'intervention' is normally
compatible with and coherent with other well-
founded affirmations concerning the nature of
God and of God's relation to the world.

Peacocke 1990 p. 183

 Divine intervention as scientifi c1theological
problem
John Polkinghorne, speaking of the conditions of the early
universe that allowed the development of human life, makes
specific mention of the idea of inflated domains in which
certain parts of the universe have different properties.
According to this view we live in a domain in which the precise
necessary level of expansion is maintained to produce a
universe within the 'anthropic limits' required for the
development of life. Polkinghorne suggests that such an
anthropic selfselection of the conditions of our 'domain' may
have benefits for theism. He explains that:

...if the idea of inflated domains is the reason

why there is a region where the precise balances
resulting from that theory's symmetry breaking
lie within anthropic limits, then that could be a
gain for the theist, who might be loath to invoke
direct divine intervention.

Polkinghorne 1988 p. 35
But why, we might ask, would theists 'be loath to invoke
direct divine intervention' in the world? There is a sense in
which the invocation of miracles has generally been viewed as a
sort of theological 'cheating,' similar to the invocation of a God-
of-the-gaps. When all other explanations fail we invoke the
miraculous intervention of God. Yet as Arthur Peacocke
correctly points out, such intervention is not normally
compatible with and coherent with other well- founded
affirmations concerning the nature of God and of God's relation
to the world.
Contemporary biblical scholars, therefore, often seek every
possible way of explaining an apparent 'miraculous'
intervention of God recorded in Scripture as taking place
within the laws of nature.1 Whereas past generations of
exegetes often did not hesitate to identify an act of intervention
as a 'miracle' contemporary scholars admit the possibility, and
then usually only provisionally, when all other explanations fail.
Physicist and Anglican priest William Pollard typifies this
tendency when he comments that the majority of 'miracles'
recorded in Scripture:

...are the result of an extraordinary and

extremely improbable combination of chance
and accidents. They do not, on close analysis,
involve, ... a violation of the laws of nature.
Pollard 1958 p. 83 2 )

For theology, it is important to distinguish between God's

ability to intervene in the affairs of the world through a
miraculous interruption of natural law, and God's propensity to
actually carry out such acts of special providence. From the
perspective of the natural sciences it is difficult to engage in
dialogue with theology if theology is constantly changing the
rules by invoking miraculous intervention. It is like playing tag
with someone who retains the right to change the 'safety' zones
at their convenience. Thus, partly for apologetic reasons,
miracles have become something of a theological problem that
contemporary theologians are 'loath to invoke'. There are also
theological grounds for this reluctance. As Polkinghorne
suggests, a God who is constantly tinkering with his creation
through special, miraculous intervention begins to look
uncomfortably like a God-of-the-gaps.
Yet when all is said and done, the ability of God to intervene
in the universe remains a fundamental confession of the
Christian doctrine of God. At issue is not so much the
immanence of God - that can be maintained apart from the
ability to interrupt the laws of nature - but the transcendence
of God. A God who cannot in principle intervene
'miraculously' in the universe can hardly be credibly
maintained to be its 'wholly other' Creator. The
transcendence of God, however, is perhaps ultimately more of
a stumbling block than the possibility of miracles. A God who
transcends the physical universe also transcends the ability of
modern science to prove or disprove his existence. In an age
when scientific research stands on the very threshold of
understanding the mysteries of the universe, a God who is
beyond its grasp remains a hard pill to swallow. Mary Hesse is
correct in her contention that miracles, or divine interventions
in general, do not seem to be the main problem, but rather, the
doctrine of God's transcendence. She writes:

Difficult to understand from the scientific point

 of view is theological talk about the special acts
of a transcendent God. The offence of
particularity is still with us, whether these
special acts violate or conform to the laws of
nature. The fundamental problem is not about
miracle, but about transcendence.

Hesse 1965 pp. 41ff.

Rethinking miracles
Now, I could easily end on this note - and a few years ago I
probably would have. But I still feel unsettled about some
things. And I have not yet come back to the question of whether
it is legitimate, in cases like that of my youngest child, to talk of
God's miraculous intervention.
A first point that needs to be made is that divine intervention
in the world or in our lives does not need to violate the laws of
nature. It is entirely possible for a 'special' act of providence
that intervenes in human or natural history to take place
without violating any laws of nature. Arthur Peacocke is correct
to contend that particular events or clusters of events:

...can be intentionally and specifically brought

about by the interaction of God with the world in
a top-down causative way that does not
abrogate the scientifically observed
relationships operating at the level of events in
question.

Peacocke 1990 p. 182

Such a possibility, according to Peacocke, is of value in that it:

...renders the concept of God's special

providential action intelligible and believable
within the context of the perspective of the
sciences.

Peacocke 1990 p. 182

Peacocke, of course, is quite right.
 I wonder whether we have not been too hasty in accepting
for so many centuries such a narrow definition of miracle.
Certainly there is a category of miracle that includes the
suspension or interruption of the regular laws of nature, as
we know them. But if, as we have suggested, our concept of
natural law has been too narrow in the past, then perhaps we
need to look at the theological side of the equation as well.
We have become so focused on the historical and, even more,
on the scientific moment of Thomas' definition that the
theological moment has become a mere addendum, even in
discussions among Christians. What would happen, I wonder,
to our understanding of miracle, if only the first and third of
Thomas' moments were essential from a theological
perspective in order to speak legitimately of miracle. In other
words, we must be agreed that something actually has
occurred, and that, upon careful reflection, it is appropriate
to understand what has occurred in light of God's special care
and love for us in the sense that ordinarily, we would not have
expected it to occur.
The momentum historicum is, in my view, indispensable. I
can think of far too many cases in Christian circles where a
miracle is proclaimed as having taken place and it later turns
out that nothing, indeed, actually happened beyond wishful
thinking. In Adelaide a few years back a prominent Christian
was proclaimed healed of cancer and a full-page newspaper
article was devoted to the story. Six months later the same
newspaper carried her obituary. It turned out there was
never any medical verification that the cancer was gone - it
was only a strong feeling after intense prayer accompanied
by a sharp reduction in the pain and other symptoms of this
particular cancer. We should be very careful before speaking
about a miracle that something has actually occurred.
At the next stage, there may or may not, I believe, be a
momentum scientificum. There are many things that occur
for which I can find no scientifically satisfactory explanation.
But two things need to be said here. A momentum
scientificum does not automatically make something a
miracle. And, I would contend, neither does its absence
disqualify an event as a miracle. As the physicist Carl
Friedrich von Weizsacker reminded us many decades ago:

A miracle was not originally defined as an event

which transcends the laws of nature; for the
 very concept of laws of nature is a modern one.
A miracle is a manifestation of superhuman [or
divine] power.

von Weizsacker 1964 p. 14f.

It is also worth noting that the insistence upon a
momentum scientificum makes all miracles 'provisional'. We
may understand them as provisional only as long as we do
not have a credible scientific explanation for what occurred.
But we can never rule out the possibility that such an
explanation may one day be forthcoming. Such a view also
puts God in a bit of a box. If God is going to intervene then it
has to be contrary to the way God appears to have set up the
physical world to run or it doesn't count. The folly of this
view is illustrated in the joke about the man caught in rising
floodwaters.
There was once a man (and as the story proceeds you will
see that it really could not have been a woman) who was
trapped in rising floodwaters. He decided to pray to God and
ask for deliverance. He felt a peace and assurance that God
had heard his prayers and would answer them. Shortly
thereafter a four-wheel drive came sloshing through the
rising floodwaters and offered the man a lift out. 'No thanks,'
answered the man, 'I'm waiting for God to deliver me. I'm
putting my faith in him alone.' The four-wheel drive continued
on its way and the floodwaters rose further, forcing the man
onto the roof of his house. Soon a powerboat sped up to the
man, now stranded on his roof, and offered him a ride out of
the flood. 'No thanks,' he responded, 'I'm trusting God to
rescue me.' Soon the man was forced to move to the chimney
and was up to his waist in water. He never wavered in is
belief that God would rescue him. Soon a rescue helicopter
came by and lowered a rope. But the man refused to take hold
of it, yelling up instead to the helicopter, 'I'll be fine, I'm
waiting on God to rescue me.' Finally the helicopter flew off.
The floodwaters continued to rise and the man drowned. As he
arrived in heaven the man confronted God. 'I trusted you to
rescue me,' said the man, 'but you let me drown.' But God only
chided him. 'I sent you a four-wheel drive, a power boat, and a
helicopter,' said God, 'just what more did you expect?'.
God, of course, in the story, was intervening in all sorts of
ways. The man would not accept them as God's intervention
because each was also entirely explicable on the basis of his
experience of the world and the way things happen.
In the traditional and strict understanding of miracle, my
son's survival was not a miracle. I can explain exactly how a
combination of steroid treatments, major surgery, and first-
class intensive paediatric care made the difference between life
and death. But at the same time, hundreds of people prayed
that God would intervene in his struggle for life. The routine
ultrasound, we were told, should not have picked up a problem
when it did. Ordinarily, we would have only known something
was wrong at birth, in the regional centre of Mt. Barker. By
then it would have been too late. Also, if we had been living in
any other city in the world than Adelaide, the experimental
treatment that likely made all the difference would not have
been available to us. And we also have a child who shows no
signs of intellectual impairment. Quite the opposite. The
outcome we had is an answer to many prayers. We thank God
for this, but also humbly recognise that many parents in similar
situations have prayed just as earnestly and have suffered
tragic loss. I cannot attempt to explain why God acted in this
way in this particular instance. But I can say that I have no
difficulty speaking about this and similar events as miraculous
in the wider, theological sense. If we are unable to do this then
I wonder if the concept of miracle will be able to retain any real
meaning among modern Christians, who have at our disposal so
many avenues of possible scientific explanations. I also wonder
what would be the implications for our understanding of God,
who by default could never be legitimately thanked and praised
for an unexpected outcome unless we were certain that God
must have broken his own rules to do so.
Some will rightly remind us that if too many events qualify as
miraculous, the concept is in danger of losing its meaning.
Perhaps. But I would also contend that if almost nothing is
allowed to be viewed as a miracle, the concept is in no less
danger of obsolescence. I would contend that, especially in our
modern world where explanations are often so readily
available, that once we have satisfied ourselves that something
special and extraordinary has indeed occurred, contrary to
ordinary expectations, and that we are able to interpret this in
light of God's loving action toward us, that whether a scientific
explanation appears likely or not, we do not shrink from
speaking of a miracle. Otherwise we may as well abandon the
term as belonging exclusively to study of the Gospels, because
we are likely to find too few occasions for its legitimate and
undisputed use in our contemporary situation.
 Endnotes
1 An example of this would be Brevard Childs' comment on the
exodus in which he points out that the direct intervention of
God is pictured in terms of 'natural' causes such as the
blowing of the east wind, the impeding of chariot wheels, and
the panicking of the Egyptian army’. (Childs 1974 p. 228)
2
Pollard, however, considers the original creation, the
incarnation, and the resurrection to be true miracles.

References
Childs, B 1974, The book of Exodus: a critical, theological
commentary, Westminister, Philadelphia.
Feynman, R 1965, The character of physical law, MIT Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Hawking, S 1988, A brief history of time: from the big bang to
black holes, Bantam Books, New York.
Hesse, M 1965, 'Miracles and the laws of nature', in Miracles:
Cambridge Study, ed. CFD Moule, AR Mowbray, London.
Hume, D 1882 'Of Miracles', in David Hume: the philosophical
works, vol. 4, ed. T Green and T Grose, Longmans, Green,
London.
Katchalsky, A 1971, 'Thermodynamics of flow and biological
organization', %ygon vol. 6(2), pp. 99-125.
Peacocke, AR 1990, Theology for a scientific age: being and
becoming - natural and divine, Basil Blackwood, Oxford.
Polkinghorne, 3 1988, Science and Creation, SPCK, London.
Pollard, W 1958, Chance and providence: God's action in a
world governed by scientific law, Charles Scribner's Sons,
New York.
Schr6dinger, E 1944, What is life? The physical aspect of the
living cell, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Stokes, GG 1891, Natural Theology, Adam and Charles Black,
London. Swinburne, R, 1970, The concept of miracle,
Macmillan, London.
von Weizsacker, CF 1964, The relevance of science: creation
and cosmogony, Gifford Lectures 1959-60, Collins, London.
 About the Author
Rev. Dr Mark Worthing, BA in religion (Michigan), Mdiv (S BTHS), STM
(TLS), PhD (Regensburg), Dr Theol (Munich) is a Lecturer and Dean
of Studies at Tabor College, Adelaide, Australia. He has studied
extensively in both Europe and America. Living with his wife Kathy
and their four children in Hahndorf, his hobbies include farming,
chess and running. Mark is an ordained Lutheran pastor and an
author of several books and articles about Christian theology. His
book God, Creation and Contemporary Physics (Fortress Press 1996)
won the 1997 Temple Book prize for new works in the field of science
and religion.
 Are Propositions Divine
Thoughts?
Alexander Paul Bozzo
Department of Philosophy
Marquette University
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Evangelical Philosophical Society
www.epsociety.org

Abstract: James Anderson and Greg Welty maintain that

God’s existence can be demonstrated on account of the
necessary existence of the laws of logic. One consequence
of their argument is the stipulation that propositions are
divine thoughts. In this philosophical note, I object that this
conclusion entails either that God's thoughts are numerically
identical to human thoughts, or that human thoughts contain
elements internal to God's mind.

James Anderson and Greg Welty maintain that God’s existence

can be demonstrated on account of the necessary existence of
1
the laws of logic. In point of fact, their demonstration only
depends upon some necessarily existent proposition, like
mathematical or analytic truths, and not on the laws of logic
per se. Indeed, as abstracta, all propositions necessarily exist
(though not all are necessarily true), and so any proposition
will presumably do. But the laws of logic are sufficient for their
purpose, and, as they correctly observe, their argument is
capable of accommodating all sorts of interpretations of these
laws (including, for instance, formulations in paraconsistent
logic). Let us grant then that the laws of logic—whether
classical or nonclassical—exist. Their argument in essentials is
this:
 1. The laws of logic are propositions.
2. Propositions are intrinsically (or originally) intentional.
3. Something is intrinsically intentional only if it is mental
(i.e. is a thought).
4. Therefore, the laws of logic are thoughts.
5. The laws of logic exist necessarily.
6. If the laws of logic are necessarily existent thoughts, then
they are the thoughts of a necessarily existent mind.
7. Therefore, there exists a necessarily existent mind.
My focus in this article solely concerns the third premise: that
is, the assertion that something is intrinsically intentional only
if it is a thought. While my preferred position is nominalism
about abstract objects, I assume propositional realism
throughout: that propositions are (with respect to human
subjects) non-linguistic, mind-independent entities. As such,
the remaining premises will not factor into the present
critique. Instead, I argue that Anderson and Welty’s contention
that propositions—such as the laws of logic—are divine
thoughts entails that our thoughts are numerically identical to
God’s thoughts. I take it for granted that this is problematic,
insofar as it requires the unorthodox claim that human beings
literally partake of the divine mind. Once more, it is worth
noting that this objection applies more generally to divine
conceptualism and certain versions of theistic activism, and is not
limited to the foregoing argument.

I. Divine Thoughts
The third premise introduces a necessary condition for
intrinsic intentionality—namely that, if anything is intrinsically
intentional, then it is mental. Something is derivatively
intentional if it indicates or is about something on account of
the intentionality of something else. Pieces of popcorn for
instance do not in themselves indicate basketball players, but
we are capable of using such pieces as a means of representing
players, in order (say) to depict a particular play in some
2
game. In contrast, our own mental activity appears to be
intrinsically intentional, since my thought that “The tree in my
backyard is lovely” seems to be about that very tree, and this
independently of any other intentionality conferring
apparatus. Anderson and Welty contend that there is “good
reason to regard intentionality as the distinctive mark of the
mental,” because mental items like beliefs, desires, hopes, and
so forth, are all intentional, whereas non-mental items like
3
rocks, clouds, flutes, and so on, are not. They thusly conclude
that, “Thoughts are the paradigmatic category of intentional
4
entities.”
But there is some ambiguity over their use of the term
“thought.”
What constitutes a thought? This is a difficult question that I
certainly do not intend to settle here. But Anderson and Welty
repeatedly characterize propositions—specifically, the laws of
logic—themselves as thoughts, suggesting that there is nothing
more to thoughts than the propositions themselves. Thus they
write: “[S]ince the laws of logic are propositional in nature and
thus exhibit intrinsic intentionality, they are best characterized
as mental entities—as thoughts—rather than as physical entities
5
or sui generis entities.” It seems then that propositions just are
thoughts. But, in other places, the authors refer to thoughts as
6
beliefs, desires, hopes, and so forth. And, as they themselves
note, these propositional attitudes can be represented as open
sentences of the form, “I believe that p,” “I hope that p,” and so
7
on, where p is a variable ranging over propositions. Let
function “R” denote the propositional attitude “I believe that
p.” It should be obvious that we have some inconsistency here.
Thoughts cannot both be identical to propositions and
propositional attitudes plus some proposition; in other words,
for some thought h and proposition A, it is impossible that h = A,
and h = R(A). The proposition itself is distinct from some mind’s
believing that proposition, and thus some thought h cannot be
identical to both. I think the unnecessary confusion stems from
Frege’s use of Gedanken. Frege clearly did not regard
propositions as mental items; in fact, he went at great lengths
to distinguish propositions—Gedanken— from ideas, the latter
 8
alone corresponding to mental or psychological items. He
referred to propositions as Gedanken because the propositional
content of our thoughts (or ideas) seem to constitute the most
practically important element of our thoughts (or ideas).
The distinction between thoughts as propositional attitudes
plus propositions and propositions simpliciter is relevant for
what is to follow, and is not intended as an objection. But here I
do want to offer a preliminary criticism of (3). It seems that
part of the motivation for (3) is the intuition that something is
intrinsically intentional because it is mental. Thus Anderson and
Welty write:

There is certainly a sense in which physical

marks on a page…can exhibit intentionality. But
it is equally evident that this intentionality is
derivative; it is dependent on the prior activity
of a mind. The physical marks exhibit
intentionality only insofar as they express
thoughts. Without minds conferring meaning
upon them, no physical structures would ever be
about anything else, for only a mind has the
intrinsic power to direct thoughts… It is the
mental—and only the mental—that exhibits
intentionality intrinsically. It is the mental that
9
confers intentionality on the nonmental.
The claim is that sentences, themselves physical entities, are
derivatively intentional because their aboutness depends upon
the activity of a mind: “for only a mind has the intrinsic power
10
to direct thoughts…” If it can be shown that something—like a
proposition—can be intentional without someone’s mind doing
the directing, then perhaps this opens the way for something’s
being intentional despite its being non-mental. Suppose that
Romulus is ignorant of which explorer discovered the Pacific
Ocean. Nevertheless, he recognizes that some explorer did in
fact discover it, and asserts that “The explorer who discovered
the Pacific Ocean was adventurous.” Now the proposition
expressed by this sentence—in particular, the definite
description imbedded therein— is about Vasco Núñez de Balboa,
and as such successfully refers. But here the definite
description refers despite Romulus’s ignorance; that is,
independent of his mind’s doing the directing. We are thus
presented with a case in which a proposition exhibits
intentionality independent of the required sort of mental
activity. Indeed, standard models have it that the definite
description successfully refers on account of the meaning of the
terms involved, such that “The explorer who discovered the
Pacific Ocean” is about Balboa because he has (or had) the
property of being the explorer who discovered the Pacific Ocean.
Since propositions (and as such the referring expressions they
at times contain) are intentional on account of the mental
activity of some mind, on Anderson and Welty’s interpretation,
they seem to debar anything like an attributive use of definite
11
descriptions. But it seems to me that an attributive
characterization of definite descriptions best accounts for their
intentionality, and not some form of mental activity. Since one
common conception of propositions is just that they are the
meaning of sentences, and since an attributive conception
characterizes meaning as the source of reference, it would seem
12
that propositions embody intrinsic intentionality. If this is
correct, then (3) is false.
I offer this as a preliminary criticism because there is a way to
extricate Anderson and Welty’s argument from it. The
contention that meaning accounts for aboutness or reference
places pressure on (3), because, if propositions just are the
semantic content of sentences, then propositions manifest
intrinsic intentionality. But it is plausible to think that
meaning, in order to exist, requires the existence of some mind,
and thus that necessarily existent propositions (that is,
meanings) require a necessarily existent mind. The debate as
such would be redirected toward a discussion of meaning and
away from the notion of intrinsic intentionality, since
propositions would constitute intrinsically intentional entities.
Moreover, the discussion would likely turn to the plausibility of
propositional realism (or the plausibility of accounting for
meaning on propositional antirealism), and, as noted, this is not
our focus here.
But let us move to my primary objection. As we have seen,
propositions are divine thoughts on Anderson and Welty’s
model. The proposition that expresses the law of
noncontradiction—let us denote it by A—is a mental item,
indeed, the mental item of a divine mind. Unlike rocks, clouds,
flutes, and so forth, which are not mental, propositions on the
above account are the constituents of a specific mind—in
particular, God’s mind. Traditionally, the contents of a specific
mind are thought to be private, such that while it is possible for
two distinct subjects to both perceive the same public object—
like a rock—it is impossible for one subject to perceive the ideas
or thoughts of another subject. Your thoughts are yours and my
thoughts are mine. Suppose that we assume the first
conception of “thought” discussed above—such that a thought
just is a proposition—then, since thoughts just are propositions,
it follows that:
8. (God’s thought that A) = A.
Imagine also that Romulus entertains the proposition that A.
In other words, Romulus is thinking about or has a thought
concerning the law of noncontradiction. Again, since thoughts
just are propositions, it is true that:
9. (Romulus’s thought that A) = A.
Therefore:
10. (God’s thought that A) = Romulus’s thought that A.
(10) is an expression of numerical identity. It is important not
to be misled by our colloquial way of speaking: God and
Romulus do not have two distinct tokens of the same type of
thought. Rather, they share the same thought-token. Romulus’s
thought that A is numerically identical to God’s thought that A
in precisely the same sense that Cicero is numerically identical
to Tully. Romulus for instance might think the same thought as
Remus—say, that “The explorer who discovered the Pacific
Ocean was adventurous”—yet Romulus’s act or instance of
thinking this kind of thought is distinct from Remus’s act or
instance of thinking it. But, (10) stipulates more than this kind
of qualitative congruence. The conclusion here is that God’s
thought that A, as a mental item internal to God’s mind, is
numerically identical to the mental item internal to Romulus’s
mind. But, the conclusion that our thoughts are identical to
God’s thoughts is unacceptable, for certainly this (at the very
least) violates the fundamental division between creator and
creature. It seems then that propositions cannot be divine
thoughts.
But maybe our second account of what constitutes a
“thought” fares better. While I think this account—where
“thoughts” just are the conjunction of a propositional attitude
with some proposition—is closer to the mark, it still engenders
difficulties. On this account God’s thought that A is identical to
G(A), where the function “G” stands for the open sentence, “God
believes that p.” Since a thought on this interpretation is the
subsumption of a proposition within a propositional attitude
(conceived as a function), it is true that:
11. (God’s thought that A) = G(A)
Similarly we can say that Romulus’s thought that A is
identical to R(A),
where “R” now reads, “Romulus believes that p.” Thus:
12. (Romulus’s thought that A) = R(A)
This avoids any sort of numerical identity between God’s
thoughts and human thoughts. Yet, problems emerge. Recall
that A is in God’s mind, and as such is a constituent of God’s
thought. This is demanded by the account that Anderson and
Welty offer: propositions are specific mental items of the divine
mind. But while it is true that on this account Romulus’s
thought that A is not identical to God’s thought that A—since
G(A) ≠ R(A)—it does follow that Romulus’s thought contains as a
constituent an element internal to God’s mind. On the standard
(or original) picture—where the existence of propositions is
external to any mind—God’s thinking that A and Romulus’s
thinking that A involves their grasping the same entity, though
this entity is external to both their minds. However, on the
present account, Romulus’s thinking that A entails that
Romulus has within his mind an item internal to God’s mental
life—namely, A itself. Our second characterization of what
constitutes a “thought,” then, does little to obviate the
difficulties expressed above. Propositions as such cannot be
divine thoughts or internal to divine thoughts.
 II. Responses
What are some potential responses to the above objection?
Since either (8) or (11) appear to be stipulated on account of the
theory itself, the only feasible way of circumventing the
objection is to deny either of (9) or (12). Maybe the law of
noncontradiction is identical to one of God’s thoughts or is a
component of one God’s thoughts, but such that human
thoughts are mere approximations of God’s exemplar thoughts.
On this understanding either of (8) or (11) are true:
8. (God’s thought that A) = A.
Or:
11. (God’s thought that A) = G(A).
And A is internal to God’s mind on either of (8) or (11), since
ex hypothesi A is not something that exists external to God’s
mind. We are assuming some form of propositional realism and
thus it seems natural to interpret A as a universal, such that
human thoughts are particular token exemplifications of this
universal or type. The specific manner in which human
thoughts are distinctively token exemplifications of God’s
universal thoughts is not important; though, to give but one
example, it may be that God’s thoughts are always non-
linguistic whereas human thoughts are always expressed in
some language. The idea is that Romulus’s thinking about the
law of noncontradiction always occurs within some language—
for instance, Romulus’s thought that B might involve the
English sentence “For any proposition, that proposition cannot
both be true and false at the same time and in the same sense,”
or “(p)¬(p & ¬p),” or either of these in French—and that B is an
instantiation of the more general type A, in much the same way
that the yellow coloration of a leaf is a particular instantiation
13
of yellowness.
The problem with this response is that it fails to avoid the
above criticisms. Propositions are often thought to fulfill at
least one of three roles: (i) propositions are those entities that
are capable of receiving a truth value, (ii)
propositions are those entities that are capable of
constituting the meaning of sentences, or (iii) propositions are
those entities that factor as objects of psychological states or
propositional attitudes. Now Anderson and Welty may wish to
endorse any number or combination of these, but what is
presently relevant is that an acceptance of (ii) engenders
difficulties for their argument, and yet (ii) serves as one of the
14
most plausible accounts of what constitutes a proposition.
We must modify (ii) however so as not to beg the question
against the view under consideration, for the present rebuttal
has it that God’s thoughts are non-linguistic propositions, and
(ii) states that propositions are those entities that constitute
the meaning of sentences, the latter embodying a kind of
linguistic item. We can avoid the difficulty by modifying (ii) to
(iv): propositions are those entities that are capable of
constituting the meaning of sentences or thoughts (including
those thoughts that are not the product of some form of
sentential expression). Presumably, (coherent) thoughts
require the expression of some semantic content no less than
(coherent) sentences, and, since God’s thoughts are not
linguistic on the present hypothesis, God’s thoughts still
possess meaning and thus constitute expressions of
propositions under (iv). This modification avoids the above
worry. But, if propositions are those entities that constitute the
meaning of sentences or thoughts, then, the following holds:
13. A = the meaning of “A.”
Let A be the proposition, “The first line of Gray’s Elegy is
excellently written.” In this case (13) asserts that, “The first
line of Gray’s Elegy is excellently written = the meaning of ‘The
first line of Gray’s Elegy is excellently written.’” Note that this
holds because we are dealing with propositions and not other
kinds of semantic items. If, instead, our concern were with (e.g.)
definite descriptions, (13) would be false. The following for
instance is false: “The first line of Gray’s Elegy = the meaning of
‘The first line of Gray’s Elegy.’” This is because the left hand side
of the identity sign refers to “The curfew tolls the knell of
parting day,” that is, the first line of Gray’s Elegy; and evidently
“The curfew tolls the knell of parting day” is not identical in
meaning to “The first line of Gray’s Elegy.” Since we are
concerned with propositions and not definite descriptions, (13)
remains true. But, if correct, and if thoughts are identical to
propositions or identical to propositional attitudes plus some
proposition, then it follows from (8) and (13) that:
14. (God’s thought that A) = the meaning of “A.”
Or (11) and (13):
15. (God’s thought that A) = G(the meaning of “A”).
Both (14) and (15) culminate in the same difficulties offered in
the previous section. For consider Romulus’s thought that B:
“For any proposition, that proposition cannot both be true and
false at the same time and in the same sense.” The meaning of
“B” just is the meaning of “A,” otherwise God and Romulus
would not be (qualitatively) thinking the same thought, and
thus in a sense would be talking past one another. God’s
assertion that A and Romulus’s assertion that B would not be
assertions about the same state of affairs. Yet we are supposing
that God and Romulus are thinking the same thing, but merely
in different ways. Thus:
1 (The meaning of “B”) = the meaning of “A.”
2 (Romulus’s thought that B) = the meaning of “B” as
expressed in English, However (16) and entail:
18. (Romulus’s thought that B) = the meaning of “A” as
expressed in English.
Given (13) and (18), and substitution salva veritate, it follows
that:
19. (Romulus’s thought that B) = A as expressed in English.
But recall that A is internal to God’s mind: (8) has it that God’s
thought that A just is A, and (11) stipulates that A is a
component internal to God’s thought. In this case it is true to
say that God’s thought is non-linguistic whereas Romulus’s
thought is linguistic, but it also holds that an element of
Romulus’s thought—namely, A, or what comes to the same
thing, the meaning of “A”— is numerically identical to God’s
thought, given (14), or numerically identical to a part or feature
of God’s thought, given (15). The same holds if we reinterpret
(17) through (19), for Romulus’s thoughts, in terms of the
thoughts as propositional attitudes plus some proposition
account. (This should be obvious given the foregoing. I will not
make this point explicit here.) For any interpretation of what
constitutes Romulus’s thoughts—thoughts just as propositions
or as propositional attitudes plus some proposition—the
contexts involved are extensional, and thus the substitutions
are warranted. Even if (Romulus’s thought that B) = R(B), it
follows that (Romulus’s thought that B) = R(the meaning of “B”),
and ultimately that (Romulus’s thought that B) = R(A), since we
are concerned with semantic identity when making our
substitutions. Thus, Romulus’s thoughts get at aspects internal
to God’s mind, rendering them publicly accessible. Hence the
proposed response does not succeed.
Anderson and Welty may wish to deny (16). Perhaps what God
and Romulus assert are not identical in meaning, though
sufficiently close enough in meaning to avoid their talking past
one another. For instance, someone might assert that, “Marcus
moved slowly through the labyrinth,” while someone else,
referring to the same person, might assert that, “Marcus moved
through the labyrinth.” The meanings of both claims are
distinct, but there is a sense in which they are talking about the
same thing. So maybe (16) is false and yet God’s and Romulus’s
thoughts are sufficiently similar so as to be talking about the
same thing. But this response will not do. Note that on this
approach A and B denote distinct propositions—after all, A and
B are distinct in meaning—and that B is not grounded in the
mental life of God. But B just is an expression, however
imperfect or impure in light of God’s similar yet distinct
thought, of the law of noncontradiction, a necessary truth. As
such, there are necessarily true propositions—namely, B—that
are not divine thoughts or constituents of divine thoughts. This
entails that premise (6) of Anderson and Welty’s original
argument is false. There would be no reason to suppose that
necessarily existent propositions require the existence of a
divine mind, which of course is required in order for their
argument to successfully demonstrate God’s existence.
There is however a way around this criticism, but it strikes
me as evidently ad hoc and thus not very promising. Apart from
our introducing an overwhelmingly large number of novel
propositions—for now we have a class of existent propositions
that are solely the object of God’s thought and a class of
existent propositions that are solely the object of human
thought (or thoughts of persons other than God)—God could
believe, in the particular case at hand, B-type propositions at all
those temporal moments at which no person other than God
believes the relevant B-type propositions. To illustrate,
supposing that for all persons distinct from God, there is some
person (it need not be the same person) who thinks that B from
times t0 to t12, and such that no person distinct from God
thinks that B at any time after t12, God thinks that B for all
times after t12. This would ground B’s necessity. God in a sense
stops thinking (in the case under consideration) B-type
propositions when other persons distinct from him think B-
type propositions, so as to avoid their thinking the numerically
same thoughts as him, and then picks up the slack (so to speak)
when persons distinct from him are not around to think these
propositions or simply fail to think these propositions. But
certainly this is not preferable. The hypothesis under
consideration might explain everything—that is, it has high
explanatory power—but an inevitable consequence of this is
that it has profoundly lower prior probability. The traditional
account of propositions as external entities seems to possess at
least as much explanatory power, and yet is far simpler, and
thus seems preferable. Moreover, this route also suffers from a
numerical identity of thoughts between all those persons
distinct from God, for the very reasons given above (unless of
course we admit the undesirable conclusion of similar yet
unique propositions for every person). It seems then that this
response is not a viable alternative.
The suggestion that propositions are divine thoughts (or
constituents of divine thoughts) leads to undesirable
conclusions. I have shown that this contention entails that
human thoughts are either numerically identical to God’s
thoughts, or that human thoughts contain elements
numerically identical to elements internal to God’s mind. Either
alternative is unacceptable for the orthodox theist.
Alexander Bozzo is a doctoral student in philosophy at
Marquette University.

Endnotes
1
James N. Anderson and Greg Welty, “The Lord of
 Noncontradiction: An Argument for God from Logic,”
Philosophia Christi 13:2 (2011): 321-338. In their words:
“[W]e will argue that there are laws of logic because God
exists; indeed, there are laws of logic only because God
exists,” Ibid. 321.
2
The example is from Fred Dretske, Explaining Behavior
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1988), 52-54.It is worth observing that Dretske’s discussion of
indicators—like tracks in the snow, compasses, a tree’s rings,
bird songs, finger prints, thermometers, bathroom scales—
count as potential examples of non-mental intentional
entities. Unlike Anderson and Welty, Dretske regards
misrepresentation and not intentionality as the mark of the
mental. As such, Anderson and Welty need to demonstrate
that Dretske’s examples of indicators are not non-mental
intentional entities or phenomena; otherwise their pivotal
argument from parsimony for (3) is suspect.
3
Anderson and Welty, “The Law of Noncontradiction,” p. 334.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid. 335.
6
Ibid. 334.
7
Ibid. 328.
8
Contrary to Anderson and Welty’s suggestion at fn. 29. Thus
in “On Sinn and Bedeutung” Frege writes: “By a thought I
understand not the subjective performance of thinking but its
objective content, which is capable of being the common
property of several thinkers,” in The Frege Reader, trans.
Michael Beaney (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1997),
156, fn. E.
9
Ibid. 334.
10
Ibid.
11
See Keith Donnellan, “Reference and Definite Descriptions,”
The Philosophical Review 75 (July 1966):281-304. Definite
descriptions are used attributively if they refer in the sense
specified above. In contrast, definite descriptions are used
referentially if the description refers not on account of the
 meanings of the terms involved.
12
Anderson and Welty may want to claim that the definite
description “The explorer who discovered the Pacific Ocean”
is intentional because God, in entertaining the description, is
thinking about Balboa. As such, while Romulus successfully
refers to Balboa despite his ignorance, he does so only
because God’s mind renders the description or proposition
intentional. I myself find this to be an implausible picture of
things (if only because I find attributive interpretations to be
largely correct), but I recognize that it does count as a
possible response to the above considerations. However, as
will become apparent below, this response does not survive
my primary criticism.
13
Thanks are due to Marc Belcastro for this suggestion. I
personally cannot comprehend the suggestion that God’s
thoughts are types (any more than I can comprehend what it
means for God or anyone to have yellowness as an object of
thought). I find Hume’s discussion of the controversy
between Locke and Berkeley to be definitive here: there can
be no abstract idea of triangularity, one that encompasses all
varieties of triangles. But, as mentioned in the introduction, I
intend to assume propositional realism throughout and thus
do not object on this account.
14
See Anderson and Welty, “The Lord of
Noncontradiction,”p.323 for an endorsement of (i) and the
above quotation for a seeming endorsement of (ii).
Philosophers commonly define propositions in terms of only
one of the three roles they play, even though they accept
some of the others. Indeed, it would be odd to say that
propositions are the bearers of truth and falsity and yet not
the semantic content of sentences. It thus seems natural to
assume that Anderson and Welty endorse (ii).
Analytic Moral Theology as
Christ-Shaped Philosophy
Michael W. Austin
Department of Philosophy and Religion
Eastern Kentucky University
Richmond, KY
Evangelical Philosophical Society
www.epsociety.org

Abstract: In this paper, I claim that analytic moral theology is

an important form of Christ-shaped moral philosophy. The
analytic moral theologian takes Christ to be the starting point
for moral reflection, given that He is our moral and
intellectual exemplar. Christ is also the end of such moral
reflection, insofar as the proper aims of analytic moral
theology include both the imitation of and union with Christ
Himself. This type of Christ-shaped moral philosophy begins
with inquiry into the character of Jesus Christ and properly
ends with the application of the results of that inquiry to the
personal and social lives of those who seek to follow the
“outcast Galilean.” I conclude with a call for Christian moral
philosophers and analytic moral theologians to imitate the
pattern in philosophy of religion by producing scholarship of
the highest quality and then translating that scholarship into
more popular forms in service to the church and the world.

A significant body of work in philosophical

theology has emerged in the past fifty years.
Many engaged in this renaissance of Christian
philosophy have focused on natural
theological arguments for the existence of
God and central Christian doctrines such as
 the Incarnation and the Trinity using the
methods of analytic philosophy. We are now
seeing the fruit of this work not only within
the academy, but in the church and broader
culture as well. Scholars, writers, and apologists
have produced works which are accessible to non-
academic audiences that are grounded in the high-
level Christian scholarship produced over the past
several decades.
However, relatively less has been done in the
field of moral theology
using these methods. In this paper, I argue that a
community of Christian philosophers and theologians
ought to turn their attention to the field of moral
theology, employing the methods of analytic
philosophy in order to deepen our understanding of the
Christian moral life in general and the virtues in
particular. To the extent that this is successful, we
deepen our knowledge of Christ
himself, given that he is the moral exemplar
concerning his deeds but especially his character. This
approach to (and application of) moral topics of
philosophical and theological import is a
significant instantiation of Christ- shaped moral
philosophy.
In order to understand the nature of analytic
moral theology, consider first the nature of analytic
theology, as characterized by Oliver Crisp:

…analytic theology, like contemporary analytic

philosophy, involves the use of certain tools like
logic to make sense of theological issues, where
metaphysical concerns are central. And like
analytic philosophy, analytic theology will prize
intellectual virtues like clarity, parsimony of
 expression, and argumentative rigour. It will also,
where appropriate, seek to deal with complex
doctrinal concerns by dividing them into more
manageable units, or focusing on providing a
clear expression of theological terms that inform
particular doctrines in important
respects...analytic theology is about redeploying
tools already in the service of philosophy to a
theological end.1

Analytic moral theology, then, involves approaching

theological topics where moral concerns are central
with the ambitions of an analytic philosopher, prizing
particular intellectual virtues, and using the analytic
style of discourse.
While many scholars are engaged in moral
theology, comparably few of them make use of the
methods and tools of analytic philosophy in their work
in the field.2 Analytic methodology is certainly not the
only methodology we should employ, but much
progress has been made in advancing our understanding
of God via this methodology in its application to
doctrines such as the Incarnation and the Trinity.
Similarly, I believe that there is great
potential for progress in our understanding and
application of concepts in
Christian moral theology if we approach the field with
analytic ambitions and style. This is not to belittle or
question the significance of the moral reflection that has
been done and is being done by biblical scholars,
theologians, or others
 1
Oliver Crisp, “On Analytic Theology,” in Analytic
Theology, Oliver Crisp and Michael
Rea, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 38-39.
2
There are examples of this sort of work; much has been
written in an analytic vein
about the theological virtue of faith, for instance. For recent
work on other virtues, see Cristian Mihut, “Change of Heart:
Forgiveness, Resentment, and Empathy,” Philosophia Christi
14 (2012): 109-124; Robert C. Roberts, Spiritual Emotions: A
Psychology of Christian Virtues (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
2007); and a special issue of the journal Faith and Philosophy
dealing with virtues and virtue theories from a Christian
perspective; see Faith and Philosophy 15:4 (1998). Some
Roman Catholic philosophers and theologians have produced
works that reflect the methodology of analytic moral theology.
My hope is to encourage others—including Protestants and
specifically Protestant evangelicals—to join with them in this
valuable enterprise.

using non-analytic methodologies. Rather, the aim is to

bring some underutilized tools to bear on Christian
moral theology. Doing this can help us to clarify and
increase our stock of moral knowledge, which in
faithfulness to Christ should then be put into practice.
This last point is essential, and accommodates “the
subversive Christian message that the outcast Galilean
‘Jesus is Lord’”3 in three significant ways.
First, the Christian scholar engaging in analytic
moral theology will take Christ Himself to be the
starting point for as well as the end of moral inquiry. In
order to understand what it means to flourish as a
human being and the nature of particular virtues which
constitute and contribute to such flourishing,
a careful examination of the moral and intellectual
virtues exemplified by Christ is essential. Christ is the
end of such inquiry, because the aim of such
scholarship is not mere understanding, but
application to everyday life. And a faithful
application of the results of this inquiry will lead not
only to the
imitation of Christ, but also union with Him
(Philippians 2:1-11; 3:17; 1 John
2:3-6).
Second, the praxis which results from the
Christ-shaped moral reflection characteristic of
analytic moral theology should be the fruit of
intentionally
making connections between scholarly reflection and
“real life.” There is potential for the Christian scholar
to instantiate both hypocrisy and pride as a result of
her theoretical accomplishments, but the proper
response is to safeguard one’s integrity and seek
humility, not to abandon theoretical
reflection. The analytic moral theologian ought to
make connections between her scholarship and her
own daily life, not only to avoid hypocrisy and pride,
but also to produce scholarship that will be useful to
the body of Christ for dealing with issues
concerning morality and character in everyday life.
A rich
understanding of the character of Christ can be
very fruitful in terms of the moral formation of
those who are His disciples.
Third, academic work in analytic
philosophy of religion has been translated into
popular and semi-popular works in apologetics;
the same is
needed in the discipline of analytic moral theology
for the sake of the church and the world. There is a
proliferation of non-Christian accounts of virtue
ethics at the level of normative theory and some
treatments of particular virtues at both the scholarly and
popular levels. More Christian treatments are still
needed, especially of particular virtues. We need
explicitly Christian accounts of virtues such as
compassion, humility, and patience that are
philosophically defensible, theologically grounded, and
conducive to moral/spiritual growth. More work
remains to be done at the theoretical level as well. And
while great

3
Paul Moser, “Christ-Shaped Philosophy: Wisdom and
Spirit United,” p. 1.
strides have been made in some areas of applied ethics
(especially bioethics and business ethics), more of this
is still needed.
This kind of work in Christian analytic moral
theology also has explanatory value related to a
Christian account of the nature of the good life. Such
moral reflection has an apologetic function insofar as
an account of human flourishing at the individual and
social levels that is theoretically
defensible and practically fruitful can serve as evidence
for the truth of Christianity. A demonstration of the
coherence and cogence of Christian morality is
apologetically useful, and offers several lines of
discussion related to ethics and human fulfillment that
are sometimes missing in apologetic dialogue.
Moreover, the application of such work to the
lives of followers of Christ
(including but not limited to the analytic moral
theologian) can function as a moral apologetic—an
apologetic of character—which is all-too-often
missing.
As my pastor recently put it, what if, when people
talked about Christians, it
was not uncommon for them to say, “They are the ones
who are compassionate, kind, humble, patient, and
loving”?4 The arguments matter, but the character of
the arguer matters as well. As we study and produce
work in analytic moral theology, then, an observation
from Adriaan Peperzak is
relevant:

Because the personal elements of a concrete life

penetrate theological scholarship, the reading of
theological texts must always be accompanied by
attention to the spiritual tone that can be heard in
them…Only a scholarly theology that is rooted in
spirituality can realize the desired unity of faith
and thought.5

As a Christian scholar, I must attend to my own life of

faith, and seek a unity of my scholarship and my
spiritual formation. Each must inform the other, so that
the character of the scholar, and those who study the
work of the scholar, are
by virtue of that work developed in ways that more fully
reflect the character of
Christ. One implication of this is that the tone of one’s
writing, speaking, and teaching must not be strident, a
trait which is too common in current dialogues related
to these issues.
Analytic moral theology as I’ve characterized
it here has an important
function related to Christian spiritual formation. In
my view, and generally speaking, there is an
insufficient focus on moral formation within some
elements of the contemporary spiritual formation
movement. Much of the
 4
Jake Lee, Northridge Church, Richmond, KY;
10/21/2012.
5
Adriaan Peperzak, Reason in Faith: On the Relevance of
Christian Spirituality for Philosophy
(Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1999), 142-143.

work done in this area (or at least the mindset of those

who read it) tends to focus on certain kinds of
experiences of God that can be had via the spiritual
disciplines such as fasting, contemplative prayer, and
meditation. The moral formation of the follower of
Christ often receives insufficient attention. It is true
that the disciplines, such as meditation on Scripture,
can foster growth in moral and intellectual virtue, and I
believe it is proper, given the role of God in our moral
and intellectual growth, to focus our attention on
spiritual practices which open our lives to divine grace
and transformative power. Nevertheless, I cannot help
but wonder whether we have de-moralized Christian
spirituality. In my own experience, it has never
occurred to many followers of Christ that they might
intentionally engage in certain actions for the sake of
moral development. We must rectify this, as being a
disciple of Christ entails that we work at becoming
more like Christ. And this essentially includes the
exemplification of His character (2
Peter 1:3-11).6 Focusing one’s attention on a virtue,
thinking about how it
might be exemplified in one’s life, and considering
the applications this might have for issues in personal
and social ethics can be very helpful for character
formation, spiritual growth, and contributing to the
common good, if those reflections are put into
practice (Philippians 4:8-9). This leads us to the
conclusion of this paper.
If a community of Christian scholars focusing on
questions of morality, virtue, and character imitate the
pattern in philosophy of religion (concerning questions
regarding the nature and existence of God) by
producing scholarship
of the highest quality and then translating it into
popular and semi-popular forms, this could help
significantly advance the kingdom of God. A project
of
this nature would exemplify Christ-shaped philosophy
with its distinctive focus upon the role of divine power
if the scholar and those who study her work
place themselves “under corrective and redemptive
inquiry by God in Christ.”7

Michael W. Austin is professor of philosophy at Eastern

Kentucky University, where he specializes in ethics and
philosophy of religion
(http://www.people.eku.edu/austinm/).

6
On this, see Michael W. Austin and R. Douglas
Geivett, eds., Being Good: Christian Virtues for Everyday Life
(Eerdmans, 2012). This collection of essays is devoted to
understanding particular Christian virtues and offers practical
advice in cultivating them.
7
Moser, 1. I would also like to thank Danny Simpson for
his helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.
 Miracles? Can they happen?
J van Popta

Last week as I sat in his chair, my barber told me that

someone had given him a Bible. He said that he had read the
New Testament many times in his life but had never read the
Old Testament. He found it very interesting, he told me. "But,"
he said, "do you believe all those stories? Do you really believe
that they happened? Are they not just parables? Fables?" He
wanted to learn from the Bible. He was willing to accept that
the Bible had a "good moral lesson." He was raised as a
"Christian" in a mainline Canadian church and now recently
married and a new father, he was seeking his way in the world.
But these stories! How can we believe them? Snakes talking!
Water from the rock! The earth swallowing men alive! Ax heads
floating! These are all Old Testament miracles and he was
wondering if I believed that they actually happened.

The Belgic Confession

As a Reformed believer I accept the Belgic Confession as my
own, so I, of course, believe certain things about the Bible. In
articles 3-7 we confess what we believe about the Bible. There
we say that the Word of God is not a human book but that men
moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God and that he
commanded them to write down this revelation. As Christians,
we accept the Bible as canonical (that is the rule and measure
for our life) for the regulation, foundation and confirmation of
our faith.
In the Belgic Confession we confess that we believe,
"Without any doubt all things contained in the books of
the Bible, not so much because the church receives and
approves them as such, but especially because the Holy
Spirit witnesses in our hearts that they are from God."
 We know them to be true because the Holy Spirit testifies that
they are true. That means that they are also historically true.

Are miracles possible?

So, "Yes," I told my barber, "I believe the stories in the Old
Testament to be true." I told him that I knew that those things
really happened. These are historical facts. And here is the
problem. Is it possible that God revealed himself in some special
way? Did God, who is the creator, act in history? Did he do
unusual things? Did he really bring the plagues on Egypt? Did
he really make the sun and moon stand still? Are miracles
possible? This is one of the great difficulties in presenting the
gospel; for unbelievers the Bible is a book full of miracles. The
Old Testament has many miracles, but the New Testament has
many more. God became man, being born of a virgin. Jesus of
Nazareth walked on water. He healed the lepers, the lame, the
blind. He exorcised demons. Having been executed by
crucifixion, he rose again and ascended into heaven. Modern
man does not want to believe these things. To him these are the
product of a pre-scientific worldview. In the modern worldview
these stories are superstitious nonsense that primitive cultures
believed. To our culture, the miraculous in the Bible story is
below the credibility threshold. It is an embarrassment in our
culture to believe that these things really happened.

Prior experience?
So how can we address this problem? How can we show to be
true what we know to be true? And we know these things to be
true because we believe the testimony of a unique and reliable
book, the Bible, and because the Holy Spirit himself testifies in
our heart that these things are true? I think that you can argue
for a sympathetic ear. One line of argument that you could use
goes something like this: The apostles are reliable witnesses.
They had nothing to gain by lying. They wrote down the
testimony as eyewitnesses. Your neighbour might say that he
cannot believe them because he has never seen anything like
these miracles happen, nor has he heard any reliable modern
reports of such events. We, however, can argue that the Bible's
testimony to miracles cannot be refuted simply by saying that
prior experiences and observations exclude the new event. If
this were true, we would never be justified in believing
anything outside our own experience. No new discoveries could
ever be made. No new observations would be accepted.

Contrary, not contradictory events

We can also argue that miracles are not contradictory to
experience. That is often the objection. "Moses could not
have turned the Nile into blood because that is
contradictory to my experience." Someone might say,
"Jesus never raised anyone from the dead and he never
brought anyone from the dead to life. I cannot believe that
he did because that is contradictory to my experience to
reality." To prove this, however, someone would need to
refute the reliable historical testimony of the Bible. It is
not good enough to argue that experience in general
shows that dead men do not rise or that mighty rivers do
not turn to blood. That is not good enough to prove that
miracles do not happen.
Christians agree with exactly this. The dead do not normally
come to life. That they are outside of general experience does
not make these events contradictory to experience. Rather,
miracles are events that are contrary to experience in general.
They are not contradictory to experience in general. To extend
this further, someone might argue that miracles are
unbelievable because they are contrary to experience in
general, but really they are simply saying that they are
contrary to similar personal general experience. To say that a
miracle is contrary to universal experience is question begging,
since that assumes that miracles have not and cannot occur
and that no one has even seen or experienced one.

Natural laws
Many have said, "If miracles occur, that would mean that
events which break the laws of nature can happen. This is
impossible." You can counter that argument by stating that
natural laws are descriptive, not prescriptive. That simply
means that what we call "the laws of nature" are but our
description of what generally happens in our experience and
are summaries of our observations of the world around us. We
can use these laws for predicting what will happen. We cannot
use them, however, to refute what we observe to be true. The
laws of nature are formulations of general observations. Let go
of your pencil 1.5 meters from the floor and it falls. It does that
every time you try. You can make this generalization, this law,
"If I let go of my pencil, it will fall." The pencil, however, does
not fall in obedience to your law. Your law describes what the
pencil does. You do not, however, prescribe what the pencil
must do. This shows that what you know to be true (miracles
can and have happened) cannot be rejected simply because of
"natural laws." Natural laws simply describe what generally has
happened in the past and will likely happen in the future. A
miracle is exactly that event that goes against what we
generally expect would happen; the wind and waves obeying
the command of the Lord Jesus, for example.

Logic and law

So my barber asks, "Well then, may a scientist say that a
miracle is naturally impossible?" To this we agree readily. That
is what a miracle is. It is an event, not contrary to logic; not
contradictory to experience, but naturally impossible. And the
only way for naturally impossible events to become historical
reality is if the God of the Bible, the Almighty Creator, stands
behind them. We believe in an omnipotent God, who created all
things and who upholds them by his power. He is capable of
free activity and so is capable acting in the universe that he has
created. He is able to cause those things that are contrary to
general experience. The miracles of Jesus Christ are examples
of such events that lie outside the power of natural causes.
They are events that occurred without physical or generally
human causes. Therefore they must have a divine cause.

Reason for miracles

The miracles of the Bible are not magician's tricks but are
events contrary to general experience by which God shows his
power and reveals himself to men. These events did not happen
in a vacuum but in a certain historical and religious context.
God's miracles in Egypt by the hand of Moses and Aaron were
not just tricks to amaze the people, nor simply to cause
Pharaoh to be afraid of the Israelites. By these mighty acts God
set his people free; and he hardened Pharaoh's heart lest
anyone should say that Israel gained freedom by Pharaoh's
grace.
 The resurrection of Jesus happened after he was publicly
charged with blasphemy and executed as a rebel. His
resurrection happened in the context and at the climax of his
unique life and teaching. This was not just a strange event at
which we wonder. The resurrection underlines the reality of
Jesus Christ's claim that he was the only son of God and that he
was one with the Father. God underlines these claims by not
leaving him in the grave and so raised him from the dead with a
glorious body.

Not just past events

As Bible believing Christians we should show the honest
seeker that there are no reasons for rejecting miracles as real,
historical events. We must show that there are no solid grounds
for him to reject what we know to be true. We must tell our
neighbour that miracles have not just happened in the past.
Challenge him that the universe may be a more wonderful
place than he imagines. God has acted in history. He has
caused the miraculous to happen. The God who created the
heavens and earth is surely capable of raising the dead or
changing water into wine. We can also tell the world that we
look forward to the great day of miracles. We anticipate with
joy the day when the trumpet will sound and with the cry of the
archangel all the dead will be raised and God will gather his
resurrected children to himself.

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