Desirism says that you use tools like praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment to help give people the desire to do good. Even if someone has never heard of desirism, they will still respond to things like this. Of course, as I mentioned before, there will be the rare person who desires to do evil and doesn’t care about any of the consequences. But I don’t see how religion could prevent such a person from committing a crime any easier than desirism could.
Sorry for the overly long reply, but I wanted to try to counter the view some people have that religion has morality all figured out and the foundations of morality are only a problem for atheists. Also, I wanted to mention this because I would be really interested in your personal take on the foundations of morality and the way in which you think God is meaningfully good.
No apologies needed for length evilA, I do find your posts informative even though I haven’t read the articles you have just linked to but will. I could wait til tomorrow and give them a thorough review but then I start feeling like CAF is a research job. Heck, I feel I have to respond almost immediately so the poster doesn’t think I’m stuck or procrastinating. Just saw your post.
Of course, Christian morality is tough, and discerning and applying is quite difficult in certain situations (look at George Weigel jumping threw the hoops of Just War Theory with respect to Iraq in First Things.). What I was trying to stimulate in this thread was a recognition of the fact that the Christian religion can be seen as being quite rationally-based unlike the secular stereotypical view of it being a superstitious hocus-pocus stew. I believe, in this, I and others may have found common ground on this with you, that our Christian position is not unreasonable and may to some atheists appear reasonable.
On the subject of rationality, there is a legal term in Civil Law cases for proof – it is called the Standard of Probability. It is not like the criminal law standard of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (a professor once explained to me the latter meant 90% certain of guilt). The Standard of Probability asks you to judge which proposition is more likely to be true (50% +). I was arguing that on a standard of probabilities the Existence of God is more rational and believable than belief in No God. One could have eminently reasonable grounds for believing in God, as Mortimer Adler argued in How To Think About God: A Guide for the 20th Century Pagan (p.s. have you ever read him on “exnihilation”).
On Catholic morality, since there are character limits in single posts the most succinct response for me personally is what is stated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church in paragraphs 1950-1974 on the Moral Law here
scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s1c3a1.htm#1950. Here I found a concise explanation of the Moral Law - the source in the eternal law of God, natural law, revealed law, and the Old and New Law of the Gospel. “The moral law finds its fullness and its unity in Christ. Jesus Christ is in person the way of perfection.”
C.S. Lewis wrote about the
Tao in The Abolition of Man and Scott Hahn alludes to it below which, pardon my apparent brazenness, I think could apply to the theory of desirism you described:
** People will usually recognize evil, even if they are reluctant to recognize good. Some might look at an apparently heroic action and imagine a selfish motive behind it…Few people, however, will hesitate to call evil by its name.
Yet, once they have done so, they have placed themselves in a bind. Indeed, they have bound themselves by law. Because evil is possible only as the
perversion of something good, the
opposite of something good, the
denial of something good. Once people have judged something evil, they have acknowledged a transcendent standard of good. They themselves have placed the world under a law.
Nor can they escape the bind by saying that law exists, but merely as a utilitarian stopgap, to ensure the safety of the greatest number of people. For even then they are invoking transcendent standards: the notion, for example, that the common good is greater than individual good; or that anyone should be concerned with another person’s safety…[Condemnations of murder or theft] are among the moral truths that human beings
naturally know…the ‘natural law’ "** (Hahn, Reasons To Believe pg42-43.
Now I know you might take umbrage of me using a quote against utilitarianism (which you differentiate from desirism) but the general statement as to recognizing “evil” entailing recognition of transcendent standards is apropos IMHO and not irrelevant to our discussion.
On the provenance of Good, I again feel another scholar J.P. Moreland put it most concisely when he stated:
“I think God’s will is ultimately expressed in keeping with His nature. Morality is ultimately grounded in the nature of God, not independently of God. There is a Euthypro-type argument that Bertrand Russel raised against theism – namely, that for the theist, morality is either arbitrarily grounded in God’s will or it’s grounded in something outside of God. But this is a false disjunction. I think the tertium quid is that morality can be grounded in God’s own nature. We obey God because He is good and loving. Now, when I state that God is good, I’m not stating a tautology” Does God Exist Moreland and Nielsen, (pg. 131).
Now you’ll forgive me as I am too tired to see if I have anywhere made use of genetic fallacy nor have I have spoken of Barth, the divine command theory or other theories. I guess we’re in the Non-Catholic Religions Subforum and not Apologetics, hence my self-interested need in not overtaxing my limited reasoning powers.
But if you want to criticize the argument anEvilA, go ahead, and please don’t feel rushed! I haven’t even looked at the Buckley debate you linked to yet.
(con’t)
Take your time. If any other members want to get involved in the meantime, more power to them and I’d be interested in hearing from others. I still haven’t read the essays you linked to either.