God Both Is And Can't Be Unchanging

Christians believe Jesus has a set of attributes on the authority of scripture. Classic Christian Apologists took these attributes and formed arguments around them that lead to their God. The cosmological argument, which argues that a First Cause is needed for our universe’s origin, emphasizes God’s atemporal and aspacial attributes to signify that only God is outside time and space. God is then uniquely qualified to create time and space under the reasonable assumption that the cause of time and space cannot come from within time and space.

Apologists then recognize a necessary consequence of God’s independence from a dimension of duration: God is unchanging. Which leads to an inconsistency that can be laid out in a syllogism, much like the cosmological argument itself.

• Premise 1: Everyone that acts, changes from a state of inaction to action.
• Premise 2: If there is a creator of the universe, that creator acted when creating the universe.
• Conclusion: Therefore, if a creator of the universe exists, that creator changed.

The apologist is left arguing for a God with attributes in conflict with the implications of their argument.

What Motivates A Pro-life Stance?

What motivates a pro-life stance? I ask myself this as the abortion issue once again takes center stage. Let’s consider the possibilities.

A ruling against abortion affects women more than men for obvious reasons. We might expect that difference to point to a disagreement on the issue between genders. That’s not significantly so. Women are not pro-choice, on average, much more than men. However, the characteristic that is predictive of a person’s stance on abortion is religiosity. Believers tend to be pro-life more often than nonbelievers. Surprising no one, this probably fits with your anecdotal evidence.

So what it is about religion that makes people pro-life? To limit confounding factors, let’s focus on the faith most relevant to America–Christianity. Christians believe abortion is a sin and unforgiven sins lead to hell. This should be enough for them to want to make abortion illegal, right? Not so fast. There are a lot of sins and, for most Christian denominations, they are all equivalent in their weight on the soul. Murder is as bad as stealing or even lying. Catholics have a category called “mortal sins” in which abortion is included…but so are many other actions that are legal. Why do Christians put so much time into ending abortions compared to ending divorce or premarital sex (both “mortal sins”)?

I think the answer has to lie in the quality Christians believe abortion share with other illegal activities–its affect a non-consenting second party. Stealing, rape, and murder are all sins made illegal because they hurt someone else who did not necessarily want to engage in said sin. The same is true for abortion under the assumption that the unborn is “someone else.” So is this the hang up for believers? I’m not so sure. If it is, why do believers assign personhood to embryos and fetuses when nonbelievers often do not? The best distinction is perhaps the assumption that a soul is created or is otherwise linked to cells at conception. I say assumption because the soul, of course, cannot be detected. The soul as a real thing is a belief taught consistently in Christianity and has biblical foundations. What isn’t biblical, to the best of my knowledge, is that the soul is tied to conception. There is no reason a Christian could not believe the soul starts at birth as easily as one could believe it starts after parental sex. When tissue goes from being soulless to soulful seems to be an arbitrary distinction.

I suppose without it being outlined in scripture, Christians are left to guess when the soul is in play and conception is as good a place as any. We are left with legislation that will severely alter the course of the country over a guess…about a soul for which there is no evidence. Welcome to America.

According To The Bible: God Either Changes Or Lies

The following is a real exchange with a Christian Apologist who's written a book and everything.

Christian: If Christianity were true, would you become a Christian?

Me: I would become Christian, but I would try to persuade God to make some changes.

Christian: Because you're so much wiser than omniscient God.

Me: Hey, he occasionally takes the advice of humans in the Bible, and if I was Christian, I would believe that.

Christian: He takes advice from humans? Give me an example.

Me: Exodus 32 shows he changed his plans based on Moses' advice.

(Commentary) In Exodus 32 9 & 10, God says he is angry at the people misbehaving down below and is about to destroy them. Moses advises God to not destroy the people and God listens. Don't take my word of it, read for yourself. There are other biblical examples of God saying is it about to do something and a human talking him out of it, but Exodus is the first that I know.

Christian: I'd hardly call answering a prayer taking advice.

Me: God literally spoke to Moses telling him what he was about to do. Moses persuaded him not to and God did not. What else specifically would you like to see from this exchange to qualify?

Christian: (No comment, links to a GotQuestions which claims God does not change his mind.)

This exchange reminded me that Christian apologetic arguments occasionally conflict with the bible. Apologists depend on maxims like "God does not change" because they support other claims. For example, change denotes time and God is "outside time" and therefore can not change. The author of Exodus wasn't aware of that maxim and therein lies the problem.

Apologists must then make their maxims work within scripture. In this case, if we accept that God does not change, that means he always knew he would say he would destroy those people, listen to Moses, and then not destroy those people. This reasoning, while convoluted, feels comfortable to the apologist in that it fits both God's omniscience and God's unchanging nature within the context of Exodus. But the implications! This means that God knowingly lied to Moses when he said that he was going to destroy those people. God knew that he was not going to destroy those people when he said he was: a textbook lie. An earlier me might argue that God sinned, but I now know how unfruitful that argument is with an apologist. God doesn't sin, full stop, and I can't argue the rules of a made-up concept like sin. God simply lies, which is actually more damning to the Christian worldview. It throws the Word into question. How can we trust what God says given proof that he lies to us?

At this point, the apologist can only argue that God lies to us for some good reason because God is good...he said so...and we can believe him.

Without God, does morality mean whatever we want?

A favorite claim among Christian apologists is that, without God, morality can mean whatever we want. That’s what happens when good and evil is not grounded by a divine standard. All we have are individuals with personal preferences judging others with preferences that may well be very different. As best, an individual or group can only impose their rules and judgements on others with a show of force, often referred to as “might makes right.” Those human rules and judgements can not be said to have inherent validity. While I’d love to rebut this claim entirely I can not do that any more than I can grant them that they are fully correct. Language and ethics are very complicated and both are at play here.

At the most literal level, yes, moral terms like good, evil, right, and wrong can mean whatever we want. Why? Because moral terms aren’t special. Any word can mean whatever we want. This should go without saying, but languages are invented and maintained by the population of speakers. If enough speakers evolve English so that evil means good, that is how it shall be moving forward. A single speaker redefining words will find himself unable to effectively communicate with everyone who hasn't adopted his fringe definition. That's why the meanings of good and evil tend to remain roughly the same within cultures, secular or religious. It’s hard to get everyone on board for an arbitrary remapping of terms.

The secular definition of moral good is essentially to behave in a way that is beneficial to others. Regardless of the letters written or sounds made to communicate this concept, it would not change it’s value. In other words, if “good” is renamed “evil” tomorrow, that would just mean that we would start to value “evil” over “good.” Now the question is: do we value the concept we call good because a divine third party made us? There’s no way to know, but we do know that there are reasons for social beings to value the concept we call good independent of supernatural mandates.

1. Being good to others earns more opportunity for earn friends and make families. (Here I could argue that the odds of finding mates and living longer are increased with this behavior, making the instinct to be good a selected trait, but I think this argument is only additive and not required for my points. Since people who do not accept evolution will likely read this, I will not argue this further.)
2. Being good allows for the creation of culture and societies that provide benefits ranging from the division of labor to shared resources.
3. Being good, rather than evil, keeps animosity from others low and makes for a more safe and stress free life.

There are many more reasons to be good rather than evil, but evildoers still exist. Apologists argue that people who do wrong do so because they separate themselves from God or ignore that divine moral compass within them. Some even say that it’s an acceptance of moral relativism that swings open the door to sin. While it is always wrong for the slave to strike an owner, it may be right (in the owner’s mind) for the owner to strike a slave. The rapist isn’t wrong to rape because (in the rapist’s mind) what’s right and wrong are up to whatever we want and, the rapist wants to rape. While there are individual defectors who periodically discard their value of good to serve base desires, they are rarer exceptions. More common are those who maintain their value of good with a more narrow view of equality. The slave owner treats other whites as peers with the same understanding of good as you or I, but define blacks as a class in which the definition does not apply. The same could go for the rapist and how he sees women. It may not be the definition of good that’s a moving target, it could be the definition of human.

There is more to the secular meanings of good and evil after we take into account context, motives, consent, ect. What’s most important to the point is that every culture has a name for this concept and places a high value on it. Apologists who admit this attribute it to the aforementioned God-given moral compass within us. I’ll stick with the alternative that all humans share something else, a desire to not be alone. Don’t underestimate how lonely, and short, one’s life would be if they placed no value on being good.

Rights, Responsibilities, & Justice

So an apologist on Twitter put out a challenge and I thought, that seems easy enough. Not easy to convince her, per se, just easy to fulfill the task. Here it is:

Critics, here’s your homework assignment. Begin with the brute facts of existence and a bare minimum of defensible assumptions. Then, using meticulous logic, syllogistically arrive at a basis for:

1. rights
2. responsibilities
3. justice
4. systematic inquiry (science)
5. hope

— Sarah Salviander (@sarahsalviander) January 6, 2019

I can take on the first three at once. I'll address the other two if we reach some agreement on the first three. Off we go:

Premise 1. People exist.
Premise 2. Most people don’t want to be hurt.
Premise 3. Most people don’t want to be alone.
Premise 4. Hurting others tends to cause either retaliation or isolation.
Premise 5. Most people meet the minimum intellectual requirements to notice the validity of the above premises from social experience.
Conclusion 1. (From premises) Hurting others is avoided by most people.

The concepts of rights, responsibilities, and justice all serve this conclusion. We collectively declare and acknowledge rights to each other, the most basic of which, the right to live, most obviously spawns from the syllogism. Responsibilities are then a drive to act acknowledging those rights. For example, I have the responsibility to acknowledge your right to live. Finally, justice is the method of enforcing adherence to responsibilities. If I cease to acknowledge your right to live and take your life, I face consequences. This tends to be physical punishment of imprisonment, an institutionalization of premise four.

I can’t hope to explain the entirety of ethics in a single post, but you can probably see how this same framework can be applied past a secular reason to not kill to a secular reason to not steal, rape, ect. It is indeed a deity-free basis for rights, responsibilities, and justice.

A Christian Scientist Camp Experience

Half way into high school I went to camp for the first time in my life. It was a Christian Science camp which would be a very odd choice if not for the fact that I was a Christian Scientist. The camp’s selling point to my parents was the promise to re-up my faith and to provide leadership opportunities as a Counselor-in-Training. The camp’s selling point to me was a canoeing trip in Canada and a three-day capture-the-flag tournament. That, and I just wanted to get out of the house.

I feel like a little background in Christian Science is needed here. CS is a religion that teaches the works of Jesus did could also be done by us providing that we have enough faith and live free from sin. In the Bible, the disciples healed and performed other miracles after JC’s death, the same premise applies to here. The implication is that, as Christian Scientists, material medicine should be avoided because using it diminishes our faith to heal thyself through God. If you need to see someone, CS has their own kind of doctors called “Practitioners” who basically talk the patient through the disease with prayer. The avoidance of medicine and the word “Science” in the name is why Christian Science is often confused with Scientology. This used to bother the hell out of me, but, in retrospect, I had little reason to be upset. The beliefs involved are no less crazy. Christian Science just seemed less crazy because it followed the legacy myth of Jesus rather than the start-up myth of aliens.

My first (and only) year at Camp Leelanau off the lovely coast of Lake Michigan happened to come at the transitional age between camper and counselor. Much of my days were spent in preparation of returning the following year as staff. Of course, that didn’t pan out, but all-in-all it was a better experience than I imagine it would have been as a proper camper. The camp’s official Practitioner was from my home church in Georgia. Both he and his two daughters were regulars of the camp and played no small part in my recruitment. I also noted upon arrival that the camp had a nurse on staff. Not so much a faith healing nurse as a nurse nurse. I remember thinking that was as odd addition. It turned out she was present to help with injuries during the camp’s more physical activities–broken bones, poison sumac rashes, the kind of stuff that leaves a mark. Although Christian Science teaches that God can heal anything, practically, it’s best to leave the invisible deity to the invisible ailments.

My class of CITs (counselor’s-in-training) was unusually small–five guys, myself included. This allowed for a tighter-nit fellowship and by the end I considered at least a few of them good friends. It also allowed for a more intimate adventure. We went to the middle of the Canadian wilderness where we canoed and camped all week. We never saw a trace of another human while we spotted wild moose, and had to hang our food and gear in trees nightly in case of bear (why we didn’t also sleep in trees is beyond me.) Every morning we’d hit the river, tie our canoes together and read from the bible and Christian Science’s companion book, Science & Health. I honestly didn’t mind the bible readings. Reading from a book about angels and demons made the trip seem more epic. Science & Health reads more like self-help than a holy text so it lessened that mood.

Long story slightly less long, we returned to camp and one of my new-found friends was hurt. He was cut up pretty bad while cutting wood or some such thing. I remember him rushing up the the nurse and being out of commission for almost the rest of our time in Michigan. Visits weren’t really allowed except for the Practitioner who, judging from the time my buddy was away and the very conventional stitches he returned with, did nothing in the way of faith healing. I imagine campers were discouraged to go see patients because the whole spiritual health scam would take a backseat to, “oh, hey, God isn’t doing anything for this guy.”

The camp experience was supposed to re-up my faith, but it only showed me reality. During one of our last Sunday meetings, a counselor enthusiastically testified that being a Christian Scientist was like being a Jedi; making the analogy that both we and the Star Wars heroes are small segments of the population who know how to demonstrate the power of their faith. After seeing failed demonstration after failed demonstration, I concluded that the real similarity a faith healing Christian Scientist has to a Jedi is that they are both works of fiction.

The Apologists Appeal To Conditional Morality

The moral argument for God requires the existence of a moral realism that can only be sustained by a deity. To argue that moral facts exist, the apologist finds commonality between himself and the nonbeliever by highlighting mutual condemnation of certain actions. Common agreement does not prove a moral fact’s existence, it only shows a shared judgement, but thats the tactic that is most commonly used nevertheless. Commonality is usually reached with the condemnation of the act of murder.

What makes an act a murder? The act itself is killing. We could break it down further to the type of act be it stabbing or shooting or poisoning, but the method is not usually factored in. What makes a killing a murder are, at the minimum, four conditions.

1. The victim must be born human.

2. The victim has not expressed a specific desire to be killed.

3. The victim must not be posing a significant and direct threat to the acting party.

4. The acting party must have the intension to kill.

One could argue that the act being unlawful is another condition, but that could become circular in this context. One could also argue that malice is an essential aspect of the intension, but malice may be defined as “wrongful intension” which begs the question when the point of this is to determine the wrongness of the act. One could argue that a condition could take into account the guilt of the victim making capital punishment exempt from the label of murder. This last bit is perhaps a worthy condition, but I am omitting it for simplicity.

To demonstrate that the four conditions are required to reach consensus on the acts wrongfulness, here are examples that do not meet the conditions.

Example 1: An abortion does not meet condition one in that the human has not been born. Many consider abortion wrong, but very few consider it murder. 

Example 2: Assisted suicide is almost never considered murder, even if it is still illegal in some places.

Example 3: Killing in self-defense does not meet condition three and therefore is not considered murder.

Example 4: Accidentally running into a car that unexpectedly slammed the brakes is not considered murder even if someone in that car dies.

No we have an action with enough conditions built into it that the vast majority of people consider it wrong. Does commonality, or even universality, imply moral fact? No. To prove this I add one more condition.

5. The victim is oneself.

This hypothetical condition means that a killing is only a murder if you’re the one who is killed. I think we can all agree that we don’t want a world of people trying to kill us. Does this common agreement imply that the aversion of this extra specific murder is a moral fact? No. Survival instinct can account for it. Hell, becoming accustomed to life or being adverse to pain can account for it. Interestingly, this same reasonable aversion is enough even without condition five. Labeling the act of killing as something not allowed is the obvious move with just the first four conditions which make any co-habitat safer for all.

All the apologist has to point to a moral judgement being a moral fact, is the universality of it. As I’ve shown, we can get to universality (or near universality) with enough conditional baggage. Until the apologist can find some means to provide evidence for moral facts beyond appealing to the masses, their arguments for morality should never be taken seriously.