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Plato

Moral Arguments IV: The Sophist-icated “Euthyphro Dilemma”

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Filed Under: Apologetics, Defending the Faith, Philosophy Tagged With: , , , ,

Summary

Perhaps a quick summary of the argument so far is in order. The primary focus of this series is the Euthyphro Dilemma, which has been adapted by contemporary thinkers to argue that a divine being or beings cannot be the source of morality. The adapted Dilemma states, in short, either God is the source of all good, in which case we have no standard by which to determine God is good (and thus all good is simply arbitrarily good), or there is an external standard that God too obeys (in which case, God does not seem to be the ultimate being). We have examined the problem and the original source of the Dilemma, Plato’s Euthyphro. We have attended to the major disagreement between Socrates and Euthyphro regarding the morality of the gods, and have noted how that disagreement sets the stage for the Euthyphro Dilemma.[1] In the last installment, we simply examined the possible relationship between power and morality. Plato and I agree here: Might does not make right, even if that might is infinite.[2]

How then can God be a source of all good while avoiding the Euthyphro Dilemma, particularly the good-is-arbitrary horn of the dilemma? Let’s again follow Plato’s reasoning.

Plato vs. the Sophists

To grasp where Plato is taking us, we need to understand his primary enemy: the sophists. Euthyphro himself reflects a sophistic idea of piety. So, who were the sophists? Well, they weren’t a solid group who shared all the same ideas, but we can get a sense of what Plato was attacking by looking at how Plato represented them. Their names are scattered throughout Plato’s dialogues: Gorgias, Protagoras, Hippias, Prodicus, as well as some less obvious examples, such as Thrasymachus, Meno, and, of course, Euthyphro. Indeed, one takeaway from Plato may be this: One is either a philosopher or a sophist. There are no other options.

OK, but what did the sophists believe? I’m glad you asked! They believed in the importance of rhetoric and the ability to debate, in the importance of convincing others that you were right and good—a terribly important skill in the democracy of Athens—they were less concerned with being right and good.

To understand why, one need only look at their view of human nature.  A creation story told by Protagoras—a story I refer to a lot in teaching and writing because of how well it reveals the basic differences in our understanding of human nature—can be found in the dialogue named after him. In Protagoras 320d-322d, the eponymous sophist tells a creation story, which I’ll sum up quickly:

There was a time when all creatures had been created by the gods, but had not yet been brought forth onto the earth. They still had to be given natural powers (speed, flight, fur, claws, ability to hide, swim, etc.). The foolish Epimetheus, brother of Prometheus, handed out the powers, and had run out of them prior to coming to humans. Thus, humans were left without the power to overcome nature and would quickly die from exposure and being killed by the other creatures. Prometheus stole fire and cleverness to help the humans, and this helped a little, but we were still going to go extinct because we could not maintain communities to protect and help one another. Finally, Zeus stepped in and sent Hermes to give justice and a sense of shame to all humans. This allowed humans to form groups and cities, because only in the relatively stable bonds of civilization could humans live and flourish.

What is the message? Nature is amoral, without concern for justice, or good or evil in general. It desires food, drink, sex, power, pleasure. Human nature is no different. Not even cleverness gets us morality. Rather, we receive a sense of morality, but it is at two removes, we might say, from our nature—and we are given morality simply so that we might not die out.[3] We need morality to survive. Otherwise, as another sophist says later in the dialogue, “…convention [Greek: nómos]…tyrannizes the human race…constrain[ing] us contrary to nature [Greek: phusis]” (Prot. 337d). This does not mean that morality—termed by the sophists as “convention”—is not at all within us. It is. But it is not fundamental to our nature. It is like wearing a coat that one must wear to survive the cold—if you take it off in the cold, you’ll fairly quickly feel a need for it—but it constrains one’s movement. And if you wear it too long, you eventually lose even the capacity for full range of movement. You’ll take it off as soon as the cold passes, though. Because it is not comfortable to wear all the time. So, too, we remove our morality once no one is watching, because morality, as the sophists say, “constrains us contrary to nature.”

Is this what morality is? Not according to Plato. And not according to Christianity—I say “Christianity,” not “Christians,” because despite the beauty and richness of Christianity, most of us Christians still feel, even if we don’t consciously state it, that morality is contrary to our nature. For what makes one happy is that which is according to one’s nature. What makes one unhappy is what is contrary to one’s nature. Isn’t sin the experience of happiness? Isn’t holiness constraining and empty (even if it leads to good things later on)? It may seem so, but that is not the message of Christianity. It is not the claim of Plato, either.

Plato, Augustine, and the Final Piece

According to Plato, the source of all being is the Good (capital “G”). We’ll not dive deep into Plato’s metaphysics here, but simply understanding that all that exists somehow connects to, participates in, the Good is enough to grasp the point. Augustine was rescued from his younger heretical attraction to Manicheanism by discovering Platonic metaphysics.[4] Existence itself is good. To be is to be good.

What then is evil? And how are we, who exist, evil? Evil is, according to Augustine, a lack, like a hole within something. Evil has no real being, it is only a corruption, a bending-out-of-shape of the good. Thus, for example, no desire is, at its root, evil. It is only a good desire bent out of shape.

How then can something that exists be evil? Because we are incomplete beings, or, to put it another way, not wholly perfect. If we were perfect, we’d be God. We were made out of nothing, and, in a sense, that “nothingness” still draws us.[5] What, in fact, could it mean to oppose the Creator God than to act against being itself?

The sophistic view of human nature is built upon the idea that human nature, and nature itself, is amoral. Morality is an added affect developed by a god or gods, or by natural selection, that benefits humanity’s survival through the development of relatively stable groups, but on the other hand constrains us so that we cannot, within morality, find the fulfillment/happiness that nature desires. It is no wonder that under such a view, morality being determined by the gods seems necessary, based upon a “might makes right” perspective. And it makes sense that Socrates—who disagrees that the gods themselves seem amoral in their natures—would employ whatever argument possible to show how such a view in fact falls apart.

The Platonic, and I think Christian, view of human nature is built upon the idea that human nature, and being itself, comes from that which is wholly good. Good and Being are in fact basically synonyms. Morality is not merely an added layer on being, but is essential to existence itself. So, too, fulfillment and happiness arise only as one becomes good, for only in becoming good does one truly become what one really is.

This effectively shuts down the Euthyphro Dilemma. For, as concluded in the 2nd of these posts, God is not divided against God (like Euthyphro’s gods), and God is pure Being (“I am who I am”), and all being is given by Him. Our existence is maintained and grows only as it resonates, harmonizes, with His Being. To turn against Him means turning against ourselves. Of course, we can flip this around: God is for us, because He is for Himself.

And with that, all problems with arbitrariness, of an evil god who would abuse or attack the nature of his creatures, falls away.

Any (Other) Takeaways?

I’ll add one more piece (or two, if it gets long) to this series, which will offer some takeaways from the claims made. Does this examination of the Euthyphro Dilemma in fact give evidence that there is an all-good, personal God who created all things? Does this bit of reflection support the idea that to believe in morality one must believe in a moral divine being? Are there still sophists running about trying to convince us that morality and nature are not related in any essential way? What does our nature being tied to the good really even mean? What was Plato’s goal in the Euthyphro—and is that goal consistent with Christianity so that we can use the conclusions in our discussions with unbelievers?

[1] There have been a series of articles arguing that the Euthyphro Dilemma does not in fact follow from Euthyphro’s claims, but rather that Socrates led Euthyphro into it by some bad reasoning. The articles seem to me to be correct as long as one ignores the context of the reasoning, most notably the disagreement about the morality of the gods. The disagreement leads to some important conclusions that, if held consistently, must necessarily lead one to the Euthyphro Dilemma. This philosophical ignoring of the context and genre of Plato’s writings has led, in my mind, to a host of exquisitely brilliant nonsense about Plato. Perhaps the worst part is that such an approach to Plato makes him painfully dull.

[2] There’s a motivational component to this claim as well that we did not look at in the previous post. Consider that having the power to mete out rewards and punishments is never sufficient to cause one to love what is right. If God has infinite power to punish me horrifically for eternity, and infinite power to reward me wonderfully for eternity, that does not cause me to love the good except as a means to a selfish end. In addition, it is unclear how morality (in terms of obedience to avoid punishment/gain reward) could ever develop into love for God. Such a view that God can make morality by virtue of His power contains all the hallmarks of the view of the sophists, described below. As a possible, but rather fearful, counterexample, we can consider the case of O’Brien’s torturing of Winston (on behalf of “Big Brother”) in Orwell’s 1984, that led, through serious psychological damage and twisting, to Winston’s love of “Big Brother.” But I cannot imagine a Christian who would embrace “Big Brother” or O’Brien as good images of the God whose Son Jesus is.

[3] This should sound familiar, though it appears in different garb today. The idea that morality is an evolutionary development is perfectly in keeping with Protagoras, just minus the gods. That is, we humans are weak with regard to almost all powers, except intelligence (cleverness). But even as clever beings, we still are rarely a match for the natural world on our own. We need to band together in groups, and so natural selection led to those who have a sense of morality that allows for groups to form to out-reproduce those who did not. The implications about morality and nature from Protagoras’s story of human nature and the evolutionary story seem to be essentially the same.

[4] Technically, it was Neo-Platonism, but that distinction is immaterial to the point here.

[5] Put perhaps a little unadvisedly, we could say that humanity has two metaphysical “parents”: God, who actively brought us into being, and nothingness, which passively was given form and substance. We live as children of both—drawn by God, Being, the Good, as well as by nothingness, death, and sin. That is what gives us the sinister capacity to rebel against God, and it is why rejecting God (sin) always leads to death. Understand that this does not mean that there is a another eternal principle alongside God that we call “nothingness.” It really just means that God did not make us uncreated, perfect, eternal beings (that is, we are not God). This idea of parentage is simply a kind of analogy to help explain something about our motives.

Moral Arguments III: Might Might Make Right, Right?

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Filed Under: Apologetics Tagged With: , , , ,

In the previous two posts, we’ve talked about one of the central criticisms of any claim that morality is derived in some way from a divine being: The Euthyphro Dilemma. We’ve looked briefly at the original text of Plato’s Euthyphro, examined how the Dilemma develops in the dialogue. And, so far, we have found Plato/Socrates not to be a critic of the idea that one can derive morality from a divine being, but rather in the kind of divine beings in which Euthyphro believed—a set of gods who are in often violent disagreement over justice and other matters related to virtue and the good.

Given that Christianity holds no such view of God, it may seem that the Euthyphro Dilemma simply has nothing to do with us. But that is not precisely correct. If we reject the claim that there is a standard of good and evil apart from, and above, God, we still have the problem of the possible arbitrariness of God’s commands. Of course, the Christian response would surely be something like this: “But God is unchangingly good, so therefore there is no arbitrariness.”

But realize what is taking place when one makes such a statement: You are appealing to a standard apart from God—for to declare “God is good” is to compare Him to a standard of goodness. In fact, modern formulations of the Euthyphro Dilemma raise this issue—that to embrace the view that something is good only because God loves it is to make the statement “God is good” essentially meaningless.

Some believers might respond thusly: God is the Creator of all things and beings (other than God). There can be no greater justification for absolute authority over a domain than being the creator ex nihilo of the domain and all that inhabits it. Thus, there can be no other standard except God’s will.

This isn’t a bad response. It makes sense. But it makes sense because there is an appeal to a standard apart from God! Did you see it sneak in? The standard of justification for authority over a domain seems to be a standard under which God labors.

In addition, we could imagine, surely, an evil being creating a domain ex nihilo for the sake of torturing it’s hapless inhabitants. Would that being have the right to do so? If the standard of authority over a domain is in fact correct, then yes. But would that being be good? Surely not! Can we ever embrace the claim, lived out by so many in power, that might makes right? We cannot help but appeal to a standard over the one in power. Are we allowed to do so when talking about God? Can we stop ourselves? Can “good” have meaning if we simply let the creator of a domain be the standard by virtue of the power of that being?[1]

The philosopher Leibniz rejected the view that God’s power over creation was sufficient for His command to be good thus:

“In saying, therefore, that things are not good according to any standard of goodness, but simply by the will of God, it seems to me that one destroys, without realizing it, all the love of God and all his glory; for why praise him for what he has done, if he would be equally praiseworthy in doing the contrary? Where will be his justice and his wisdom if he has only a certain despotic power, if arbitrary will takes the place of reasonableness, and if in accord with the definition of tyrants, justice consists in that which is pleasing to the most powerful.”[2]

The more contemporary James Rachels agrees, but claims that this approach undermines our capacity to even declare God to be good:

“[I]f we accept the idea that good and bad are defined by reference to God’s will, this notion is deprived of any meaning. What could it mean to say that God’s commands are good? If ‘X is good’ means ‘X is commanded by God,’ then ‘God’s commands are good’ would mean only ‘God’s commands are commanded by God,’ an empty truism.”[3]

I do not think, though, that we must reject the claim that what is good is determined in some way by God’s will or God’s love. Let’s take another cue from Plato. The Euthyphro, as you’ll recall from the second post in this series, is a dialogue that is written on the backdrop of coercion used to support religious morality. In addition, Euthyphro, the arrogant seer whose pride keeps him from admitting his ignorance, is himself attempting to leverage legal-religious power against his father to compel some sort of religious purity. In short, Plato is surely criticizing the use of and appeal to power as a source of morality. And, of course, gods who themselves exhibit no steady morality can only possess authority over the standard of piety by means of their power. If you’re paying close attention, Plato is writing a dialogue that, at minimum, is declaring emphatically that might does not make right—neither human nor divine might is sufficient to make an action good. But that does not mean that he thinks that morality cannot come from a divine being. It just cannot be derived from power without falling prey to the Euthyphro Dilemma.

What, then, is the clue that Plato offers us? And can Christians use it to defend a view of morality that is dependent on the will of God?

If not power, then how might God be a source of morality? In the next post, we will look at Plato’s primary philosophical enemy, the sophists, and with that background we can derive some important insights into Plato’s possible solution to the Euthyphro Dilemma.

[1] Another possible response: Maybe God commands His own existence, and thus is judged good by His self-preservation. It is not entirely clear what this means, but it clearly leaves us back where we started. That God calls Himself good simply throws us back to the question: But is God good so that He can call himself good?

[2] G.W. von Leibniz, “Discourse on Metaphysics,” in Selections, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Scribner, 1951), 292.

[3] James Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, 4th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 51. Both this and the previous quote by Leibniz were found in Lewis Vaughn, Doing Ethics, 5th ed. (New York: Norton, 2019), 11.

Moral Arguments II: Disagreeing over God(s)

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Filed Under: Apologetics, Defending the Faith, From the Board, Philosophy Tagged With: , , ,

When we make arguments in support of a Christian view, those arguments can avoid accusations of question-begging by appeal to sources other than Scripture. Given that the Euthyphro Dilemma, which has been wielded against the idea of God as a source of morality, originated with Plato, what if Plato already had within the Euthyphro the answer, or the beginning of an answer, to the Dilemma that in fact supported the Christian perspective?[1]

Socrates’ Disagreement with Euthyphro

Plato’s Euthyphro is a dialogue between Socrates, who is about to be tried, in part, for impiety, and the younger seer Euthyphro, who claims to know all there is to know about religious matters. Socrates seeks to learn what piety is from Euthyphro.

There are a number of important events that take place in the dialogue that impact the way that we should approach the Dilemma. First, Euthyphro is a know-it-all, in the bad sense. Second, the entire episode must be read as driven in large part by force or coercion. What I mean is this: Socrates is driven to this setting (that is, the king-archon’s court, which determined whether issues of religious pollution, such as impiety or murder, should be sent to court) by accusations of wrong-doing by those who were angry at him. In turn, Euthyphro is at the king-archon’s court to accuse his father of murder, due to a complicated situation in which the father (perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not) caused the death of a servant (who himself had killed another servant). In both cases—Socrates’s accusers and Euthyphro—they were using legal compulsion to cause some change in the accused.

Third, while Socrates spends most of the dialogue, as with most of his conversations, simply drawing out the implications of Euthyphro’s own claims, there is one point at which he directly disagrees with Euthyphro.[2] Such a direct disagreement is rarely heard from Socrates, usually appearing no more than once in a dialogue. And that should draw our attention. This disagreement is where we’ll begin to see how Socrates the character[3] (and Plato the author) possesses a view similar to Christianity, and how the arrogant Euthyphro does not.

The disagreement begins with Euthyphro’s justification of his own prosecution of his father by reference to the gods’ activities. After all, Euthyphro claims, “Zeus is the best and most just of the gods, yet…he bound his father because he unjustly swallowed his sons, and that he in turn castrated his father for similar reasons” (5e-6a). Socrates responds, “…I find it hard to accept things like that being said about the gods…Tell me, by the god of friendship, do you really believe these things are true?” (6a-6b).

Already here, we should feel a kind of kinship with Socrates: “…that there is really war among the gods, and terrible enmities and battles, and other such things…” (6b) we, too, would reject. In part, because we’re not polytheists, but also because it does not seem like something worthy of a god to act in such a way. Nevertheless, Euthyphro embraces such stories as true. Socrates, who is trying to draw out of Euthyphro what he believes, simply agrees for the sake of argument, and moves on to talk about piety. Thus begins the usual Socratic dialogue of Euthyphro giving a definition of piety, and Socrates showing how that definition leads to a conclusion that Euthyphro himself cannot accept, and thus asking Euthyphro for another definition. Rinse and repeat, until Euthyphro gives up in frustration and leaves.

Why the Disagreement Matters

The definition that Euthyphro gives that leads to the Dilemma is this: “[T]he pious is what all the gods love” (9e).[4] What could be wrong with this definition? Remember that the gods warred with one another, and that such wars surely arose from disagreements over what is in fact dear. This suggests that they had differing views on, say, what was just and unjust, over what was good and evil, and so forth. If so, then their loving of the same thing was purely a matter of chance. If they could not agree on the good, then why would their unanimous love mean anything except that they happened to all like the same thing. We in the U.S. have managed to be in enmity with one another over everything from politics to how we refer to our dogs[5]–meanwhile, we are borderline unanimous in our love of pizza. Does that make pizza a morally good thing, and eating pizza a virtuous act? If not, then neither would the affection felt by the gods—who seem to have an understanding of the Good that is not qualitatively different than ours—make something good or virtuous.

Socrates capitalizes on this problem by formulating his Euthyphro Dilemma. Now, in fact, it would have been possible for Euthphro to avoid the dilemma had he not agreed to some of the statements made by Socrates that led up to the Dilemma. Most importantly, Socrates makes this series of claims about something being carried and being a carried thing, that sounds rather strange. But his point is something like this: If “piety” simply means “a thing being loved by the gods,” then saying “the pious is that which is loved by the gods” means nothing more than “a thing being loved by the gods is defined as that which is loved by the gods.” You’ll recognize that this definition doesn’t seem helpful in determining what kinds of actions would be pious or impious. And thus it leaves us without any knowledge of what piety could be.

And this problem is not solved by saying that the love of the gods makes something pious. For the gods of Euthyphro, as we’ve already seen, are at war over what constitutes the just and the unjust, and other matters of central important for understanding the good and the virtuous. Therefore, the only method we’d have for determining what is pious is by a poll of the gods at any point (for what they hold as good and evil might change from time to time as well).

The Start of a Solution

Is there a solution to the Dilemma? There are two solutions. Either define morality apart from the gods altogether, or go back to the disagreement and reject Euthyphro’s view of the gods.

As Christians, removing morality from God seems wrong. So, let’s see if there is a solution by going back and rejecting Euthyphro’s view of the gods.

Firstly, we obviously reject his polytheism. And this leads to, secondly, the claim that there is no division within God about what is just and good—God is not at war with Himself, nor are Father, Son, and Spirit at war over what is right and good.

Does this solve the problem? It’s the beginning of the solution, but it does not quite finish the job.

We’ll see further how Plato, and a fan of his, Augustine, can help us finish solving the contemporary form of the Euthyphro Dilemma long before it was ever formulated. We’ll get to that next time.

[1] Of course, I haven’t tried to define “the Christian perspective” on the relationship between God and morality. Let me simply say that I think most Christians believe morality comes from God, but also want to avoid the problem of apparent arbitrariness exposed by the Euthyphro Dilemma.

[2] Such singular disagreements takes place in a number of the dialogues, and, just as in the Euthyphro, mark a significant turning point in the conversation. A couple of the more obvious examples, in case you’re interested, can be found in Republic II, 372d-373a and Meno 86d-87a.

[3] Socrates was very likely a real person, but I refer to him as a “character” here because we are reading here Plato’s presentation of Socrates. How accurate to real life is this depiction? Did these events in fact take place? We can’t be sure.

[4] This specific definition follows from Euthyphro saying that the pious is what is dear to the gods, without specifically claiming that it is what all the gods love. Given that the gods were at war and enmity, and that such strife arises from differences of opinion about important matters, such as justice, beauty, the good, what is dear to the gods (piety) could change from god to god. Thus, something could be both pious and impious (dear to, say, Zeus, and hated by Athena—like the situation faced by Agamemnon in Aeschylus’ tragedy, where two gods demanded opposing actions). The solution for Euthyphro was, therefore, to say that piety is what all the gods agree is good.

[5] If you have a “fur baby”…well, I’ll not comment.

A Primer on Justice II: Getting Confused with Plato

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Filed Under: Christianity and Politics, Church and Law, Philosophy, Worldview Tagged With: , , , ,

Getting Properly Confused

I’ve stated in another blog that being unsure, even confused, can be a result even of the experience of the grace of Jesus. I may be wrong, for perhaps I just find too much confidence in one’s beliefs unpleasant. It surely undermines dialogue and therefore also can reduce the chance of befriending those with whom one disagrees. It can also often be a kind of hidden laziness, in which one is unwilling to go through the difficulty of entertaining other positions.

But I’m not talking about dropping confidence for some cheap (false) humility that declares everything to be unknowable. That is merely the same old arrogance, but this time the laziness (in this case, of not assenting to anything) is on full display.

Nor am I talking about being filled with doubt to the point of agnosticism. In this case, I am not talking about belief in God at all, but rather about our understanding of the basic ethical concept of justice.

I’ve already suggested that our approach to justice is fraught with a bad kind of selfishness and emphasis on the retributive elements of justice. Rare is the one who speaks with the awe that, say, justice-as-shalom should inspire. If indeed justice is a state of wholeness and peace, then we should be in awe of it—not simply because it stands far above our approaches to life, but because justice-as-shalom seems to outstrip our understanding.

The Questions of the Republic

Probably the most famous piece ever written about justice is Plato’s Republic. It is an expansive dialogue (in ten books), talking about everything from personal virtue to the decay of good societies into tyrannies to reward and punishment in an afterlife. It remains a brilliant work, almost prophetic in places, from which we can glean much today. But perhaps most important are not really the conclusions to which the interlocutors come, but the way in which the various questions about justice arise. Before turning to Scripture, let’s explore this dialogue, and see how it might help us ask better questions about justice.

In Book I of the Republic, we are introduced to a number of interlocutors, the most important in that book are Socrates, Cephalus (an old, well-to-do man), Polemarchus, and Thrasymachus. Excepting Socrates, the other speakers essentially disappear for the rest of the dialogue (Books II-X), being replaced by Plato’s brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus.

The dialogue begins with Socrates and Glaucon ascending from Athens’ port city, Piraeus, back up to Athens. They are stopped by the various other interlocutors and forced playfully (but still forced) to stay down in Piraeus. They enter the house of Cephalus, who is busy preparing for a religious sacrifice. Socrates engages him in conversation, and from this the conversation about justice arises. Cephalus, upon being asked by Socrates to talk about justice, immediately leaves the conversation to attend to his sacrifice. Polemarchus picks up the argument, using Cephalus’ claim about justice—namely, that justice is truth-telling and paying back to each what is owed to each.

This is not a bad description of justice. Socrates ultimately undermines the second part, for it is clear that there are times when giving back to someone what one owes is improper. Say you borrowed a gun from Bob, and Bob, overcome with rage over a backstabbing friend, asks for his gun. It is his, you borrowed it, and it is owed him, but it does not seem to be just to give it to him at that time.

Polemarchus modifies his answer to mean that “what is owed” is deeper than merely giving people back their stuff: It means that I owe to my friends good things and to my enemies bad things (compare Matthew 5:43). Socrates undermines this claim by leading Polemarchus to agree that a virtue (justice) cannot cause true harm—for true harm is falling into vice. Therefore, justice cannot mean to cause harm to one’s enemies.

At this point, Thrasymachus angrily interrupts the discussion, criticizing Socrates for always asking questions, but never answering them. It is not too long before Thrasymachus offers his own definition of justice: It is that which benefits the stronger. That is, justice is merely a term for whatever is best for the most powerful person. Thrasymachus voices the cynical view that “justice” is merely a means of maintaining the status quo to keep the powerful in control. Consider that a rebellion that fails (e.g. the Civil War) is determined to be unjust, but a rebellion that succeeds (e.g. the Revolutionary War) is considered just.

Socrates undermines this claim too, though in a rather complex way, leaving Thrasymachus embarrassed and angry (for Socrates was apparently the more powerful between the two!).

While when we are at our best, we may reject the claims of Cephalus, Polemarchus, and Thrasymachus, I think we struggle to rise out of these conceptions of justice. In many ways, we have not, in the 2400 or so  years since the Republic was written, moved past Book I. And, yes, I include us Christians among those who have mostly failed to move past Book I.

Understanding Justice and Justification: Owing and the Powerful

Consider the way we talk about salvation. The account, in a nutshell, goes something like this: There is a law set in place by God. The first humans (Adam and Eve) broke that law, and we, in concert with Adam and Eve, continue to break that law. God the Son took on human flesh to be the perfect sacrifice so as to appease God’s wrath against humanity for breaking His law, and so giving us the opportunity to be forgiven, if only we believe and are identified with Jesus.

I do not believe this account is false or erroneous. But the way many look at it is false or erroneous because justice is understood in Republic, Book I terms. Consider that if we understand justice as the benefit of the most powerful, then we see that God made up a law that benefits Him, and that He tyrannizes over us to serve Him, without concern whether it hurts or helps us, and then judges us as evil for failing to live as proper servants. While many Christians would nod their hands to this account, it is based on the very bad idea that “might makes right.” It suggests that God isn’t really fundamentally good, but must be considered good simply because no one is powerful enough to overthrow Him. This means, in turn, that power is the fundamental characteristic and the only one that makes one worthy of worship.

Of course, then we can add the Cephalus/Polemarchus view of justice to this: Justice is getting what is owed. Clearly, we are owed punishment. But Jesus gives to God what is owed Him in the sacrifice, so that God lets us off the hook.

This approach isn’t bad, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far. Is salvation merely getting out of hell? Or is it more than that—being included in Christ, in the overcoming of death, being made like Christ, so that we might “glorify God and enjoy Him forever”? Surely, this is more than God getting what is owed and our not getting what we’re owed.[1]

Of course, perhaps I’ve made a mistake here. Perhaps, justice explains why we’re in trouble, while mercy explains why we’re not in trouble anymore, and, say, grace explains why we’re getting so much more.

But that means that justice is something we don’t really want…except against our enemies. It also means that God’s mercy is fundamentally at odds with His justice. Of course, we usually accept this idea, claiming that His mercy led to Jesus on the cross so as to appease His justice. Again, I think this is not really wrong, but simply does not go deep enough to understand justice.

A Focus on Recompense: Justice vs Mercy

Let me see if I can explain the problem a little more clearly. It might be easier if we look at a society, rather than God for a moment. Consider a man who has been found guilty of a capital crime—say he was a mass shooter, killing numerous people in a crowded mall. There is really no question that the man did it—it has been confirmed by eyewitnesses, recordings, and DNA evidence. The man writes a letter admitting that he had done wrong and feels bad about it. Upon hearing of the letter, the President decides to pardon him.

Has the President acted justly or mercifully? It seems clear that he has acted mercifully toward the man, but this mercy has reduced the level of justice in our society. For justice seems to relate to how the entire society functions, while mercy is for that single individual. Too much mercy and society will be overrun with crime. Too much justice, and we are all in prison.[2] And so in a society, one must balance mercy and justice. They are opposites and a well-functioning society will have to learn to balance them reasonably well.

God, if granting too much mercy, allows the unrepentant a place in the kingdom. If enacting too much justice, puts everyone in hell. Mercy seems directed toward universal eternal reward, while justice seems directed toward universal eternal punishment. Put another way, justice seems aimed toward appropriate recompense, while mercy is aimed toward cancelling negative recompense and/or increasing positive recompense. That is, His mercy and justice are pressing in opposite directions and must be balanced.[3]

That strikes me as a bad view of God’s justice and mercy. It is a helpful analogy, but seems to make God at odds with Himself—such internal division being a problem, I think, of sinful humans.

Recognizing internal division—having our motives battle one another—as a problem for limited, sinful creatures gives us some direction for understanding what kind of thing justice might be, or at least what it is not. For surely God is not divided in His thoughts or motives. If He were, He would not be unchanging and ever-faithful—for the result of a divided mind and warring motives is faithlessness, constant changing, and so forth.[4]

It seems to me that if justice and mercy are about recompense, then they must be opposed. And since I do not believe that God’s desires are so divided, I think it reasonable to believe that recompense is not really what true justice and mercy are about.

This does not mean that concerns over recompense have nothing to do with justice and mercy, but simply that the best we can establish regarding recompense will never achieve the heights of that true justice that is a description of God’s character.

Of course, we should not fall into despair and forgo the pursuit of justice and mercy as we presently understand these terms. But we absolutely should seek to understand as best we can the nature of God’s view of justice and, it would seem, try to bring our society’s view of justice better in line with His perfect justice.

But we cannot really determine what is involved in bringing our society’s justice closer to God’s justice, or whether it is possible or desirable to do so, until we begin to gain an understanding of what God’s justice looks like. That will be our aim in the following post.

[1] Some are probably thinking that I’m mixing up justification with sanctification. Yes, I am. After all, the Bible does it. It is merely our systematic attempts to divide things up into conceptual parts that leads to the division. We can talk about inhaling and exhaling as distinct acts, but in everyday life, they depend on one another and cannot be separated (without killing the person). Perhaps our obsession with justification (inhaling), our persistent analyzing, debating, evangelizing, analogizing, making relevant of salvation-as-justification has undermined our grasp and concern for sanctification (exhaling). We’re full of grace and yet still sucking in air as one suffocating, not realizing that it is the outward flow of “good works” (sanctification, a life directed by God glorifying purpose) that fills the body with new life.

[2] If we paid for every crime we committed—many of which we may not even know we’re committing—we’d all be in trouble—many of us simply for speeding.

[3] Obviously, they would have to be balanced by some other consideration. That is, God’s motivations would have to be driven fundamentally not by justice or mercy, but by some other thing(s). As noted in the footnote below, perhaps God’s glory is this other consideration that decides how to bring balance.

[4] Of course, this undivided mind of God regarding justice and mercy can, perhaps, be solved by appealing to a simple claim that God chooses a set group to receive mercy and the rest to experience the full weight of justice, and that this decision was from eternity (that is, God experiences no clash within Himself because He has never not decided how many will receive mercy, for—it would seem—this precise amount would result in the greatest glory for Himself). While this approach makes so that God is unchanging, faithful, etc., I am not entirely sure that it really deals with the warring nature of this understanding of justice and mercy. In any case, I will not follow this line of reasoning because I believe it is too easily accepting of a human idea of justice-as-appropriate-recompense and opposed to mercy-as-inappropriate-recompense (that is, even though God is not experiencing division within Himself, justice and mercy are still opposed within Him).

Knowledge, Understanding, and Love III: Ignorance through Grace

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Filed Under: Apologetics, Humility, Philosophy, Worldview Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Ignorance and the Good

The last entry in this series noted that recognizing our own ignorance—the simple recognition that we do not possess the Truth, but that the Truth possesses us—may be essential to be good, even for Christians. But how can Christians both claim to know the Truth and be ignorant? Let’s begin with Socrates again, and then show how similar ideas are evident in Christianity.

The recognition of one’s own ignorance relates closely to what Socrates obsessed about: ethics. Ethics isn’t simply what tells you what to do. In fact, that is a rather simplistic view of ethics. In reality, ethics gives the why of everything, explains how it all fits, and because it puts it all together, it shows us how to navigate through this life without stubbing our toes or falling into a pit.

According to Socrates, all things exist by virtue of their “participation” in the Good (or, which is the same thing, the Beautiful). While that sounds too metaphysical to be meaningful, it includes something a little more down-to-earth: To understand something, you must understand what good it is, and what is good for it, and where it fits into a life directed toward good things.

Think of any piece of information in the world: From information about a friend’s struggles with self-esteem to information about the incredible power released when splitting an atom. We can learn this information, but what is the point of this information? If I have no aims at all, then the information is meaningless. It could just as well be a jumble of nonsense words, easily ignored or forgotten or misused. If my aims are destructive, then I could use my friend’s struggle to destroy her, and my knowledge of atom-splitting to kill multitudes.[1] If my aims are good, then I may build my friend up and help develop safe nuclear power plants and work to make sure use of nuclear weapons remains unnecessary, a thing of fiction alone.

The ethics one possesses tells where the information belongs, how it all fits. Plato believed, in fact, that all things derive their being from the Good itself, and thus truly to know something meant in fact to have familiarity with the Good. And this familiarity with the Good was not the possession of mere facts about the Good, but required living a life of virtue—a life, so to speak, in the Good. Socrates’ interlocutors, insofar as they suffered from vice, are shown to be utterly lacking in knowledge of things, most glaringly they suffer from that most destructive of vices: Unawareness of their own ignorance.

Why did they suffer so badly from this unawareness? Not because they were ignorant in the sense that we use the word today. Many of the characters in Plato’s dialogues stood at the tops of their fields of study—many of the rich paying enormous sums (equivalent to what we pay for college) to learn from them. What they suffered from was not lack of information or knowledge, but wisdom. And their wisdom failed them because they did not live virtuously, pursuing the Good.

A life of vice leads one to be unable to see how things fit together. Plato shows us this vicious failure of understanding through Socrates’ elenchus, that rather unpleasant process through which he showed glaring inconsistencies in his interlocutors’ claims. Plato’s purpose was not to suggest that these people needed to study more or learn more facts. Quite the opposite: They had become so enamored of their knowledge and skill that they found the whole of virtue unnecessary.[2]

Transforming Self-Justifying Pigs into Forgiven Humans

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 8:1 that “‘knowledge’ puffs up, but love builds up” (ESV). He is writing about those who understand that an idol is nothing, and so eating the food sacrificed to an idol is acceptable. But to grab hold of this knowledge and to act in accordance with the freedom one feels in possessing it can lead to the destruction of a fellow believer: “And so by your knowledge this weak person is destroyed, the brother for whom Christ died” (1 Cor 8:11 ESV).

It is clear in this context that knowledge of the facts is insufficient. Knowledge must be directed by love, otherwise it can be used for evil. Just as knowledge of nuclear physics or another’s weakness can be wielded for good or evil. I believe that this can be true even of the knowledge that God exists: Even the demons believe.

What the demons, the bad physicist, the manipulative friend, and the knowledgeable, but uncaring idol-carnivore are all missing is the proper framework into which to place the facts they possess. This framework is really less a simple framework, and more a stance, an aim, a direction in which one is moving. In Plato’s language, a pursuit of the Good. In biblical language, love (of God and neighbor).

This perhaps is why Jesus warns us: “Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you” (Matt 7:6 ESV). A pig can see a pearl, can experience that pearl’s hardness, shape, luster, but the pig does not have the framework to recognize the value. The pig’s values are unswervingly directed toward other things. The same goes for the dog and the sacred.

The pig represents the one whose aims are vulgar, worldly, or simply full of malice. When you hand them anything of value, whether that is a fact or one’s time, the “pig” will recognize the fact, but not interpret it correctly. Have you ever shown someone a kindness, and that person immediately became angry or bitter? I myself spent a good portion of my life as that very kind of pig—genuine kindnesses shown to me would cause me both intense prideful anger and a festering self-loathing.

Before something of value could be given to pig-Travis, I had to be transformed into a human. How did this happen? Through a crisis. This crisis was a kind of ethical-epistemological crisis—I experienced the collapse of the system that included my way of living and my beliefs: the framework (my life) fell apart, and the beliefs scattered into a confusing mess. I found myself confused, lost, ignorant—but not “ignorant” in the normal sense that we usually use that term. I mean “ignorant” in a broader sense: I knew facts about life, I was relatively “well-educated,” had experienced a decent amount of life, I had worked and even taught. But this ignorance was that feeling that nothing I knew seemed to fit anywhere anymore—as if all that I was, did, and knew had been tossed into space, floating scattered about.

But that was a starting point. I was able to recognize how un-directed and confused, how ignorant, I was, and so I was able to look back and see myself more clearly than I did before. For our ethics are most often attempts to protect ourselves and blame others. After all, what did Adam and Eve do immediately upon receiving the knowledge of good and evil (arguably, the very definition of ethical knowledge)? They blamed others for their actions—Adam blaming Eve (and God), and Eve blaming the serpent (and, implicitly, God)—and they did this to protect themselves. Our lives form around our attempts to justify ourselves—if you are poor, you will surely see your position as more holy than that of the rich, and if you get a high-paying job, you will surely believe that God is calling you to that job and learn to live quite comfortably with your much higher wages. So, too, if you are having sex before marriage, you will likely convince yourself that your love is so rich that you are an exception to traditional sexual morality (or that traditional sexuality morality is simply wrong). If you despise someone, you surely come to believe that they are so bad as to deserve being hated, or, more likely, you will be quite convinced that you do not “hate” them, but “love” them, and so like a kind of monstrous transubstantiation, all the accidental properties are that of hatred, but the essential nature is love. Our ethics are largely wielded to justify our lives and to condemn those we don’t like. No wonder original sin consisted of eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil!

But when we have that moment of confusion, of being at a loss about our own lives, in that dangerous moment in which you lose the grasp on your own life, you are free to see yourself without the haze of your self-justifying ethics standing in the way. In that moment—a moment dangerous, as if balancing on the edge of a precipice—I saw myself as the pig I was. I saw that I was trampling on pearls and the sacred.

I hope you do not miss that this is, in some ways, precisely what recognizing the grace of God does to you. If your view of ethics and way of life are largely built around self-justification, then Jesus’ forgiveness is not some pleasant experience. It is surely full of mercy and grace, but it can destroy your life, throwing all your previous ways—not just sinning in the obvious ways, but sinning in that most sinister and sneaky manner, self-justification—away. And if this gave your life order, a confrontation with Jesus’ mercy will throw you directly into chaos. Like being baptized into death, or picking up a cross, or drinking the cup that Jesus drank. Through that, comes life.

And so it did for me: those pearls and the sacred suddenly began to re-form a framework into which the bits of floating facts surrounding me started finding their places. I saw moments in which people loved me that I had never recognized before. I saw the hand of God in my life, working even as I tried to shove Him away. My eyes were opened again, a little more to the beauty of God.

The point? The difference between a pig-Travis and human-Travis is that the human had come to recognize his ignorance. A pig does not know that it is ignorant. For a pig to become a human, that pig must lose its ethical-epistemological system of self-justification. In the language of the New Testament, the pig must die, must lose its life, and so be raised with Christ as the new man.

And we must not come to believe, even as Christians, that we have outgrown that ignorance. We have been gathered up by Christ. We do not own Him anymore than a fingernail owns the head. Or, put differently, we must not think that we have come to understand God any more than a man should ever come to think that he has understood his wife. For though I may understand my wife to some extent, if I ever have her completely figured out, completely nailed down, I would lose all desire to listen to her, to pursue her, and, well, to try to understand her. More fundamentally, it would show that I am ignorant of my own ignorance, for only a corpse can be completely understood. How much more does God stand above our understanding—yes, even if your theological knowledge is so grand that sermons are dull and the “average Christian” is not worthy to untie the thongs of your intellectual sandals.

God stands above us. Way above us. Recognition of our ignorance is a necessary condition for trusting in Him. That’s true for every human, even an impassioned, educated, Bible-memorizing, praying, fasting, activist, evangelizing-daily, feeding the hungry and clothing the naked Christian. And definitely for me.

But here’s the beauty of all this: Recognizing one’s own ignorance is not, as it may first appear, a kind of dead end, a stalling of learning and pursuit. It is just the opposite: It opens the door for greater understanding, a passionate pursuit of that which you don’t understand. And this passionate pursuit is contingent upon a trust, a faith, that the One whom you pursue is worth the pursuit.

[1] Note here that if you in fact hate John, you may quite easily remember and “understand the fit” of information about John’s weaknesses. Of course, you can do this because you see injuring John as “good” (you might not say that it is good, but you nevertheless, in a sense deeper than your words, believe it to be a good thing). Of course, this “good” and this “fit” are weak and shallow—easily acquired and cheaply held. Socrates’ elenchus, which I mention just below, works to undermine such cheap understandings of “good” throughout Plato’s corpus. For these vicious forms of “good” can very quickly be shown to lead to fatal inconsistencies. Love of John, even if he is your enemy (and may even need to be made incapable of acting), gives to one the true good and true fit, which is difficult to acquire and held at a cost to oneself. The valuable, of which the Good is the source, always requires sacrifice to acquire. Of course, while a believer may not hold to Plato’s metaphysic of the Good, it is not difficult to recognize that love of neighbor and love of God are not merely two unrelated commandments, but that they are organically united. You can’t have one without the other. So, too, we might say: The valuable, of which God is the source, always requires sacrifice to acquire. For to love John is to better know him than to hate him, for to love John is to better love God, who is the source of all truth, understanding, and good. And to fail to know and love God, no matter how much information you possess, is to walk in darkness, (arrogantly) stumbling about blindly.

[2] Plato seems to have believed that virtue was largely an all-or-nothing thing. To have one virtue properly is to have all of them. And so while his interlocutors may have exhibited a virtue, it was really a sort of reflection or adulterated image of the virtue. It was this holistic virtue that Socrates’ interlocutors seemed incapable of embracing, not the specific (semi-)virtues that they practiced.

Knowledge, Understanding, and Love II: Ignorance and Information Technology

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Filed Under: Apologetics, Philosophy, Worldview Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Remembering vs. Reminding: Fit

In the previous post on this issue, we ended by asking why we should blame technology for our strange (but organic) mix of arrogance and foolishness. Why not simply suggest that people are just not as nice and humble as they should be, and so we should try to be nicer and humbler? In this post, we’ll reflect further on Plato’s Phaedrus and begin to see how the claims in that brilliant dialogue relate to the warnings of C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, and, of course, Scripture.

To begin, let’s look at the problem that Socrates, in his telling of the myth of Thamus and Theuth, suggests arises from writing: The loss of the ability to remember.

This problem might seem the most obvious: When we have all the information at our fingertips, we concern ourselves less with memorization. But why does that matter?

Consider those things that you best remember as opposed to those of which you must be reminded. What is the primary difference between these two? Well, a host of things can make you remember things—significant pain or pleasure linked to the experience of remembering or simple drilling and repetition, as well as other activities. But those things that are easiest, or most natural, to remember are new pieces of information that fit with what you already know and augment one’s grasp of how things work or how they really are. It is like finding that puzzle piece that settles easily into the empty space. My wife describes her experience of getting a degree in business after having worked in business for some time in this way. She barely needed to study, despite learning new things, because those new things complemented so well what she had experienced. They just fit.

Perhaps the beginning of understanding is in recognizing that all the knowledge one has must be put together like a puzzle, while knowledge qua knowledge is the possession of discrete pieces of information without any awareness that or how they need to be put together. This difference between understanding and mere knowledge is why someone who has a host of fancy degrees may struggle like a novice in a new job when compared to the high school dropout who has been working that job for ten years. Experience gives a sense of where all those numbers and figures and ideas and skills fit together in the real world.

When we know where things fit, we remember them. When we do not know where they fit, we need to be reminded again and again. And when we can be reminded again and again, we no longer feel the urgency of seeing how things fit so that we might remember them. The omnipresence of information technology encourages a mind full of fragmented facts, which in turn results in a worldview that is itself fragmented (i.e. lacking cohesion, coherence, or even containing contradictory elements).

The Ethics of Understanding

Experience doesn’t merely help you understand where things fit, it shows why the things you learn matter. There is a close relationship between understanding where/how things fit and why they matter. In fact, why they matter may be the very thing that makes them fit.

This issue of the “why” gets us to the heart of Socrates’ critique of writing. In the myth, Thamus says the following: “[T]hey will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own.”

This statement at first appears simply to describe the difference between relying on a written account as opposed to memorization. But, if we examine more of the Phaedrus, as well as other writings of Plato’s corpus, we find that much more is being said here. Let me explain.

Immediately upon telling the story of the origin of writing, Socrates criticizes written speeches. He complains that a written speech “roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not.”[1]

This problem is not unfamiliar to us. Think of that time you wrote something on social media, were interpreted wrongly, and suffered a deluge of unjustified criticisms. When someone who cannot properly grasp the meaning of something reads the information and misuses it, we see the failure of information access for many. What does Socrates propose instead? Discourse, or the dialogical pursuit of knowledge called “dialectic”: “The dialectician [as opposed to the written speech] chooses a proper soul and plants and sows within it discourse accompanied by knowledge—discourse capable of helping itself as well as the man who planted it, which is not barren but produces a seed from which more discourse grows in the characters of others. Such discourse makes the seed forever immortal and renders the man who has it as happy as any human being can be.”[2]

Dialectic between one who knows and one worthy of dialogue results in an ongoing discourse within both of them. That discourse then grows and gives birth to new discourse—new questions and ideas and awareness of areas in one’s life in need of growth. And if you know where it fits and so see its importance, it will develop a discourse within you, so that this idea ceases to be an external idea that you have to struggle to remember. Rather, it becomes a discourse within you that touches all of life and begins to (in)form the way you live. All new information that relates at all to this bit of knowledge will add new levels of questions, new ideas or new development of old ideas, and, in general, a richer and more beautiful way of living in the world.

What is the hallmark of one who is worthy of dialectic? Anyone familiar at all with Plato should know the answer to this: The realization that I am ignorant—far more ignorant than I usually recognize.

On the other hand, what is the hallmark of almost every argument today, particularly in light of access to the internet, the most easily accessed bit of information technology in history? An insufferable know-it-all attitude. Written speeches versus written speeches. And no understanding arises, no meaningful dialogue, no discourse. Nothing that could possibly be mistaken as making a person “as happy as any human being can be.”

Rather, given our arrogance and pursuit only of that information that supports the position we already have, we rarely have discourse with others or within ourselves, and so become “difficult to get along with, since [we] merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.”

But how could one come to recognize one’s own ignorance when one in fact has access to so much information? Indeed, how could Socrates who seemed capable of out-arguing almost any person he spoke to declare his own ignorance? Even more, am I arguing that Christians should consider themselves ignorant in order to have better discussions with people? Recognition of one’s own ignorance sounds a bit like “humility,” but we Christians possess the truth, do we not?

We will dig further into these questions in the next one of this series. But perhaps reflect on this idea: It is perhaps more correct to say that the truth (or perhaps better, Truth) has possessed us, rather than that we have possessed the truth. Believing the latter leads to pride; the former, humility.

[1] Plato, Phaedrus 275d.

[2] Plato, Phaedrus 276e-277a.