(A series of short reflections on Christianity.)

A Friend’s Question:

Why do you need this fancy thing called God to respect each other? The drive should be intrinsic. Is the belief that “a divine entity will be angry if you do bad things”, not a just a way to explain a complex natural phenomenon?

My Reply:

The short answer: of course we do not need God to respect each other. The act of displaying respect, or any action is initself a mechanistic phenomenon. We don’t need God to explain why or how we respect. We need God to determine whether we ought to.

Slightly longer answer: religious language can be misleading. In this post I attempt to simplify as far as posssible the true role of God in the context of moral action, and the implications one must contend with in His absence.

Let us now consider two possible universes:

Universe A: the set of all physically observable facts that obtain. For example, it obtains that today’s high was 10 degrees in Montreal, it obtains that today I walked past an old lady struggling with groceries.).

Universe B: Universe A $\cup$ A’, where A’ is the set of facts that ought to obtain (today I helped an old lady with her groceries).

We call Universe A the materialistic or naturalist’s universe, and B the theistic universe. As an aside, we immediately notice that B obtaining does not contradict A (i.e. science and faith are compatible).

Universe A is made exclusively of particles, updating their state in a manner entirely determined by their physical constitution and that of its interaction partners. One can clearly see that the ‘intrinsic drive’ towards respect, as raised in the original question, is certainly possible in Universe A. Our brains are made of particles organized by natural selection in such a way that tends to respond ‘respectfully’ under certain conditions. This is the universe in which science, whose job is it to discover the ‘how’ of all possible phenomena that obtain in this universe, operates.

The problem with this universe is that there can be no real basis for what ought to be, i.e. value. Since the value a thing cannot be the thing itelf, and if this universe consists only of things in themselves then there can be no value. Of course, this does not perclude the reality of phenomena such as a genuine desire for a particular state of affairs. One may certainly harbor the desire to erradicate all disease in Universe A, but it would hold no greater authority than someone else’s the desire for the continuation of all disease. Perhaps one responds by pointing to the fact that more people desire the erradication of disease than those who wish for more disease. To this, I would ask to see the set of elements in A which enshrine that the desire of majorities ought to be followed. Or perhaps one can point to the fact that groups that strive to erradicate disease tend to have higher chances of survival than those who do not. To which I ask for the elements of this universe that enshrine survival of humans as pererrable, and so on. Ultimately, every possible state of affairs in A carries exactly equal value.

Universe B, on the other hand, contains all of A, as well as an equally real component: A’, the set of phenomena which ought to obtain. A’ is such that for every phenomenon $a$ that obtains in Universe A, there is a pointer to an event $a’$ in A’. Here, value naturally enters the picture as the distance between $a$ and $a’$ (i.e. the degree to which an action in A falls short of A’). In other words, God can be understood simply as the entity that assigns weight to the elements of A by describing A’ (it’s no coincidence the Higgs Boson is nicknamed the God particle). The most essential belief of a theist is that ‘ought’ is a concrete aspect of reality, on the same standing as the firmess of the ground, or the charging of a bull. As such, in this Universe we are free to either contend with or ignore the ‘ought’, but always at our own peril.

The question of which universe we in fact inhabit, of course remains. As finite beings we will never gain full certainty on this question, and must rely on available evidence and our best reasoning to discern between them. A full treatment of this topic is for another post but for now I will briefly pre-empt the objection that there is no evidence for Universe B and plenty for A:

We operate in the world by collecting evidence from multiple sources: sense perception, memories, testimony, and logical/mathematical intuition, all of which can be unreliable or inappropriate depending on the question at hand. Choosing arbitrarily to discard certain sources of evidence of course artificially inflates the support for a given hypothesis. In future posts I will discuss the evidence in support of Universe B.

“Do we need God to respect each other?” is perhaps the wrong question. Instead, the question theists contend with is: “what is this world made of?”. This question is by no means settled. And if the stuff of this world is mere matter, I accept that matter on its own is capable of performing righteous actions, but only the theist can paint a golden halo around righteousness.