Loving Our Neighbor
11
The Good
The first component of the cumulative moral argument we would like to construct pertains to the issue of value, or axiology, and this in two respects. First, we will briefly discuss objective moral values, especially the topic of moral goodness, and then spend the bulk of our time discussing a specific sort of value: distinctive human worth. Having argued for the thesis of moral realism earlier, here we will explore its evidential significance. When we speak of moral values, we are talking about whether something is good or bad in an ethical sense. To say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is good or bad, independently of whether any human being believes it to be so.
Objective Moral Values
Religious scholar and Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has written that among the mind’s transcendental aspirations, the longing for moral goodness is probably the most difficult to contain within the confines of a naturalist metaphysics.1 Let’s start with a few preliminary thoughts on this important topic of goodness and objective moral values. We all guide our lives, however inconsistently, by a certain set of values. But are the values we hold dear and guide our lives by mere social conventions akin to driving on the left- versus right-hand side of the road, perhaps instilled into us by evolution and social conditioning, or mere expressions of personal preference akin to having a taste for certain foods rather than others? Or are they valid independently of our apprehension of them, and if so, what is their foundation? Is there some standard determining good and evil that is ultimate and absolute? To say that it is ultimate is to say that explanation stops with it, and to say that it is absolute is to say that its value is not merely relative to some other end.
The Good
The topic of objective moral values deserves a book-length treatment, so what we have to say here is largely meant as suggestive; our discussion of it is intentionally delimited, mainly designed to point readers to the magisterial work of Robert Adams, whose Finite and Infinite Goods offers a sustained philosophical case for taking God to be that foundation of objective moral values. Indeed, Adams argues that God himself is the ultimate good. We can’t do his work justice in short compass, but we want to begin the discussion of goodness with him. Borrowing themes from Plato, Adams insists that it is natural for a theist to take God as best filling the role played by the Beautiful in the Symposium or the Good in the Republic. He takes intimations of an ultimate good or ultimate paradigm of beauty as veridical, akin to beatific visions of God among theists. It is in view of the similarity of these perceptions that he thinks it only natural that a theist would take God himself to be what we apprehend in those moments.
Adams argues that it makes best sense to think that God functions as the exemplar of goodness. On this understanding, God himself constitutes goodness in the sense of being its exemplar, perfect standard, ultimate paradigm, and final source. God need not be reconciled with an abstract conception of the good; since God is a person and, on this view, ultimate goodness itself, goodness is concrete, personalist, and relational.
When we apply the notion of goodness to situations, things, or states of affairs, we risk domesticating moral goodness, reducing it to a matter of producing pleasant consequences or avoiding harmful ones, without coming to terms with the fact that it’s people and their decisions, wills, and characters that are, by turns, morally good, bad, or some admixture of the two. Pain, though unpleasant, isn’t morally bad. Intentionally inflicting harmful and needless pain is a morally bad action, but note that it’s the action of a person. When persons are seen as the appropriate subject of ascriptions such as “moral goodness” or “moral badness,” the intriguing and revelatory nature of such predicates can emerge. Otherwise, the result is typically domestication, and the evidential power of this dimension of morality is lost, narrowing the focus to material circumstances rather than allowing for talk of transcendence.
The role of our desires, on Adams’s view, is to fix the reference of our value terminology to a property or object that has its own nature independent of our desires. He maintains that if there is indeed a single best candidate for the role of the good itself, or the property of goodness, there may certainly be some things that do not agree with it, and therefore fail to be good, even though virtually all of us may think they are good. But a property that belongs mainly to things that almost all of us think are bad, he insists, would certainly not fill the role picked out by our talk of goodness.
For Adams, whatever best fills the role of goodness is an object of admiration, desire, and recognition, at least commonly and to some degree. He insists that if we do not place some trust in our own recognition of the good, we will lose not only our grip on the concept of good but even our cognitive contact with the good itself. The thesis here that seems to Adams the most clearly correct is that to the extent that anything is good, in the sense of “excellent,” it is good for us to love it, admire it, and want to be related to it, whether we are in fact or not. Adams attempts to persuade his readers that it is most plausible to take God as best filling this role, and heartily commends others to do the same. He then makes the claim, roughly following Plato, that the property of goodness consists in the relation of resemblance to the ultimate good. Finite goods are themselves good—that is, to whatever extent they measure up to the ultimate standard.
Thinking about some of the distinctive features of Plato’s Form of the Good gives us more reason to think that God best satisfies such a description. The Good for Plato was no garden-variety Form but rather the one that had ontological primacy over all the others, the ultimate standard for all evaluations of the good. He likened it to the sun, and it is said to be the source of all that exists. The Form of the Good is self-predicating and is good itself; both the “is of identity” and the “is of predication” are operative, much as theists think of God himself as the ultimate source of and exemplar of the highest good. The affinities between the Platonic conception of the Good and God himself are so pervasive and striking at so many levels that it is hard to exaggerate.2
God as the ultimate paradigm of moral goodness has the additional advantage of not stopping explanation prematurely but of stopping only when we have reached the metaphysically ultimate being: a self-existent, metaphysically necessary being from whom all remaining reality derives and beyond which one cannot go. If there is an ultimate reality that is the proper stopping point, God is the least arbitrary solution. If we are to have an ultimate reality that lies behind all other explanations, it would be conceptually desirable if its nature had properties that make it sensible that it enjoy such a status. The greatest possible being, unlike a universe of matter/energy, arguably has within its conception resources for satisfying this constraint. We think it a mistake to call this ultimate reality a mere “brute fact,” like Platonic truths existing apart from God, for reasons that we will explore in part 4.
According to classical theism, objective moral values are rooted in God. God’s own holy and perfectly good nature supplies the absolute and ultimate standard against which all actions and decisions are measured. God’s moral nature is what Plato called the “Good.” He is the locus and source of moral value. He is the ultimate source of the Good; he is by nature loving, generous, just, faithful, kind, and so forth. “God is good” should be construed as both the “is of predication” and the “is of identity.” A. C. Ewing once wrote that a being in whom the whole moral law resides could hardly fail to be perfectly good.3
As such, theism provides a sound foundation for the objectivity of moral values. On the theistic view, objective moral values are grounded in God. As Anselm saw, God is by definition the greatest possible being and therefore perfectly good. Indeed, he is not merely perfectly good; he is the paradigm of moral value. God’s own holy and loving character supplies the absolute standard against which all things are measured. If God exists, moral values are objective, being wholly independent of human beings.
A Few Objections
Although Michael Huemer scorns the ontological argument predicated on Anselm’s famous definition,4 it is important to see that conceiving of God as the greatest possible being need not commit one to the cogency of the ontological argument. Norman Geisler taught that even if one does not regard the ontological argument as a successful piece of natural theology, Anselm’s argument can still be of tremendous value as a guide to a robust concept of God as a being that is metaphysically necessary, omnipotent, omniscient, and so on. Such a being serves as an explanatory stopping point that avoids various arbitrariness concerns.
Wesley Morriston finds it strange that the paradigm of moral goodness embodies a degree of love unattainable for us, and he suggests that it isn’t in general true that the degree to which one possesses some property is measured by one’s distance from an absolute maximum.5 To the contrary, however, we should say that we want the ultimate or infinite good to embody absolute perfection—how could it be anything less? There is no problem in finite persons’ possessing different degrees of goodness though all fall infinitely short of perfection. Analogously, every natural number falls infinitely short of the least transfinite cardinal א0, but they are nonetheless ordered by a greater than relation that facilitates comparison of their greatness.
Why, one might inquire, need there be some particular person who is maximally good in order for the rest of us to be even a little bit good? Could one not simply say that the addition of a maximally loving and just person to the world would not make the ordinary loves and just dealings of ordinary persons any better? This query is not, however, so much an objection to a paradigmatic conception of the good as it is a refusal of it. If God is the paradigm for moral goodness, he is the moral yardstick (or meter bar) that determines what little good we exhibit.6 It is not as though there is some justice or goodness in the world that is improved by adding God; rather, the existence of such a paradigmatic good explains why there is justice and goodness in the world at all.
On our favored account, the reason something is good or bad is its degree of resemblance to God. For those who might like scientific analogies, consider the debate among palaeoanthropologists over what it is to be human. There is no consensus concerning necessary and sufficient conditions for classifying a hominin as human.7 But if we take ourselves as paradigms of what it is to be human, then we can use the degree of resemblance to that paradigm as a way of speaking objectively of prehistoric human beings. A paradigmatic approach to moral values does not preclude describing the paradigm as loving, generous, faithful, kind, and so forth, without thinking that those properties make the paradigm good.8
To wrap up this short section and anticipate another, it’s worth noting that Adams provides a theistic Platonic account of the ultimate good, consistent with the notion of goodness as absolute. Some contemporary Thomists think we need only Aristotle’s way of speaking of goodness as mere goodness of a kind. A good pen writes well, a good car transports us from one location to another well, and so on. We can and do agree with Aristotle that a thing can be a good thing of its kind, but there is also goodness that is independent of a kind. It is good that humans exist, for example. They have intrinsic value. We think that a Platonic conception of the good is better suited to explain this than an Aristotelean conception. So our view is that Aristotelean views of value need to be rooted in a Platonic theory of value. Indeed, Aquinas himself would agree, having tapped into ideas from both Aristotle and Plato. A good Thomist should in this sense also be a Platonist.9 After a short additional reflection on God and goodness, we will turn to the matter of the intrinsic value of human beings, because it offers a particularly perspicacious variant of the moral argument.
Moral Apologetics
Divine Hiddenness
We want to interject at this juncture some additional thoughts about God and goodness that we think are centrally important to the task of moral apologetics.10 The notion that there is a primordial good that somehow has primacy in the universe is, of course, a matter of some dispute. In fact, a careful investigation of a central religious disagreement between Kant and Hume centered on this very issue. Whereas Hume tended to focus on the evils of this world as evidence against such a notion, Kant retained a firm conviction in the priority and reality of moral goodness. The difference is a great one; for example, it led Hume to think the problem of evil rather intractable, contrary to Kant.
The problem of evil is likely the strongest reason to doubt God’s goodness (or God’s existence altogether). It, too, is a moral argument, a negative one. Its central idea is that the quality and quantity of the evil in the world (both natural and moral) render an Anselmian God’s existence either unlikely or incoherent. The moral argument and the problem of evil are, in a real sense, locked in a zero-sum game; the success of either spells doom for the other.
Paul Moser makes an interesting point about the problem of divine hiddenness, which may well be a subset of the problem of evil. His point is generalizable and rife with epistemological implications, and it is this: Our inquiring into the question of God’s existence is more than an intellectual quest. If God is essentially a being worthy of worship, because he is good, a function served by divine hiddenness may well be that it forces the hand of the seeker to inquire in the right spirit. Evidence we find for God must be fitting to God’s character construed in such a way—a being worthy of worship (that is, essentially good). Speaking as Christians, we are convinced that nobody showed better what a being worthy of worship involves than Jesus did. Linda Zagzebski’s work on moral exemplarism follows such a lead by encouraging moral apologists to zero in on compelling moral exemplars. The relevant evidence to consider should pertain to God’s moral character and what that involves for us.
In this spirit, Moser thinks we should ask questions like this: Who am I as an inquirer about God asking for evidence for God’s existence? What do we expect the evidence to be, and, importantly, what are we going to do with it? If it’s just about becoming puffed up or accusing others of irrationality, we’re not yet ready to receive the evidence, in which case a God worthy of the title will hide from us. Divine hiding is a theme rampant throughout the Bible. As Moser puts it, we shouldn’t expect God to be trivially obvious.
As for where to look for the relevant evidence, he argues that it should be in the deepest center of human moral agency: the moral conscience. Our conscience challenges us to renounce selfishness and become oriented toward others. The place where God self-manifests and gives evidence of divine reality is in the conscience. Sounding a bit like John Henry Newman, Moser argues that the conscience is indicative of fundamental reality because of the way it works so concretely. To be a personal agent is to be an intentional agent, setting goals and the like. The important question about conscience is whether its evidence indicates intentional agency.
Since conscience can lead people who are responsive to it away from selfishness and can deepen concern for others in a way that is purposive, he argues, there is reason to think it’s deeply personal. We are moved less by abstract principles than by something intentional, something personal, an intrinsically morally perfect being worthy of worship. So the relevant evidence to consider is to be found in human moral experience where people are morally challenged in a way that’s indicative of God’s character, but there is a side of us that doesn’t want to find the evidence, a point Pascal famously made many years ago. So what’s required is moral candor and a willingness to comply.
In this way, epistemology becomes morally robust. Moser admits that secular ethical theories are possible, but he thinks they leave unanswered a central question of Plato’s Republic—namely, Is the just life really worthwhile? Can it be sustained? Will there be ultimate justice and a balancing of the scales? In a purely secular universe the answer is likely no, Russell’s dissembling transparent bravado in “A Free Man’s Worship” notwithstanding.11 Plato was asking whether the morally good life is sustainable, vindicatable, commendable—redolent with lasting meaning of the sort monotheists talk about.
The challenge, Moser argues, is whether we can be candid enough to leave room for such evidence—to give it honest attention, to be morally attentive and responsive. This is no time to be casual or sanguine; conscience constantly challenges us to be responsive to moral intrusion. Are we willing to go through a change of priorities? Moral phenomenology gives us the tools for a case for a personal and worship-worthy God at work speaking to us powerfully through our conscience, if we have but the ears to hear it.12
In apologetics we tend, understandably enough, to put the focus on truth. In classical thought, though, the so-called transcendentals included not just truth but also goodness, beauty, and unity. Goodness and beauty are of particular relevance at the moment. God’s worship-worthiness is inextricably tied to his goodness, as we just discussed; and goodness and beauty are both ineliminably experiential. No moral argument is likely to be persuasive for someone who has not had visceral experiences of goodness or good enough moral exemplars to emulate and admire, nor an aesthetic argument for someone lacking the requisite experiences of beauty.
The problem of evil is quite a large discussion, one we cannot pursue here due to space constraints. We have discussed it elsewhere, though, and included in the notes are some helpful references to navigate that difficult and challenging issue.13 For now, we want to continue tracing out this line of thought of God as good (indeed, goodness itself). We submit that this makes moral apologetics, broadly construed, more than just an intellectual exercise, and it potentially involves a different avenue to discover the truth than discursive analysis alone, including elements deeply relational and experiential.
The Goodness of God
A central biblical motif is that God is good and we are and should be drawn to him for precisely that reason: as good, which fits the classical philosophical conception of goodness as essentially desirable. The worship pattern of the people of God in Scripture was consistently to face joys and challenges by focusing their attention on God’s goodness, expressed in his steadfast love (hesed) toward them. “On this view,” Horner says, “we as rational agents are drawn to what we take to be good, and, whether we are reflectively aware of it or not, we in fact order our lives in relation to what we conceive to be our ultimate good, our summum bonum. Such is the basic shape of moral psychology in the classical, especially the broadly Aristotelian, tradition.”14 According to Boethius, God is identical in his substance to true or supreme goodness, by which he rules all things. God’s goodness is the “helm and rudder, so to speak, by which the fabric of the universe is kept constant and unimpaired.”15 The goodness of God is a central (perhaps the central) feature of Augustine’s thought. Augustine endorses the classical moral psychology. Here the supreme good is sought, the good to which we refer everything that we do, desiring it not for the sake of something else but for its very own sake. Obtaining it, we require nothing further in order to be happy. It is truly called the “end,” because we want everything else for the sake of this, but this we want only for itself.16
The highest good, Augustine argues, which everyone is ultimately seeking, is in fact God himself. Augustine’s famous words at the beginning of his Confessions should be understood in that light: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”17 God is our good, the good we ultimately seek. In Thomas Aquinas, the classical understanding of good as desirable is at the heart of both his moral psychology and his metaphysical teleology. The “perfect good” toward which all human desires ultimately point, for Aquinas, even beyond the full realization of the specific potentialities of human nature, is God himself.18
Moreover, again, God as the locus of the good is worthy of worship. Horner writes, “Anselmian apologetics . . . follows the broader pattern of biblical examples of apologetics found, for example, in the Psalms—where psalmists, using vivid poetry (set to music), declare and describe God’s manifold greatness (beauty, goodness, power, majesty, truth, etc.) as being supremely worthy of worship, and call the nations, on that basis, to respond with such worship. God is not just an inferred entity or the best explanation of certain phenomena, but the ultimate to-be-worshiped. This broader picture, it seems to me, should be reflected in our apologetics.”19
Philosopher John Hare describes the phenomenology of a moral property as its having a kind of “call” on one—it elicits a response, obliges one, binds one, presses in on one, draws one.20 Because of this affective aspect of morality, some philosophers have mistakenly inferred that moral judgments are “nothing but” expressions of desire or feelings or intentions, as we saw in part 2. But moral experience is more than merely cognitive—it’s surely not less. It ought to involve engaging one’s affections, desires, and will, procuring a “taste” for what is good. Horner argues compellingly that the project of moral apologetics should be full-orbed, holistic, and, most importantly, done in such a way to make goodness look attractive. Failure on this score is where Horner thinks that traditional moral arguments can fall short for many people: not as good philosophy but as fully persuasive apologetics, given current epistemic soil conditions. Horner’s insights here resonate greatly with the wisdom of Aristotle’s Rhetoric.
Although we cannot do all of what Horner is suggesting here, that is a limitation of our own, not of the moral argument. We are, though, attempting to provide some of what he’s getting at here by, say, considering the relevance of moral exemplars, embodied moral apologetics, nondiscursive analyses, and experiential dimensions of the moral life.
The Value, Dignity, and Rights of Persons
Human Dignity
Talk of value per se can seem a bit vague, recondite, and guilty of overreach, so an effective way to wrestle the discussion of value into something more manageable is to accentuate the value of persons. There is actually a cluster of closely related moral notions here of note—the moral value of persons, the dignity of people, essential human rights, and perhaps something like the essential equality of people.21 Something that draws us to this strand of the moral argument is that it often speaks to people with whom we may not otherwise share a great deal of common ground. As such it is something we often may not have to argue for; it’s something that many from a number of disparate worldview perspectives readily recognize and acknowledge. Not everyone, of course, but a great many. It is indeed telling that this particular piece of moral evidence is something that many of our unbelieving friends themselves intuitively recognize. At least at moments they are often able to see that people have great intrinsic value and dignity. They may not know why—just as they may not know why we have moral obligations, or that people are of equal moral worth, or that basic human rights obtain—but they can recognize the truths themselves. Otherwise, something like the moral argument could not get off the ground, because the moral argument appeals to just such moral evidences.
Human value and dignity are closely connected to the idea that we have basic human rights, not conferred on us by governments but in virtue of our humanness. It is often discussed in terms of the Kantian notion that we should treat people as ends in themselves and never merely as means. Speaking of Kant, he was careful to capture this idea of the incommensurable value of persons, contrasting human dignity with the notion of price. No amount of money can replace a person; we have value, indeed, something like infinite value. Kant, among others, was of the view that this is less a conclusion we draw than an inviolable deliverance of the moral law, something we start with.
Think about the Nazi depiction of Jews, the ugly history of American chattel slavery, or, more recently, the intellectual contortions required to deny the humanity of unborn children to justify their convenient elimination. In such paradigmatic instances of reprehensible mistreatment, we see on ready display the perceived need to deny the humanity of the victims. This is thought to make it okay; we would otherwise have to come to terms with the behavior residing beyond the moral pale. Even at our worst, we somehow recognize the value of humans and seek to rationalize our behavior when we deny the humanity of the victims—just as Goebbels’s propaganda did regarding the Poles. We suspect general revelation alone gives us reason to think human beings are intrinsically valuable, sacred, and the legitimate bearers of human rights. Such recognitions should then lead us to ask what it is about reality that explains such truths. Why is it that people have such great intrinsic dig-nity and value?
Now, its very obviousness might be thought to imply that we need not search for a more ultimate explanation. If it’s that obvious, why ask why? But this is to confuse the matter of the truth of something with our knowing it to be true. We may be able to recognize that something is true without being able to explain why. This is the aforementioned difference between something being self-evident and something being self-explaining. Another way to put it is that it is confusing metaphysics (what is real) with epistemology (our knowledge of what’s real). Even unbelievers can often grasp that people have mysteriously great intrinsic value, but they simply don’t have the metaphysical resources to make good sense of it. Human value is a piece of moral evidence that veritably cries out for adequate explanation.
The question to ask is what features of the world explain this notably high intrinsic value we intuitively recognize that human beings possess. Value often gets tied to dignity; Kant himself did this, linking dignity with respecting the autonomy of others. Others, like Mark Linville, associate basic human dignity with people being the legitimate bearers of basic human rights. Women have the right not to be raped; children have the right not to be burned alive for the entertainment of the rich. Where do such rights come from? Among the “natural signs” adduced by Evans is human dignity and worth. Evans agrees with Nicholas Wolterstorff that belief in the value of human beings undergirds the conviction that we possess “natural rights” as humans.22 Such rights arguably hold prior to any governmental conferrals of rights. They are moral rights, not merely legal ones; the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. highlights some of the organic connections between those two types of rights.
Now, historically speaking, religious perspectives have often bolstered convictions about basic human rights. Some even argue that they are a product of Judaism and Christianity, both of which claim that human beings are not only creatures of God but made in the image of God. Grounding human rights in capacities like the power of reason isn’t workable, since many who have such rights lack such capacities. “Infants, those with Alzheimer’s, and those born with severe mental impairments lack any such rational powers,” Evans writes, “but they surely still have whatever inherent dignity and worth belongs to humans as humans.”23 Even historically what we find is that seeing the value of disabled children, or the mentally ill, or the desperate refugee was often tied to the Judeo-Christian ethic and its influence.
To be clear, it is the metaphysics here that matter the most. It is not belief in God that’s either necessary or sufficient to sustain human dignity. It is a theistic worldview that is better able, ontologically speaking, to explain intrinsic human dignity in a requisitely deep way. It is incumbent on a worldview to explain what does and does not exist in a way that follows naturally from the central explanatory commitments of that worldview.24 Why treat others as ends in themselves? Why think people have intrinsic dignity and value and worth? As Linville argues, no merely secular variant of normative or substantive ethical theory—egoism, utilitarianism, or virtue theory—contains resources sufficient to explain the moral regard for persons we should have.25 Our having been made in God’s image, however, provides a robust explanation of why we are here, why we possess the value we do, and why persons should be treated as ends in themselves and never merely as means.
Loving Our Neighbor
Austin Farrer, recall, had for one of his main points of emphasis the value of persons. In his book Reflective Faith, he asked readers to consider the way we normatively ought to think about other people. It is of great importance, he argued, that we value them rightly, that we think about others in such a way as to regard them properly. The only limitations that such deep regard for others should encounter are those that cannot be avoided—namely, those “set by the conditions of our life,” as he put it.26 Such regard should be at once so pure and so entire that it leads to a sort of frustration that comes from the incompleteness of our definition of those we so regard. Thinking of our neighbors in too garden-variety a way can’t sustain the esteem we intuitively think they deserve. The conclusion to which Farrer felt compelled is that what deserves our regard is not simply our neighbor but God in our neighbor and our neighbor in God.
The most important command we have been given is to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and then, intimately tied to that, our neighbor as ourselves. Learning to love our neighbor involves nothing less than learning to see God in our neighbor and our neighbor in God. Every person we encounter is someone for whom Jesus died. A low view of other people is often caused by a low view of God. Fred (“Mister”) Rogers held a high view of God and a corresponding high view of people. In fact, he liked to say that, frankly, there isn’t anyone you couldn’t learn to love once you’ve heard their story.27 We are all made in God’s image, but each one of us is also unique, so Rogers would have also liked Marilynne Robinson’s words: “Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it.”28
Allow us to add another word about Fred Rogers. We observed an interesting phenomenon some years ago when a documentary came out about Mister Rogers and the gentle life of service he led. At the documentary’s conclusion, grown men could be seen weeping as they left the theater. There is something unavoidably touching about this man’s sacrificial love for his neighbors and earnest investment in the lives of the most vulnerable. We submit that, in a real sense, Rogers’s very life constituted a moral apologetic, but because it was the embodiment of the principles we are discussing philosophically, people’s defenses are often down and, in those moments of seeing it, they allow themselves to feel the force of it rather than to put up their intellectual defenses. We encourage you not to see this discussion merely as an intellectual exercise; what is at stake here is too high, and the price of denying what we can’t not know is simply too steep. Rogers agreed that all of us are divine image bearers and, as a result, have tremendous value as people, such that a special holiness accompanies every one of our normal daily interactions. As C. S. Lewis put it, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”29
In his 1940 novel The Power and the Glory, a hauntingly beautiful story of a disgraced priest, Graham Greene charged his readers to recognize and respond rightly to this intrinsic value: “When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity—that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”30 As a quick aside, the face appears particularly important to our identity and personhood somehow. We can’t see the face of God and live, the Bible tells us. Lewis recognized the maturation of our selves and the formation of our faces in titling his greatest novel Till We Have Faces. Moreover, in more than one language, the word for personality is etymologically tied to the face. There is something ineliminably personalist about the face. It’s far easier to be cruel to those who remain faceless; this is likely why online activity can so often be acidulous, dehumanizing, and vitriolic.
This is one of those places we are inclined to think the moral argument points to something more fine-grained than a generically Anselmian God broadly understood. Such a notion as our having been made in God’s image goes beyond Anselmianism in the broad sense. To say God possesses the “omni” qualities does not entail that God made us in his image. This piece of teaching we get from revelation, but it is what enables us to posit that theism grounds the exalted nature of persons. According to this view, held in common by the three great monotheistic traditions, God is personal and is the source of all value. The value of personhood is found in the fact that the metaphysically, axiologically, and explanatorily ultimate Being is personal.31
To love one’s neighbor as oneself, as the Bible enjoins, is not to conjure artificial warm sentiments toward them. It is rather to recognize their intrinsic worth and dignity and honor that obtain irrespective of whether there is reciprocation—not just in their general humanness but in their true uniqueness. This makes insightful indeed the recognition that we have been endowed by our Creator with certain inviolable human rights. To have been made in God’s image, created for a reason and purpose and imbued with inalienable rights, and to be loved infinitely by him: This is the deepest source and excellent explanation on offer of human dignity and value.
Indeed, on the Christian story, an account of goodness rooted in God must emphasize not just what good things humans share in common but the distinctive ways they are different, for in our very differences are reflections of disparate aspects of God. A theistic and Christian picture of the human condition provides a compelling account of human dignity, of incommensurable worth, not just for humanity as a whole but for each and every individual. This is an account strong enough to sustain our deepest intuitions about the inestimable value of each and every human person.
None of this is to deny that there is an ultimate accounting for our actions and, owing to those actions, for our habits and character. Our intrinsic value does not entail intrinsic moral goodness. A later chapter will take up this issue, but for now it is worth mentioning that the horrific possibility exists that some people may eventually become truly despicable, making it hard to see them as bearing God’s image and deserving or prompting love. Scripture teaches that all of us fall short of God’s glory and need God’s grace, but if God’s overtures of love are ultimately rejected and resisted altogether, the result is a fearful destiny indeed. In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis intimated at such a fate when he wrote that hell begins with a grumbling mood, but there might come a day when one no longer can resist it; at that point, there’s little to no you left to criticize the mood or even enjoy it, just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine.32 In each of us there’s something growing that will be hell unless it is nipped in the bud.
1 David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Yale University Press, 2013), 251.
2 See Robert Merrihew Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (Oxford University Press, 1999), part 1.
3 A. C. Ewing, Value and Reality: The Philosophical Case for Theism (George Allen & Unwin, 1973), 199.
4 Huemer’s brief discussion of the ontological argument is out of date. It is false that the ontological argument claims that “God exists” is an analytic truth. No existential assertion is analytic, and so construing it would make it impossible to assert that God really does exist. By the same token, current versions of the ontological argument (like Plantinga’s) do not try to define God into existence but are modal arguments asserting that it is possible that God exists, from which metaphysical possibility it follows that God does exist. So the old claim that the ontological argument proves only that if there is a God, then God exists necessarily, fails to take cognizance of the modal versions. One might think Huemer’s inadequate grasp of the ontological argument something of a side issue, to be graciously overlooked, but this deficit looms surprisingly large, we think, in his rejection of grounding moral values in God.
5 Wesley Morriston, “Does Morality Have a Theological Foundation?,” in A Debate on God and Morality: What Is the Best Account of Objective Moral Values and Duties?, ed. Adam Lloyd Johnson (Routledge, 2021), 127.
6 Although Morriston notes some disanalogies between God and other paradigms—such as the contingency of the meter bar’s setting the standard or the ease of something’s being a meter in length or the public accessibility of the paradigmatic standard—he does not press these, since “these analogies are meant only to provide examples of cases in which a familiar property . . . can plausibly be identified with resemblance in a certain respect . . . to a single [paradigmatic] standard” (“Theological Foundation?,” 9–10).
7 See Ian Tattersall, “The Genus Homo,” Inference 2, no. 1 (February 2016), http://inference-review.com/article/the-genus-homo.
8 For a fuller treatment of God as the ultimate good, see the chapter on goodness in David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls’s Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2011).
9 Thanks to Steve Evans for this insight.
10 We take much of our inspiration for this section from a remarkable talk that our friend and colleague David Horner gave some years ago. See “Too Good Not to Be True: The Shape of Moral Apologetics,” posted April 9, 2015, by FOCLOnline, YouTube, 1 hour, 12 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBSK4Hw1XoY. We urge readers to listen to his rich presentation.
11 In Mysticism and Logic, and Other Essays (Allen & Unwin, 1917).
12 Frederick Choo, “Chapter 5 of God and Cosmos, ‘Moral Obligations.’ (Part 1),” Moral Apologetics, March 15, 2017, https://www.moralapologetics.com/wordpress/chapter-5-of-god-and-cosmos-moral-obligations.
13 See chap. 8 and appendix B in Baggett and Walls, Good God, and see Paul Copan’s chapter on the problem of evil and the moral argument in the forthcoming Oxford University Press collection edited by Baggett and Hare. A specific instance of the problem of evil is the conquest narratives of the Old Testament (among other issues connected to biblical stories that seem prima facie hard to square with widespread moral intuitions). See Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God (Baker Books, 2011); Is God a Vindictive Bully? Reconciling Portrayals of God in the Old and New Testaments (Baker Academic, 2022); and with Matthew Flannagan, Did God Really Command Genocide? Coming to Terms with the Justice of God (Baker Books, 2014).
14 Horner, “Too Good Not to Be True.”
15 Consolation of Philosophy 3.12. Quoted from Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. V. E. Watts (Penguin Books, 1969), 115.
16 City of God, 8.8. Quoted from Augustine, Political Writings, ed. and trans. Michael W. Tkacz and Douglas Kries (Hackett, 1994), 63–64.
17 Quoted from Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford University Press, 1991), book 1, chap. 1.
18 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Christian Classics, 1981), I-II.1.6c, I-II.4.7 ad. 2, I-II.5.4c.
19 Horner, “Too Good Not to Be True.”
20 John Hare, God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, and Human Autonomy (Eerdmans, 2001). Unlike his father, Hare conjoined prescriptivity with objectivity, as a believer that there indeed are moral facts.
21 Something at least in the vicinity of animal rights could also be discussed here. Presumably their possession of rights is not a function of their having been created in God’s image, but a compelling case could still be made that there are some treatments of these sentient creatures that are beyond the moral pale. Theism can make excellent sense of this, although we won’t pursue that line of argument here.
22 See Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, for example. Mark Linville’s twofold moral argument can be found in “The Moral Argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, ed. William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland (Blackwell, 2009), 391–448. C. Stephen Evans’s Natural Signs and the Knowledge of God (Oxford University Press, 2010) lays out his distinctive approach rooted in Reformed epistemology. See Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton University Press, 2008), 316–19, and his Understanding Liberal Democracy: Essays in Political Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2012). See also his “Would You Stomp on a Picture of Your Mother? Would You Kiss an Icon?,” Faith and Philosophy 32, no. 1 (2015): 3–24.
23 C. Stephen Evans, Natural Signs and the Knowledge of God: A New Look at Theistic Arguments (Oxford University Press, 2010), 138–39.
24 J. P. Moreland, The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (SCM, 2009), 3.
25 See Linville, “The Moral Argument.”
26 Austin Farrer, Reflective Faith: Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Charles C. Conti (Wipf & Stock, 2012). See in particular the chapter “A Moral Argument for the Existence of God.”
27 See this useful biography of Rogers: Maxwell King, The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers (Abrams, 2018).
28 Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004), 66.
29 C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (HarperOne, 2001), 45–46.
30 Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (Penguin, 1940), 131.
31 See Mark Linville’s “The Moral Argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, ed. William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland (Blackwell, 2009), 391–448.
32 In The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (HarperOne, 2002), 507.