Overview of Chapter 3
3
Early Modern Figures
We can think of the early modern period as spanning the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The transition from the medievals to the moderns is marked by several significant events, including the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the scientific revolution. Among the results of these significant cultural transformations was a loss of confidence in religious authorities, a rise in humanism, and a greater emphasis on efficient causes over formal and final causes.1 In this chapter, we will direct our attention mainly to seven prominent figures from the period.
Before getting started, a few words are in order about the Reformation. Both Martin Luther (1483–1546) and John Calvin (1509–1564), central Reformation figures, wrote about issues relevant to the moral argument. Of course, they do not speak for all Protestants, much less all Christians or theists, but both Luther and Calvin seemed, on the whole, to opt for the voluntarist horn of the Euthyphro Dilemma. Unqualified voluntarism leads to insuperable problems, as seen, but for now our point is simply to record the fact. In particular, the doctrines of free will and unconditional election functioned to animate their convictions. Free will was, for Luther, a “tangled labyrinth,” and human dependence on God’s grace vitiates human autonomy in the fallen condition. This makes God exclusively responsible for choosing the elect, a view that Luther recognized could seem counterintuitive; but he thought theology required it. He wrote the following about unconditional election:
Doubtless it gives the greatest possible offence to common sense or natural reason, that God, Who is proclaimed as being full of mercy and goodness, and so on, should of His own mere will abandon, harden, and damn men, as though He delighted in the sins and great eternal torments of such poor wretches. It seems an iniquitous, cruel, intolerable thought to think of God, and it is this that has been a stumbling block to so many great men down the ages. And who would not stumble in it? I have stumbled at it myself more than once, down to the deepest pit of despair, so that I wished I had never been made a man.2
God is not, though, by Luther’s lights, unjust, for “God is He for Whose will no cause or ground may be laid down as its rule and standard,” for “nothing is on a level with it or above it, but it is itself the rule for all things.” He went on to insist that “what God wills is not right because He ought, or was bound, so to will; on the contrary, what takes place must be right, because He so wills it.”3 A robustly voluntarist view indeed!
Likewise with Calvin, who thought this one fact, if nothing else, should preclude anyone from questioning God’s justice for condemning someone to hell on the basis of his will alone: “His will is, and rightly ought to be, the cause of all things that are.”4 Although Calvin disavowed that embracing such a view was to advocate “the fiction of ‘absolute right’ or a ‘lawless god’ who is a law unto himself,” his view remains a robust expression of voluntarism with respect to morality. Although we retain strong reservations about radical voluntarism, we resonate with the motivation to see God as somehow foundational to moral truth.
René Descartes
René Descartes (1596–1650) was a brilliant French philosopher and mathematician. A vitally important early modern figure, his epistemic starting point—the justly famous “I think, therefore I am”—has been hailed by many as a definitive move toward an individualist approach to knowing what we do. Even in the process of doubting, he argued, one has reason to believe that one exists, at least minimally as a mind, a thinking (doubting) entity. Most philosophers since have recognized that the epistemic standard of certainty that he upheld is unrealistically and impracticably high. Very few beliefs can pass such a test, except for a relatively few internal to our own heads. Efforts to build a bridge from such “Cartesian” (or apodictic) certainty about some internal beliefs (like “I appear to see a tree” or “I am feeling pain”) to the external world invariably sacrifice certainty in the process. A significant takeaway from his work thus comes from this very failure of his. The insight to be gleaned is the need to distinguish knowledge from complete certainty and not to hanker after such certainty as a necessary condition of knowledge. This is a useful lesson to bear in mind as we subject arguments from natural theology to critical scrutiny.
Regarding ethics in particular, in his “Dedicatory Letter to the Sorbonne,” introducing his famous Meditations, Descartes wrote about the vital role that belief in God and the soul play in providing a robust incentive for morality. He aimed to show the reality of God and the soul by natural reason. Since in this life the rewards offered to vice are often greater than the rewards of virtue, few people would prefer what is right to what is expedient if they did not fear God or have the expectation of an afterlife. This is, admittedly, less a moral apologetic than, at first approximation, a claim that we need belief in God and an afterlife to motivate virtue.
Descartes also made bold claims about God himself, not just belief in God. For example, he was a philosopher and theist who believed that even mathematical and logical truths are contingent (or at least not necessarily necessary) because of God’s ability to alter their content. This is why he has been characterized as a “universal possibilist,” someone who believes that anything is possible as long as God wills it. For example, he wrote that God lays down the mathematical truths we call eternal just as a king lays down laws in his kingdom, and that they depend on him completely. Such dependence is thought by Descartes to entail control; later thinkers who distinguish these, as we will see, contrast with Descartes.
Descartes wrote that it is
useless to inquire how God could from all eternity bring it about that it should be untrue that twice four is eight . . . ; for I admit that that cannot be understood by us. Yet since on the other hand I correctly understand that nothing in any category of causation can exist which does not depend on God, and that it would have been easy for him so to appoint that we human beings should not understand how these very things could be otherwise than they are, it would be irrational to doubt concerning that which we correctly understand because of that which we do not understand and perceive no need to understand.5
Three points for now about Descartes bear emphasis. First, he saw the practical connections between morality and its authority, on the one hand, and whether there is an afterlife, on the other. This is an issue that will recur numerous times in the history of the moral argument. Second, he saw the vital importance not just of the afterlife and of God but also of the character of God. He thought nothing less than the classical or “Anselmian” conception of theism is philosophically powerful enough to merit our allegiance. An adequate theology is vital for solving problems associated with theistic ethics emanating from the Euthyphro Dilemma, and doing so is a crucial part of moral apologetics. Third, Descartes apprehended the need to acknowledge God as the ground of all reality, in one way or another. Whatever the merits of his ultravoluntarism, it seemed motivated by a felt recognition to see God function as the ultimate ontological foundation of all that there is.
Blaise Pascal
The life of Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) overlapped with that of Descartes. Pascal, too, was a mathematical genius. Before dying at the age of thirty-nine, he was reputed by many to be the leading thinker of Europe. Over the course of his life, his focus shifted from mathematics to philosophy. He experienced a dramatic conversion to the Christian faith, an experience he referred to cryptically as his “night of fire.” Afterward he would dedicate most of his intellectual energies to arguing for the truth of Christianity. He thought that none of us can rationally ignore the existentially urgent question of whether there is an afterlife. For him this question makes a huge difference, not only in how we should understand morality but also in how we should approach our entire lives. In his famous Pensées—the posthumously organized notes he was compiling in his preparation to write his Christian apologetic—he wrote, “The immortality of the soul is something of such vital importance to us, affecting us so deeply, that one must have lost all feeling not to care about knowing the facts of the matter. All our actions and thoughts must follow such different paths, according to whether there is hope of eternal blessings or not, that the only possible way of acting with sense and judgment is to decide our course of action in the light of this point, which ought to be our ultimate objective.”6
Although Allan Bloom once wrote that everyone in France is either Cartesian (driven by reason) or Pascalian (driven by faith), Pascal and Descartes both affirmed that morality, God, and the afterlife are inextricably linked. In pointing to the need for ultimate correspondence between happiness and holiness, they were concerned with nothing less than the full rationality of morality, a recurring theme in the history of the moral argument. It so happened that Pascal accorded to epistemology a more expansive scope than what reason narrowly construed can encompass. In this way he anticipated figures like John Henry Newman, William James, and others.7
John Locke
The great English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) echoed the role that divine reward and punishment plays in matters of moral motivation. The forthrightness with which he emphasized the centrality of reward and punishment has elicited from some the accusation that he thought moral motivation involved nothing else. This attitude can seem more about being prudential than actually being moral. Another take on his emphasis here is possible and plausible, however. Locke seemed to be putting his finger on a crucial element in the moral enterprise when he insisted on an ultimate reckoning and balancing of the scales of justice. Unless ultimate reality itself is committed to justice, many of our deepest hopes for the rectification of wrongs and redemption of sufferings will be in vain.
In fairness to Locke, moreover, his discussion of moral motivation was more nuanced and textured than is often acknowledged. In addition to fear of punishment or hope for reward, he also ascribed central importance to acting in accord with conscience. In his more mature work, The Reasonableness of Christianity, Locke reiterated that moral law functions as a way of ensuring obedience. Humans can appreciate the intrinsic goodness of virtue, even its appeal, but this is often not enough to motivate virtuous behavior. “The philosophers indeed showed the beauty of virtue: they set her off so as drew men’s eyes and approbation to her. The generality could not refuse her their esteem and commendation; but still turned their backs on her, and forsook her, as a match not for their turn.”8
To remedy this problem, on Locke’s view, God attaches clear and explicit sanctions to ensure that the virtuous course of action will always be the more attractive option:
[Virtue] has another relish and efficacy to persuade men, that if they live well here, they shall be happy hereafter. Open their eyes upon the endless, unspeakable joys of another life, and their hearts will find something solid and powerful to move them. The view of heaven and hell will cast a slight upon the short pleasures and pains of this present state, and give attractions and encouragements to virtue which reason and interest, and the care of ourselves, cannot but allow and prefer. Upon this foundation, and upon this only, morality stands firm, and may defy all competition. This makes it more than a name; a substantial good, worth all our aims and endeavors; and thus the gospel of Jesus Christ has delivered it to us.9
George Berkeley
A radical British idealist, George Berkeley (1685–1753) proposed the notion that what we think are material objects are actually ideas in the mind and thus cannot exist without being perceived. What motivated Berkeley was a theological conviction that everything depends on God; his stance happens, of course, to be a particularly insistent variant of such a notion. Whatever the merits or drawbacks of his version of radical idealism, the theological rationale, or something in its vicinity, functions at the heart of moral apologetics. Subsequent luminaries in the history of the moral argument (like A. E. Taylor) were also in the British idealist tradition, though often less radical than Berkeley.
Interestingly enough, Berkeley was convinced that affirming the independent existence of the world apart from God would result in worshiping matter. It would involve attributing to the physical world traits reserved for God alone, like absolute ontological independence. Although his solution may not be the only or best way to avoid such a problem, his prediction that materialists would eventually have few qualms about attributing to the empirical world qualities traditionally reserved for deity alone proved prescient.
Regarding morality in particular, the empiricist Berkeley (like the rationalist Gottfried Leibniz [1646–1716]) thought that all God does is right and just. In Leibniz’s case, he pushed the point that the actual world is the best possible world because of God’s perfect nature, a view parodied in Voltaire’s Candide. In Berkeley’s case, he thought all of God’s commands are meant to produce the best consequences, so we can use our minds to determine their content. We might say at the normative level he was something of a utilitarian, while at the metaethical level he remained a theistic ethicist, because what constitutes the best overall consequence is a function of the world as God designed it. Theism can augment utilitarianism by furnishing an answer to the question of why one ought to, say, maximize utility.10
Bishop Butler
In a memorable series of carefully crafted and argued sermons, the English Anglican bishop and philosopher Joseph Butler (1692–1752) attempted to refute the egoism found in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Hobbes’s determinism and materialism seemed to entail a view of human beings as invariably guided by their strongest desires, rendering them violent and power hungry. This left little room for morality more classically construed.
By offering a sustained argument against psychological egoism, Butler attempted to make room for genuine altruism and benevolence. Butler argued that human motivation is quite a bit more complex than Hobbes thought. The mind features a whole taxonomy of impulses, an organized hierarchy of disparate inclinations and principles, some altogether unselfish. In properly organized minds, such impulses are controlled by the principles of self-love and benevolence. The highest practical authority of all in the human mind is God-given moral conscience, which dictates that one ought to promote the general happiness and personal happiness. Often these two aims largely coincide in the present life; transparently self-centered people, for example, tend to sow the seeds of their own downfall.
Admittedly on occasion the wicked seem for a time to prosper. It is God who guarantees ultimate perfect harmony of virtue and self-interest, Butler thought. Interestingly enough, he even argued that humans are not too concerned with issues of self-interest, but rather are not concerned enough. He pointed out several ways in which greater attention paid to what is legitimately in one’s long-term interests enables one to see that showing more respect for others and caring with more empathy leads to a better quality of life.
Thomas Reid
Thomas Reid (1710–1796) was an important thinker in the history of the moral argument, but before discussing him, a quick word about John Wesley (1703–1791), a British Anglican instrumental in founding Methodism. On Wesley’s view, the moral law, flowing from the fountain of God’s love and goodness, will, if followed, make for our well-being and happiness. Wesley was convinced that it was adapted to the nature of things as God created them. If the standard depends on the nature and relations of things, then it must depend on God if those things themselves, with all of their relations, are the works of God’s hands. Moreover, Wesley thought, since no account of human flourishing is complete that does not include communion with God, man’s summum bonum is impossible apart from reconciliation and fellowship with God.
In contrast with Calvin and Luther, Wesley harbored grave misgivings about the doctrine of unconditional election. He understood biblical conceptions of election more along communal lines than individualist ones and endorsed the notion of prevenient grace that makes possible genuine human volition to accept God’s offer of salvation despite our fallen condition. By such means he circumvented some of the thornier challenges to God’s essential nature of love posed by more rigid doctrines of predestination. That said, he wrote that he was theologically but a “hair’s breadth” from his more Augustinian brethren. In the medieval debate between the intellectualists and voluntarists concerning which has primacy, God’s will or nature, Wesley wrote, “It seems, then, that the whole difficulty arises from considering God’s will as distinct from God: otherwise it vanishes away. For none can doubt but God is the cause of the law of God. But the will of God is God Himself. It is God considered as willing thus or thus. Consequently, to say that the will of God, or that God Himself, is the cause of the law, is one and the same thing.”11 Wesley seemed to think that the Euthyphro challenge was something of a false dilemma. The only way to countenance radical voluntarism is to sever it from the character of God, which struck Wesley as a serious mistake that leads to a view like unconditional predestination.
Born seven years after Wesley was Thomas Reid, a central figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. Reid offered a few arguments in support of the aforementioned “coincidence thesis,” the coincidence of well-being and virtue. His first argument wasn’t that they are necessarily coextensive but rather that they are bound together in various important ways. In the process he made it clear that he saw virtue and well-being as distinct. The way to secure their coincidence, despite this, is by positing the existence of a benevolent deity. As Reid put it, “While the world is under a wise and benevolent administration, it is impossible, that any man should, in the issue, be a loser by doing his duty. Every man, therefore, who believes in God, while he is careful to do his duty, may safely leave the care of his happiness to Him who made him.”12
Terence Cuneo points out that Reid held that the coincidence thesis lies deep in the moral life. Reid thought it a virtuous coincidence that the moral life is, or is at least likely to be, good on the whole for the virtuous agent. At the same time, Reid recognized that certain experiences of evil can shake this conviction. Cuneo adds that “Reid sees no way to defend the coincidence of virtue and well-being apart from supposing that the world is under benevolent administration. There is an important sense, then, in which Reid’s ethical views are ineliminably theistic.”13
Reid was convinced that genuine virtue requires being committed to the moral life for its own sake, not for some reward. Importantly, though, he saw no way to make sense of that commitment apart from holding “that there is a God who is just and benevolent in the administration of the world, ensuring that an agent’s virtue and good on the whole coincide if not in this life, then in the next.” As Reid put it, “Virtue is his [i.e., God’s] care. Its votaries are under his protection & guardianship.”14 Unlike Joseph Butler, who engaged skeptics of the coincidence thesis in an effort to change their minds, Reid thought a commitment to that thesis, though virtuous, natural, and intuitive, goes beyond the evidence in some sense. Another step was needed before it could become fully evidentially significant. It was for Immanuel Kant, born just fourteen years after Reid, that these considerations would provide the material for an argument for God’s existence. To Kant, perhaps the best-known moral apologist of all, we at last turn to round out this chapter.
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was arguably the first great proponent of the moral argument. Owing perhaps, at least in part, to his strong focus on authoritative moral duties, he was the first to articulate the moral argument in elaborate fashion, although, as we have seen, there were several significant precursors. He is well known for writing in his Critique of Practical Reason that two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. He offered two main moral arguments for God’s existence. Here is a discursive formulation of his performative argument from grace:
1. Morality requires us to achieve a standard too exacting and demanding to meet on our own without some sort of outside assistance.
2. Exaggerating human capacities, lowering the moral demand, or finding a secular form of assistance aren’t likely to be adequate for the purpose of closing the moral gap.
3. Divine assistance is sufficient to close the gap.
4. Therefore, rationality dictates that we must postulate God’s existence.15
This argument pertains to the possibility of the moral life; if ought implies can, then the requirements of morality, if they are to be met, have to be within our reach. With God’s help, and only with God’s help, they are. This is the first half of “Kantian moral faith”: reasonable faith that God enables us to fulfill the moral law.
Later we will extend that argument to underscore how God’s grace can meet our need not just for a measure of moral transformation but also for forgiveness and even complete moral transformation. We will argue that by thus extending this argument from grace, we can actually deploy the moral argument to argue for something distinctively Christian and not merely generically theistic.
Here’s Kant’s other argument, the moral argument from providence:
1. Full rational commitment to morality requires that morality is a rationally stable enterprise.
2. In order for morality to be a rationally stable enterprise, it must feature ultimate correspondence between happiness and virtue.
3. There is no reason to think that such correspondence obtains unless God exists.
4. Therefore, rationality dictates the postulation of God’s existence.16
This argument pertains to the coincidence thesis, discussed in various forms in Locke, Descartes, Pascal, Reid, and Butler. It pertains to the idea that virtue and ultimate well-being coincide, which is the other half of Kantian moral faith. Kant wanted to emphasize not just the issue of happiness but also the moral issue of deserving to be happy; there is something about the coincidence of virtue and well-being that struck him as profoundly right, and on this basis he formulated a variant of the moral argument for God’s existence.
Kant is notorious for arguing in the First Critique that theoretical efforts to demonstrate God’s existence fail, but his Second Critique augmented that picture. Following the likes of Palmquist, Hare, and Ameriks, we see Kant there according primacy to the practical. Taking the inference to God as regulative merely warrants acting as if God exists; but taking it as constitutive, as Kant thought his practical argument made possible, warrants believing that God actually exists. We will discuss Kant in greater detail in a later chapter.
Overview of Chapter 3
This chapter quickly surveyed contributions to the moral argument from seven early modern figures after a brief mention of the Protestant Reformers Luther and Calvin—namely, Descartes, Pascal, Locke, Berkeley, Butler, Reid, and Kant. The contemporaneous Frenchmen Descartes and Pascal both saw the relevance of the afterlife to fundamental questions of the moral quest. Berkeley was drawn to a consequentialist normative theory but also to a larger theistic framework, and Butler argued that it is God who guarantees ultimate perfect harmony of virtue and self-interest. Both Locke and Reid were drawn to an early version of the coincidence thesis, which set the stage for Kant. Kant offered a few variants of the moral argument, one pertaining to the matter of transformation by God’s grace and the other predicated on the coincidence thesis. Brief mention was made as well of how Wesley stood in the broadly Reformed tradition while differentiating himself in a few respects from Luther and Calvin. At times Wesley sounded like a natural lawyer, but at other times he intimated that the distinction between the voluntarists and intellectualists was artificial.
1 Aristotle distinguished between four types of causes. The material cause is the stuff something is made of, the formal cause is its design or shape, the efficient cause is the agent that brings it into existence, and the final cause is its purpose or goal.
2 Martin Luther, Bondage of the Will, trans. J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnston (Revell, 1957), 217.
3 Luther, Bondage, 29.
4 John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T. McNeill (Westminster, 1961), 3.23.2.
5 “Reply to Objections to Meditations VI,” in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. E. Haldane and C. Ross (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2:251, quoted in Alvin Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature? (Marquette University Press, 1980), 96, 101.
6 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. Honor Levi (Oxford University Press, 1995), 143.
7 See William J. Wainwright, Reason and the Heart: A Prolegomenon to a Critique of Passional Reason (Cornell University Press, 2006).
8 John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, ed. I. T. Ramsey (Stanford University Press, 1958), 70.
9 Locke, Reasonableness of Christianity, 70.
10 Of course, the theist can be challenged with the question, Why obey God? This is an important query for theistic ethics discussed later in the book (the “prior obligation” objection to DCT). John Stuart Mill himself would later countenance an adjacent possibility when responding to the charge that utilitarianism is a “godless doctrine.”
11 John Wesley, The Works of John Wesley, 3rd ed. (Baker, 1986), 5:441.
12 Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, intro. B. Brody (MIT Press, 1969), 256.
13 Terence Cuneo, “Duty, Goodness, and God in Reid’s Moral Philosophy,” in Reid on Ethics, ed. Sabine Roeser (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 256.
14 Thomas Reid, Practical Ethics: Being Lectures and Papers on Natural Religion, Self-Government, Natural Jurisprudence, and the Law of Nations, ed. K. Haakonnssen (Princeton University Press, 1990), 120.
15 Much credit here goes to John Hare for providing resources and language to formulate Kant’s argument so concisely. See his Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance (Clarendon, 1997).
16 Kant gave this argument in the Dialectic of the Critique of Practical Reason and at the beginning of Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and the end of the First and Third Critiques.