Engaging Mormon Apologetics

[_MrStakhanovite]

Well I think it is a genuine disagreement by this definition, but that's ok.

Actually, I think we are talking about the exact same thing now.

Having been raised Catholic, I suppose I am prone to a strict definition of "ontology".

I pulled these quotes from my Oxford Companion to Philosophy under the entry of Ontology:

Ontology, understood as a branch of metaphysics, is the science of being in general, embracing such issues as the nature of existence and the categorical structure of reality. That existing things belong to different categories is an idea traceable back to Aristotle. Different systems of ontology propose alternative categorical schemes. A categorical scheme typically exhibits a hierarchal structure, with 'being' and 'entity' as the topmost category, embracing everything that exists.

a few paragraphs later it says:

It is now better appreciated that the natural sciences embody implicit ontological schemes which cannot be wholly justified on purely empirical grounds and which on occasion engender theoretical perplexities, as in the quantum-mechanical disputes over wave-particle duality. Only metaphysical reflection can ultimately dispel such perplexities.

I hope that clears things up.

I can't recall any discussions of what "can or cannot exist" in Mormon thought.

I think a great example would be the spirit children in the pre-existence, us in our fleshly tabernacles, translated beings, Jesus Christ and the Heavenly Father.

I usually think of ontology in terms of Platonic forms or Heidegger's "Being and Nothingness" or even Whitehead for that matter

Heidegger is a perfect example. He used 'ontic' to describe things like chemistry and 'ontologisch' for things like Metaphysics. The whole phenomenological testimony is trying to weave together ontic things like fear to describe ontological structure of human 'existenz' (beings as they are).

OK well anyway, how then does morality relate to "what can or cannot exist" in LDS theology?

It has everything to do with things Dan has said in his essay that I've been responding to. Things like this:

Secular anti-Mormons typically criticize the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on two broad grounds. First of all, they say that its claims are untrue. Second, they accuse it and its leaders of wrongdoing—with respect, for example, to the origins of plural marriage, its supposed manipulation of history, and the Mountain Meadows Massacre. But it is not clear that, on a purely secular and naturalistic basis, either form of critique can be coherent. In order for one or both types of criticism to be coherent, it may be that theism is a necessary precondition.

But on what basis can a materialist, whose universe is exhausted by material particles and the void, claim that something is objectively wrong? Do right and wrong not become matters merely of personal preference and, perhaps, of power?

Dan strongly hints that he doesn't think objective morality cannot exist apart from God and that materialism cannot provide a grounding for an Objective morality. So the majority of my posts in this thread have been geared in response to that.

Since I'm pretty confident you would not agree with much stated above, anything I've been saying thus far doesn't have much merit to you.

[_mfbukowski]

Dan strongly hints that he doesn't think objective morality cannot exist apart from God and that materialism cannot provide a grounding for an Objective morality. So the majority of my posts in this thread have been geared in response to that.

Since I'm pretty confident you would not agree with much stated above, anything I've been saying thus far doesn't have much merit to you.

Well you may be right about that. I would disagree with Dr. P. if indeed your interpretation of that essay which I have not yet read is correct. But I seem to recall on one of these many threads that he explained himself pretty well in regard to that, and as I recall ultimately I could see that he was being misinterpreted.

But I am not a scholar- I don't much care about arguing what one person might have said which may or may not disagree with what some other person said. I don't see much value in that kind of discourse. I mean really, who really cares if some guy agrees or disagrees with some other guy on some obscure point that makes no difference in anybody's life.

I see my task in life as a human being is to form a coherent, rational and logical world view that I can live with which improves my life and causes me to affirm my own life and the lives of other people in this very limited sphere in which we live both alone and together.

I think the bottom line is that there is a compatible position upon which both theists could agree with atheists on what underlies morality, and that notion is really something based on the affirmation of the progression of mankind toward a better life for everyone both individually and collectively.

For me, that is pretty much where I see the path of exaltation and the sealing together of mankind as one family unites both humanistic goals and LDS doctrine. The genius here of what Joseph revealed is that if God is a man, mankind as a whole becomes godlike. We are the creators of reality and the world in which we live. You guys can take that metaphysically and as a sort of myth to live by, and we can take that more literally and see God as our Father and all that- but the underlying belief is the same, in my opinion.

And I also think that the underlying materialism of Mormonism fits well with a humanistic notion as well- of course I would add to materialism a spiritual component- call it consciousness or intelligence or spirit- whatever word fits- to go along with that.

So over all, with a few tweaks here and there, I think humanism, with its implication that humans are god and the Mormons' human God dovetail nicely.

No, that is probably not the way Joseph Fielding Smith would see it, but I plan to have a long conversation with him about it someday. We will both know a lot more about it by the time that happens though.

[_EAllusion]

Two points:

1) Early Mormon thought easily lends itself to materialism. Orson Pratt clearly was a materialist, for instance. DCP, however, is anti-materialist and you should take him at his word that this is what he is critiquing. He equates materialism with atheism from time to time. This article is an example of that. This is common in fundamentalist, evangelical writings and I think DCP is just in lock-step with them on those subjects.

2) I think it would be easier to just attack divine command head on. If moral truth or knowing it i dependent on the will or nature of God, then it follows that God doesn't have moral reasons for doing what he is doing (or that we can't know that he has good moral reasons). So a statement like "God is good" becomes a trite tautology since all it really means is "God is what god is." So there's no moral basis for God's commands we can know of and thus no particular reason to care about them or about morality if it is so grounded. If you conform to God's moral standard, you are by definition conforming to something that is morally arbitrary as far as you can know. From that it follows that you can't predict how God will behave on the basis of his goodness. If God was a lying reprobate, that by definition would be good, so you can't predict he won't be because he's "good."

The more serious issue is that this is an arbitrary flag to plant morality in and doesn't help us explain moral properties. It's no more useful than defining moral truth in terms of what my will would be. In fact, doing that would work as equally well and there is equal reason out there to think that's what grounds moral properties. (And it's secular too!) Sure, that achieves some factual basis for moral truth, but it doesn't help us understand why morality has the features it does. In other words, we don't have any reason to think that it is the correct grounds for morality just because it works as a ground. In fact, we wouldn't need to have it grounded in a person's subjective will at all. Instead of moral truths being grounded in my nature, we could ground your moral intuition into the brute fact nature of nature itself. We have no reason to do so and it's not particularly helpful, but it's no worse than the previous two options. To quote a poster on another message board whose link I can't find at the moment, "The lesson is that it’s not enough to produce a set of criteria such that it’s possible (in principle) to objectively determine whether any given act qualifies as “right” or “wrong” according to them. Someone else could equally well produce a different set of criteria which give different results. Unless one can offer some compelling reason to regard one’s own criteria as the “correct” ones – i.e., for thinking that the acts that come out as “right” according to these criteria are just the ones that really are right – such a scheme can hardly be called “objective.” I think that is where you are going Mr. Stak, but...

DCP flat denies divine command theory. He doesn't think morality or knowledge of it has to depend on the existence of a God. But if that is the case, doesn't that flat contradict his argument made here? Yes, yes it does. If morality or knowing it does not depend on the existence of a God, then it follows that someone who doesn't believe in God is not in some unique state of self-contradiction for having ethical opinions.

What's DCP have to say about all of this? Nothing but evasion, appeals to nonexistant authority, and sly attacks on you.

[_EAllusion]

I think the bottom line is that there is a compatible position upon which both theists could agree with atheists on what underlies morality

I think we can word this stronger. The only positions on what underlies morality out there worth taking seriously are those where atheists and theists can equally adopt. And, as a pratical matter, secular theory dominates meta-ethics as practiced by both professional atheist and theist philosophers.

Mormons usually believe that God could theoretically cease to be God by acting in an immoral fashion. This suggests that God has freedom to act in an immoral fashion because there is a standard of morality independent of his nature. That, in of itself, is a rejection of morality being based in God's existence. So I think Mormonism is already lending itself well to this point.

However, DCP, in his effort to go after atheists says,

First, the [atheist] critics' basis for criticizing Mormonism on moral grounds is unclear, and its coherence needs to be demonstrated. "Rebellion cannot exist," observes Camus, "without the feeling that, somewhere and somehow, one is right."[48] But on what basis can a materialist, whose universe is exhausted by material particles and the void, claim that something is objectively wrong? Do right and wrong not become matters merely of personal preference and, perhaps, of power? Not only existentialists but many superficial "life counselors" suggest that we should construct our own "meaning" for life. But is such a self-constructed meaning really meaning at all? Or is meaning not, rather, something that can only be received from another intelligence? And why should anybody else pay even the slightest attention to somebody's self-constructed "meaning"?

Camus observes of the atheistic French revolutionaries of 1793 that, when they effectively guillotined God, "they deprived themselves forever of the right to outlaw crime or to censure malevolent instincts."[49] "From the moment that man submits God to moral judgment, he kills Him in his own heart. And then what is the basis of morality? God is denied in the name of justice, but can the idea of justice be understood without the idea of God?"[50] If those who deny any objective basis for morality nonetheless go on behaving morally and invoking morality, we can only be grateful that they have not pursued the implications of their position to their logical end and that they continue to live on borrowed moral capital. Of the nihilistic revolutionaries who are the subject of his brilliant meditation in The Rebel, Camus remarks that

All of them, decrying the human condition and its creator, have affirmed the solitude of man and the nonexistence of any kind of morality. But at the same time they have all tried to construct a purely terrestrial kingdom where their chosen principles will hold sway.[51]

It is not surprising that, just prior to his tragic and early death in a 1960 automobile accident, Albert Camus was evidently giving serious consideration to being received into the Roman Catholic Church. He was, I am guessing, horrified by the revolutionary excesses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and had come to suspect that only theism could provide an objective basis for moral judgments. It is precisely the same kind of reasoning that led the Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden to embrace Christianity: He found himself sitting in a movie hall in the late 1930s, in an area of New York City then heavily populated with German immigrants. As a newsreel played, depicting acts of Nazi barbarism toward European Jews, the audience around him erupted with cheers and surges of pleased laughter. Shaken by what he had witnessed, Auden realized that his secular worldview could not provide him with a firm moral ground from which to protest that Nazi brutality was objectively evil.

Camus and Auden may have been right. On the basis of what moral principles do secularizing critics pronounce the church wanting? How were those principles chosen, and why should anybody else defer to them? Even if one were to grant the factual claims on which they stake their moral judgments, it is not at all clear that those moral judgments are capable of bearing any objectively real weight.

So take it up with him.

[_EAllusion]

Some objections:

Someone might say that the difference between grounding morality in God's commands and grounding them in mine is that God is morally perfect whereas I'm not. This, unfortunately, begs the question. If I'm by definition the standard of goodness, then I am morally perfect and God, to the extent he differs, is not.

Someone might say that God explains the "ought-to-doness" of morality whereas my will does not because God can make people behave in a moral fashion. First, God clearly is not making people behave morally. Second, if the proposal is that oughtness is a matter of absolute might, then all the divine command theorist is saying is that might makes right, which is itself a rejection of divine command. Now they've adopted a secular moral theory - that might makes right - that can exist regardless of how mighty the most powerful being happens to be.

But, the person might say, the issue isn't so much might as God has the unique position of being able to make "right" actions in your ultimate best interest. So that explains why you ought to behave in accord with his dictates. Again, this represents a subtle rejection of divine command. What the person is saying is that one ought to behave in accord with their own self-interest. In ethics this is known as "ethical egoism." the person who says this has just adopted a secular, though usually poorly treated, theory of morality that can be true regardless of whether God exists. All God does is provide a "fudge-factor" to square their best interest with moral intuitions that might contradict it.

[_mfbukowski]

I think that the notion that God follows natural laws is compatible with a God who "knows" what is right and wrong just as we do- by calling "good" those things which are life affirming and condemn those things which are not.

One could go through the commandments and show how each is life affirming- which they are in a broad sense. Stealing for example is not acceptable in a culture because societal peace cannot be maintained in a society of thieves, and without societal peace, the family breaks down, which is not life affirming. Adultery and covetousness are in the same category

Actually, when one looks at the Didache, there is a section about the "Two Paths"- one of which affirms life and the other does not. This notion coheres perfectly with that of the Didache, not surprisingly.

This gives the TBM a notion of morality which is unchanging, and yet escapes the point that EAllusion brings up, of the question-begging nature of the definition of God as "good".

Recognizing that God follows a moral law which all humans find to be "good" (the affirmation of human life) is an approach that is both very compatible with LDS theology and which puts us solidly into a philosophical tradition which affirms the changing nature of truth, which is also required by continuing revelation and the view that God himself progresses.

We as humans - including God himself- all progress by following natural laws which the human race itself has found to be indispensable to it's existence.

Such a notion would I think be compatible both with Mormonism and secular humanism.

The advantage of such an approach is that I think it puts Mormonism directly where it belongs to continue its growth beyond the "unrestored" notions of neo platonism found in creedal Christianity. We cannot keep the philosophical positions of previously discredited ontologies (yes, this time I meant to use that word!) while claiming that "the truth is restored"

For better or worse, I think such an approach would show the compatibility of at least certain "philosophies of men" with the overall Mormon approach, and give an overall coherent world view to thinking Mormons which I think has been lacking.

But of course I could be wrong.

[Guest]

mfb -

Sure, a Mormon is free to believe that God follows an independent standard of goodness. Not only is that compatible with LDS thought, I think that is the best interpretation of the LDS tradition. My only point to that is that this represents a rejection of divine command - or at least the ontological version of it.

Then even if God doesn't exist, that same independent standard of morality can exist in any case. So DCP's point about belief in objective morality (moral realism to be more specific) depends on theism vanishes. That's the point.

But suppose a Mormon instead buys an epistemic version of divine command. While morality might exist independent of God, we can only know moral truths by having them revealed to us through God. So to know morality you need theism. I think that results in the same Euthyphro dilemma problems. You couldn't know God was good because you'd have no access to independent criteria to judge him by, for instance. God would still just be whatever God is.

[_mfbukowski]

I think we can word this stronger. The only positions on what underlies morality out there worth taking seriously are those where atheists and theists can equally adopt. And, as a pratical matter, secular theory dominates meta-ethics as practiced by both professional atheist and theist philosophers.

Mormons usually believe that God could theoretically cease to be God by acting in an immoral fashion. This suggests that God has freedom to act in an immoral fashion because there is a standard of morality independent of his nature. That, in of itself, is a rejection of morality being based in God's existence. So I think Mormonism is already lending itself well to this point.

For which of course, there is already a precedent in the Mormon idea of God being subject to natural laws.

Well I think it is clear we agree on this.

And as I have said earlier, I am not interested in what others believe or do not believe.

I am too busy trying to figure out what works for me than worrying about what works for other people.

[_MrStakhanovite]

Quick question EA,

The more serious issue is that this is an arbitrary flag to plant morality in and doesn't help us explain moral properties.

If abstracta are necessarily existent entities, they need no explanation for their existence. Even a rabid fan of the PSR would admitt to that I think. You don't think a Moral Fact could be constructed as such?

EDIT to add: 3 being prime was true before humans came about, as an example.

[_EAllusion]

If abstracta are necessarily existent entities,

That would require a demonstration of God as a perfectly moral being's necessary existence for it not to be arbitrary to ground necessary moral properties in God's existence. I don't think the ontological argument is successful. But if it was, a person wouldn't then need to reach to the moral argument to point out the irrationality of atheists. If ontological arguments worked, presuppositionalism wouldn't ever be brought up, would it?

You don't think a Moral Fact could be constructed as such?

I think moral facts are contingent truths, not necessary. (See my version of moral realism above.) I don't see a route to grounding some set of moral facts in the abstract as necessary for grounding rational thought or as platonic forms.