In this two part article I will be looking at the response of Andrew Ollerton to Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch's loss of faith. Andrew Ollerton is the author of the Bible Society's successful Bible and Romans courses, courses we have run at our church. Andrew's response to Badenoch can be found on the Premier Christianity website here. Below I interleave some of Andrew's content with my own comments.
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Andrew: In a recent BBC interview, the leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, revealed that her belief in God was destroyed when she put her ear to the monstrous crimes of Josef Fritzl. For Kemi Badenoch, the idea of a God who ignores the cries of victims like Elisabeth, while answering other relatively trivial prayers, is completely untenable.
My Comment: I'm not going to elaborate on the awful crimes of Josef Fritzl toward his daughter Elizabeth; that can be discovered on the internet. Suffice to say here that Kemi Badenoch was quoted as saying that when she heard about these crimes what faith she had was snuffed out like a candle flame. Kemi has my sympathies; so often the challenge of suffering overwhelms any attempt at theodicy. But at this juncture I'm reminded of this post where I considered atheist PZ Myers' response to suffering and evil. Viz:
PZ Myers: No one uses the problem of evil to disprove a god, but only the idea of a benevolent god, or more specifically, the perfectly good being most Christians promote. When I see it deployed in an argument, it’s usually to make the narrower point that I don’t believe in your god..........But OK, sure, (if) the problem of evil says you should be anything but a traditional Christian, I’ll take it.
Well, that's a slightly different response to Kemi Badenoch's atheistic reaction to the problem of suffering and it is one, as we shall see in Part II of this two part series, which challenge's Andrew's apologetic.
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Andrew Ollerton: No doubt we all share Kemi Badenoch’s moral outrage at this horrific crime. But must we also share her atheist conclusions? In the dark of evil and suffering, is belief in God morally justifiable?
My Comment: According to Myers the question has changed to this: Is belief in a Christian God morally justifiable? But more about that in Part II. What now follows is what Andrew calls his Logical Response to Kemi B.
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Andrew Ollerton: Firstly, some
logic. If God does not exist then the universe consists of nothing but motion,
matter and blind chance. Moreover, without God moral concepts such as ‘right’
and ‘wrong’ are arbitrary and carry little weight.
My Comment: Not quite in my view! Without God the universe consists of nothing but a meaningless patchwork of conscious sensations and yet which appear to be coherently organized by an inexplicable set of succinct and elegant laws, the mystery of whose origins is unsolved and in fact is logically unsolvable by mere descriptive science without getting into an "algorithms-all-the-way-down" regress. Moreover, particles, motion, space, chance and matter are not fundamental; rather they are mathematical constructions made conceptually possible by the organization of experience, but the true nature of the "thing-in-itself-ness" associated with these constructions is obscure; these objects are only known through our perceptions and conceptions.*
And yet in spite of that, concepts of right and wrong can be derived from conscious cognition in so far as the compulsions of sentience quickly teaches us what constitutes bad experiences to be avoided and which, in that sense, can be classified as "wrong". It's no doubt a crude gauge as to what is morally right and wrong, but it's a start.... the qualia of conscious cognition naturally categorizes experiences as "bad" or "wrong" whether we believe in a deity or not. In fact we can go a bit further: If we have some idea as to what is "bad" for us, then given our ability to get into the the minds of others we are able to extrapolate, at least to some extent, as to what is also bad for them.
However, the foregoing is no complete fix for the questions of morality because the long term ramifications of human action for the conscious cognition of both ourselves and others may be difficult to work out for epistemically challenged human beings. But acknowledging the existence of the role of pre-existing sentience in defining morality gets the moral ball rolling; it's a pointer that right and wrong are not completely arbitrary constructions carrying little weight. But this conclusion is based on the assumed existence of sentience, a sentience which touches, feels and thinks.
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Andrew Ollerton: As C.S. Lewis noted, the assumption that a line is crooked implies the existence of a straight line. To say that someone’s actions are morally ‘wrong’ presupposes a ‘right’ way. Otherwise, all human behaviour is just ‘natural’.
My Comment: My guess is that both theists and atheists would identify the origins of morality in the social accommodation & reconciliation of the conscious feelings of themselves with that of other humans; in this connection the Golden Rule is universally understood as the basic heuristic of morality. However, the fair implementation of the Golden Rule in community is not straightforward and Christians would likely appeal to God's omnipotent perception of society for the finer points of such an implementation. But the beginnings of the moral "straight-line" which Andrew speaks of is to be found in the consciences of both atheists and theists.
What ought to be clear, however, is that moral rights or wrongs don't exist simply because God, apparently for arbitrary reasons, labels them as such. Rather, I would propose that God declares what is right and wrong based on deep social implications which emerge from the Golden Rule, a rule which only makes sense given, a priori, the existence of conscious cognition, a context where it is meaningful to talk of good and bad experiences.
Contrast the former with the views of fundamentalist theme park manager Ken Ham, who comes close to defining morality simply in terms of rules invented by God without acknowledging the deeper "Golden Rule" logic behind these rules. Poor old Ken seems to have got no further with his concept of morality than something being "right" or "wrong" simply because "God said so". Yes, God lays down the law, but the motivations driving this law are be found in a community of beings who touch and feel and must reconcile the conflicts of interest which inevitably result of living together.
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Andrew Ollerton: If Kemi Badenoch no longer believes in God, then what grounds her belief in morality and why is she so angered by evil and injustice? Atheism cannot explain our feelings of moral outrage. What Josef Fritzl did to his daughter was not ‘Wrong’ with a capital W unless we believe there is a ‘Right’ way for a father to treat his daughter.
My Comment: Suffering doesn't need to be labelled as wrong by God: It argues for itself as wrong, just as one's experience of say the colour red argues for itself as red and isn't "red" simply because it is called "red". My guess then is that Ms. Badenoch has strong in-built instincts about the suffering associated with injustice and evil and these remain as the basis of her morality whether she believes in God or not. True, as a Christian I believe these instincts are created and maintained by the God of creation just as is the rising of the Sun. But disbelief in God doesn't mean to say moral urges go away, although like the rest of the cosmos their sheer existence is inexplicable to bland atheism.
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Andrew Ollerton: Equally, Fritzl can
only be brought to justice if he was responsible for his actions and not merely
subject to genetics, brain chemistry, and primal urges. In short, the reason we have a problem with evil is because we believe in
a good God. This still leaves us wrestling with many mysteries.
But to reject God because of evil is to saw off the very branch we are sitting
on.
My Comment: Fritzl is responsible for his actions even if they have "causes" in genetics, brain chemistry and primal urges. (One of those primal urges is the ability of most human beings to empathetically extrapolate feelings to other humans). See my series of articles on freewill and predestination for more on this subject (See here, here and here)
I disagree: The reason we have a problem with "evil" is not because we believe in a good God, but because we have strong empathetic instincts about the effect of evil on conscious cognition, and these instincts are common to both theists and atheists. I would agree however that such instincts are sourced & maintained by God and that without God empathetic moral behavior not only appears anomalous but has no apparent absolute anchoring. Its existence is as perplexing as the origins and maintenance of the laws of physics. For in a cosmos where a survival "ethic" is the only constraint on the dynamics of existence, standard "Golden Rule" morality has no logically obliging basis (See The Riddle of the Sphinx)
.....to be continued
Footnote
* The subtle twist here is that we find we can describe the formal structure of our conscious cognition in terms of these mathematical constructions.
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