Randal Rauser's Blog, page 69

Beyond the Anathema: A Catholic/Protestant Dialogue

This year, I decided to recognize Reformation Day (October 31) by inviting my friend, Catholic apologist Trent Horn, to share his understanding of the Catholic faith for my community at Taylor Seminary. We had some technological problems, but we powered on through. And this is that exchange.

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Fundamentalist Biblical Interpretation: A Critique

Millions of conservative Protestant Christians (fundamentalists and evangelicals) believe that the Bible should be interpreted “literally where possible”. But is this a defensible interpretive principle? Does it even make sense? In this short lecture, I offer four objections to the Literal Where Possible Principle.

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Is the Lock Him Up Chant a decline in civility?

Here is a link to a Twitter survey that I posted on the Lock Him Up chant:

What do you think of the actions of baseball fans who chanted "Lock him up!" when Trump's presence was announced at the World Series game yesterday?

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) October 28, 2019

And now for my thoughts: I’ve read several political pundits lamenting the fact that people were chanting #LockHimUp as a further decline in civility. Maybe, but journalists long ago took to calling Trump a liar given his uniquely tenuous relationship with truth.

The lesson: An especially depraved and criminal politician elicits new responses from politicians, journalists, and baseball fans alike. That new response need not itself constitute a decline in civility but rather could be a reasonable response to a decline that is already underway.

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When conservative Christians confuse their interpretation of the Bible with the Bible

Yesterday, I tweeted the following observation: Many Christian conservatives profess to defend the inerrancy of Scripture when, in fact, they are defending the inerrancy of their interpretation of Scripture.

In order to appreciate the reasoning of the conservative Christian, we should begin by unpacking the assumption that there is a commonsense way to interpret a particular statement. For example, if your friend says, “I’m going on a business trip for six days,” you interpret him in the plain and natural sense of his statement: he’s going to be gone for approximately six 24 hour periods. You surely don’t interpret him metaphorically. And if I say, “The German priest Heimerad died one thousand years ago,” you interpret me in the plain and natural sense: Heimrad died one thousand years ago (i.e. around the year 1019). You don’t interpret me as referring thereby to an undefined period of time which could potentially be many thousands of years.

And with that background of commonsense assumption, the conservative Christian turns to the Bible. Thus, when you read in Genesis 1 about creation in six days, you should interpret that in the plain and natural sense as six literal days. And when you read in Revelation 20 about the devil being locked in a bottomless pit for a thousand years, you should interpret that as a literal thousand years. (By the way, you should also interpret that as a literal pit with a literal lock.)

Those literal interpretations are, so the conservative Christian reader assumes, the commonsense and straightforward readings. By contrast, non-literal readings are anything but commonsensical. If anything, so the conservative assumes, divergence from the literal and plain meaning reflects an attempt to obscure the plain meaning of the texts such as they have been revealed to us. In short, any attempt to interpret “day” or “thousand years” in anything but a literal sense represents a pained attempt to subvert the plain revelation God has revealed as errant.

Underlying this analysis is an extraordinary assumption. It is the assumption that when a contemporary English reader comes to a 2600-year-old Ancient Near Eastern cosmogonic creation narrative in contemporary English translation that the text will carry a commonsense and straightforward meaning for that contemporary English reader. And it is the assumption that when that same contemporary English reader comes to a 2000-year-old apocalyptic text chock full of prophetic symbols rooted in the Hebrew Bible/intertestamental period and responding to a late first century period of tension with the Roman Empire in Asia minor, that this text will likewise carry a commonsense and straightforward meaning which is readily accessible to that contemporary English reader.

Needless to say, this assumption is profoundly flawed. There is a vast cultural and literary distance between the original writing and the contemporary reader and there is no basis for assuming that interpretations which seem natural and commonsensical to the contemporary reader are thereby legitimate, still less that they are beyond reproach. However, once inerrancy has been imputed to the reader’s interpretation, which is what effectively occurs with those who believe that any deviation from their view is subverting the plain meaning of the text, the result is that this extraordinarily presumptuous interpretation has been effectively inoculated from external critique. And it is within those narrow confines that fundamentalism is born.

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The Imprecatory Pretzel: Why it doesn’t work to use the Psalms to curse your enemies

Many Christians think that the imprecatory psalms provide models for how to curse one’s enemies. The hermeneutical assumption seems to be that the imprecatory psalmist’s declarations of hatred for his enemies and his desire that they be destroyed are sanctified and wholly correct statements and wishes.

However, ask a person who takes that view when one should begin cursing their enemies and you will soon see them taking the form that I call the imprecatory pretzel. For a particularly painful, labored example of this, consider the conversation that was birthed on Twitter from two tweets I posted a few days ago:

The Christian reader who tries to baptize this worldview as a description of reality is fated to the hinterland of cognitive dissonance. The only consistent reading is to judge this worldview mistaken and properly critiqued through the person and work of Jesus Christ.

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) October 19, 2019

These tweets elicited some pushback, the most vigorous of which came from this fellow named “Michael Remus”:

To everyone bending over backward to make "niceness" into essential Gospel orthodoxy & orthopraxy, let ye be henceforth warnèd!: this is where you'll end up.

Men who dismiss imprecatory psalms have no eyes in their heads & no heart in their hollow chests.https://t.co/sBPr3I3m25

— Michael Remus (@AuroraHilaron) October 22, 2019

I responded to Mr. Remus and our ensuing exchange provides a template of the absurd knots into which one can twist themselves when they are committed to the position that the imprecatory psalms should be read as normative models for hating and cursing one’s enemies. I have recounted our conversation below.

Randal: Congrats, you’re great at the stentorian declarations! Understanding and engaging with the views of others? Not so much.

Michael: What didn’t I understand? I’m happy to learn!

Randal: Well, all you did was tweet what appeared to be some sort of quasi-Lewisean insult. So I’d invite you to explain what, exactly, the substance of your critique is. And a tip: the issue isn’t “niceness”.

[Editor’s Note: I have not included some of Michael’s tweets which strangely talked about disconnected issues like John MacArthur and Beth Moore.]

Michael: As for the Psalms, your analysis of what they’re saying is anemic. Christians can hate evil people and love them/pray for their salvation simultaneously, without cognitive dissonance. Why? Because God is sovereign in salvation. “Will not the judge of all the earth do right?”

Randal: What is “anemic” about my analysis of the Psalms?

How do you know when to love your enemies and when to hate them, pray for their destruction, pray that their children would be killed, laugh at their coming destruction, and long to bathe your feet in their blood?

Michael: Well, that’s a good heart-examining question! Obviously you can be too imbalanced one way or another, but I think my point was also that it’s not either/or (see tweet #3). Basically, is the great multitude justified in happily praising God for destroying the great prostitute? 1/2 Insisting on measuring out salt vs sugar in a cookie recipe to the precise nanogram isn’t an argument against whether or not salt should be in the recipe in the first place. I think I’ve made the case that it should be in there; not sure there’s a scientific formula tho 2/2 But I’m still not sure you’ve pointed to where I’ve so obviously misunderstood you (as you said in your original tweet). What did I get wrong about your position?

Randal: You talked around my question over the span of three tweets. Perhaps you could try answering it?

Michael: When they meet the criteria as laid out in the imprecatory psalms themselves. Ps69 is a good start. If you want more modern criteria, see my tweet about sexual perversion mongers, or see Romans 1. (a bit ironic since you haven’t pointed out my misunderstanding yet, but ok)

Randal: How does Psalm 69 tell you when to switch from loving and blessing other people to hating and cursing them?

Michael: Like I said, you don’t switch. That was the point of my thread a few tweets ago. What Ps69 might tell you is the level of fury you should be rightly feeling. There are atheists who are mild and kinda sad (not much fury), then there are firebreathers. What did I misunderstand?

Randal: You don’t switch? So you simultaneously love/bless and hate/curse the same person?

Michael: That was what I said earlier, which I’ve argued to be the biblical position (ex: Paul can curse and pray for Judaizers). Obviously the target and aim of these two things are slightly different (it’s not a contradiction / “X but also not X”). Sir, what did I misunderstand?

Randal: Which is it? Do you simultaneously love/bless and hate/curse other people? Or do you intermittently switch from loving/blessing them to hating/cursing them? And if the latter, then we’re back to my question: how do you know when to hate? And how does Psalm 69 guide you?

Michael: The former. My previous tweet was insulating that position from charges of contradiction. Ex: Love bears all things. John says refusing to invite false teachers into your home is truth & love. Something can be curse-ish and loving at the same time. *What did I misunderstand?*

Randal: You simultaneously love and hate, bless and curse all people? That sounds nonsensical, not to mention psychologically impossible since it involves simultaneous contradictory mental states.

Michael: Well, glad to see you disagree with my position! But you still haven’t answered what exactly I’ve misunderstood, which was your original criticism of my first tweet. I’ve tried to answer all your questions, but you haven’t answered any of mine. Who is “engaging” the other more?

Randal: The psalms are a record of honest human experience. At times the psalmist describes God as absent. At other times he describes God as hating his enemies. Those are honest expressions of life’s circumstances. To assume that God should thereby be thought of as absent or hating one’s enemies is a hermeneutical assumption that you’ve brought to the text. To be sure, you’re free to read descriptive texts as normative and authoritative theological assertions, but again, that’s what you brought to the text. And it leads you here, to the absurdity of espousing a position where you simultaneously love and hate, bless and curse all people. And that is surely among the clearest examples of a reductio ad absurdum that one could hope to find.

Michael: I recognize that is your position, but you claimed I misunderstood it. Where did I do so? I never said “all people”. I fear you might be misunderstanding me! How is your view that the Psalms’ theology here is mere human experience not also, by your own standards, an assumption?

Randal: So now we’re back at it: how do you decide for which people you hold the incompossible dispositions of loving/hating, blessing/cursing and which you do not? We both have interpretations. Mine does not involve the postulation of incompossible mental states to the same individual.

To follow up on my question, how do I know when I should add the mental disposition of hating and cursing you to the disposition to love and bless you?

Micahel: Sir, I’ve answered these questions repeatedly. You’ve shown yourself unwilling to understand my actual point. You’ve also charged me with misunderstanding your position and not once substantiated it. very cool

Randal: When I initially asked you when you begin to hate/curse, you replied that it is an ongoing state concurrent with love/blessing. You then specified that it is a subset of the population that you simultaneously love/hate and bless/curse. So I asked again: when do you start?

The fact that you have repeatedly refused to explain when you begin to hate/curse people (somehow concurrent with still loving and blessing them) is an illustration of the untenability of your position. As I said, it is a clear reductio ad absurdum.

Let’s debrief

First, Michael kept asking how he had misunderstood my view. The problem is that he never described it or interacted with it to begin with. He initially referred to my tweet and suggested that I have no eyes in my head and no heart in my, er, “hollow chest”. He also said my view is “anemic”. But he didn’t explain how.

My view is that the imprecatory psalms are not model curses to be emulated but rather honest curses that we may identify with while in the midst of our own pain. But our end goal is to become like Jesus, he who said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:43-5)

By contrast, Michael has taken the extraordinary view that the imprecatory psalms teach us to adopt a stance of simultaneously blessing and cursing, loving and hating, a subset of the population. (Needless to say, the imprecatory psalms never make any such claim.) But Michael refused to explain how such a posture is even psychologically possible. Nor did he explain how one identifies the subset of the population toward which one adopts this stance.

And that is what I call the imprecatory pretzel.

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What’s Wrong with Young Earth Creationism?

A few weeks I appeared on the Skeptics and Seekers Podcast to debate young earth creationism. In preparation for the debate, I was asked to provide a written statement in response to a statement by co-host David Johnson. I have decided to repost my statement here.

I thank David for the invitation to discuss young earth creationism, especially since we have such a fundamental disagreement on this theology. David thinks that Ken Ham is on the side of the angels. I think, on the contrary, that Ham represents a naïve literalist reading of ancient cosmogonic creation narratives which perpetuates much harm. Like many Christian fundamentalists, Ham appears to adhere to the principle that biblical texts should be interpreted literally when possible under the assumption that this is a straightforward and commonsense approach to the texts.

But this is a completely erroneous assumption. To begin with, Ham exhibits great confidence in the so-called commonsense of the contemporary English reader. But this confidence is deeply misguided. To illustrate, consider this story. I recently read about an American psychologist who attended a conference in Britain. At the end of the evening, the female colleague he had been speaking with said, “I’ll knock you up in the morning.” He was initially taken aback by this bizarre and wholly improper sexual proposal appended to what had been a perfectly professional discussion. It took him a while to figure out that when his British colleague said “knock you up” she in fact meant “come knock on your door.” In short, she wasn’t proposing a sexual liaison. She was merely saying that they should continue the conversation in the morning.

If two contemporary English speakers can miss the meaning of each other by a wide margin, what are the chances that a contemporary English Bible reader like Ham might misunderstand a three-thousand year old text written in a foreign language (Hebrew), within the milieu of a very foreign ancient near eastern culture, and translated into contemporary English? At the very least, one must be very cautious about overreliance on what seems to be the sensible interpretation.

Ham places much emphasis on the fact that the word “day” in the text is being used to refer to a twenty-four hour day. That may be so, but that observation also misses the real point by a wide margin. Consider, William Carlos William’s poem “This is Just to Say” makes reference to cool plums in a fridge. And there’s no doubt that Williams really is referring to plums. But it hardly follows that the reference to plums does not also have a greater literary and symbolic significance within the poem.

And so it is with the reference to days in Genesis. These “days” clearly have a symbolic role as they provide structuring motifs for this etiological account of the origin of all things. For one thing, the text functions, rhetorically, to establish the universal, cosmic significance of the Sabbath as the Jews envisioned it by rooting a day of rest and reverence into the very order of creation. To think that the days of this cosmogonic narrative must refer to six literal 24 hour days in the past in order to accomplish this etiological account of creation and Sabbath is about as sensible as thinking that Carlos’ poem must refer only to some literal plums in a fridge.

While Genesis 1 is an etiology and a cosmogony, it also evinces the hallmarks of poetry: viz. highly structured and rhythmic language. For example, the first three days constitute a structuring of creation through origination and separation: light comes to be and is separated into day and night; water comes to be and is separated into water above and water below; and then land comes to be separate from land and it gives forth life. And so end the first three days with the structure of creation.

The final three days constitute a filling of that structure: lights are created to fill the day (sun) and night (stars; moon); then birds fill the sky (the fifth day) and animals fill the land (the sixth day). And finally, we see the appearance of the apogee of creation, human beings.

Thus far, I’ve noted that Genesis 1 is an etiology and a poetic account of cosmogony. At this point, we can also add another blow against flat-footed literalism: the entire sequence of the Genesis 1 account is out of step with the distinct account of creation in Genesis 2. For example, in Genesis 1 human beings come last whereas in Genesis 2 the male human being comes first and then the animals and then Eve.

So what’s going on between these two accounts? The minimal courtesy we should grant every writer or redactor (editor) is that they weren’t stupid. In short, the editor of these two ancient accounts was fully aware of their differences. And in fine rabbinic fashion, he leaves the reader to explore that tension. At the very least, this is one more reason to keep in mind that we are not merely reading the ancient equivalent of a newspaper account of origins.

In the seventeenth century, Galileo famously observed that Scripture tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. In other words, the message of Scripture is a message of God’s creation, fall, and redemption culminating in the kingdom of God through Jesus Christ. The Scriptures were not given to us to teach us science.

And it is clear that where science is concerned, the understanding of the Hebrew represents an ancient science. For example, the “waters above” in Genesis 1 refers to the raqia, a hard dome that the Hebrews believe held a literal ocean above our heads. Today we know that there is no raqia. But the message of Genesis 1 isn’t that God made a raqia. Rather, the message is that God made creation, and that message is understandably conveyed to (and through) the ancient Hebrews in the scientific understanding of their day, one which included the raqia.

For all these reasons and more, it is deeply misguided to read Genesis 1 as a flat-footed literal account of origins. No doubt, Ken Ham means well, but his errant and naïve reading of the biblical text does a grave disservice to Christians as it inclines people to read a faulty young earth creationist theology back onto the text. And this, in turn, does nothing more than discredit Christians and the church before a skeptical world. For these reasons, I don’t believe that Ham is on the side of the angels. Indeed, I must conclude that if any angels take pleasure in Ham’s misbegotten textual reading, they are likely of the fallen sort.

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Why do conservative Christians diminish the scourge of sexual assault?

The Christian Post recently published my short article “Pepe Le Pew stinks: The sexual violence of Looney Tunes in a #MeToo age.” The article attracted three comments, presumably from Christian conservatives (the primary readership of The Christian Post).

Not surprisingly, the comments were all critical of my moral censure of Pepe Le Pew and his trivialization of sexual assault. I say “not surprisingly” because, in my experience, evangelical Christians often diminish the moral offense of sexual assault. And these three comments bear out that assumption.

The shortest response comes from a fellow named William White who sarcastically opines, “As an alien, the depiction of Marvin the Martian offends me!” While Mr. White’s sarcastic rejoinder is somewhat hamfisted — the article is not critiquing the portrayal of a minority population — nonetheless, the main point is clear: criticizing a Looney Tune character amounts to PC moralizing run amok.

A more substantial — and disturbing — response comes from a lady named Nina Bourque. Ms. Bouque writes:

“I grew up with all those cartoons as well. We all loved them. Even as children I think we knew they were not realistic and amounted to a slapstick humor. No one can fall over cliff and have a safe land on them and survive. It is ridiculous. And a mouse beating up on a cat? A canary defeating a cat? An amorous skunk? At least he was swooning over a girl, new cartoons have boys swooning over boys. Popeye saving Olive Oyl from the Brutus? How about Mighty Mouse or Superman? I subscribe to Boomerang for my grandson because I cannot abide the new brand of cartoons. They are insipid, push SJW agendas and the violence is far worse then any Road Runner cartoon I ever watched. Young children with guns out to save the world? They all push some frightening agenda on children. Give me Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny and Road Runner any day. Pepe Le Pew is still fine by me!”

This is the most revealing line:

“An amorous skunk? At least he was swooning over a girl, new cartoons have boys swooning over boys.”

First, take note at Bourque’s intentional framing of the issue: Le Pew is “amorous” and is merely “swooning over a girl.” But that is not what the cartoon depicts, at all. Rather, Le Pew is a predator who sexually assaults a victim.

The most extraordinary thing, however, is that Bourque suggests this depiction of sexual assault is somehow less egregious because it is, at least, heterosexual: “new cartoons have boys swooning over boys.” This is an ugly, cretinous attitude, one that effectively excuses male heterosexual predatory behavior.

And that brings me, finally, to the most extraordinary comment of all. This one comes from Marvin Thompson:

“It isn’t funny – anymore. But that is because we have changed both culturally and morally. We are far removed from the times when such humor was nothing more than that – humor. Scripture warned us that these days would come when a depraved, vile and corrupt mindset would prevail. It is like eating the “forbidden fruit” and realizing we are naked.”

It might take a minute to wrap your brain around what Thompson is saying, but it is truly extraordinary. Thompson is comparing the Looney Tunes era to the prelapsarian state in the garden, the time before there was sin when male and female lived in harmony with one another and God. During this time, a skunk groping a terrified cat “was nothing more than … humor.”

According to Thompson, the problem is not with the cartoon. No, the problem is with our “woke” moral age, one that takes the innocent tryst between a skunk and cat and turns it into something “depraved, vile and corrupt”.

You might consider these comments a glimpse behind the veil of what it means to “Make America Great Again.” Together, these commenters long for a return to a time where non-heteronormative people were in the closet and where heterosexual males would be free to act out their “amorous” fancies on fleeing females without fear of being charged with sexual assault. Worst of all, this deeply immoral picture is viewed as exemplifying traditional mom-and-apple-pie moral values.

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Join My Kiva Team Today!

Over ten years, I have spent thousands of dollars to run this website and I have never taken any advertising dollars (except the very modest kickback I get from Amazon widgets). However, I do ask that you would please consider joining Kiva, a great micro-lending agency that allows you to lend money to business owners in the developing world. And once they pay it back, you can relend it. Follow this special link to join and I get an additional $25 credit on my account that I can lend to somebody else. It’s a win-win! https://www.kiva.org/invitedby/randal9033

And after you join, also sure to join The Tentative Apologist Lending Team. This is our motto: “Debating the existence of God and the meaning of life means little if you don’t lend a helping hand to those in need.”

And we’re making a difference. So far, we’ve made more than 1.7K loans at $48,400, and counting…


 


https://www.kiva.org/team/tentative_apologist_blog

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Do All Children Go to Heaven? On the age of accountability

This article is based on chapter 30 of my book What’s So Confusing About Grace?

Parenthood opens you to new questions you never thought to ask before. For me, it initiated a new stage in my wrestling with salvation and the Gospel: what did it mean for my daughter to be saved? Did I agree that toddlers or young children were possibly under threat of damnation? If so, I’d better start implementing a plan now. What about a four-year-old? Could a child of that age be damned? Here is a recording of my daughter singing “Happy Birthday” to me back in 2006 when she was four-years-old:

https://randalrauser.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Birthday.m4a

Okay, so she’s a bit off-key, but at the very least, surely she is innocent, no?

So I have to ask: was my daughter damnable at that tender age? To put it bluntly, could she have been culpably separated from God for eternity when she was but four years old? And if so, what about a three-year-old? Or a three-month-old? What is the (how should I put this?) damnability threshold, the point at which a child who failed to confess the right beliefs could be damned for that failure? When I first held that newborn seven-pound swaddled bundle in my arms, these questions were no longer merely academic. I needed to find an answer.

From my perspective, it would be unimaginable to think that the God who is Love, and the Jesus who described entry to his Kingdom as becoming like a little child, would damn a four-year-old to hell. If I were to push beyond that intuition in search of an underlying reason for my confidence, I’d be inclined to say that the four-year-old had not yet reached the age of accountability, that is, the age at which point a person becomes accountable for their beliefs and actions (or entrenched in patterns of implacable rebellion). Of course, this is not to suggest that a four-year-old is completely unaccountable for their beliefs and actions. Rather, it is just to say that a four-year-old is not ultimately accountable for a decision so momentous that it could result in their eternal damnation.

The notion of an age of accountability appears to draw on an analogy with the so-called age of majority, that legal threshold which demarcates the move from childhood to adulthood. The transition into the age of majority is significant for a number of reasons. For example, a person is not legally responsible for a contract they sign when they are still a legal minor. But the moment they become a legal adult, they are held responsible. Further, criminal responsibility varies as to whether the crime was committed when the individual was a legal minor vs. an adult. For these and many other reasons, the age of majority threshold is enormously significant legally, morally, socially, and personally.

As significant as the age of majority is in contemporary civil society, it utterly pales in importance with the age of accountability. To fill out the picture, we begin with two stages:

1) the age of innocence when a person is innocent and not damnable;

2) the age of accountability when a person is guilty and damnable.

A damnability threshold divides these two periods. Every human being begins in the age of innocence, the period of time during which one is secure for heaven and thus will not be damned for any sins they may commit. Eventually, as each individual matures he/she crosses the damnability threshold into the age of accountability, the period of time during which one becomes responsible and thus damnable for one’s sin.

It is important to appreciate that just as there are no gradations between heaven and hell (that is, you’re going to one or the other) so there are no gradations between innocence and damnability (you’re either one or the other).

And in case you were wondering, that fact doesn’t change if you accept the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, for all who enter purgatory eventually move on to heaven. So even with purgatory there still are only two final options: heaven or hell.

Whether you like it or not, the choice is an absolute binary: either one is ultimately saved or one is ultimately damned; either one (eventually) enters an eternity of blissful existence after death or one faces a horrible fate of destruction. There simply are no other options.

It is the very absolute, binary nature of the choice that is so distressing, particularly when considering children and their gradual journey toward moral responsibility. Societies that observe an age of majority are always clear on when that point is and for good reason given that it represents the hugely important transition into a new age of adult responsibilities. Given that crossing the damnability threshold into the age of accountability represents a transition point of unimaginably greater significance (the difference between the default destination of heaven and the possibility of hell), wouldn’t one expect that God would make it that much clearer when a person crosses into the age of accountability?

So what does the Bible say about the age of accountability? Given the enormous burdens that must be borne by this doctrine, it is quite surprising to discover that the textual support for it is, in fact, surprisingly thin. Indeed, the truth is that it takes a bit of imagination to find anything in the Bible that may be viewed as direct evidence for a clear transition from innocence to accountability.

The most commonly cited text in favor of a period of innocence is found in 2 Samuel. The moment comes just after David’s newborn child tragically dies. In response, he stoically observes: “now that he is dead, why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I will go to him, but he will not return to me.” (2 Samuel 12:23, NIV 1984) As the reasoning goes, David is expressing the conviction that he will be reunited with his child again in heaven. And that provides evidence for an age of innocence, at least for newborn infants.

Even if we accept that David is expressing this hope, the fact is that it only applies to newborn infants. David says nothing about older infants, toddlers, or four-year-olds. Consequently, once we attempt to extend an age of innocence to a wider pool of individuals, we are moving well beyond David’s prayer and into the realm of hopeful speculation. And few parents will be content to leave the salvation of their beloved children to the realm of mere speculation, hopeful or not.

There is another big problem with appealing to David’s prayer as evidence for an age of innocence. The problem here is that the Hebrew understanding of the afterlife developed over time, and the notion of the clearly distinct states we know as heaven and hell only appeared after David spoke these words. At the time David expressed his sentiment, the common view was that at death all people without distinction went to sheol, the place of the dead.

Given that fact, when David says he would be reunited with his infant son again, he likely wasn’t imagining some victorious reunion in heaven which was based on the child’s default state of innocence. Rather, he was only anticipating the time when he would join his child in the realm of the dead. Consequently, the text simply doesn’t provide a guarantee that all infants who die go to heaven.

Here’s another way to approach the matter. Could it be that the first sin, if there is a first sin, that this act constitutes the moment when a child crosses that threshold of damnability? Could it be that a single first sin is enough to leave a child worthy of damnation? That certainly is a disconcerting thought. But if we are to consider that possibility we must ask the question: what might a first sin look like?

Here’s a candidate. When my niece was a two-year-old she asked her mother for a glass of water. So her mom obligingly poured her daughter a cup. The child took the cup, looked defiantly at her mother, and dumped the water out on the carpet. Could that have been her first sin? Perhaps, and if it was then it was appropriately dramatic!

If we grant that this was a first sin, could it also be the moment when that child crossed the threshold from innocence to accountability? Some theologians seem to think so. And to strengthen the claim they ask us to consider the nature of sin at its root. They say that any sin–no matter how seemingly trivial–is ultimately an offense against the sovereign Lord of the universe.

As evidence, these folk note that when King David confessed his sins against Uriah, Bathsheba, and the nation, he famously observes that it is against the Lord only that he has sinned (Psalm 51:4). These theologians argue that this shows all sin to be, at its root, an offense against God. And, so the reasoning continues, any sin against an infinite God is worthy of infinite damnation. Thus, on this view in the moment that a two-year-old obstinately pours out a cup of water on the carpet, she sins against God and thereby crosses the threshold into being an appropriate subject of eternal damnation.

But even if I concede that all sins are, in some sense, a sin against God, I remain skeptical of the accompanying calculus which insists that every sin, no matter how seemingly trivial, thereby makes one a proper object of eternal damnation. The two-year-old who has the nerve to challenge her mother’s authority may be deserving of a time-out. If you’re more traditional in your preferred disciplinary methods, you might even think she deserves a spanking. But can we really think that by committing this action she is now a fitting object for infinite and eternal damnation? Sorry but I just can’t buy that one. Eternally damned toddlers?! Surely that can’t be right!

As I reflect on this notion of responsibility, I can’t help but suspect that thinking in terms of one single threshold of damnability is just too simple a grid given the fact that moral agency and moral accountability appear to come in degrees. In short, my intuitions and experience strongly support the conclusion that (all other things being equal), a two-year-old is more responsible than a one-year-old, a three-year-old is more responsible than a two-year-old, a thirteen-year-old is more responsible than a three-year-old, and so on. And if that’s true then this reality should be reflected in our accounts of what it takes to be damned. Unfortunately, degrees of responsibility are not recognized on a model in which damnability, like pregnancy, is a binary status: either you’re pregnant or you’re not, and either you’re a proper object of damnation or you’re not.

Given that the age of accountability is a binary state, the next question we need to consider is whether there is a fixed date of damnation for every person, a single moment that functions like the age of majority. Could it be that every person becomes damnable at the same time on their fifth or thirteenth or eighteenth birthday, for example? If this is the case, then which date is it?

I have two big problems with the idea that there is a single universal damnability date for everyone. The first problem, as I already suggested, is that God has neglected to tell us when precisely that date is. As a doting-borderline-neurotic helicopter parent, that seems to me to be a significant oversight. What could possibly be wrong with letting worried parents know the date at which their beloved progeny become damnable?

My deeper problem is with the very idea of a single universal damnation threshold. As I said, this seems to be fundamentally unjust given the gradual way that moral agency, responsibility, and guilt are acquired at different times. What is more, we all have different types of emotional and cognitive baggage that can slow our development and skew our choices. We can all probably think of particular kids who, through no fault of their own, experience various cognitive and emotional learning delays. Is it really the case that God would hold all these individuals with their various degrees of cognitive and emotional development and responsibility to be damnable on the same day?

I’m inclined to say no: I think God would take the details of each individual life into account. And that leads me to believe that there couldn’t be a single, fixed damnability moment for everyone. Instead, I suspect that if damnability is a binary status with a momentary threshold, it is one that is crossed at a different moment for every individual. To change metaphors, you might say that God flips the damnability switch at the appropriate moment for every person based on his perfect knowledge of their particular range of cognitive abilities and life experiences.

While that seems like a reasonable compromise, it also has a rather unfortunate implication: barring some special revelation, it now follows that nobody knows the day on which they first become damnable. And yet, surely as with the age of majority, this is important information to have. Once again, this doting-borderline-neurotic helicopter parent wants to know the first day my kid would be in danger of going to hell!

With these thoughts in mind, I turn my attention back to my infant daughter sleeping peacefully in my arms. The questions remain unaswered, at least to the precision that a parent would demand. And yet, I can still take comfort in the knowledge that the God who knows the answers is infinitely wiser, more loving, and more merciful than I could ever be. And that itself is an answer.

For further discussion, see my book What’s So Confusing About Grace?

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What’s wrong with the scientific study of morality? An interview with Paul Rezkalla

Paul Rezkalla

Paul Rezkalla has an MA in Philosophy and Ethics from the University of Birmingham and an MA in theology from St. John’s University. He is currently working on a PhD in philosophy at Florida State University (with the esteemed Michael Ruse) and an MSc in cognitive and evolutionary anthropology from Oxford University. In this conversation, we talk about the question “What’s wrong with the scientific study of morality?”

Randal: Paul, thanks for joining us for this conversation about science and morality. Before we dive into the topic, perhaps you could share a bit about yourself and how you have come to be interested in the relationship between science and morality.

Paul: Thanks for having me, Randal! Well, I was born in Egypt and grew up in NYC. In college I was studying pre-medicine on track to become a physician (like a good Egyptian kid) and then I got a taste of philosophy and decided to pursue graduate studies in philosophy, as a result. My interest in the sciences never really subsided and I guess that may be what drew me to questions about the relationship between ethics and science (and evolution, in particular). I’m really interested in whether philosophers and scientists are studying the same set of phenomena when they study “morality.”  I’m also interested in questions about our moral intuitions, specifically the extent to which intuitions about values are shared cross-culturally and whether evolution tells us anything important about how we make moral judgments. 

Randal: Fascinating! I didn’t know that good Egyptian kids become physicians. Here in the Great White North, the standard aspiration is “hockey player”.

Anyway, enough with my bad jokes. What say we jump right in? In his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, E.O. Wilson provocatively argues that eventually non-scientific fields like history, philosophy, art, and morality will “fuse” with the sciences to produce one continuous body of scientific knowledge from fundamental quarks up to aesthetics, morality, and religion. What do you think? Is that a vision that could possibly be realized? Or is it just scientism run amok?

Paul: While it may seem like an interesting project at first glance, Wilson’s vision is misguided, at best. Elsewhere he emphasizes that “the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.” It’s a bit unclear what Wilson (and others like him) have in mind when they say things like this, but, as Philip Kitcher has pointed out, there are controversial and uncontroversial ways of understanding this sort of “biologicizing” project. Sure, science can shed light on why we have certain tendencies to prefer our family members over strangers or why we feel repulsed at the thought of lighting a cat on fire (philosophers love bizarre, macabre examples). Science can even helpfully point out that humans are prone to judge others more harshly for committing the same bad actions that we ourselves are guilty of and that “clean smells” can incline us to be more generous when asked to give to charitable causes. However, it’s not clear that science can tell us whether we should judge others or give to charity, or light cats on fire. Ethics has a unique “ought-ness” quality that puts it outside the realm of scientific inquiry. This feature (among others) throws a massive wrench in the “biologizication” project. In sum, as Kitcher puts it, science can’t tell us “what ethics is all about”.

Randal: Hmm, are you describing what philosophers commonly refer to as the is/ought fallacy?

Paul: That’s one way of putting the problem. What we’re doing when we do science is describing the way the world is, but that doesn’t tell us how the world ought to be. The “ought-ness” we mentioned earlier is not something we discover by doing science, it’s a different project, altogether. For example, there’s really good evidence showing that we have implicit racial biases that incline us to form judgments (both good and bad) about people simply because of how they look or what their names sound like. There are evolutionary and cultural explanations for why and how our brains form these mental shortcuts, but notice that this is just a description of a human behavioral tendency. However, it’s clear that we should try to become aware of our implicit biases and try to shed them as best as we can. This latter fact is not a scientific fact, rather it’s a fact about what we ought to do–it’s prescriptive. What is and what ought to be are conceptually distinct. Science is really good at the former, but the latter is a philosophical project.

Randal: Fair enough, but there are many philosophers and scientists that disagree with you. Could it be, for example, that oughtness is an emergent property? A single H2O molecule doesn’t have the property of being wet, but put enough of them together and wetness emerges out of the whole. Is it possible that when you get sufficiently complex collections of matter that they become moral agents and their actions take on emergent moral properties of being morally praiseworthy or blameworthy which are analogous to the collection of H2O molecules taking on the property of being wet?

Paul: Two things to point out. First, oughtness and praiseworthiness are two distinct features. For example, praiseworthiness is a feature of persons whereas oughtness or normativity, as philosophers call it, is not. Whether oughtness is emergent is a different question from that of praiseworthiness. And second, even if emergence is a possibility, it’s certainly not a scientific question. Whether or not oughtness or praiseworthiness are emergent is not the kind of question we can answer without doing philosophy.

Randal: Perhaps we can take a step back. I suspect some folks reading this may be wondering this: how does one decide when one is doing science vs. philosophy? Perhaps I can put it this way: do you see a hard and fast boundary between these disciplines? Or is that boundary porous or blurred? And at the risk of rambling, let me ask it in another way. Theologians are often warned of a God-of-the-gaps, of invoking a theological explanation when a scientific one will suffice. Is there a similar warning for the philosopher? And if so, how do you decide when that is?

Paul: That’s always a fun question! I’m not a huge fan of trying to draw hard lines between disciplines (demarcation projects). But I do think there’s a fairly obvious and non-controversial distinction between empirical and non-empirical claims. For example, if we’re arguing over whether or not we should buy diamonds and my position is that we should not buy diamonds given their ethically dubious sourcing, my argument will be comprised of one empirical premise and one non-empirical premise. 

Non-empirical Premise: If diamond-harvesting results in or is dependent on the loss of human lives, then we should not buy diamonds. 

Empirical Premise: Diamond-harvesting does, in fact, result in or is dependent on the loss of human lives. 

Conclusion: Therefore, we should not buy diamonds. 

Virtually everyone will grant the first premise. The second premise is empirical–meaning that we confirm or disconfirm this claim by looking at the world. We can’t do that for the first premise. It’s not the kind of thing that we know by observation or by accumulating evidence. 

So, to go back to what first brought all of this up, it’s not clear that questions about moral responsibility and normativity are empirical questions. Sure, there may be a dimension of empiricality when we’re gathering the facts to determine whether someone is morally responsible, such as whether she was in proper control of her actions and had sufficient knowledge of what she was doing. But those facts only work as only part of any argument offered to determine whether she is actually responsible, blameworthy, etc. Those arguments will include a non-empirical premise like “we should blame those who do X and are in control of their behavior when doing X”–and we don’t arrive at those premises purely by accumulating evidence from the way the world is. We’re not doing science when we’re working out those non-empirical premises. Those are more properly in the domain of philosophy. 

Randal: Excellent, a very helpful response. So as we wind this conversation down, I’ll offer a crude summary and invite you to respond, noting both where you agree and where you disagree as well as where, as the saying goes, I’m not even wrong.

So here’s my summary statement: the is, descriptive, empirical aspects of the moral sphere are proper subjects of scientific investigation, but the ought, prescriptive, non-empirical aspects are not.

Paul: Or another way to put it, “science is good for what science is good for”! Science is one of our best tools for understanding the world. It gives us lasers, refrigeration, and even energy by harnessing the sun! Science also helps illuminate our racist, sexist, and overall selfish tendencies; it confirms that humans are susceptible to a host of nefarious motivations and impulses. But that’s as far as it can go. When we’re trying to answer the questions of how we ought to be and live or which impulses we ought to ignore and which to endorse, then we’re no longer doing strictly science.

You can learn more about Paul by visiting his website here.

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