Book: God, Gödel, and Grace: A Philosophy of Faith by Clifford Goldstein
Chapter: “1: Trinkets of Death”
Context: A friend of mine, a Christian, gave me this book. This is my second time, after many years, reading it. When I read what the books they gift me, I am often filled with renewed gratitude and optimism about friendship, the human endeavor on this lonely planet – heck, even about religion.
Sum: In this chapter, the author tackles meaning, mortality, and morality. The chapter is excellently written with chartable and thoughtful representations, with citations, of the opposing side: namely, atheism. He questions nihilism and subjective morality, setting the tone for the rest of the book.
Thoughts: My beef with this chapter, despite enjoying the book so far, is with the bit about morality. Goldstein writes, what atheists can’t do is “derive an internally coherent moral system based upon any transcendent or immutable absolute—because, they assert (often absolutely), none exists” (14). (I don’t think so. I’m a moral realist – and an agnostic.) There’s more, “If morality does not transcend the human … then Hitler’s murder of the Jews in lands under Nazi occupation was moral because it was legal.” Further, “there are no transcendent, transnational, and eternal moral values” without God (16).
I might write a blog post about this. But I’ll try to be brief here. Yes, God makes morality easy. I think this is not a good thing; one should be cautious of easy morality. Well, this ancient, internally-contradictory collection of books (with unverified supernatural claims) written by homophobic and misogynistic (and so on) people says God defines what is good – and it’s all in here! Yay! Morality solved! How should we treat our slaves? And what should be done to gays? How about women who are sexually violated? Oh, and children who do not obey their parents? What about the Canaanites? Really, even their children and their animals? Jeez, well, who am I to question Him?
No, morality is actually quite hard. Welcome to the human condition. If we just take consequentialism into account, which I’m partial to, we must live day-to-day ignorant of the true consequences of our actions (because we cannot reliably predict the future with much depth and can’t infinitely compute). There’s so much more I want to say. But this is supposed to be a brief. I’ll just say, Christians are not immune to hard morality, even if some think they are. For example, which laws and commandments do you follow? Have you read Leviticus? Have you stoned anyone to death? Whose example do you follow: Yahweh’s, Moses’, Jesus’? Post-Enlightenment Christians sure do read these texts differently. One more thing, Christians believe in God. So, even if you believe your morality (whatever your interpretation) is perfect, you also have doubt; after all, you believe in the supernatural. To be clear, you’re basing your entire morality on a belief that most Christians acknowledge might be false. Now, that’s hard (and subjective).