Читать книгу What It Means to Be Moral - Phil Zuckerman - Страница 11
ОглавлениеThe Insidiousness of Interpretation
One night about twenty years ago, I was lying in bed watching TV, clicker in hand, flipping through channels, when I came across an episode of the show 20/20. John Stossel, one of the lead reporters, was doing an investigative story on polygamous families. He went to some region of Utah where Mormons still practice what they call “the principle of plural marriage,” which entails one man having multiple wives. Stossel and his TV crew hung out with these pious, polygamous men and women for a few days, spent time in their homes, attended their church gatherings, and interviewed them. From the television footage, everyone profiled seemed quite content; I got the sense that none of the adults featured in the show were being forced to live in a polygamous situation, but rather they all seemed to enjoy living a life that was spiritually rich and full of communal and (extensive) family ties.
The part of the episode that is most seared into my memory is when Stossel sits down with about five or six of the Mormon men to talk to them about how they manage life with so many wives and children. One man says that it’s quite stressful being the head of such households, full of responsibility. But then Stossel politely challenges him, asking what’s so stressful about it. After all, the women take care of all the kids’ needs, the women do all the cooking and cleaning, and the men get to have sex with three, four, or five different women, as per their desire. But the women don’t get to have sex with any other husbands. It seems unfair. It seems like it’s all for the men. When Stossel pushes this matter of gender inequality, one of the men offers an earnest rebuttal: “I didn’t make the law, God did.”
“Amen,” the other men resoundingly affirm in confident, almost gleeful support.
And there you have it: men enjoying an unequal, imbalanced domestic situation. But, hey, they didn’t make the law—God did. They’re just obediently living in accordance with the Lord’s will, and if it happens to benefit them, what can they do? How can they be to blame? They are ethically obliged to follow the laws of their Heavenly Father—end of story.
I am not personally opposed to polygamy. I think consenting adults should be able to live in whatever kind of domestic unions they choose. And I recognize that polygamy can even have potential benefits for some women; Martha Hughes Cannon (1857–1932), a Mormon wife in a polygamous marriage, was the first female state senator ever elected in the United States, and she was able not only to pursue politics but also to get a medical degree largely because she had numerous “sister wives” to help her, support her, and take care of her children in her absence.
But most Mormon men today are not polygamous because of what it can do for their wives’ careers. In fact, Mormon women are significantly less likely to work outside the home full-time than non-Mormon women,1 and Mormon theology is pretty clear that a woman’s primary role is that of homemaker and baby-raiser. And they are definitely not to have more than one husband. Why not? Well, as their husbands can readily explain: God said so. Such is the ultimate bottom line as to why these Mormon men don’t change diapers, do dishes, cook casseroles, or let their wives sleep with other blokes. How unabashedly convenient for these fellas. How utterly self-serving. And—above all—how deeply typical of traditionally religious approaches to morality and ethics.
One Wife or Fifty-Five?
The polygamous Mormon men profiled on that 20/20 episode are actually on some rock-solid theological footing. They believe that the founder of their religion, Joseph Smith (1805–1844), was a prophet of God and that God directly communicated with Smith, outlining very clearly what he wills for humanity in the sacred, holy text of the Mormon religion, Doctrines and Covenants, which is a collection of God’s direct messages to Smith concerning various aspects of how life ought to be lived here on Earth. Among the plethora of prescriptions and proscriptions in Doctrines and Covenants, we find some very direct words concerning the structure of marriage; in Chapter 132, God declares the following:
For behold, I reveal unto you a new and everlasting covenant, and if ye abide not that covenant, then ye are damned; for no one can reject this covenant and be permitted to enter into my glory . . . [then lots of stuff about marriage, stuff about Abraham and David, stuff about Joseph Smith’s wife, etc.] . . . if any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, and if he espouse the second, and they are virgins . . . then he is justified; he cannot commit adultery for they are given unto him . . . and if he have ten virgins given unto him by this law, he cannot commit adultery, for they belong to him; therefore he is justified. But if one or either of the ten virgins, after she is espoused, shall be with another man, she has committed adultery, and shall be destroyed.2
Pretty clear, right? Men can have up to ten wives, so long as they are virgins, but if a woman is with a man other than her husband, she shall be—um—destroyed. How brutally murderous, baldly immoral, heinously unethical. Gross inequality is woven into the marital relationship. But again, let’s not forget—Joseph Smith didn’t make the law, God did. And despite the fact that none of the men on that 20/20 show were filmed advocating for the murderous destruction of any women, they were clear that, in their decision to live in polygamous marriages, they were simply following the moral commandments of God as most plainly revealed.
Or were they?
According to the current leaders of the Mormon religion based in Salt Lake City—officially known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—this passage from Doctrines and Covenants is actually not what the Lord requires of his flock. At least not anymore. Polygamy is no longer divinely supported, and according to the current Mormon president and the Twelve Apostles—God’s present spokespeople on planet Earth—monogamy is what the Lord now requires: one man and one woman. Any other marital arrangement is sinful.
The twisting story of polygamy in Mormonism has been well-told elsewhere,3 but here’s a very brief sketch: at the height of his charismatic heyday, back in the late 1830s, Joseph Smith, who was able to convince tens of thousands of people that he was the prophet of God, started taking additional wives. He eventually received holy sanction for this endeavor in the form of God’s direct communication, already outlined above. Although his first wife, Emma, was not happy about this new principle of “plural marriage,” Smith was undeterred; one historian, Andrew Jenson, records that Smith eventually had twenty-seven wives, Fawn Brodie counts forty-eight, and Stanley S. Ivins put the number at eighty-four.4 After the murder of Smith, his successor, Brigham Young, continued to champion the practice of polygamy with religious zeal; estimates vary, but it’s safe to say that he had between twenty-seven and fifty-five wives.5 While most Mormon men could not afford to support multiple wives, many could, and somewhere between 20 percent and 45 percent of Mormon adult men and women lived in polygamous marriages in the latter half of the nineteenth century.6
All of these married men living with numerous wives in the territory of Utah caused quite an American scandal: salacious stories—peddled by journalists, novelists, and various anti-Mormonists—percolated throughout the country, raising much intrigue and ire.7 Subsequently, the federal government got involved, passing a series of anti-bigamy laws, such as the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887, aimed directly at destroying the Mormon practice of “plural marriage.” Such anti-Mormon legislation severely crippled the Mormon community: many leaders were imprisoned, parents’ rights over their children were endangered, the Church’s land holdings were threatened, and even the movement for the territory of Utah to join the United States was in peril.
And then, in 1890, the Mormon leadership made a spiritual about-face. Wilford Woodruff, the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, spent a prayerful night struggling with the Lord, the result of which was his issuance of a new manifesto declaring that Mormons would no longer engage in plural marriage. Utah was subsequently admitted as a state in 1896. In 1904, the new president of the Church, Joseph F. Smith, further declared that any Mormons who continued to practice plural marriage would be excommunicated, a declaration approved by the Twelve Apostles. And such has been the official position to this day: the website of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints currently proclaims that the “standard doctrine of the Church is monogamy.”8
Throughout the short history of Mormonism, this thorny matter of polygamy has caused much schismatic strife. It first spurred a split when the Prophet Smith initially instituted it; his wife, Emma, and her sons were so opposed to the practice that they broke off from Smith’s new religious movement and formed their own, non-polygamous version of the Mormon faith: the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with its headquarters in Independence, Missouri—where it remains to this day under the name Community of Christ. Next, when polygamy was officially denounced by the heads of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City in 1890 and 1904, this caused another schism between those who would now only practice monogamy and those who felt it was the Lord’s will to continue practicing polygamy. Some members of the Twelve Apostles resigned over the matter, believing that God still wanted the principle of plural marriage to be practiced, and other like-minded Mormons, dubbed “fundamentalist” Mormons, rejected the Church leaders in Salt Lake City, setting up their own breakaway congregations where polygamy could still be practiced. It was just such a community that John Stossel visited for his 20/20 exposé.
So, there you have it: a small, tight-knit, new religion—founded only some 190 years ago—full of fervent adherents who all believe in God, and all agree that Joseph Smith was God’s prophet, and all concur that living a moral life means obeying the will of God—and yet they simply can’t agree on whether or not God wants them to be in polygamous or monogamous marriages. And the spiritual stakes are pretty high: the fundamentalist Mormons believe that you can’t get into the highest level of heaven (the “celestial kingdom”) if you don’t practice plural marriage,9 while other Mormons, those remaining members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, believe that you can’t get into heaven at all if you do practice plural marriage.
And, thus, we come to the second major problem with any ethical system based on God: staunch theists claim that morality is based on belief in God and in following God’s will, and yet they can’t agree on just what God’s will is.10 Interpretation of God’s will becomes the name of the game. And what a deeply problematic, all-too-human game it is, with everyone interpreting differently, bringing his or her own interests, experiences, cultural lens, political leanings, tribalism, communal needs, and personal proclivities to the process.
Slavery, Anyone?
There are many other instances from throughout history that reveal the depth of this problem of theistic interpretation.
Consider, for example, the matter of slavery. Is it morally acceptable to forcibly enslave another human? Is it ethical to keep other humans in bondage, forcing them to work for your own advantage, and denying them not only the very fruits of their labor, but their basic right of personal liberty?
According to the logic of theistic morality, the first authority—indeed, the supreme authority—to consult in trying to decide upon this matter would be God and his commandments. According to God’s Ten Commandments, as recorded in the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament, God doesn’t say, “Thou shalt not enslave another.” There’s no such prohibition. He does provide other prohibitions, such as “Thou shalt not have any other gods before me” and “Thou shalt not make any images of anything that exists in heaven or on earth” and “Thou shalt not lie” and “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shall not commit adultery.” But nothing about slavery.
Well, that’s not quite true. There is that one significant commandment that does sort of seem to accept servitude as permissible: in Exodus 20:17, God declares, “Thou shall not covet they neighbor’s house, wife, male servant, female servant, ox, donkey, or anything else that belongs to your neighbor.” So, what we have here is a list of things that can belong to your neighbor: including objects (a house), animals (oxen, donkeys), as well as people (wives and servants). God thus seems here, at least implicitly, to approve of servitude.
And then God’s approval of slavery goes from implicit to explicit. In Leviticus 25, God tells the people of Israel that they can in fact purchase other human beings and own them: “You may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are around you . . . they shall become your property.”
Of course, the wording is crucial here. Does God condone servitude or slavery? Well, the original Hebrew word used in these biblical passages, written thousands of years ago by a culture dramatically different from our own, is ebed. And it is beyond difficult to definitively know just what this ancient Hebrew word ebed accurately translates to in our modern American verbiage.11 Does it correctly correspond to our word “servant,” or is it better translated as our word “slave”? We can surely appreciate what a world of difference the words “servant” and “slave” make when it comes to their moral meanings and ethical implications in our contemporary society. So, who has the final say on this matter of interpreting the true meaning of ebed—some balding, bespectacled professor in Boston or Jerusalem? Alas, how troubling that even the very translating of God’s commanding words must be based on linguistic and historical interpretation, and thus can’t ever be definitively, objectively agreed upon.
So is owning another person as a slave morally acceptable to God? According to the New Testament of Christianity, it seems like it definitely is. Jesus does not condemn slavery, and in Luke 12:42, he implicitly condones the practice. Paul, the founder of Christianity and its leading authoritative voice—second only to Jesus—definitely did not condemn slavery. Nor did he condemn slave owners. He did not say, “Free those you hold in bondage, as Christ has freed you.” Rather, in Ephesians 6:5, Paul declares, “Slaves, obey your masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.” In Titus 2, Paul again teaches that slaves ought to be “subject to their masters in all things.” Elsewhere, in Colossians 3:22—just to make the Lord’s position on slavery as unambiguous as possible—Paul reasserts the imperative: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters.”
Such biblical injunctions are deeply immoral. Just like the deeply immoral injunction from Exodus 21:20, in which God explicitly declares that people can violently beat their male and female slaves, so long as the beating doesn’t end in death. It is nigh impossible to even fathom just how much pain and misery, how much violence and degradation, how much abuse and assault has occurred—just how much human enslavement over the centuries has been physically enacted and religiously justified—from such biblical passages. Perhaps this all helps to explain why Frederick Douglass, the great writer, orator, abolitionist, and former slave, experienced the worst cruelty at the hands of the strongly Christian. As he wrote in 1845:
Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.12
And yet despite such cruelty, the architect of Christianity, Paul, exhorts the unfortunate who are forced into bondage, through no fault of their own, to obey their earthly masters—with respect and fear, no less! So it goes, if you uncritically accept the New Testament as holy writ.
Or not.
Many Christians who uncritically accept the New Testament as holy writ have been, and are, antislavery. But how can this be? Don’t the Ten Commandments implicitly allow for servitude? Doesn’t Paul explicitly exhort slaves to obey their masters? What is ambiguous here?
A lot. Or nothing. Once again, it is all—and I mean all—a matter of interpretation.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, American Christians—ardent and pious to a soul—were deeply divided over the moral question of slavery. A small number of theologians, preachers, and politicians, such as William Wilberforce, George Bourne, Charles Spurgeon, and John Wesley, condemned slavery as a grave sin and injustice. And the small Christian denomination of Quakers came to believe that slavery was immoral, working hard to undermine what they saw as a cruel, inhumane practice that went against the will of God. But the Quakers and their faithful ilk comprised a distinct moral minority; most Christians of the day interpreted God’s will quite differently. As American historian Forrest Wood exhaustively documents, “despite the humanitarian efforts of some Christians on behalf of the millions held in bondage, Christian thought and conduct in the first three centuries of American life came down overwhelmingly on the side of human oppression”13 and “defenders of slavery among men of the cloth were far more numerous than opponents.”14 Here’s but one glaring example: when William Lloyd Garrison, the tireless antislavery activist and editor of The Liberator first wanted to offer an abolitionist speech in Boston, every single Christian denomination denied him their stage.15
The reigning Christian view in the nineteenth century—among whites, of course—was perhaps best expressed by John Henry Hopkins, bishop of the Episcopal Church, who in his 1861 publication The Bible View of Slavery explained that “the Almighty” ordained Black people to slavery “because he judged it to be their fittest condition.” As for God’s son’s take on slavery, well, Hopkins pointed out that Jesus “uttered not one word against it!”16 Indeed, the majority of white Bible-believers in the United States, especially in the South, were convinced that God approves of slavery. As historian, sociologist, and civil rights pioneer W. E. B. Du Bois noted, back in 1913, the Christian Church not only aided and abetted the slave trade for centuries, but it “was the bulwark of American slavery.”17 Du Bois documented the fact that “under the aegis and protection of the religion of the Prince of Peace . . . there arose in America one of the most stupendous institutions of human slavery that the world has ever seen. The Christian Church sponsored and defended the institution . . . the Catholic Church approved of and defended slavery; the Episcopal Church defended and protected slavery; the Puritans and Congregationalists recognized and upheld slavery.”18
Consider one glaring example, the proslavery Christian leader George Whitefield—known by many as the founder of American Evangelicalism. A slave owner himself, Whitefield was a vociferous defender of this “peculiar institution.” And he did so as a devout servant of God: when he testified before the British Parliament, in order to advocate for the introduction of slavery into Georgia, he not only relied on the biblical defense of slavery, but he argued that God had specifically created the climate in Georgia to be suitable for enslaved Africans to feel at home in their bondage.19 His argument won the day and was deemed morally and ethically correct by most of his fellow Christians, especially Southern whites. Heck, you know the Southern Baptists—the largest Protestant denomination in the United States? Did you ever wonder why they are called Southern Baptists, as opposed to just Baptists? It’s because of their historical support of slavery: once the white Baptists in the North eventually condemned it, the white Baptists in the South broke from their northern coreligionists and formed their own Southern religious denomination in 1845. And Baptists weren’t the only Christian denomination to split over the question of whether or not God commands or condemns the enslavement of other human beings: Presbyterians divided over the matter in 1837 and Methodists in 1844.20
Irreconcilable Interpretation
So far, we have looked at the historical extent to which Christians have been split over whether or not God approves of slavery, and we’ve explored the specific instance in which Mormons diverged over what form of marriage God commands. These represent just two distinctly American versions of theism that have been deeply divided at times over fundamental questions of human conduct—divisions based on incompatible interpretations of God’s will.
But we haven’t even thrown any other religions into the interpretive mix—like, say, Islam. What does Islam say about polygamy? According to a direct reading of the Quran—which is considered by hundreds of millions to be the precise, literal word of God/Allah—Sura 4:3 states that a man may have up to four wives, so long as he can treat them all equally. So Allah clearly approves of polygamy. Or does he? While the majority of Muslims agree that God allows it, some Islamic theologians have interpreted Sura 4:3 differently, claiming that since it is nearly impossible for a man to truly treat multiple wives equally in all aspects, then polygamy is clearly not God’s ideal. Today, most Muslim-majority nations allow polygamy, but a handful do not.
Where does Judaism stand in all of this? For most of its early history, Jews interpreted God’s will as being in favor of polygamy, and it was widely practiced. But then, after Rabbi Gershom ben Judah of the eleventh century proclaimed it against God’s will, it steadily petered out. The state of Israel currently outlaws it. However, one of the most powerful contemporary rabbis in Israel, Ovadia Yosef, came out a few years ago in support of polygamy, and many orthodox rabbis in Israel currently perform polygamous weddings on a regular basis—as their interpretation of God’s will condones.21
Then there is Hinduism, Sikhism, Bahaism, Zoroastrianism—all with their own different interpretations of God’s will (or the gods’ will) regarding the ideal, approved marital structure for humanity.
And as for the issue of slavery—again, let’s consider Islam. Do Muslims believe that Allah approves of slavery? The answer is: yes, no, yes, no, yes, no—or rather, a multitude of interpretations, depending on this or that Islamic theologian’s construal of this or that historical epoch and from this or that school of Islam from this or that part of the world.22
The obvious point here is that when it comes to what is ethically correct and morally commanded, the major religions of the world interpret God’s will differently, resulting in widespread disagreement. But it’s not just the different major religions that are characterized by such conflicting interpretations—it is the case that even within the same religious tradition, one finds radically conflicting interpretations of basic questions of God’s will concerning human conduct. And this has not only been the case throughout history, but it persists today.
For a contemporary example, we see dramatically different interpretations of God’s will when it comes to the morality or immorality of gay marriage: the Roman Catholic Church, American Baptist Churches, Assemblies of God, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, every Islamic denomination, the Orthodox Jewish Movement, the United Methodist Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, and the National Baptist Convention oppose it, while the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Conservative Jewish Movement, the Reform Jewish Movement, the United Church of Christ, the Society of Friends (Quakers), the Unitarian Universalist Association of Churches, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America support it.23 And both positions are theologically justified by contradictory interpretations of God’s will.
This dysfunctional dynamic of conflicting interpretation both between and within every religion is readily observable and perpetually at play. Whether the question is doctor-assisted suicide or vegetarianism, transgender rights or universal health care, the death penalty or abortion, climate change or mass incarceration, fervent God-believers from different religions can’t agree, and even fervent God-believers from within the same religion can’t agree—and they all continue to interpret God’s scriptures and God’s laws and God’s will differently. Vastly so. Irreconcilably so.
And thus, to say that morality rests upon God—isn’t saying much. To insist that we need God’s guidance when confronting ethical dilemmas—isn’t insisting much. Because at root, everyone interprets God’s will differently.
A God of One’s Own
And by everyone, I mean just that: every single person. Because in reality, the widespread array of differing theistic interpretations gets even more granulated and diffuse: subjective, self-serving, contradictory, and incompatible interpretations of God’s will inevitably manifest themselves at the individual level.
Consider my friend and colleague Stephen Davis.
Stephen Davis, the Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, is one of the world’s leading Christian thinkers. With a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary and a PhD from Claremont Graduate University, Professor Davis has published over fifty scholarly articles in academic journals, and he is the author of thirteen books, such as God, Reason and Theistic Proofs (1997), Logic and the Nature of God (1983), and Faith, Skepticism, and Evidence (1978). Professor Davis’s scholarly expertise is wide-ranging and highly regarded within Christian circles, and he is specifically respected as an expert on Jesus; in books such as Risen Indeed (1993), he argues that the New Testament account of Jesus’s resurrection is factually, historically accurate.
Beyond his impressive scholarly achievements, he’s a warm, kind, and affable man. And regardless of our stark disagreements on matters of religion, and despite the fact that I devote much of my professional life debunking what he spends much of his professional life defending, he has always treated me respectfully. And he regularly agrees to visit my classes and speak to my students, providing them with an alternative take on God, religion, morality, and so forth.
The last time Professor Davis spoke to my class, he revealed something very interesting—and quite relevant to this discussion of the inevitability of theistic interpretation at the individual level.
It was a night class in the spring of 2017. About twenty-five students were present. Professor Davis was lecturing about God’s role in establishing morality, explaining to the students that God establishes clear moral rules and obligations that are objectively true, and he argued that without such a God-based, objective morality, ethics is reduced to nothing more than personal preference, subjective notions, relativism. He said that if morals and ethics were merely subjective and relative, then “anything goes” and it becomes impossible to claim that one’s own sense of wrong or right is binding on others. Such an approach to morality, he insisted, won’t do.
“Some things just are immoral,” he emphatically declared. “They are fundamentally, objectively wrong.” His example of such a thing? “Genocide.” As he explained, “Genocide just is wrong. It is immoral. Case closed.”
While all of my students were in agreement about genocide being fundamentally immoral, some of them had immediate difficulty understanding how Professor Davis could square his unequivocal stance on the immorality of genocide with his abiding faith in the biblical God. As one student asked: “If morality comes from God, and you claim that genocide is fundamentally, objectively immoral, then why does God actually command his followers to engage in genocide numerous times throughout the Bible?”
The contradiction was true, and just so glaring: here was the erudite Professor Davis saying that genocide is the ultimate example of something that is truly, unquestionably, manifestly immoral, and yet the very God he worships—and thinks establishes objective morality—both commits and commands genocide throughout the pages of the Bible.24
Professor Davis’s pat response: “Oh, I don’t think that those parts of the Bible in which God commands or commits genocide are true. I don’t believe them. I think those things were inserted there by people, but God didn’t actually command or commit them. They aren’t to be taken as historically true, or as literal. God would never command or commit genocide. I just can’t believe that.”
Here is a man who is a devoted Christian, a most thoughtful theist, who claims that the Bible is holy, and strongly believes that the New Testament’s account of Jesus dying and rising from the dead is factually, historically accurate—empirically supported by convincing evidence—and yet when it comes to different pages of the Bible, wherein God commands and commits genocide, he has no problem simply discarding those passages as untrue, historically inaccurate, and not to be believed. Because the God he believes in just wouldn’t do things like that. Because the deity that Professor Davis has devoted his life to would never approve of or engage in genocide, anything in the Bible that states the opposite he simply interprets as untrue.
This self-protective, explicitly illogical move by Stephen Davis is perhaps the most common, widespread form of theistic interpretation out there: individual God-believers simply dismiss anything God says or does that doesn’t comport with their own personal view of God. Or in a related vein, individual God-believers interpret something God says or does in such a way that it firmly squares with their own individual concept of morality. Or rather, God-believers adamantly insist that the God they believe in does or does not approve of this or that, as their subjective needs dictate. That is, people who think that slavery is a good and moral thing—or gay marriage, or higher taxes, or meat eating, or the death penalty, or recycling, or building a border wall, or corporal punishment, or smoking marijuana, or using condoms, or getting a divorce, or having multiple wives, or banning women from driving, or guns—each and every single one of them interprets God’s will in such a way as to snuggly support their own subjective position with regard to these various issues.
As George Bernard Shaw once quipped, “No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says. He is always convinced that it says what he means.”25
Theistic Morality as Echo Chamber
To prove that people generally interpret God’s values so as to nicely fit their own personal, subjective values, a team of researchers led by University of Chicago Professor of Behavioral Science Nicholas Epley conducted a simple experiment. First, they asked people who believe in God to give their own personal views on various controversial issues in America, such as the death penalty and abortion. Next, they asked these people what they thought various prominent Americans’ views were on these same issues—people like Bill Gates. And finally, they asked them what they thought God’s views were on these issues. As to be expected, peoples’ own values on these controversial issues most strongly aligned with those values they also attributed to God.
But here’s what the researchers did next: they took a different group of people and had them engage in a variety of tasks specifically intended to influence or challenge their preexisting views and values on various issues. For example, subjects were instructed to do something like write a speech on the death penalty in which they had to take the position opposite their own. And then, after completing such a task, they were asked what they thought the values were on these controversial issues for various prominent Americans and also God. The result? People shifted a bit concerning the values they attributed to God, but not on those that they attributed to other prominent Americans. In other words, when their own social or political values were shaken up a bit and perhaps softened, this was reflected in what they thought God’s values were—which also softened a little, continuing to align closely with their own, newly softened values. But there was no change in what they thought various prominent Americans’ values were. Those remained the same. Given these findings, Professor Epley observed that “intuiting God’s beliefs on important issues may not produce an independent guide, but may instead serve as an echo chamber to validate and justify one’s own beliefs.”26
Then things got even more interesting, neurologically speaking. Professor Epley and his team went on to use fMRI technology to scan the brains of the people volunteering in this study, looking at what parts of their brains were activated when they were thinking about their own values as well as the values of God and those of other Americans. In the first two—thinking about their own values as well as God’s values—the same parts of the brain became active. However, when they thought about what other Americans’ values might be, a different part of the brain became active—which suggests that theists literally, physically map God’s values onto their own.
As Professor Epley and his team concluded:
People may use religious agents as a moral compass, forming impressions and making decisions based on what they presume God as the ultimate moral authority would believe or want. The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing. This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God’s beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing.27
The grand takeaway: we ought to be very wary of anyone who claims that God-based morality is objective. It is anything but—given that everyone interprets God’s will differently, and all too subjectively.
Which brings us back to Stephen Davis. He is certain that genocide is morally wrong. And he is equally certain that the God he believes in would never approve of genocide—even when the Bible clearly says otherwise. So why does Professor Davis interpret God’s nature the way he does, as a deity who would never command or commit genocide? Because Professor Davis is a good, ethical person who finds genocide morally abhorrent. In fact, he is so ethical—and is so intrinsically horrified by the very possibility of genocide—that he projects his own internal moral orientation out into the imaginary heavens and up onto the presumed God he worships. Professor Davis dismisses the passages of the Bible in which God both commits and commands genocide because he can’t help but construct a deity that fits his own moral outlook—even as he simultaneously insists that his moral outlook comes from God.
Professor Davis thinks that he is good because he believes in a moral God, but it is actually the other way around: the God that Professor Davis believes in is constructed as good because he—Stephen Davis—is moral. As Paul Kurtz explains in his book Forbidden Fruit, such a religious person is often engaged in a flagrant form of self-deception, wherein he or she doesn’t even see the true source of his or her own morality and mistakenly places it in the hands of an imaginary deity.
My friend Professor Davis does what all God-believers do: interpret their deity in a way that aligns with their own proclivities and orientations. Theists generally believe in exactly the kind of God they want to believe in, or have been socialized to believe in, or at least the kind of God others in their community want and expect them to believe in. Which means that interpretations of God’s will are always and invariably projections of people’s own inner dispositions, or justifications of political goals, or collective communal constructs, or subjectively self-serving—or a combination of all four. And thus, “God” cannot comprise a sound, solid, or objective basis for our morals and ethics, because theism inevitably and invariably involves interpretation to such a high degree as to make it essentially useless.
But let’s say—just for the sake of being open to the possible claims of traditional theism—that all of the differing, contradictory, and irreconcilable interpretations of God’s will could somehow, some way, be worked out. Hard as it may be, let’s imagine that someone, somehow has the indisputably correct interpretation of God’s will for humanity—and that this person could somehow convince everyone that her interpretation was indeed exactly correct. That is, let’s imagine a situation in which all God-believers were somehow on the same page concerning what the Lord requires. Would this then make theistic morality feasible? No. In fact, even if there was incontrovertible evidence that God existed, and even if everyone could actually agree on his will, this would not enhance or sustain human morality.
If anything, it would denigrate and destroy it.
The next chapter will explain why.
