And what is good, Phaedrus...

I’m a few weeks late to the party, but I want to put in my two cents about the whole birth control nonsense/”controversy” that arose last month.  But I don’t want to talk about any of the hot-button issues that have been rehashed over and over. I want to talk about what this means for God. (Knowing full well that I’m on my way to getting myself killed on a zebra crossing.)

Let’s back up a few thousand years. A famous philosophical dilemma—and a staple of freshman philosophy classes nationwide—is the so-called “Euthyphro problem,” after Plato’s Euthyphro. In its simplest (and monotheistic) form, the problem asks the following question: Are things good because God commands them, or does God command things because they’re good?

The reason that the Euthyphro problem is called a “problem” is that both responses are unsatisfying. If things are good because God commands them, then anything that God commands—anything from torture to genocide—could be considered “good” if God indeed commanded it. On the other hand, if we believe that God would not command such things because they were “bad,” then God would be appealing to some higher, more fundamental notion of “good,” which is at odds with the general monotheistic view of God.

Among the many ways to escape the Euthyphro problem is to recognize that there are quite a few assumed premises wrapped up into the question. For example, the question presupposes that God only commands things that are good. Anyone familiar with Abraham’s debate with God prior to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah will note that the God of Genesis is not so simple a creature.

More important for my purposes, however, is the assumption that we know what God commands—an assumption that any practical agnostic will reject. After all, if we have no access or insight to what God commands, then God’s will is—for all intents and purposes—academic and irrelevant. If we want benchmark for what is “good,” it must be based on something other than “God’s will.”

If one does claim to know God’s will, then there is a range of possible theological positions that one can take. For example, “natural law” theorists would have us believe that morality can somehow be derived from the natural order of the world. However, I have yet to see any example of this that is not absurdly dangerous (e.g. social “darwinism”) or question-begging (e.g. any position taken by Robert George).

A better approach, perhaps, is that of an arch-rationalist like Kant. Such a person would argue that insofar as God commands anything, his commands are the commands of pure, practical reason. This, to me, is a plausible and defensible position, and it lends itself to a morality that is (in theory, at least) rationally defensible.

Whatever their merits, an agnostic position, a natural law position, or a rationalist position all share an important feature in common: they point to something other than “God’s will” in order to justify their positions. As much as I disagree with most of these positions, I can at least respect the intellectual effort that it takes to subscribe to them.

But there’s one type of position I simply cannot tolerate: revelationism. If a person says, “I know what God commands, and what God commands is good,” I simply stop listening. This position—biting Euthyphro’s bullet, if you will—is the most dangerous and least defensible type of morality.

I must note that I am not impugning faith. Faith is something I’ve never had and something I cannot understand, but I recognize that there are many faithful people out there whose faith leads to great things, both for themselves and for others.

But faith is different from orthodoxy. I simply have no tolerance for people who point to the Bible and take their moral positions from it. The Bible is a racist, sexist, bigoted, spin-doctored piece of propagandist nonsense that may have worked decently well for an isolated society that existed two thousand years ago, but it has no place whatsoever in modern discourse. If you want to discuss morality with me, you had better come at me with something more than an ancient tome. Because if that’s all you have, I won’t even give you the time of day.

Ultimately, when it comes to morality, I am an absolutist because I’m a nihilist. I do not believe there is any such thing as a one correct or “true” morality, and as a result I believe that any contender for a moral code must be accompanied by a justification. If you want to say that you find paying for birth control morally objectionable, I want to hear your justification for that position. Maybe you have one, and maybe it’s a good one. (If you have one, let me know, because I haven’t heard it yet. And while you’re at it, you can try explaining your objection to gay marriage.) But “God says so” is not a justification. It’s the total absence of justification. “God says so” is the basis of a vacuous morality that has no place in the modern world.