Transcript

Uh, we're live.

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Welcome back to Shameless Potpourri.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer, and I'm having a Cup O' Joe with Vanessa Parrish, That One Catholic Girl, as well as my producer, Metal Mike.

Good morning to both of you.

Good morning.

Morning, Joe.

All right.

Well, why don't we do this?

Mike, do you wanna explain to everybody how this works?

'Cause I know this is still a new format for people, and then we will, um, talk about coffee and then kick off the actual theology.

Absolutely.

Good morning, everyone.

Hope you're enjoying your coffee along with us.

Uh, these streams are focused around a specific kind of apologetic question or topic, and we would love to have your guys' engagement in the chat and contribute to this conversation.

Wanna make sure we are focusing on questions that pertain to the topic, so even if people Super Chat in, if it's not specifically to the topic, we'll throw it on screen, but we're not necessarily gonna answer the question.

And thank you in advance to everyone who's watching and everyone who does Super Chat.

All right.

Wonderful.

Um, and as I said, we'll talk coffee, then we'll talk theology.

So one thing that, you know, because it's Cup O' Joe, each time we, we have some kind of coffee.

This time I have Roasterie.

I've got their Super Tuscan blend.

This is, uh, a preferred favorite.

And, uh, so let's talk about morality with God.

Vanessa, you wanna start us off?

Of course I do.

So a question that I've been pondering a lot, and I get a lot, is do we need God to be good?

Yeah, it's a good question.

What are your thoughts?

It's one that I think in some ways we have to make a lot of distinctions, and that always sounds like a dodge for people.

Let me just read this comment that this, I think, captures a certain atheist way of viewing the question and exposes one of the problems with maybe how we're thinking about it.

This is a guy named Jonathan Lloyd.

He says, Morality depends on choice.

We are good because we have made a choice to do good acts.

At the core of goodness is empathy, but this is another question entirely.

I would not agree that the core of goodness is empathy, but I'll leave my thoughts to the side.

He says, If we choose to do good merely because we fear retribution from a god, then that choice is not entirely freely chosen.

It depends on the possible punishment if we choose differently.

Here we choose to avoid punishment, not to choose to do good acts for the sole purpose of doing something good.

So if you think you're a good person because you do good acts due to a god's threatened punishment or his reward, then can that be considered good?

No.

Only a good act chosen freely can be considered a truly good moral action.

An action done to achieve a reward or to avoid a punishment is too far removed to be considered good.

So you do not have to be a good human being.

You can choose to be one, but only if you do so apart from any god reward or god punishment, end quote.

So in his view, not only can you be good without God, it seems he would suggest only an atheist can be good.

Because if you're a Christian who believes in the possibility of judgment, heaven, and hell, that can influence your actions, make them less free, and therefore take away the moral credit you get for doing good, which he defines kind of confusingly, uh, as empathy.

And so then Actually, Vanessa, y- you just chatted me a question I think would be really good if you wanted to share that.

Sure.

Um, a, one thing that comes up is what exactly is goodness?

Like, how do we define goodness, and how do we get that direction from our Lord?

Yeah, it's a, it's a good question.

And then actually SirCadsalot says, How do people even define goodness without God?

So I think this is a really good question for people to ask, and it's clear atheists and Christians alike are going to see this and, and have thoughts on it and maybe be a little bit confused, uh, about it.

Like, what, what do we mean by this?

So I wanna suggest at least four different things that the question could mean because I think one of the issues here is that we're kind of talking past one another.

I'd give you this example.

If I said, Can an apple fall to the Earth without gravity?

Somebody who thought that meant can an apple fall to the Earth without somebody knowing about gravity, well, sure, it can.

Uh, and maybe there's another way the apple could get to the Earth.

You could throw it down.

With inertia, it, it heads towards the Earth even without a gravitational pull.

Is that falling?

Et cetera, et cetera.

So the question of can it fall without the existence of gravity compared to can it fall without the knowledge of gravity, those are two different questions, and many times we're really talking past one another.

So as I said, there are at least four different things that the question could mean.

Number one, if God literally did not exist, could we do good?

Now, that question we would say is clearly no.

But it's not just that goodness wouldn't exist in, in the sense that we're talking about.

We couldn't do good.

We couldn't do evil.

We couldn't be.

We would not exist.

Like, one of the core beliefs we have as theists is not just that God exists, but God exists necessarily, and there's no adequate explanation for the universe without the existence of God.

And so if God ceased to exist, you wouldn't continue Like, all creation is, is held together by God.

There is no deeper explanation for the metaphysical existence of you and of the entire cosmos beyond the existence of God.

Oh, we can take the, the Jonathan Lloyd quote down now if you want.

So that's one thing we could mean.

A second thing we mean or could mean is can we know, uh, that an action is good or bad without having the knowledge of the existence of God?

So here we're still at the level of discerning moral goodness, and as Christians, we would say, yeah, there's a huge amount that you can know, uh, without, uh, knowing the existence of God.

Actually, if you could pull up Romans 2, there's a, a great quote from St. Paul on thisHe says in Romans 2:14, When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they're a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law.

He goes on to say, This shows the law is written on their heart.

So there is a real sense in which we can talk about atheists discerning, I shouldn't steal.

I shouldn't do whatever.

Not just atheists, pagans, everybody.

And now, that's a core, um, reflection I guess I would say, of the existence of natural law.

The fact that you know there is good and evil should actually point to the existence of a, a divine lawgiver.

Uh, C.S. Lewis in chapter one of Mere Christianity talks about this.

I know there are people who dislike his argument, but he makes the point that when people debate, when they argue, that they'll regularly point to these shared philosophical assumptions, and they expect the other person, even if it's a total stranger, to agree with them.

So if you said, uh, You can't sit there, I was already sitting there, or, you know, like, like s- you, you go to a restaurant, you sit down, you get up to grab a cup of water and somebody steals your spot, you would say like, Y- hey, you can't sit there.

I was already sitting there.

You don't know the person, but you expect that to make sense in their moral framework.

Without knowing their religion, without knowing any of their belief system, you expect they have a basic idea of justice, they'll understand their actions have violated this principle of justice, and you can work from there.

So we would absolutely agree with an atheist that there's a lot of the moral law that you can know because it's written on your heart.

In fact, we would point to that as a good sign of the existence of a divine lawgiver.

There is sometimes-

And this actually kinda goes to-

Oh yeah, go ahead

uh, this guy's comment right here.

Uh, he's saying he got into a discussion with his friends who constantly send him Bible verses about, um, why he would believe in good or bad if God doesn't exist, and he says right here, I don't need the Bible to understand why abuse is wrong, why I shouldn't kill people, and more.

Using prior knowledge and my own set of beliefs, I'm able to determine if things are good or bad.

Yeah.

And unfortunately, there are some Christians who have a certain kind of divine command theory of ethics where things are good and bad just because God says so.

And they often understand this in a very direct, kind of like revelation sense.

And the problem with that is God could say, Abuse is good, or these Christians would say that, Abuse is bad only because God says it's bad.

And that's actually a very shallow understanding of good and evil, and I think points to a, a pretty, uh, deficient understanding of the metaphysics of good.

And i- this is, this is an area where I th- I think the atheist critique is, is on the money, that there is a lot that you can know.

Now, I, I actually think there's two things here.

One, atheists often are not aware how indebted they are to a Christian society.

Meaning, these things that just seem axiomatically true, like, Oh, we would never leave a baby on the hillside to die because it was a girl, that's axiomatically true because of how deeply this society has been informed by Christianity.

Tell, tell me you've never visited China without saying you never visited China.

Or ancient Rome.

Or ancient Rome.

I mean, exposure was, was not even viewed as a shameful thing.

The ancient world did things that we would regard as, as horrific.

I mean, there's a reason the term barbaric exists, these things that culturally are radically unacceptable.

So then the question becomes, okay, once you see that, once you see that the rest of the world and the rest of human history doesn't just view empathy as this automatic human good, and doesn't even view, uh, things like compassion to the weak as automatically a human good, that there was much more a, a pagan sense of the strong are strong 'cause that's good, and weakness is a bad thing and, and therefore we should disdain the weak, not, not have mercy on them.

Like, this is, uh, you know, if you're familiar with Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, this is one of his critiques of Christianity and, and Judaism, which is that he views it as slave morality.

That this is, Oh, you're being compassionate to weak people, that this is one of the critiques.

So it's very strange when atheists just assume this so-called slave morality is just automatically something, Well, obviously everyone just knows this is right or wrong.

Like, no, no, this is part of this Christian revolution of mercy, that we are compassionate to the people who sometimes are the least deserving of it, people who've made a mess of their own lives, and are almost always the people who can do the least for themselves.

These are the people we have a special mercy for.

These are the least of these.

So that isn't just axiomatically, automatically knowable from nature.

A lot of this is, is being received through the culture, and that leads to one of two conclusions.

Either one, this is nevertheless true because it corresponds to a higher law that is not dependent on culture, or two, this is just our particular culture.

You know, in, if you go to China, you don't leave your chopsticks pointing straight up and down.

It's extremely rude, because it reminds people of gravestones, and so there's a strong cultural taboo against it, but it's only wrong because the culture says it's wrong.

I actually do have a-

So there are Oh, go ahead, go ahead.

Ooh.

I actually do have a question for you, Joe.

Yeah.

So do you think that our modern culture rejects God because it wants to reject moral constraints?

It, I think, I wouldn't say culture-wide that's necessarily the case.

I do think that is a major part of it.

I mean, when you look at when people leave Christianity, overwhelmingly we're talking the teenage years and young 20s.

And if you think about everything from, like, the development of the frontal lobe to anything else in the brain, it's n- they're not leaving when they're the most rational and deliberative in terms of their own-Development, their own growth there are people who leave later in life, but that is overwhelmingly not the norm.

The norm is when you are the most driven by hormones when you have the biggest reason to want a lawgiver not to exist who is going to police things like sexual morality that's when people suddenly discover that they have all these problems with God.

Now, I think in fairness, part of the other issue is Christians often don't do a good job of explaining to kids why we believe in Christianity, and so as soon as the first deep philosophical challenge comes along, they're unequipped to answer it, and so they, they drift away.

But in terms of the number of people who stop believing in God or stop practicing religion because of some deep philosophical question, my impression certainly is that that number is dwarfed by the number of people who leave for other less noble reasons.

So the, the idea of a lawgiver is inconvenient, and that's going to make it easier to not believe, uh, and make it harder to believe.

So, um-

Actually, yeah, this question-

I, I agree-

this comment is really good.

But go ahead, Mike.

I agree with what you're saying, and I also wanna add, I think part of the zeitgeist, especially since the turn of the century or maybe even before that, is in a modern or post-modern liberal society, the words obedience and submission are dirty words.

They're, they're those are four-letter words-

Yeah.

Right

according to our culture.

And I think that's a huge reason why people are just like, Your authority?

Psh.

Nah.

I'm, I'm an individual, without realizing that they're actually appealing to the Imago Dei for all of their individualism.

Yes.

They Yes.

Rather be uh, rather Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven, uh, from Paradise Lost, Satan's great act of rebellion.

I mean, there are people who unironically think that's really amazing and bold, and it's like, no, no, that's imbecilic, and it, it's a very bad understanding of freedom.

Like, the person who gets addicted to drugs is less free than the person who isn't, that when you sin, you actually become less free as an individual.

That's very obvious with things like psychological and physical addictions, but every sin damages you and your relationships in such a way that it actually impedes your freedom properly understood.

That is enough tangent.

I'm gonna put a pin in that, but I think you're absolutely right to say-

It is a tangent.

I apologize for that.

No, no.

I mean, it, it's relevant to the do people rebel because they don't like the idea of a lawgiver God, but I just know that there's a whole other sort of side discussion in this.

Very much so.

Yeah.

I wanted to take it a little further, and so I hope I'm not taking this too much on a tangent, but, um, as humans, are we naturally inclined to do good or naturally inclined to reject goodness?

Ah, it's a good question.

Great question.

I think the best way to put it is that we are broken.

Like, this is the doctrine of original sin.

It doesn't mean we're just wicked, awful, abhorrent beings, and you can sometimes have a view of total depravity in the kind of Calvinist sense that goes too far.

Whether you think that's an accurate understanding of total depravity or not, there are people who say, Oh, we're fundamentally evil.

If we were just fundamentally evil, then Christ becoming incarnate to redeem us would not be a good act, uh, because Jesus becoming man, if, if man is just wickedness, y- you would have to say either Jesus becomes evil or he doesn't fundamentally become human because to be human is to be evil.

Neither of those is acceptable.

On the other hand So we have this orientation towards good.

We're made in goodness.

We desire goodness.

We have, uh, such a disposition that only goodness will satisfy us, and yet, because of what St. Thomas Aquinas calls the twofold darkness of sin and ignorance, we regularly choose things that are not actually good for us.

Now, if we didn't have this orientation towards good, that would be an incoherent thing, but evil is something we regularly choose, something we regularly desire in a certain kind of superficial sense, and yet it never satisfies us, which is why people can be unhappy with a life of, of evil.

So that, that second of the four ways we talked about.

You know, can, um, can we know an action is good without God to command or prohibit it, or could an action even be good without God, uh, to command or prohibit it?

We would say God is good by nature.

Good is, in other words, not an arbitrary set of properties, that metaphysical goodness in its ultimate, uncreated, infinite sense is like being a non-arbitrary part of the nature of God.

And so from this flows what's called the eternal law.

And so when God says, This is good, or, This is evil, these aren't just arbitrary decisions.

Now, he can have things that are only good or evil because he says so.

Like, he can say, Don't eat shrimp, and there's nothing inherently wrong with eating shrimp.

It's wrong just because it's outlawed, and so it'd be an act of disobedience.

But there are other things which are contrary to the nature of his creation or to the nature of goodness itself.

And so an atheist who says, Yeah, I already know the Ten Commandments without needing the Ten Commandments, we would say, Yeah, that's, that's probably right.

Like, people knew it was wrong to steal before the Ten Commandments.

The Ten Commandments are sort of revealing, but they're revealing things that were knowable and largely known.

There's The First Vatican Council talks about this, that one of the reasons God does this is because even those aspects of morality that are knowable in principle, and those aspects of, you know, uh, just anything, but morality is usually where this comes up, they are often knowable only through effort.

And so you're gonna have people who spend a lot of time thinking about these great questions, you know, think about all the great Greek thinkers of old or, you know, fill in the blank, any of the great philosophers and, and thinkers.

Uh, they're gonna it's gonna take effort to know it, and people are gonna have an admixture of error, and, uh, y- not everybody's gonna know it.

And so to make it very easy and obvious to everybody, here it is, stone tablets.Don't steal don't murder, don't covet, don't commit adultery, you know, those kind of things you'll notice though there's another part of the Ten Commandments that there are these duties that we owe to God and so as we're talking about it one of the things to think about is there is a, a basic duty in justice to give worship to God and pagans recognize this in fact, if you were to go around the world, discover some tribe tomorrow that no one's ever heard of before I can virtually guarantee that this tribe has a religion, and within that religion has a strong sense that there is a duty that they owe to God and, uh, as a result, they, they kind of live accordingly.

Th- this is an act in justice.

So we would say the virtue of piety, uh, is about three sets of relationship, my relationship to my mom and dad, my relationship to my country, and my relationship to my creator.

And what do those three have in common?

I can never repay the debt that I owe to God the Father, to the fatherland, to my dad, and, you know, you can also add motherland, whatever, but you, you get the idea.

Uh, there's a, a debt owed in justice that can never be repaid to the people who give you life.

And so even if you were to die for your country or die for your God, you haven't actually repaid that debt.

Even if you were to die for your family, die for your parents, uh, they brought you into the world.

All-- they-- at best, you've sort of squared up by giving your very life.

That-- y- that still-- you've still got s- however many years for free, where even if you said, They gave me life, and then I offered my life back to them, that's the idea of piety, and that's actually knowable from reason alone, that if there's a creator, we owe him everything.

We can never repay the debt to him.

And so an atheist should be able to recognize just from reason if God exists, and I've been ignoring him my entire life, I've been depriving him of an infinite debt that I owe him, and that is an act of injustice.

From reason, we can know this.

So when we're talking about can we be good without God, one of the issues is part of the act of goodness, justice, we're unable to fulfill that if we don't know if God exists or if, you know, if there's someone to whom we owe this infinite debt or not.

Now, there are two more wa-- I don't know if you have anything you wanna add right there.

There's two more ways we can talk about what it means to be good without God.

Um, I don't have anything to add to that one.

Okay.

But Sir Cadsalot has been my favorite commenter today.

He's just- absolutely nailing the crux of these, these topics.

He said, A lot of arguments for modern sins boil down to, quote, 'But I wanna,' and I think this highlights for me something I just realized today.

You know, Christians have the, the problem of evil, you know, and I, I think that's one of the best, uh, atheist attacks against Christianity.

And the atheists, I don't know if they realize or not, they actually have the opposite problem.

They have the problem of good.

So when you remove the objective measuring stick, now what are you comparing this psychological concept in humanity that we call good?

What are you comparing it to?

Because we have been able to distinguish between moral judgments and preferences.

We, we have done that scientifically i- in psychology.

Now, you are collapsing both of those categories together in your framework, and it doesn't match lived experience.

So how can you run around calling things morally good when you've just boiled them down to preferences?

How, how, why-

Right.

If, if good just means I like this or I, uh, you know, evil just means I don't like this, uh, this was a philosophical school called the emotivism.

Yes.

That doesn't match how any culture uses the language of good and evil.

There is a very, um, good but a little bit philosophically dense but pretty funny article called On Good and Evil by the philosopher Peter Geach where he talks about what do we mean when we use these terms, and I think he shows very definitively that when we say something is good or something's evil, we don't just mean that we like it or that we don't like it.

Because you can even say, I, I can say Tom Brady is a good quarterback without liking Tom Brady.

That's, uh, not a hypothetical.

Um, so what we mean by good or evil is that it fulfills the thing for which it exists.

So what it is to be a quarterback includes certain properties.

Tom Brady excels at those properties, or at least he did, probably still does if we're being honest, and so we can objectively call him good whether we like him or not.

Then you can even say, uh, he gives the example, like so you could say somebody's a good cutthroat, like somebody's a good assassin.

You're not giving a moral endorsement.

You might say they're really good at doing something morally evil, but in calling it good, you mean that they in, in, they achieve the goals included in that description.

But that means to say someone is a good man or a bad man, a good person, bad person, however you wanna say it, that includes some implicit sense that being a human being, like being a cutthroat or a quarterback or a painter or anything else, includes some baked-within-it ideas that there are goals relative to our nature.

Uh, this is what's called the telos.

And so once you have that, then I think you're well on your way to seeing like, okay, well, that account of goodness, that account of evil only makes sense if we're built with a design.

Because you can't say something is malfunctioning if it doesn't have a function, and so you can't say someone is not achieving the ends for which man exists if man has no ends for which he existsAnd so while it is certainly true atheists can recognize something as good or evil, they can't, I would suggest, completely account for the existence of things as good or evil, uh, in that way.

Uh, there is-

They can't justify it.

That's right.

Uh, there was, I think it was back at nine thirteen, The Great Wall.

Can you pull that comment up?

He says, I believe you would need a standard for goodness, otherwise you couldn't make judgments about other cultures doing things you viewed as not good, or people in general.

Which com- which comment was this?

Uh, nine thirteen, The Great Wall.

It's all right, I'll just read it.

Great.

Um, okay.

I think he's correct, and I think this bears some explanation because when we say, Why is this thing good and that thing's evil?

There's a few answers we can give.

One is just, well, we have this intuition, but that doesn't really explain why.

That might explain how you know, but it doesn't explain why it is good or why it is evil.

And if you say, Well, helping other people is good because it helps other people, that's completely circular.

Why should I want to help other people?

And your explanation can't just be, Well, because in that case, it'll help other people.

You need something deeper, and a lot of utilitarianism unfortunately is like, We should help the greatest number of people because then we'll help the greatest number of people.

That doesn't work.

You have to convince me why I should play the utilitarian game before you can convince me how to win at the utilitarian game, and Christian morality is different, and I'll explain why.

But so one answer is just gonna be intuition.

Another answer is, well, we know these things because of subjective preference.

We just talked about that.

A third answer is we know these things because of culture, that I believe it's wrong to leave your kids to die on the hillside because my culture says it's wrong.

You might be from a culture that says it's good to leave your kids to die on the hillside, so then you don't have extra mouths to feed that you don't want.

And if the highest arbiter of that is just the culture we happen to be in, that doesn't work.

There's a famous story of Ch- General Charles Napier, who was the first, uh, Lord Commander or whatever of India during British colonial rule, and one of the first things that he did is he outlawed the practice of bride burning.

There was an ancient Hindu practice where when a man would die, they would take all th- all of his possessions, including his wife, and put them in a big pile and burn them all.

And, uh, Napier quickly outlawed this, and some Hindu priests objected and said, This is our culture.

And Napier's reply is pretty famous where he just said, Okay.

It's something along the lines of, That's your culture.

You build a pyre and you burn women on it, and you have to obey your culture.

But we also have a culture, and our culture is when people murder women, we build a gallows and we hang them from.

So you build your pyre, we'll build our gallows, and then we'll each follow our own culture.

And it shows that a kind of moral relativism doesn't work.

I mean, in that case it, it resulted in the outlawing of bride burning, which we'd say that's a happy conclusion.

But imagine if the, like, colonization had happened the other direction where Hindus took over u- the United Kingdom and, and said, Okay, now we're gonna institute bride burning.

It can't just be a situation where might makes right, which is what this kind of devolves into.

Mm-hmm.

But you can also see every time we either condemn an evil action an- another culture did, you know, the Nuremberg trials are a great example.

You can't just follow orders, and the fact that there is no law in Germany outlawing the Holocaust is an argument against the inadequacy of German laws, not an argument for the Holocaust.

But also think about things like Civil Rights Movement or any moral movement within a culture where someone within a society says, The laws of this society are immoral and they need to be changed.

This only makes sense if there is a standard of morality higher than that of society.

So yes, you can, uh, you can know a lot of good and evil without the knowledge of God, but this is actually a thing that points to the existence of a law giver above the level of culture.

Would this be our conscience or would this, is this like our understanding of consciousness?

Yeah.

So conscience plays an important role here.

Um, so classically, conscience is divided in two categories.

There's what's called synderesis and conscientia.

Synderesis is the basic knowledge of moral principles.

Everyone knows these things.

These things are impossible not to know.

So things like do good and avoid evil, we all know that, and so no one is in genuine ignorance of that.

The second level of conscience where I have to put those principles into action, what's good in this situation, what's evil in this situation, that's consc- conscientia, and that is formed in part by yourself, by your culture, by your upbringing, and so on, uh, hopefully by the church, and there is room for error there.

Like, it is possible for someone to err in conscience, uh, in that regard.

Oh, yeah.

The Great Wall has a good follow-up question.

Yes, he does.

He says, Playing off of Vanessa's question, is it the conscience in people or the Holy Spirit convicting humanity?

Which I think goes towards another one of your ways of looking at the question, uh, with, with divine will acting in people's lives.

Yeah, that's right.

Because when you ask, Can we be good without God?

You could mean, would an action be evil without God?

You could mean, if God literally didn't exist, could we do good?

We've already covered those.

You could also mean, can we act morally without the knowledge of God?

And you could also mean a fourth way, I'll just tee it up, is can you act morally without the assistance of God?

Hopefully you can see that distinction because God could help someone who doesn't have a knowledge of who he is.

Conversely, someone could know of the existence of God, but they're not in a state of grace.

They don't have divine assistance.

So in this way-Uh, we can say, yes, the Holy Spirit can and does convict people.

There is also the actions of, of the individual conscience, which could be actions of the Holy Spirit prompting your conscience or it could be a misfiring of conscience.

So Saint John Henry Newman famously refers to the conscience as the aboriginal vicar of Christ.

It's like the little pope inside your soul telling you, Do this.

Don't do that.

But unfortunately, that little pope inside your soul is not infallible.

And so you could have, for example, somebody who is raised in a morally evil culture that believes it's wrong to do the right thing in particular cases.

I, I've talked to priests who will say things like that they talk to couples who worry that it's wrong that they're not cohabitating before marriage because they were told, like, You, you need to do that.

It's just It's the responsible thing to do.

And so they feel a totally misplaced moral guilt about not living together prior to marriage.

There you can see, like, a, a toxic, a corrupt culture has corrupted conscientia.

They've, they've corrupted the workings of conscience as it tries to apply moral principles in action.

But circling back to this question of, um, doing good without divine assistance, we would make a distinction.

You have what are called the cardinal virtues, and these are sometimes called the moral virtues.

So this is gonna be prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice.

These basic principles you can know regardless of religion or lack thereof, and you can largely do these regardless of religion or lack thereof.

So for instance, an atheist can go to a restaurant in a foreign country where they know they're never gonna be back again.

They get the bill.

They don't dine and dash, even though they know they could get away with it.

They pay their bill.

That's an act of justice.

They're not really afraid they're gonna get caught.

They, they know they'd be able to just slip out.

It's, you know Imagine it's crazy crowded, whatever.

They're never coming back.

They don't have any other There's no social reason.

They're not with anybody.

They're not trying to impress.

They just know this is obviously the right thing to do in this situation.

The demands of justice require it.

Those are very obvious demands of justice.

They pay their bill.

Uncontroversial.

There are, however, two other things.

One, because of sin, our ability to practice even the virtues we know we should practice is weak.

Everyone watching this has behaved in ways that they know are unjust, myself included.

Uh, and so we need divine assistance to better fulfill even those parts of the moral law that we can know and do somewhat on our own.

But nevertheless, there is what's called natural virtue, and so it is completely reasonable to say you might know someone who in many ways acts in a very upstanding way.

They're temperate.

They're just.

They're brave in the face of danger when they need to be.

They are prudent in their decision-making.

All of that is certainly possible, and some of the great work on the virtues comes from pagan philosophers.

So we, we certainly agree with them on these things.

There are, however In addition to those areas where we can use divine assistance in practicing the virtues, you can have what's called infused virtue.

There are also three virtues called theological virtues, which you literally just cannot do without God's help: faith, hope, and love.

And Saint Paul talks about this in 1 Corinthians.

These are gifts from God, where you're not just making a human act of intellectual ascent.

You're trusting in God with this divine strength, you're hoping in God with divine strength, and you're loving God and your neighbor with the love of God.

Those are things you can't achieve by your human effort.

Those are gifts you can be disposed to.

You can't give them to yourself.

You can't attain them.

Once they're given to you, you can make acts of faith.

You can make acts of hope.

Uh, you can make acts of love.

But those are things that you have to get from God.

All right.

Uh, Dinkle Dork has a super chat.

Thank you for your super chats.

He And this actually tees up your upcoming Pints with Aquinas interview, uh, coming up next week.

Oh, yeah.

I've got a Pints episode coming out Monday.

He says, If moral goodness requires God, does it require a God whose nature is identical with goodness itself, or could morality be grounded in a God who preset- who progressed to divinity without an already existing moral framework?

LDS related.

Yeah.

They Actually, this is very related to the conversation I had with Matt Fradd.

Because in the so-called Mormon, the LDS, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints', view of things, God is not the author of morality, nor is God coterminous with morality.

That rather these are just traits that God progresses into.

God used to be a man, and then he becomes perfected.

He becomes divinized.

He becomes elevated.

It's a little bit unclear whether he has a god who raises him to that status or whether he somehow raises himself to that status.

There's That's a kinda discussion for another time.

But just from the level of morality, this raises-

Begs several questions.

Yeah it begs a lot.

Begs a lot of questions.

Uh, but it, this presents a pr- a famous philosophical problem called Euthyphro's dilemma.

And Euthyphro's dilemma, it, it's actually Socrates who asks this.

Euthyphro isn't the one who I mean, he's the one who the dilemma is posed to.

He wants to know, is an action right because it's commanded by the gods, or do the gods command it because it is right?

And here's the problem with either of those answers.

If you say, It's right because God wills it, then that means God could change things right or wrong.

He could say tomorrow, Actually, torture is good.

Compassion is evil.

Like, love is now bad.And we intuitively recognize that that is not the right answer.

Actually, if you could pull up that abstract I sent you, Mike

Absolutely.

One moment

Uh, oh yeah, there it is.

There we go

So there was a study of 129 kids between the ages of four and nine where they wanted to know which things that these kids thought an all-powerful God would be able to change.

Like, could he make fire hotter than snow?

He can change physical properties of the world, that's not particularly controversial.

But there was a shared consensus, uh, particularly as they got into the seven to nine range that Or sorry, earlier than that, that God couldn't change fundamental moral principles.

That the kids across the age range, from four to nine, recognized that while there are certain controversial moral propositions God could change, uh, there's some fundamental moral propositions that he couldn't.

Now, I'm not pointing to this 'cause I think the kids completely got the right answers there.

I think it's actually a bit of a muddle in terms of how they posed the questions, and I think it's I, like, what they call widely shared moral propositions were things like, it's not okay to call someone a mean name.

I would say that's actually a much more culturally contingent controversial assumption Whereas their idea of a controversial one is that it's not okay to tell a small lie to help someone feel happy.

Who would say, actually, lying is the intrinsic evil.

Name-calling is not intrinsically evil.

So their question is not great and-

These guys clearly don't lift.

I'll just say that.

They clearly don't go to the gym

So, okay, you can, you can close that, that screen.

But it's-

Gotcha

it's pointing to the fact that there is part of morality that feels extremely non-arbitrary, and which I think we rightly recognize is not arbitrary.

It doesn't just feel that way.

We can intuit these things are destructive of society, these ones build up society, or these things are destructive of the human person, these ones build up.

And so we can recognize in that that something in divine command theory is incomplete.

The flip side though, where we wouldn't say something is good because God wills it, but rather that God wills it because it's good, then the problem becomes that God appears to be held to some higher moral standard.

And and that's gonna lead us with one of two possibilities.

Either there is a supreme law giver above God, or the moral law doesn't actually have a law giver at all, in which case why should we follow arbitrary laws?

Like, if the law is And so I, I've alluded before to the fact that you can't ground morality in culture.

You also can't ground morality even in something like biology.

Because people are right that there are some things that biologically help or hurt the species, but nobody lives pursuant to those laws all the time.

So for instance, if you get married after your teenage years, you have done something that has not enhanced your fertility.

Like, if you're just guided by the propagation of the species and that's it, like biological impulse is the highest law, then you would imagine people would be getting married and having kids from an extremely early age.

And yet you see people put off marriage, you see people embrace celibacy, you see, you know, non-Catholic people and, and bad Catholics as well, using things like contraception.

Those things are against the propagation of the species.

So if all morality is, is the propagation of the species and that's why we have this sense of right and wrong, well, then there's no reason we would be bound by that, because we can have all kinds of biological impulses that we don't act on.

And so if the law of morality is something like that, or maybe it's not biological, but it's some kind of universal sense that exists, and that even God, uh, is simply responding to, why is it good to respond to that?

And so that's not a satisfactory sort of understanding of goodness.

Christianity, in its classical understanding, solves this problem by saying that goodness is metaphysically knowable and exists.

It's actually coextensive with being, and that it is found infinitely in God.

So it's part of God's nature to be good, not simply part of a, an extrinsic command or an extrinsic law, that it's actually intrinsic to God to be good.

That this is in the same way that if you said God's existence is intrinsic to his nature.

He's not contingent.

He doesn't just exist under certain external conditions like you and I do.

It is i- in his being to exist, which is why he can say, I am who am.

Now, that is admittedly philosophical deep waters, but understand that this means that when we talk about the eternal law, this is something that flows from the nature of God, not something he is either arbitrarily commanding or trying to live up to that somebody else has, has commanded him or left him

Um, Joe, earlier you mentioned the conversation about the atheists knowing the Ten Commandments.

Yeah

And, um, so I'm curious, would How do I phrase this?

Um, so let's say someone goes as far to go like, Okay, I believe that there is a creator, um, a creator that's, um, that created the world, but what happens if people are just acting good because they're afraid of the consequences?

Like-

Oh, yeah

for example, someone doesn't run the red light because they think they're gonna get a ticket.

How would you respond to this question?

Yeah.

I'm, I'm glad you brought it back to that because that was really where we kind of started, and I don't think I really adequately addressed why that's such a bad understanding.

The notion of consequences from your actions is actually largely baked in.

So even if Mike, could you pull up that very first comment, the one I read kind of starting us off, objection one?

YeahUm, nope, that's not it.

There it is.

Uh, the idea empathy is goodness, no.

Uh, we're good because we make a choice to do good acts regardless of the reward or consequence.

If you're trying to be a good person, that is a consequence.

And so saying you're only good if you try to be good without wanting to be good is, it's nonsensical in a real way.

Everyone wants to do things that will result in positive outcomes.

This is Like, when you are trying to do the right thing, you're trying to do the right thing for a reason.

So an idea like, Well, I'm just blindly following the law regardless of any outcome, that's not how people behave as, as moral actors.

Even if you do the right thing and when it's unpleasant, even if it leads to some bad consequences, there is still a sense that, but this is good in the long run because it's good to follow the law, or because it's good for salvation, or because of some other reason.

The consequences are not enough to justify the morality of, say, an evil action, but every time you behave in a good way or an evil way, there's always some end in view, some telos in view.

So to that end, like you Go back to Matthew 6, Jesus talking about the works of piety: prayer, fasting, almsgiving.

We just, uh, read from this gospel yesterday.

And He warns that those who do their acts of piety to be seen by men have already received their reward.

But notice He's taking for granted that there are rewards attached to this.

So doing the right thing because you're gonna get a reward out of it is a kind of an inescapable part of this.

The question is just, what is the reward you're looking for?

The reward might be this makes somebody I love happy.

That's still a reward.

We I think we hear the term reward, and we imagine something superficial or shallow, like everyone will be impressed with me.

You're right, that's not a good reason to act.

There are higher reasons to act, but this action will make me a horrible person, or this action will lead me to hell so I don't wanna do it even though it sounds really fun, is actually a perfectly adequate reason not to act.

Now, when I say, uh, perfectly adequate, I wanna leave room that there are higher goods.

So we can talk about this in terms of fear and love because there is what appears to be a contradiction in Christianity, and it's not really a contradiction, and the apparent contradiction is this.

The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, we're told, but we're also told perfect love casts out fear.

But then there's also this, like, fear of the Lord in some way that, that seems to endure.

So what's going on there?

The base level is what's called servile fear, and I think that atheist comment points to that.

So this is a thing.

I'm gonna describe the moral life and then kind of plug in where I see an atheist failing.

The first stage of, uh, fear of God is servile fear.

Oh, I'm living in such a way that I deserve to go to hell.

I don't wanna live that way.

I wanna live right for God so I don't go to hell, so I can go to heaven.

And it's based on, like, the, the fear a servant has of a master.

It's not a loving fear.

It's just, yeesh.

If you go to class because you don't wanna fail, that's servile fear.

As you grow, as you grow morally, as you grow in love, that becomes less and less and eventually goes away.

Now, you're not going to class because you're afraid you're gonna fail.

You're going to class because you love the course material, because you want to become an expert in the field, because you want to graduate, whatever.

Now you're going out of love.

Now, is there some part of you that maybe you're tired one day and you wanna skip class, and you say, No, I don't wanna let down the people that I love in this class.

I don't wanna let down my professor.

I don't wanna let down my classmates.

So you notice there's still a kind of fear, kind of analogously fear, that you don't wanna disappoint the people that you love.

Well, similarly, this is So servile fear goes away as you grow in the moral life.

Filial fear, the, the kind of fear you have of not wanting to let down your father or to let down God, not wanting to behave in a way that harms the relationships you have with those that you love, that endures.

In fact, that grows because the more you love God, the more you wanna act in ways that are helpful to that relationship and not harmful to that relationship, so that endures.

Uh, one thing that I notice So again, you think about the college example.

If somebody said, Oh, everybody at this school is worse than me because I go to class when I want to.

They always just go to class 'cause they're afraid they're gonna fail, I think you would reasonably hear that and think, I don't think that person really gets why they're at college, because they're just going out of a sense of compulsion, and eventually a person like that is likely to drop out because they don't really know why they're there, what they're there for.

Well, similarly in the moral life, the number of times I've heard atheists speak as if servile fear is the driver for all Christians is a red flag because servile fear is really 101, and you're supposed to grow past that.

So if you imagine that Christians are always just living in terror of hell, and that's why we do everything we do, that is a sign you have not gone far enough in the Christian life yourself.

And so if you rejected Christianity because you thought that's all there was to it, you just didn't drink deeply enough from the well, or you didn't grow enough in your moral life, and so you never got past that very, uh, infantile sort of stage of spiritual development.

Um, Mike pulled a question from the screen: Would it be right to say that God's way is actually the most conducive to human flourishing as opposed to any other way?

That's right.

And, and we can prove that in a pretty obvious way because God made you.

He made us collectively.

He made us individually.And if I want to know, like let's say I've got a tool, and, you know, if I just give a screwdriver to my two-year-old, I already know what he would do 'cause I've seen him, uh, you know, he'll just use it as a hammer, or he'll use it as a sword, or he'll, you know, do something like He won't use it properly as a screwdriver.

Let me give an example.

It just means your son is based, okay?

Your son is super based.

Absolutely.

Uh, but unfortunately we're called beyond base to virtue.

So if I Let me just give you an example.

Let, let's take two clocks.

One of them is a gorgeous 18th century, 17th century, whatever, Rococo, ornate, gorgeous, very expensive timepiece, and it looks beautiful, but it no longer has hands.

And so it's gorgeous.

It doesn't actually tell time anymore.

The other one is just like a $5 Target black and white clock, but it tells time.

Which of those is a better clock?

Either of you.

Oh, you're muted, Mike.

I, I was typing, sorry.

Oh, okay.

No one's listening to me.

Uh, the-

Sorry, Joe.

I- imagine you got two clocks, a really ornate one that doesn't tell time, and a really simple one, like a $5 one that does tell time.

Which of those is the better clock?

The one that does tell time.

Exactly.

Yeah.

The other one might be a more beautiful, uh, wall ornament, but in terms of the goodness of clockness, the better clock is the one that tells time, 'cause that's what it is, to be a clock.

A hammer isn't a good screwdriver.

It might be a good hammer, but it's not a good screwdriver 'cause it doesn't drive screws.

So when we're talking about, uh, you know, how we are made, what does it mean to be a good man, a good woman, a good human being, we have to know why were we made.

And you know who knows why we were made, what we're made for?

God.

And so acting accordant- in accordance with our instruction manual makes complete sense.

Like again, from reason alone, you can know the all-knowing, all-powerful God who invented us and created us with the purposes for which we were made, knows how best we're going to achieve those purposes, those ends, in ways that we may not know ourselves left to our own devices.

We'll know something, but we won't know everything.

Okay.

So I think a good way to wrap this up, we're talking about some really fun philosophical concepts that we like to nerd out over.

Yeah.

But practically out in the wild, how should we as Catholics evangelize atheists?

Yeah.

I think there's a couple ways.

One, try to build on the natural law.

Like sometimes we can jump to imagining that the only way we know morality is from divine revelation in s- what's called special revelation, like scripture or the ch- the church says so, and that's not it.

Like it's very clear that the law of God is written on human hearts.

It's also clear that we can be ignorant to some extent of the law of God because of sin and because of ignorance, because of society telling us wrong things and so on.

So Saint Paul talks about this in Romans.

Uh, you can also see this when he is on Mars Hill in the Gospel of Acts.

The Gospel of Acts.

The Book of Acts.

Uh, that we want to like build on what is already written on the hearts of the person we're speaking to.

There can be this sense that we have to come in and explain the basics of morality to the atheists that are in our lives, and that's just not true.

God is already doing something in their life, and our job in some ways is to call out the law already written on the mind and hearts of, of everyone with whom we're, we're talking, but then to maybe draw out principles they don't even know they have.

So, you know, uh, there's o- this would be too big of a, a tangent to go down right now, but something like with abortion.

About 10% of atheists are pro-life.

That shows that there's a huge failure rate of morality, that left to your own devices, 1 in 10 of them are coming to the right answer on should we kill unborn children.

Nine in 10 aren't.

But if you say, Should we kill the innocent?

I bet you're gonna get nearly 100% who say, No, we should not.

And then it becomes a question of, well, is a human being that doesn't feel pain right now still worthy of protection from being killed?

Some are gonna say yes, some are gonna say no, and then you can give some examples.

Like, Okay, is it okay to kill someone while they're sleeping?

Is it okay to poison them while they're sleeping where they don't even feel it, they never wake up, maybe no one would even know they've been murdered?

Hopefully people can say, Well, that would obviously still be wrong.

Is it wrong even if they don't have family and friends that'll miss them?

Like, if you find a homeless person who their family doesn't even know where they are, where you 'Cause sometimes people will say, Oh, it's wrong to kill a sleeping person because other people will be sad that they're dead.

Let's say you find someone who's a vagrant and nobody knows where they are.

They've been left for dead.

No one's even aware they, they still are alive.

Is it wrong to poison them and have them painlessly die?

Almost everyone is going to realize the answer is yes, that's obviously wrong.

But if that's obviously wrong, if it's wrong to kill people who are asleep, even if they won't be missed, then it's also wrong to kill unborn children, whether they can feel pain or not.

That is not Like, the reason murder is wrong is not just because it's painful to be murdered.

The reason it's wrong is 'cause it's actually wrong to take innocent human life, and if we lose that, then we've lost a very basic part of morality.

So I would say work with the natural law as we find it.You can build people towards better moral principles, and this is relevant not just for them living better, but as we sort of talked about before, faith is an act of both the intellect and the will.

So the more your actions are at odds with the law of God, the less you're going to be interested in the existence of God, the more you're gonna want God not to exist, and you can convince yourself He doesn't.

And so getting someone to live in a better way can already make them more disposed to hear the gospel.

Additionally, when you're having these conversations about the moral law, you don't have to say, Oh, you couldn't possibly know this.

You're an atheist.

You can say, You do know this, but the only reason you know this is because God has put it on your heart.

There's no other adequate explanation for the existence of morality.

Okay.

Vanessa, did you wanna read-

Yes

this last comment?

Oh, yes.

Um, so this is from The Good Fight, Tony L. He says, God willing, we'll meet y'all at Trent Horn's conference in April.

So Joe, there's a conference that you'll be at in April apparently.

There is.

Are you two gonna be there?

I will be there, yes.

I will not.

I will not be there.

Okay.

So two out of three ain't bad.

Uh, yeah.

So Conference of Trent, it is Is it Divine Mercy Sunday?

I should know this.

What What weekend?

It's the Sunday right after Easter.

Yeah, that's Divine Mercy Sunday.

Um, so it's April the 11th-

Yeah.

Yeah

in Frisco, Texas.

And, um, there are already We only have, like, 100 tickets left to sell, so if you guys want to be there and meet Joe and Trent and all your favorite, like, Catholic content creators, I definitely suggest registering for the conference at conferenceoftrent.com.

Yeah.

Excellent.

Thank you for doing that.

And it's, it's a good way to just kind of meet people, have I think it's a smaller group where you're more likely to get to actually talk to these people you've maybe seen on the internet.

Uh, Lila Rose is gonna be there.

Brian Holdsworth is gonna be there.

Evan Raugust is gonna be there.

And these are people who are I've talked to all three of those people, plus Trent.

They're great to talk to.

They're, they're good conversations.

They're wonderful people on screen as well as off.

And so if you want to, you know, have a conversation with them, obviously I can't promise that'll happen, but your odds are a lot better.

So yeah, if you, uh, haven't checked that out, I hope you do.

If you have checked it out, let me know.

Like, comment in the comments below, not in the chat, in the comments below.

And then, uh, anyone who is a Shameless Popery Patreon, uh, member, shamelessjoe.com, I will probably try to do some kind of meetup either Friday night or someday Saturday, uh, once I figure out the logistics to at least say hi, maybe grab a coffee or something for an hour, and, uh, yeah, we'll take it from there.

All right, everyone.

Thank you so much for joining us today.

If you have any thoughts on the premise, Do we need God to be good people?

leave them in the comments below.

And if you have any ideas of things that you want us to talk about in the future, go ahead and leave those in the comments as well.

All right.

Thank you, Mike.

Thank you, Vanessa.

Thank you to everyone who contributed with the chat.

Uh, for Shameless Popery, I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you