[RD] Ask a Theologian V

[spryllino]

I don't believe there's really an exact equivalent to the editions you mention. With biblical texts the "editions" are the different translations, which you'd normally find as complete Bibles, rather than as separate books with editorial apparatus as you would for other classical texts. So rather than looking for an edition with introduction and notes etc., you'd consult one of the standard biblical translations for the text and then look at another book for the equivalent of introduction and notes.

The usual translations favoured by scholars are the RSV/NRSV and perhaps also the REB and Jerusalem Bible. For the secondary literature, obviously there's a vast amount. Cambridge University Press has a very good series called "New Testament Theology", with each book focusing on just one text (or group of texts) of the New Testament, and these do pretty much the job you describe. It has another series called (amazingly) "Old Testament Theology", none of which I've read, but I would guess that they'd be much the same for those texts (and they seem to be more recent too).

There are undoubtedly other, similar series to these as well, but I'm not familiar with them. If you look in the theology section of your university library I'm sure you'll find shelves devoted to the various biblical books, and you will probably see similar-looking books appearing in each section. Those would be the ones to grab.

Thank you!

 

[Mouthwash]

Can God deceive us about his nature? How would we distinguish between a benevolent God and a God that just wants us to believe he is benevolent, for purposes of his own?

 

[Borachio]

I don't know the theological answer to that. (Obviously.)

But perhaps you can tease an answer out for yourself (and me). Could you deceive yourself about your own nature, for instance?

(I'd guess that you might say you could. But then how would you know that you had?)

 

[Mouthwash]

I don't know the theological answer to that. (Obviously.)

But perhaps you can tease an answer out for yourself (and me). Could you deceive yourself about your own nature, for instance?

(I'd guess that you might say you could. But then how would you know that you had?)

Well, I wouldn't really have any way of knowing, but after reading cognitive bias literature I might be able to prevent myself from doing so.

Of what relevance is this question?

 

[Borachio]

I'm not sure, tbh. But if you're trying to work out whether God could deceive people into thinking he was benevolent, then whether you might be able to deceive yourself could be relevant if you thought, for example, that God was a human construct to begin with.

I'd suggest that you can't really and effectively deceive yourself. Not in the final analysis, that is, because how would you ever find out that you had?

Still, my brain is feeling more than usually fried at the moment, so this probably isn't coherent.

edit: meh! Ignore me. It doesn't add up to anything.

 

[Plotinus]

Assuming that God is perfectly good, and that deception is wrong, one would have thought that God couldn't deceive. One might think that perhaps deception could be justified if it brings about a greater good. However, if God is omnipotent, he shouldn't need means to bring about his ends. Moreover, Catholicism at least teaches that it's never justified to do something wrong in itself even if it brings about a greater good.

I'd say that, pretty much by definition, God must be benevolent, or he's not good and therefore not God. So to talk about a God who pretends to be benevolent when he isn't doesn't make much sense to me. One might perhaps talk about an entity which is like God in every way apart from benevolence. Presumably an omnipotent, omniscient, and eternal entity could deceive everyone into thinking it was benevolent because there would be no barrier to its performing whatever actions would serve this deception. And I think it would indeed be impossible, in practice, to tell such an entity apart from a genuinely benevolent God (assuming that there didn't also exist a genuinely benevolent God who could expose it). However, it's questionable whether such an entity could even exist. I think the traditional view of classic theism, at least, is that all the divine perfections come together in a package (and in fact they're identical). So a "God" that has some of the divine properties but not others is incoherent. Whether this is a plausible view of the divine properties, though, I don't know.

 

[Flying Pig]

Assuming that God is perfectly good, and that deception is wrong, one would have thought that God couldn't deceive. One might think that perhaps deception could be justified if it brings about a greater good. However, if God is omnipotent, he shouldn't need means to bring about his ends. Moreover, Catholicism at least teaches that it's never justified to do something wrong in itself even if it brings about a greater good.

Where does that leave the doctrine of double effect?

 

[Plotinus]

Ah, I should have been more careful in my language. Double effect means it's OK to do something that has a bad outcome as long as the bad outcome wasn't your intention. E.g. it is (or may be) OK to kill someone in order to protect someone else as long as your intention was to protect. That's OK under Catholic moral theory. What isn't OK is performing a bad act intentionally in order to bring about a greater good. E.g. if I murder someone in order to use his organs to save several other lives, that's wrong because murder is always wrong. This situation differs from the first because I can't be reasonably said not to intend the death of my victim in this case, whereas (say) in shooting a kidnapper to save the life of his hostage my intention is solely to save a life, even though I can do so only by taking another.

 

[Flying Pig]

My understanding of it, though, is that Catholic doctrine allows you to 'discount' even consequences which you could reasonably have foreseen would have happened - so it would allow you to solve a hostage situation by poisoning the water and thus killing the kidnapper, even if that means that somebody else will have a drink and die. What's the difference between that and your organ-stealing example?

 

[Borachio]

in shooting a kidnapper to save the life of his hostage my intention is solely to save a life

Does this hold water, though? In effect, you seem to be saying that's it's OK to kill someone, imo.

How can you distinguish between intending to kill someone (with the side-effect of saving someone else) and intending to save someone (with the side-effect of killing another)?

My point is that, in this situation, it's impossible to state that your intention is solely to save a life, because it isn't true: your intention is to save a life by killing someone else.

And, naturally, this has the added consequence of you making a value judgement about which life should be saved and which taken.

If I were Catholic, I'd be very uneasy about this. Still, maybe not. Catholicism is a profound mystery to me altogether.

 

[Mouthwash]

Do you find this convincing?

 

[Plotinus]

My understanding of it, though, is that Catholic doctrine allows you to 'discount' even consequences which you could reasonably have foreseen would have happened - so it would allow you to solve a hostage situation by poisoning the water and thus killing the kidnapper, even if that means that somebody else will have a drink and die. What's the difference between that and your organ-stealing example?

I would guess the difference is that the organ-stealing involves two distinct acts, one of which is the intrinsically sinful act of killing someone, whereas the water-poisoning is a single act with two immediate consequences, one of which is undesirable. But I'm not sure.

Do you find this convincing?

Not tremendously. It is true that when Aristotle talked about "ethics" he didn't mean what modern analytic philosophers mean, and he wasn't interested in distinguishing between "right" and "wrong" actions. But I don't think that that means that the ancients had no concept of "right" and "wrong" at all or that it's all down to Judaism. Surely non-western, or non-Christian, cultures have concepts comparable to these too.

Besides the purely historical question, I don't see how the headline would follow even if it were true that normative ethics were an incredibly recent invention of Christianity. Even if our notion of "right" and "wrong" depends historically on the notion of God as a law-giver, it doesn't follow from this that once we stop believing in God we have to stop believing in right and wrong. After all, western science developed largely as a result of people's belief that the natural world was created by God and is therefore inherently rational and comprehensible. But the practice of science continues perfectly well, and perfectly coherently, even without belief in God. I don't see why the same thing couldn't apply to normative ethics.

 

[Mechanicalsalvation]

Assuming that God is perfectly good, and that deception is wrong, one would have thought that God couldn't deceive. One might think that perhaps deception could be justified if it brings about a greater good. However, if God is omnipotent, he shouldn't need means to bring about his ends. Moreover, Catholicism at least teaches that it's never justified to do something wrong in itself even if it brings about a greater good.

I think your answer is perfect. I am not sure about the bolded part though. If something really brings about greater good can it be actually wrong? Yes it can, I guess, becouse right and wrong are bound to be relative and arbitrary values but from some absolute/God point of view?

 

[Borachio]

Well, then we'd be back to the hypothetical question of whether it would be right or wrong to torture one innocent child to death if the result would be eternal happiness for the rest of mankind.

I'd be inclined to think it would still be wrong to do so.

 

[El_Machinae]

That's what God did!

 

[warpus]

Moreover, Catholicism at least teaches that it's never justified to do something wrong in itself even if it brings about a greater good.

Are God's actions excused from this? i.e. the flood and other instances where a temporary wrong lead to some fulfillment of God's plan - a greater good

 

[Plotinus]

I think your answer is perfect. I am not sure about the bolded part though. If something really brings about greater good can it be actually wrong? Yes it can, I guess, becouse right and wrong are bound to be relative and arbitrary values but from some absolute/God point of view?

Well a consequentialist would say that an act that really brings about a greater good wouldn't a wrong act, but the Catholic Church rejects consequentialism and holds that rightness/wrongness consist in something else. (Precisely what, I'm not sure.)

Are God's actions excused from this? i.e. the flood and other instances where a temporary wrong lead to some fulfillment of God's plan - a greater good

I suppose the answer to that would be that these weren't acts that were wrong in themselves. E.g. the flood was a righteous act - even apart from its consequences - because it was a righteous judgement on sinners, which God is perfectly entitled to enact.

Also, some people think that there are acts it's OK for God to do that wouldn't be OK for us to do, because of his unique relation to his creatures. Richard Swinburne says that God could (for example) end someone's life without any wrongdoing, because that person's life is a gift from God in the first place and he's within his rights to withdraw it if he wants to. Whereas of course you or I couldn't end someone else's life without serious wrongdoing. So if you take that view then you might say that God could kill enormous numbers of people - even innocent people - and this would be morally OK even if we don't take into account his role as righteous judge. This doesn't seem to me a very palatable line of thought, but there you go.

 

[timtofly]

The biggest hurdle of logic is self justification, and not on God's part. How can limited human knowledge justify anything without knowing the whole of the thing?

Even historical accounts of "God's" actions are still "colored" by human understanding. Humans get away with justifying everything or anything from their limited experience and knowledge.

According to the knowledge we have, every natural act does not have to be pre-determined, but it is an act of God, not because God did it, but because God allowed it, and the way nature works is just as much a part of God working directly or indirectly. God did not walk away from creation, but creation is an active and continuing act of God.

We get God's benevolence only from God's choice of whom is benefited, not because God is an overall beneficial being. If that were the case, then humans could interact with nature on every level and would be limitless in the scope of human abilities just like God. However we are limited to the laws that govern nature and the consequences of "breaking" such laws.

 

[Flying Pig]

Well a consequentialist would say that an act that really brings about a greater good wouldn't a wrong act, but the Catholic Church rejects consequentialism and holds that rightness/wrongness consist in something else. (Precisely what, I'm not sure.)

[How] does the Church address the Euthyphro Dilemma?

 

[Borachio]

That's what God did!

Yeah. But, you know... that God entity?... She makes it all up as she goes.