synderesis
Diane and I attended a debate Friday evening at WFU. The subject of the debate was the question, “Can morality exist without God?” and more specifically, the issue of whether a transcendent, personal God is necessary as a foundation for our sense of morality. It was highly enjoyable for both of us, even though we were on the edge of our seats, so to speak. As neither of us are overly into sports and we share such a interest in the fundamental questions of existence and worldview, we joked that an event like a debate is the rough equivalent of attending a sporting event for us. It certainly was in terms of anticipation.
The two debaters were Drs. Bruce Little and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, the former a professor of philosophy of religion at Southeastern and the latter a philosophy professor at Dartmouth. We were obviously biased in favor of Dr. Little, but Dr. Sinnott-Armstrong acquitted himself well, all things considered. His main failing was a result of his rejection of a transcendent moral source. He was forced to construct a synthetic moral framework from examining the particulars of human behavior without being able to focus on the essence of what makes man the way he is. In practical terms, this means he used many examples from the world as foundations for his thesis, trying to arrange them into a cohesive picture of man’s moral state, instead of starting with a proposition of man’s moral state and explaining the world from that direction.
The general movement of his argument was from the particulars to the universals, something philosophers have been trying to do for thousands of years without success but the only possible approach if the Christian worldview is rejected and the thinker is intellectually honest and consistent. It was certainly an elusive approach in terms of the subject of the debate and one far less intellectually rigorous than the one taken by Dr. Little, but the inevitable one if a transcendent moral source is rejected.
Diane made the excellent point that a semantic clarification at the beginning of the debate would have been very helpful, specifically between the terms ethics and morals. As R.C. Sproul pointed out, the etymology of the words speaks to the source of their meaning: ethics deals with the ethos of things, their essence and thus a refers to transcendent values, while morals come from the mores of the people and represents more typically the values of a given society in the here and now. They’re not interchangeable and more precision on that count would have been nice.
A great point made by Dr. Little, in his closing statement, was that, “Facts are not self-interpreting.” In other words, one cannot claim to have a perfectly empirical, dispassionate worldview. Those who claim to only “trust science” and what it tells us about the world inevitably make meaningful judgments about the facts they encounter based on their worldview. We all have assumptions we bring to the table, no matter how impartial and open-minded we claim to be.