Demolishing Triablogue: Steve Hays tries to justify biblical morality

This is my reply to an article by aoologist Steve Hays entitled

Moral skepticism and Scripture

From an exchange I had with an unbeliever on Facebook:

The answers you give curiously avoid quoting those parts of the bible where God takes personal responsibility for death and evil, therefore, your attempts to explain alleged evil as the result of natural earthly forces, constitutes dishonesty on your part.  You are a Calvinist.  If you believe God secretly willed for Hitler to massacre the Jews, and secretly willed for pedophiles to rape small children, you need to just come out and admit that yes, that is the way your god is.  Otherwise, the atheist to whom you give your naturalistic answers might get a false impression about how unspeakably nasty your theology actually is.

I have no theory as to why God predestines a particular hurricane to strike a particular area. In general, hurricanes are natural forces which restore the balance of nature.

If God is all-powerful, he doesn't need to use hurricanes, he can simply cause humans to desire whatever he wants them to desire with his magic wand called irresistible grace, a presupposition you Calvinists are bound to accept. 

It's not as if hurricanes are targeted to hit population centers. That's an incidental consequence of humans living in hurricane zones.

Then you aren't a very good Calvinist, since under Calvinism, the only reason anybody ever found themselves at the mercy of a hurricane, or desired to move to or stay in a location that was eventually hit by a hurricane (such as Houston Texas most recently), is because God predestined or foreordainted them to do so.  And further under Calvinism, they had no chance of successfully resisting making the movement and choices they were predestined to make.  You aren't a Molinist, are you?

In general, humans die in natural disasters as a side-effect of living where natural disasters happen to strike.

But the reason they die in natural disasters is because that was the method God used to kill them, as required by bible passages in which God claims personal responsibility for all death and murder:

 39 'See now that I, I am He, And there is no god besides Me; It is I who put to death and give life. I have wounded and it is I who heal, And there is no one who can deliver from My hand. (Deut. 32:39 NAU)

Hays continues:

God created a world with natural mechanisms.
And everything happens according to his master plan for the world. In that respect, even bad things happen for a good reason. And this life is not the ultimate frame of reference.

Your skeptical opponent believes none of those propositions, so why are you using them?  Whoops, I forgot...it is because God predestined you to use them.

    When men fight with one another and the wife of the one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of him who is beating him and puts out her hand and seizes him by the private parts, 12 then you shall cut off her hand. Your eye shall have no pity (Deut 25:11-12).
i) To begin with, who started the fight? Who threw the first punch? Who's at fault?

 You shall not add to the word of the Lord.  See Deut. 4:2 and 12:32.  If the law doesn't speak about who started the fight, neither should you.  So you only do so because you wish to make the Calvinist god look more politically correct in the eyes of modern people whose individualist sense of justice naturally prompts them to ask such clarifying questions. 

ii) You also disregard the nature of the offense. Grabbing the genitals risks rendering the man impotent. A harsh penalty for a harsh crime. The penalty is completely avoidable by avoiding the crime.

But in Calvinism, if a woman does grab a man's testicles to help her husband win a fight, God predestined her to do this.  So if God wants a woman's hand cut off for grabbing another man's testicles, God desires to horribly harm and maim a woman for successfully carrying out the divine will.  Your distinguishing between God's revealed will and his secret will, doesn't get rid of the moral atrocity just described.  Even assuming Calvinism to be the most biblically justified form of modern Christianity, God is still horribly and shockingly cruel for inflicting pain and misery upon people simply because they successfully carried out his true will.


What would be wrong with making this a federal law for America today, especially since you believe it was a harsh crime?  If God wanted women who grab a man's testicles during a fight to have their hand cut off back in the days of Moses, and if God doesn't chance, what makes you think God today thinks a less harsh penalty is somehow "better" today?  Or did God predestine you to avoid answering this?

    18 If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, 19 then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, 20 and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ 21 Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear (Deut 21:18-21).

 

i) I didn't say if that was the thing to do now. Not everything that God commanded ancient Israel to do is a direct command to or for Christians.

But adultery in its original OT context was to be answered with the death penalty, Leviticus 20:10.  If your NT somehow imposes the prohibition against adultery on Christians, but not the death penalty that originally attached to it, I'd say that means the NT authors are guilty of picking and choosing in arbitrary fashion what they please from the OT.   You appeal to the authority of Jesus and the NT writers to overcome the picking-and-choosing criticism?  I have good reasons to view Jesus as a non-divine human revolutionary, and Paul as an intentional perverter of what Jesus said.  You don't do Calvinist apologetics to convince anybody at all except other Calvinists, that's for sure.

ii) You fail to grasp the nature of the Mosaic penalty structure. As various scholars contend, the death penalty was generally a maximum penalty, not a mandatory penalty (first degree murder might be a notable exception).

You shall not add to the word of the Lord, Deut. 4:2, 12:32, which is exactly what you are doing when you try to get away from the plain meaning of the text via "scholars".   If the bible doesn't express or imply that the given law/penalty has exceptions, then you shall not add to the word of the Lord, it's real simple.

ii) The fact that the legislator invokes the purgation formula in the case of the incorrigible son indicates to me that in this case (and other cases in kind), the penalty is indexed to the cultic holiness of Israel. If so, that doesn't carry over into the new covenant era.

The Jews of the first century apparently reached for rocks to stone Jesus to death for blasphemy, apparently because, despite living in the first century, they nevertheless thought that the judicial penalty demanded in the Pentateuch (death, Lev. 24:16) applied in their own day too.  So if NT authors and Jesus clearly taught such judicial penalties no longer applied, there is excellent biblical and historical reasons for saying they got it wrong.  But to discuss that in depth would be to assume the bible gives the "correct" answer, when in fact as a skeptic I believe the biblical teaching on "new covenant" is hopelessly confused if not contradictory to the theocratic regime of the Mosaic legislation.  I would be pointing out that "we know" bears cannot talk in English, and you'd be responding that Goldilocks was a fine little girl whose testimony cannot be impeached.  But I'll toy with you further for the benefit of the reader who might think you could possibly win such debate if you carped long enough about it.

By contrast, the penalty for murder antedates the Mosaic covenant. The penalty for murder is indexed to the image of God rather than holy land.

Which sounds like excellent reason to believe that because sinners in the New Covenant are no less made in the image of God than Moses was, the death penalty required for marring God's image under the Old Covenant still applies under the New. 

Deuteronomy has a refrain about "purging evil" (Cf. Deut 13:5/6; 17:7,12; 19:13,19; 21:9,21; 22:21-22,24; 24:7). A dramatic illustration is the ceremony to cleanse the land of blood guilt (21:1-9). These penalties operate within a framework of ritual holiness, where the land is culturally holy, and transgressions defile the land, necessitating punitive actions that reconsecrate the land. But that principle doesn't carry over into the new covenant, because the holy land category is defunct.

On the contrary, there is nothing about the changes in the political climate of Judea and Palestine between Moses and Pilate to suggest that it ever stopped being "holy land".   You think God inspired the captivity Psalms, some of which show desire for bloody Mosaic-style reform (Psalm 137:9), despite the fact that these were written after the Hebrews were taken captive and prevented from going back to Jerusalem.  Sorry Steve, but you don't justify a new plan by proving that God's original plan didn't work.

Furthermore, Jesus prefaced his Sermon on the Mount requirement of cutting off a hand (Matthew 5:30) with a general admonition that it was folly to attempt to avoid obeying even the least of the Mosaic law (5:17-20), so that's a pretty stiff argument that, contrary to the much-easier-to-accept modern view, Jesus really meant the hand-amputation part in v. 30 no less literally than he meant the mental adultery (v. 28) and the basis for divorce (v. 32) literally.  Or doesn't Calvinist exegesis require you to give due regard to the immediate context?  If you as a Calvinist can believe God sends to hell forever the 5 year old girl born to unbelieving parents all because she rejected the gospel at church the Sunday before dying in a car accident (children of unbelievers are not holy until at least one parent becomes a Christian (1 Cor. 7:14, and where do you think people go if they die in a state of being unholy? Purgatory?)), then you should have no trouble believing equally horrifying atrocities, such as your Jesus being far more fanatical against sin than anybody on earth ever was, seriously believed that literally amputating the offending limb (the psychological effect of which would profoundly dissuade from future like-sins) was the better way.  Think real hard before you say literal amputation of a limb doesn't change the heart.  If you were caught stealing in fundamentalist Arabia and endured the involuntary amputation of your hand as a result, you'd be fanatically hesitant before you stole something again, as literal amputation is naturally presumed traumatizing physically and psychologically for all except the truly incorrigible.

iii) Your position suffers from self-referential incoherence. On the one hand, you appeal to stock arguments for moral skepticism. If I was born at a different place and time, I'd have different views.

On the other hand, you attack OT ethics. But your moral skepticism neutralizes your ability to attack OT ethics.

No, we can attack OT ethics by showing that YOU Christians disagree with what your own God approves of, forcing you to admit you lost the debate, or forcing you to foolishly argue that atrocities most common sense people are shocked by, could somehow yet be "good". 

You can't say that's wrong.

 We don't have to day it's wrong, all we have to ask is whether you think Jesus approved of rape.  If you answer "no", then we just found a contradiction in God's attributes, since the God of the OT approves of rape (search for the phrase "The American Bible Society produced the "Good News" bible" in my article containing my exegesis of Deut. 21:14), you would be required to condemn this god because your own morals do not make any room for the possibility of morally justifying rape.

Do you believe it is always absolutely wrong to derive pleasure from causing rape and parental cannibalism?  If so, you must join us in criticizing the morals of your god, because he causes, rape and parental cannibalism (Deut. 28:30, 53), and says he will take just as much "delight" to cause these atrocities as he takes in granting prosperity to those who obey him (v. 63).  If you sinply hide under the "God's ways are mysterious" then because you don't find it persuasive when "heretics" appeal to God's mysterious ways just to get their asses out of theological jam in a way that saves face, neither do we skepics find it persuasive when you employ the exact same excuse for the exact same reason...at which point you drop the debate because you are intellectually incapable of going any deeper, at which point the readers recognize you are not doing apologetics to convince anybody except those who already agree with you that Jesus is the Son of God and the bible is the inerrant word of God. 

Ironically, I agree with moral skeptics that moral intuition is unreliable, given the fact that different cultures have different taboos. What's admirable in one culture is abominable in another, and vice versa. So we need something over and above moral intuition to correct or corroborate our moral intuitions.

And since you don't think getting delight out of causing women to be raped can be morally justified, we can safely dispense with any foolishness that says the God of Deut. 28:30, 63) is the proper moral authority.  Otherwise, it would be "godly" to derive pleasure from causing women to be raped, raising the question of why it would be wrong for Christians today to rejoice in rape similarly to the way OT Hebrews rejoiced at the thought of slaughtering the children of their captors (Psalm 137:9).

You attack OT ethics, but obviously the Pentateuchal legislator didn't share your outlook.

And we skeptics are frightened by the prospect that an ancient crazy man disagreed with common sense civility.

You have your convictions and he had his. So what brokers the disagreement? Who's the referee? What makes your moral opinion superior to the viewpoint of the Pentateuchal narrator?

First, under atheism, the fact that we cannot prove the U.S Constitution morally "superior" to the barbaric practices of the Congolese army, does not mean there's no rational answer.  We are still people with genetic predispositions living in a country that has evolved to give us the right to condemn in free speech the contrary morals held by other nations.  Rape is a naturalistic evil because the unwillingness of the female usually implies she is not ready to provide for offspring, and that is counterproductive to the naturalistic goal of survival, which is not to have kids merely to let them die of exposure,  and indeed, though rape be found in the lower order animals, it isn't very common and can safely be chalked up to a flaw in evolution, since clearly the willingness of the female to be made pregnant strongly implies an ability to provide for such offspring thus achieving the naturalistic goal of survival.  We evolved from animals and they do not just do nothing all day because there is no way to prove which of their conflicting moral predispositions is "better" than the others.  Two bucks continue to butt heads to gain the affections of the female in the group, despite the fact that by being without God, there is no way to prove which one of the bucks morally "deserves" to get the female.  So it does not follow logically that without an ultimate moral law-giver, we "should" do anything, such as just sit around and let anybody do whatever they want.

And in case you didn't know, moral relativity under atheism does not automatically favor the man trying to stab me to death....it also justifies me, the other atheist in the fight, to do whatever I want to do in that situation, such as inflict fatal injuries on my attacker.  So stop telling atheists their belief logically compels them to just sit back and let an attacker harm them.  Relativity doesn't merely tell attackers they are free to do whatever, it says the victims enjoy equal freedom to do whatever too.

So if atheism is true, I am not doing anything inconsistent with the moral relativity of the universe, when I physically resist somebody trying to stab me to death.  And the world doesn't show us much more than that winners in a conflict are those who have the most power, legally, physically or otherwise. Moral disagreements are nearly NEVER decided by on party convincing the other that the latter's moral view has fatal rational or logical deficiencies.

Therefore we should only expect that despite the relative equality of morality in life, human beings are going to continue clashing with each other about it regardless.  Nobody can prove that one form of government is "better" than another either, but that hardly convinces most people to just shut up about politics.  The need for self-preservation and preservation of one's preferred group logically implies one will naturally speak out against and react against any known contrary morality.  If you wish to avoid dying, you are naturally going to oppose the views and acts of those who wish for you to die. 

Second, the question could similarly be put to you as to why you, an alleged follower of God, think rape is absolutely wrong, when your Calvinist viewpoint requires you to ground rape in the secret will of God even if not the revealed will, prompting questions that make you look stupid as soon as you try to answer them, such as "if God wills rape, how can it be ungodly to praise God for causing rape?"  What now, Steve?  Will you go out on a limb and publicly state that rape must be good because God's good nature is necessarily implicated in his secret will no less than in his revealed will?

In light of biblical evidence against God's intellect and rationality, any biblical statements assuring you that God is good no matter what, are legitimately open to falsification and more than likely better interpreted the way Copan and Flannagan interpret the wholesale slaughter statements of the Pentateuch: mere Semitic exaggeration.  Only god's jailhouse lawyer would insist that Christians who adopt open-theism are spiritually dead.  They don't just say God is limited because that's how they feel, Christian scholars like Pinnock, Sanders and Boyd have stepped into the intellectual arena and have provided biblical explanations supported by appeal to standard hermeneutics for why it is that when the bible says God repented of his own choice to create man (Genesis 6:6-7) this is not language of appearance or mere anthropomorphism, but was understood by its originally intended audience as a reality about god (your belief in biblical inerrancy is sufficiently minority among Christian scholars that it hardly requires anybody to attempt to "reoncile" the open-theistic interpretation of Gen. 6:6 with other biblical statements about God's perfection.   Sorry Steve, but the falsity of open-theism is not quite as obvious as you would wish.  Your controlling presuppositions buckle rather quickly under attack.

You're using the same argument John Loftus employs, but it disqualifies you from assuming the posture of a moralist.

 Maybe that was the case with the skeptic you were talking to, but now you are talking to an atheist/former Calvinist, me, who is more than adequately prepared to kick your moral teeth out the back of your skull (probably more because your Calvinism is an absurd travesty of morality, given that in your world, the good God's willing of anything infuses good into it, even if what was willed was rape).  Let me know when you have the guts to put your money where your triablogue mouth is. I've already reviewed Turek's insane "I don't have enough faith to be an atheist", so when you reply, I hope you have something a bit more serious than asking atheists how they know that Hitler was wrong, or blindly presuming the nations surrounding the ancient Hebrews threw live babies into burning ovens.