If the supernatural claims of your religion were refuted, would you still adhere to the ethics?

[Shushersbedamned]

Well, good for you.



Pardon?​

I was taught by church personnel that these things are not to be taken literally etc.

 

[Vouthon]

I was taught by church personnel that these things are not to be taken literally etc.

I would assume, therefore, that you didn't belong to a particularly orthodox denomination.

In mainstream Christianity, these doctrines are taken very seriously as tenets of faith.

 

[Shushersbedamned]

I would assume, therefore, that you didn't belong to a particularly orthodox denomination.

In mainstream Christianity, these doctrines are taken very seriously as tenets of faith.

There is no such thing as mainstream Christianity. And I would not make such conclusions without pretty accurate and wide ranging personal observations.

 

[Vouthon]

There is no such thing as mainstream Christianity. And I would not make such conclusions without pretty accurate and wide ranging personal observations.

I would extend the same guidance to you, with respect to judging the level of aptitude that a person has in terms of biblical exegesis, based upon your disagreement with their personal religious beliefs.

That said, mainstream Christianity does exist. It consists of the small c-"orthodox" mainstream Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant branches.

And the largest denominations take these doctrines seriously. If you doubt this, then I would invite you to engage some of our Evangelical RF members in conversation.

 

[ChristineM]

I have heard Christians, predominantly of the Protestant persuasion I must admit, contend that if the miraculous claims of our religion - resurrection, virgin birth and so forth - were hypothetically refuted, then they'd have no reason to follow Christ's ethics or even view them as something worth following.

This all or nothing attitude has always befuddled me, since it was never the supernatural claims of the Christian Faith that drew me to it but rather the profound ethical framework and its impact upon the course of intellectual history in the West, that opened my eyes to the possibility of the religion maybe having a divine revelation as its source and ultimately leading me to that conviction, supernatural claims and all.

As such, I seem to approach this issue in an altogether inverted fashion to the thread title.

If it were one day conclusively proven that Jesus's unresurrected dead body had been found, thereby undermining the doctrine of the resurrection, or some manner of scientific evidence that totally excluded the possibility of a divine agent behind creation, I would naturally face an existential crisis like every other Christian and have to accept that the supernatural claims of my religion were bogus. (Now, I don't believe that either of these two scenarios are ever going to pan out, this is a purely hypothetical exercise).

However, that wouldn't make me any less a cultural Christian in the sense of, in the main, admiring the ethical framework and embracing it as my own. I could easily be a Jesusist. There is nothing that will change my understanding of the role played by the early Christian movement in completely overturning the theoretical justifications behind the ancient Graeco-Roman aristocratic values-system, in favour of a radical assertion of human equality and the privileging of the weakest members of society, for instance, or the innovation of the medieval church canonists in laying the groundwork for the concept of natural, inalienable human rights that no state has the power to violate.

I might have to justify these ethical beliefs, and others like them, on different epistemological or philosophical (and to my mind somewhat less certain) grounds - but luckily, the last three centuries of secular Western thinkers has already done much of the work in that respect! (thank you enlightenment liberalism and secular humanism!)

So, what say you about this? Would the Parable of the Good Samaritan be any less meaningful and poignant to you if the supernatural claims of Christianity were conclusively refuted? Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you? Turn the other cheek? The least among all of you is the greatest? The humble should be exalted and the exalted humbled? It is better to serve than to be served etc.?

I extend the same question to every religion.

It takes all sorts... Think how boring it would be f we all agreed

 

[Shadow Wolf]

When I left Christianity I also left much of it's "baggage ethics" behind, and it took some time for me to get completely over it (such as accepting LBGT people).

 

[PureX]

If I were no longer a believer in supernatural Christianity, I would be under no obligation to consider some unsavoury elements of the Old Testament as relevant to an appraisal of Christ, since the claim that he was the prophesized Messiah would be meaningless.

Interesting.

As a modern Christian, I see no logical reason why I should be beholding to the religious ideals and dictates of ancient (OT) judaism. Jesus was a Jew, yes, but Jews then and now do not believe that a non-Jew needs to convert to 'find' or to 'be right with' God. And Jesus did not admonish anyone to do so. Nor did he withhold his message from non-Jews, or in any way imply that it was only intended for Jewish ears, hearts, and minds.

So I find the idea that to be a Christian I must subjugate myself to these ancient Jewish religious tenets to be unfounded.

 

[joe1776]

I think I made it quite clear in my opening gambit that I was referring to the teachings of Jesus in the gospels, and some distinctive ethical contributions of early and medieval Catholicism.

Yes, I understood that, but you did list some good moral advice in scripture. I simply wanted to point out that those had to be cherry-picked.

If I were no longer a believer in supernatural Christianity, I would be under no obligation to consider some unsavoury elements of the Old Testament as relevant to an appraisal of Christ, since the claim that he was the prophesized Messiah would be meaningless.

Granted.

My Christian tradition does not teach that our sense of right and wrong emanates from the Bible anyhow. We regard it as stemming from the primacy of conscience as a vehicle for mediating the dictates of the natural law.

Yes, but your church regards the judgments of conscience as judgments of reason. If they are judgments of reason, they can be taught and learned. Conscience can be "informed" by the church. One might have a Catholic conscience, for example.

If Aquinas was wrong, if the judgments of conscience are intuitive, they can't be taught and learned. There's no basis or need for the church to give moral instruction.

Over the past 30 years, research is supporting the idea that our moral judgments are made case-by-case. They are immediate, intuitive judgments emerging from the unconscious. For example, if a soldier is ordered to kill civilians, his conscience will immediately protest. If he carries out the order, his conscience will nag him with guilt as long as he lives.

He knew that the church had made moral mistakes and engaged in miscarriages of justice due to the fact that these lapses often violated the principles of our own moral doctrine.

I acknowledge that your examples support your point, but...

The principles of the Church's moral doctrine are subject to interpretation. John Paul II would have had to be an extremely arrogant man to take the position that all his predecessors back to the Crusades were wrong in their reasoning and he was right. I think it far more likely that his conscience agreed with that of the non-Catholic world that the Church had often failed morally in the past and so he broke with the Church's tradition of never admitting mistakes. In doing so, I think he upgraded his church's image in the world.

 

[nPeace]

I have heard Christians, predominantly of the Protestant persuasion I must admit, contend that if the miraculous claims of our religion - resurrection, virgin birth and so forth - were hypothetically refuted, then they'd have no reason to follow Christ's ethics or even view them as something worth following.

This all or nothing attitude has always befuddled me, since it was never the supernatural claims of the Christian Faith that drew me to it but rather the profound ethical framework and its impact upon the course of intellectual history in the West, that opened my eyes to the possibility of the religion maybe having a divine revelation as its source and ultimately leading me to that conviction, supernatural claims and all.

As such, I seem to approach this issue in an altogether inverted fashion to the thread title.

If it were one day conclusively proven that Jesus's unresurrected dead body had been found, thereby undermining the doctrine of the resurrection, or some manner of scientific evidence that totally excluded the possibility of a divine agent behind creation, I would naturally face an existential crisis like every other Christian and have to accept that the supernatural claims of my religion were bogus. (Now, I don't believe that either of these two scenarios are ever going to pan out, this is a purely hypothetical exercise).

However, that wouldn't make me any less a cultural Christian in the sense of, in the main, admiring the ethical framework and embracing it as my own. I could easily be a Jesusist. There is nothing that will change my understanding of the role played by the early Christian movement in completely overturning the theoretical justifications behind the ancient Graeco-Roman aristocratic values-system, in favour of a radical assertion of human equality and the privileging of the weakest members of society, for instance, or the innovation of the medieval church canonists in laying the groundwork for the concept of natural, inalienable human rights that no state has the power to violate.

I might have to justify these ethical beliefs, and others like them, on different epistemological or philosophical (and to my mind somewhat less certain) grounds - but luckily, the last three centuries of secular Western thinkers has already done much of the work in that respect! (thank you enlightenment liberalism and secular humanism!)

So, what say you about this? Would the Parable of the Good Samaritan be any less meaningful and poignant to you if the supernatural claims of Christianity were conclusively refuted? Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you? Turn the other cheek? The least among all of you is the greatest? The humble should be exalted and the exalted humbled? It is better to serve than to be served etc.?

I extend the same question to every religion.

I myself would not change my life to go against the values I find work to the betterment of my life - namely inner peace, a good conscience, righteousness... as promoted by the Bible.

However, the only way man could possibly refute the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the existence of the supernatural, is to do the impossible - press rewind on the camcorder that was running from the beginning of time - for which there is none.

 

[Jumi]

Supernatural claims aren't important to me. Regarding my ethics and morals, they make no difference.

 

[Vouthon]

Yes, I understood that, but you did list some good moral advice in scripture. I simply wanted to point out that those had to be cherry-picked.

Well, it's a matter of perspective I guess.

Is it cherry-picking if one singles out the gospels, Jesus's purported teachings, and references some of them?

I didn't say "the Bible"; even less was I implying the Old Testament literature because that's Jewish, anyway, rather than uniquely Christian.

Yes, but your church regards the judgments of conscience as judgments of reason. If they are judgments of reason, they can be taught and learned. Conscience can be "informed" by the church. One might have a Catholic conscience, for example.

The revealed Divine Law was considered by Thomist Catholics to be a means of illuminating what is morally true and not what determines what is morally true. They are meant as guide to conscience, should we find ourselves struggling to work out some vexing moral problem on our own - in accordance with intuition and right reason - but never as a substitute for conscience.

Your right, though, when you say that the traditional Catholic 'Thomist' approach from the High Middle Ages was close to rational ethics. However, Scholastic theologians worked out a differentiation between two Latin terms involved in the process of conscientious moral decision-making: synderesis and conscientia.

As explained by one scholar, Lyons (2009): “conscience is the whole internal conscious process by which first principles of moral right and wrong, learnt intuitively by synderesis [a functional intuitive capacity], are applied to some action now contemplated in order to produce a moral verdict on that action, known as conscientia." (p.479).

So, no, intuition is involved at the offing and then a moral verdict involving a "judgement of reason".

If Aquinas was wrong, if the judgments of conscience are intuitive, they can't be taught and learned. There's no basis or need for the church to give moral instruction.

Since conscience involves both synderesis and conscientia, the answer is both/and.

I acknowledge that your examples support your point, but...

The principles of the Church's moral doctrine are subject to interpretation. John Paul II would have had to be an extremely arrogant man to take the position that all his predecessors back to the Crusades were wrong in their reasoning and he was right. I think it far more likely that his conscience agreed with that of the non-Catholic world that the Church had often failed morally in the past and so he broke with the Church's tradition of never admitting mistakes. In doing so, I think he upgraded his church's image in the world.

It has always been recognised that episcopal office-holders acting in the name of the church are capable of making errors of judgement. This was conceded already at the Second Vatican Council:

"...10. It is one of the major tenets of Catholic doctrine that man's response to God in faith must be free: no one therefore is to be forced to embrace the Christian faith against his own will.(8) This doctrine is contained in the word of God and it was constantly proclaimed by the Fathers of the Church.(7) The act of faith is of its very nature a free act....12. In faithfulness therefore to the truth of the Gospel, the Church is following the way of Christ and the apostles when she recognizes and gives support to the principle of religious freedom as befitting the dignity of man and as being in accord with divine revelation. Throughout the ages the Church has kept safe and handed on the doctrine received from the Master and from the apostles. In the life of the People of God, as it has made its pilgrim way through the vicissitudes of human history, there has at times appeared a way of acting that was hardly in accord with the spirit of the Gospel or even opposed to it. Nevertheless, the doctrine of the Church that no one is to be coerced into faith has always stood firm..."

- Dignitatis Humanae (Declaration on Religious Freedom), Second Vatican Council, 1965
​

In the early 14th century, a Pope, John XXII, voiced heresy from the pulpit during a sermon in which he denied the doctrine of the Beatific Vision.

At the time, the most devoted Catholics publicly reprimanded him. When the Pope attempted to enforce this erroneous interpretation on the Faculty of Theology in Paris, the King of France, Philip VI of Valois, banned its teaching.

John XXII – Cardinal Schuster wrote –“has the gravest responsibilities before the tribunal of history (…) since “he offered the entire Church, the humiliating spectacle of the princes, clergy and universities steering the Pontiff onto the right path of Catholic theological tradition, and placing him in the very difficult situation of having to contradict himself.” (Alfredo Idelfonso Schuster o.s.b. Jesus Christ in Ecclesiastical History, Benedictine Publishing House, Rome 1996, pp. 116-117).

The next pope issued a dogmatic constitution solemnly and infallibly correcting the error.

 

[joe1776]

The revealed Divine Law was considered by Thomist Catholics to be a means of illuminating what is morally true and not what determines what is morally true. They are meant as guide to conscience, should we find ourselves struggling to work out some vexing moral problem on our own - in accordance with intuition and right reason - but never as a substitute for conscience.

Your right, though, when you say that the traditional Catholic 'Thomist' approach from the High Middle Ages was close to rational ethics. However, Scholastic theologians worked out a differentiation between two Latin terms involved in the process of conscientious moral decision-making: synderesis and conscientia.

As explained by one scholar, Lyons (2009): “conscience is the whole internal conscious process by which first principles of moral right and wrong, learnt intuitively by synderesis [a functional intuitive capacity], are applied to some action now contemplated in order to produce a moral verdict on that action, known as conscientia." (p.479).

So, no, intuition is involved at the offing and then a moral verdict involving a "judgement of reason".

Since conscience involves both synderesis and conscientia, the answer is both/and.

That theologians would have to come up with two Latin words to explain conscience puts me on alert. In an English explanation, do they defy translation?

What are those first principles of right and wrong learned intuitively by synderisis? If we know those intuitively, why do we need moral guidance from the church?

Conscientia is Latin for conscience. If syndereisis is intuitive, how did we get to a judgment of reason? Didn't we miss a step?

Judgments of reason are the product of slow, deliberate reasoning. Research has shown that moral judgments are immediate. The explanations we offer for them are after-the-fact. Here's a link to Jon Haidt's research on this point.
https://www.motherjones.com/files/emotional_dog_and_rational_tail.pdf

 

[Vouthon]

What are those first principles of right and wrong learned intuitively by synderisis? If we know those intuitively, why do we need moral guidance from the church?

Synderesis is, secondarily, known by the term scintilla conscientiae - which roughly translates "the spark from which the light of conscience arises".

It concerns an immediate, intuitive apprehension "of the most general and universal knowledge of first principles of the moral order", whereas conscientia has to do with particular applications of first principles, hence it being a judgement of reason.

St. Bonaventure (ca. 1217 - 1274) associates the term synderesis with the notion of instinctus naturae (natural instinct), explaining how synderesis operates at the affective and emotional level, inclining man toward morality without deliberative efforts (Greene, 1991; Lottin, 1942; Ojakangas, 2013).

Here's a link to Jon Haidt's research on this point.
https://www.motherjones.com/files/emotional_dog_and_rational_tail.pdf

The paper cited above was published in 2001, meaning that it is somewhat 'dated' as far as peer-reviewed literature goes, although it was a very significant paper indeed. Greene et al.’s (Greene, Morelli, Lowenberg, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2008; Greene, Nystrom, Engell, Darley, & Cohen, 2004; Greene et al., 2001; Greene, 2012) "dual-process theory" is more recent and in my opinion superior as an explanation of the data.


See:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01210.x

Reflection and Reasoning in Moral Judgment

Joseph M. Paxton,a Leo Ungar, Joshua D. Greene,

Department of Psychology, Harvard University. Stanford University School of Medicine

4 November 2010

We examined the roles of reflection and reasoning in moral judgment. Experiment 1 documented the influence of reflection on moral judgment by inducing people to be more reflective. In general, this reflectiveness manipulation increased utilitarian moral judgment, although there was one item for which this effect was not reliably observed. A follow-up study indicated that trait reflectiveness is also associated with increased utilitarian judgment. Both results are consistent with Greene et al.’s (2001, 2004, 2008) dual-process theory of moral judgment.

Experiment 2 examined both reflection and reasoning by examining the effects of argument strength and deliberation time on moral judgment. Consistent with the influence of reasoned reflection, we found that a strong argument was more persuasive than a weak one, but only when subjects were encouraged to reflect. These results are consistent with a recent study (Suter & Hertwig, 2011) showing that decreased deliberation decreases utilitarian judgment. The present results demonstrate a parallel effect in which increased deliberation influences moral judgment, making judgments more consistent with utilitarian principles. This effect depends critically on argument strength, thus implicating moral reasoning. Based on our reading of the literature (Paxton & Greene, 2010), these results provide the strongest evidence to date for the influence of reflection and reasoning on moral judgment​

The more recent evidence and paradigms are closer, in fact, to the Catholic interpretation of a two-step process IMHO.

For more information see:


Dual process theory (moral psychology) - Wikipedia

Dual process theory is an influential theory of human moral judgment that alleges that human beings possess emotion-based and rationally-based cognitive subsystems that compete in moral reasoning processes. Initially proposed by Joshua Greene along with Brian Sommerville, Leigh Nystrom, John Darley, Jonathan Cohen and others,[1][2] the theory can be seen as a domain specific example of more general dual process accounts in psychology.

The dual process account asserts that human beings have two separate methods for moral reasoning. The first refers to intuitive or instinctual responses to moral violations. These responses are implicit and the factors affecting them may be consciously inaccessible.[3] Greene asserts that these responses are supported by emotional activation. The second method refers to conscious, controlled reasoning processes.

These processes ignore the emotional aspects of decision making, instead focusing on maximizing gain or obtaining the most desirable overall outcome. In everyday decision making, most decisions use one or other system, but in moral dilemmas in which an individual must compromise between violating moral rules and maximizing overall good, the systems come into conflict...

This theory of moral judgment has had influence on research in moral psychology. The original fMRI investigation[5] proposing the dual process account has been cited in excess of 2000 scholarly articles, generating extensive use of similar methodology as well as criticism. An alternative formulation of dual process theory in moral psychology may be found in.[6]​

 

[GoodbyeDave]

This is a question that only makes sense within the monotheistic religions.

Firstly, I am not committed to a distinction between natural and supernatural. Nature may have a creator, who would by definition be super-natural. But I know of no real evidence that anyone has ever been contacted by such a being: if a creator exists, I would conceive of them being as conceived of by the deists.

Secondly, since I have personal experience of some of the gods, their existence can no more be refuted than that of the couple next door! Polytheism is based on experience, not faith.

Thirdly, my ethics have no connection with religion. It is only the gods of monotheists who issue commandaments. My ethics is naturalistic, summed up by writers like Aristotle and Mencius. The goal is to be a virtuous person: a good specimen of a rational social animal within a given society.

 

[joe1776]

It has always been recognised that episcopal office-holders acting in the name of the church are capable of making errors of judgement. This was conceded already at the Second Vatican Council:

I concede your point that the office-holders were capable of error and indeed made some. I do not concede that those errors in judgment, subsequently discovered by John Paul II, offer a satisfactory explanation for more than a hundred public apologies by him during his reign.

 

[joe1776]

Synderesis is, secondarily, known by the term scintilla conscientiae - which roughly translates "the spark from which the light of conscience arises".

It concerns an immediate, intuitive apprehension "of the most general and universal knowledge of first principles of the moral order", whereas conscientia has to do with particular applications of first principles, hence it being a judgement of reason.

St. Bonaventure (ca. 1217 - 1274) associates the term synderesis with the notion of instinctus naturae (natural instinct), explaining how synderesis operates at the affective and emotional level, inclining man toward morality without deliberative efforts (Greene, 1991; Lottin, 1942; Ojakangas, 2013).

If we are not consciously aware of those "first principles of moral order" how can we possibly consciously reason from them? Can you can give me an example of a first principle and use it to reason to a judgment on a moral situation of your choosing?

The paper cited above was published in 2001, meaning that it is somewhat 'dated' as far as peer-reviewed literature goes, although it was a very significant paper indeed. Greene et al.’s (Greene, Morelli, Lowenberg, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2008; Greene, Nystrom, Engell, Darley, & Cohen, 2004; Greene et al., 2001; Greene, 2012) "dual-process theory" is more recent and in my opinion superior as an explanation of the data.

Truth doesn't decay with time. Haidt's 2001 paper got it right.

In fact, Josh Greene, whose work you're touting, built on Haidt's work. Greene has been fascinated by moral dilemmas. I can explain why that's not a smart thing to do if you want to understand our moral nature.

Only optional actions A and B are possible. Both intuitively feel wrong because they cause harm to innocent people. When people are asked to choose an action, their answers are split. Greene sees this as evidence that intuition is unreliable. He's missing the fact that moral dilemmas are an exception to the general rule that the final judgment on a moral situation is intuitive.

Moral dilemma example:

Intuition is correct that option A is not something we should do. The same is true for option B. But intuition cannot weigh the consequences and choose the option which causes the least harm. That job falls to reason. That's why two parts of the brain light up on fMRI when moral dilemmas are being considered.

Greene blames the hit-or-miss outcomes when testing moral dilemmas on intuition when reasoning is at fault.

Hume pointed out long ago that we humans adore our ability to reason. That's why reason has dominated moral philosophy for centuries but has yet to make a significant contribution to our understanding of the topic.

Sadly Greene, Haidt and others seem to be trying to find ways to fault intuition and hang onto their fantasies about reason and morality.

 

[Araceli Cianna]

Yes, I am a pagan, that's why I chose it. The ethics are about looking after the earth, animals, and fellow human beings. It's basic decency. Finding out the supernatural is not real would not change anything for me. I enjoy feeling connected to nature. Nature is what we are, after all.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

So, what say you about this? Would the Parable of the Good Samaritan be any less meaningful and poignant to you if the supernatural claims of Christianity were conclusively refuted? Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you? Turn the other cheek? The least among all of you is the greatest? The humble should be exalted and the exalted humbled? It is better to serve than to be served etc.?

I extend the same question to every religion.

Yes: the message of Christianity would be very different without the supernatural aspect. If Christianity’s supernatural claims aren’t true, then the implication of “do not resist an evil person” changes from “trust that God will make things right in the end” to “allow injustice to perpetuate itself.”

And Jesus doesn’t say “the humble should be exalted;” he says “the humble will be exalted.” It isn’t a suggestion to others; it’s a promise from him... and it’s a promise that relies on the supernatural to be honoured.

Edit: IMO, Christianity being ethical depends on its claims being true.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Having said that, I am as curious as the OP is why anyone would think removing the supernatural support for an ethics would necessitate kicking the ethics down the street.

The ethics of an act - or a code of behaviour - depend on its practical consequences. Those consequences are going to often depend on what is and isn’t true about the physical world.

 

[joe1776]

The ethics of an act - or a code of behaviour - depend on its practical consequences. Those consequences are going to often depend on what is and isn’t true about the physical world.

Your conclusion rests on the premise that we humans are morally guided by the code of ethics we accept. I doubt that premise because Christians, like atheists and agnostics, have abolished legal slavery and accepted the equality of women even though neither of those positions is supported in their Bible.

I think the moral advances we humans make are conscience-driven; and conscience is a moral guidance faculty we all share that is unaffected by our beliefs.