Cass had felt discomfited by Fidley’s question, not only the hostile way in which it had been asked, but by the substance of it as well. He doesn’t want to be forced into criticizing religious people. He suspects that Fidley has figured this out about him and is going to exploit it.
Now it’s his turn to ask a question, and he looks at Fidley as he speaks, but Fidley doesn’t look at him.
“Professor Fidley, you’ve argued that the belief in God is as necessary to our living coherently as is our belief in logic and our belief in the lawfulness of nature. As you pointed out so eloquently, there can be no thought at all without believing in the fundamentals of thinking, in the rules of logic and the rules of scientific induction. Likewise, you want to argue, our living coherently requires our sense that we matter, and that this mattering in turn requires a Transcendental Underwriter, something beyond ourselves that ensures that we do actually matter. How is it possible to live coherently, you ask, leading lives that are worthy of us, without faith in a transcendent purpose? But there’s something about this line of reasoning that strikes me as viciously circular. If we already know that we’re worthy of having a transcendent purpose coming to us, why would we need the transcendent purpose? The transcendent purpose would be redundant. And if we don’t know that we’re worthy unless we acquire that transcendent purpose, then who says we have a transcendent purpose coming to us in the first place? This demand for a transcendent purpose seems either unneeded or unearned, or am I wrong?”
All the talk about Hume, Cass had seen, had been just so much silt-stirring. Fidley’s three-pronged argument is an elaborate variation of The Argument from Personal Purpose. Fidley’s argument is only as sound as Cass’s #19.
Fidley smiles again, that same thin gash cutting into his left cheek, and he keeps his face turned toward the audience.
“It’s hard for me to accept anything Cass Seltzer has to say about my argument, since his entire discussion has begged the question in a way I think must be obvious to everyone here, including Cass Seltzer himself. He’s coming at my argument from a moral high ground that he can’t legitimately claim. There is simply no way for an atheist such as himself to be able to claim any sort of objective morality.
“Cass Seltzer spoke of the tragedy of a child being exterminated by the absolute evil that was Nazism. But how, coming from his worldview, can he possibly maintain that there’s anything like absolute evil? It’s on the basis of the evil in this world that he argues that our world yields empirical evidence against God’s existence. But the absolute distinction between good and evil can be maintained only on the basis of God. According to the Nazi system, it was perfectly okay to send that child to his death. And without God, who’s to say the Nazis were wrong?
“Now, Cass Seltzer, of course, is not a Nazi. He has another system from which he judges the Nazis’ actions wrong, the suffering inflicted on that child evil. But if it’s just some people’s systems going up against other people’s systems, with no higher authority to adjudicate between them, then it all dissolves into moral chaos and ethical relativism, and Cass Seltzer isn’t entitled to talk about the moral complexion of the world at all.
“I can talk about it, but only because I know that there’s a God who establishes the objective difference between right actions and wrong actions, between immoral systems like Nazism and moral systems like Judeo-Christian ethics. But how can Cass Seltzer claim such objective moral distinctions?”
Fidley stops speaking, and he still isn’t looking at Cass, and Cass isn’t quite sure if this is the second question that Fidley is lobbing at him or just a rhetorical flourish.
“Is that your second question to me?”
“Yes, it is.” Still the man won’t look at Cass, and it’s beginning to irk him.
“I’d be glad to answer that question, Professor Fidley, but first I do want to point out that you didn’t answer my question, and that disappoints me. Instead, you’ve switched the topic and are arguing that my own argument makes no sense because it’s a moral argument and without God there can be no moral truths. I’m more than happy to address that point.
“Morality is often claimed by the theists to come much easier to them than to the atheists. It’s a natural thing to think. The claims of morality seem so mysterious-involving, as they do, not just claims about what is the case but about what ought to be the case-that it’s natural to feel that you have to ground them in a mysterious foundation. Morality is mysterious, God is mysterious, let’s reduce one mystery to the other and assume that the mystery of God takes care of the mystery of morality. Morality has to be more than just one people’s system of values clashing with another people’s system of values, Professor Fidley says, and I agree. But then he also says that the only way that it can be more is if there is a higher authority adjudicating between them.
“But grounding morality in God doesn’t work at all. After all, you have to ask the question whether God has any reason for his moral adjudication. Does God have some reason for endorsing a system that enshrines a moral principle like ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,’ while he rejects the principles of Nazism that sent that child and so many like him to their deaths? Professor Fidley asked me how we humans can adjudicate between moral systems if we don’t have recourse to God’s adjudication. Now I’m asking the same question about how God adjudicates. Either God has a reason for his moral decisions or he doesn’t.
“Let’s say he does. Well, then, there are reasons independent of his will, and whatever those reasons are provides the justification for what makes those moral decisions the right ones. God’s reasons for wanting us to do unto others as we would have them do unto us are the very reasons that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us. The reasons are what make such actions moral, and God himself is redundant.
“The alternative is that God has no reason at all because there are no moral reasons independent of God. But if he really has no moral reason pushing him one way or the other-because otherwise that would be the moral reason and we could leave God out of it-God could just as well have reversed himself. He might want each of us to do unto others the very thing we lie in bed worrying that someone might, God forbid, do unto us. He might order a loving father to take his son and prepare him for sacrifice, binding the terrified boy as one binds an animal to be slaughtered, and, because there is no morality independent of God, the father will obey without demurral. Ah, you say, but the Lord stayed the father’s hand, as we knew that he would, since he would never demand something as morally heinous as child sacrifice. But that’s to bring in a morality independent of God. If there really isn’t any morality independent of God, then we would all be in the position of Abraham, prepared to commit the filicide he came close to committing in Genesis 22. We would all be prepared to commit the genocide that God commands in Numbers 31, when he is outraged that not every last woman and male child of the Midianites had been killed. Without any moral reasons independent of God, God’s adjudication becomes the whim of an entirely arbitrary authority, and it doesn’t clear up the mystery of morality in the least. Without an independent concept of morality, how can we even say that God is good and that therefore his adjudication is relevant to our moral decisions?