googlef87758e9b6df9bec.html A Sure Word: Is the Bible Immoral? Part 1

Saturday, November 14, 2015

Is the Bible Immoral? Part 1

Some people criticize the Bible with the claim that it is immoral. That is, they believe the history recorded in the Bible and the commandments of the Mosaic Law offend our sense of right and wrong and so are evidence that the Bible is not the revelation of a good God. It's an excuse to not be a Christian or believe in God.

Critics who use this argument will also sometimes accuse Christians of picking and choosing which parts of the Bible we want to believe. If a Christian, for example, speaks out on the political issue of gay marriage, a critic might ask why doesn't the Christian also believe in executing homosexuals as commanded in Leviticus 20:13? This is an obvious attempt to undermine the Christian's credibility, claiming he appeals to the Bible when condemning homosexuality but ignores other parts of the Bible. If Christians feel we can ignore parts of the Bible with which we disagree, then how can we condemn the critic for doing the same?

Two of the most often cited examples of the Bible's immorality are probably God's command to the Israel army to kill the Amalekites (1 Samuel 15) and the Bible seeming to condone slavery (Leviticus 25:44-46, et al). I intend to discuss these two examples in more detail in my next two posts. In this post, I intend to discuss the weakness of these criticisms in general.

When responding to arguments like this, there are several points that should be kept in mind. The first, and probably the most significant, is to ask by what standard does the critic judge these acts to be “wrong”? If there were no God, then the universe is empty of morality. Everything that happens is nothing more than matter acting on matter. One man killing another is no more “evil” than a lion killing a zebra. When a person says it's “wrong” for God to command the Israelites to kill the Amalekites, it begs the question: wrong according to who? Obviously the Universe doesn't care what happens. The Israelites didn't believe it was wrong. What makes the critic's opinion on the subject the “correct” one? No one can call anything “wrong” without first acknowledging an absolute standard of right or wrong exists. There is no such standard in an impersonal universe. Objective morality exists only if God exists.

Moving on to my second point: We can see that the critic can't ever objectively say the Bible is wrong. At best, he can only say his sense of morality differs from how he understands the Bible. Ok, then what is the critic's point in raising this criticism? Is he trying to say there is no God because the Bible records things he finds offensive? You can see how that doesn't work. It would be sort of like me saying the Holocaust didn't happen because no dictator could be that cruel. This is a logic fallacy known as an argument from outrage.

Noted apologist for atheism, Richard Dawkins, wrote in his book, The Greatest Show on Earth, “Even if it were true that evolution, or the teaching of evolution, encouraged immorality that would not imply that the theory of evolution was false.” This is one of the few things on which Dawkins and I can agree. I would never try to attack evolution by saying Darwin was a racist. By that same token, though, someone claiming the Bible is immoral is not evidence that the Bible is not true.

We can see already that these criticisms of the Bible are built upon shaky foundations. Yet there are still a couple of more points we must consider. One thing is that God established the Law specifically for His people. When God established the Nation of Israel, it differed from other nations in that it did not have an earthly ruler – God was their ruler. The Jews lived their lives according to the Law and Judges were appointed to interpret the Law whenever a dispute arose.

Eventually, the people demanded to have a king like other nations. God relented and gave them Saul. Since then, we are subject to earthly rulers and laws during our lifetimes. The Law commanded that adulterers, for example, should be stoned. In the US, adulterers aren't executed but God is still the final Judge and someday we still must stand before Him to give an account for our sins. We are still judged according to the Law. However, the punishment for our sins is no longer necessarily at the hands of earthly rulers.

Finally, the Law was given to a fallen world. Some of the things it contains do not represent God's perfect will but rather are allowances God has made for sinful people who live in a corrupt world. Consider this passage from Mark 10:

And the Pharisees came to him, and asked him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife? tempting him. And he answered and said unto them, What did Moses command you? And they said, Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement, and to put her away. And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept. But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife; And they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. (Mark 10:2-9)

We see in this passage that when Jesus was asked about divorce, He explained that it was God's intentions that people never divorced. The Laws governing divorce were only written because of the hardness of our hearts. So even if the Bible seems to allow certain things, it does not necessarily mean the Bible “endorses” that thing.


I'll talk more about specific examples in my next couple of posts. For now, suffice it to say these are weak criticisms of the Bible.

5 comments:

Steven J. said...

If there were no God, then the universe is empty of morality.

It no more follows, from the premise that a barracuda cannot be immoral, that a human cannot, that it follows that since the barracuda can breathe through gills but not on land, that this is also true of humans. Morality could well be an emergent property, developing with the capacity for sympathy and rational thought. Indeed, you come close to arguing for a pure divine command theory of ethics: morality is whatever God declares it is, and is moral merely because might makes right and omnipotence makes "absolute" right.

This is a logic fallacy known as an argument from outrage.

God is supposed to be all-good; while this formulation derives from neo-Platonist philosophy, the Bible itself contains many assertions of God's moral excellence, kindness, and mercy. Scientific theories attempt to explain how the world works, rather than passing a moral judgment on it (or on their formulators, for that matter), so it is no refutation of them if we conclude that the world they describe is cruel. But if the Bible describes God as good, yet also describes Him as acting in ways that we would regard as horrible, unjust, and unreasonable if done by anyone else, we have something of a problem.

It seems to me that the Bible's morality is inconsistent. How does the same God call down fire from heaven (twice!) on fifty hapless soldiers because their captain was insolent to one of His prophets (in 2 Kings 1), yet refuse to to do the same to a Samaritan city that was inhospitable to the Son of God (in Luke 9)? How can God in Deuteronomy (and of course in all the curses on descendants -- from Canaan's to all of Adam's -- in Genesis) punish children for the sins of their parents and declare in Ezekiel 18 that He will not do this, but will punish each soul for its own sins? The problem is that the actions of God, in some parts of the Bible, are immoral, judged by His actions and commands in other parts of the Bible.

Since then, we are subject to earthly rulers and laws during our lifetimes.

The Israelites were subject to earthly rulers from the time the Mosaic Law was handed down (even ignoring parts of the law that clearly refer to establishing a monarchy). When, e.g. the law states that a betrothed woman who is raped where no witnesses are must not be put to death for adultery, it implies human authorities (city elders, tribal chiefs, etc.) who must use standards of evidence and court procedures and carry out punishments rather than leaving them to miracles. Annointing a king merely created a central authority atop the local and tribal authorities that already existed; the law from the start assumed and depended on human administrators and judges (and there's no evidence that the death penalty for adultery was abolished when the monarchy was established). So the mere existence of state-level societies today does not establish why we shouldn't, e.g. stone adulterers and heretics.

RKBentley said...

Steven J,

You said, “It no more follows, from the premise that a barracuda cannot be immoral, that a human cannot, that it follows that since the barracuda can breathe through gills but not on land, that this is also true of humans.”

I find your criticism unconvincing and not analogous. Your side has always argued that our sense of morality is an evolved trait similar to an instinct. Yet if there is no God, on what grounds can you say our instincts are “correct”? If we condemn the accounts in the Bible as “evil” according to our modern sense of morality, it is about as persuasive as saying the barracuda is “wrong” for breathing through gills instead of lungs.

You said, “... if the Bible describes God as good, yet also describes Him as acting in ways that we would regard as horrible, unjust, and unreasonable if done by anyone else, we have something of a problem.”

What exactly is the “problem”? Is there no God because the Biblical portrayal of Him strikes you as “horrible”? My point, which you've seemed to miss entirely, is that no matter how grotesque a picture you paint of the things in the Bible, it's not evidence there is no God or that the Bible isn't true.

You said, “The Israelites were subject to earthly rulers from the time the Mosaic Law was handed down.”

God ruled His people through the Law. The “standards of evidence” you mentioned were also spelled out in the Law so even the Judges, whose job it was to interpret the Law, were subject to the things written in the Law. When the time of the Kings began, the kings began to implement new laws which were not part of Mosaic Law. There is a distinct difference in the two eras.

Thanks for your comments. God bless!!

RKBentley

Steven J. said...

Yet if there is no God, on what grounds can you say our instincts are “correct”?

If there is no God, on what grounds can I say that grape juice tastes better than battery acid? If a book purporting to be inspired by God insists that battery acid tastes better, am I supposed to believe that my own sense of taste is deceiving me? Human moral instincts are right -- about us -- because they're human moral instincts. They might be wrong about some very different species (Darwin in fact speculated about this in one of his notebooks).

Is there no God because the Biblical portrayal of Him strikes you as “horrible”?

Two points: first, there might be a God even if the Bible is wrong about Him; "the Bible is inerrant and inspired," if true, implies that "God exists," but the converse is not true.

Second, finding a command to kill little boys and every non-virgin girl "horrible" is not some idiosyncrasy of mine, or some weird modern ethical notion (like civil rights for vegetables) dreamed up by liberal atheists. It's a real moral problem (indeed, in the story of Abraham bargaining with God not to kill the innocent along with the guilty in Sodom, it's a real moral problem recognized in the Torah itself -- and oddly, there God does not solve it by declaring that humans are His property and whatever He does to them is moral by definition). Declaring that this is the action of a morally perfect Being is like declaring that "2 + 2 = 5" is the equation of a genius mathematician. And, again, God's actions in some parts of the Bible are hard to reconcile with the moral principles attributed to God in other parts of the Bible. A book that flatly contradicts itself cannot be entirely true and infallible.

You seem to be at some pains to argue that, e.g. the death penalty for adultery ought not be the law for modern societies. After all, of course, the establishment of the monarchy is irrelevant to whether the Mosaic Law remained in force -- as is, indeed, the establishment of additional laws and regulations (note that 2 Kings 14:6, Joash cites the Mosaic law as a reason not to kill the sons of his father's assassins). So the mere establishment of secular governments rather than eternal rule by prophets and judges cannot, of itself, render obsolete commandments to kill practioners of non-biblical religions. So what could, except your own conviction that this isn't really a very good law?

RKBentley said...

Steven J,

You said, “Human moral instincts are right -- about us -- because they're human moral instincts.”

Yet you continuously claim that the acts of humans in the Bible are “wrong.” I say again, “wrong according to who?” To you? Why is your “moral instinct” correct and the people's of the Bible wrong?

You said, “finding a command to kill little boys and every non-virgin girl "horrible" is not some idiosyncrasy of mine, or some weird modern ethical notion (like civil rights for vegetables) dreamed up by liberal atheists. It's a real moral problem.”

You cannot even explain to me what the moral problem is. The Israelites were acting in a way they thought was best for them. Their “moral insticts” are obviously different than yours. You could try to argue that it's better for a species to not kill little boys but infanticide occurs regularly in nature so there must be some evolutionary benefit in it. Regardless, you have no moral footing to say your view on the matter is the correct one.

You said, “You seem to be at some pains to argue that, e.g. the death penalty for adultery ought not be the law for modern societies.”

Death is STILL the penalty for adultery. It's also the penalty for lying, stealing, and killing. The Bible says, “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). We are all sinners, we will all die, and we will all be judged by God's Law. None of that has changed. The only difference is, God once had a system where His justice was exercised immediately by His people.

Thanks for your comments. God bless!!

RKBentley

Steven J. said...

Of course there's an evolutionary benefit in infanticide: you kill off infants who don't carry your genes to leave more resources for infants who do. "More resources for copies of your genes" is pretty much what natural selection is about. You may, of course, save infant females because they can bear children that also carry your genes. Hence God's purported commands to the Israelites are crudely very Darwinian.

Side note: archaeological evidence suggests that no such genocide actually occurred: there is no evidence of a single wave of wrecked cities, or a wholesale replacement of Canaanite material culture. That, and the fact that the Israelites spoke Canaanite rather than the Aramaic-Egyptian creole one would expect from their reported history, suggests that they arose in Canaan, and took over the culture with somewhat less violence than the book of Joshua implies.

Anyway, the moral instincts of the people in the Bible changed over time. A big part of that change was what has been called "the expanding circle of moral concern." If you don't think of people outside the clan/tribe/nation as anything except competitors for resources or breeding stock, then you might as well treat them in ways that you would find abhorrent to use when dealing with someone inside the clan/tribe/nation. Thus, Jacob is annoyed when two of his sons massacre the village of Shechem, but makes no moral objection to it -- he simply notes that this will stir up antagonism from their more numerous neighbors. The Shechemites are outside his circle of moral concern. Later on, this was less true of foreigners, as the Israelites came to view them as people in their own right. Since people outside one's own family, tribe, or nation actually and objectively are people, recognizing this seems to objectively be progress.

The Old Testament does not prescribe death for stealing. There was a time in western culture when secular laws did so, but I do not think you would favor returning to such laws, or defend them as compatible with biblical morality (indeed, "death as the penalty for sin" has some logical problems: on the one hand, dumb animals and plants die, although presumably they don't sin, and human babies sometimes die, despite being too young to sin, and Christians supposedly forgiven for their sins die, and eternal conscious torment in Hell is not exactly what most people understand by "death" -- though it may be that Paul, who never actually mentions Hell in his epistles, believed either that the unrepentant wicked would be annihilated, or that eventually everyone would repent and be saved).