UPDATE: In keeping with the title of the Baptist Press article, this post’s photo has been changed to a picture of Penny praying before a meal with Halloween monster teeth in place.

The inquirer was struck by the fact that Colossians 3:1 tells Christians, ”Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.” Did you catch that? “Since, then, you HAVE BEEN raised?” It seems like Paul is talking about our resurrection as something past, not something future; as our life of discipleship and not some actual miracle in which the literally dead come to life again.

My questioner wanted to know how to understand this passage in light of Paul’s statements elsewhere (e.g. 1 Corinthians) in which the resurrection is forcefully described as a future miracle. Had Paul perhaps changed his mind? Was this evidence of a contradiction in Scripture? Is it the case, perhaps, that we are currently living fully resurrected lives and that this is exactly what the resurrection looks like?

To help set the question in a more informed context I mentioned the work of N. T. Wright. Wright is currently a professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and Newsweek once referred to him as “the world’s leading New Testament Scholar.” In his excellent book on the resurrection of Jesus, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Wright examines all the literature from the early Christian era (and before) that speaks of “resurrection” and delves into the specific meaning behind that word. When he considers the passage in Colossians 3, he writes that Paul is speaking metaphorically when he uses the term “resurrection” and that, in so doing, he was adapting a long-standing Jewish practice:

Of couse, some might argue that Lewis is mistaken (along with others who employ the so-called Moral Argument for God): there are no objective moral facts about right and wrong. If that were the case then the argument would fall apart. Well, to such skeptical folks and as an aid to the Wednesday night class, the following is an argument for the reality of objective moral facts grounded in broader considerations of epistemology, that is, theories of knowledge or ideas regarding how we know what we know.

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We believe most of what we believe on the basis of evidence of one sort or another: informal observation, formal experimentation, reportage, etc. (I’ll call these evidential beliefs “Level 3 Beliefs”; the reason why is coming later.) But in all these cases, our “ways of knowing” are predicated on more fundamental epistemic principles, principles which are ultimately rooted in unprovable, indeed untestable axioms of belief. Here are two just as examples.

The Reality of the External World: I have an experience of light, color, temperature, texture, smell, taste, etc. Taken together this aggregate is sometimes called my “phaneron,” the totality of that of which I am aware. But, does this aggregate refer to something external to myself, an objective reality beyond my own mind? There’s no way to prove that, no way to test it even; it’s entirely possible that I am experiencing something comparable to an extended dream and every test I could think of might just be another part of the dream. And yet, despite this, it’s entirely reasonable to believe that the external world is really “out there,” that it’s not all just “in my head.” In fact, the alternative (i.e. solipsism) seems quite insane.

The Reality of the Past: Just as I have a strong (and totally intuitive) belief in the reality of the external world, I likewise have a very strong sense that there is something we call “the past.” I have thoughts which seem to be about that past: we call them memories. I see what seem to be signs of time’s passage all around me. But just as with the external world, the reality of the past isn’t really open to test. How do I know that my memories refer to anything? How do I know that they aren’t just fanciful creations of my mind, a function of my imagination perhaps? How do I know that the apparent signs of age around me are really signs of age and not just the way things are? Every test I could conceive of and carry out would seem futile. After all, once I plan the test, execute it, and then find myself in a position to consider the results, the entire test will be “in the past”… so how do I know I’m not just imagining the past reality of the test itself? And thus solipsism can become “moment solipsism”—a philosophy advocated by some schools of Buddhism. But again, despite the impossibility of proving that the past really happened, it’s an entirely reasonable dogma, one that would seem—if not impossible—then at least insane to deny.

Now these probably aren’t the only fundamental, untestable, and axiomatic rational human beliefs (I’ll call them Level 1 Beliefs), but they’re enough to demonstrate that there are indeed some pieces of legitimate knowledge about objective realities that do not come to us by way of evidence or experimentation of any sort.

Once we’ve established this very important concept with reference to the Level 1 Beliefs, I think that we can move on to legitimately class belief in some other objective phenomena alongside them as (at least largely) axiomatic. These beliefs, while not being utterly immune to test like the Level 1 are, can nevertheless be seen as epistemic “defaults” which can reasonably be believed in the absence of evidence (Level 2 Beliefs, let’s say).

I’d class notions like freewill in this category. I think I’m justified in just assuming that it’s real—my intuitive experience of it is that immediate and strong. The same thing goes for the reality of conscious minds “in” people beside myself. After all, I know that I exist—in the sense of an integrated psychological ego. I’m quite confident of that. And I see other bodies out there in the world that look a lot like mine. Those bodies move and dress and talk a lot like me, too. I’m even told that those bodies contain a specific part—brains—that are a lot like my body’s brain. Indeed, given all this I have a strong intuitive sense that those bodies aren’t just bodies but that they have self-conscious minds (however that works) “in” them also, minds just like me. But I can’t really prove that. I can know that I have an internal consciousness, but I can only assume that the same is true of them, that they aren’t just highly sophisticated biological automata mindlessly executing neurological programming. But even though I can’t prove it, again, it’s entirely reasonable to believe that other people have minds and are therefore full “persons.” And, again, the alternative belief just seems so absurdly egotistical as to be literally crazy.

Now, unlike the reality of the external world or the reality of the past, however, it seems at least possible that someday someone could develop a way to test the reality of free will and other minds. And it’s possible that these tests would end up either proving or disproving their objective existence. But until that day comes—indeed, even if it never comes—I feel entirely justified in assuming—on the basis of my intuitive experience—that my free will and your mind are objectively real. In other words, for Level 2 Beliefs, the default position is one of belief, and the burden of proof rests on the denier.

Now we come to morality.

Just as I have an immediate and powerful subjective mental experience of such qualities as color and temperature and texture, I also have an immediate and powerful subjective experience of such qualities as wickedness and, to a lesser extent, goodness. I see footage of the emaciated bodies of Auschwitz prisoners staring blankly through barbed wire fences, I read stories of the outrages of Josef Fritzl, I hear of children abducted from their families only to be raped and tortured before being dumped (dead) into a shallow grave along the interstate. In each case my mind immediately forms the strong and unshakable impression that these things aren’t merely indecorous, or socially gauche, or rude; they’re something qualitatively different, they partake of a phenomenon we call “evil.” Similarly, when I read of men like Jaime Jaramillo rescuing Colombian street children from sewer hideouts and giving them a decent life, or Bishnu Shrestha fighting off forty armed men to protect an Indian woman (no joke, forty men!), I likewise have a strong immediate impression that these actions aren’t simply kindly or seemly; they also partake of a qualitatively different phenomenon: what we call “righteousness.” The former are things which simply should not be done; the latter are things which, in some sense, should be done.

Now my experience of evil and righteousness is not only immediate and strong, it’s also fairly consistent: the same stimuli provoke the same evaluations over and over again. Also, the great bulk of humanity—across time and cultures even—agree with me in my evaluations; we generally concur, at least with reference to the extreme cases, as to which realities and states partake of evil and which of righteousness. Given all this—the immediacy, the strength, the consistency, and the transpersonal ubiquity of these moral judgments—I’m inclined to think that my subjective experience of good and evil is not merely subjective but is instead a perception of legitimate objective realities beyond myself, of objective existential duties. And this in much the same way that I believe my subjective experiences of light and darkness refer to legitimate objective realities beyond myself. Or, again, just as my mind naturally forms the conclusion that other people besides myself have minds of their own and that I possess free will, so my mind rather naturally forms the conclusion that some things are indeed objectively evil and others objectively good.

Now I don’t think that the objective reality of good and evil are necessarily beyond the reach of testing. I suppose that some clever person could one day imagine a way to test whether my experience of good and evil were veridical or totally illusory. And thus I wouldn’t class my belief in the reality of objective good and evil as a Level 1 Belief. Still, I think the belief is very much an epistemic default and so I would class it as a Level 2 Belief. As such, I think that belief in the objective reality of good and evil is justified until such notions are disproven and, thus, the burden of proof rests on the denier.

Now I’m familiar with several arguments employed by skeptics of objective morality in an attempt to meet that burden of proof. There are those who argue on dogmatic grounds that nothing other than matter and energy exists and that moral duties, as neither matter nor energy, simply cannot therefore exist. There are those who argue that the lack of complete agreement among people as to what is right and what is wrong undermines the idea of objective moral duties. There are those who point to the grisliness of the animal world as cause for skepticism. And there are those who argue that our perceived sense of moral duty is just an atavistic delusion, that “right” and “wrong” ultimately reduce to actions which promote Darwinian reproductive advantage and disadvantage respectively and that our consciences are just our genes bossing us around under the guise of something grander.

When I survey these arguments I find them all to be more or less weak. Indeed, I find some of them so weak as to seem sort of sad.

As for the physicalists, their attempted disproof merely begs the question: how do they know that only matter and energy exist? When was that proven? As for people like me, we already believe that something that transcends the universe of matter and energy exists (the universe’s metaphysically necessary cause); maybe objective moral duties are just one more of those things in heaven and earth, Horatio Dr. Dennet, than are dreamt of in your philosophies.

The relativist argument is a bit better in that it at least tries to prove its case, but it still falls far, far short of success. So there are some few people out there in the world who don’t think raping children is wrong. So what? There are also some few people out there in the world who are blind, and many more who are color blind. Do those people prove that there’re no objective stars in the sky to be seen, or that light doesn’t actually come in different wavelengths? Of course not. Those people just have bad eyes. Similarly, unabashed child molesters are just bad people. The presence of defective senses (physical or moral) doesn’t at all demonstrate the unreality of the thing intended to be perceived.

There is the argument the while it is seemingly “wrong” for people to kill other people, it is not thus wrong for lions to kill other people and that this undermines the idea of truly objective moral truths. This argument is better. But it’s still not good. Lions aren’t genuine moral agents and so their actions don’t rise to the level of morality or immorality.

Imagine that you brought a lion into a room with large numbers painted on the floor at different places. Then, from some safe vantage point you tell the lion, through a loud speaker, “Lie down on the number that is equal to square root of nine!” After a few moments the lion grows bored of standing around and plops down on the ground. As it so happens, the lion lies down on the number twelve. Now, would it be correct to say that the lion did the math incorrectly? No, of course not; the lion isn’t doing math at all. Its mind (assuming it has a mind) isn’t sophisticated enough to even understand the concept of square roots; it’s just lying down when it’s tired. But the objective truth that the square root of nine is equal to three is unaffected by this obvious limitation of the lion’s. In the same way, the objective truth of morality would be totally unaffected by the inability of lesser minds’ to understand it—whether those lesser minds belong to lions “murdering” people for food or to babies “stealing” other people’s keys for stimulation.

Now for the biggie.

The Darwinian reductionistic argument is probably the best thing going in the skeptical community on this matter. It’s simple, it gets to dress itself up in the trappings of scientific jargon (always a plus), yet, just like all instances of evolutionary psychology, it’s immune to scientific testing since all the supposedly relevant neurological changes are supposed to have taken place at the microscopic level millions of years ago—good luck finding those fossilized neurons! It even has some plausibility to it: after all, I grant that I may indeed find my wife’s figure attractive because of Darwinian reasons, why not apply the same calculus to my antipathy for child-murder?

But even with all these advantages, there are fatal problems with a socio-biological reductionistic interpretation of our sense of moral duties.

First, there’s the problem of scope. My sense of moral obligation extends to all human beings and, potentially, even to non-humans. As a white American I think it’s wrong to torture a white American child. But I also think that it is equally wrong to torture a black Congolese child. And, I suppose, if ever we contact intelligent life on other planets, I’d effortlessly confess my belief that it would be wrong to torture a purple Alpha Centarian child. So why this universal scope to my sense of duty? Some would say it’s due to the effects of “group selection;” not only do individual generational lines evolve, but entire communities evolve as a group and thus come to develop altruistic behavior that benefits all and sundry. The problem with this oft-repeated trope (it’s especially popular among laymen) is that the great bulk of biologists totally reject the idea of group selection. It’s precisely the ability to outperform one’s fellows—to compete against them reproductively and win—that amounts to success on a Darwinian understanding. So my willingness to sacrifice and possibly even die for total strangers that don’t carry my genes would be a terrible Darwinian strategy and thus can’t be reasonably attributed to Darwinian pressures.

Well, what about the more modest idea of “kin selection?” Like group selection, kin selection asserts that altruistic behavior develops within communities so that the reproductive fitness of the community as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But unlike traditional group selection, kin selection posits that organisms will develop altruism within the family, that is, towards those who share the same genes (a corresponding xenophobia is supposed to develop toward “outsiders”). In this way, even if I ultimately sacrifice my life for the good of the tribe, that tribe shares my genes and thus in their Darwinian success I find my own, so to speak. But this just brings us right back to the problem we faced at the beginning: why do I feel a sense of moral obligation, not just to my own blood relatives, but to all sentient life, including the “outsiders?” Why do I think that I should sacrifice for strangers in need or risk harm to defend a powerless woman of a totally different race? The dilemma remains: the informed skeptic is trying to get premium group selection mileage out of economy kin selection gas.

Well, how do informed skeptics respond to this problem? They cheat. They claim that our capacity for altruism developed as a result of Darwinian kin selection and then, wouldn’t you know it, it’s currently “misfiring” in our modern contexts so as to make us act in ways that are often vengefully anti-Darwinian. As Richard Dawkins has written, “Both [our sexual desire for the infertile and our altruism toward non-relatives] are misfirings, Darwinian mistakes…” (The God Delusion). So our willingness to be flagrantly selfless is really just the product of an instinct to be subtly selfish, an instinct that has gone haywire.

Person One: “Why did Joe buy a blue car?”

Person Two: “Because Joe really loves red.”

Person One: “How is that an explanation at all?”

Person Two: “Well, clearly his love of red has gone haywire.”

You’ll pardon me if I don’t find this particularly compelling.

But there is another very serious problem with the Darwinian reductionist account (DRA): it seems to be talking about the wrong thing. Our moral sense is, as I’ve said, largely about what we should and shouldn’t do—and that in something of an absolute existentialist way; not merely what we should and shouldn’t do if we want to pass along our genes as effectively as possible. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that rape “works” in a Darwinian sense; it enables a man to flood the gene pool with his own progeny. Okay, would that make rape morally right? It seems that, on the DRA, it would do exactly that. On the DRA “right” is just an instinctual and lexical place-holder for “reproductively advantageous.” So, if something like rape proves reproductively advantageous it is, by definition, “right”. Similarly let’s assume for the sake of argument that caring for abandoned children doesn’t “work” in the Darwinian sense; it so burdens a couple’s time and resources that they have fewer of their own biological children than they otherwise would and thus they don’t pass on their genes to the extent that they could have. Would this mean that caring for abandoned children is morally wrong? Again, given the DRA, that would certainly seem to be the case. For, again, on the DRA “wrong” is just an instinctual and lexical place-holder for “reproductively disadvantageous.” So if something like caring for abandoned children—feeding them, binding up their wounds, loving them—proves reproductively disadvantageous, then the practice is, by definition, immoral. But surely this isn’t at all what we mean by “right” and “wrong”; in fact, the above “moral” calculations seem disturbingly evil in themselves—like the sort of things a Nazi would tell himself to sooth his conscience after a long day of murdering Jews.

Thus, whatever insights evolutionary psychology may have to offer us in terms of why we do what we do, it seems to be totally irrelevant to the question of what we ought to do—and the skeptics know it. To return to Dawkins for a moment: even though he cheerily chalks up our moral sense to a misfiring herd-instinct, he just can’t leave the matter there, and that’s very much to his credit. As I said above, Dawkins calls our universal sense of altruism one of a pair of “misfirings, Darwinian mistakes,” but he immediately adds that they are “blessed, precious mistakes.”

What?!

One wonders, according to what standard is Dawkins evaluating the “blessedness” of these mistakes? Is he just giving himself over to consciously vicious circular reasoning in which our instincts are “good” because “good” is just another word for our instincts? That doesn’t seem to be what he’s getting at. It seems instead that Dawkins is implicitly endorsing the universality of our altruistic scope as, in some sense, objectively correct—the way it should be. In other words, Dawkins, for all of his pontificating about viciously selfish gene-centered instincts masquerading as transcendent moral truths, just can’t help but concede to an objective moral standard in the end—one against which our instincts can be measured. Our moral impulses may be genetic mistakes, but they’re the right mistakes nevertheless.

For all these reasons I think that the arguments of the skeptics fail; they thus haven’t met the burden of proof necessary to overthrow our intuitive perception of the objective evil and goodness that supervenes on certain phenomena. As a result, our Level 2 Belief in the reality of good and evil stands.

The entire month of May this year is part of the season of Easter. While we tend to think of Easter as a single day, historically speaking the Christian Church has spread the fun out a bit, setting a full month aside (and then some) to focus on the significance of Jesus’ resurrection. This drawn-out nature of the holiday is only fitting. After all, since the resurrection of Jesus has had such enormous ramifications down through the centuries pertaining not only to obviously spiritual matters but also to social and even political issues, why not reflect that enduring historical influence through an enduring commemoration? So just as we spent April 24^th focusing on the resurrection here at First Baptist, we’ll do the same on May 1^st… and May 8^th… and May 15^th; you get the idea.

 Think about what that means for a second. Resurrection isn’t just dangled in front of us for a moment only to be whisked away and stored out of sight for the rest of the year. Rather, that notion of newness, of victory over seemingly impossible resistance, is made to linger. The incredible story of Christ’s triumph over death itself and the equally incredible inspiration it offers to us lasts… and then it lasts some more—waiting for us to be ready to receive it.

Easter calls out to us with the enticing idea that change is possible, and that not just in some airy-fairy spiritual realm that’s two steps away from sheer make-believe; change is possible here and now, in the real world of space and time, matter and energy. Jesus demolished sin, overthrew death, and humiliated the forces of evil; surely we (with his grace to support us) can give up smoking, or build a better relationship with our spouse, or finally go back to school like we’ve been planning.

What was that? Oh, you missed your chance last week; you say you weren’t quite ready? Well, how about this week? It’s still Easter after all.