More on the Atheist Debate

Posted on November 3, 2009
Filed Under Religion | 2 Comments

Surprisingly that quick post from the other day on Postmodern Conservative and the New Atheists got a bit of traction. Razib put up some comments at Secular Right. There were then two more posts (here and here) at Postmodern Conservative. I think my own position was misunderstood a little. I’m not making complaints about people seeing others as immoral. My own comments basically reduced to seeing the role of Heidegger as pretty odd for an argument against atheists. I don’t think I said anything about morality at all. That said there were some interesting comments today by Peter I wanted to address in a more Mormon context.

Peter says,

Christ freed us from the limitations of our merely biological natures through his perfect reconciliation of the nature of God and the nature of man. He was, the Nicene church fathers concluded, fully God and fully man, and his incarnation and victory over death divinized every man. So he freed each of us for unlimited love for every other person made in God’s image, and he was the foundation for a virtuous way of life based on “a vision of the good without precedent in pagan society.”

I think for Mormons there is a more unique view of the notions of justification and sanctification. For one, even a person born again (in the LDS sense – not Evangelical sense) is still progressing, still sinning and most importantly for a Mormon, still limited by their body. Being justified thus doesn’t remove ones nature in that sense. Rather it’s more a pronouncement that you passed the test of mortality and will be resurrected in glory one day. It of course does say something about ones basic character but it doesn’t mean a person is somehow magically perfectly ethical. To a Mormon only Jesus managed that.

However to a Mormon there will be a resurrection and that will change our bodies in some way. (How isn’t clear, although to a Mormon we’ll still be materially human looking people with a fairly similar society – albeit an ethical one) I think to many Mormon materialists the main things that will change will be our brains which limit us in big ways and give us instincts, drives and the like that lead us to unethical behaviors. While I don’t want to say all Mormons have always accepted the central place of the brain in who we are, I think the Mormon view of bodies and material certainly points that way.

So while Mormons don’t disagree with Peter Lawler’s quote above, I think we tend to see it as something deferred until after death.

Moving beyond that theological point, I’m pretty skeptical that many Christians in this life are somehow more ethical than many other good people. Indeed in Mormon theology this is an important point. Mormons have multiple degrees of glory, depending upon how much of Christ one accepts. To a Mormon exaltation is Celestial glory but people who reject Christ (even after death) can still be highly moral people and worthy of a pretty high glory called Terrestrial glory. Likewise Mormons think there is something called the “light of Christ” which is given to everyone – a kind of conscience. How to take this isn’t clear. But it seems one could easily see at least part of this as many of the ethics given us by our instincts due to human evolution.

The point of all this is that to a Mormon, one can be highly ethical, even be following divine gifts of ethics, and be an atheist. Further the view of history Mormonism has is more a cyclical one of apostasy and redemption. As such it’s quite a bit different from the Catholic one which tends to see a revelation of Christ’s Church that radically transformed the world in an ethical way. (As I suspect Peter Lawler is arguing for, and probably David Hart as well). Not only do we think God can reveal a lot through non-Christians, he can reveal things to them the Christians didn’t have. That’s not in the least to deny the importance of Christianity. Just to deny it some privileged role in human history and society in terms of positive change.

While I’d never want to doubt that individual Christians have done great and marvelous things, I think the idea that Christianity was essential for this is more dubious.

Related posts:

  1. Clean Rooms and Clean Hearts
  2. Beckwith on Mormonism and Natural Law
  3. Liberty vs. Equality
  4. Varieties of Consequentialism
  5. Approaching Justice
  6. Misc LDS Stuff

Comments

2 Responses to “More on the Atheist Debate”

Just to be clear, the clearest presentation of Peter’s point is in his comment

The fundamental question is, can man as a whole (not just isolated examples here and there) live in a world without the ethics supplied by faith in the transcendent, or religious faith?

To a Mormon there are probably two ways of taking this. After all to a Mormon God is ultimately behind creation. But that’s a trivial sense and Peter clearly means something stronger. I think the LDS notion of a terrestrial kingdom pretty well demands that LDS reject this view.

However I think stronger than that history demands we reject it. After all there have been plenty of highly ethical communities. (Say the Hopi) Sometimes the communities don’t last a long time. But then I’m not sure I’d consider Italy through most of its history the pinnacle of human development either.

I think it is safe to say that Mormon doctrine implies that atheists are and can be inspired in the pursuit of any worthwhile objective, whether they believe or not.

Arminians call this “prevenient grace”. Catholics maintain the same principle. Calvinists as well (and more radically so), with some limitations. It is a practical matter of Christian orthodoxy (even more so than in the Mormon variant) that no good thing ever happens except by or through divine grace of some sort. And with the creatio ex nihilo world of Christian orthodoxy, that makes an enormous amount of sense.

Mormon theology doesn’t generally require that every good thing be so dependent, but it definitely implies that divine inspiration is nigh unto universal in one degree or another anyway.

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