Christianity-spouting presidential candidates versus philosophy and biblical interpretation

So, a lot of people, and not just her most ardent backers, applauded U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren for raising Matthew 25, namely, the phrase about "whatever you do to the least of these, you have done unto me.

Well ... it's not so nice, in two ways that I mention on Twitter and one way that I'll add to that.

Matthew 25 & "the least of these" is nice, but if you really need a deity to tell you that?
You probably need to learn what the Euthyphro Dilemma is.
It's called #Philosophy, folks, something not enough Americans know as is. Here's a chance to learn a bit https://t.co/W8XSPVIH8J

— I'll Be Biden Time in South Carolina primary 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) February 26, 2020

So,.what is this dilemma?

Per the link (and you can find it at any basic philosophy website, too, as I slack on a vow to use Wikipedia less this year and stop rewarding its Zionist owner), it's pretty simple, and it comes from Plato. Whitehead wasn't right that all philosophy, or even all Western philosophy, is but footnotes to Plato, but most of pre-1900 Western philosophy mostly is. But I digress.

Plato had Socrates ponder to Euthyphro:

"Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"

And it IS a dilemma.

In case you don't want to think it through, let me help.

Substitute the word "good," and it becomes yet more stark.

If something good is loved by the gods because it is good, then the idea of goodness stands outside of the gods. If something is good because it's loved by the gods, then divine decrees could be arbitary.

And, yes, Plato used "the gods" plural. But, many classical Greeks were some sort of henotheists, at a minimum. Besides, it actually applies in spades to the Greek-extracted omnipotent + omnibenevolent god of Christianity.

(I had a graduate student at Harvard Divinity, a deep drinker from the "Ground of Being" [use solemn voice] Paul Tillich idea of god claim it didn't, but he was simply wrong.)

So, that's the philosophy issue: Trying to ground human ethics on a divine pronouncement gets you in trouble.

And, per that Wiki link, it's not a false dilemma and the idea exists independently of Platonism.

Per the tag, I've obviously blogged about this before.

==

And now for the biblical interpretation side.

Click this link to read Matthew 25, especially the last part from which Warren extracts "the least of these," if you're not familiar.

Three originally independent chunks of text, with a loose unity, come together.

The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins is about being prepared for the Last Judgement.

The Parable of the Ten Talents is about manifesting one's faith while living a life expecting the return of the king — "The Return of the King" — it's about expecting the Last Judgement and manifesting faith, not about expecting Aragorn. The parable talks of the "master," to be honest, not a "king," but I couldn't resist the joke.

It doesn't come off as much of a parable as the Virgins, but, the passage begins with "again," indicating that it too should be regarded as a kingdom parable.

The Sheep and Goats ends us.

I don't call it a parable at all, though many commentators do. There is no "again" connecting it, and there is no "the kingdom is like" introduction. "Pronouncement story" (extended) or something like that is a better descriptive.

Anyway ...

It's a story about that Last Judgment to which the two parables above point.

Yes, Jesus does say to the "sheep" just what Warren quotes.

He also sends the goats to an eternal hell. It says that quite explicitly at the end of the story.

So, my second tweet:

Let us also remember that Matthew 25 is overall a biblical chapter about the Christian Last Judgment, with a vengeful omnipotent god sending people to an eternal hell.
Early Xn Fathers like Tertullian got their jollies by imagining part of the fun of heaven wld be watching hell.

— I'll Be Biden Time in South Carolina primary 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) February 26, 2020

And, yes, all of that, including the Tertullian stuff, is quite true. Yes, it's a punishment based on good works, not Pauline faith, faith, faith. Still, it's an eternal punishment based on this-world temporal evil. Arguably, the Jehovah's Witnesses idea of annihilation is less painful.

But, this is the Golden Rule, right?

Yes, and ...

The Silver Rule, as it's often called, is better. It's more laissez-faire. It's less meddling.

And, it is?

"Do NOT do unto others what you do NOT want done unto yourself."

In other words, live and let live in an ethical sense.

So, all political candidates, above all, presidential ones? "Judge not (by what biblical passages you cite) lest ye be judged."

‘Critical’ Xns not any more rational than fundys?

Or at the least, they can be just as determined in their habits and depth of motivated reasoning, perhaps.

In one particular case, I know that’s true.

In an extended debate on Google Plus with a new Harvard Divinity School student, I wound up learning a number of things along that line.

I started the thread with this post:

If God wants us to be unselfish and think of others first, then why does he want us to think above him above everyone else?

I explained that this was influenced by an actual religion column by a conservative, mainline Protestant (Lutheran) but nonfundamentalist minister.

Eventually, Mr. Harvard Div responded:

When you base your joke on an if that presumes the Christian God, you leave the question of whether God exists behind. You enter a world that assumes such a God exists.

So, thing No. 1 I learned?

This person thinks a rhetorical device use of “if” thinks that I’m actually committed to the propositional statement that follows the “if.” Either he’s clueless about use of rhetoric, or he’s willing to distort my rhetorical stance that much that he’s willing to engage in intellectual dishonesty. Or a bit of both.

Anyway, he then goes on to make a claim I expected more from a conservative, non-critical-scholarship Christian.

So you seriously think that, granting a creator of everything, literally an author of everything, that one could effectively do good without loving the author?-- and further you believe that so strongly that you think it's not even a passably good argument?

I responded in two ways, saying, basically, I and many other secularists feel that way, and we have nearly 2,500 years of philosophical history behind us.

Plato raised this issue 2500 years ago in the Euthyphro – are things good because god(s) say(s) so, or is/are god(s) good because they follow an order of goodness outside it/them? Plato saw way back then that one cannot logically anchor morality on the existence of adivinity. I know many Christian apologists claim he presents a false dilemma, but their counterarguments are weak. … The answer to your question, not just from me, but from many secularists of all sorts of nametags ... is YES. Yes, I believe one can do good without loving a creator, and that logically, claiming a creator is necessary is horribly illogical.

By this point, I wasn’t expecting him to accept Plato’s argument. And he didn’t, with this response:

Plato's gods in the Euthyphro are not all that similar to the Christian God which you were here critiquing, and Christian thinkers have described their God largely in terms that avoid the Euthyphro dilemma.

To which, and other things, I said, basically, “that’s your perception.” It wasn’t the first time in the thread where he made a statement of his opinion, IMO, assuming it was right. 

Beyond that, the Wiki article on the Euthyphro dilemma, linked above, directly addresses his absurd claim that Plato’s thought can’t apply to the Christian god.

The dilemma can be modified to apply to philosophical theism, where it is still the object of theological and philosophical discussion, largely within the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions. As Leibniz presents this version of the dilemma: "It is generally agreed that whatever God wills is good and just. But there remains the question whether it is good and just because God wills it or whether God wills it because it is good and just; in other words, whether justice and goodness are arbitrary or whether they belong to the necessary and eternal truths about the nature of things."

The fact that hordes of Christian, Jewish and Islamic philosophers worried about it shows they damn well knew just how much it applies.

And, the disingenuousness of their response shows that, too. Still from the Wiki article:

Anselm scholar Katherin A. Rogers observes, many contemporary philosophers of religion suppose that there are true propositions which exist as platonic abstracta independently of God. Among these are propositions constituting a moral order, to which God must conform in order to be good. Classical Judaeo-Christian theism, however, rejects such a view as inconsistent with God's omnipotence, which requires that all that there is is God and what he has made. "The classical tradition," Rogers notes, "also steers clear of the other horn of the Euthyphro dilemma, divine command theory." From a classical theistic perspective, therefore, the Euthyphro dilemma is false. As Rogers puts it, "Anselm, like Augustine before him and Aquinas later, rejects both horns of the Euthyphro dilemma. God neither conforms to nor invents the moral order. Rather His very nature is the standard for value.”

The last two sentences, per the analytic philosophy that said Harvard Div student showed elsewhere he (for good reasons, I guess, from his point of view) doesn’t like, are basically meaningless. The last sentence, if anything, accepts the first “horn” of the dilemma, that things are good only because (a) god says they are. 

The second-last sentence, combined with it, if it came out of Paul Tillich’s mouth, would be calling God the “ground of moral being.” But, wordplay can’t escape logic.

He follows with this:

Now, you may find such a God logically impossible, but it is still a mis-representation to say that if this logically impossible God exists, then he couldn't do X because it is logically impossible (ha ha, let's all have a laugh because of how these people didn't think of this). They did think of this. Their answer is fully consistent with the nature of God that they point out; if God's nature is the embodiment of moral value, as in Christian thought, then it follows that to love him is to love what is good.

I realize how wedded he is to Tillich-type thought with that statement. In fact, in an earlier thread, on Facebook, he more directly referenced Tillich, in the same comment as saying how he rejected analytic philosophy.

Yep, and we know why.

Well, sir, Paul Tillich is as dead as god, and so is Tillich’s theology. Really, if that’s the best a supposedly broad-minded student can bring to Harvard (it’s his first semester, so, I won’t blame it ON Harvard yet). In fact, I’m surprised the Wiki article on the Euthyphro dilemma didn’t bring Tillich into the discussion. After all, his theology is largely based on ontology, and, as I’ve blogged before about Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of god, it fails because …

Here’s that damned analytic philosophy again …

Because it commits a category mistake. “Existence” is NOT an attribute.

And, that said, I know where Mr. Harvard Div’s claim that Platonic gods are not like the Xn god comes from. They’re not “the ground of being.” And, that’s why people like this don’t like analytic theology – because it cuts through the attempted word play to get at actual meaning and content.

Anyway, lesson learned. Any time I should again get in a discussion of morals, ethics or related issues, let alone the “problem of evil,” with a “critical scholar” Christian, I’ll ask questions first. Starting with what they think about Tillich in particular and modern “ontological theology” in general.

That said, and again, it’s meant to be snarky … what if a Hindu claimed Krishna was the “ground of being”? I suspect that at least some “enlightened, tolerant” critical-thinking Christian scholars would first laugh, then go on the critical-philosophical attack.

UPDATE: Speaking of, a Western academic Buddhist, on a FB thread, says "Karma and reincarnation aren't falsifiable claims." So, this isn't even a liberal-vs-conservative Christianity deal, with them being the two sides of the same coin, it's really a religion vs. naturalism claim.

I of course responded that David Hume first pointed out, even if not using Carl Sagan's words, that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." I also, riffing on Ben Johnson's comment about patriotism, politely said the claim "metaphysical stance X isn't falsifiable" was the last refuge of the religious, without adding the word "scoundrel."

For both conservative and liberal Christians, not only is Yahweh jealous – so are his followers. That's the second lesson learned.