Paying Attention To The Sky

There was a reviewer on Amazon that got this book perfectly: “Professor `Isa Ben Adam (nice name in translation), a Palestinian Arab scholar and Absolutist, is interviewed (and debated) by Moral Relativist Libby Rawls, a black journalist and former wife, psychological social worker, surfing instructor, actress, alcoholic, and PI. What a marvellous debate ensues as Libby throws every relativist argument at the learned prof, only to have them roundly and soundly demolished!

This easy non-academic read is a useful guide for those engaged in dinner-table debates on this most crucial of issues. Obviously born from years of experience as an embattled Absolutist in American adademia, this Kreeft work is a delight to read as it sets out the arguments for and against. As everyone who’s ever debated this subject knows, it’s very hard to avoid ad hominems and other flesh-cutting retreats from reason, and they’re here just as in real life. Another step towards the Restoration of Metaphysics. This is the book you’ll want your Relativist friends to read (but which they’ll probably ignore because refutation has too many implications for their personal lives). Get it.”

You’re relativist friends won’t go anywhere near it, but highlight some of the selections below and email them. If you spend anytime on the Internet, as I do, arguing for your faith against the diabolists, learning this stuff becomes highly instructional because you see the how the august liberal mind works. Many just bloviate their talking points so it is possible to engage them and talk the air out of them. For that Professor Kreeft should have our profound thanks.

The Future of Society Under Moral Relativism
The modern West (geographically, Europe and its former colonies; theologically, apostate Christendom) is the first society in history whose mind molders are moral relativists. No other society in history has ever survived without rejecting moral relativism and believing in moral absolutes. There has never been a society of relativists, any more than a society of solipsists. Therefore, this society will either disprove one of the most universally established laws of history, or repent of its relativism and survive , or persist in its relativism and perish… C.S. Lewis said in “The Poison of Subjectivism”, relativism will certainly “damn our souls and end our species.” (He said that because he was a Christian), so he could not disagree with the teaching of Jesus and of all the prophets in Jesus’ Jewish tradition — and later Islamic Tradition, too….In order to be saved, to go to heaven, you need to repent. But you can’t repent if you don’t believe in sin to repent of, and you can’t believe in sin if you don’t believe in a real moral law, because sin means disobeying that. Moral relativism eliminates that law, thus sin thus repentance, thus salvation.

Submission of the Heart to Truth And The Relativistic Churchgoer
A religious believer who knows the true and the good in his head but who doesn’t love it in his heart and his life — he won’t submit to it, he wants to make it relative to his desires, relative to what his heart really loves and wants and seeks — he’ll lose even the truth and goodness he already has by making it relative to himself, his heart, his will, his desires, his demands. He won’t submit is heart to truth. That’s the essence of all true religion: submission of the heart to truth, to God, to what God is: truth and moral goodness. That’s why I say that the honest and moral atheist is a religious man and the realistic churchgoer is not. The atheist really wants to submit to the truth; he just doesn’t know what he truth is. The relativistic churchgoer has had the truth given to him, and he doesn’t like it, he doesn’t want to submit to it, he won’t convert his heart and his life to it. So he chooses to change it instead of letting it change him. He wants to sing “My Way”. …It’s the first things principle: put first things first and second things will follow; refuse to put first things first and you lose the second things too.

Four Different Kinds Of Relativism
There are four different kinds of relativism:
(1) metaphysical relativism is the same as theism (assuming God means the absolute being). Metaphysics is about being.
(2)Religious relativism says there is no absolute religion, no absolutely best or truest religious relationship with God. Atheism says there is no God, no absolute being, no absolute anywhere in reality.
(3)Epistemological relativism says that perhaps there is a being somewhere; but it can’t be known. There’s no absolute in human knowledge, skepticism about the absolute, at least, or agnosticism. Or it could be total skepticism, skepticism about all reality…. Metaphysical relativism says “No absolute in reality”, and epistemological relativism says “Perhaps in reality but not in knowledge” and then
(4) moral relativism says” perhaps there are absolutes in non-moral knowledge, like “two and two make four”, but not in moral knowledge: we know no moral absolutes:. And then finally religious relativism says “Perhaps in moral knowledge but not in religious knowledge. Perhaps love, or the Golden Rule, or justice, can be known to be absolute, but no religion can.” ….Relativism says there are no absolutes… Absolutism says there are some absolutes. At least one absolute. Absolutism is relatively absolutistic, and relativism is absolutely relativistic.

Foundations of Modern Moral Relativism
The first relativist was the devil: “Did God say that in the day you eat of the forbidden fruit you will die? I say you won’t. God is keeping something from you. Eat this and you will know what it is. You will know God’s dark side. The light is relative to the dark, and the dark to the light. Good and evil are relative, you see. The sophists called themselves “wise men”, men of Sophia. Socrates called himself a lover of wisdom instead….Sophists said: “man is a measure of all things — my mind, your mind, any individual mind is the measure of all things, or at least of good and evil — what could be more arrogant than that?

It’s arrogant because the measurers of wisdom can’t be measured by wisdom and they can’t be judged as unwise. If you are the measure, you are the God…Peter Abelard in the middle ages was a kind of Christian relativist with his new teaching that our personal subjective motive was the defining thing that made any act good or evil. But the main foundation of modern relativism in medieval Christian philosophy was William of Ockam’s Nominalism.

Nominalism was the philosophy that reduced all universal terms to mere names, nomina — there are no real universals, is what Nominalism says — and therefore there are no moral universals, like “Honesty is always good” or “Adultery is always evil”, by the very nature of those things , by their unchangeable essence….Ockam’s Razor was his famous principle that led to relativism…”never multiply entities beyond necessity”, that is you should always choose the simplest hypothesis, the most reductionist explanation. Reduce the complex to the simple. That’s why he eliminated universals.

How Relativism Evolved
First through what philosophers call the divine command theory got rid of the more complex natural law theory. The divine command theory says that God’s command is the only thing that makes an act right, or morally good. The natural law theory says that there is also a natural law, as well as a divine law — a law that comes form the nature of the act itself, and the nature of man and that this natural law also makes an act good or evil. The natural law is the proximate cause; the divine law is the ultimate cause. Two causes instead of one; not the simplest explanation. Ockam’s Razor could be used to eliminate either one.

The religious Nominalists like Luther thought they could maximize religion by eliminating the divine law, and the nonreligious Nominalists thought they could minimize religion by eliminating the divine law. Both sides used the razor. The same principle that the Protestant reformers used to eliminate the natural law and natural human reason that knows it, the secularists used to eliminate divine law and the faith that knows that. Faith and reason became enemies instead of the allies that they were in all classical medieval philosophy, whether Islamic or Jewish or Christian.

The Relation Between The Intrinsic Goodness Of An Act And God Willing It
Islamic philosophy had had the same controversy centuries earlier…is a thing right (Socrates used “pious”) because God wills it or does God will it because it’s right? …What is the relation between the intrinsic goodness of an act and God willing it, or between the intrinsic badness of an act and God forbidding it? Which is the cause of the other?  If God’s law causes an act to be good or evil, then God seems arbitrary and irrational, and we’re back in pagan theology with Zeus instead of God.

The bad religious consequence is an irrational arbitrary despot. The bad human consequence is that all of human morality then seems to come from God’s mere power, not from anything rational, anything our reason can understand (Assuming we can’t understand God’s mind and motives, only our own.) That’s the first horn of the dilemma. The other horn of the dilemma is this: if you say that the nature of the human act is the cause or reason why god wills or forbids it, then you’re putting something above God.  Because you’re saying that this thing  — the intrinsic nature of the human act — is the cause of God willing it. Then God is no longer God, no longer the First Cause, the Uncaused Cause.

So you’re back in pagan theology again. The solution was to show that Ockam’s Razor was wrong — An act is good or evil both because of its nature and because of God’s will. And god’s will is rational , not arbitrary, because it flows from his nature. He is good. That’s why he wills good for us, and that’s why good acts are good. So there are really three things involved , three causes, in a sense: God’s nature, God’s will, and the nature of the act. The Razor tempts you to cut two of them away.

Empiricism And Relativism
Empiricism led to what’s called the “emotivist theory of value”: the notion that moral judgments like “Murder is wrong” are really only an expression the speaker’s subjective feelings about murder rather than statements about the real objective nature of the act of murder — in other words there’s nothing right or wrong, but thinking makes it so… David Hume was the philosopher who analyzed moral judgments as subjective feelings, “Murder is evil” really means “I hate murder”

Facts And Values: A Truism
Analytic philosophy has an axiom, an assumption — they almost accept this as a truism — that there’s a radical distinction between facts and values. Facts are objective and values are not And this truism — this false fact of professional philosophy has seeped into popular thinking by a kind of osmosis. It comes out in our use of the word “values” instead of “laws” or “virtues” or “goods“. Nobody ever used the world values to refer to anything moral or ethical because the nineteenth century before Nietzsche or Kant.

The Source of Morality
Morality is objective and comes from universal human nature. It is not subjective and does not proceed some human wills ( a consensus, public, collective, social). The absolutist says reality includes things like God or gods, and angels, or spirits. And eternal truths, the nature of things, unchangeable essences, Platonic Ideas, divine Ideas. So reality can include objective values, real goods. Morality was a dimension of reality before the Enlightenment, not just a dimension of thinking or feeling.

Kant and Morality
Kant’s most important idea was the notion that the human mind makes the truth instead of discovering it, that truth is formed by the human mind. And that includes moral truth, Kant called true morality “autonomous”, that is man-made rather than “heteronymous”, made by another, by God….Kant believed that all minds worked the same way and created the same morality — like logic or math. So morality was universal and necessary for Kant but not objective — one short step from relativism.

Hegel And Relativism
Hegel added another idea that became part of relativism: universal process. Everything flows, everything is in flux. Truth itself evolves, even God evolves, through human history, according to Hegel. History is like a mother and God is its baby. And then along came Nietzsche who aborted the baby.

Existentialism And Moral Relativism
Existentialists generally hold a rejection of ”abstractions”, that is universals, including moral universals. In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard praises Abraham for transcending the moral law when he was willing to kill Isaac because “the individual is higher than the universal.”

Deconstructionists
Deconstructionism explicitly denies the very essence of language: internationality. That’s the technical, traditional term for the quality words have that makes them meaningful, significant, signs that point beyond themselves to objective reality. There is no objective reality to these Deconstructionists, no world beyond texts. Texts are worlds and worlds are texts….Nietzsche called himself “the philosopher with the hammer”…He said “We (atheists) have not gotten ridden of God until we have gotten rid of the grammar”…Grammar is the traces of God and creation and form and objective truth and order in language…the deconstructionists rage against even that trace of divine order, because they see it’s connected with moral order.

Denying Absolute Morality
Data comes first , the experience comes first, and it has to judge the theory, not vice versa…Real objective morality, absolute morality can be denied by your modern theory, but only after it is first affirmed by your natural moral experience, by everybody’s moral experience. You can deny moral absolutes only as a Buddhist denies matter…Conscience immediately detects real right and wrong, just as the senses immediately detect real colors and shapes…Moral relativism is to moral experience what Buddhism is to the experience of the senses or what Mary Baker Eddy’s “Christian Science” is the experience of sickness an death. These philosophies all tell us not to trust our experience, that our experience deceives us,  that the thing we experience isn’t really there! They say the experience is an illusion to be overcome by faith…Moral relativism is a faith , a dogma an ideology. Moral absolutism is empirical or experiential. It’s data based, data friendly.

Opinions And Values
Different cultures may have different opinions about what’s morally right and wrong, jus as they have different opinions about what happens after death; but that doesn’t (mean) what’s right in one culture is wrong in another. What’s believed to be right and what really is right aren’t necessarily the same, just as what’s believed to exist after death and what really exists aren’t necessarily the same. We can be wrong about it. Just because I don’t believe there is no hell doesn’t mean there is none or that I won’t go there. If it did, the infallible way to be saved would be just stop believing in hell!…Just because a good Nazi thinks that genocide is right, that doesn’t mean that it is….An opinion INTENDS something; it refers to something, it has a referent. If values are only opinions, what are their referent? “Thou shalt not murder” and “Courage is good” aren’t opinions about how many people will be killed or how many people are in fact courageous. Values are not opinions about facts or opinions about opinions (opinions without referents).

Moral Differences Need Common Premises (An Absolute)
Beneath a moral difference you always find some moral argument. Otherwise it’s not a moral argument. Because all argument needs a common premise. You can’t even imagine a  totally new morality any more than you can imagine a totally new universe, or set of numbers or colors….Try to imagine a society where honesty and justice and courage and self-control and faith and hope and charity are evil, and lying and cheating and stealing and cowardice and betrayal and addiction and despair and hate are all good.  You just can’t do it….You can create different acceptable rules for driving and speech and clothing and eating drinking…but we are not free to make murder or rape or slavery or treason right, or charity and justice wrong. We can create different mores but not different morals….We know from experience that we’re free to choose to hate, but we’re not free to experience a moral obligation to hate, only to love.

The Four Cardinal Virtues
The four cardinal virtues are a kind of trinity, or trinity: one thing with three aspects…in Plato’s version anyway. The three parts are wisdom, courage, and self-control, and together they make up justice. Wisdom means knowing the truth, especially the moral truth, the truth about the good to be done. Courage means the will choosing the good even when it hurts, the will following reason instead of the desires when reason says X is good and the desires say X doesn’t feel good, when it gives pain instead of pleasure. And self-control means not following passion when passion says X is fun and reason says it’s evil — not listening to the philosophy that says, “It can’t be wrong if it feels so right.” It’s also called temperance; tempering the feelings or desires, controlling the desires moderating them, not being a fanatic about anyone , like alcohol or money or media approval or sex….in the minds of  society’s mind molders, self-control has become repression.

Ecstasies
Sex and death are thrills because they’re ecstasies in the literal sense of the word: standing-outside-your-self, out-of-body experiences. Death has been secularized into another learning experience or just another stage of life to accept blandly and limply like a nice night’s sleep…. Sex and drug addicts are looking for heaven…the state of mind that the saints in heaven have and the mystics have for brief moments on earth…in some of the very worst places….God wants us all to have that but not by using drugs or illicit sex.