#883 Two Reactions to my Interview with Alex O’Connor

Dr. craig’s response

To Agustin

Agustin, thank you for sharing that very revealing quotation from Prof. Dawkins! It shows that apart from God and His commands it is extraordinarily difficult to affirm that anything is truly right or wrong at all.

For that reason I don’t think that the objection based on the slaughter of the Canaanites can be presented as an external problem to Judeo-Christian faith. Rather Dawkins needs to present it as an internal problem for the Judeo-Christian faith, namely, the logical incompatibility of two beliefs held by Bible-believers, namely,

a. God is all-loving and all-just.

and

b. God commanded Israel to drive the Canaanites out of the land on pain of death.

My claim is that not only have the critics failed to show that (a) and (b) are logically incompatible, but that we can show that they are logically compatible. I show this by offering a Divine Command Theory of ethics, according to which God Himself is the paradigm or standard of goodness and our moral duties are determined by His commands. I have defended this theory in Questions of the Week #16, 225, and elsewhere. If the critic is to show an inconsistency between (a) and (b), he must show that God’s issuing such a command is incompatible with His being either all-good or all-just. I argue that in issuing such a command God wronged no one, neither the adult Canaanites nor the Canaanite children nor the Israeli soldiers themselves, so that (b) is consistent with (a). The challenge for the critic is to show who was wronged by God in this situation.

Now I wholly agree that “any kind of systematic extermination of people. . . seems to be in conflict with our normal moral intuitions.” So, yes, “our moral intuitions are, in fact, in tension or conflict with God commanding the slaughter of the Canaanites.” That’s why these Old Testament narratives are so agonizing and so puzzling.

Now the naturalist might explain this tension by saying that “our moral intuitions have been formed for normal, everyday, mundane circumstances and not for exceptional cases like this.” As a result of socio-biological pressures a kind of herd-morality has evolved among Homo sapiens that strongly rewards co-operative behavior and is advantageous in the struggle for survival. But from a Christian perspective, I think that there is an even better reason for our deep-seated moral intuitions: namely, God has written His moral law on the hearts of all men so that we have an instinctive grasp of our moral obligations (Romans 2.14-15).

At the same time, however, these general moral obligations can be overridden or superseded by a higher obligation. For example, we have a general moral obligation to tell the truth. But if the Gestapo is knocking on your door, demanding to know if you are harboring any Jews in your house, then your moral duty to love your neighbor as yourself supersedes your moral duty to tell the truth, and you should lie to the Nazi agents. These sorts of moral dilemmas are commonplace in thought experiments aimed at values clarification. For example, should you throw a person in the overcrowded lifeboat overboard if failing to do so results in everyone’s perishing? These sorts of moral dilemmas can be agonizing, and the answers are far from obvious. In the same way, given that our moral obligation to obey God is our supreme obligation, God may issue a specific, extraordinary command that supersedes or overrides our general moral duty not to kill based on His general commands.

To Anthony

Anthony, your letter hit me like a gut punch. I would never deliberately do something that would harm a person’s relationship with God, so I am deeply grieved that my demeanor during this interview should have driven you away from Christianity as the religious course for your faith. If I behaved in a callous and unempathetic manner, then, please, blame that on me, not on God. It shows only that I am an insensitive, overly-intellectualized, uncompassionate clod, not that Christianity is untrue. My personal failings should not be allowed to reflect negatively on whether God exists or Jesus rose from the dead.

Indeed, I fear that you are reacting emotionally rather than rationally to this interview, for as I read your letter, Anthony, it just does not seem to make sense. As Alex and I agreed, even if my defense of the historicity of the conquest stories is a total failure, all that that implies is that these stories are not literally true. They are legends or misinterpretations of God’s commands, in which case all we have to give up is biblical inerrancy, which does not touch the core of Christian beliefs. (Alternatively, we could regard them as hyperbolic speech, as my colleague Paul Copan argues, in which case not even inerrancy need be surrendered.) The falsity of such stories obviously does not imply that God does not exist or that Jesus did not rise from the dead. 

So it seems that you are bothered by more than my callous demeanor.  For you ask, are we “to accept that this slaughter is justified?” Yes, and I have given a defense of the compatibility of God’s being all-loving and all-just and His issuing the command in question. You seem to see accepting this fact as “a test of faith” which God may require of you but which you doubt you can pass. But no one is asking you to accept this by faith. I’ve given a rigorous philosophical defense of God’s issuing such a command, and you haven’t even begun to interact with that defense.

You go on to say that while our God may require you to accept that His command was morally justified, nevertheless you “do not believe Our God would put the blade in my hands and ask me to cut apart a poor, innocent baby.” Maybe not; but He did ask this of Abraham, didn’t He (Genesis 22.1-14), so what makes you exceptional? Maybe He wouldn’t have put you in Abraham’s place because you lack Abraham’s faith, but then the shortcoming is yours, not God’s.

You wonder why would God command the Israeli soldiers to kill Canaanite children. Read Question of the Week #16 for a possible justification. I get the impression from your letter that you’ve not read any of the debate leading up to this interview, so it’s no wonder that it strikes you as scandalous. I think that in doing this interview I probably miscalculated by assuming that listeners would be familiar with the exchange of arguments that forms the backdrop to the interview. But for naïve Christians who have never wrestled personally with such questions and maybe never even read the Old Testament conquest narratives, all this must appear shocking, callous, and cerebral.

You say that “the slaughtering of a baby makes no sense to me other than that of an act of horrible evil,” and so “I do not believe this slaughter is [of] God. For me to justify that belief, as a believer and defender of Christ our Lord, is a dissonance laden confusion I cannot justify in this moment.” But, Anthony, I’ve tried to provide that justification for you, and so far you’ve made no effort to interact with my arguments. As for Jesus Christ, have you considered that he doubtless believed in the historicity of these stories, just as he believed in the rest of the Old Testament and, I should add, in the God of the Old Testament?

So what should you do? I think you should first shore up your apologetic case for the truth of Christianity. The fact that your faith would be so easily shaken suggests that you do not have a very robust apologetic case for your faith. At the same time you should begin to read and wrestle with the relevant arguments and the implications of this question rather than let your emotions be your guide.