Relativism

Both criticisms have force, and Barna’s framing should be read with care. Absolute is a philosophically loaded word that many moral realists reject while still holding that morality is objective, and moral truth depends on circumstances is something a robust realist can affirm, since circumstances change which act is right. So surveys of this kind overstate relativism. Neutral sources (Pew, the World Values Survey) replicate the broad finding that a large share of Americans reject absolute morality, but not the exact percentages. The weight of this claim rests less on any survey than on the interview data, where people said in their own words that they had no basis for calling anything wrong.

Both points are fair. This is the same researcher and the same method as the previous exhibit, and it should be read as an update rather than independent confirmation. The 74 percent who decide morality by feelings also deserve a careful reading: a moral realist can consult feelings as evidence of moral facts, the way one consults perception as evidence of physical facts. Deciding by feeling is not the same as holding that feelings make things right. The line between the two is exactly what the interview study in the next exhibit tried to probe.

The sample point is fair: the study is illustrative rather than representative, and it should be read that way. The articulacy point is partly fair too; nobody expects a metaethics seminar from a twenty-year-old. But Smith’s finding was not that respondents lacked technical vocabulary. It was that many actively denied there was any fact of the matter about right and wrong, and then reacted to concrete evils as if there were. That gap between stated theory and moral reaction is the whole point: not that people cannot explain morality, but that what they say about it and how they respond to it come apart.

Exactly, and the wording of this claim is careful on that point: the Gospel of John presents Jesus identifying himself as the truth. That is a claim about the text, which is not in dispute. Whether the saying is historical is a separate question that is not asserted here. In conversation, say John records Jesus saying rather than Jesus said, and you are on ground no one can knock you off.

Carson is conservative, but on this specific point, that the I am sayings in John function as identity statements rather than job descriptions, he states the consensus of Johannine scholarship across the spectrum. Raymond Brown, a Catholic, and Rudolf Bultmann, a radical critic, read them the same way. The disagreement among scholars is about whether Jesus said them, not about what John meant by them.

Agreed, and the modern framing should be held lightly. John gives no interpretation of Pilate’s tone, and readers have heard it as cynical, weary, or sincere. The scene is cited only as supporting context that John returns to the theme of truth around Jesus at the trial as well as in the upper room. Whatever Pilate meant, John’s point is that truth stood in front of him and he did not stay for an answer.

The analogy is meant to make one narrow point: that widespread agreement can be wrong, and that true means matches reality, not currently believed. It does not show that morality has a reality to match; that argument is made separately under the claim about a moral source beyond human beings. The disanalogy is also smaller than it first looks. Moral reasoning does have methods (consistency, testing principles against cases, reflective equilibrium), even if they are not laboratory methods, and people use them to change their minds about slavery, torture, and the treatment of children.

The warning is fair, and the point being made here is the opposite of the anti-science one. Science corrected itself because it is answerable to evidence, which is exactly why consensus in science is trustworthy in a way consensus in fashion is not. The lesson drawn is that reality is discovered, not voted on, and that is a compliment to science, not an attack. Miasma theory also got the correlation right (filth and disease go together) and the mechanism wrong, which is why some of its remedies worked. A theory can produce good results and still be false, and it was evidence that showed it.

True, and the story is often told as a cleaner victory than it was. The correction was slow and resisted, and that detail helps the point rather than hurting it. The truth about cholera did not depend on whether the Board of Health believed it, and reality eventually forced the change. Slow, resisted correction is what the discovery of a mind-independent fact looks like.

Correct, and the two should be kept apart. Error theory says moral claims aim at objective facts and all of them fail, because there are no such facts. The right response is not that’s just your feelings but this requires you to say that torturing a child for fun is not really wrong, and no one can believe that. Mackie himself conceded that his view is deeply counterintuitive and defended it on the grounds that objective values would be metaphysically queer, unlike anything else in the universe. The theist’s reply is that queerness is only a problem if the universe is fundamentally impersonal, which is the point in dispute.

This is the objection a fair reader raises immediately, and it deserves a straight answer. The Christian response is that the Bible itself contains the standard by which those practices were later judged (humans made in God’s image, love of neighbor, neither slave nor free), and that the trajectory of Scripture runs from regulating existing institutions toward undermining them. Critics reply that this reads later conclusions back into the text, and that debate is real. Either way, the argument for a standard above culture is not weakened by the fact that Christians have had to be corrected by it. That is what a standard above culture is for.

Correct, and that is the only thing he is cited for. Rachels is one of the thoughtful people who argue that objective morality can stand without God, and his presence here shows that rejecting cultural relativism is not a religious position. Whether morality can be grounded without God is a separate question, taken up in the exhibit on a transcendent moral source and in the Atheism case.

A sharp objection. The theistic reply is that the bridging premise is different in kind. A perfectly good being who made you, and to whom you owe your existence, wills X is not merely a natural fact, since goodness and obligation are already built into the description, whereas your ancestors who did X had more offspring contains no normative content at all. Whether that reply succeeds is the Euthyphro question again, which is treated under the transcendent-source exhibit. The honest framing is that both sides face a grounding problem and the argument is about which grounding is more plausible.

The quotation is accurate but represents one wing. Evolutionary ethics includes realist versions in which evolution equipped us to perceive moral truths, roughly as it equipped us to perceive physical ones. The reply to those versions is that tracking moral facts requires there to be moral facts to track, which is the point at issue; evolution explains the perceiving, not the existence of what is perceived. That is a friendlier exchange than the illusion quote suggests, and it lands at the same place: what are moral facts, and what makes them binding?

This is the classic objection, and every philosophy student will raise it. The standard theistic reply is that the dilemma is a false one: goodness is neither above God nor arbitrary but is God’s own nature, so his commands express what he is rather than what he happens to decide. Whether that reply works is debated (critics ask what makes God’s nature good), but it is the reply, and it has a long pedigree from Augustine to Robert Adams. The argument here points to a transcendent source, not automatically to the Christian God, and it leaves room for exactly this debate.

The argument is an inference to the best explanation, not an argument from ignorance; the difference is whether the alternatives have been examined and found wanting on their merits, which is what the previous three exhibits attempt. The fair criticism is that a fourth alternative is missing here: non-theistic moral realism (Wielenberg, Enoch, Parfit), on which moral facts are basic and need no grounding at all. That is the strongest rival, and it is treated in the Atheism case. The argument holds only to the degree that all four alternatives fall short, and you should weigh that fourth one yourself.

The conditional wording (if objective moral duties are real) is deliberate; moral realism is not claimed as proven here. What is offered is that nearly everyone, including most moral philosophers, believes some things are really wrong, and that the person who denies it has to explain away that near-universal conviction. The Atheism case gives the survey data on philosophers’ views. Arguing from a premise most readers already accept is a legitimate way to argue, as long as the premise is stated, and here it is.

It is fair to take the careful version. Someone can hold that many claims are framework-dependent without saying every claim is, and that position is not self-refuting. But it is also not relativism in the strong sense people reach for when they say all religions are equally true or morality is just opinion. Pressed, the careful relativist keeps some claims objective, which concedes the point. The question then is which claims are objective and why, and that is the conversation worth having.

This is the apophatic version of pluralism, and it deserves an answer. If ultimate reality is beyond all description, then cessation of the self and eternal life with a personal God are both false as descriptions, which is a claim the Buddhist and the Christian each reject about their own summit. The apophatic pluralist has not reconciled the traditions; he has overruled both. Hick’s own treatment of this problem, and the responses to it, are in the Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry on religious diversity, and the exchange is worth reading in full.

Hick’s reply should be on the table. The response, from Plantinga and Gavin D’Costa among others, is that a second-order hypothesis which entails that every first-order tradition is wrong about its central claims is not neutral, whatever level it occupies. To say that the Christian’s personal God and the Buddhist’s cessation are both masks on an unknowable Real is to tell both that they have misdescribed what they most care about. That is a rival claim about the summit, and it has to compete like any other.

Anekantavada holds that partial descriptions from different standpoints are each true in a qualified sense, not that flat contradictions are both true; even the Jain holds that the soul exists and the soul does not exist cannot both be true in the same respect. Anyone who claims that ultimate reality is personal and ultimate reality is impersonal are both true in the same respect has abandoned the ability to say Christianity is false, which the pluralist wants to retain. The point does not depend on Aristotle; the Jain logicians make it themselves.

The parable’s origin should be credited, and the reply, which comes from Lesslie Newbigin, should be too. The reply has force against Hick’s use of the parable, which does claim to know that all the religions are responses to one Real. It has less force against a Jain who uses the parable to say that all views, including his own, are partial. The two uses are different, and the honest move is to ask which one the person in front of you is making before answering.

The parallel is fair: Christian theology also holds that God exceeds our concepts. The difference is that Christian apophaticism denies that our concepts capture God fully while affirming that God is truly personal, not less than personal; Advaita’s higher level denies that God is personal at all, so that the personal God of bhakti is finally provisional. That is a real disagreement about whether personality is ultimate or penultimate, and it is the disagreement to name rather than a generic complaint about relocating the clash.

Correct, and this is the objection to answer. The accident-of-birth point applies to the pluralist too, since pluralism is largely held by Western academics, which is also an accident of birth, so it cannot decide anything; and where one first hears a claim does not determine whether it is true. The argument from diversity is more serious and is Plantinga’s subject in his essay defending religious exclusivism, where he argues that awareness of disagreement may reduce confidence but does not make exclusive belief irrational, since the same is true of every contested belief in ethics and philosophy. The Stanford entry cited here contains both the objection and the replies.