Religion, Morality, and Kitty Wells

Country music, as most of us know, is  the most theology-laden form of popular music. The lyrics of this song, sung by Kitty Wells in the early 60s, illustrates, I believe, something interesting about the effect of religion on morality. It is a song of a woman who supposes herself to have been a wrongly deserted wife whose husband has given her divorce papers, all legal and proper. However, she asks whether "God is satisfied" with his actions, telling him that he will be called to account for what he has done by God, and implies that his lawyer won't do him any good when he stands before God and must be held accountable for his actions.

Your lawyer called and said he had the papers all prepared
To sign my name was all I had to do
He saw the judge, now he seen me, there's only one thing left
Will your lawyer talk to God for you?
Will your lawyer talk to God and plead your case up on high
And defend the way you broke my heart in two?
Manmade laws to set you free on earth but is God satisfied
Will your lawyer talk to God for you?
We all face that final judgment and it's very strict they say
When your time comes, I wonder what you'll do
Will you bow your head in shame or will you turn your head away
Or will your lawyer talk to God for you?
Will your lawyer talk to God and plead your case up on high
And defend the way you broke my heart in two?
Manmade laws to set you free on earth but is God satisfied
Will your lawyer talk to God for you?

I am not saying anything about the morality of divorce in general. Clearly, it is evident that at least some people desert marriages without adequate moral justification, and the law, as we currently conceive it, cannot prevent them from doing so. I bring these lyrics up because it seems to make nonsense of the popular idea that somehow religious belief, or lack of same, isn't a game-changer when it comes to morality. Assuming atheism, this appeal would be plain nonsense. Again, I am not arguing that no one can follow a moral code without a belief in God. But I think we must admit the force of this sort of consideration, and face that fact that many people, over the centuries, have turned away from a wrongful act because they believed that God would hold them accountable if they performed that action. I am thinking primarily here of the accountability and shame for these actions, as opposed, say punishment in hell. If someone can't see the moral force of this sort of thing, then I would have to say there is a screw loose somewhere.

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Surprisingness and evidence for supernatural occurrences

From my paper "Miracles and the Case for Theism."

It is true that in order for miraculous occurrences to play a role
in a case for theism, it must be the case that such events contradict
naturalistic expectations. But it does not follow that, from the point
of view of naturalism, these events have to be maximally improbable.
Other events that contradict naturalistic expectations to a greater degree
can be passed off as mere anomalies because no plausible theistic
explanation is available to tempt the naturalist to alter his beliefs about
the way the world works. Paul Horwich gives an account of what it is
for an event to be surprising that may shed some light on this matter.
He claims that it is necessary to distinguish between unlikely events
and surprising events, since many unlikely events do not surprise us.
If I were to flip a coin 100 times and get heads every time it would
surprise me, even though any other sequence of heads and tails would
be equally unlikely. What distinguishes surprising events from other
unlikely events is the presence of an alternative account of the circumstances
under which the event occurred, an account not previously
accepted, that would diminish the improbability of the event in
question. Thus in the coin-tossing case the possibility that the coin
might not be fair causes me to wonder if the world is in fact the way
I, who am accustomed to coins being fair, previously thought it to be.
This explains why it would not be surprising if Jones were to win a
lottery amongst a billion people, but it would be surprising if Smith
were to win three lotteries amongst a thousand people, even though it
is more probable that Smith should win his three thousand-person
lotteries than that Jones should win a billion-person lottery. This is
because the Smith case gives me reason to change my background
assumption about the fairness of the lotteries in a way that the Jones
case does not. Thus surprisingness, for Horwich, does not vary with
improbability, it varies with the degree to which events force us to
change our hypotheses about how things happen in the world. 21 In
cases where there is evidence that a miracle has occurred, it is the
combination of natural improbability and the availability of supernatural
explanation that makes the evidence surprising from the point
of view of naturalism, not the improbability alone. So perhaps we can
attribute Mackie's insistence that miracles are maximally improbable
for atheists to the fact that good evidence for miracles would be maximally
surprising for atheists; for persons with a naturalistic bent the
acceptance of miracles requires a thorough revision of their view of
the world. (Miracles would also surprise theists, if they were not expecting
God to act in the way he did and would find it necessary to
change their view about what God is like). However, as Horwich has
shown, surprisingness is not strictly a function of improbability; therefore
Mackie is mistaken in assuming that since miracles are maximally
surprising they must also be maximally improbable.  

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Why Francis Collins believes in God

The head of the Human Genome Project.

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Evolution and its impact on Christian theism

There are two aspects of evolution that raise issues for religion. One is the obvious conflict between the theory of evolution and the traditional literal reading of Genesis. If, as traditionalists assert, the Bible gives us a comprehensive genealogy of the human race, then the age of not only "the earth" but also the heavens can at least approximately be calculated, and it comes to about 4004 B. C. (at least, that is what Bishop Ussher thought). That, of course, conflicts with evolution, but it also conflicts with garden-variety astronomy, which teaches that distant stars can be a million light years away. This site attempts to answer that question on behalf of the traditional reading of Genesis.  But such a reading of Genesis was rejected not merely by moderns who have been shown the problems with this by modern science. It was rejected by St. Augustine, hardly someone running scared from modern science.

The other, and more serious issue, is that evolution attempts to provide an explanation of speciation which replaces design with a trial and error process without design. At least in theory, you should be able to get to any level of sophistication in the engineering of the human body through genetic replication, natural selection, and, of course, enough time. So we can't go as easily as believers would like from what looks like the tremendous engineering of the human body to an intelligent designer, much less a creator. What looked to even our eighteenth century forbears like overwhelming reason to believe that there was an intelligence behind our universe (even for deists, who claimed that God created and designed the universe, but did not interfere in its operation, and did not incarnate himself as Christ to save the world). Even Hume, depending on how you read him, seems to cave in to a very denatured form of the design argument at the end of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. But ever since Darwin, the sledding has been tougher for arguments from design to a Designer of the world. Some of the most popular forms of the design argument today make an end run around evolution, and look at the cosmic constants in place at the Big Bang, which, by definition cannot be products of an evolutionary process. 

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