{"id":6391,"date":"2016-06-04T05:49:08","date_gmt":"2016-06-04T05:49:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/06\/04\/abraham-isaac-and-trumping-from-above-a-partial-retraction\/"},"modified":"2016-06-04T05:49:08","modified_gmt":"2016-06-04T05:49:08","slug":"abraham-isaac-and-trumping-from-above-a-partial-retraction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/06\/04\/abraham-isaac-and-trumping-from-above-a-partial-retraction\/","title":{"rendered":"Abraham, Isaac, and Trumping ‘From Above’: A Partial Retraction"},"content":{"rendered":"

I say on my Welcome page:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

I write about what interests me whether I am expert in it or not.  Some find this unseemly; I do not. I oppose hyper-professionalization and excessive specialization.  Every once in a while I post something that is mistaken, someone corrects me, and I learn something.  I admit mistakes if mistakes they be.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Time to admit a mistake.  Johannes Argentus comments and I respond (in blue):<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
Dear Dr. Vallicella, <\/span><\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n
You wrote in your June 01 post<\/a>: <\/span><\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n
"To get a feel for how there might (epistemic use of 'might') be a trumping or suspension of the moral\/ethical, consider the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac. This is an example of what could be called 'trumping from above.'   On Dylan's telling<\/a>, God said to Abraham: "Kill me a son!"  But Isaac was innocent and in killing him Abraham would be violating God's own Fifth Commandment. Had Abraham slaughtered his son he could not have justified it in terms of the moral code of the Decalogue; nor can I imagine any consequentialist line of moral reasoning that could have justified it; but he could have justified it non-morally by saying that God commanded him to sacrifice his son and that he was obeying the divine command.  If God is absolutely sovereign, then he is sovereign over the moral code as the source  of its existence, its content and its obligatoriness. He is outside of it, not subject to it; it is rather subject to him and his omnipotent will.  We are in the vicinity of something like Kierkegaard's "teleological suspension of the ethical" as conveyed in Fear and Trembling<\/em>.<\/span>"<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
 <\/span><\/div>\n
The key factor <\/span>for a correct understanding of God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac is the timing <\/strong>of the event with relation to God\u2019s gradual revelation, and with relation to human reason\u2019s gradual illumination and liberation, by God\u2019s word, from the darkness into which it had fallen since the time of original sin.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

According to the timing of the event with relation to God\u2019s gradual revelation, there was no problem in God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son because it was centuries before He decreed the prohibition of human sacrifices in the Law given through Moses (Deut 18:10). Thus the command did not contradict any positive divine law known by Abraham.<\/span><\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n
BV:  Excellent criticism.  I mistakenly ignored the proper sequence of Biblical events.  Contrary to what I suggested, God was not putting Abraham in a situation where he  had a non-moral reason to override a known<\/em> divine absolute moral command. Nevertheless, in commanding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac God was<\/em> commanding an absolutely immoral act. The act-type — slaughtering an innocent human being — was no less ojectively immoral for being unknown to Abraham.<\/span><\/div>\n

And according to the timing of the event with relation to human reason\u2019s gradual liberation from darkness, there was no problem either because that process was just starting, and Abraham lived within a culture in which it was a common practice to sacrifice the firstborn son to the personal or local god. Thus the command did not contradict the clouded knowledge that Abraham had of natural law.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n
The command, then, was not a case of <\/span>'trumping from above'<\/span> a rationally discovered or divinely revealed moral commandment, because Abraham was not aware of any such commandment forbidding the sacrifice of his firstborn, which in his cultural environment was a fairly common practice. <\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n
BV:  Argentus is right.<\/span><\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n
Neither does the command necessarily show that God is arbitrarily sovereign over the moral code, which would be the case only if the event had taken place after<\/strong> the revelation of the Decalogue. Rather, the event is wholly dependent on Abraham's (and his contemporaries') state of ignorance regarding moral law and more broadly the meaning of life, which required the establishment of the only base on which the whole edifice could be built: absolute trust and obedience to Absolute Being.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n
Thus, the pedagogical and "that-time-only" nature of the event is fully consistent with the notion that moral law is inherent to human nature and therefore fully determined once human nature is, so that the acts forbidden by the Ten Commandments are not morally bad because they are forbidden, but rather they are forbidden because they are bad, because they are against human nature. Thus, God is absolutely sovereign to design human nature (except of course for logical contradictions), but once designed, He cannot contradict the moral law inherent in that nature because He cannot contradict Himself. Moral design is already in the ontological design.
<\/span><\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n
BV:  Whatever the solution to the Euthyphro Dilemma, it remains the case that God commanded Abraham to do something objectively immoral, even if Abraham did not know it was immoral or believed it was not immoral.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nRelated articles<\/span><\/legend>\n
\n
\"\"<\/a>Sam Harris on the Very Idea of Divine Revelation<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Pope Francis' Attempt to Put a Christian Face on Islam<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Could I Pass an Ideological Turing Test?<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Nietzsche and the New Atheists<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>The Ten Commandments as Survival Manual<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I say on my Welcome page: I write about what interests me whether I am expert in it or not.  Some find this unseemly; I do not. I oppose hyper-professionalization and excessive specialization.  Every once in a while I post something that is mistaken, someone corrects me, and I learn something.  I admit mistakes if … Continue reading “Abraham, Isaac, and Trumping ‘From Above’: A Partial Retraction”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[674,60,574,303],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abraham-and-isaac","category-ethics","category-old-testament","category-retractiones"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}