An Introduction to Defeater Ethics
Christian skepticism is no longer merely an academic discussion.
Christianity exists to love, serve, and bless those outside the Christian faith. This is a core commitment of Christ for Kentucky’s devotion to the common good of the Commonwealth. That commitment manifests itself in our public work that we hope will bless our state, but we must not forget the greatest blessing we have to offer our Kentucky neighbors is the gospel of God’s salvation.
In light of this, we will be hosting regular gatherings for seekers and skeptics to explore Jesus and his claims. However, I recognize there are certain questions and objections, which remain barriers for these friends to even consider that exploration. And I would argue these barriers have changed over the past ten years.
In 2008 Tim Keller published his New York Times bestseller The Reason for God: Belief in the Age of Skepticism. The premise of the book sought to address what Tim Keller refers to as “Defeater Beliefs.” Keller says, “Every culture hostile to Christianity holds to a set of 'common-sense' consensus beliefs that automatically make Christianity seem implausible to people. These are what philosophers call "defeater beliefs". A defeater belief is if Belief-A is true, Belief-B can't be true.” Simply put, there are beliefs people hold that, by definition, make belief in Christianity implausible.
The aim of Christian apologetics is to address these defeater beliefs, thus dismantling intellectual barriers to Christianity’s plausibility, and Keller does so masterfully in The Reason for God. However, Keller published his book in 2008, which was the peak of the new atheism movement. Richard Dawkins had just published The God Delusion, he and other famous atheist like Christopher Hitchens were on speaking tours using science and skepticism to supposedly disprove Christianity, and thus the defense of the Christian faith took the form of classic intellectual apologetics.
I want to suggest the nature of apologetics needs to change. What makes Christianity implausible now is less about intellectual doubts and more about ethical concerns, particularly among the younger generation. Youthful skeptics are not wrestling with whether Christianity is true but whether Christianity good. In other words, Christianity’s implausibility is not its supposed inability to meet intellectual demands but rather ethical demands. Thus, my argument is that defeater beliefs have been replaced by defeater ethics.
My skeptical friends are not rejecting or leaving Christianity because of classic atheistic arguments from science, logic, and reason. They are rejecting Christianity because of its sexual and gender ethic, church abuse scandals, Christian hypocrisy, partisan vitriol within churches, our past support of slavery and segregation, our current failure to do justice, love the poor, correct oppression—these and other issues now make the Christian faith implausible for many. Simply put, what Christians must now contend for is less the reason for God and more the goodness of God.
That will be the aim of this blog series. Before we invite our Kentucky neighbors to explore the Christian faith, I am going to do my best to address the defeater ethics perhaps standing in the way of accepting that invitation.
In this introductory post, I will briefly speak to the broadest ethical objection, which is that God does indeed have ethical expectations for us all. Christians claim there is a Creator God, and as Creator he has a design for his creatures. That design for us is contained in his moral law. Meaning, we do not believe that we inhabit a lawless existence, but rather, there are laws that govern creation.
We recognize this as uncontroversial when it comes to the laws of science, such as the immutable laws of math and physics. The Christian says this is because we do not inhabit an accidental, random, and disordered existence. There is a Creator, and his creation is designed and governed with lawful order. But when you move away from science into philosophy, things get more complicated and controversial. Are there moral laws which are as true the laws of physics?
Christianity claims this is so. In the same way there is order to the physical existences, there is a moral order with moral absolutes that originates from the essence and goodness of the Creator. This notion of objective moral laws that all humanity is accountable to was once an uncontroversial claim, but now it is anathema. The reason for this is expressive individualism is now the air we breathe. We have rejected ultimate authority and replaced it with individual authority. Morality is determined by the individual, seeking to find his or her authentic expression, desires, and so forth. Thus nobody, certainly not a deity, has the right to threaten my subjective journey to determine what is right or wrong for me.
This gets most attention in the arena of sexuality, but the notion of subjective morality as opposed to objective morality now reigns within our society. Therefore, the idea of a God who reigns with a moral law does not fit within the plausibility structure of our expressive individualism and has becomes a major stumbling block to our culture. It’s not that we aren’t spiritual or even religious, it’s just that we dictate the terms of our spirituality, and in this way, the individual becomes the god of their own religion. Thus, the first defeater ethic I need to address is simply that there is a God who has an ethic for us.
Allow me to begin my answer with an apology. In fact, these newer defeater ethics all deserve some form of an apology, because unlike intellectual objections, ethical objections are felt personally. I have no intention of gaslighting skeptics by arguing their concerns aren’t worthy of concern. Instead, I will begin the way Jesus himself commands his followers to begin—with contrition.
But what apology is there to offer regarding a God who makes ethical demands of us? It’s not what God has demanded that harms, but what we have demanded. I am sorry that too often we present our rules as God’s rules. While it is a true that God does have a moral law that we are accountable to, what Christians have notoriously done is add to his law with burdensome ethical demands that do not originate in God but in our own agendas.
Jesus himself recognizes and rebukes this proclivity by condemning those who, “tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people's shoulders.” Jesus is speaking to what we now refer to as religious fundamentalism. Fundamentalism dishonors God’s law, not by breaking it, but by adding to it. I’ll explain with an uncontroversial example. Drunkenness is not God’s design for us, and his law makes this clear. This law is good as demonstrated by the countless stories of devastation, not just from addiction, but even one night of drunken decisions.
But in the 19th Century, Christian fundamentalism gave us the Temperance Movement, which approached the wrongfulness of drunkenness in another harmful way. If people can’t even drink, they can’t get drunk, and gradually drinking itself became immoral. And that gained so much moment it led to actual legislation in the prohibition era. That subtle move is the essence of religious fundamentalism. In order to prevent us from breaking God’s law, we will add more laws that if followed won’t allow us break God’s law, but then those added laws become canonized in such a way that to break our laws is synonymous with breaking God’s law. And when our rules become God’s rules, we do what Jesus condemns by heaping impossible to bear burdens upon other’s shoulders.
Perhaps that’s been your experience with Christianity? Perhaps you think of our faith as a harsh, hyper-critical, cumbersome experience demanding you follow with precision a bunch of rules that aren’t God’s rules but rules of our own making. And perhaps it led you into unhealthy guilt, shame, self-loathing, maybe even depression. And I would not be surprised in the least if you abandoned the source of that harm.
But here would be my challenge to you, if would be willing to consider it. No doubt the rules of our own making will harm you, but would you be willing to assess if the rules of your own making are proving harmful? The pendulum swings both ways. On one side there are consequences to adding to the law of God via the authority of religious fundamentalism, on the other side are the consequences of disregarding the law of God via the authority of expressive individualism. And the reason why both are harmful is because both are a denial of the Creator who actually does have a good and perfect design for creation.
Have you considered that in wanting to break free from harmful religion, you have created a harmful religion of your own making? In my experience people only trade the wounds of religious fundamentalism for the wounds of individual fundamentalism, a fundamental commitment to obey only themselves and their own desires. If that is you, may I be so bold to ask: How’s it going for you? Consider if you have traded one form of tyranny for another. The autonomous freedom you seek is destined to be its own bondage full of regrets and pain, inflicted not by fundamentalism but by the oppression of self-determination.
If you are peaceful and content, then so be it. But if there is a God, and if that God’s ethic is the good and perfect design for us all, then neither adding to his ethic nor disregarding his ethic is a sustainable option for life. Eventually it comes undone, and we are left in the ruins. If you are not there, I am probably not going to be able to persuade you. But to you who are there. Who are sick and tired of what has become of your life, my invitation is to come home. Not to fundamentalism, but to your heavenly Father.
And here is the good news. He’s not angry. A shaming session is not waiting for you. Only his open arms are waiting, along with a party to celebrate your return. Jesus told a parable about two sons. One representing the harshness of fundamentalism, the other representing those who leave altogether to pursue the agenda of their own desires. The son who leaves gets sick of what he has done and what he has become and returns to his father. His father runs to him, embraces him, and throws the grandest of parties full of feasting, music, dancing, and laughter, for his son has come home. But guess who refused to attend the party and was even indignant that there was a part? The angry, judgmental, harsh older brother.
I am so sorry if your experiences have led you to equate Christianity with that older brother. But that is not our God. Our God is throwing the party. And this is only reinforced by the life of Jesus who gets angry with those who add to his law but very tender with those who break his law. And more than tenderness, he sacrifices himself to forgive us for breaking his law.
And then the entirety of his religion comes in the form of two words: “Follow me.” Follow Jesus and discover the blessedness of life with Jesus in charge of your life. Not fundamentalism in charge, but Jesus in charge. Does he make demands of us? Of course. We call him Lord for a reason. But unlike the unbearable burden of religious fundamentalism, he says this to us, “My yoke is easy, my burden is light.” In following Jesus through obedience to Jesus we discover life that is not available to us in adding to his law or breaking his law. We discover that his law sets us free.