Values

In the final two sessions of this series on believing in God, we’ll be looking at values. Some people reject God because they reject the values they associate with God. Others see God as the essential origin of their values. I shall try to show the logic of that position.

 

I shall leave morality till next time and focus here on progress, purpose, value and meaning. Although it can be confusing I shall follow tradition by using the word ‘value’ in two senses, sometimes specifically for our concept that things are valuable, and sometimes to refer to all these concepts together as ‘values’.

Science does not find them. Some people conclude that there are no values there in the world, so we have to explain why people invent them. Others conclude that they do exist, independently of human inventions, so we have to explain how we can find out which values are true values.

I shall describe each of the four in turn, and then return to the question of whether we need to believe in God in order to make sense of them. The pattern will be that progress presupposes purpose, purpose presupposes value and value presupposes meaning.

Progress

Progress. We all have problems we would like to solve, and hopes and ambitions we would like to achieve. Progress is gradual change towards desired objectives. Without a desired objective, a purpose, there is only change, not progress. Life would be just ‘one damn thing after another’. The change is gradual because we see it as part of a process.

We talk about progress for individuals, families, communities, nations and the world. Our ideas of progress need to be consistent with each other: what we hope for for ourselves has to be consistent with any hopes we have for our family and our local community. If you want to make world a better place, your hopes for the world will need to be consistent with your other hopes. This means that, unless we are very self-centred, our hopes for our own progress are part of a bigger vision of progress.

In Europe enthusiasm for progress reached its peak in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They expected it in various ways. We have inherited their ideas of progress through scientific research, education, economic growth and new technologies. They also had other ideas which we have not inherited, like racial progress through killing off ‘inferior’ races so as to fill the world with white Europeans.

You cannot have a concept of world progress unless you have got a concept of humanity as a unity. The ancient Stoics thought of humanity as a unity. Christianity gave it a theoretical basis by claiming that we were all created by a single God with a consistent set of purposes. It followed that if we have been made by a God like that, it should be possible for world humanity to make progress towards fulfilling God’s plans. Not that Christianity did always expect progress in this world, but the idea was revived in the seventeenth century.

World unity

By the end of the nineteenth century it was no longer scientifically acceptable to interpret progress in terms of God’s plans. When God is taken out of the picture the main reason for seeing humanity as a unity has gone, so all that remains is different people with different values. The 1948 International Declaration of Human Rights was an attempt to establish universal truths about humans, in the hope that if every country could agree on a set of principles, they would provide a basis for resolving international disagreements. Some countries refused to accept it, arguing that it is a western concept. Some postmodernists argue against internationalism in general: we cannot assume that other people’s interests are compatible with our interests, so we expect our governments to defend Britain’s interests without caring about the effects on other people.

Agreed purpose

Nineteenth century enthusiasts for progress replaced God with other unifying principles: Providence, Destiny. So what is Providence? Is it just another word for God, or is it Fate?

The most influential replacement for God was scientific Necessity. Many believed that the scientific laws of nature included laws of human progress, so that progress was inevitable. Thus Karl Marx thought the dictatorship of the proletariat would be inevitable.

These replacements changed the character of progress. Instead of being pulled towards a vision of God’s plan it was pushed by inevitable scientific laws. However, in the absence of a desired objective, it is no longer progress. It is just change.

Without a desired objective, without a sense of purpose, we do not know which changes to make. One of the things that struck me most forcefully when I studied the histories of progress is that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries generated lots of new ideas. The twentieth century did not produce any: it just followed through the logical implications of the ones it had inherited. The idea of progress has survived, but without the theories which had previously justified it. It seems to me that modern western society has become like hikers whose map has been blown away by the wind: we no longer know which way to go, so we carry on the way we were going before.

Purpose

Progress needs a desired objective, a purpose.

The problem that arose with progress in the nineteenth century had in a sense already arisen with purpose. The ancient Greek Aristotle thought we could explain the way things are in terms of four causes. Three of the causes are still accepted today; taking an acorn as an example, there is the stuff it is made of, how that stuff is arranged, and what causes it to change and develop. The fourth type of cause, final causes, was the one early modern scientists rejected.

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For Aristotle, the final cause of a thing is the objective towards which it moves. The final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree.1 He thought final causes were internal to each thing. They were not really purposes, because he was not saying acorns want to become oak trees. However when medieval Christians rediscovered Aristotle, they thought final causes could be God’s purposes. Early modern scientists accepted God’s purposes, but argued that Aristotle’s final causes did not really explain anything. So later on, when God was taken out of the scientific picture, scientists saw it as their task to explain the processes of nature without reference to any future objectives at all.

In practice scientists use the language of purpose all the time. if you ask why some plants produce pretty scented flowers, they do it to attract bees. If you ask your doctor why you have got kidneys, they purify the blood. These explanations are about purpose. However, if you do not believe in God the language of purpose is only shorthand for saying the thing evolved like that because this is how it survived.

In that case the only purposes that remain are the ones humans create. Some purposes are pure self-gratification with an end point. Tonight I shall get drunk. Tomorrow I shall feel awful but tonight it will be great. Most of us also have purposes which are part of a story of progress. If I ask you ‘For what purpose are you revising for your GCSEs?’ You might answer ‘Because I want good grades so that I can do A levels’. ‘For what purpose do you want to do A levels?’ ‘To get the qualifications I need to become a television presenter’. ‘Why do you want to become a television presenter?’ If I keep asking, we will eventually reach a future point that you have not started thinking about yet; but until we reach that point the answers you give are going to locate your present purpose within a bigger story of purposes.

If our lives are to avoid total chaos all our purposes need to be consistent with each other and with our bigger picture. How big does the biggest picture need to be? Is there a single purpose for the human race? If not, it is only to be expected that different local purposes will conflict with each other,2 so conflict is inevitable. But if there is a world purpose, what does that imply? A purpose is a valued objective. There has to be a conscious mind doing the valuing. If we think there is a purpose for the world, does there have to be some kind of world mind giving it its purpose?

Value

Purpose implies value. The purposes we have reveal what we value. So what is value?

In the last lecture I made some critical remarks about social engineering, with its elitist claim that ‘we know what is best for you’. The other extreme is free market capitalism. Free market theory argues that the state has no business telling people what is good for them, so that the state should not make any such judgements at all: instead it should let free individuals decide for themselves which lifestyles to pursue, and the free market is the process for satisfying as many desires as possible.

One feature of this theory is that it reduces value to what the individual wants. It leaves everyone to set their own priorities and pay for them if the price is acceptable. The mother wants food to feed her children, the alcoholic wants methylated spirit, and in theory the state refuses to say that one of these is more valuable than another. Why you want it is irrelevant; all that counts is how much you are willing to pay. What the individual wants becomes bedrock, the starting point upon which all values are built. In practice though we all spend time wondering what we should want, and in doing so we draw on values we already have.

Evaluators

To say something is valuable is to say it is to be valued, so there must be some conscious being that values it. The question is whether only humans evaluate, or whether there is a higher conscious evaluating mind that evaluates more authoritatively than humans do.

If only humans evaluate, then a particular thing has no value unless at least one human values it. In some cases this makes sense: if there is a television programme which absolutely nobody watches, perhaps it has no value. In other cases it produces bizarre results. How many people consciously value bacteria? Yet our lives depend on them. Dinosaur bones have immense value because they generate endless fascination: but when the dinosaurs were alive, there were no humans around so did they have no value at all?

Most people think at least some things have value over and above whether anyone values them. However if anything is valuable over and above humans valuing it, there must be some other evaluator apart from humans. Furthermore we must be prepared to grant to that evaluator the authority to decide what we should count as valuable.

This superhuman evaluator could be society. Many people accept the values of their host society. Others often think society’s values are wrong: not just wrong for individuals who have chosen different values for themselves, but objectively wrong. If we think that society’s values are objectively wrong, we need to appeal to a higher authority than society. Only if there is a higher authority does it make sense to disagree with society’s values while still believing there are objective values.

Meaning

When we value something, we are saying it has a quality which means something significant to us. Value presupposes meaning.

So what does ‘meaning’ mean? The word ‘three’ means a number between two and four. Sometimes actions or situations mean things in a similar way. When you say ‘I give you this ring as a sign of our marriage’, it is not just the words which have meaning: it is the action, and the action in a particular setting. To describe an event or activity as ‘meaningful’ is to say it has a quality which resonates with our deep concerns.

As with purpose and value, it helps if the things you find most meaningful are consistent with each other, and express your presuppositions about the meaning of your life as a whole. As well as the meanings of words and the meanings of actions we sometimes talk about our lives having meaning. So what is the meaning of your life, if it isn’t just 42?

Many people deny that there is any objective meaning given to our lives. We create whatever meanings our lives have. In the 19th century Nietzsche wrote:

Ultimately man finds in things nothing but what he himself has imported into them: the finding we call science, the importing – art, religion, love, pride.3

In 1981 Richard Rorty wrote:

there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions.4

People who argue like this nearly always expect us to create our own meanings. On this account, if you feel your life is meaningful, that is all the meaning you can expect to have. To say that your life is meaningful is to describe a feeling.

Others argue that if that was all there was, it would imply that your emotions determine the meaning of your life; so if something changes the state of your hormones, the meaning of your life will change. Most of us want to say more than this about the meaning of our lives.

Robert Nozick proposed an experience machine. We wire your brain up to a machine which can produce in your mind any experience you want. You can spend the rest of your life having whatever experiences you like. It hasn’t been invented yet, but if it was, would you use it? Nozick says:

We learn that something matters to us in addition to experience by imagining an experience machine and then realizing that we would not use it.5

Robin Attfield argues:

to count towards the meaningfulness of a life these varied activities [activities we find meaningful] have to be more than just performed by the agent with an eye to personal satisfaction; they have to be capable of being informed by a vision of their value in the whole, by a sense of the worthwhile part they play in the growth and flowering of each unique human individual, and of the other human lives with which that story is necessarily interwoven.6

You may like to reflect on whether that is true of your life.

Values in general

This concludes my descriptions of progress, purpose, value and meaning. I shall now generalise from them. There are two things they all have in common. Firstly, they only work in connection with consciousness. They can only exist where some conscious mind locates them.

Secondly, science does not explain them. It presupposes them, because you couldn’t engage in any search for knowledge unless you had some values and some sense of purpose and progress; but values are not what science itself reveals.

We can respond in one of two ways. Either they do not exist, so the question is why people invent them. Or they do exist, independently of human inventions, so the question is how we can find out what they are.

Creating values

When people started thinking that they are pure human invention, they thought the implications were massive. In 1919 Bertrand Russell wrote:

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.7

Today a more common position is that although there are no objective values in the world, we create our own values. If there is no God, this is the only possible way of getting them. Daniel Dennett has written in detail about how evolution caused us to create meanings for our lives.8 What’s wrong with values like that? Some people think this is all we should expect our values to be. Others make the following criticisms.

• Must we create values, or is it just that we happen to do so?

Some commentators focus on the processes by which humans create values, from a comparatively dispassionate perspective, explaining how, as a matter of fact, humans create values. I don’t know of anyone who manages to be completely dispassionate about it: not even Nietzsche or Russell managed that.

Far more often, they enthuse about creating our own values. They say things like ‘We must create our own values’ or ‘my way of creating values is the best way to do it’. But according to the theory, until you have created your values, you haven’t got any values, so there is nothing you must do and there is no best anything. What they are really doing is proposing to develop values on the basis of values they have already got; but this is to contradict the whole idea that we create our own values.

• It’s arbitrary.

For a moment let’s imagine that you wake up one morning valuing absolutely nothing and decide to create some values. It would be a difficult thing to do. If you really were completely devoid of values, you would have no reason to create any. You couldn’t tell yourself that it would be a good idea to create values, because ‘good’ is a value and until such time as you have got some values, nothing is good. So if you did go through this experience and create some values, those values would be arbitrary.

• They would also be a complete fiction.

Suppose you start from scratch and decide to count your life as valuable. You then count your friends, your facebook account and your dog as valuable. You instruct yourself to behave as though they were valuable. But the universe hasn’t changed. It’s only your mind that has changed. You have decided to treat some bits of the universe as though they were valuable. They seem valuable to you because you have so decided to perceive them, and for no other reason. You have created a fiction.

• Individual and society

Of course nobody is seriously suggesting that people do create values from scratch like this. We are brought up in societies, we inherit values from them, most of us accept them, some of us question them, and a few succeed in changing them. But this means that we don’t create values. Individuals and societies alike inherit values. We may change them, but when we do that we do it in the light of the values we hold at the time, values given to us by a tradition which itself never started from scratch with a blank sheet.

• Lack of commitment

The idea that we create our own values leads to lack of commitment. Even if it is society rather than individuals who create values, it is you as an individual who decides which values to accept. Tomorrow you may decide to change them. Today you can be a suicide bomber for the Taliban, tomorrow you can give it all up to be a steam engine fanatic. You could decide to value consistency; but that too would be your own decision, and you may abandon it tomorrow. The logic is that if we create our own values, they are always subordinate to our own will. They can never give direction to our lives, because we have given them their direction. The authority structure is always the other way round. We end up as classic postliberals, refusing to be committed to anything.

• Our values become true by definition

If all values are human creations, and there is no authority above humans to declare our evaluations right or wrong, then they never are the right values or the wrong values. If the USA government thinks it was right to kill Osama bin Laden, then their judgement was correct – for the Americans. For the Pakistanis, on the other hand, it was the wrong thing to do, and that judgement is also correct – for Pakistanis.

• Conflict becomes irresolvable.

If all values are created by individuals and societies, so that no values are right or wrong except from one perspective or another, we have no reason to expect any progress towards resolving our value disagreements. We can only expect that just as disagreements about values cause wars, they always will.

Discovering values

The choice between the two

The idea that all values are human creations was the product of positivism. Positivism starts with the fact that science cannot prove the existence of values, and deduces that therefore there are no values unless we create them. The alternative is to start the other way round: we all experience values all the time, so since science cannot explain them we need some other explanation.

In the 13th century Thomas Aquinas argued that by reflecting on the finite things of the physical world, the human mind is able to know something of what lies beyond – the things on which finite things depend.9 This may sound highly speculative, until we notice that this is precisely how all scientific research works. We start with established data and theories which convince us, we examine them, and this leads us to develop new hypotheses about new entities. Scientists do this all the time. The difference is that today secular society has imposed a taboo on making such connections with anything religious. Aquinas lived long before this taboo had been invented, and it seemed to him a perfectly normal connection to make. As John Cottingham puts it, there is

a perpetual tension in our make-up: we are constrained by our nature, but we see beyond it… The human condition is paradoxical precisely because it is our nature, qua human beings, to have boundless aspirations which we cannot, qua human beings, fulfil.10

Our values are based on other values

So how do we explain our values? What I have said so far indicates two features. Firstly, our concepts of progress, purpose, value and meaning usually focus on local and personal matters, but they only have the quality they do if they can be understood within a wider setting; and that wider setting can only have its quality if it is understood within a wider setting still. Even though we often do not think about it, there has to be a big picture underlying all our values, or they would be arbitrary and would conflict with each other.

How big does the big picture have to be? When we reflect on it, it makes no sense to think any part of the universe is valuable unless the universe as a whole is valuable. How do we justify the idea that the universe is valuable? Does the value of the universe also need to be explained in terms of another value bigger still?

progression of value

 

My answer is yes. Our understanding of values is always incomplete. We start with our ordinary awareness that life happens to be full of values, and when we try to explain our values, our explanations keep directing our attention further and further away from our own little selves towards something bigger than the human mind can conceive.

Values and consciousness

The second feature our values have in common is that they can only be values by relating to a conscious evaluating mind. If the values we hold are indeed part of a bigger picture of value, there must be a bigger mind that does that bigger valuing, a conscious mind with an overall view of the universe. That conscious mind will not be a human one.

Conclusion.

To conclude. We all experience values, in countless different ways. There are two possible ways to explain them. One is that they are a figment of the human imagination, so that nothing has value over and above what we choose to consider valuable. The other is that our values are part of a bigger story of values, and if we follow the implications, we have to root them in values and an evaluator which are more valuable than the human mind can conceive.

I believe this reason for believing in some kind of divine being is shared by the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. For most people it is just a gut feeling, not a logical argument. I have tried to show how the argument makes sense.

Notes

1 Edel, Abraham, Aristotle and His Philosophy, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982, pp. 61-64.

2 Edel, Aristotle, p. 66.

3 The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R J Hollingdale, New York: Random House, 1975, p. 327, quoted in Cottingham, Meaning, pp. 11-12.

4 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982, p. xlii, quoted in Cottingham, Meaning, p. 16.

5 Wielenberg, Erik, Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe, Cambridge: CUP, 2005, p. 26.

6 Cottingham, John, On the Meaning of Life, London & New York: Routledge, 2003, p. 31.

7 Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic, London, Longmans, 1919, quoted in Markham, Truth and the Reality of God, p. 18.

8 Dennett, Daniel C, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Penguin, 1995. See especially pp. 204ff and 401ff.

9 Aquinas, Summa Theologia 1.88.a2, ST 1.88.a2, found in http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1088.htm. Discussion in Copleston, Aquinas, pp. 59-60.

10 Cottingham, Meaning, pp. 78-79.

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