Good and Evil

[Immanuel Can]

Well I do have relationships with people, some of which involve love, and you seem to be saying that it's okay to feel I have some sort of duty to them, but when I said the same thing to you, you said I had no "warrant" to feel that.

Subjectivism would imply that any such sense of duty is merely a feeling, not a fact.

But it is a fact that I have the feelings.

Right: we do have feelings. But that doesn't tell us that the feelings "mean" anything, far less that they "signify" that we have a duty toward somebody or some action. If I'm right, then the feelings are little more than a rather-semi-trustworthy icing-on-the-cake, a byproduct of possibly having done or not done our duty, rather than an indicator we have duty to do. And even at that, feelings are not reliable. They often go astray.

So far from having a duty, all you'd have is an impression that you could overcome in the next ten seconds, should your mood, your will or even your digestion shift.

This might make theoretical sense to you, but I'm sure you know that, in practice, it is not the case. It is certainly not the case in my case.

Perhaps not. But since feelings CAN shift just this fast, and DO for some people, then we know how perfidious feelings can be.

The soldier who is terrified does his duty if he does not capitulate to his feelings and run from his post. The faithful husband does his duty if he does not capitulate to lust for other women on a business trip. The fireman does his duty when, fighting his survival instinct, he rushes headlong into a blaze to rescue a trapped child. In all such cases, feelings and duty are at opposite interests. They are clearly very often not conducive to the same imperatives, therefore.

Exactly, people -at least some- will follow their sense of duty at great personal expense. That impulse is already in us; we don't need God to turn it into a command before we act.

I think that's too hasty a conclusion. The fireman, the soldier, the husband...all do their duty because of the special role they occupy. But what tells them that that role is worth sacrificing their own well-being? The fact that courage, or self-sacrifice are praised are not because they are easy, or because we generally feel like doing them: they're praised precisely because they are a triumph of principle over feelings.

But where is such a principle written?

I don't see how one could know something that they cannot see, hear or touch, or have any direct experience of at all, let alone love it.

That's a pretty good argument for the necessity of the Incarnation, of course: to provide a tangible, direct experience of God, but one not overwhelming to the will. For God wishes to be known by free choice, not by compulsion. The direct experience of the eternal God would be an overwhelmingly compelling experience, of course.

That just sounds like a very human attempt to get people to believe something they would otherwise have absolutely no reason to believe.

It could be that...if it weren't true.

So He has appointed this time in which we find that if we want, we can resist the knowledge of Him,

It seems more like he is giving us the opportunity to resist the attraction of our common sense.

Not our common sense, but rather our common human desire to imagine ourselves as the center of the universe. It's our opportunity to come into living relationship with something much more profound and outlasting than we are...if we have the vision to accept it.

He does not ask much of us: but to believe He exists,

Our survival depends on our faculty of rationality, and we completely rely on it to navigate our way through life, so I have to strongly disagree that asking us to abandon it is not asking much.

That is not what's being asked. What's being asked is rather a greater realism...more reason, not less.

One has to stop imagining that one makes things so simply because one wants them to be a particular way; one has to stop pretending one is the center and meaning of the universe; one has to come to grips with one's own mortality; and one has to come face to face with one's own duty to morality, as well. And one has to become dreadfully realistic about the fact that one came into the universe by powers beyond oneself, and will exit this mortal coil the same way. We all know these things to be true; and if often takes a great exercise of unreason or faulty reasoning to suppress our awareness of them. Nevertheless, that's what humans often do.

Grasping these things requires not less reason, but much more, much more seriousness, much less frippery and puffery. For if we examine them we will find that every one of them is more true than our imaginative self-possession of all our own circumstances. We are not captains of our fate or masters of our souls. We are contingent beings, fallible, weak, subject to disaster, often suffering, and here for a very short time and then gone. And reason invites us to set those events in their rightful larger context, lest the smallness of our earthly horizons should drive us first to selfishness and then to inevitable despair.