Quandary: Logic and Morals

I keep hoping I’ve got it explained, but from time to time, questions come up indicating that, for at least one person, I came up short.

This business of moral reasoning throws people off the track. In the first place, my ranting about Ancient Near Eastern and Hebrew intellectual traditions is a historical reference, an established anchor point in human memory that remains a valid expression of something much deeper than mere history. We look back to the record of that time as a manifestation of God’s way for us, not the thing itself. History itself is a parable, a symbol of something beyond words.

You can get to that godly reasoning without delving into the Antiquities the way I have. You cannot get there from here in Western intellectual traditions except by accident, by a divine miracle, as it were. The biggest single barrier is the unconsidered assumption that ours is the human default. It is certainly the most popular approach to reality, but is most certainly not the default. It does require some history and digging into ancient literature to realize that. But once I went there and dug around, some part of me realized it was entirely possible to get there without taking my particular path.

My fiction series on Artificial Intelligence (AI) was supposed to raise that possibility. Antiquities will help, but it’s possible to create an environment and legacy of understanding without it. I am convinced that, in God’s eyes, that fundamental change is more important than the path you take to get there. The real miracle is your will bringing your mind into subjection of the Spirit. Once the intellect no longer rules all things, it’s hard to fail.

It’s a false dichotomy to assume that if we do not trust logic and reason, then the only other option is to let the fleshly emotions rule. We certainly prefer reason over unrestrained appetites, but that doesn’t go far enough in understanding how things work. There is a potential human faculty above reason, and certainly above emotions. So the whole point here is tapping that higher faculty, regardless of the flavoring.

This is why I persist in mentioning the Spirit Realm. It can register as an intellectual concept, but that doesn’t mean you get it. If you don’t somehow get a breath of that higher atmosphere in your soul, you cannot get it. A vast portion of humanity is convinced that seizing pure reason is that experience of eternity. But there is a very distinctly different effect between the two. We who have tasted of Heaven can tell the difference in how people talk and act. While it’s possible to cite some specific symptoms of human behavior, that typically misses the point, because each of those can be faked. Rather, using that same higher level perception, we can detect the absence of that higher level in the gestalt of cues. The thrill of pure reason is the taste of arrogance, but the flavor of Heaven is humility.

Pure reason is so thrilling because it’s as high as you can get without surrendering to the Spirit. You cling to the instinctive notion that you can handle things, that you hold the ultimate competence, if only in potential. You are altogether certain that, given enough effort to shed all that is less than pure reason, you can enter a realm where you become some kind of master. You can easily sublimate that as a belief in a broader human potential, but hidden in the basement is that arrogant king waiting to take his throne with a vengeance. That ugly beast in the basement shows his face in those worst moments when the human capability is stretched, and we who are spiritually ruled will see it.

It’s not as if we don’t have the same basic failings; we do indeed. But our response to that fundamental human flaw is different. It’s not that we have learned to grovel at the proper cues, but that we openly grovel at the feet of God. The differences may be at times subtle, but nothing on this earth can substitute for kneeling before the Cross of Christ. When you are kneeling there yourself, you can tell when someone shares that space.

Nor do we regard this perception as if it were a mandatory answer for everyone else, but only for ourselves. That’s the other part of the flaw of human reason: It seeks objective universals. Spiritual reasoning denies that such is possible. It’s a difference fundamental in the nature of the two different faculties. The winds of Heaven drive us to say things like, “I don’t know the answer for you, but I know where I have to go with this.”

I note in passing that the difference between implacable self-assurance on the one hand, and otherworldly confidence in God on the other hand, is not always obvious to observers. The two can produce similar behavior patterns in some contexts.

The whole point is that we don’t reason from the basis of facts, but moral discernment. We might well consider what our senses tell us and what our human capabilities can do with that sensory data, but we never trust it to give us ultimate answers. We see that as mere context. We can discern what we believe it all means, but our spiritual faculty demands we pass it through another, higher process. We evaluate the moral significance of things, as well. The trouble comes in which moral frame of reference we use. An extension on that assumption that our intellectual context is the human default also assumes our moral context is the default.

This is the other half of our struggle in teaching: We have to convince folks that what they assume are God’s morals are nothing of the kind. They are merely one narrow cultural assumption about morality, and very ungodly in many ways. It has proved so far easier to debunk the intellectual deception than it has been for the moral mythology. For most folks, some variation of the Anglo-Saxon moral tradition is morality itself. I can usually get folks to grasp the notion that people in the Bible had a different thought process, but I struggle hard against the reflexive trust in Anglo-Saxon morals.

This is the task before me. Nobody says you can’t use reason, but you have to use the right brand of logic and the biblical moral assumptions with it. The moral assumptions are the ground of all logical processing because they are the sole objective in bothering to process. The whole concept is radically different from what is common in mainstream society. We don’t lose touch with what we used to be, so folks aren’t alien to us, but we are surely alien to them.