Adam is right. I did already answer most of your questions. So here again are the things I wrote about a week ago, on January 23:

What if all my decisions were random? Let’s imagine that I somehow manage to get through life by carrying around, say, a coin and a die. When I have to choose between two things, I flip the coin; for more than two choices, I roll the die. Whatever comes up, that’s what I do. The question is, would it be possible to live that way? Outside the realm of fiction, I don’t think so. Here are a few reasons: preference, laziness, practicality, and reciprocity. Let me explain how I think each of those would prevent me (or anybody else) from wanting to live strictly by a randomizing coin-toss or dice-roll.

Preference means that, in many, if not most choices, we will have a preference. In your example, I may have a preference to keep the $20. But I might not. For example, if the person who helped me in the store was rude and made it into a terrible experience, my preference to keep the money might be greater. But if the person was otherwise—say, someone friendly and attractive with whom I hoped to have more interaction and wanted to impress—then I might have a preference to give the money back.

Laziness means that, for example, if I discover the additional $20 but the clerk has now gone to another part of the store to help someone else and I don’t feel like waiting around, I wouldn’t feel like bothering to do anything about it. On the other hand, if the give-back transaction would be easy, I might be more inclined. Laziness is probably a minor factor in this specific example, but in other situations it could play a larger role. What if you are driving to the store and you see someone on the side of the road with a flat tire and they obviously don’t know how to change it, but you do? Laziness would play a large role in that decision, I think.

Practicality means that some conduct is more likely to be useful than others. What if I see two vehicles on the side of the road with flat tires: an ambulance and a mail truck. How do I decide which one to help? Practicality might say (unless laziness or preference over takes everything) that I should probably help the ambulance. But what if I am more selfish, and more concerned about getting mail than others receiving medical care? Maybe practicality for me will be reversed.

Reciprocity means that I can increase the likelihood of later receiving beneficial conduct in return if I decide something a particular way now. Going back to the $20 example, there might be a different consideration if this is a store where I shop daily, or one where I never expect to return. For example, if I want to build up a good relationship with a local business owner, I will almost certainly give back the $20 and enhance my reputation. But if I am far from home, that urge will probably be reduced. (On the other hand, if I have been chatting with a proprietor in some faraway land and she learns that I am from California, and then complains that people from California are always rude, I might see the opportunity to give back the $20 as a way to enhance the reputation of California—as a matter of pride.)

There are probably other considerations that would keep people from sticking to a wholly randomized life of coin-tosses and dice-rolls, but those are the ones that come to my mind immediately. And my point here is not that those things provide a foolproof path to a respectable set of ethics, but that they prevent me from being completely random, without being recognizable as a “standard” or an “authority.” In other words, I think that when you put “no decision” against “standard” or “authority,” you are setting up a false dilemma: people can make decisions in the absence of standards or authorities, and without even being completely random.

So the idea that in my actions I must be reliant on some “standard” or “authority” that is concealed or unrecognized, or else I must not be acting at all, cannot succeed.

At the same time, it seems quite clear to me that if we think about these separate principles for how people act, aggregate them, and think further about the many benefits we receive when everyone in a community or a society (or even globally, though we can only imagine that today) behaves in a way that is generally predictable to others, then we have a strong reason to create both a “standard” and an “authority” to enforce it. None of this leads me back to anything supernatural. Not remotely!

And again:

Since none of us, not one of us, exists wholly independently from anything or anyone else—all of us are contingent on something and someone—there is no way that we can think about ourselves and our ethics without accounting for how our actions affect the people and things around us. But the same contingency means that there is no way for us to pretend that, for instance, by expecting children to respect their parents—who provide for their basic needs—we are not teaching children that part of treating others right is protecting the sources of our contingency. There’s a reason we say things like, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”

So think about the benefits we receive from the others around us. Earlier this evening, I picked up my phone, called a restaurant, and ordered food for my family. Then I got in my car, drove to the restaurant, used a debit card to pay, picked up the food, and drove it home. Think of all the other people I depended on in doing those things: the ones who built and maintained the phone and financial networks, the people who grew the plants and animals for my food, the ones who transported it to the restaurant, the ones there who prepared it, the people who designed and built my car, and so on. I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate further. I like being in that loop. It makes my life a whole lot nicer. And my participation makes their life nicer, too.

But that system would break down if people were dishonest, or if they broke their promises, or treated others poorly. For example, if the restaurant where I went refused to pay its bills, then it would be forced out of business. Or if people just called and made orders without intending to pick them up, as a prank, so that food is wasted, then they would probably stop providing the phone-order service. While I was driving, if I decided to travel on the left-hand side of the road, or ignore the speed limits, or fail to use my turn signals, I would significantly increase the risk of major problems. If people aren’t following rules of conduct to make their interactions work well, then the whole system breaks down. That’s why corruption runs societies into the ground and leaves people with such a low standard of living: rather than using the efficient practice of altering their behavior to make society work, they use inefficient practices like bribes, which suck up far more resources than rules.

Whether I like it or not, I need other people, which means I need them to need me, too. Is it selfish to conduct my affairs so that I’ll receive the greatest benefit from others that I can? Sure. But the kind of selfishness that causes a person to follow rules is quite a lot different than the kind of selfishness that causes a person to break them. For one thing, rule-following selfishness is looking out for long-term consequences, treating each interaction with others like an investment: be kind to this person, reap a benefit later. Rule-breaking selfishness, on the other hand, is only concerned with short-term consequences: use a gun to hold up the corner store to grab some cash now, and risk the possibility of being caught.

In other words, what looks like “pure” altruism (and I’m hoping now you’ll think back to the question I put at the top of this comment) is really just a form of social investment through ethics. And when you’re on the receiving end, it doesn’t make much of a difference. As Adam Smith pointed out, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” But the difference between that kind of selfishness and the kind that we consider immoral or even criminal is not a matter of quality, but of quantity: it’s how far ahead you’re looking, and what you’re willing to risk. Socially and ethically, most people have a conservative outlook in that sense; we are not willing to risk the terribly adverse consequences of taking the high payoff in the short term for robbing the proprietor of the corner store at gunpoint.

You ask where these rules came from. You might also ask whether it would be possible to have other rules (much the same way that physicists ask whether the universe could exist with different physical laws and constants). For example, could a society work where the rule was that one should never tell the truth? How about a society where murder is acceptable? What about a society where children are taught to hate, despise, and abuse their parents and elders? How about a society where one can never have the security of personal property, where anyone can come and, literally, rip the shirt off your back because they like the fabric and want to use it to make their own shirt (which could then be subsequently ripped off their back, and so on)?

First, it should be clear that every society must have some rules. Complete chaos and anarchy would not be a society. It would be every individual for itself. But we have no evidence that humans have ever lived that way. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of an animal species that lives that way. So rules in themselves, without regard to their content, are simply necessary if complex forms of life are to exist. Individuals can gain a lot more if they cooperate; so in a world where individuals tend to survive and reproduce if they’re better off, the ones with a cooperative instinct will leave more ancestors. (Of course, as with most types of variation, there’s a “bell curve,” so that every generation will include some small percentage of individuals who are predisposed to riskier behavior: those will be the ones looking for the high payoff in the short term, without regard to serious consequences later on. We try to control their influence on our society with punishments and other sanctions, and probably also by labeling certain risky and destabilizing behaviors as “immoral” or “sinful” and attaching a mythology that’s intended to induce feelings of guilt.)

Your football example is misguided, I think. If we took the refs out of the game, then the game would lose its structure, many players would quit, and the audience would lose interest. Football would just dissolve. Has there ever been a sport that’s just pure chaos? I can’t think of one. People need some kind of beginning, middle, and end before they’ll care about a competitive sport. Rules and refs do give the players a set of limits that they will push, but if we took away the limits, then what would they have to push against? Would anybody really care to play in a game where a bunch of guys just go out on a field and try to move a ball through unstructured physical chaos? And who would want to watch? The faux Darwinism you suggest would never occur: in order to have natural selection, you need to have some selection pressure, some parameter that creates a limit for the agents involved. Take away the limit and you take away the selection pressure. In social life, rules arise from the natural limits of humans living in constant close contact, as I suggested above. I can’t just walk around lying, cheating, stealing, and murdering: it would irritate the hell out of everybody else and they would put a stop to me. So there are limits to what I can do, and those lead to the formulations that we turn into cultural ideas of what we should do.

From the basic requirement that society requires rules, what will be the content of those rules? You suggest, and rightly so, I think, that nobody is suited to make those rules. I don’t think anybody ever sat down, long ago, and said, “You know, let’s make a rule against murder. Let’s say, ‘murder is wrong.’” They didn’t have to. Who wants to live in a society with people where murder is acceptable? It just would not work. We can see that in portions of our own society, including high-crime areas, and even certain demographic groups, where there are high rates of murder, there is a low rate of functional society and a much lower quality of life. If left unchecked, those pockets of society would either obliterate themselves or evolve into groups, like gangs, where the prohibition against killing applies only to people inside the group. Eventually, one group would dominate the others and the in-group ethic would prevail, so that members of that society would come to see the prohibition against killing as something universal.

There are varying levels of efficiency in society that can be obtained, depending on the rules people have, and that’s probably one reason why certain societies have been more successful than others, and why, for instance, some societies are now said to be “exporters” of law. People around the world look to the law-exporting societies for guidance, for instance by citing the decisions of their high courts, or borrowing ideas from the enactments of their legislatures. (The United States is an exporter of law in that sense.) Why? Because our style of rules has worked very well to obtain a high standard of living.

Why is murder “wrong”? It’s not that anyone ever “said so” because no one ever needed to say so. The act of murder is terribly destabilizing to a society, and destabilization is going to have adverse effects on economic success and quality of life.

People can’t just arbitrarily make up rules. The rules have to arise from the specific problems that the group is facing. For example, the United States has a complex system of immigration laws because it has traditionally experienced a high volume of people wanting to get in, in large part due to our consistent economic success. Other nations have different immigration laws because they face different immigration situations. Arbitrary rules aren’t likely to be successful, or they will fall into disuse. On the other hand, where there is a need for a rule that could be satisfied equally well by several different rules, then it makes sense that we would see variety: we drive on the right, the English drive on the left—but it simply doesn’t work to not have any rule on that point, so long as you have a sufficient amount of traffic to necessitate a rule.

And here are some short answers, whose basis can be derived from everything I just quoted above:

“[H]ow did the principles upon which societies base their laws originate?”

Nobody knows.

“Did it just happen that murder, adultery, theft, etc., are actions that are typically found to be contrary to ‘good behavior’ in a society, and worthy of punishment?”

Yes. Try having a society the other way around, where murder, adultery, theft, etc., are prescribed, rather than prohibited. It just won’t work. I guarantee. Or it won’t work for long.

“Who determined these actions were wrong?”

Nobody did.

“Did our great philosophers, or statesmen?”

Nope.

“If so, how did they form the ideas that such behavior was wrong?”

Not applicable. See above.

“Then we have the moral sins like lying, cheating, the wealthy often times taking advantage of the poor, etc. Where did the idea that these actions are wrong?”

Nobody did. See above. Same explanation. Try having a society the other way around, where lying, cheating, taking advantage of the poor, etc., are prescribed, rather than prohibited. It won’t work. I guarantee. Or it won’t work for long.

“The problem is that some people don’t care whether the aforementioned actions are wrong or not, they engage in them because they say, no one has the right to tell them how to live. “

No, I think you need to study a little more criminal psychology. Do you really believe that people break laws and rules because they have taken a conscious, principled stand against others telling them how to live?

And finally:

“[T]here have to be absolutes, because they do exist already. People simply choose to ignore them or deny they exist. Anything else is a kind of moral relativity, period.”

Maybe you should clarify what you mean by “absolutes.” If you mean there are basic limits to how human societies can work—e.g., since society is, by definition, cooperation, then uncooperative conduct is fundamentally anti-social and will inevitably lead to a reduction in quality of life—then, sure, I guess you can call them absolutes. But nobody thought of them because nobody needed to.

Can your God make a human society with rules that say dishonesty, theft, infidelity, murder, and greed are required?

The answer, since you are unwilling to provide one yourself, is quite simply: No. Your God could not do that.

If you disagree, then explain. If you ask one more time for me to tell you something that I have already said, then you shall receive no reply. But if you ask a clarifying question that is specifically based on something already set forth above, on the grounds that you want more detail or explanation (which means you will need to quote my words back to me and formulate a specific responsive question), then I will answer.

You claim the Bible says, “the message for relationships between people, and the route to salvation have been made clear by Jesus Christ.” And yet, when I provide you with examples (and there are multitudes more) of the incredible disparity between people who claim your particular brand of religion, you ignore it. It’s not even remotely clear.

You can’t claim ultimate authority on morality from a book that creates some of the most diverse sets of moral theories across the globe! And it’s extremely hypocritical to point at an outside system of morality and claim that it’s a free for all when the position you’re standing on is the same exact thing.

As for your last response to Peter, it’s infuriatingly troll-like. You keep asking these questions like neither Peter nor I have answered them on several different occasions, here, at my blog, and in the letter threads at the Bee. It’s called a social contract, Greg. They’re things that have been agreed upon by members of the societies in which they’re deemed wrong because they upset the balance and benefits that come from cooperation. Just claiming that something is absolute doesn’t actually make it so.

Why don’t you read back through the 40-some odd comments above. You’ll see that Peter already answered your last questions.

Maybe I might think Mao was correct and want to live according to his example and writings, regardless of who it hurts, is that ok?

“As it is with everything that people are involved in; they can screw things up. But the bad ones are not representative of what Jesus Christ calls His church.”

We just had long drawn out discussion about deciding who true Christians are and how we somewhat agreed that neither of us was qualified to make that distinction. That’s what you’re doing again. We’re back at square one where you’re telling me who the true Christians are and who the bad Christians are.

If you want to do that, then I’ll use my earlier example, again. Scott Roeder tells us that murdering a man who provides abortions is a righteous action in his god’s name. He claims to be a Christian just like millions of other people. I know plenty of Christians who would say that taking anyone’s life, for any reason is absolutely against their god’s word.

Which one is the bad Christian? Which one is the true Christian? Until you can logically address this dilemma, you haven’t answered any of my questions.

The Bible gives us the direction we are to take on this earth, period. The message is clear, it has been clear for all time. Although there may be issues (such as the book of Revelation and what is to come) which are not clear, the message for relationships between people, and the route to salvation have been made clear by Jesus Christ

This is kind of like cops. We have good ones and sometimes we have bad ones. Because of the bad ones, we don’t shun all cops. As it is with everything that people are involved in; they can screw things up. But the bad ones are not representative of what Jesus Christ calls His church. The members of Christ’s church do not do whatever they want and then expect salvation. As I have previously said, one can pay lip service to anything and do nothing in furtherance of its cause; hypocrites are not members of Christ’s church.

In one of our previous discussions, I believe that you stated that you looked to some of the men that have written authoritatively on various philosophical issues and human relationships for establishing rules or laws that we live by. Do you subscribe to that still? If you do, could you elaborate on your view in this area?

You wrote:

There have to be absolutes, both with regard to restrictions on behavior in a society and what a society would call good behavior. As I have stated earlier, the principles upon which these absolutes came from had to have their roots somewhere.

Why do there have to be absolutes? A few sentences later, you referred again to the idea that satisfying ourselves would be one way to look at the situation, in the absence of rewards and benefits on an eternal scale. But even that doesn’t explain why there must be absolutes. Assuming there is a God making rules for people to follow, what would stop God from changing the rules all the time? Or is God bound to say that murder is wrong, whether God wants to or not?

So you choose option #3 wherein, faith will get you into heaven, but you don’t necessarily have to be a good person, or even try to be a good person. Your assumption is that because someone comes to a place where they can say they have faith in your god and truly, honestly believe he is the one and only, they will automatically try to live a good life.

Of course, the issue you have there is the disparate ideologies that spring from Christianity. It’s not a nice neat little bundle with a unified and authoritative morality as you like to claim. If it was, you wouldn’t have Scott Roeder justifying, with his Christianity, the assassination of another human. You wouldn’t have Christians all over the world exhibiting a wide spectrum of morality systems that don’t agree with one another and yet, stem from the same origin.

When you come from a position of trying to say secular morality doesn’t work because people would do whatever they wanted to do, it’s best that you don’t come from a position where the system of morality you’re toting ends up with a bunch of people doing whatever they want to do and then essentially white-washing it by claiming they’re Christian and therefore forgiven. That’s what I was talking about when I said religion is a dangerous place to receive morality from.

This means that one cannot earn salvation by keeping the law. This would be a legalistic approach and is consistently condemned in the Bible. This verse is meant to insure that no one can take credit for their own salvation. If anyone could attain salvation by their works, it would negate the sacrifice Jesus Christ made on the cross. Jesus came to die for our sins, not to see that we earned our way to eternal salvation.

The part where it becomes a little more complicated is in the Book of James2: 14-18, where it states “What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith, but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed, but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if not accompanied by action is dead. But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.” Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.

Satan has faith in God and His Son in the sense that they exist, and people will mentally assent to the fact that God exists and that Jesus came to earth which can be interpreted as a certain type of faith. The point at which the genuine faith parts company with the foregoing, is the type of faith that says, Jesus Christ You are my Lord and Savior and I will put my full trust and faith in You for all time (as the apostle Paul did) and I will live my life in accordance with how You taught me to live.
Thus, the result of good works comes from more than a mental assent or acknowledgment of God’s existence, but a genuine faith and dependence upon Jesus Christ.

Your comments are like spinning merry-go-rounds; there is no way to get on. You need to choose a foundational point and then build from there.

For example, in the first paragraph of your last response directly to me, you say:

[W]hat . . . I believe about the need for us to believe in God is that, God looks to the soul (which He gave us), the driving force behind what we think and by extension what we do.

and

It is with this spirit, we make our connection to God through His Holy Spirit.

Both of those sentences, while they make sense, only make sense if we have already determined what you mean by “God,” and whether we can even agree that whatever you mean is real.

When you say that the soul that God gave us is the driving force behind our need to believe in God, you have created a closed system. You are standing on an island—it may be a real island, or it may just be a verbal island. Either way, nothing you’re saying really means anything to me unless we can establish some shared sense of what you (and then we) are talking about.

So what is God?

And, just fair warning, the follow-up question will almost certainly be, “How do you know that?” or “What gives you trustworthy knowledge to answer that question?” I’m telling you my follow-up question in advance so we can maybe save an extra runaround; I have a hunch that your answer to my follow-up question is going to be the subject of my first question, and vice versa. In other words, here is something like what I expect you to say (and feel free to prove me wrong):

‘God is described in the Bible, and the Bible is trustworthy because God caused it to be written.’

I’m not trying to anticipate your argument here because I’m trying to build a straw-man—I would be quite happy if you gave some other answer. The purpose of my anticipation is to point out that my fundamental questions may not be the same as yours, or Timothy Keller’s. My fundamental questions, ones that I have never had satisfactorily answered by any Christian, even after reading a big stack of books on theology and Christian apologetics, even after engaging in many of discussions like this one, are the ones that, if left unanswered, or unsuitably answered, are going to make everything else you might say seem pretty pointless to me—or like a spinning merry-go-round that won’t let me on.

So I’ll state my questions again as succinctly as I can:

1. What do you mean when you say “God”?

2. Where do you find trustworthy information to answer that question?

Also, my copy of Keller’s book arrived today. I’ll take a look as soon as I can.