Cambridge Roundtable | Dialogues in Science, Art & Religion

Rae Langton, Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at MIT, answers the question affirmatively March 10th: "Yes, we can be good without God." Rae Langton: When someone asks, 'Can you be good without God?', there are two questions they may have in mind. First, perhaps, there is a question about justification. Without God to decide what's good, how can anything be good? We have here the famous fear of Ivan Karamazov: 'if God is dead, then everything is permitted'. Second, there may be a question about motivation. How, without God's help, can we get ourselves do what's right? If there is no God whose heaven can reward, or whose grace can enable, we are surely morally stranded. Both anxieties are mistaken. Indeed, a more pressing question may be: Can you be good with God? Bringing God into the picture distorts both motivation, and justification. It distorts motivation, because religious motives usurp motives that are truly moral. It distorts justification, in the way that Plato showed. Plato asked whether whether God wills something because it is good, or whether is it good because God wills it. He showed - contrary to my learned colleague, Bill Craig - that this really does present a dilemma, resolved only by the discovery that goodness is independent of God. Our co nclusion should be generous. We can be good, or bad, with God; we can be good, or bad, without God. But God does not make it any easier."

William Lane Craig, Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, questions whether we can be good without God: "Sometimes people ask, 'Does God will something because it is good, or is something good because God wills it?' The question is a false dilemma. Traditional theism rejects both the alternatives. The alternative traditionally taken by theists is that God wills something because He is good. That is to say, what Plato called the Good just is the moral nature of God Himself. God is by nature loving, kind, impartial, fair, and so on. He is the paradigm of goodness. Therefore, the Good is not independent of God. So if God exists, objective moral values exist."

Owen Gingerich is Senior Astronomer Emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophy sical Observatory and is a former Professor of Astronomy and of the History of Science at Harvard University, and as chairman of The Cambridge Roundtable, he will convene the March 11 evening devoted to asking the question, "Does the Universe Suggest Evidence for God?" W.L. Craig answers: "With each successive failure of alternative cosmogonic theories to avoid the absolute beginning of the universe predicted by the Standard Model, that prediction has been corroborated...Of course, in view of the metaphysical issues raised by the prospect of a beginning of the universe, we may be confident that the quest to avert the absolute beginning predicted by the Standard Model will continue unabated. Such efforts are to be encouraged, and we have no reason to think that such attempts at falsification of the prediction of the Standard Model will result in anything other than further corroboration of its prediction of a beginning...It seems to me, therefore, that it is not only coherent but also plausible in light of the kalam cosmological argument that God existing changelessly alone without creation is timeless and that He enters time at the moment of creation in virtue of His causal relation to the temporal universe. Given that time began to exist, the most plausible view of God' s relationship to time is that He is timeless without creation and temporal subsequent to creation."

Abraham Loeb, Professor of Astronomy and the Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at Harvard University: "As the Universe expands, galaxies get separated from one another, and the average density of matter over a large volume of space is reduced. If we imagine playing the cosmic movie in reverse and tracing this evolution backwards in time, we would infer that there must have been an instant when the density of matter was infinite. This moment in time is the " Big Bang", before which we cannot reliably extrapolate our history. But even before we get all the way back to the Big Bang, there must have been a time when stars like our Sun and galaxies like our Milky Way did not exist, because the Universe was denser than they are. If so, how and when did the first stars and galaxies form?" How Did the First Stars and Galaxies Form? The Scientific Story of Genesis (Princeton University Press, May 2010)

Howard Smith, Senior Astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: "The real world, as uncovered by modern science, contains messages of spiritual importance that are no less Divine than those of scripture. Like many religious viewpoints, a Jewish mystical perspective offers intellectually rigorous and rewarding insights about our world. Imagining these two realms as being confrontational is an outdated simplification that hinders thoughtful discussion, with one consequence being that the recent spectacular successes of science appear to have fostered extreme attitudes instead of new paradigms. Attentive listening is a shared imperative of science and religion; it is rewarding, not threatening, to learn from the voices from both." Please see Howard's book, Let There Be Light at www.lettherebelightbook.com

The Cambridge Roundtable on Science, Art & Religion