Response to Christopher Tollefsen’s “Morality and God”

Abstract

Let me begin by thanking Dr. Tollefsen for his paper, and Dr. Crosby for inviting me to comment on it. I find this paper extremely engaging and useful for organizing my own thoughts on several topics. What to me was most provocative in it was his discussion of commands. I also found the last section of his paper the most elegant in its synthetic solution to a number of vexed questions having to do with the way in which God communicates the natural law to us. I think Tollefsen is right in his concluding assessment that “our view of God’s communication of the law—natural, divine, and, let us say, personal—has perhaps been somewhat deformed by our relying on too close an analogy to the imperatival form of speech act associated with human positive law and to the form of speech act associated with imperfect human fathers of intransigent children.”1 The “authoritative invitations,” as Tollefsen describes them, seem to me to strike the right sort of balance that natural lawyers are looking for between the ways in which we are motivated to act rightly by being the desiring and deliberating beings we are and the ways in which God exercises authority over the universe, and indeed our very natures, via the Eternal Law. The doctrine of hell suggests that perhaps not all of God’s communications can be thought of just as authoritative invitations since the threat of damnation seems to imply something stronger than an ignored invitation. Nevertheless, I am convinced that a great many divine communications can helpfully be thought of in terms of authoritative invitations. It is with some hesitation that I offer a few comments on the first section of Tollefsen’s paper since it concerns several points of dispute between him and Mark Murphy. Notwithstanding these misgivings, let me offer a few observations on the topic of God as explanation of morality in the hope of clarifying what might be in dispute between Murphy and Tollefsen on this issue. What is an explanation? What sort of work ought it to do? What should we expect from an explanation? It is no fault of Tollefsen that he does not take up an elaborate answer to these questions in a paper dealing with how God explains morality, for the answers to these sorts of questions often