Lecture Topic:  God and Christian Morality   

Lecture 1 Morality   Tuesday, October 28, 2014, 4:00 to 5:30 pm –Champlain College room M2  
There are truths about which actions are morally good or obligatory, morally bad or wrong. Whether an action is morally good (or whatever) depends both on contingent matters and on necessarily true moral principles. It is good to give money to the charity Oxfam because it will use to feed starving humans (a contingent matter), and it is always good to feed starving humans (a necessarily true moral principle).  We can discover what these necessarily true moral principles are by the method of ‘reflective equilibrium', which consists in finding the simplest principle which makes sense of most of our moral intuitions.  The necessary principles of morality are independent of the will of God, and hold whether or not there is a God.   

Lecture 2 God and Morality  Wednesday, October 29, 2014, 4:00 to 5:30 pm –Gzowski College room 106  
Among the necessary moral truths are the principle that one ought to show respect to the great and the good,  the principle that one ought to show gratitude to  benefactors, and the principle that one ought to fulfil any conditions under which one has received a gift. So if there is a God, we owe him enormous respect and gratitude, and we must fulfil the conditions under which he has given us life, which include obeying his commands. God has good reasons to issue commands to us which impose on us obligations additional to those which we already have to humans.  These reasons are: to reinforce our obligations to do what is already obligatory, to make us the kind of people  who do supererogatory good acts, to coordinate our good actions with those of others, and to give us a special role in God’s plans.     

Lecture 3 Christian Morality Thursday, October 30, 2014, 4:00 to 5:30 pm –Champlain College room M2     
In order to know what God has commanded, we need a revelation from God. The Christian revelation through Jesus claims that by his commands God makes it obligatory for us to do more than we would otherwise be obliged to do for our fellow humans; and also to obey certain precepts concerned with gender roles, sexual behaviour, and the preservation of life. (Hence I discuss the traditional Christian views about family headship, divorce, homosexual acts, and suicide.) God has reason to issue commands (including prohibitions) about these matters.   

Details about this year’s lecture series can be found at:  http://www.trentu.ca/philosophy/news.php  or kfife@trentu.ca

Posted on Monday, September 29, 2014.