IS THERE SUCH A THING AS "SINS"?

Responses to a Facebook friend who argues that the concept of sin is meaningless:

It is simplistic to suggest that there are no sins, only crimes. Characteristic of the coffee house philosophy of the early 20th century, such as the infamous Vienna Circle. It is an unprovable assumption that there are no higher moral laws, and is in only logical-positivistic conditioning (rather than evidence) that has led anyone to regard it as a fact. You do not have to be religious to believe in a higher law - perhaps one hardwired into human psychology via evolution because altruism and social responsibility have a survival value. Indeed, it is the growing realisation that there are higher laws that has led some high profile atheist moral philosophers to believe in God in later life, e.g. Anthony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre. In fact Kant based his logical argument for the existence of God on the universal human sense of duty. What else but awareness of a higher law would lead people to risk their own lives by helping Jews escape from the (totally legal at the time) Holocaust? Or to risk imprisonment in our own culture by whistleblowing on immoral (but totally legal) government actions. The distinction between crime and moral offence (whether you call it sin or not) is taught as an objective fact in the national GCSE syllabus.....

I must take issue, respectfully, with you and the prevailing episteme which we all inhabit, in the way you treat assumptions as facts. It is an assumption, not a fact, that thought and conscience are purely socio-physical in their source. Psychology, criminology and anthropology cannot by their very essence perceive, much less transcend, the context within which this assumption has developed, precisely because they are sub-branches of a monist, nominalist, determinist school of philosophy which defines both their reach and their methods. By contrast, the philosophy in its entirety involves (without any religious or anti-religious bias other than in the minds of individual thinkers) a continuing evaluation of the ontological, epistemological and moral debates from all sides: monist vs. dualist, nominalist vs. realist, determinist vs. libertarian, moral absolutist vs. moral relativist vs. moral subjectivist, etc. True philosophy identifies the assumptions and the chain of logic on each side, and in every generation it throws up brilliant minds of every conviction. The source of the universe, the source of intelligence and the nature of thought and conscience and goodness are philosophical rather than scientific fields of enquiry precisely because they entail questioning rather than simply accepting the purely synthetic epistemology within which science is trapped. That is not a religious viewpoint but an objective philosophical one....

Good point about whether a non-religious philosopher ever used the word "sin". My answer would be that you are (in the nicest possible way) trying to shackle my argument by tying it to the word "sin" which I agree is a religious jargon word. However, we must get over stereotyping ethical theories (even the absolutist ones) as if they all belonged in the religious ghetto. Sin is a religious code word that encompasses all the battlegrounds in which self-interest and altruism collide, and there are plenty of secular code words for the same thing which are the proper stuff of objective philosophical debate and cannot be stereotyped as religious. The most important of these is arguably alienation (Marx), but the debate could be had in terms of utility (Bentham, Mill), duty (Kant), neurosis (Freud), social cohesion (Weber), virtue, natural law...

Regarding separating philosophical enquiry from religious or scientific enquiry, I absolutely and categorically agree. If I have given the opposite impression, I have done us all a disservice. My whole point is that scientific and religious enquiry are siblings and have a complementary and equally important role to play in the philosophical project. The point I am specifically trying to make is that good science and good religion are collaborators rather than opponents, and both in their purest form recognise the difference between analytical truths on the one hand and the contingent conclusions drawn from observation and experiment on the other. Both require assumptions in order to function, but no assumption is beyond re-evaluation.....

Believe it or not I absolutely agree. Wittgenstein is the touchstone here: each peer group has technical language which has profound symbolic meaning to members of the group. When members fail to recognise that the meaning of these words is symbolic and contextually dependent, and use them as though they had absolute meaning in relation to the world outside their circle, then language becomes an obstacle to meaning. It is valid for religious believers to talk to outsiders about sin if they are expressing their world-view; not to try to use them to describe objectively the listener's predicament.....

Therefore I cannot meaningfully tell you that you are a miserable sinner :-))) but I can meaningfully say that my peer group uses the word "sin" as shorthand for a package of alienation, remorse and internal conflict that you may possibly have experienced......


...at least, I know I have.....

Beautifully put. And although I have chosen to live within a Christian worldview, some of which I take to be absolute truth, I am not blind to the possibility that all religious doctrine is a Wittgensteinian "language game" for the kind of atonement that you advocate. I just believe that Jesus is the ultimate guide and role model in reconnecting to our original source.