**Two things: First, while this post appears to mark a detour from parental authority, you will see later on that it is not at all.
Second, much of what I say here comes from Mark Murphy’s excellent book called An Essay on Divine Authority. In particular, all the criticisms of arguments from divine perfections and general moral principles are his (with the exception of the criticism of the argument from justice). The ending thought—i.e., that we should think of divine authority as beginning with normative facts about our relationship to God—is also from an unpublished paper of Mark’s. I plan to develop this idea by appealing to the parent-child relationship in another post, but I just want to note at the outset that the ideas here are more or less summaries of Murphy’s work.**
Most people think that God, if he exists, has authority over us. And why wouldn’t he? He’s God! How could God be God without having authority?
But once we start trying to develop an argument for why we should think God has authority over us, things get less obvious.
The main problem with many arguments for divine authority is that they only tell us it would be good for us to submit to God’s authority. These arguments do not, however, tell us that we are therefore under God’s authority.
Here are just a few arguments that suffer this problem:
Power: God has authority over us because he can punish us if we disobey him. But God’s power clearly does not mean he has authority over us. Deeply evil and tyrannical states have the manpower to punish just about anyone, but this power seems to say nothing about whether citizens of that state owe any obedience to that government. Maybe we should submit to tyrannical states to avoid execution, but that does not mean we are therefore under the state’s authority.
Knowledge: God has authority over us because he knows what is good for us. This doesn’t work either: Even if an intelligent person knows what is in your best interests, their knowledge does not give them authority over you to compel you to do what they say. We may have good reason to listen to this person, but it does not follow that they are therefore authorities over us.
Goodness: God has authority over us because he is perfectly good. Guess what this argument has in common with the previous two? Correct! It’s bad. Mother Teresa was a very good person, but her commands are not therefore authoritative over us. We may have good reason to comply with her demands because she is a sort of moral expert, but that does not place us under her authority.
God’s perfections do not appear to work. So, what about general moral principles? The problem with many of these appeals is different from the “it-would-be-good-for-me” problem that affected appeals to divine perfections. The problem with an appeal to most general moral principles is that they are insufficient: That is, they only tell us we have a duty to submit to God’s authority, but they do not tell us that we are therefore under God’s authority.
Here is what I mean. Suppose you live in the state of nature and there is a political community that only admits citizens on the basis of explicit consent to its rule. This community has been very kind to you by offering you an abundance of material goods for your survival. Moreover, the community has a great deal of problems that you have the specific skills to meet (e.g., you might be a gifted teacher and this community has a serious teacher shortage). There are very clear ways you could help out citizens in this community, and it looks like you have compelling reasons to do so given how they have helped you.
Perhaps some moral principle requires you submit to this community’s authority and help out in various ways. Gratitude might require this submission as the only fitting expression of thanks given the ways this community has helped you. Justice requires giving to each what they are due, and this community might be due your obedience for a variety of reasons. Fairness may require your submission since you appear to be free-riding by taking benefits from a community’s labor and not contributing anything else in return. All of these things may be true together; nonetheless, you are not under the state’s authority until you sign the contract. From the fact a general moral principle requires you to submit to the state, you are not yet under the state’s authority until you do so.
The same thing happens when we use these moral principles in our arguments for divine authority. All of these principles, for their own unique reasons, may require our submission and obedience to God. Nonetheless, until we actually submit to God’s authority, we are not under it. We need something else to bridge the gap from our submission-duties to our actually being under God’s authority.
Now, here is a very sensible reply to these thoughts: “God’s authority is not the sort of thing that requires our submission!” I agree. In fact, the thought underlying my various objections to appeals to perfections/general moral principles is that they do not take this seriously.
What explains our being under God’s authority is that, from the start, we are already in a relationship with him that carries various normative demands on our conduct. If we think about friendships, for example, this is a relationship that carries with it a set of special duties. Just in virtue of being my friend, you have duties to do all the things we expect of friends: Socialize with me, care for me, help me in times of need, etc. We do not need to get into the details about the exact content of these duties; the point is that we recognize friends have duties to each other simply because they are friends.
Something similar happens between us and God. My sense is that, from the start, we already exist in a relationship with God that places normative demands on us. In a later post, I will argue that this relationship is one of parenthood: God is our divine father, and the fact that we are his children provides the grounding for God’s divine/parental authority over us. This authority does not depend at all on our consent or the general moral principles of justice/fairness/gratitude; it is just a primitive feature of the relationship.
More on this later. For now, I just want to note that there is a serious problem: Most people think God is authoritative over us, but if they think about why this is true, many of the arguments they might use are false.
How would you define authority? Excited to part 2
Does this sort of analysis take into consideration the very different kind of being God is? I'm sure there is a more technical word here, but your objections don't really seem to take into account that we may owe God obedience precisely because he is, well, a transcendent being that is unlike us in very significant ways!
(I agree w you that the arguments outlined above are bad, I just feel there's a missing metaphysical component)