The Books that Shaped Us (Part 2)

Bulletin Roundtable

Aug 16, 2021

Bulletin Roundtable

As mentioned in part one of this month’s Roundtable, all of us at the Bulletin have been greatly shaped and encouraged by good books over the years, and we know the same is true for you. Below, David Baggett concludes our discussion by describing a book that had a transformative influence in his intellectual and spiritual journey. If there’s a book that’s had a crucial influence in your life, feel free to share about it in the comments below.

David Baggett

When I was in college I first encountered the Euthyphro Dilemma in an early Socratic dialogue. The Euthyphro Dilemma—not the “Urethra Dilemma,” as one student wrote in a paper—is the challenge, to put it in modern terms, of whether God commands something because it’s moral or something is moral because God commands it. It fascinated me from the start, and I knew I wanted to think about it quite a bit more. I found it endlessly engaging, and though I thought there was a good answer to it, I didn’t quite know what it was.

After switching majors from physics to philosophy, I had occasion to think some more about the Dilemma, and the connections between God and morality more generally, but it was while subsequently attending Asbury Seminary that I found the chance to think about it in much greater depth. Studying with Jerry Walls, in particular, furnished me the opportunity, and so as a seminarian I was able for the first time to start writing about it. Admittedly I was only getting started; some of my lines were less than memorable—“God is at least as much God as a circle is a circle,” for instance. (Let’s never mention that again.)

By the time I finished seminary I knew I wanted to earn a PhD in philosophy, and I knew from day one that I would write my dissertation on the Euthyphro Dilemma. The work of Robert Adams had been important to me already, but I heard he was working on a big book on the topic of God and ethics. Serendipitously, perhaps providentially, as I was in the throes of writing my dissertation, his book was published in 1999. Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics did not disappoint and proved to be a treasure trove of goodies.

I had been working on my doctorate and dissertation at Wayne State University, a bastion of analytic philosophy. Alvin Plantinga had started his career there after Yale; he describes coming up with the central idea of God and Other Minds in a dingy parking lot on Wayne’s campus. I’m quite sure I have found myself in that dingy parking lot; if not that one, plenty of others. But by the time I came around there were no believers on faculty in the philosophy department. There are now, once more, but not when I was there. My friendship with fellow believer Sloan Lee while there was a lifesaver.

I did the bulk of my study of ethics there under the tutelage of Bruce Russell, a very good philosopher but a committed atheist. He was fair, and he taught me a lot—as did plenty of others on faculty from Herb Granger to Michael McKinsey, Larry Lombard to Larry Powers. The work in ethics and analytic ethics was done with Bruce, though, and fairly all of the reading I did seemed divorced from anything like theism. This bothered me, because a longstanding conviction of mine had been that morality robustly and rightly construed almost certainly broached central matters of worldview and was more plausibly at home in a theistic world rather than an atheist one. The rigor and analytic machinery were a thing to behold, crucial to learn, but sometimes the aridness of it all felt like a lifeless desert, leaving me feeling parched.

I still vividly recall an afternoon in a library on campus, dutifully reading through an anthology for class, coming across George Mavrodes’ “Religion and the Queerness of Morality.” It was nothing less than exhilarating, an oasis and stream in the desert. At long last I had found someone who spoke my language and saw ethics the way I had for as long as I could remember. But that was just a prelude or precursor. Thanks to the resurgence of interest in Christian philosophy, I gradually began to come across more profoundly good work in ethics and metaethics by Christian thinkers, along with unbelievers who took theistic claims seriously. Finally, at last, when Adams’ magnum opus came out, it was a rigorous, book-length treatment of a whole range of moral phenomena, the whole discussion structured by a (Platonic) theistic paradigm—more theistic than Platonic. I remember long nights spent reading the book, enraptured by its every page, mesmerized by it, inspired by it, like practically nothing else I had ever read. It ushered me into a whole new arena, and I knew my work would never be the same.

Among other things, what a tremendous confidence booster it was to see a world-class philosopher at the top of his game, an unapologetic professing Christian believer, so forthrightly and intelligently bring his theistic convictions to bear in his work. Mine was a context where the reigning view and undeniable subtext so often was that theism is suspect and God is for the credulous. I know I should have known better already, but sociological forces in a context like that are strong. I know plenty of professing believers, facing such explicit or implicit resistance and condescension, who simply stop bringing up their faith in those environments. Maybe religious conviction in our culture remains a majority view; it is often a distinctly minority one in secular philosophy departments, a dynamic that can wear down one’s defenses and over time prove oppressive and daunting. Sometimes a single flicker of light in such darkness is priceless. Finite and Infinite Goods was that flicker for me—at the time it felt like a ball of fire. To this day I remain more grateful than I can put into words.

Invariably the book’s timing and epic quality meant it would have a significant impact on my own developing views, and sure enough, it has continued to wield an ongoing influence on me until this day. I count it one of the very best books on theistic ethics and moral apologetics—John Hare’s more recent God’s Command is the only other contemporary book in its league on the subject, as far as I am concerned.

Sometimes scholars might wonder if their work is read, and whether it has an impact. The sort of training and rigor it takes for a book like this one to be produced means it loses lots of its readers. In a constantly hurried, harried culture, it does not garner lots of tweets or Facebook likes; nothing viral about it. Adams is no pop cultural icon, nor counted an internet celebrity of note or social media superstar. His is a long, slow, and challenging book (as are his others, like his treatise on Leibniz), but so eminently worth the effort to wade through and digest carefully, rife with substance, replete with insight, redolent with wisdom. A weighty exercise in culture making, it prodigiously impresses without trying to.

Despite that it does not have thousands of reviews on Amazon, and likely never will, Adams’ book will continue to have a longstanding influence for generations to come. Like relentless drops of water gradually cutting rock, its influence will eventually and ever so incrementally percolate down and make its difference felt; only a furtive glance at its ultimate payoff will be seen in our lifetimes. Like A. E. Taylor’s Faith of a Moralist or John Henry Newman’s An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, Finite and Infinite Goods is a classic; it explores matters that matter most and will be sure to stand the test of time and endure well after the entertaining ephemeral voices of fame have been long silenced.

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