Gregory Koukl and J. Beckwith

Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air

Baker House books, 1998

Reviewed by Jeffrey Stueber

   "There are no absolutes!" "You can't legislate morality!" "You can't force your morality on me!" These are the beliefs of our modern rebellious times, spirits of a freethinking age, the flies in our cultural ointment. You hear them ever so often among the enlightened and many who most likely are your neighbors. These phrases are uttered by the supposedly sincere, but really insincere, who would rather excuse an attitude or behavior looked upon poorly by benevolent folks who still scrutinize human morality by transcendent standards instead of liberalized set-on-shifting-sand ethics.

   Everyone believes in truth but so many won't admit it. That's because it's far easier to be a skeptic, a doubter, a firm believer in nothing. This brings to mind something Allan Bloom once said: every student entering college believes truth is relative and if he claims truth is not relative, he is looked at with one of Bloom's "uncomprehending stares." It's easy to not believe because not believing is so easy, especially in a culture that prides itself on openness. One can just say, "I don't believe," and leave it at that; that's an easy statement to utter. Actually claiming to believe something or anything requires work of the kind most would rather avoid. You have to provide proof, or evidence, when it's found out what you believe - especially if it's controversial - and then face your dissenters who would rather stab at the heart of your beliefs than embrace you. Then there's the obligations inherent in belief. If you believe and say God has actually given us ten commandments to obey, you imply we ought to obey those statutes even if they run contrary to so many of our cherished urges. Saying you believe in some absolute is somewhat easy; actually abiding by the dictates that flow from that absolute is much harder.

   Many people don't believe in absolutes, or rather claim to be openminded and it is here the crux of Koukl and Beckwith's book rests. Take for example Faye Wattleton, quoted by Koukl and Beckwith, former president of Planned Parenthood, who argues at length that she thinks a sense of morality is one of the best gifts she can give her child, but a sense of morality doesn't mean imposing one's morality on others. Wattleton's set in her beliefs and she's dedicated in this life to living in the shadows of Margaret Sanger by working to liberate individuals from the mighty engines of repression. And, of course, stopping anti-abortionists is part of her crusade. Koukl and Beckwith call Wattleton's essay from which they quote "impressively and persuasively written, one of the finest expressions of this view available in the space of five short paragraphs." Yet, Wattleton's views are so inconsistent because, although she claims to be a relativist and to be tolerant, her attempted damning indictment of her opposition shows she is anything but a relativist. Wattleton's opinions mirror the anti-Christian bias inherent in other relativists - or maybe I should say "potential relativists" - who think the only imposition of morality rests with the religious. That would mean incredibly somehow that blocking an abortion clinic is imposing a foreign morality on another while harassing a child for reading a Bible in school is most certainly not in imposition of morality.

   What I find fascinating about this book are several features. First, it's not a political tract with several comments on relativism; it's a book totally devoted to the subject of relativism with it's pitfalls, errors, dogmas, and, dare I say, rituals. Second, it is among few in a genre that expose the numerous problems with relativism and just how unable one is to live as a human who doesn't make any moral judgments. The book is brilliant in it's expositions but dangerous for the relativist who wears blinders, arguing for relativism for everyone else but he or she.

   In Relativism we find incredibly that true relativists cannot find any immoral laws, cannot accept praise, cannot take part in any kind of moral reformation, can't complain about evil, can't hold any meaningful discussions about morality, and can't even promote the trait of tolerance. To those well versed in philosophy, like I am, the inability of relativists to make any moral judgments on anything or much less live as a true relativist is well known to me but perhaps not to so-called relativists like Wattleton and company. Relativists cannot find any immoral laws because one has to know what moral laws are and this suggests the existence of a moral absolute by which to measure these laws. As Carol S. Lewis once observed when he was an atheist, his thoughts of the evil in the world were absurd as he had no criteria by which to judge evil - as if a man who saw a crooked line was calling it crooked without any idea of what a straight line is. Relativists cannot accept praise either because their praise is measured against an absolute set of expectations one is meant to respect. Without any absolute set of expectations to measure one's actions by, one is left drifting in a universal sea of nothingness with no idea of how one ought act to receive praise. Relativists cannot promote tolerance unless tolerance is some kind of absolute vector of behavior to strive to fulfill and neither can they complain about evil unless there is some absolute standard by which we all are judged. It would be very difficult to live as a true relativist, that is, if relativism is true. Perhaps we may pretend to be absolutists while relativism is still true, but this is a little like claiming a rock will keep you afloat even though every attempt to ride it across the ocean lands you fifty feet underwater.

   Koukl and Beckwith's book is so good that I can find little wrong with their methodology - the way they go about explaining exactly what their subject is. They start out explaining the difference between relativism and absolutism, and objectivism and subjectivism, by using an ice cream analogy (an acquaintance of mine recently argued that all religions were right (i.e. factually true) in the way different ice cream flavors are right for each individual). It's a good idea to define your terms and give examples and they do this as well as giving examples of the moral poverty that results from relativism which may produce the "moral hero" who leaves a baby to die on a hospital table or produces a brother or sister who can have a sexual relationship, a relationship columnist Ann Landers can describe as "Sick, sick, sick."

   I daresay that true relativists will struggle to dodge the philosophical bullets Koukl and Beckwith shoot, but unfortunately too many people won't. They'll be happy traveling along life's road claiming to be relativists while making judgments about the religious beliefs of those that trouble their souls while ignoring the plight of the helpless who must suffer at the hands of the supposedly enlightened.