Almost 25 years ago, I was a first-year journalism student at Ottawa’s Carleton University who took an introductory course in philosophy at the suggestion of a high school guidance counsellor before I’d graduated from said high school. That course wound up being one of the most frustrating courses I ever took, because the professor was someone willing to play Devil’s Advocate. We’d read some Immanuel Kant, and then be subjected to holes punched through Kant’s arguments. We’d read some Ludwig Wittgenstein, only to find out that Wittgenstein himself had doubts about his philosophies. Just when you thought you were getting the answer to life, the universe and everything, that professor would come along and pull the rug out from under you.

I never took another philosophy course at Carleton.

Anyhow, flash forward to now and you have me reading a deeply philosophical work that has a religious underpinning. Written by the husband and wife team of David Baggett and Marybeth Baggett, The Morals of the Story is a book that seeks to answer the question, Is God Real? And, if He is, why do we have morals? It is because God wills us to act in a good, upright fashion (and what God wills us to do is inherently good), or is acting in a good, upright fashion the means to which we’ll find favour with God? Well, I’ve read the book and I still don’t have the answer to that. The Morals of the Story is basically like 10 books shoved into one. Each chapter could easily be its own book.

So, for a book that’s also about Christian apologetics, or an attempt to prove God and God’s worth, I have to apologize myself and say A) I didn’t understand much of the book and B) the book is probably meant for those pursuing Master’s degrees in religious studies. This goes against what the authors say in the introduction, that this is a book for everyone living, not dead. I can see why they wrote that assertion — they basically want people to believe in God and so on and so forth, and this book is the justification of that belief. Still, I must say that journalism at Carleton was, in my time (and probably still is), a notoriously difficult undergraduate degree, so I consider myself to be one smart cookie. Still, the point of this volume sailed right over my head, off into the sea, down to the end of the flat earth, and down into a deep dark chasm.

The book quotes Kant a lot — whose theories, of course, my philosophy teacher disproved — and also C.S. Lewis, a Christian who is probably a touch too conservative for my tastes. That kept me at arm’s length. However, what parts of the book I was comfortable with and did understand had me going, “Hmmm. I bet if I had more time and more thought, what the authors are saying here could easily be disproven.” So there’s that. However, in the authors’ quest to be universal, the one thing I really liked about this volume was that they go out of their way to make sure they’re not pooh-poohing people who don’t believe what they find to be true. Thus, atheists are encouraged to read the book — it’s probably most meant for them, anyway!

There were interesting nuggets in the book here and there. One of the questions it raises is the nature of guilt. The authors seem to have the argument that guilt is a precondition of there being the existence of a God, because, I think, only the fear of something absolute above you in the pecking order of things would enable a person to feel guilt. Still, I found myself in dialogue with the book — which the authors actually encourage, by the way — and wondering if guilt could be explained away by social interactions with other people; that it’s a learned, not inherited, emotion of sorts. I don’t know if my doubts there were ever articulated in the book because things happen to go by at a lightning quick pace. For instance, one sole chapter of The Morals of the Story introduces the ground-breaking work of no less than 20 theologian philosophers. That means that each individual and their work gets only a paragraph or two’s worth of mentioning! Authors: Slow down! Us little people don’t have the knowledge that you do.

And that’s essentially my criticism of this work. For people that spend a lot of time on Kant, a bit of an overview on his maxims would have been appreciated because I’m now 25 years removed from reading him. The authors seem to presuppose that you’re familiar with all of the things they’re familiar with. Now, granted, there is a lot of footnoting in this book, and the footnotes sometimes run for a good page or two on my Kindle (I had an electronic advance reader’s copy of the book). The information might have been in the footnotes. However, I stopped reading the footnotes due to formatting issues with the galley (which is not the authors’ fault, nor am I being critical of the publisher here — galleys are often uncorrected proofs of a work). More importantly, though, I felt that if the information was really important, it would not be relegated to a footnote. So, yes, The Morals of the Story is an academic work that probably encourages you in normal situations to read the footnotes. Anyhow, I sort of want to give this book to a friend who is studying to become a minister. Maybe she would be able to make heads or tails of the work. And the footnotes.

One other thing I should mention is that this book tries to not take itself too seriously by injecting corny humour into its pages now and then. I’m of two minds of this — on one hand, it humanizes the authors and their subject matter, but, on the other, it makes one not want to take the depth of the ideas presented here too seriously. I write academically for a freelance client, and I know I would not get away with the gags the authors pull in my own writing for my client. So consider myself torn on this issue. I am not for or opposed to the jokes. At least the authors are consistent.

Overall, I would suggest you read The Morals of the Story if you’re in graduate school and are perhaps an atheist. That seems to be the target audience for this work because, after all, we Christians don’t need to be convinced that God is real and we should follow His law regardless of reason. I wish I was able to get more value of this work. Things kept me from really digging deeply into this book. The information is fairly loosely structured, too — for instance, the book begins with an account of Paul’s defence of Christ at Mars Hill in the Book of Acts for a reason I cannot really discern, and the most complex chapter by the authors’ own admission falls halfway through the read. The Morals of the Story, in the end, reads like a humorous, disorganized academic paper. So, armed with that knowledge, consider if this book is right for you. I don’t think it was meant for me, but I don’t think I was meant to really read it. After all, I think I only got a B or a B+ in that philosophy class at university all those years ago.

This book is captivating, and it did a good job on informing the reader on the different arguments for morality. It also did a good job arguing for the fact that the moral argument is one of the most effective in arguing for theism.

The best part of the book is the elaboration of the question of whether something is good because God says so or is it good in and of itself. The elaboration on the fact that goodness comes out of God's character and therefore God is not arbitrary in declaring things good makes the book a worthwhile read.