#294 The Plausibility of Grounding Moral Values in God

Dr. craig’s response

Maybe I shouldn’t have picked this question, Devin, since I shall simply voice my agreement with almost everything you said! But it serves as a good model to our readers of clear thinking.

My main corrective would come in response to your friend’s appeal to G. E. Moore to justify rejecting theistic ethics. As I have pointed out elsewhere, we must clearly distinguish between moral semantics and moral ontology. Moral semantics asks about the meaning of moral terms. Moral ontology asks about the reality of moral values and duties. The claim that objective moral values are grounded in God is a claim about moral ontology, not about moral semantics. The theist does not make any claim that “good” is somehow to be defined in theistic terms, e.g., “belonging to God’s nature.” The theist may thus fully embrace Moore’s view about “good” being a primitive term, not to be defined in terms of something else. Your friend has clearly conflated moral semantics and moral ontology.

What your question really addresses, I think, is not the meaning of the term “good” but rather the plausibility of theistic ethics, which takes God to be the paradigm of goodness. Anyone is free to propose whatever moral theory he likes, and we shall assess its plausibility. So if the theist proposes to take God as the paradigm of goodness, how plausible is that ontology?

It seems to me that you argue effectively for its plausibility.

First, as you point out in your first and third arguments, apart from God to ground moral values, there just doesn’t seem to be anything else that could plausibly do the job. This is the nerve of the moral argument for God. I agree that platonism is multiply defective. The humanist might try to ground objective values in human beings, but that seems to be a premature and implausible stopping point in the search for explanations. But when we get to God, there just is nothing more to which one might appeal. So the regress of explanations stops plausibly in God.

Second, as the greatest conceivable being, God must be morally perfect. For it is better to be morally perfect than to be morally flawed. This seems to me rationally undeniable. Moreover, God by definition must be worthy of worship, and only a perfect being can be worthy of worship (as opposed, say, to admiration). That is why, as Oxford philosopher Peter Millican points out, there cannot be an evil God. We can imagine an evil creator-designer of the universe in an atheistic world (an evil god), but such a being would be neither worthy of worship nor maximally great and therefore not God. I should add as well that it is greater to be the paradigm of goodness than merely conform to that paradigm, so that God must be goodness itself.

Your points are relevant to those who misguidedly try to rescue the false dilemma posed in the Euthyphro argument: either something is good because God wills it or God wills something because it is good. Because these alternatives are not contradictories it is open to the theist to propose a third alternative, viz., God wills something because He is good. Unhappy with this defeat of their dilemma, some have demanded: is something good because of the way God is or is God that way because something is good? The critic isn’t listening. We’ve already said that something is good because of the way God is. “But why is God good?” the critic persists. It’s hard to make sense of this question. The moral theory just is that God is the paradigm of goodness, and it makes no sense to ask why the paradigm of goodness is good. The critic must be asking, “Why believe your theory?” The answer is, “because it makes the best sense of objective moral values and duties.” It is the most plausible ethical theory out there. Your arguments are basically defenses of the plausibility of theistic ethics, and I think they succeed.