"Is God Necessary for Morality?"

Introduction

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William Lane Craig

Good evening.

I want to begin by thanking the Veritas forum for the privilege of taking part in tonight's important debate. Professor Antony and I have previously debated the question of God and morality in a book entitled God and Ethics, and so I'm happy to have the opportunity to continue our discussion this evening.

The question before us this evening is, "Is God Necessary for Morality?" Notice what the question is not asking. We are not asking whether belief in God is necessary for morality. No one in tonight's debate is arguing that in order to live a moral life you have to believe in God. Rather, the question is whether God is necessary for morality. The answer to that question obviously depends on what you mean by morality. If by morality you mean simply a certain pattern of social behavior prevalent among human beings, then obviously that sort of behavior could still go on even if it turned out that God does not exist. God isn't necessary in order for human beings to exhibit certain patterns of social behavior which they call acting morally. But if by morality you mean that certain things are really good or evil, that certain actions are unconditionally obligatory or impermissible, then many atheists and theists alike agree that God is indeed necessary for morality.

In the absence of God, morality turns out to be just a human illusion. The same patterns of social behavior might go on without God, but it would be a delusion to think that such behavior has any objective moral significance. Accordingly, in tonight's debate, I'm going to argue that God is necessary for morality in at least three distinct ways: without God, objective moral values, moral duties, and moral accountability would not exist.

So let's look at that first point together. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist. When we talk about moral values, we're talking about whether something is good or evil. To say that there are objective moral values is to say that things are good and evil independently of whether anybody believes it to be so. To say, for example, that the Holocaust was objectively evil is to say that it was evil even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was good. It would still have been evil even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in brainwashing or exterminating everybody who disagreed with them so that everybody thought the Holocaust was good.

My first claim is that if there is no God, then moral values are not objective in that sense. Traditionally, objective moral values have been based in God, who is the highest good. He is the locus and the paradigm of moral value. God's own holy and loving nature supplies the absolute standard against which all actions are measured. He is by nature loving, kind, generous, faithful, just and so forth, and thus if God exists, objective moral values exist. But if God does not exist, what basis remains for objective moral values? In particular, why think that human beings would still have moral worth?

On the atheistic view, human beings are just accidental byproducts of nature which have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust called the planet Earth, lost somewhere in a hostile and mindless universe in which we are doomed to perish individually and collectively in a relatively short time. On a naturalistic view, moral values are just the byproduct of biological evolution and social conditioning. Just as a troop of baboons exhibit cooperative and even self-sacrificial behavior because natural selection has determined it to be advantageous in the struggle for survival, so their primate cousins, Homo sapiens, exhibit similar behavior for precisely the same reason. As a result of sociobiological pressures, there has evolved among Homo sapiens a sort of herd morality which is useful in the perpetuation of our species. But on the atheistic view, there doesn't seem to be anything about Homo sapiens that makes this morality objectively true.

Philosopher of science Michael Ruse reports,

If we were to rewind the film of human evolution back to the beginning and start anew, people with a very different set of moral values might well have evolved. As Darwin himself wrote in The Descent of Man,

For us to think that human beings are special and our morality objectively true is to succumb to the temptation to speciesism, an unjustifiable bias in favor of our own species.

The objective worthlessness of human beings on a naturalistic worldview is underscored by two implications of that worldview: materialism and determinism. Naturalists are typically materialists or physicalists who regard man as merely an animal organism. But if man has no immaterial aspect to his being, whether you call it soul or mind or whatever, then we're not qualitatively different from other animal species. On a materialistic anthropology, there's no reason to think that human beings are objectively more valuable than rats. When a terrorist bomb rips through a market in Baghdad, all that really happens is just a rearrangement of the molecules that used to be a little girl.

Secondly, if there is no mind distinct from the brain, then everything we think and do is determined by the input of our five senses and our genetic makeup. There is no personal agent who freely decides to do something. But without freedom, none of our choices are morally significant. They're like the jerks of a puppet's limbs controlled by the strings of sensory input and physical constitution. What moral value does a puppet or its movements have? Richard Dawkins' assessment of human worth may be depressing, but why on atheism is he mistaken when he says,

If there is no God, then any basis for regarding the herd morality evolved by Homo sapiens as objectively true seems to have been removed. Take God out of the picture and all you seem to be left with is an ape-like creature on a tiny speck of dust beset with delusions of moral grandeur.

Second, if God does not exist, objective moral duties do not exist. Duties have to do with whether something is right or wrong. You might think at first that the distinction between right and wrong is the same as the distinction between good and evil, but if you think about it, you can see that this isn't the case. Duty has to do with moral obligation, with what I ought or ought not to do. But obviously you're not morally obligated to do something just because it would be good for you to do it. For example, it would be good for you to become a doctor, but you're not morally obligated to become a doctor. After all, it would also be good for you to become a firefighter or a homemaker or a diplomat, but you can't do them all. So there's a difference between moral values and moral duties.

Now my claim is that if God does not exist, then we have no objective moral duties. To say that we have objective moral duties is again to say that we have moral obligations regardless of whether we think that we do. Traditionally, our moral duties were thought to spring from God's commandments, such as the Ten Commandments. Far from being arbitrary, these commandments flow from God's very nature. On this foundation, we can affirm the objective rightness of love, generosity, self-sacrifice, and equality, and condemn as objectively wrong selfishness, hatred, abuse, oppression, and discrimination.

But if there is no God, then what basis remains for objective moral duties? On the atheistic view, human beings are just animals, and animals have no moral obligations to one another. When a lion kills a zebra, it kills the zebra, but it does not murder the zebra. When a great white shark forcibly copulates with a female, it forcibly copulates with her, but it doesn't rape her. None of these things has any moral dimension; they are neither prohibited nor obligatory. So if God does not exist, why think that we have any moral obligations to do anything? Who or what imposes these moral obligations upon us? Where did they come from? It's very hard to see why they would be anything more than subjective impressions arising and ingrained into us by societal and parental conditioning.

On the atheistic view, certain actions such as rape and incest may not be biologically and socially advantageous, and so in the course of human development have become taboo. But that does absolutely nothing to show that rape and incest is really wrong. Such behavior goes on all the time in the animal kingdom. On the atheistic view, the rapist who goes against the herd morality is doing nothing more serious than acting unfashionably, like the man who belches loudly at the dinner table. If there is no moral lawgiver, then there is no objective moral law which we must obey.

Thirdly, if God does not exist, then there is no basis for moral accountability. Traditionally, it's been held that God holds all persons morally accountable for their actions. Despite the inequalities of this life, in the end the scales of God's justice will be balanced. Thus, the moral choices we make in this life are infused with an eternal significance. But if God does not exist, then what basis remains for moral accountability? Even if there were objective moral values and duties under atheism, they seem to be irrelevant because there's no moral accountability.

If life ends at the grave, it ultimately makes no difference whether you lived as a Stalin or as a Mother Teresa. As the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky rightly said, "If there is no immortality then all things are permitted." Given the finality of death, it really does not matter how you live. The state torturers in communist prisons in the Soviet Union understood this all too well. Richard Wurmbrand reports,

Given the finality of death, it really does not matter how you live. So what do you say to someone who concludes that we may as well just live as we please out of pure self-interest? You might say that it's in our best self-interest to adopt a moral lifestyle, but clearly that's not always true. We all know situations in which morality runs smack dab in the face of self-interest. Moreover, if one is sufficiently powerful, like a Ferdinand Marcos or a Papa Doc Duvalier or even a Donald Trump, then one can pretty much ignore the dictates of conscience and safely live in self-indulgence.

Historian Stewart C. Easton sums it up well when he writes,

To believe then that God does not exist and that there is thus no moral accountability would be quite literally demoralizing, for then we'd have to accept that our moral choices are ultimately insignificant, since both our fate and that of the universe are ultimately the same regardless of what we do. By demoralization, I mean a deterioration of moral motivation. It's hard to do the right thing when it conflicts with your own self-interest, and it's hard to resist temptation to do wrong when desire is strong. The belief that ultimately it does not matter what you choose or do is apt to sap one's moral strength and so undermine one's moral life.

As Robert Adams observes,

The absence of moral accountability from a philosophy of atheism thus makes an ethic of compassion and self-sacrifice a hollow abstraction.

In sum, it's plausible that without God, there are no objective moral values, no objective moral duties, and no moral accountability. God is therefore vitally necessary for morality. As I said, this is a conclusion that is accepted by a good many atheist philosophers such as Nietzsche, Russell, and Sartre. Though the conclusion is a painful one, these thinkers believe that honesty compels them to face it squarely. The challenge confronting an atheist philosopher who, like Professor Antony, continues to cling to objective moral values and duties after letting go of God is therefore threefold.

First, to explain what is the basis of objective moral values on atheism, in particular, what is the basis for the intrinsic value of human beings? Second, to explain what is the source of objective moral duties on atheism, what makes certain acts obligatory or forbidden if there is no moral lawgiver to command or forbid them? And third, to explain how on atheism ultimate moral accountability exists, or alternatively, why it is not necessary for morality.

Louise Antony

Well, I'm really happy to be here tonight and to have the opportunity to discuss this really important and I think fascinating question with Dr. Craig and with all of you, and thanks very much to Don Lent and to the Veritas forum for setting this up and to Dr. Craig for agreeing to participate in this conversation with me. I also have to thank all of my friends who have been helping me think about this. I hope Dr. Craig had the benefit of similar support.

I hope that we can make some real progress tonight, progress in understanding the nature of moral value.

The question before us tonight is whether God is necessary for morality. You might think that this is a question that must necessarily divide theists from atheists, that if you believe in God, you must believe that God is the source or the ground of morality, and that if you don't believe in God then you must believe that morality is independent of God. But this is incorrect. Many atheists agree with Dr. Craig that God is necessary for morality, and they infer from this in their premise that God doesn't exist that there is no morality, no objective right or wrong. Dr. Craig quoted some of these atheists to you tonight, so atheists can agree with theists that God and morality go together.

On the other hand—and this might be surprising to some of you—many theists, like many atheists, believe that God is not necessary for morality, and that what is right is right independently of God's existence. So the position that I'm going to defend is a position that is a perfectly acceptable position for religious people to adopt. Indeed, I'm going to argue that my position on this issue is a more pious position than Dr. Craig's, a better position for theists to hold.

If God exists and is perfectly good, then I contend that my position is the position that God wants his creatures to adopt. The reason is that only if morality is independent of God can we make moral sense out of religious worship. It's only if morality is independent of God that any of us can have a moral basis for adhering to God's commands. Dr. Craig's position can give us at best self-interested reasons for obeying God. It's Dr. Craig's position, not mine, that's destructive of morality.

But let me back up. Maybe some people are surprised just to learn that atheists ever believe or that they can believe that there are objective moral truths, that there are really moral obligations or moral virtues. I gather that some people think that it simply follows from atheism that there is no right or wrong, that if God does not exist everything is permitted. But this does not follow. I am an atheist and I believe that some things are morally right and some things are morally wrong.

Where's the contradiction? I believe, for example, that it's wrong to drive people from their homes or to kill them because you want their land. I believe that it's wrong to enslave people. I believe that it's wrong to torture prisoners of war. I also believe that if one sees any of these things going on, one has a sober moral obligation to try to stop them.

But do I think these matters are objective? Yes, in at least three senses of objective, and it's actually a complicated philosophical issue exactly what it is to be objective, but here are three senses that are fairly standard. First, I think that whether something is right or wrong—oh, I should say Dr. Craig and I agree on this completely—first, I think that whether something is right or wrong does not depend on human attitudes toward it. In this respect, moral judgments are true or false in just the way non-moral judgments are, by corresponding or failing to correspond with the way the world is. So I hold the claim that slavery is wrong is not at all like the claim that chocolate is delicious. That claim simply expresses my attitude toward chocolate, which is extremely positive by the way. The judgment that slavery is wrong is rather like the claim that chocolate contains antioxidants. That's a claim about the way the world is, and specifically about how chocolate is.

Objectivity in this sense also means that the moral facts are as they are independently of human beings' knowledge of them. We can be ignorant of moral facts and we can make mistakes about them. Some people think that abortion is morally permissible and others deny that it is. Someone here is making a mistake. Someone's right and someone's wrong. Notice in contrast that when I say, "Chocolate is delicious," and you say, "No it isn't," we aren't really disagreeing about the objective features of chocolate. We are simply expressing contrary attitudes toward it. Neither of us is making a mistake. Well, I take it back, chocolate just is delicious.

There's a second sense of objective in which I think moral facts are objective, and that is that they're independent of human will. It is not up to us to decide what is right and what is wrong in the way it is up to us to decide what the rules of baseball will be or what the traffic laws will be. We can decide what it is for someone to be a good baseball player, we can lay those conditions down, but not what it is to be a good person.

Third, I hold that morality is objective in the sense of being universal. I am not a relativist. The fundamental moral facts do not change from culture to culture, nor does the fact that one's culture condones something make that thing in any way morally right. In the examples that I've given above, I deliberately chose things that were historically or are currently regarded as morally permissible within my own culture, and I'm going to try in what follows to keep my examples to real life cases, things that are facing us now. I don't care if these things are regarded as morally permissible by some people; I repudiate them. Slavery is wrong. Torture is wrong, even if the laws of one's country permit it.

Now what Dr. Craig needs to show is that none of these specific moral judgments, nor these claims about the nature of moral judgments in general, can be true unless God exists, and that seems to me to be a remarkable claim. If God turned out not to exist, then slavery would be okay? There'd be nothing wrong with torture? What could possibly make someone believe that?

The only answer to this question that I can think of is that God is what makes moral facts true, that the things that are morally good are the things that God has commanded or endorsed, and they're good because he commanded or endorsed them. This theory is called Divine Command Theory. Divine Command Theory would explain certain things about the objectivity of morality because God exists independently of human beings and their attitudes. His commands do, too. We didn't invent God, so we didn't invent morality. We can be ignorant of God's will and hence mistaken about what is morally good. Because God is omnipresent and eternal, his commands apply to all people at all times in all places. That's all fine. It would follow from Divine Command Theory that moral facts are objective. The problem is, it wouldn't follow that they are moral.

The argument for this claim is an ancient one due to Plato. In his dialogue, Euthyphro, the title character tries to explain his conception of piety to Socrates. The pious acts, Euthyphro explains, are those which are loved by the gods. But Socrates finds this definition ambiguous and asks Euthyphro, "Are the pious acts pious because they are loved by the gods, or are the pious acts loved by the gods because they are pious?"

Now what's the difference? If the first reading is correct, then it's the gods' loving those particular acts that makes them count as pious acts, that grounds their piousness. "Pious" on this alternative is just shorthand for "something the gods love." Whatever the gods happen to love, "Bingo, that's pious." If the gods change their preferences on a whim, and they did if Homer knew his stuff, then the things that are pious change right along with them.

In contrast, on the second reading, pious acts are presumed to have a substantive property in common, a property in virtue of which the gods love them, a property that explains why the gods love them.

Now, translated into contemporary terms, the question Socrates is asking is this: "Are morally good actions morally good simply in virtue of the fact that God favors them, or does God favor them because they are—independently of his favoring them—morally good?"

Divine Command Theory corresponds to the first option. It says it's the mere fact that God favors them that makes morally good things morally good. Now, theories that endorse the second option—let's call any such theory a Divine Independence Theory—these theories contend on the contrary that the goodness of an action is a feature that is independent of and antecedent to, that predates, God's willing it. God could have commanded either this action or the opposite, but in fact he chooses the good one. Both Divine Command Theories and Divine Independence Theories entail that there's going to be a perfect correspondence between the class of actions that God commands on the one hand and the class of actions that are good, or rather they do if you add the assumption that God is perfectly benevolent.

The two theories differ, however, on what accounts for this congruence. Divine Command Theory says it's God's command that explains why the acts are good. It becomes true merely by definition that God commands good actions. Goodness on this view becomes an empty honorific; it has no independent content. Divine Independence Theories on the other hand say that it is a substantive property of the acts—their goodness—that explains why God commanded them. I go even further and say that it's the goodness of the things that God chooses that makes God good. God is good in virtue of choosing only the morally good things.

Now, Divine Independence Theory presumes that we have an independent grasp of ethical facts and that we can use that grasp to predict and understand what God will prefer. Now it's hard to appreciate just how radical and bizarre Divine Command Theory really is. Divine Command Theory makes the claim, "God commands the good," into a mere definitional tautology, like "bachelors are unmarried." This makes for really appalling consequences from an intuitive moral point of view. Divine Command Theory entails that anything at all could be good or right or wrong. And I'm making this funny gesture with my hands to indicate quotation marks, to indicate what we call scare quotes, to indicate that I'm using these words with the strange meanings they would have if Divine Command Theory were true. If God were to command you to eat your children, then it would be right to eat your children. The consequences are also appalling from a religious point of view because Divine Command Theory implies that we can have no moral reason for obeying God's commands. It may be that we have prudential reasons for doing so—self-interested reasons for doing so. God is extremely powerful and so can make us suffer if we disobey him. But the same can be said of tyrants, and we have no moral obligation, speaking now in ordinary terms, to obey tyrants. We might even have a moral obligation to disobey tyrants. The same goes for worshiping God. We might find it in our interest to flatter or placate such a powerful person, but there could be no way in which God was deserving of praise or tribute.

Now, defenders of Divine Command Theory are going to object that God could not or at least would not issue any such command. The reason is they'll say that God's nature is essentially good, and this fact is also supposed to explain why we ought to obey God and why we should worship him. But the reply misses the point. What is it about God that makes him good? God's moral properties do not follow from his natural powers, his omnipotence or his omniscience, nor do they follow from the fact that he created the universe or even that he created us. It is certainly conceivable that the creator of the universe was a powerful, intelligent tyrant who issues commands of his own. If the term "good" is not just an empty epithet that we attach to the creator, who or whatever that turns out to be, then it must be that the facts about what is good are independent of the other facts about God. If "good" is to have normative force, it must be something that we can understand independently of what is commanded by some powerful, omnipresent being.

Another thing that defenders of Divine Command Theory might say is that we can infer that God is good by looking at the kinds of things that he has in fact commanded. Now, I actually think this is a slightly dangerous strategy, since there's at least some textual evidence that God has commanded some pretty bad things. But I'll say more about that in a minute. God's commands, they say, show that God loves his creatures and commands only what is good for them. But this reply also misses the point. Either the words "love" and "good" in this context have non-normative meanings, as in "I love animals, I think they're delicious," in which case we again would have no moral basis for obeying God, or the words "love" and "good" have normative meanings, in which case we once again presuppose that we can make sense of what is objectively good independently of what God commands. In short, it has to be God's goodness that gives us a reason to obey him or to worship him, and not the mere fact that he exists. But then goodness has to be a substantive property and not an empty formal term that is defined as just whatever way God happens to be.

Now, as a matter of fact, I doubt that there are many religious people who really believe Divine Command Theory. If there were, then there would be fewer interpretive difficulties surrounding those stories in the Bible that depict God commanding things we would ordinarily regard as moral atrocities. So what, everyone would say if God orders genocide as he does at 1 Samuel 15:1-3, or if he commands a father to slaughter his son? "God commanded it, so it's good." But of course, this is not the attitude that most religious people take toward these stories. Most people struggle to make sense of them in light of the clear moral fact that killing innocent children is wrong. Indeed, ordering a parent to kill an innocent child is wrong, even if you don't intend to let him go through with it. If these acts are wrong and God is good, then there must be some mistake. We must be misinterpreting. God must not really have commanded these things, or we must be wrong about what it is that he actually did command.

Now, for this sort of interpretive practice to make sense, it must be that we have an antecedent grasp, we already know before we read about God's commands what moral rightness is. In all of these cases, reflective and morally responsible religious people find reason to reject surface readings of scripture and other authoritative texts when such texts appear to attribute to God edicts that conflict with common sense morality. But if Divine Command Theory is true—if there's nothing to moral goodness than God's preferences—then there can be no rationale for seeking alternative readings of morally troubling texts. There can be nothing morally troubling about an endorsement of slavery or a command to vigilante violence or to genocide because, according to Divine Command Theory, there's no moral standard independently of God's will. It is only if—and I repeat myself—moral goodness is a property independent of and explicative of God's will that it makes any sense to question reports of apparently immoral commands of God. In short, God's existence is not only not necessary for morality, it is not enough. God must also be good. For the claim that God is good to mean anything, the good must be independent of God.

William Lane Craig

Well, thank you, Dr. Antony, for your very stimulating comments. I think that we're in for a good exchange tonight.

Now, you'll recall that at the end of my opening speech, I invited you to listen carefully to how Dr. Antony would address three fundamental questions: "If God does not exist, what is the basis for objective moral values, moral duties, and moral accountability?" Did you notice that Dr. Antony did not address any of those issues in her opening statement? Nothing that she said gives us any clue as to what sort of positive account she would give of the basis for moral values, moral duties, and moral accountability on atheism. What she did instead was to go on the offensive and argue that moral values cannot depend upon God. They must be independent. Either that the good is something that is arbitrarily willed by God, or that the good is something that exists independently of God.

Rather, the view that I defended in my opening speech is the view that traditionally theists have taken, namely that God wills something because he is good. That is to say, what Plato called "the good" just is the moral nature of God himself. God is by nature loving, kind, impartial, fair, just, and so on. He is the paradigm of goodness, and therefore the good is not independent of God. Moreover, God's Commandments are a necessary expression of his moral nature. His commands to us are therefore not arbitrary but are necessary reflections of his character, and therefore it makes no sense to ask, "If God were to command us to eat our children, would it be right to eat our children?" Because this proposition has an impossible antecedent, and therefore no non-trivial truth value. It's like wondering, "If there were a square circle, would its area be the square of one of its sides?" The question just has no meaningful answer because it's logically incoherent.

Now, Dr. Antony has some intimation of this third alternative, for she recognizes that theists will say that God's nature is essentially good. Well, that's not exactly the point. Rather, the point is that God's nature determines what is good. She objects to this view because then we would have no understanding of what it means to say that God is good. She says, "For the claim that God is good to mean anything, the good must be independent of God." This objection, I think, embodies an important confusion. Let me first state what the confusion is and then explain it. Dr. Antony is confusing, I think, moral ontology with moral semantics.

Now what do I mean by that? Well, the discipline of moral philosophy is subdivided into a number of different fields. For example, moral semantics studies the meaning of moral terms and sentences. Moral epistemology studies how we come to a knowledge of moral truths. Moral ontology studies the metaphysics of morals, their foundation in reality. Now when we say that the good is grounded in God, this is an ontological claim about moral values' foundation in reality. It is not a semantical claim about the meaning of the word "good." So I agree completely with Dr. Antony that semantically, "goodness" is not, as she puts it, "an empty formal term that is defined as just whatever way God is." I concur wholeheartedly that the word "good" must, as she says, "be something that we can understand independently of what is commanded by a powerful omnipresent being."

Theists typically maintain that God is the ontological foundation of moral values and without him, objective values would not exist. But theists do not maintain the implausible semantical thesis that the word "good" means anything like "commanded by God." The Euthyphro argument is thus a false dilemma and therefore logically invalid. It does nothing to show that moral values cannot be grounded in God. God's own nature determines what is good, and his nature expresses itself toward us in the form of divine commands which then constitute our moral duties. It is this alternative that Dr. Antony must show to be impossible, not straw men like God's inventing arbitrarily the good or the good being something to which God is subservient outside of himself.

Now, without the lynchpin of the Euthyphro argument, Dr. Antony's case for objective morality without God collapses. She must then give some positive account to those three questions I posed. So I want to return to those questions to review the challenge confronting the atheist.

First, if God does not exist, why think that objective moral values would exist? As we saw, in the absence of God there's no reason to think that the herd morality evolved by various human societies is objectively true. Dr. Antony seems incredulous. She says, "If God turned out not to exist, then slavery would be okay? There'd be nothing wrong with torture? What could possibly make someone believe that?" Well, the answer is that on a naturalistic worldview, human beings are just animals, and activity that counts as slavery and torture is common and natural in the animal kingdom and a-moral. Ants, for example, enslave aphids to labor in the depths of the anthill where they're imprisoned for life. If ants were endowed with rationality, then ant morality would consider slavery to be morally just. Remember Darwin's illustration of human beings raised under the conditions like beehives. As for torture, have you ever seen an ordinary house cat toying with a mouse until it finally bores of the sport and kills it? If there isn't any God, then what makes slavery and torture among human beings uniquely evil? How do these strange non-natural moral properties come to supervene upon the members and actions of our species? This question is especially pressing when we recall those two implications of naturalism, namely materialism and determinism. It's impossible that something that is essentially a puppet or a machine can have a moral dimension to its actions.

Secondly, if God does not exist, why think that we have any objective moral obligations or prohibitions? The problem here for the atheist, I think, is very easy to see. If there isn't anybody to command or prohibit certain actions, then how can we have moral obligations and prohibitions? All Dr. Antony had to say on this point is, "I am an atheist and I believe that some things are morally right and some things are morally wrong. Where's the contradiction?" Well, the problem isn't that there's a contradiction, but rather that there's no basis on the atheistic worldview for the affirmation that some things are right and some are wrong. It's as if the atheist were to say, "I am an atheist and I believe that chocolate is objectively delicious and vanilla is objectively revolting. Where's the contradiction?" The problem again isn't that it's self-contradictory, but rather that it makes an objective assertion without any basis in reality.

Finally, on atheism, there just is no moral accountability ultimately. As the philosopher Immanuel Kant recognized, God is a necessary postulate of moral reason, for only he can guarantee that happiness will be proportioned to virtue as it ought to be, and morality is fundamentally vain if this fundamental "ought" is unsatisfied. On atheism, morality is ultimately futile and inconsequential.

So, in summary then, I think that the Euthyphro argument is logically invalid and therefore fails to prove that moral values exist independently of God. On the contrary, I think it's very plausible that on atheism there are no objective moral values, moral duties, or moral accountability, and therefore I think we have every reason to think that God is vitally necessary to morality.

Louise Antony

Okay. Well, as I expected, Dr. Craig has reported to you that there are many atheists who agree with him that without God there would be no morality. This is absolutely correct. It's also absolutely irrelevant to the topic of the debate. I'm an atheist who believes that there are objective moral truths. I think Michael Ruse is wrong. I think Richard Dawkins is wrong. I think that—and by the way, Russell, I think did believe that there were objective moral truths. He spent months in a prison in Great Britain because he refused to pay war taxes for a war that he thought was immoral. What Dr. Craig needs to show is there's something wrong with my position, and he can't do that just by noting that there are people who disagree with me. What Dr. Craig needs to show is that nihilism, the view that there's no objective moral value, follows from atheism. I haven't seen any argument for that.

Well, there's one argument, but it's full of confusions. Dr. Craig says that atheists must believe that human beings are "just animals" and that since "animals have no moral obligations toward each other," it follows on the atheist view that human beings have no moral obligations toward each other. There are two separate fallacies here. First is that it doesn't follow from "X is an animal" that "X is only an animal," that is, that X has no properties other than those properties X has in virtue of being an animal. This inference doesn't even hold for, pardon the expression, animals. My dog is an animal, but she isn't only an animal. She's many other things. She has many other properties. She has the property of being a pet. She has a psychological property, the property of being loyal. Human beings have lots of properties beyond their biological properties and lots of properties that other animals lack. We're different from other animals. We have the capacity to make plans, to value beauty, and to reflect on our own behavior. These are morally important properties, properties that make us morally valuable creatures and that generate moral obligations.

Now, Dr. Craig commits this fallacy repeatedly. It doesn't follow from the fact that we are made of molecules that we are only molecules. There are collections of molecules and there are collections of molecules. Some of the collections of molecules constitute inert objects like rocks, but some constitute living, sentient beings—beings with hopes and fears and beliefs and values. Those collections of molecules, because they also have these other properties, are morally important. The point is simple: what matters to the kind of thing you are is not what you're made of—we're all made of the same stuff ultimately—but rather how the stuff you're made of is put together, how it's organized or formed. What's the difference between a piece of copper wire and a copper coin? Not the stuff that they're composed of—it's copper in both cases. We can even imagine that the very same lump of copper was fashioned first into wire, then melted down and fashioned into a coin. The whole field of organic chemistry exists because there are many substances that have very different properties even though they have the same chemical formulas, like ortho-butane and iso-butane, both C4H10. These isomers differ not in the kinds or numbers of molecules that compose them, but in the way those molecules are arranged. Now, the arrangement of molecules needed to compose a human being is extraordinarily complex, and it gives rise to creatures that have brains and nervous systems that bestow upon them capacities for consciousness, self-consciousness, rational thought, for sympathy, and for a sense of justice, for a capacity to recognize these very same capacities in other creatures. Ants don't have that. Zebras don't have that. Sharks don't have that. Creatures who have these capacities are creatures of surpassing moral value.

No atheist and no materialist has to accept that if a child is killed by a bomb, "all that happens is a rearrangement of the molecules that used to be a little girl."

Second fallacy: Dr. Craig's argument is either invalid or question-begging depending on what he means when he says "animals have no moral obligations." If he means that some animals have no moral obligations, then the argument is invalid. It has the same form as this one: "Some animals cannot talk. Human beings are animals. Therefore, human beings cannot talk." On the other hand, if he means "no animals have moral obligations toward each other," then the argument begs the question. It assumes the thing it's supposed to be proving. If human beings are at least animals, then there are animals that have moral obligations toward each other, namely us.

Now, third, although it's true of most animals, this is something that's misleading—it's not a fallacy. Although it's true of most animals that they possess no moral obligations, this is misleading if you think that animals have no moral significance at all. Many animals have the capacity to feel pain, and that means that we human beings, who recognize the fact that they can feel pain and who can appreciate the moral significance of the fact that a creature can feel pain, we have moral obligations toward those animals.

Okay, let me talk a little bit about the basis of morality. Dr. Craig says that I must explain the basis of objective moral value on atheism and that I must explain what the source of objective moral duties are. Well, I don't have that obligation, and we're probably going to play "burden of proof volleyball" here a little bit, but I can have good grounds for rejecting an answer to a question even if I don't have any other answer to offer. Consider the question of the origins of life on Earth. Some people think that life was brought here by benevolent aliens. Now, I can have good reasons for thinking that this theory is wrong without knowing how life did originate. I don't have a clue. Dr. Craig's theory about the basis of moral truth is not a good theory. That's what the Euthyphro argument shows. It shows that God's mere existence is insufficient to ground moral obligation. You need not for God just to exist; you need for God independently to be good. So I can reject Dr. Craig's theory even if I have no other theory to offer.

That said, I think I may be able to answer Dr. Craig's question anyway or his challenge. If he wants to know what about the world makes it true that, for example, it's wrong to cheat poor people, I can tell him it's the objective wrongness of cheating poor people. If he wants an explanation of why this is wrong, I can tell him that too. It's wrong because it's unjust. It's wrong because it causes needless suffering. Those are observation facts. They're obviously true and they're facts whether or not God exists, and they're sufficient to explain why those actions are wrong.

Now, it is wrong to kill innocent children with bombs in order to achieve a political goal, and it's wrong, by the way, whether this is done by a stateless radical or by the president of the most powerful country in the world. Such a thing is wrong because the child is innocent, because it will cause the child to suffer, because it will cause anguish to the child's loved ones, and for countless other reasons as well. All of these reasons would exist even if God did not. I'll go further: if God exists and is good, then if you ask him why he forbade us from doing these things, I bet he'd cite exactly the same reasons. There's something objectively true about such actions that explains why God forbade them. What the Euthyphro argument shows is that either God's commands are arbitrary, in which case we have no moral obligation to obey them, or they're not, and God has reasons for commanding what he commands. But if God is responding to reasons when he issues his commands, then the reasons have to exist independently of him and antecedently to his commands.

Okay, what makes moral obligations obligatory? Dr. Craig thinks that there are no moral obligations unless there's someone there who imposes them. That seems to me to be an extraordinary claim.

I don't know whether or not, according to Dr. Craig, God commanded us not to torture animals – it's not the Ten Commandments anyway – but it's certainly and obviously wrong to torture animals. Maybe the idea supposed to be that without laws given by a lawgiver it would neither be moral nor immoral to torture animals, and that seems just as obviously false.

Dr. Craig's making an additional claim, and that is that human beings cannot distinguish between what some authority commands and genuine moral obligations. But they can and they do from a very early age. Psychologist Elliot Turiel has shown that children between the ages of three and four recognize that moral rules have force independently of any particular authority. Larry Nicha [sp?] has shown that even children and adolescents raised in strict religious traditions (Orthodox Judaism, Catholicism, Calvinist Dutch Reform) distinguish morality from religious authority. Listen to Marsha, a nine and a half-year-old Jewish girl:

Interviewer: Suppose that God had written in the Torah that Jews should steal. God commanded all Jews to steal. Would it be okay then for Jews to steal?

Marsha: No.

Interviewer: Why not?

Marsha: Because they know. They have a brain. They know it's really bothering the person they take it from. We all know. We all have a brain.

Accountability. I find this section really bizarre. Dr. Craig criticizes those atheists who think that there's nothing to morality but naked self-interest, and then tells us there's nothing to morality but naked self-interest. Dr. Craig can't see that anyone would have any reason to behave in the ways we call moral if they had no fear of eternal damnation nor any hope of eternal reward. Now, I agree that if you believed you were going to be punished in some afterlife for things you did in this one, that would structure your incentives. It structures your incentives. [Can I go on another half a minute?] It structures your incentives to learn that Tony Soprano would like you to hire his son-in-law. That doesn't give you a moral reason to do what he wants, only a self-interested one. In contrast, I see and hear every day of people who do what's right, who make sacrifices, who put their lives at risk, not because they expect to be rewarded for it, not because they're confident their causes will triumph. It's because they believe passionately that what they are doing is right. Dr. Craig says even if there were objective moral values and duties under atheism they seem to be irrelevant because there's no moral accountability. Irrelevant to what? Not to what I ought to do. Is Dr. Craig dismissing the avowed motives of people who do good things and say, “I just wanted to help. I did it because it was the right thing to do.” I don't see what's puzzling or irrelevant about wanting to help or wanting a loved one to flourish, not unless one really thinks that goodness and evil are unintelligible except in the context of a quasi-contract made with a tyrant where the notions turn out to be synonymous with what will keep me out of trouble, and what will get me into trouble.

William Lane Craig

Before I look at these specific arguments again this evening, let me review the general logic of what's been said tonight. Dr. Antony, I do not think, is able to provide us a basis on atheism for thinking that human beings have objective moral value, objective moral duties, or moral accountability. But her claim is that she doesn't need to do that because she has this Euthyphro argument, which shows that moral values cannot depend upon God. And that's why, as I said, this argument is the lynchpin in her case. If that goes, the whole case collapses.

Now, she has not dealt with my third alternative to the Euthyphro argument. The Euthyphro argument is simply a false dilemma. The good is neither something arbitrarily invented by God, nor something to which God is subservient. Rather, the good just is the nature of God himself and expresses itself toward us in the form of his Divine commands. This provides a logically coherent basis for objective moral values, duties, and moral accountability. The only response she gave in her last speech was to say, "But children from the very earliest ages are able to recognize moral values and moral duties without any training." Sure, this is ingrained into us by biological evolution as well as parental conditioning.

Steven Pinker, who is a psychologist at Harvard University, in an article in January of this year, has written the following. He says,

Pinker has no solution to this problem and therefore adopts a non-objectivist view of morality. Now, Dr. Antony rightly finds that view morally abhorrent, as do I. But the question is, why on atheism, why on naturalism, is Pinker wrong and Dr. Antony right? It seems to me that her commitment to objective moral values and duties, which I applaud, is simply a faith commitment. It's a faith commitment of a naturalist for which the naturalist worldview provides no ontological foundation. What I'm offering is not a different set of moral values but a foundation for those moral values that we both hold dear and cherish, but which is lacking on the naturalistic worldview.

Take the question of whether objective moral values would exist in the absence of God. We saw that there isn't, on naturalism, any basis for affirming the intrinsic value of human beings as opposed to other species. She says, "Well, I think Dawkins and Ruse and others are wrong." Right, but why are they wrong rather than Dr. Antony? She says, "Well, human beings have more properties than just being animals. They have lots of different properties, some of which are morally significant." Well, now I agree, they certainly do have moral properties, but that's not the question. The question is, why would they have moral properties if there were no God? She says, "Well, human beings are very complex organisms. They have self-consciousness and rationality." Fine, but why does that invest them with moral value? Why does that make them morally valuable? Take, for example, the copper wire and the copper coin. The copper coin has all sorts of different properties than the copper wire, but intrinsically and objectively, the copper coin has no more value than the copper wire. It's a social convention of human beings that we use the coins for valuable currency, but intrinsically it's no more valuable than if we'd use seashells for coins. It's a subjective viewpoint of human beings, and the question is, why isn't morality like that on an atheistic view? Why think that creatures that have self-consciousness and rationality are inherently valuable? Indeed, we saw that if the evolutionary conditions were different, creatures like us might have evolved quite different sorts of morality.

Moreover, what about human beings that lack self-consciousness or rationality? What about those in a coma or unconscious or mentally retarded? There's no moral basis for their intrinsic human worth on this proposal that Dr. Antony offers.

So, given especially the determinism and the physicalism of the atheistic view, I can't see any reason to think that this particular species has the sort of objective value that she imagines us to have.

Secondly, without God, why think that there are any objective moral duties? She says, "Well, it's wrong to do certain things because it causes suffering," but why is it wrong to cause suffering to members of the human species? Of course we think that's wrong, but if there were intelligent guinea pigs or ants or other species, they would think their morality was objective. I don't see any reason to think that causing suffering to members of the human species is something that is objectively wrong on atheism. I just don't see any basis for this on a naturalistic worldview. Indeed, as Michael Ruse points out in his very interesting article, "Is Rape Wrong on Andromeda?" we can easily imagine a race of extraterrestrial beings who are rational persons with self-consciousness for whom rape would not be morally wrong. He says, “Although the immorality of rape is a human constant, we cannot thereby assume that it will be a constant for other organisms including extraterrestrial intelligent organisms." Certainly, if we look elsewhere in the animal world, we see that acts which look very much like rape occur on a regular basis, and indeed, he says there are good biological reasons for why this occurs in the animal kingdom. So, again, it just seems to me that Dr. Antony is guilty of an unjustified bias toward our own species.

Finally, without God, there is no moral accountability. She says that “Craig is looking for a self-interested reason to be moral. He's not giving you a moral reason to obey.” On the contrary, on the theory of ethics that I'm defending, we do have moral reasons to obey God because God is the ultimate good. His commands to us are therefore right and therefore we have a moral obligation to obey God. But the advantage that I'm offering is that on theistic-based ethics, moral choices are significant. They make a difference; they have a consequence to them that makes them ultimately meaningful. Whereas on the atheistic view, ultimately mankind and all of us are doomed to perish in the heat death of the universe. Ultimately, it does not matter whether we live morally or not. It makes no ultimate difference to the final outcome or our fate, and therefore morality becomes ultimately empty and futile on atheism. In other words, prudential interests run contrary to moral interests often on atheism; but on theism, prudential value and moral value can coincide and run together. And if they were to conflict, the moral interest will trump prudential interests and indeed it ultimately will be in your prudential interest to obey God in the long run. So I think that theism offers both prudential value as well as moral value, whereas on atheism there simply is no ultimate significance and final value to acting morally.

Louise Antony

I'm puzzled by the contention of Dr. Craig that on his view moral choices are significant and make a difference, and on my view they're not. I just don't see what the argument for that claim is. I think it makes an enormous difference. It makes an enormous difference to sentient creatures all over the planet what we choose to do about global warming. I think it makes an extraordinary difference to sentient creatures all over the planet whether we continue a war or not. I don't understand what more objective basis there could be for the prohibition against causing needless suffering than the fact that there are creatures on this planet that are capable of suffering. I don't see any more fundamental explanation possible than that.

Let me say just a little bit more about the accountability business. I still get the feeling Dr. Craig says that it's an advantage of his view that the prudential and the moral reasons can coincide. Well, he's worked it out so they always coincide. Boy, that's not my experience of things. My experience of things is that sometimes it's very hard to be moral, to do what's right, and the choices of people who decide to do that are all the more admirable because it's difficult. As for the unjustified bias for our own species, I have no bias for our own species. I made a point of saying that we have obligations toward other species. It's not what your phylogeny is, it's not what evolutionary branch you came off of, it's your characteristics. Are you the kind of creature that's capable of feeling pain? If you're the kind of creature that feels pain on Andromeda, and if you have the rational capacity to recognize that you're dealing with a creature that feels pain on Andromeda, you will see rationally that you ought not to cause that creature pain. That would be wrong.

Now one thing that I think Dr. Craig continues to confuse when he talks about evolution is the question of where did our moral sensibility come from, where did we get this capacity to recognize moral facts? That's a very interesting question. I think some evolutionary psychologists have some interesting things to say. I think they have some wrong ideas about things, but it's a very interesting question. It's not the same question as "what makes it right or wrong?" I think Darwin's speculation is hyperbolic. He imagines us raised in beehives, but are we like bees? If we're like bees, we don't have much in the way of a brain. If we're like bees, most of our brain is devoted to finding honey and finding nectar and communicating that to the rest of our hive mates. But if we were human beings and we lived in a hive-like situation, that would be a social form that might dictate different kinds of responsibilities. We might have different conceptions of property rights and so forth. But there would still be some fundamental facts. We're sentient creatures and we have the capacity to recognize that there are other sentient creatures on the planet. That generates the obligation to not cause needless suffering.

Now, this business about providing a basis for morality. We are going to play "burden of proof volleyball" here. The claim is that I cannot provide an objective basis for morality. An objective basis for morality would be a fact about the world that is true independently of what human beings believe about the world and that is true universally across the planet. Okay, there are plenty of such objective facts. The most important one, I think, for grounding morality is the fact of sentience, the fact that there are creatures that feel pain. Another fact that's very important is that there are creatures who have goals, who can set ends for themselves. Once you have creatures who can set ends for themselves, then you've got creatures who have a right to pursue those ends. That's what makes it the case that you should not interfere with people's liberty unless you have a very good reason.

And then, finally, the rational capacity that we have to understand these facts about each other. Now, what Dr. Craig has to show is that if God didn't exist, none of those facts would make any difference. It's one thing to say, "Here's another possible basis for morality: we could have a perfectly good being in the universe who issues commands." That's one possible basis. He has to show that my basis is inadequate. He hasn't shown that. All he said is that the basis that I'm talking about is a basis—these are facts that evolved through some natural process. Why does that make them not facts? I don't understand. He says they could have evolved differently, they could have turned out differently. It's true, we might not have been sentient. That would not change the moral fact that if we encountered any sentient creatures, we ought not to cause them pain. It wouldn't change that conditional fact. It would change the actual facts about how we could treat each other. So I'm not a speciesist. I think that any creature—any creature, any device, right? If robots develop sentience—then we would have an obligation not to cause them pain. Any rational creature in the universe is a creature to whom we have certain kinds of responsibilities.

Let me say something, too, about the Euthyphro false dilemma. The point of the Euthyphro is to show that the mere existence of a being that has a power to command things, the mere existence of such a being, is not enough. Now, I think Dr. Craig and I agree that what you need to add is that the being is good. Okay, but that's an objective moral fact that's independent of the other facts about the being. Now, you can have two choices here. And Dr. Craig is right to distinguish an ontological question from a semantic question, but they have implications for each other. You have two choices. You either say, "I'm going to characterize a being. I'm going to point to that being, and I'm going to say whatever the nature of that being is, that's what good is." That's the first Euthyphro interpretation that says it doesn't matter what the objective facts are. It doesn't matter what that being likes. It doesn't matter what that being commands. Whatever the nature of that being is, that's good.

Another way of saying it is, "There is a being, and I'm going to look at the choices that being has made. I'm going to look at the commands that being issues, and on the basis of the characteristics of those commands and those choices, I will tell you whether it's a good being or not." Consider the following possibility: there is a universe that is created by a very powerful, very intelligent being, and this very powerful and intelligent being decides to populate the universe with sentient creatures. And this being thinks that it would be terribly amusing to put these sentient creatures into really difficult situations, and he sees them wriggling around like flies, like a little kid who pulls flies' wings off. He sees them wriggling around. "This is just so amusing. This is so diverting." He's very, very pleased. Now, I think that we would all agree that that Creator would be evil. But the only thing different between that Creator and Dr. Craig's God is the objective presence or absence of a moral property. Both of us have to say that there are fundamental moral facts. I say the moral facts are the facts that relate the conditions that generate obligations and the obligations, and that those very same facts are the facts that enable us to say with substance, and if you're religious, with piety and respect, that God is good.

William Lane Craig

In my closing statement, let me try to draw together some of the threads of the debate and see if we can come to some conclusions. First, does the Euthyphro argument give any reason for thinking that moral values cannot be grounded in God? Well, I think not. Dr. Antony admits that Divine Command Theory does give an objective basis for values. Her initial argument was, however, that they wouldn't be moral in character. But if you think of who God is, God is the greatest conceivable being. God is a being which is worthy of worship and therefore God must be morally perfect and therefore morally good. Any being that is not worthy of worship, that is not the greatest conceivable being, cannot be God. And therefore, this meets the arbitrariness objection that she has when she says, "Whatever the nature of the being is, you just say that's good." The concept of God, I think, entails that God is morally perfect and is a being worthy of worship. So this gives us a ground for moral values that is both objective and moral. By contrast, I simply can't see why on a naturalistic worldview, we should think that this primate creature that has evolved down here on the planet Earth, lost somewhere in the universe, is the source and locus of objective moral values rather than the victim of delusions of moral grandeur.

First, without God, why think that human beings have objective moral value? All Dr. Antony, I think, is able to say here is that it's simply wrong to cause pain and suffering to a rational sentient creature, and that's her stopping point. Well, I agree, yes, it is wrong, but what I can't understand is why you would think it would be wrong if atheism is true. It would be arbitrary, it seems to me, to pick those properties and invest them with goodness and moral significance. There isn't any reason to think on atheism that those properties of moral value or moral rightness would supervene upon this particular creature or upon properties of rationality and self-consciousness. She says, "Well, there's a difference between grasping moral values and the existence of moral values." I certainly think that's true. Even if the evolutionary account is true of how we come to grasp moral values, because they're grounded in God I think that gives us objectivity. But what I can't see is why on the atheistic view moral values would be anything more than just these subjective illusions which are the spin-off of the socio-biological evolutionary process. We can certainly imagine different moral values to have been produced by that same process, and it's hard to see why one set would be objectively true rather than the other.

What about the second point? Without God, there are no objective moral duties. I think this is an especially weak point of atheism because the notion of obligation or prohibition requires someone to issue those imperatives. The notion of being obliged or forbidden to do something has by its very nature the notion of moral imperatives which are given to us, but on atheism there is no source of moral obligation or imperative. And she says, "Well, there's simply nothing more fundamental than that pain ought not to be caused." Well, why? Pain is caused by other animal species all the time in the animal world. Why is it wrong among human beings? She says, "Well, creatures that have the ability to set ends have the right to pursue those ends." Where did that come from? Where did that right come from and why is it wrong to prohibit them from going after those ends? On atheism, you don't have any source for moral duty or obligation on atheism because there is no moral lawgiver.

Finally, without God, there is no moral accountability. I think we agree on this point that on atheism no one holds you morally accountable for what you do. My charge is that that makes morality empty and vain. Ultimately, it makes no difference. She says, "But of course it makes a difference to sentient life on Earth. Look at global warming, look at the question of war." Those are nothing but short-term transitory changes that ultimately make no difference. Science tells us that ultimately as the universe continues to expand, we will all perish in the heat death of the universe. Humanity, matter itself, light, heat, all will be extinguished in the final heat death of thermodynamic equilibrium. It is all futile and vain on the naturalistic worldview. So that ultimately it really makes no difference how you live. Moral values, moral duties become like shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. Your end is the same no matter what you do. By contrast, theism I think is morally bracing because it gives us a sound foundation for morality which has consequences and therefore is not a vain and futile gesture in an empty and meaningless universe.

Louise Antony

Catholics make a distinction between two forms of remorse for your sins. You can have perfect or imperfect contrition. If you have perfect contrition, you're sorry because you did something wrong and you offended God. If you have imperfect contrition, you're only sorry because you're afraid of being punished. It's okay if you have imperfect contrition; that will keep you out of hell, but perfect contrition, I was taught, was much better because it bespeaks the best possible motives for repentance: not fear of punishment, but hatred of sin and desire to do what's right.

Now, as a young Catholic girl, I always felt that my own contrition fell short. No matter how hard I tried to focus on the inherent evil of my sins, I found myself thinking instead about what it would cost me later. "How many days in purgatory is this worth? Tease the cat? It's worth it." Later, when I was in college, I found my faith flagging, and I was struck by a perverse insight: the perfect contrition that had eluded me hitherto might finally be achieved if I became an atheist. If I didn't believe in God, then fear of eternal damnation could hardly be a reason for me to repent anything. If I as a non-believer felt bad for having done something wrong, it could only be because it was wrong. Much emboldened, I took my reasoning a step further. Maybe atheism was the only way to achieve perfect contrition, the only psychologically possible way for fallible, selfish human beings to put aside concerns for ourselves in confronting our misdeeds. And wouldn't a God who loved what was good be more pleased with creatures who sought what was good for its own sake than with those who did so only to curry favor? Why, I said, did God prefer perfect to imperfect contrition? Disobedience clearly displeases God, but why? Is it the mere fact of disobedience? That didn't seem possible. God was not one of those petty tyrants like you encounter in school, teachers or principals who issue arbitrary commands and prohibitions just for the exercise, just for the delight of bending another person to their capricious wills. No, I concluded, God wills what is right, only what is right, and prohibits only what is wrong. Disobedience offends because disobedience entails the commission of a crime. It's the right and wrong he cares about, not that he said "do it" or "not do it." It's the goodness, not the “godness.” Piety is doing what's pleasing to the gods, doing good and being good. Surely what's most pleasing of all then is someone who does good because it is good, because she understands what the good is and because she values it for itself and not for the prizes it might bring. Atheists, if they commit themselves to justice, to peace, to the relief of suffering, can only be doing so out of love of the good. Atheists have the opportunity to practice perfect piety.

Now all that said, I want to close by conceding a couple of significant things to Dr. Craig. There are things that you lose when you give up belief in God; morality is not one of them. I don't understand what better basis there could be for the duty not to cause pain than that there are creatures that suffer it and that it hurts. Nonetheless, you have morality, but here are some things you do have to give up. They're not insignificant. First, you lose the guarantee of redemption. Suppose you do something morally terrible, something for which you cannot make amends, something perhaps for which no human being could be expected to forgive you. I imagine that the promise made by many religions that God will forgive you if you're truly sorry, that that might bring enormous relief and comfort. You can't have that if you're an atheist. As a consequence, as an atheist, you must live your life and make your choices with the knowledge that every choice you make contributes in one way or another to the only value your life can have. Dr. Craig thinks that if atheism were true, human choices would be insignificant. I think just the reverse. I think they become surpassingly important.

A second thing an atheist must relinquish is confidence that it will all work out in the end. Moral causes frequently seem to be lost causes, and it takes enormous courage and commitment to continue the struggle without any rational confidence that one's efforts will be rewarded. But it's a higher, more praiseworthy state of mind to be able to continue to act without promise of success, with only the comfort that one is doing what one can to make things better. The exhortation to keep faith even in the face of the dark possibilities that all will be lost is, I think, a profound expression of confidence in the moral capacities and possibilities of human beings. The fact is that tragedy is possible. Human lives can be ruined, civilizations can be destroyed. Nothing guarantees that these things will not occur, nothing but our own limping, limited efforts. All we have is this world, this life, ourselves, and each other, and it's up to us to make that be enough.

Q&A: Moderator

I'm going to begin by asking the first question, and I'm going to try to set the good example here and keep my question under 30 seconds as well. I believe that both of you would agree that somehow objective moralities are superior to subjective moralities. And the one thing I learned about myself tonight was that, just like Steven Pinker, I must be a non-objective moralist. So the question I want to ask is, what is the fundamental basis by which we as human beings can know morality as objective?

Answer: William Lane Craig

You remember that I said that moral philosophy is distinguished or subdivided into a number of different subfields, like moral semantics, moral epistemology, and moral ontology. Our focus tonight has been on moral ontology, but Dr. Goodwin's question concerns moral epistemology, that is, how do we know these moral truths? If there are objective truths, how do we come to grasp them? We haven't really talked about that tonight; that hasn't been the burden of my case to argue anything about how it is that we come to know these truths. But I would be open to various theories for how we might come to a knowledge of moral truths. I think as a theist that God has constituted us with a certain moral faculty that enables us to grasp objective moral truths, the difference between right and wrong. And he has so crafted our cognitive faculties that we have a moral sense. In addition to that, I think that by grasping the intrinsic value of human beings—that human beings do have intrinsic and inherent worth—we can then use reason to deduce certain moral duties and obligations for how we ought to treat other people by recognizing that we need to treat them as ends in themselves rather than as means to an end. So, given the intrinsic value of human beings, you can then rationally work out whether or not, for example, you ought to steal your neighbor's car from his garage or something of that sort for which we have no explicit divine command but which would fall under these general moral truths that would follow from how we treat people as ends in themselves. And I think divine revelation can also be a source of moral knowledge. I think that God reveals himself to us in various ways that can tell us moral truths that could not be deduced simply by reason alone or which are not built into our moral sense. So all of those would be different ways in which we might come to know objective moral truth.

Answer: Louise Antony

Okay, I think this is... I agree with Dr. Craig that this is a different issue than the one that we have been concerned with. I think it's a really fascinating question. It's a question not just for philosophers but for psychologists and ethologists and evolutionary biologists as well: how it is that we come to have the faculty that we think of as a conscience. It's quite clear that cross-culturally, as I was saying, some of the data that I was citing, cross-culturally, children develop a moral conscience along the same developmental timetable. And, interestingly enough, a moral conscience that has some of the same features irrespective of the culture in which the child was brought up. One of the most robust features of this innate sense of morality is a capacity for distinguishing between the dictates of an authority and what the child perceives as right or wrong independently of what they're told is right or wrong. They can make that distinction; they do make that distinction. This is true even of children that are taught to believe that there is a God and that God issues only good commands. I certainly think that the problem of moral epistemology is a difficult one, but I think it's only made way more difficult if you bring God into the picture, particularly if you think about all the different understandings there are of God, all the different texts and scriptures that people at different places around the world and in different times have regarded as sacred and as the record of God's will. My own view is that God could have been a little more explicit and maybe used a language that everybody understood and not just a small group of people in the Middle East. But in any case, it is an interesting question how we come to know these things, and I think some of the things that Dr. Craig mentioned are certainly involved. I think that when we realize about ourselves that we set ends, that we conceive projects and that we value those projects, and then we determine through observation and reason that other creatures on the planet are just like we are, then we have the basis for making the leap that Kant talked about and generalizing, seeing that if we give ourselves rules about right behavior, this is something that we have to think of as binding on all people.

Question

I thought I had a monopoly on Dr. Antony, but it seems that I have a tail following me, so I'll keep my question shorter than I at first was going to have it. Dr. Antony, first of all, thank you for a stimulating and sincere debate tonight. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears to me that in your view, you can have acts that are simply wrong, and that is the stopping point. Whereas, we couldn't have a God as simply good, simply good not in virtue of having done acts. Does it not appear to be a better explanation, with more explanatory scope and power, to have an infinite being in whom these things are grounded rather than finite things that you can think are in themselves simply good?

Answer: Louise Antony

I'm not denying that if there were a supremely good being, if there were such a being, that that might be a sufficient basis. But what I'm saying is it's the goodness of that being and not the fact that it's God. And so, what you need for there to be objective moral facts is objective moral facts. If it's the goodness of a Divine being, that's an objective moral fact. If it's the objective badness of causing suffering to creatures that experience suffering, that's an objective moral fact. Dr. Craig and I agree that there are fundamental moral facts. I don't see that it detracts from the existence of fundamental moral facts for God not to exist. And by the way, it's not the contingent existence of the creatures that feel pain that is the moral fact. The moral fact is that if there are creatures that feel pain, then you must not cause unnecessary pain. That's a necessary truth. It's true in all possible worlds. It's true before there were any sentient creatures. It will remain true when there cease to be sentient creatures.

Answer: William Lane Craig

I think the question is a good one, and I noticed that whereas Dr. Antony is willing to simply stop with certain moral facts, like "if there are sentient creatures, it's wrong to cause them pain," she seems to demand an explanation for why one should think that God is good and is the basis of moral values, and that seems to me to be rather odd. The very concept of God is that of a being which is worthy of worship.

Question

And now a question for Dr. Craig. First, thank you, Dr. Craig and of course Dr. Antony, for a fantastic debate. But I just hope we can go back to the Euthyphro question for a moment. Having some difficulty understanding your resolution of the Euthyphro challenge. I'm just not sure how the distinction you draw between ontological and semantic ethics leaves any place for God to do ethical work. Because let's say we have a complete explanation of the semantics of the good for the moment, let's say that issue is settled; we have an account. What does it do to say that there exists an X such that it instantiates perfectly all of those things which we have established in our semantic account of the good, or constitutive of what we say the good is? Especially since it seems to be a part of the semantics of the good that it is normative. What does it do to say that there is some perfect instantiation of the good greater than which nothing can be conceived?

Answer: William Lane Craig

The role that God plays in this would be to provide an ontological foundation for thinking that there are objective moral values, but it doesn't play a semantic role in defining the concept of the good. Giving a semantics for the meaning of the English word "good" doesn't do anything to show that there are such properties as goodness or that it really exists. So it's quite distinct. You can understand the concept or the definition of the word "good" without understanding what its ontological foundation is. Let me give an analogy from physics. Take light, for example. We know that light is a certain range of electromagnetic radiation; that's the nature of light. But that is not a semantical thesis about the meaning of the word "light." People were able to use the word "light" meaningfully long before they knew anything about its nature. And similarly, they knew the difference between light and darkness before they knew anything about its nature. So what I'm suggesting is that it's similar with God. God provides an analysis of what it is for something to be good and then also right and wrong, but it's not the definition of the word, any more than the definition of the word "light" is a certain range of electromagnetic radiation.

Answer: Louise Antony

I think that's a very good point. I'd like to say something about the way in which natures are supposed to explain things. The nature of water is H2O. We know that water is constituted by these atoms bonded in a certain way, or these molecules bonded in a certain way. And it's true that people knew perfectly well what the meaning of water was before they knew that it was H2O. However, H2O explains all the properties that we use to pick out water and that we used to pick out water before we knew what it was. Now Dr. Craig keeps stipulating that God has a good nature, and if you ask further, "Well, what is it to have a good nature?" "Well, it's to be God." Now that to me says that whatever God was like, whatever choices he were to have made, those would have been the good ones because God is stipulated to be good. This is not a nature that's going to explain anything. God's being good is not going to explain why it's wrong to torture sentient creatures. So it doesn't bear the same relationship to our judgments, our ordinary pre-theoretic judgments about what the good is, that the explanation about the fact that water's H2O bears to our understanding of what water is.

Question

Hey, Dr. Antony, I was just curious, you began to talk about your experience in college, sort of this process of losing faith, and I was wondering if that was more of a, was it purely a thought process or were there some experiences contributing to that?

Answer: Louise Antony

It was entirely the result of my first philosophy class where I thought about the arguments for the existence of God, and I fought tooth and nail to defend them, and I just found that they were not convincing to me. The ontological argument that Dr. Craig has been kind of alluding to, that God is a being greater than which none can be conceived, I just didn't see how some fact about what I'm able to conceive to conjure up was supposed to demonstrate that something actually existed, for example. And then I hit the argument from evil, and I just couldn't maintain it anymore. It seemed to me so obvious that a perfectly good being could not have set things up the way they were, that I just found I didn't believe.

Answer: William Lane Craig

Let me say something about my own experience. My faith journey was quite in the opposite direction. I was not raised in a Christian family or churchgoing home, but it was in high school that I began to think about the big questions in life, and one that tortured me was the meaning of my existence. I understood what science told me about the eventual fate of the universe and of the human race and my own life, and in light of that inevitable extinction, it just seemed to me that life was meaningless and purposeless. And I later discovered that people like Nietzsche and Sartre and other existentialist philosophers had written and thought exactly the same way. And so when someone first shared with me the love of God that could be known in the person of Jesus Christ, this was just a revolution and a revelation to me. The idea that God loved me was something that was just shattering and new to me, and so I began to read the New Testament. I had never read it before, and as I did, I sensed there the ring of truth and a wisdom that I had never encountered before, and eventually I did come to faith and it changed my life. And as for the arguments for the existence of God, I found these to be very helpful and persuasive. I think tonight there's been an argument for God's existence lurking in the background, a kind of moral argument, namely: if God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist; but objective moral values do exist—on that, at least, we both agree—from which it logically follows: therefore, God exists. So I think that what we've been talking about tonight can actually provide moral grounds for believing in God's existence.

Question

Thank you both. I don't go to this school, so I don't really have this opportunity. This was really great. My question is kind of a two-part question. You quoted Dawkins earlier and saying that there is no bottom, it's all meaningless, there is no purpose, and he says that the physical description of the universe points to that directly. And doesn't that give us more of a responsibility to take actions into our own hands and morality to be a part of our nature? And I mean, if God did exist and we're his children, don't you think he would want us to grow up and be responsible for ourselves anyway?

Answer: William Lane Craig

Well, yes, if he did exist, I agree with that. But the other part, no. I would agree with Dawkins when Dawkins says we're just machines for propagating DNA so that on an atheistic view there is no purpose, there is no responsibility. Responsible to what?

Question

We put the responsibility of morality, as we talked about tonight, in the hands of an omniscient being who we are unsure of its existence, yet we are completely aware of each other's existence. And why can't we be the ones that are responsible for our own actions?

Answer: William Lane Craig

Well, the question is, responsible to whom? You see, on atheism, as I said, there is no moral accountability. There is no ultimate responsibility on atheism, and eventually we'll all die anyway, so who was it? It was Steve who read the thing, "What is posterity done for me lately?" You know, this is, I think, a very poignant question for the atheist to ask. So, I guess it's just very hard for me to see why on atheism we would have these sort of moral responsibilities and objective duties rather than say, "We're just a primate that has evolved on this planet and so why not just live for yourself rather than for others?"

Question

Well, can I just answer that real quick? If God didn't exist, then this is the only life we have, so that's why there would be morals, to make the best of this we possibly can.

Answer: William Lane Craig

I guess I... How do you think that that follows? If there is no God, then this is all that we have, but then nothing follows about how we should behave.

Question

No, of course not.

Answer: Louise Antony

I think you're a very wise young man. I think the universe has no purpose, but I do, right? I have lots of purposes. I have a book I want to write. I have children that I love and a husband that I love that I would do anything for. I have friends that are very dear to me. There are injustices in the world that I want to see corrected. I have lots of purposes. It makes a lot of difference to a lot of people and to me what I do. That gives my life significance, and I don't understand why . . . I'm worried for Dr. Craig. I wonder if he has any friends! I mean, don't you feel that your friends’ well-being gives you purposes, that it gives your life some significance? If I were to sacrifice my life for my children, as I hope I would have the courage to do, the only thing that would make it insignificant is if my children's lives are insignificant, and boy, you better not say that.

Answer: William Lane Craig

But Louise, on atheism, they are insignificant. We're all... we're...

Answer: Louise Antony

Not to me!

Answer: William Lane Craig

No, not you, but that's just subjective.

Answer: Louise Antony

Sorry, we're just objective facts.

It's an objective fact that they are significant to me, and if there's anybody on the planet to whom anything is significant, that's a fact that has all the significance that I need to take account of.

Question

Dr. Antony, you mentioned earlier that oftentimes it's hard to do the moral thing, and I'm wondering what is the atheistic explanation for a struggle like that to exist? Why would it be hard for human beings to do what is moral?

Answer: Louise Antony

Well, because it sometimes makes you do things you don't want to do. Like, as I was writing this paper and writing all this stuff about not torturing animals and sentient beings, I thought, "Well, I make a point of eating free-range meat and buying humanely slaughtered animals, but I don't know where the restaurants that I eat at get their stuff, so I have to not eat meat in restaurants." Let me tell you, I love food, and I love going to restaurants, and I really like the taste of lamb and I really like pork well-prepared and so forth. I think I'm going to have to stop doing that. Now, that's on the scale of difficult moral choices an easy one, right? That's not a big deal. People lose their lives. Rachel Corey, a 23-year-old American woman, went to the Gaza Strip to try to stop home demolitions from happening—illegal, immoral home demolitions. She was crushed by a bulldozer. She gave up her life. Now, sorry, I think that is incredibly significant, and I think she had enormous courage that goes beyond anything I can do, I'm sure, and she did it because she was outraged by the injustice. So that's hard.

Answer: William Lane Craig

Well, I think it's hard to be moral because so often the moral thing runs contrary to what self-interest prescribes. And so you have on the one hand this evolutionary principle of survival of the fittest. On the other hand, you have this moral ethic of compassion, and on the atheistic view, especially, these are contrary to each other because survival of the fittest says, "Go for number one, climb to the top, the fit will survive," and that is just at odds with an ethic of compassion. So the dilemma the naturalist faces is, why should he deny what evolution has programmed into him, that the fit should survive, and instead adopt this moral perspective? Why should Dr. Antony on naturalism not eat lamb when wolves eat lambs and do nothing immoral to the lamb? Why is it wrong for her to be carnivorous, but it's not wrong for the wolf to be carnivorous? I can't see any basis on naturalism for that. But on theism, I do want to say I think we do have responsibility toward animals and toward plants and the ecosystem, not because they are moral agents, but because on theism, we are, and we have a creation mandate from God to steward the Earth and to care for his creation. God, in the story of Adam and Eve, set man and woman upon this planet as gardeners, or to care for the earth and the environment. So I think theism does give us a good basis for an environmental ethic that on naturalism and survival of the fittest I just can't see any basis for.

Question

Hey, great debate. I was just wondering, is it morally permissible to do something that most people would consider immoral, like to kill someone or commit genocide, like in the Bible, if you think that God told you to do it? Like if you had a mental disorder like schizophrenia, and if you thought God told...

Answer: William Lane Craig

We haven't talked about that tonight, and that's a very complicated issue on which a whole lot has been written, but I want to refer you to an article on my website that deals with this. It's question number 16 in the question archive, where it deals with this question of whether or not God could command things like genocide or Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, and how we're to understand that. And so to try to deal with that here in one minute would just be inadequate, but I have written at length on that on my website.

Answer: Louise Antony

Yeah, I think it's a big problem. How you're supposed to distinguish the commands of a God who you know because of the historical record does command genocide from time to time, does tell people to wipe out every living thing, does tell a father to slaughter his son as a sacrifice and then says, "Never mind," does enter into a bet with the devil to see if he can test his faithful servant Job? So you know that God does do things like that, so it's kind of an epistemological problem, what God is actually telling you to do. Now, the people that I know who are religious and are sincerely moral people will say things like, "Look, those were stories written by primitive people." What they're doing is they're taking their independent sense of what's right and wrong and they're using that as a guide to what God commands. We can all think of the good as what God would command if we mean by God a perfectly good being, but we can think of good in that way without God actually having to exist. We can use that as a sort of regulative ideal about what we're imagining the good is.

Question

All right, now I'm going to feel bad because I have a kind of two-part question. Dr. Antony, most of your arguments stem from the fact that morality is based on sentience. Because I can confirm my existence, you can confirm your existence, stealing from you would be wrong, and you stealing from me would also be wrong. The first part of the question is, what would you consider the least of all... The least-evolved sentient being? I don't want to take up too much time.

Answer: Louise Antony

What do you mean by least-evolved? Everything that's on the planet has undergone evolutionary change.

Question

All right, fair enough. But if I were to say that a squirrel or a rabbit was not sentient, and then something like me was sentient, what in the absence of God creates that sentience and therefore morality?

Answer: William Lane Craig

That raises the question, "How is having a certain complex nervous system the foundation for saying that therefore this is morally valuable, that this is a good?" Your question about the least-evolved sentient being I think is a good one, because I think you're asking, "Where is the lower threshold where moral value breaks off and neutrality begins?" I think that you're raising a good question. It just seems to me to be arbitrary to think that sentience is objectively good on atheism, at least.

Question

I hope I have an easy question for you. It's a yes or no question. So it should be kind of quick. Dr. Craig, if I understood you correctly, you asked the question of Dr. Antony, you asked her to answer this question: If there is no God, what sets human beings apart from other animals? Why should we follow any code of morality when ants and sharks and other animals clearly do not? What reasons do we have to consider ourselves above certain acts that other animals take part in? Well, I ask you, isn't the fact that we as humans can conceive of a higher power, the fact that we have an ability to believe in God, isn't that enough?

Answer: William Lane Craig

No.

Answer: Louise Antony

Well, insofar as the capacity to do that probably entails the other capacities that I think are significant . . . I think my answer is yes.

Question

I know that physicists and chemists, they formulate hypotheses about universes with different fundamental constants. I was just wondering if you could imagine a universe with different sets of morality or where morality was more invariant than gravity.

Answer: Louise Antony

I think there are some moral obligations that we have that are socially constructed, like property rights. I think that property rights are rights that are constructed by our agreement to form a social contract with each other. But I think that the fact that if a being is sentient, and you can recognize that, you have a duty not to cause that sentient being unnecessary pain. I think that's a necessary truth. I just want to say something about this question about why it isn't immoral for wolves to eat lambs. It's because wolves have no capacity for understanding moral obligation. They don't meet the preconditions for having moral obligations. They have some moral rights because they're sentient, right? They have a right not to be harmed by a being that knows that they're harming them. But wolves don't have the capacity to recognize the moral facts. They don't have the obligation . . .

Answer: William Lane Craig

Well, now that just strikes me as really bizarre. You think that wolves have the right not to be harmed by a being which knows what it's doing if it harms the wolf, or that the lamb has a right not to be eaten by a being that has the knowledge of what it's doing, which the wolf doesn't have?

Answer: Louise Antony

Not that... I don't think lambs have a right not to be eaten. I think they have a right not to be caused gratuitous pain.

Answer: William Lane Craig

Okay, that's incredible to me. How on a naturalistic, atheistic view would lambs and wolves and things like that have these sorts of rights? It just strikes me that there's nothing in the naturalistic picture that would make us think that. It just seems to me to be . . .

Answer: Louise Antony

Okay, suppose that's so. There's nothing in the naturalistic picture that makes it the case that I have a duty not to torture a lamb. Okay, now God comes and says, "Don't torture a lamb." I don't see how anything has changed, except that now the creator of the universe who can commit me to eternal flames has told me he doesn't want me to do it. Now I have additional information that is going to structure my incentives. I don't see how any moral fact is created.

Question

Dr. Craig, this might be another question 16, but you said that God's nature determines what is good and his commands come down to us in that way, so that's how we can tell what's good and what's not. Well, that's helpful if we have one idea of God and an agreed-upon set of commandments that we need to obey. But the reality is that there are multiple faiths in the world that have absolute truths that are not negotiable with each other, and they end up fighting each other over these truths. And you can have a non-religious person say that slavery is wrong while watching these two religious groups fight over issues of slavery if they're part of their faith. And so in the end, we end up choosing the faith or the non-faith based on the comparisons of these from our own standpoint. And so does that complicate the issue of God being necessary for morality when in fact there are so many different kinds of morality that exist?

Answer: William Lane Craig

No, I don't think it complicates the issue of God being necessary for morality as the ontological foundation for morality. What you're talking about is now again moral epistemology: "How do we know the content of the good? How do we know what is right and wrong?" And here I agree with Dr. Antony. As I said, I think that semantically we know the meaning of moral terms and sentences without defining them in terms of God, and I think epistemologically we don't need to believe in God in order to know certain things are right and things are wrong or good and evil. So issues of moral epistemology and semantics are quite distinct from the reality of moral values and duties. Now, this does underline the importance, I think, though, what you're saying, of being sure that we believe in the right God, because certainly there are religions with concepts of God that are, I think, quite inadequate. And so this does underline the very important question of, "Well, which God is the true God?" and that I suppose is a debate for another evening.

Question

Dr. Antony, the basis for your morality, if I understand, is primarily whether something causes suffering.

Answer: Louise Antony

No. The basis for my morality is the objective moral facts. One of them is that it's wrong to cause a sentient creature suffering. I think that's pretty comprehensive.

Question

How do you determine what the objective moral facts are?

Answer: Louise Antony

We do it by testing our reactions to certain kinds of possibilities, thinking about the principles that those reactions might entail, testing those principles against new cases, pretty much the way we find out about anything.

Question

So I have a sort of a continuation of what my original question was because you didn't give me the answer I expected, so I'll continue it. It's still relevant. Why would you pick one moral standard over another principle? Why would you decide that the principle that it's wrong to cause suffering as one of your principles? Why would you pick that over, say, the principle "anything is wrong which does not cause me the greatest amount of pleasure"? What is an objective standard by which you would choose these principles?

Answer: Louise Antony

I'm not sure what kind of an answer you're looking for. It seems to me that if I were to say, "Anything that causes me suffering is wrong, but I don't care about the suffering of other people,” that seems a morally arbitrary position to take. If there's something about me that makes my pleasure morally important, and I see that there are other beings that are constituted as I am, that experience pleasure, it seems like it's a kind of inconsistency to not think that their pleasure is important to them too, and that's a fact I have to take account of. Are you tempted by this view?

No.

Answer: Louise Antony

Why not? Are you tempted to think that . . . I mean, does it strike you as a view you need to consider that maybe the morally right thing to do is to just do things that benefit...

No, I’m just using that as an example.

Louise Antony

So why aren't you tempted?

I'd like to ask you... We'll move on to the next question. Thank you, though.

Question

You commented on speciesism and how atheists and others are being specious by saying rape is wrong for humans but let's say not necessarily for sharks if God is necessary for morality. Why isn't it being speciesist by saying that God only cares about humans, and what makes human morality more important than other creatures if God made them all? And if it's a soul that makes humans follow this, then isn't God kind of being speciesist by only giving humans souls and not other creatures?

Answer: William Lane Craig

No, not at all. What speciesism is is thinking that your own species is somehow invested with objective moral worth when in fact you're no different from all the others. It's kind of like racism, you know, thinking that your race is somehow privileged and special and the others aren't. But if, for example, human beings are made in the image of God, that is to say they are persons as God is personal and they have a soul and are moral free agents, then they are very different from sharks and zebras and lions and so forth. There are objective differences between human beings and non-personal creatures. Now, if there were a person who had a shark body, say, then that person I think would have moral obligations that would be given to that person by God. So the physical body isn't the important thing. It's whether or not we're dealing here with persons who have those same qualities that God exhibits and therefore are intrinsically valuable.

Question

I'm not exactly saying it's the body itself. It's just what makes only humans the personal creatures? What makes them more important just because they can comprehend it, but why wouldn't other creatures just be able to comprehend it if God isn't necessarily remarking that they are more important?

Answer: William Lane Craig

I'm not sure I understand the question. Did you say, "Why aren't other creatures able to comprehend it?

Question

Why would God make that so?

Answer: William Lane Craig

Well, I think ultimately . . . now, this is, again, this is just my personal opinion. I think that these serve the purpose of having an ecosystem that is one in which human beings can flourish and ultimately come to know God and to be members of his kingdom and part of his family. And that these are also a reflection of the beauty and the creativity of God himself. I think God is a sort of supreme artist, and his beauty is reflected in the creation, so he delights in the abundance of creatures that exist in the universe, and these serve as a kind of arena in which this human drama is then played out.

So sometimes arbitrary decisions are both needed and justified, and I am going to let you respond. I'm just going to say that we are going to stop at 10:00, and I say that because we've asked a lot of our panelists tonight, and I say it out loud because the people at the end of those lines may be very upset with me in 10 minutes. So I just hope that we'll all keep that in mind and try to keep as much of this exchange going on as possible in the last 10 minutes.

Answer: Louise Antony

You ask a very interesting question and a good question. It's one I haven't thought about, and the question is... I think your question leads into a kind of new argument for evil against the benevolence of the creator. God seemingly arbitrarily chose human beings to invest with souls, to create in his image. The other animals he didn't. What are the consequences? Well, human beings he can command to regulate their activity with respect to each other in a way that might limit the amount of pain and suffering they cause each other, but he didn't give those capacities to animals, to sharks. So they're just ripping each other to shreds, causing each other enormous pain, and apparently God isn't concerned about that. It may be beautiful, but it's painful. It's painful to be not a human.

Question

Dr. Antony, you said in your concluding statement that in a world without divine redemption or intervention, certain acts that we all think are unforgivable would be even worse because we'd have to live with it without God intervening. Now, what do you make of the Christian doctrine that we are all so flawed that we've all done seemingly unforgivable things, like for instance, I bought this shirt knowing full well that it caused immeasurable pain in the third world country? We all do stuff like that, so do you disagree with that idea that we are all so horribly flawed? If so, why? Or do you agree with it, and if so, then how can you live with yourself in a world where there's no atonement or grace?

Answer: Louise Antony

Well, I didn't say there's no atonement or grace. I think there is. I think that you can atone for things by trying to make up for the damage and repair the damage you've done. I just think it has to be done here. I really reject and find offensive the view that there are no moral distinctions to be made, and I don't believe you believe it either. You think that you are the moral equivalent of Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot? I don't. I think there are worse things and worse things. I mean, I think there are lots of things, of course, we all do things for which we are sorry and we regret. We try to do better, but there are some things that are really, really, really awful, and I just think there are moral distinctions to be made. And if your religious view is that they're not, I think that's a really good refutation.

Question

I'll be very quick because my question's already been answered. I was going to speak about Dr. Antony's comments about intrinsic value for evil and for good, and I was going to voice it in the question about God permitting genocide and children being killed. I'll look at number 16 on your website. Just want to make an editorial comment: you do have a friend because I fully recognize that the heavens do declare the glory of God.

Question

Our moderator in his introduction raised the question of why we owe posterity anything. You frequently said that sentient beings have a moral duty not to cause others pain. Future generations don't exist and so they don't feel pain, so what and why do we have a responsibility towards them?

Answer: Louise Antony

Well, to start with, we have responsibilities toward the people who are here, and some of those people are people who are going to have children. And we want the people that are here to have the kind of world that will allow them to lead fulfilling lives.

Question

So it's for the sake of the present generation and not for the sake of the future generations that we have a moral obligation?

Answer: Louise Antony

Well, that's an interesting question, what the ontology of obligation is. I think the duties that we have to current generations are certainly enough.

Question

As a general question, would you agree that the morality that God gave humanity is unchanging and everlasting?

Answer: William Lane Craig

Not necessarily. I do agree with what Dr. Antony said when she said that some moral obligations could be contingent. For example, God gave certain moral commands to Israel in the Old Testament that were temporary and not permanent. And so it does seem to me that it's within God's prerogative to do that sort of thing. But when we're talking about these really fundamental moral goods, like the intrinsic value of human beings, then I think those are certainly metaphysically necessary truths and would be unchangeable.

Question

I feel like in this conversation everyone here has been ignoring the institutions in which people praise, worship, and preach the word of God. I feel like these institutions have over time changed their own morality, such as the Christian Crusades and the Vatican's approval of Nazi Germany, and now more fundamental Islamic extremism. And I feel like therefore, would it be true that instead of an existing God and his morals, that these institutions were created as a form of social control and that these morals were created to control the population instead of a god preaching these morals to the people?

Answer: William Lane Craig

It doesn't follow that they were created for that purpose, but it certainly may well be true that they serve that function of social control and manipulation of populations and so forth. I think a very good case could be made out for that. I don't think anything follows from what you've said about the subject of tonight's debate because Dr. Antony and I would both agree that we can make moral mistakes. And that, therefore, for example, if the church thought that the Crusades was something that was morally right and good, that they were simply wrong in thinking that. If there were theists who were guards at Auschwitz, they were just morally mistaken. So I agree with what Dr. Antony said when she said, "I don't care if my culture says something is morally permissible, and I know that it's not. My culture is simply wrong in that case." So those institutions may have served the function on occasion of social manipulation or control, but that doesn't follow that God doesn't exist or that he's not the foundation for morality or that there aren't objective moral truths.

Question

So picking up on that comment, it seems you both agree that there are moral objectives, and Dr. Craig wonders how Dr. Antony can hold to them without belief in God. And my question for Dr. Antony is, notwithstanding your questions and you raise some important questions and deep issues with from the biblical record, but is it possible, how would you respond to the possibility that being made in the image of God, though you at present have issues with God, you still have that inherent sense of morality and what some things are just wrong and some things are just right as a reflection of being created in the image of God?

Answer: Louise Antony

I suppose it's possible. It seems to me extremely unlikely that that's where I came from. I think I probably evolved. And if I could just take the opportunity to say something about why I think Dawkins and others are wrong and why Dr. Craig is wrong. Dawkins persistently confuses a matter about what is essentially an evolutionary filter, survival of the fittest. All survival of the fittest says is, there are conditions such that if you don't meet these conditions, you're not going to survive. Whatever survives, that is ipso facto fittest. He confuses that with the question of what actually motivates individual intentional creatures. It can evolve that you are a creature who has intentions that are very different from anything to do with the conditions that structure your ability to pass on your genes. So there's nothing in me that is aiming to maximize the number of copies of my genes in the world. God forbid I should do that! I don't want that many children. So that's the conflation. The idea that all we have to work with is survival of the fittest is just a fallacy. That said, there are lots of possible stories. It's not the only right story, but it seems to me the most plausible one.

Answer: William Lane Craig

Let me simply say that it seems to me that if there are these objective moral truths and principles on realism, such as Dr. Antony and I think they are, that it is extraordinarily improbable in the extreme that the evolutionary process would produce by survival of the fittest just those beings that happen to have the correct moral perceptions and intuitions of those moral truths and values which are causally unconnected to the evolutionary process. And that's why I think given the evolutionary story, it's just highly, highly improbable that what we grasp onto would be objective values and truths.

Answer: Louise Antony

I think it's highly probable. The probability is one. Here we are.