Highlights From Debate with Erik Wielenberg. Part One

KEVIN HARRIS: I just heard a very interesting debate between Dr. Craig and Dr. Erik Wielenberg on God and morality. Welcome to Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. I'm Kevin Harris. Maybe you saw this debate. It was streamed online on Facebook and on YouTube from N. C. State University before a live audience on the question, what best accounts for objective moral values and duties? Of course, Dr. Craig argues that theism does. Dr. Erik Wielenberg is an atheist and he took the opposing view. This was a good debate and was familiar territory, but some new things, I think, came into this debate, and I think you will get a lot out of it. Today you are going to hear Dr. Craig's opening speech, and then very soon Dr. Craig and I are going to get together in the studio where we are going to discuss this debate. Today, let's hear Dr. Craig's opening speech and we will discuss it with him very soon on Reasonable Faith.

DR. CRAIG: Thank you. It is an honor to be participating in this debate on “God and Morality” with so provocative and incisive a thinker as Erik Wielenberg.

The question before us this evening is: what is the best account of the objectivity of moral values and duties? What makes certain actions objectively good or evil, right or wrong?

In tonight's debate I am going to defend two basic contentions:

I. Theism provides a sound foundation for the objectivity of moral values and duties.

II. Atheism does not provide as sound a foundation as theism for the objectivity of moral values and duties.

So let’s look at that first contention together. Here I want to examine two subpoints with you.

First, theism provides a sound foundation for the objectivity of moral values. Moral values have to do with what is good or evil. On the theistic view objective moral values are grounded in God. As St. Anselm saw, God is by definition the greatest conceivable being and therefore perfectly good. He is not merely perfectly good; He is the paradigm of moral value. God’s own holy and loving character supplies the absolute standard against which all things are measured. He is by nature loving, generous, faithful, kind, and so forth. Thus, if God exists, moral values are objective, being wholly independent of human beings.

Second, theism provides a sound foundation for the objectivity of moral duties. On a theistic view objective moral duties are constituted by God’s will or commands. God’s moral nature is expressed in relation to us in the form of divine commandments which constitute our moral duties or obligations. Far from being arbitrary, God’s commandments must be consistent with His holy and loving nature. Our duties, then, are constituted by God’s commandments, and these in turn reflect His essential character. On this foundation we can affirm the objective rightness of love, generosity, and self-sacrifice, and condemn as objectively wrong selfishness, hatred, abuse, and oppression.

In summary, then, theism grounds the objectivity of both moral values and moral duties. Hence, it’s evident that if God does exist, we have a sound foundation for the objectivity of moral values and duties.

Let’s turn, then, to my second contention, that atheism does not provide as sound a foundation for the objectivity of moral values and duties. I’m not going to argue this point in general; rather I want to look specifically at Dr. Wielenberg’s view, which he calls “Godless Normative Realism” and ask whether it provides as sound a foundation for morality as theism. I’m going to argue that Godless Normative Realism not only involves extravagant metaphysical commitments which make it very implausible, but it also faces a number of formidable objections as an account of objective moral values and duties.[1]

First, Godless Normative Realism involves extravagant metaphysical claims which make it very implausible. Because Dr. Wielenberg wants to affirm the objectivity and even necessity of moral values and duties, he cannot take them to be mere byproducts of biological evolution or social conditioning. Rather he must find some transcendent ground for the objectivity of moral values and duties. He finds this in moral Platonism.

His view is akin to mathematical Platonism, which holds that in addition to the world of concrete objects, there exists a transcendent realm of immaterial, causally effete, abstract objects, like numbers, sets, and other mathematical entities. Most of us think that such entities have at most a sort of conceptual reality; but for the Platonist these objects are objectively real. Wielenberg holds that moral values are similarly abstract objects of some sort existing independently of human beings.[2] When the right physical situations occur in the world, these abstract objects supervene on the situations. So, for example, the abstract object goodness supervenes upon two persons’ loving each other, so that their loving each other is objectively good.

Platonism is a metaphysical view which is so extravagant that it makes theism—which itself involves hefty metaphysical commitments!—look modest by comparison. The prominent metaphysician Peter van Inwagen explains,

The Platonist must think of objects, of what there is, as falling into two exclusive and exhaustive categories, the abstract and the concrete. If x falls into one of these categories and y into the other, then no two things could be more different than x and y. . . . the differences between God and this pen pale into insignificance when they are compared with the differences between this pen and the number 4; indeed, the number seems no more like the pen than like God. The difference between any abstract object and any concrete object would seem to be the maximum difference any two objects could display.[3]

Given this strange bifurcation of reality into these two causally unconnected domains, it would be much more credible to suppose that one of the categories is empty. But concrete objects are indisputably real and well-understood, in contrast to abstract objects. So, van Inwagen maintains, the presumption should be that abstract objects do not exist. Nominalism of some sort is thus the default position. Indeed, van Inwagen believes,

one should not believe in abstract objects unless one feels rationally compelled by some weighty consideration or argument. . . . a philosopher should wish not to be a Platonist if it’s rationally possible for the informed philosopher not to be a Platonist.[4]

The objectivity of moral values cannot itself provide such a rationally compelling reason, since Dr. Wielenberg acknowledges that he has no rationally compelling arguments either for the objectivity of moral values or for moral Platonism.[5] He thus cannot overcome the presumption against Platonism and, hence, against Godless Normative Realism. The theist, by contrast, faces no such obstacle because he grounds moral values in a concrete object, namely, God, and so is not committed to a realm of abstract objects.[6]

Thus, Godless Normative Realism involves extravagant metaphysical claims which make it less plausible than theism.[7]

My second criticism is that even given the truth of moral Platonism, Godless Normative Realism faces a number of formidable objections in its account of the objectivity of moral values and duties.

First, its account of the supervenience of abstract moral properties on physical situations seems unintelligible. How is it that these abstract objects like goodness or badness come to be attached to physical situations? Dr. Wielenberg recognizes that it would be implausible to say that this just happens, as if by magic.[8] Rather he claims that the physical objects cause the abstract objects to supervene on physical situations.[9] This is not ordinary supervenience; this is what has been called superdupervenience![10] Unfortunately, this superdupervenience is utterly mysterious. Ask yourself: How can a physical object somehow reach out and causally connect to a transcendent, causally isolated, abstract object?

Ironically, in order to make his claim plausible Dr. Wielenberg has to appeal, of all things, to theism as an analogy to his view. He writes,

A paradigmatic example of the sort of robust causation that I have in mind is the causal relation that many theists take to hold between a state of affairs being divinely willed and the obtaining of that state of affairs. . . . Theists typically maintain that if God wills that p, this necessarily brings it about that p obtains. . . . I propose . . . to construe the making relation involved in . . . supervenience as this sort of robust causation.[11]

Unfortunately, this analogy fails, precisely because neither God nor the universe is an abstract object. God and the universe are concrete objects endowed with causal powers and dispositions, which can therefore be causally related to one another. But how physical objects can be causally connected to abstract objects is wholly obscure.

Moreover, we may ask, how do these physical situations “know” which abstract objects to instantiate? What if instead of picking out moral goodness, some physical situation might pick out moral badness? Indeed, what if it picks out some other abstract object like √2 to instantiate, so that two people’s loving each other has the property of being √2 instead of being good? Wielenberg says that while some moral properties are caused necessarily to supervene on certain physical situations, in other cases they are only contingently caused to supervene.[12] So why does this happen?

Again, ironically, Dr. Wielenberg turns to theism in order to explicate his position. He invites us to consider the doctrine of divine conservation.

According to that doctrine, God not only brings all contingent things into existence; He also sustains or keeps them in existence for each moment that they exist. . . . there is a robust causal relation between divine willing and every contingent thing at each moment of its existence. One way of construing my proposal, then, is as a doctrine of non-moral conservation: whatever moral properties are instantiated are conserved or sustained by various underlying non-moral properties via a robust causal relation that holds between the relevant non-moral and moral properties.[13]

But once again, the analogy with theism fails, for God is a personal agent who freely chooses to instantiate in being certain contingent things.[14] By contrast, Dr. Wielenberg says that his proposal “should . . . not be understood as ascribing agency to non-moral properties.”[15] But without agency how can these physical situations correctly select the right moral states of affairs to instantiate? The problem is not just that the holding of this causal relation between non-moral and moral states of affairs is, by Dr. Wielenberg’s own admission, inexplicable.[16] The problem is that Wielenberg’s view, which is supposed to be consistent with scientific naturalism, imputes to physical objects causal powers that are mysterious and completely unknown to contemporary physics. It is, in fact, a sort of Voodoo metaphysics.

Second objection: Godless Normative Realism’s account of objective moral duties is seriously flawed. I’ll mention two problems. First, in the absence of a divine lawgiver, why think that we have any moral obligations or prohibitions? On Dr. Wielenberg’s view, moral obligations are constituted by having decisive moral reasons for doing some action.[17] For example, if I’m trying to decide whether to steal someone’s pocketbook, I examine the moral value of alternative actions and see that I have decisive moral reasons for not stealing the pocketbook. Therefore I ought not to steal it.

Dr. Wielenberg’s view has the implausible implication that if you have decisive moral reasons for doing something, you are obligated to do it. That is incompatible with morally supererogatory acts, like sacrificing one’s life for another, for even though such an act is supremely good, it is above and beyond the call of duty. Moreover, Dr. Wielenberg’s view seems to imply that we are always obligated to do the best thing, whereas in some cases we are obligated at most to do a good thing, not the best thing. Even if it were morally better, for example, for you to become a doctor rather than an engineer, you’re not morally obligated to become a doctor, for both are good moral choices.

In any case, having decisive moral reasons to do an act implies at most that if you want to act morally, then that is the act you ought to do. In other words, the obligation to do the act is only conditional, not unconditional. But a divine command provides an unconditional obligation to perform some act. A robust moral theory ought to provide a basis for unconditional moral obligations, which Wielenberg’s view does not.

The second problem is that Dr. Wielenberg’s view subverts the objectivity of moral duties by undermining freedom of the will. Dr. Wielenberg endorses what he calls “the causal closure of the physical.”[18] That implies that your mental states are causally effete. The mind has no effect on the body. The only causality is from physical brain states to mental states. Thus, mental states are causally impotent states which just float along, as it were, on brain states. They do and effect nothing. In that case, everything you think and do is causally determined by prior physical states.[19] You are an electro-chemical machine, and machines have no moral obligations to do anything.

Your body is not morally obligated to do anything. What about your self, your mind? On Dr. Wielenberg’s view the self is just a succession of discrete mental states; there is no enduring subject which persists from one moment to another.[20] Thus, there literally is no one who can be held morally accountable for prior acts. Moral praise and blame are impossible, since there is no enduring moral agent. Your perception of yourself as a moral agent and your sense of moral duties and accountability are illusions of human consciousness. Thus, the objectivity of moral duties, along with moral agency and moral accountability, is undone by Godless Normative Realism.

The third formidable objection I want to raise is that Dr. Wielenberg’s view seems to make moral knowledge impossible. Dr. Wielenberg’s account of moral knowledge seems vulnerable to Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism.[21] Plantinga argues that naturalism is self-defeating because if our cognitive faculties have evolved by naturalistic processes, they are aimed, not at truth, but at survival, and so cannot be relied on to produce true beliefs. This is especially evident on Dr. Wielenberg’s view, since our mental states have absolutely no effect on our brain states. Thus, the content of our beliefs is irrelevant to our survivability. But if we cannot rely on our cognitive faculties to produce true beliefs, then the belief in naturalism is itself undermined, since it has been produced by those very cognitive faculties.

We can apply Plantinga’s argument to our moral beliefs as follows:

1. The probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable, given naturalism and evolution, is low. 


2. If someone believes in naturalism and evolution and sees that, therefore, the probability of his cognitive faculties’ being reliable is low, then he has a defeater for the belief that his cognitive faculties are reliable. 


3. If someone has a defeater for the belief that his cognitive faculties are reliable, then he has a defeater for any belief produced by his cognitive faculties (including his moral beliefs). 


4. Therefore, if someone believes in naturalism and evolution and sees that, therefore, the probability of his cognitive faculties’ being reliable is low, then he has a defeater for the reliability of his moral beliefs.

Because our moral beliefs have been produced by faculties aimed at survival, not truth, we can have no confidence that our moral beliefs are true.

Dr. Wielenberg is acutely aware of this problem for Godless Normative Realism. His very complex answer to this problem, simply put, is that the same cognitive processes that produce our moral beliefs also cause the abstract moral properties to be instantiated.[22] Notice that this account depends crucially on the supposed causal connection between physical properties and abstract moral properties, which is perhaps the most obscure point in his philosophy. But Plantinga’s argument gives us reason to doubt as well whether our cognitive processes which supposedly cause certain moral properties to be instantiated will trigger the appropriate moral beliefs, rather than beliefs which are merely conducive for survival. Dr. Wielenberg reassures us that we are no more lucky in having true moral beliefs than we are in having true beliefs in general.[23] But if Plantinga is right, it is an incredibly lucky coincidence, given naturalism, that our beliefs of any kind, including our moral beliefs, turn out to be reliable.

The solution to this problem is to deny, not evolution, but naturalism. On theism God can supervise the evolutionary process in such a way as to guarantee the fundamental reliability of our cognitive faculties. Since Dr. Wielenberg, by contrast, is committed to naturalism as well as evolution, he has a defeater for the reliability of his moral beliefs. Godless Normative Realism thus makes moral knowledge impossible.

In conclusion, it seems to me that theism provides a more plausible account of objective moral values and duties than does Godless Normative Realism. The latter involves extravagant metaphysical commitments that render it more implausible than theism; and it faces formidable objections even given those commitments. Therefore, theism is the more plausible moral theory.[24]