Highlights From Debate with Erik Wielenberg. Part Two

KEVIN HARRIS:  I want to welcome you to part two of our podcast featuring highlights from the debate between Dr. Craig and Erik Wielenberg on God and morality. Today we are going to finish up this podcast series, and then very soon Dr. Craig and I are going to discuss this debate in a little more detail. That’s coming up very soon as Dr. Craig and I get into the studio. Today we want you to hear from the audience. This is the Q&A session that took place after the debate. It was moderated by Adam Johnson. He directs the first question to Dr. Craig.

MODERATOR: We are going to start with a question for Dr. Craig. He will have two minutes to answer the question. Then Dr. Wielenberg will have one minute to respond. Then we will have a question for Dr. Wielenberg, and the same routine – he’ll have two minutes to answer it and then Dr. Craig will have a minute to respond. We will go back and forth like this so that each debater gets an equal number of questions.

So, Dr. Craig, the first question is for you.

If the theist yourself is claiming there is a God then the burden of proof relies on you, the theist, to provide irrefutable, preferably empirical evidence, that there is a God. How is it useful to use your claim that there is a God in your reasoning? In logic you can’t use an unproved statement as proof for another claim.

DR. CRAIG: The question is: given the objectivity of moral values and duties, what is the most plausible account of these? Here the theist can certainly make the conditional claim that if God exists then we have a plausible account of both objective moral values and duties. That is unobjectionable. He doesn’t have to bear the burden of proof to show that God exists. What I argued is that Platonism, however, does have a kind of presumption against it - that in the absence of some rationally compelling argument, the default position ought to be that abstract objects do not exist. So I do think that the Platonist has a presumption of nominalism to overcome that the theist doesn’t face because the theist sticks with concrete objects as the explanatory ultimate for objective moral values and duties.

DR. WIELENBERG: I think it is a helpful question because I think it helps to bring out a certain parallel in the approach of Craig and I thinking about morality and the metaphysical underpinnings of morality. I think that for Dr. Craig and I, we both agree that there are objective moral facts and that any argument against that is going to be less plausible than that claim itself. I think for us the interesting philosophical question is not really whether there are these objective moral facts but what is the most plausible sort of account of their foundation. So Craig has an influential moral argument for the existence of God where he says God is the best explanation or provides the best account of these facts. During the debate you noticed he repeatedly challenged me to give an argument for my Platonic entities. The argument I would offer for the entities posited by my view has the same structure as Craig’s which is I think those entities provide the best account of objective moral duties. The argument I would give parallels Craig’s moral argument, and that is why I think the issue is whether his theistic approach can account for moral facts is so crucial.

MODERATOR: The next question is for you Dr. Wielenberg.

Did you arrive at your position of Godless Normative Realism through inductive means or deductive means? How can you be certain you have arrived at the correct set of moral principles?

DR. WIELENBERG: It sounds like there were two questions. In the end there I thought it maybe turned into a question about how do I know I have the correct moral principles. I think the first part of the question seemed to be about how do I know I got the right metaphysical foundation. Can I ask you for your take on that?

MODERATOR: He is asking: how did you arrive to your overall position (your model) – through inductive or deductive means?

DR. WIELENBERG: Winston Churchill has this famous remark about democracy which is something like it is the worst of all forms of government except for all the others that have been tried. That is my attitude to my own meta-ethical theory – what Dr. Craig is calling moral Platonism.[1] I think abductive or deductive – I think it is an argument to the best explanation in the sense, again, what makes the best sense of the reality of objective moral facts. A full-blown argument for my view because you can see with the Churchill remark involves ruling out all of the other alternatives. That is obviously a large task. What I have tried to do tonight is to make the case that Craig’s particular theistic approach doesn’t do the job. That obviously knocks down, if my argument succeeds, just one competitor to my view. But my general approach is, again it parallels Craig’s, I think, approach in his moral argument for God’s existence. We’ve got these objective moral facts; what makes the best sense of them? What is the account? So I would describe it loosely as an inference to the best explanation. The argument I would offer is: it turns out we have to posit these entities to make sense of objective moral facts. Again, I try to make the case tonight that Craig’s theistic approach doesn’t work, so it would be part of the larger argument I try to give.

DR. CRAIG: I would like to identify a false assumption that seems to underly both of the questions that have been posed this evening. And that is that one has to have some sort of certainty about these conclusions in order to be justified in holding them. The first questioner asked, Do you have irrefutable arguments? The last questioner asked how Erik could be certain of his conclusions. These are false standards of success in argumentation. That is why what we’ve argued tonight is which view is the more plausible view. Which one has the balance of evidence and argument in its favor? But the quest or demand for certainty is a will-o-the-wisp that will ultimately lead to sheer skepticism.

DR. WIELENBERG: Amen, brother! [laughter]

MODERATOR: The next question is for you, Dr. Craig.

Dr. Wielenberg claims that your views imply that without God’s command there is no evil act committed. Is God’s intrinsic goodness sufficient for providing a basis for objective morality without special revelation?

DR. CRAIG: She misunderstood Dr. Wielenberg. He did not say that in the absence of a divine command nothing would be evil. What he said was that in the absence of divine commands nothing would be wrong. That is the difference between values and duties. Moral values are rooted in the very nature of God and so there would still be evil acts that would be done even if they were not prohibited by God and therefore wouldn’t technically be wrong acts. One would then raise this question that Dr. Wielenberg does: why would God command then people to do things when he knew that they wouldn’t do them so that they now become not only evil but wrong? I think it is important to understand that every one of us is comprised in this situation. Every one of us is a fallen creature who does evil things and are infected with evil. God communicates his will to us for our own good. Not to communicate his will to everyone would allow people to remain in their evil condition. In that fallen state they could never be able to enjoy communion with God. But God is not content to allow us to remain in such an evil state. Instead he does everything he can to save us. By communicating to us his moral law he helps people to see that they have cut themselves off from God. He helps him to repent, to seek God’s grace and forgiveness. So God’s giving us his law helps us to understand our need for grace and to accept it and so ultimately to find salvation. Otherwise, evil-doers would never be able to enjoy union with God which would comprise all of us.

DR. WIELENBERG: OK, that is interesting. I think during the debate it became clear that Dr. Craig hadn’t answered the objection about why the challenge to explain why God would command people to do things we know won’t make a difference anyway. So now the idea seems to be he commands us to do what will make us happy, and this helps us get over our fallen state and so it is for our own good. I guess one challenge I would offer there goes back to what Craig was saying earlier about the distinction between how good and evil are treated on his view and how moral obligations are treated on his view.[2] One thought is that, since even without commands good and evil exist, God can simply inform us about or give us knowledge about the good and evil of our actions. So it is still not clear to me why the commands would be necessary.

MODERATOR: The next question is for you, Dr. Wielenberg.

Does your view address cases where moral duties conflict? For example, the classic case of lying to protect Jews from Nazi soldiers that appear at your door.

DR. WIELENBERG: The view I hold is sort of where what is morally required of us depends on what moral reasons we have. It is similar to the view put forward by the early 20th century philosopher W. D. Ross. The basic idea is morality is kind of messy. There are all these different things that provide moral reasons for us to do certain things or not do certain things. It is when you are trying to figure out what to do a lot of times it has to do with weighing these reasons against each other. I think in that case – that is just a particularly difficult case in the sense that you’ve got weighty moral reasons on both sides. It may be very difficult to know what the right thing to do is. There are a lot of easy cases like if you promise to meet someone for lunch – and here’s the classic example from philosophy-land filled with drowning babies. You promised to meet someone for lunch, you are passing through philosophy-land and here’s a drowning baby. If you save the baby you will break the promise. There it seems clear that the reason for the importance in saving the baby outweighs the promise. But there are other cases that are harder. I think if the question is about conflicting duties, I would think of those cases as cases where you just have weighty reasons on both sides and it is hard to tell what your duty is, but there wouldn’t be literally conflicting duties. There would be one actual obligation, it just would be very hard to know what it is when you’ve got weighty reasons pulling in conflicting directions.

DR. CRAIG: It seems to me this highlights the problem of trying to derive moral obligations from simply normative considerations – weighing the moral values of alternative actions. Indeed, it makes me wonder what the situation with psychopaths would be on this sort of view since they wouldn’t be capable in many cases, I should think, of weighing the moral norms required to have an obligation. Certainly mentally retarded people and infants and people in comatose conditions would not be able to derive moral obligations in that way. Whereas I would say on my view I was talking about normal moral agents, not mentally ill people, comatose people, little infants, mentally retarded. That is what I meant when I was referring to being written on the hearts of all people – normal, moral agents.

MODERATOR: OK, Dr. Craig, the next question is for you.

Why should we obey God’s commands? Where does that “should” come from? How is that “should” grounded in God?

DR. CRAIG: This relates to the question that came up a little bit in the debate about whether or not your moral theory has some sort of explanatory ultimate which cannot be further explained. It seems to me that divine command theorists could say simply that this is my theory – divine commands constitute our moral obligations. Therefore the question doesn’t even arise – “Why should I obey God’s commands?” - because that just is the theory that you are giving. This is an explanatory ultimate that doesn’t have a further explanation. It seems to me that would be a perfectly legitimate move. But he could say something else. He could say that we are to obey God’s commands because God has commanded us to. That would not be viciously circular. For example, all of the things mentioned in the debate tonight is itself mentioned in the debate tonight. So there are things that are included in themselves. If God issues a command, You shall obey all of my commands, that command itself would be comprised in that command. In this case you are not left with some sort of brute explanatory ultimate. Rather, you would have an explanation for why you should obey God’s commands. Because God has commanded you to obey all of his commands including that one.[3] So it seems to me that that would be a perfectly acceptable answer to the question that was raised by the questioner.

DR. WIELENBERG: I think this question is helpful. It brings out an important other parallel between my and Craig’s view, and actually, as far as I can tell, anybody who wants to believe in objective moral truths or facts, which is at some point you are going to need a moral axiom where you have some basic moral claim or principle which has no further explanation outside of itself. I think sometimes in debates between theists and atheists about morality it is presented this way: on a theistic view God is the foundation, on the atheist view they have no foundation. That is very misleading. I think both views require moral axioms, the only difference is which moral axioms. On the particular question of why obey God’s commands, I would just point out that the most prominent defenders of divine command theory – for example, Robert Adams – realize that this is a very pressing question. Robert Adams spends a lot of time trying to provide reasons to obey God’s commands. In doing so, he inevitably and predictably appeals to unexplained brute moral axioms. So I think you cannot get away from that.

MODERATOR: Dr. Wielenberg, this next question is for you.

Dr. Wielenberg, in your book you discuss two alternative analyses of the making relation. One is causation, and one is grounding. Do you think that analyzing “making” as “grounding” rather than “causing” would help you to escape Dr. Craig’s objection concerning the obscurity of concrete-abstract causation?

DR. WIELENBERG: Maybe, but I don’t feel the force of that objection. Again, especially if the question is which view is more plausible, as I was suggesting in the debate, Craig’s view involves a particular causal relation which in the history of philosophy is sort of notorious. Its critics routinely point out this is obscure. Again, it goes back to this letter from Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia where she was making the case if you’ve got a physical body and a totally non-physical soul how the heck could these two things interact with each other? The challenge was how does it work? What is the mechanism? What is the sort of explanation? I think if there is a challenge for my idea that the particular – in the child on fire case – the natural features of that situation cause you to have the obligation to assist. If there is a worry there it is the same kind of worry – how does it work? In the end I don’t actually think that these worries are actually big problems. Come to two points here. There is a similar problem for both Craig and I, and there is not really a difference there. The heart of the matter is there is no theory as to how this causation works. But I guess the important thing to see is if you think there is causation you always get to a point where you just say, “Huh, that is just how it is.” There is no further story as to how it works. You see this in physics all the time. You eventually get to a point where they are just like, “That is just how it works. That is just what the universe does. Things are this way that makes things be this other way.” How does it work? It just does it. Again, this is a problem that everyone has. If there is going to be causation at all there has got to be some causation where there is no further story as to how the causation works. So I think it is important to see that that can’t be a fatal objection to a theory because then most theories will be out the window.

DR. CRAIG: I think what Dr. Wielenberg just said undermines his view. Eleonore Stump, a Christian philosopher, recently pointed out that our inability to explain how the mind affects the body is not a serious objection because, as Dr. Wielenberg says, we don’t even understand how matter affects matter! Ultimately we don’t really understand how any of this stuff works. So how can you indict mind-body causation when you don’t even understand body-body causation? The point is that in the connection of our own minds with our bodies we do experience that it occurs even if we don’t know how it occurs. But we do not know that it occurs between these non-moral properties and these moral properties. If you have a drug that you know that it works, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know how it works. But you do know that it works. In this case we are missing the “that” when it comes to Platonism.[4]

MODERATOR: OK, Dr. Craig. The next question is for you.

Can you give a fuller explanation about whether or not psychopaths are morally responsible? If they are not, how does that align with the Bible?

DR. CRAIG: I can’t because I am not a psychologist. I have not read literature on psychopathy, so I can only speak conditionally on this. To say if it is really true that a psychopath cannot grasp the difference between right and wrong then in the eyes of the law he lacks a culpable mental state. In order to be found guilty the accused needs to have an act of wrongdoing (which in the law is called an actus reus) and a culpable mental state (a mens rea). When people are found not guilty because of insanity, for example, it is not because they didn’t do the act. It is because of their mental illness they are found not guilty due to insanity. The question would be: do psychopaths fall into that category or not? If they do then the law would say they are not guilty by reason of mental defect. On anybody’s moral theory you wouldn’t want to say that they failed to live up to their moral obligations. But if they do grasp the difference between right and wrong then they will be held morally culpable by the law for their crimes. My limited experience with psychopaths is that they do grasp and can grasp the difference between right and wrong even if they lack feelings of empathy for their victims, feelings of compassion. A good example of this is David Wood who, those of you who are Christians will know, is a prominent Christian thinker who is a psychopath. He tried to murder his father and became a Christian while in prison. David testifies to the fact that he could grasp the difference between right and wrong even if he still lacks the sort of feelings of empathy with people that would characterize a normally healthy person.

DR. WIELENBERG: Psychopathy is an interesting disorder. I think it is . . . I will just mention some of the sources. Dr. Craig mentions one case of David Wood. I do not know David Wood so I can’t comment on that case. There is a substantial body of research in psychology devoted to psychopathy in particular. Robert Harris, one of the main figures, has a book called Without Conscience. A student of his has a book called The Psychopath Whisperer. That is the body of research I am drawing on when I bring pychopaths into the discussion. I think the key thing to see is . . . the thing that Dr. Craig was saying about the law and mens rea, none of that really gets to the objection I raised which has to do with whether psychopaths have moral obligations. Again, I think the problem for Craig is on the one hand whether or not psychopaths know the difference between right or wrong, they do not grasp the authority of morality which on Craig’s view seems to preclude them from having moral obligations. Yet, for whatever reason, Craig also wants to claim that he says that God doesn’t let evil-doers get away with their evil acts. If that is true then psychopaths have to have moral obligations. The whole thing that psychopathy is a moral disorder does not address the objection because on Craig’s view this is a mental disorder that God should not permit by Craig’s own principle.

MODERATOR: OK, Dr. Wielenberg, the next question is for you.

You appeal to theistic notions a lot to argue for your position. Why not just go all the way and become a theist? Why do you believe that God doesn’t exist? Maybe he is asking why are you an atheist in the first place?

DR. WIELENBERG: That is a good question. Yeah, um . . . one thing that is behind this question is a lot of contemporary atheists, or at least the ones that get a lot of attention, they are sort of hardcore naturalists where they say the only thing that exists are what science can tell us or all there is is the physical world. I am not that kind of atheist. I think there is a physical world plus these irreducible moral features of things. That, I guess on the spectrum of views, does push me more towards atheism. If the question is, Why don’t you just become a theist?, that is like saying you believe in physical objects, dragons are physical objects, so why don’t you believe in dragons? Well, there is a distinction to be made. Just because you believe in some non-physical things doesn’t mean you should believe in all non-physical things.[5] The short answer to the question of why don’t I go whole hog and become a theist – it comes back to the old familiar problem of evil. Obviously I am just explaining what my position is. I am not going to try to defend the problem of evil. That is of course a huge topic in its own right. But the combination of things that leads me to my view is I think there is objective morality. Like I said before I think I've got this Churchillian view where I think my view is the least bad explanation for those objective moral properties but then the presence of all the evil and various kinds of evil and so on suggest to me that it is implausible that there is this perfect being that is sort of in charge of everything. So it is kind of those two considerations that land me where I have landed.

DR. CRAIG: I have wondered this question myself. What some of you might not know is how familiar Dr. Wielenberg is with the writings of C. S. Lewis. He teaches on Lewis. He knows his writings well. Dr. Wielenberg is thoroughly conversant with Christian philosophy. I am hoping that he still will become a Christian especially since such good work has been done in our generation on the problem of evil. There has been real advance philosophically in this area through the work of people like Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, Eleonore Stump, Marilyn Adams, and others. I really hope, Erik, that you will work your way through this problem of evil and come to a knowledge of God in the end.

MODERATOR: Our plan is to continue asking these questions and letting our debaters answer them until 9:30. So we have just a few more minutes to go and hopefully time for a few more questions here. Dr. Craig, this question is for you.

By what metric can we evaluate that God is truly good? If we could only use God in understanding what is good, by what metric can we determine if this idea of good is truly beneficial for humanity?

DR. CRAIG: The goodness of God follows from the Anselmian concept of God as the greatest conceivable being. A greatest conceivable being must be perfectly good. Indeed, it would not be simply perfectly good, it would be the very paradigm of goodness and love. That is why God is worthy of worship. Again, by definition, any being that is not worthy of worship is not God. God by definition is a being worthy of worship. To be worthy of worship, when you think about what worship is (not just praise or admiration but adoration, worship) this must be the greatest conceivable being. And that will entail moral goodness. So God is the metric. God is himself the metric, and he is essentially loving, fair, kind, compassionate, caring, and so forth. These moral values are rooted in the concept of God as the paradigm of goodness. It is rather as the length of a meter used to be determined by that meter bar in the Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris. It wasn't some abstract quantity. It was the length of that bar; that meter bar was the paradigm of being a meter. In the same way, God's nature is the paradigm, the metric, for what moral goodness is. It follows from the concept of God as a being worthy of worship, the greatest conceivable being.

DR. WIELENBERG: I think there are some interesting puzzles and perhaps problems there but I am not going to actually raise any objection to anything Dr. Craig just said. Instead I am just going to point out how I think this idea connects with the point I made earlier that anyone who believes in objective morality is going to have to at some point appeal to at least one, usually more, unexplained brute moral axioms. I think in the account Craig was just describing, he said God is worthy of worship. Of course, being worthy of worship is a normative notion so you've got on his view this claim that there exists a being worthy of worship.[6] That claim has no further explanation because the being that is worthy of worship is supposed to be God, and God has no explanation outside of himself. So it is another case where on Craig’s theistic view there is a normative claim that is just sort of built-in to reality and has no further explanation. I am not arguing that that is false; I am just highlighting the fact that you can't really get away from this problem. Again, I think when the theist wants to use this as a sort of a weapon against the atheist (Oh, you've got these ungrounded moral claims that you are just sort of pulling out of your hat) it seems to me that everyone, including the theist, is in the similar position.

MODERATOR: As I said at the beginning of the Q&A time we wanted to make sure that both debaters had an equal number of questions. Since we began with the first question for Dr. Craig, we will end now with the last question for Dr. Wielenberg.

Theists give arguments and evidence for their belief in God. What arguments or evidence do you have for the existence of these brute moral facts that you are positing?

DR. WIELENBERG: If it is the moral facts themselves, I think that again connects to the point I was making. The brute ones – my only argument is these seem right. These seem plausible when I think about it. Again, if you are sort of confronted to explain your position and you are like, Yeah, that seems the right, that can be unsatisfying. I understand. Which is why a big theme of my work is but we are all in the same boat. Again, I would characterize the difference between, I'll just take myself and Craig as a relevant example, we just pick different moral axioms as far as I can tell. I think that when you get down to Dr. Craig's foundational moral axioms I don't think he really has an argument for them. I think he thinks they are the most plausible or as he sometimes says the lease arbitrary. I try to make the case tonight that I think some of his moral axioms are implausible. And I got my own moral axioms that seem more plausible to me. It is not a case where one person is with axioms and the other person is without, it is just different axioms. I don't know if this is quite what the questioner was asking but perhaps another part of the question is: what is my argument for my sort of metaphysical account of the objective moral facts (again, what Dr. Craig has called moral Platonism). As I said before, I think we need to posit those things to make sense of objective moral facts. I think they are part of the best account of objective morality. Again, the structure of that argument parallels the structure of Dr. Craig’s moral argument for God's existence. So that is why I think the question of which of these accounts makes better sense of objective morality is really the crucial one.

DR. CRAIG: I appreciate the question because it highlights the fact that there is a variety of arguments for the existence of God: the cosmological argument, the argument from contingency, the argument from design (particularly the fine-tuning of the universe), the ontological argument, and the moral argument. I would say, as Dr. Wielenberg said, you need to posit some sort of explanation for the objectivity of moral values and duties. You could do that through moral Platonism, but I think a far more plausible account will be that there is this concrete object, God, who furnishes the ground for morality. So the moral argument would be part of a cumulative case for theism that I think is very powerful. If you are interested in looking at some of these other arguments for God's existence, look at the home page of our website ReasonableFaith.org where we have these wonderful animated videos on arguments for the existence of God that are very entertaining but also instructive as well. Thank you for coming tonight. I think we've all really enjoyed having this debate with you this evening.[7]