Is The Moral Argument Reasonable?

Kevin Harris: Bill, we have a special guest. Your colleague, co-author, and friend, Dr. David Baggett joins us to talk about your collaboration on the new book, Reasonable Moral Faith. It's published by Baker Academic and available now. If you would do the honors, Bill, and introduce and welcome Dr. Baggett to the podcast.

Dr. Craig: David Baggett is the most prominent exponent of the moral argument for the existence of God today. He is the author of a tetralogy of books on the moral argument published by Oxford University Press, absolutely top drawer among academic publishers. He's also published some popular-level material.

I first met Dave, I think, as a professor at Houston Christian University. He was appointed there as the head of the Center for the Foundations of Ethics and pioneered that effort. He has now gone on to the University of Missouri Law School, where he is studying law.

So Dave, it's great to have you on the podcast today. Welcome.

Dr. Baggett: Thank you so much. We did actually meet before, though, Dr. Craig, remember? Because we did a book panel discussion on Good God way back in 2011.

Dr. Craig: Yes, you're right. And you were with us on that European trip where you and I did that presentation of Paul's Areopagus speech in Athens.

Dr. Baggett: That's right. That was a lot of fun.

Kevin Harris: It's great to have you, Dave. Great to have you on today.

And the book, again, is Reasonable Moral Faith from Baker Academic. How did you and Bill end up working together and eventually publishing this new book? We've heard a little bit of the story right there, Dave, but go ahead and fill in some blanks for us.

Dr. Baggett: I'd love to do that.

When I was in graduate school, I first heard about William Lane Craig from a fellow student, Sloan Lee, and he was singing his praises. I really didn't know who he was at that time. Then I became more familiar with him and was amazed at all these things that he was doing and doing so well.

I never told Dr. Craig this, but early on, after I met him or became familiar with him at an EPS, I had this suspicion down deep that one day we were going to work together. I never told him this. Maybe it was just wishful thinking on my part. I thought, I think we have business to do. We're going to do something together, but I never imagined it would be a book.

I got his sweater at an EPS for $1,000 or some such amount of money. He was raffling it off for folks who wanted to contribute to the ministry. And I won that. I won. I still look at it fondly. I can't wear it, of course, but that was a good experience.

Then, when Good God came out, the first book in the tetralogy, he and Paul Copan were on a book panel discussion with me and Jerry. Then Paul did a very friendly sort of exchange with Jerry. Then Dr. Craig gets up and I have to answer him. It was rather difficult. It was rather challenging. I have to say, I don't think that was entirely fair.

But it turned out to be a wonderful experience. One of the things that we got arguing about was, should we do the moral argument in a deductive form or in an abductive form? We'll talk more about that.

Then I was at Houston Christian. He was already teaching there, and I went there. Then we got to co-teach a class together on the moral argument, and that was a great deal of fun. At the end of that, I approached him with some fear and trembling about the prospect of our doing a book together. He was open, and here we are all these years later. It finally came to fruition.

So I really am so appreciative for the opportunity to work with this fellow.

Dr. Craig: As am I with you, Dave.

Kevin Harris: A lot of good history here, it sounds like. Dave – you and Bill, you just mentioned – you've had a contrasting approach to the moral argument in the past: a deductive version in his case, an abductive version in yours. Explain the difference in approach and how you worked it out in the book.

Dr. Baggett: Sure.

I listened to a guy give an abductive presentation in a podcast for the case for the resurrection, and I was so impressed. I thought, that's the approach I want to take with the moral argument. By the way, that fellow was Dr. Craig.

Anyway, we wrote the moral argument in sort of an abductive form. This has to do with what's the best explanation of these various moral phenomena, right? And if it's God, according to various principled criteria, then you have some reason to infer God's existence on that basis.

In a deductive argument, it's like, all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, so Socrates is mortal. It's all airtight: premise, premise, conclusion. The conclusion follows necessarily from the premises such that if the premises are true, the conclusion is going to be true. It's pithy, it's succinct, and it was Dr. Craig's approach.

I had the temerity to challenge that approach and suggest maybe the abductive approach is better. That's one of the things we argued about in a very friendly way out in California all those years ago.

The difference is that it's not as important as some people think. It was kind of funny. After that, a lot of my students would take sides. They were like, "I'm on the deductive side," or "I'm on the abductive side." That was kind of fun and funny.

In fact, one of my former students had the temerity to write an article in a Canadian philosophy journal saying Craig was right and I was wrong. Rude. Anyway— I'm looking at you, Zach!

When it came to the book, we were going to have to decide. I naturally assumed it would come to fisticuffs, but then I remembered that Dr. Craig works out. So I figured I better find a better solution than that.

What we did was sort of split the difference. In this book, we give an inductive argument. We didn't go with a deductive or abductive version. We actually went with an inductive version.

One more thing on that. Richard Swinburne distinguishes between two kinds of induction, P and C. I always forget which is which, but one says the evidence makes the proposition in question more likely than it was before, but without necessarily making it likely true. Then the other kind of induction is more ambitious. The evidence renders the proposition in question likely true.

What we did, since we had five parts to our argument, was suggest that each one of them individually made more plausible theism. Then we floated the possibility, and readers could come to their own conclusions, that when you take the case cumulatively and put all the pieces together, you have a very strong inductive argument that may well render theism more likely true than false.

But even if it doesn't, the moral argument doesn't have to do all the work. There are other arguments out there, and it can combine forces with those. It certainly deserves a place at the table, and that's much of what this book was all about.

Dr. Craig: In my most recent volume in my Systematic Philosophical Theology, Kevin, where I do an excursus on natural theology, in my treatment of the moral argument, under Dave's influence, I present the argument abductively as well as deductively because I think that the argument can be formulated either way.

As Dave says, there's really not a great deal of significance in terms of how it's formulated. In either case, you're going to be presenting similar arguments for your conclusions.

Kevin Harris: Before we dive into the book, Dave, I wanted to ask you about moral arguments for God. There's not just one, is there? There's a family, perhaps, of various arguments—moral arguments for God. It might be helpful to define "moral" just in case somebody's confused about that.

Dr. Baggett: Sure. I'll handle that first.

Dr. Craig is known for referring to objective moral values and duties, and I think that's a great place to start. What are we morally obligated to do on pain of genuine guilt and whatnot? And then moral values—what is it that has intrinsic value? You need an account of that.

I might just add the issue of virtues as well, since that's just so important. It's sort of like the purpose of morality is to make us into particular kinds of people exhibiting virtues.

That's sort of, in a nutshell, what we're talking about when it comes to morality. But as you'll see as the conversation goes along, there are other dimensions that we'll bring in as well. That's a nice starting line.

In terms of the variety of moral arguments that are out there, here's how you can conceptualize it.

The basic idea of any moral argument is going to be that there's some moral phenomenon or phenomena in need of explanation, and God, so the argument goes, in one sense or another provides the better account of those moral realities. So you infer God's existence on some basis, in some fashion, on the basis of those moral truths or realities.

The variety comes in here. Which particular moral phenomenon or phenomena do you want to emphasize? Dr. Craig is well known for talking about moral values and duties. And how do you want to argue to your conclusion? Do you want to couch it in a deductive way, or in an inductive way, or in an abductive way?

You can even do it in other ways, like Reformed epistemology kinds of ways, where you have certain experiences that naturally incline you to believe certain things. It's not so much an inference as just finding yourself believing on the basis of experiencing these things. I think there's some truth in that.

You could do a deductive argument based on moral knowledge, or you could do an inductive argument based on three or four moral phenomena. This helps explain why these arguments can take different shapes.

Kevin Harris: One more preliminary question. Both of you have talked about how popular moral arguments for God are, particularly among students. There's something that resonates with people about it. But what do they often get wrong about the moral argument for God? Something you frequently must correct.

Let's start with you, Dave.

Dr. Baggett: I find, probably more than anything else, folks misunderstand the argument to be saying that atheists are immoral, bad people and all of this, and theists have it all going on because we've got God in our corner. We believe in God and we can make sense of morality. They can't. So they're moral wrecks and we're moral saints, or some such.

You'll often hear this thing: "I don't believe in God, but I know this is wrong or this is right or this is good or that's cruel, and I can take strong stances on those things." And of course they can. They're absolutely right. Because the argument is not at all about believing in God's existence. It's about God himself and the role that he plays in the metaphysics of the thing, the epistemology of it, and all the rest.

In point of fact, what I would say to my atheist friends, as I have said many times, is: we're counting on it. We're counting on your ability to apprehend moral truths, and we're counting on your caring about these truths enough to give serious thought to the right kind of account of these truths without watering them down.

Morality has a kind of authority to it, for example, and we encourage people to really reckon with that, to take that seriously, not just to quickly explain it away.

We are counting on our secular friends, in order to have a really good, deep conversation in good faith on this issue, to be able to apprehend a great many moral truths and, hopefully, even already before they're Christians or believers or anything like that, to care about morality.

Dr. Craig: I really appreciate this question, Kevin, because I have found increasingly in recent years that many people respond to the moral argument incorrectly because they think that because our moral experience is subjective, the object of that experience is subjective. This is just completely wrong.

You can have a subjective experience of an objective reality.

Think, for example, of our experience of the external physical world. This is mediated to us through subjective experience: visual experience, smells, tactile experiences, auditory experiences. All of those are subjective experiences because they are states of mental awareness.

But that doesn't mean that the external world of physical objects is therefore not real or objective, that it's somehow subjective, a projection of your consciousness.

Once you understand this key distinction between experience and the object of that experience, you simply won't make this fallacious inference that because my moral experience is subjective – “it’s mine” – that somehow that means that moral values and duties are subjective. That is just a faulty inference.

Kevin Harris: There are four main parts to the book. Dave, if you'll give us an overview, tell us what they are, and then we'll go back and highlight some topics from each of these four main parts.

Dr. Baggett: Yes. Dr. Craig and I really wanted to make this book into a sort of one-stop shop when it comes to the moral argument. We wanted to put all the most central things into one volume.

This involved three main tasks.

We wanted to give a rudimentary history of the moral argument, which we did in part one. It's a much richer history than a lot of people realize. It's a much richer history than I had realized for the longest time.

Then, in part two, we wanted to talk about moral realism, that all this moral stuff is real and really deserves our attention and needs an account. We wanted to critique the alternatives to moral realism. That's what we did there. We gave a primer in metaethics culminating in moral realism.

Then, having done that, in part three, we began to lay out our version of the moral argument. Then it got a little long, and we broke part three up into two parts, three and four. Part four really is just an extension of giving our particular version of the moral argument.

Kevin Harris: All right. Let's start with part one, historical highlights of the moral argument. This goes all the way back to Greek philosophy, Dave.

Dr. Baggett: Yeah, we wanted in that section to talk about the ancient Greeks especially, and then medievals, early moderns, late moderns, and contemporaries.

You can make the case that you can find, in ancient Greece, precursors to the moral argument. We don't claim that you're getting a full-fledged moral argument at that stage, but you're getting important precursors.

Mainly, when it came to those guys, we wanted to talk about Socrates, we wanted to talk about Plato, and we wanted to talk about Aristotle. These guys are really all very interesting.

You can't find a full-fledged moral argument for God's existence among the ancient Greek philosophers, but you can find important hints, clues, echoes, and precursors to the moral argument.

What we did was we looked specifically at Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and rightly so, because so many of the arguments in philosophy that we have today trace back to those very guys.

In fact, in this area of theistic ethics, the Euthyphro dilemma came out of an early Socratic dialogue. If you pick up most any ethics text today, it will say most definitively that theistic ethics is dead in the water because of the Euthyphro dilemma. People still invoke the specter of the Euthyphro dilemma as if it's somehow decisive. These guys are very relevant to the conversation. Of course, we disagree with that whole thing about the Euthyphro dilemma, and we deal with that at some length in the book.

In Plato, for example, he delved into issues of metaphysics in a more ambitious way than Socrates did, and he ended up talking about the Forms of various sorts, most importantly the Form of the Good, which he thinks is foundational and fundamental, more so than any of the other Forms.

The idea is that we are to live in alignment with it, that reality itself was committed to these truths in some real sense. There's something inspiring about that. We ourselves believe in that. We believe that very thing, but we feel like we have a better account of it than these kind of abstract Forms that just exist in metaphysical limbo.

Do you remember George Mavrodes? He was a philosopher at the University of Michigan. When I was in graduate school at Wayne State, taking an analytic ethics class, I'd read all these various ethicists, and none of them really excited me until I came across this article.

We were assigned "Religion and the Queerness of Morality" by George Mavrodes. I didn't even know who he was at that time. I read that article, and I still distinctly remember being in the library at Wayne State. It was as if music started playing in my head when I read this piece. It so resonated with me. It was just delightful and remarkable. If you've not read "Religion and the Queerness of Morality" by George Mavrodes, do it.

Here's something that he says in that article. He's talking about the Platonic man, someone who sees things in that sort of Platonic fashion, the way Plato did.

He says:

"A Platonic man who sets himself to live in accordance with the Good aligns himself with what is deepest and most basic in existence. To put it another way, we might say that whatever values a Platonic world imposes on a man are values to which the Platonic world itself is committed through and through."

Isn't that remarkable?

What he was saying here is not that Plato had it exactly right, but he was saying that in this respect there's a profound insight that Plato had: that reality itself is committed to these moral truths. They are real, they exist, and they have authority and power, and we are to live in alignment with them.

It's not just us committed to certain moral values. Reality itself is committed to those values.

I think theism and Christianity provide the considerably better explanation as to why that's the case. But that is the case, and it's very much a central idea at the heart of the moral argument.

Kevin Harris: Part two gets really interesting. It deals with moral realism, as you said, Dave. Let's define it. Talk about why you say a sturdy version of moral realism is required for a strong moral argument for God.

Dave, start us off.

Dr. Baggett: It's certainly needed for the sort of moral argument that we propose and advance, since it's predicated on objective moral values and duties and then some other moral phenomena that we'll point to as well.

As to what moral realism is, it begins by saying that moral sentences are truth-apt. That is, they have a truth value. They are either true or false. That rules out a view that says moral sentences just express emotions or something like that.

But more is needed, because you could have moral sentences that have a truth value, but they're all false. Every moral claim you make is just a false one. That wouldn't be moral realism.

Here you have to say that at least some moral claims that we make are true. At least some. That rules out something like error theory, which we'll discuss later.

Then a third component says that you have to understand these truths of morality as, in some sense, objective and prescriptive at the same time—prescriptive objectivity or objective prescriptivity. This was J. L. Mackie's understanding of morality, and he was an atheist, but I think he got this completely right. Morality has a kind of authority to it. It has a punch. It has a purpose. It has authority over us such that if we violate it, it's on pain of guilt or something like that. Not just subjective guilt, but objective guilt.

Someone like Mackie I have a great deal of respect for because he took morality with great seriousness. He didn't water it down. He didn't domesticate it. He didn't reduce it or deflate it. He really took it at face value. It's taken to be something that possesses this kind of prescriptive authority. That's crucial for moral realism, and it's crucial for our argument.

There is a fourth component, too. You could have all those conditions, and there are true moral facts that exist and all of that, but we don't know any of them. That wouldn't be good. So moral realism also requires that we have knowledge of at least some of these moral truths.

Put all that together, and that, in essence, in a nutshell is what moral realism is all about. Our argument is certainly predicated on it.

Dr. Craig: I think it's evident from what Dave has said that all of these would be critical to a defense of the second premise of the deductive version that I present.

The second premise is: objective moral values and duties do exist.

This is challenged by anti-realists like expressivism, error theory, and constructivism. One of the great virtues of this book, as Dave has put it together, is that it responds to those different schools of thought and thus provides, I think, a robust case for that second premise.

Kevin Harris: Well, Dr. Craig and Dr. Baggett have laid some good groundwork, and on the next podcast they'll give you their moral argument that they present in the book.

Again, the book is called Reasonable Moral Faith. It's available right now. Get details at ReasonableFaith.org.

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