back
05 / 06
birds birds birds

Reasons for Divine Commands

April 25, 2022

Summary

Dr. Craig discusses and article on Divine Command Theory by his colleague Dr. David Baggett.

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, we are going to look at an article from David Baggett.[1] Before we do, talk about your work with David Baggett.

DR. CRAIG: David Baggett is a Christian philosopher who has truly distinguished himself in the area of theistic-based ethics. He has written about five different books with Oxford University Press – the premier academic publisher – defending the view that objective moral values and duties are rooted in the nature and commands of God. I had the privilege last fall of team-teaching a course with Professor Baggett at Houston Baptist University where he is a Professor of Philosophy.

KEVIN HARRIS: This article is “Reasons for Divine Command.” He's talking about divine command theory of ethics. We will get into that here. His article begins:

Recently I came across a couple of similar but subtly different critiques of divine command theory. Both came from philosophers I respect a great deal, though neither is a theist. One came from Russ Shafer-Landau, and here’s a succinct formulation of the argument:

1. Either God does not have reasons for his commands, or he does.

2. If he does not, then morality is entirely a function of divine command, rendering morality whatever he wills it to be, which is to say it is altogether arbitrary.

3. On the other hand, if God were to have reasons for his commands, then those reasons, rather than God’s commands, would be why we have the obligations we do.

4. So morality is either arbitrary or it is not the divine commands that are the real reasons for the obligations. (Whatever Happened to Good and Evil?, 80-81)

What do you think of that argument?

DR. CRAIG: Well, I think it's an odd argument. As we'll talk about later, it seems to think that moral obligation arises from God's having certain reasons for commanding what he does. But it seems to me that it is the command itself that imposes an obligation upon us. Obligations arise from imperatives issued by a qualified authority, and if those imperatives are not issued then I can't see that any obligation arises. Imagine, for example, that God had reasons to command something but he just kept those reasons to himself and never actually commanded anything. Would we be under obligation in that case to do it? I can't see that we would. It seems to me that the notion of a command is essential for the reality of obligation.

KEVIN HARRIS: David continues,

The other argument is from Michael Huemer, which he articulates as follows: “Why does God command what he does? If God has no moral reasons for his commands, then they are merely arbitrary—and why should we obey arbitrary commands? But if God has moral reasons for his commands, then some moral truths must exist independently of his commands. Either way, the divine command theory is false.”

That seems to be a dilemma for divine command.

DR. CRAIG: Well, I'm a little surprised that Michael Humer would raise this objection since he was one of the commentators in Adam Johnson's edited volume of my debate with Erik Wielenberg on Is the Foundations of Objective Values Supernatural or Natural? It was very clear in that debate and in the comments on the debate that we are not committed to saying that there are no moral truths independent of God's commands. So I'm just really puzzled that he would think that those of us who hold a divine command morality would believe that.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next David writes,

Both philosophers are taking on a version of divine command theory that says that all moral truths are rooted in divine commands. This isn’t the strongest version of divine command theory; Steve Evans and Robert Adams, for example, build their versions of divine command theory on a theory of the good—in Adams’ case a Platonic theistic account of the good, and in Evans’ case a natural law conception—and confine their theories to accounts of moral obligation. So the fact that both Shafer-Landau and Huemer are taking on a radically voluntarist notion of [divine command theory] rather than a more nuanced and sophisticated conception introduces real limitations into their analysis.

Several things to address there, including the theory of The Good and why volunteerism limits their analysis according to David.

DR. CRAIG: I think what Baggett is saying is that this critique only applies to voluntarist views of divine command theory. An example of a voluntarist account would be William Ockham, the late medieval philosopher, who thought that God just makes up his commands as to what is good and evil, right or wrong, and there are no constraints upon what God might will in that regard. But, as Baggett says, I can't think of any contemporary Christian moral philosophers who are voluntarists in that way. In the case of someone like a Robert Adams, what Adams says is that God himself is what Plato called The Good. God is the paradigm and the locus of moral value. And the commandments that he gives reflect his essential moral character, and therefore there certainly are truths about what is good and what is evil independently of any commands that God might give. Moral obligations (or right and wrong) are rooted in God's commands, but moral values (what is good and what is evil) are rooted in God himself, not in his commands.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next, the article continues,

At any rate, assuming, as I think we ought, that God does indeed have reasons for any commands he issues, does it follow that, as Shafer-Landau puts it, those reasons, rather than God’s commands, would be why we have the obligations we do?

I wondered about that, too. Is it the reasons for God's commands or just the fact that God even arbitrarily commands something that gives us obligations?

DR. CRAIG: I agree with you. As I said earlier, I just can't see why God having certain reasons would result in an obligation or a prohibition for us if those reasons are never expressed to us in the form of commands – thou shalt do this, thou shalt not do that. It is in virtue of the commands by a qualified authority that our moral obligations arise. I think that apart from the divine commands we would not have the obligations that we do.

KEVIN HARRIS: Then he continues in the article,

And does it also follow, again assuming God has moral reasons for his commands, that, as Huemer puts it, some moral truths must exist independently of his commands?

Let’s address Huemer’s point first. Huemer seems right to suggest that God’s having reasons for his commands would entail that some moral truths exist independently of God’s commands. Since most contemporary divine command theorists, though, as noted, delimit application of their theories to matters of moral obligation, and predicate their accounts on a nonvoluntarist theory of the good, this is no criticism of divine command theory thus explicated. All moral truths might depend on God without depending on God’s commands alone.

What about that? Moral truths existing apart from God's commands.

DR. CRAIG: The moral truths that David is speaking of here would be moral truths about good and evil – that it is good to act justly, it is evil to be cruel and selfish. There are moral truths about good and evil that are based upon God's very nature wholly apart from questions of moral obligation that would arise if God commands us, for example, do not act unjustly or do not act cruelly. Then we would have an obligation. But there are moral truths about good and evil apart from divine commands and apart from our obligations, and these are rooted in the very nature of God.

KEVIN HARRIS: David concludes by discussing God and libertarian freedom. By the way, I've noticed that in any theological discussion it doesn't take very long before free will comes up. Libertarian freedom, libertarian free will. He says God presumably has libertarian free will. He continues the article,

So now consider a case where God issues a contingent command—a command that could have been otherwise. Take a command to tithe, say, 10 percent of our income. This example seems to be a likely case of what Evans calls the “discretionary hypothesis,” according to which God’s command could have been different. He could have told us to tithe, say, 20 percent. Not everyone believes in the discretionary hypothesis, [David says] but I do; it seems quite intuitive that at least some of God’s commands are contingent rather than necessary.

Discretionary hypothesis?

DR. CRAIG: I've come to adopt this view myself. In my earlier work on the moral argument I made some careless statements where I said that God's commands are necessary reflections of his morally perfect nature. I think that what is correct to say is that God cannot issue commands that are incompatible with his nature or inconsistent with his goodness but, as David says, there can be contingent commands like to tithe 10% rather than 20% which are consistent with God's perfectly good and morally perfect nature. So I do think that he's right in saying that God has the ability to issue contingent commands which become our contingent moral duties. There are possible worlds in which God wills otherwise, and in those worlds we would have a different set of these duties.

KEVIN HARRIS: Finally David writes,

On the reasonable assumption that at least some of God’s commands are contingent, they could have been different. . . . But neither set of reasons would entail the command, and thus entail the obligation. Rather, it’s the command that generates the obligation, contra Shafer-Landau’s claim.

Since God’s ways are above our own and we see through a glass darkly, we don’t always know God’s reasons for his commands, which is an epistemic point. My points for now are different ones. An element of contingency when it comes to God’s commands might be thought to introduce problematic arbitrariness. I rather suspect it’s a theoretical advantage of theistic ethics that we serve a living God rather than an abstract set of principles. Contingent commands do not preclude God’s having reasons for the commands, and his having reasons for his commands does not always mean those reasons entail the commands. This leaves real room for divine command theory to do important explanatory work.

David appeals to both Scripture and philosophy here it seems.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, quite rightly so. When you think about the Old Testament, it's filled with seemingly arbitrary commands. You shall not eat pork, for example. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with eating pork, and that restriction was done away with in the New Testament when Jesus pronounced all foods clean. There are many, many other sorts of these seemingly arbitrary laws laid down in the Old Testament that governed the people of Israel for a certain time in their history. And God had good reasons for doing that. I once was talking to an Indian, that is to say an Asian-Indian, who said to me that there is an inveterate tendency on the part of Eastern people to assimilate everything into The One – into The Unity. He said that Indian people will say to you “sab ek hai” which means “all is one.” And he said, I think that the reason that God gave all of these seemingly arbitrary commands to Israel in the Old Testament was to teach them the objective distinction between good and evil, that it is not all one. By so training them in this way (to think of either-or rather than both-and) he morally educated them and prepared them then ultimately for the Gospel. So God could have good reasons for issuing these contingent commands, and I think we have great examples of that in Scripture.[2]

 

[1] “Reasons for Divine Commands” from the February 2022 issue of The Worldview Bulletin (Pt. 2).

[2] Total Running Time: 16:03 (Copyright © 2022 William Lane Craig)