The Good, the Bad, the Moral Argument!

Kevin Harris: Our special guest is Dr. David Baggett, who has co-authored a new book with Dr. Craig, Reasonable Moral Faith. Let's continue our conversation on it.

I've noticed anecdotally that several atheist philosophers try to hold to some form of moral realism, as if it has more philosophical appeal. One example is Dr. Peter Singer, who recently announced that he has moved toward some form of moral realism. Do you notice any trends like that, Dave—moral realism or something else?

Dr. Baggett: Yeah, I do. There are a great many secular folks, atheists and agnostics and such, who, when asked, will say without hesitation that they're something like moral realists. They think some things are absolutely right and some things are absolutely wrong. Sometimes they'll even bristle and say, "What do you take me for? Of course I see that this is right or that is wrong." And I believe them. In fact, I think they're being profoundly honest that they can see these things, not in virtue of being an atheist or whatever, just in virtue of being a human being. We have the tools, we have the faculties and capacities to recognize and apprehend moral truths, and they can see them, I think, just as clearly as we can.

That's not the issue. The issue is what's going to best account for the reality of these various moral truths and such.

Some atheists, some really good philosophers, attempt to back up moral realism with the resources they have at their disposal. And I think they should try that. That's an important thing for them to attempt, and various efforts succeed to various degrees. But ultimately, we think a theistic account is just better.

The fact that there are atheists and agnostics who would claim something like moral realism is great from our perspective because that's halfway there to the moral argument. So it really gets the ball rolling, gets the discussion started. We're excited to see that, and in a lot of ways we're allies with them up to that point entirely. So that's great to have that kind of common ground.

There is, though, another trend, of course, among some secularists in the other direction, where they sort of water morality down. They might embrace one of the alternatives to moral realism, or they might even push so hard as to say there are no moral facts at all. Nietzsche was famous for saying that. There's a whole school of thought that I think we'll discuss called "error theory” that basically says this – there are just no moral facts at all.

In that sense, we kind of agree to disagree. On their worldview, you can sort of understand why they might come to that conclusion. Personally, I much prefer the others who say, "No, we are strong believers in morality and its objectivity and its prescriptivity and all that," because then we can have that discussion about what best explains it. You have to back up another step with the others who are denying these moral truths.

In light of what we just said about the atheists who can see and apprehend these moral truths so clearly, I think these other folks are, in a sense, logically consistent. But in another sense, I really think they have to almost deny a part of their humanity to say taking a baby and throwing it into a wood chipper is just neutral. There's really nothing morally to say about such a thing. You have to swallow really hard and pay a pretty steep price if you want to say something like that.

So, yeah, you see both trends among our atheist friends.

Kevin Harris: Bill, any thoughts on that?

Dr. Craig: I can say anecdotally that, in my experience, I've often used the moral argument as part of a cumulative case for theism in debates on university campuses and almost never does my opponent respond by adopting moral anti-realism. Instead, they'll try to affirm the objectivity of moral values and duties without God. But almost no one would deny the reality or objectivity of moral values and duties. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Louise Antony, Sam Harris, and on and on—the typical response to the moral argument that I get is not moral anti-realism or subjectivism.

Kevin Harris: You examine several competing theories in this section, starting with expressivism. Bill, why don't you start off and walk us through that?

Dr. Craig: Yes. I think that the chart on page 155 of the book is worth the price of the entire book. Dave has here constructed a kind of flowchart where, by asking questions, you proceed from one view to the next until you finally arrive at theistic moral realism.

The first node in the flowchart is whether or not there are moral propositions. Do moral statements have a truth value? Are they either true or false? The expressivist denies this. He says that there are no propositions expressed by moral sentences. So if you say something like, "Stealing is wrong," all you're doing is just expressing your emotions. It's as though you were saying, "Stealing—ugh!" There's nothing there that's true or false. That's the view of expressivism.

As Dave indicates, this is a hard view to hold because it means that there aren't even moral falsehoods. If someone asserts that hatred is good or that you ought to abuse your children, you ought to hurt them, you can't say that's false because there are no moral truths or falsehoods. These are just expressions of emotion that have no truth value.

Kevin Harris: Dave, anything you want to express on expressivism?

Dr. Baggett: Just maybe this. I find it so interesting that those who would claim to be expressivists don't say, "In light of the fact that these moral sentences don't express a truth value, why don't we just replace the language of morality altogether?" They continue to use the language and seem to encourage others to use the language, knowing full well that most people don't use moral language in the way that they describe. There just seems to be a kind of disingenuousness about that.

Why don't they simply say, "Look, rather than continuing to borrow the cachet and purchase of moral language, given our reductionist analysis that renders these things non-cognitivist altogether, why don't we just eschew such language and be a little more honest about what we're saying here?" You know, like, "Pedophilia—ugh." We're done. If that's all there is. But when we say it's wrong, most people understand that to be something quite different from what the expressivists would suggest. I just find that interesting.

Kevin Harris: Again, I want to encourage everyone to get this book. As you just said, Bill, the metaethics chart on page 155 is worth the price of the book. I found it very helpful in organizing all the "isms."

Let's continue going through them. Next on the chart is error theory. Dave, start us out on that one, if you would, please.

Dr. Baggett: Yeah. Sometimes this is called nihilism. This is a view that says moral sentences are cognitivist. They have a truth value. So, in that sense, it's different from expressivism.

But what the error theorist says is that every moral proposition has a particular truth value, and that is false. So every moral claim that you make is false. This is very much a rejection of there being any moral facts. Again, this is sort of a Nietzschean view. Although Jerry Walls and I had this disagreement. He argued there were these realist elements in Nietzsche, and you can read Nietzsche in that particular way, but I don't tend to do that.

The big name associated with error theory is J. L. Mackie. His basic argument is kind of a famous one. It's his so-called "queerness argument" against morality. Queerness in the sense of oddness—it's a bad fit or something like this. The idea is that moral facts and truths would carry with them certain features that are just an odd fit with a naturalistic world, especially the kind of binding authority of morality and the connection between moral claims and empirical claims. Like, if you torture a cat, there are empirical claims involved there, but there's also this mysterious moral quality. What's that connection? Then how would we have knowledge of the moral facts if they were to exist? In all of these ways, he suggests that there's a real oddness or queerness about morality, especially in a naturalistic world, if all that there is is the natural world.

But, of course, we're rather inclined to agree, and this is what gives part of the weight to this dimension of the moral argument. Because, yeah, the natural world in and of itself does have a hard time explaining those things. But we don't usually start there. We start with our moral experiences that seem to suggest, and very strongly for all of us—atheists and theists alike—that moral facts are real, that they have purchase, that they have authority, that they have prescriptive power, and all these various things. Then, if you're trying to do good philosophy, you should ask yourself, "Well, what would explain those things?" Rather than simply saying, "Well, it's a naturalistic world. I don't even need an argument for that. These things are a bad fit, so I'm going to throw them out." No. You take them seriously. And this is so much the logic of the moral argument. You take these qualities that would otherwise be odd in a naturalistic world and explain that they're not odd at all in a theistic world. In a theistic world, they make excellent sense—that we've been created by God and in His nature and for a purpose and for a reason, and that this world is shot through with moral significance. Human beings have infinite value. There are certain things that we should do or should not do on pain of genuine guilt. This is what our moral experience delivers to us. I think our job is to take that evidence seriously.

In principle, you could maybe find reasons to throw all of that out, but you don't start there. You take that evidence seriously and you see where the evidence leads. We argue that it leads toward theism.

One last point about this, which I find really interesting. I need the book to read a few lines from this, and I wish I had remembered the page. J. L. Mackie talks about all three of these features of oddness. With respect to each point, he makes the case that theism would solve the problem! So this was an atheist who admitted that, in each of these three points of oddness, theism would solve the issue.

With respect to the first, he said—and this is a quote from Mackie:

Intrinsically prescriptive features supervening upon natural ones constitute so odd a cluster of qualities and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen without an all-powerful God to create them. If then there are such intrinsically prescriptive objective values, they make the existence of a God more probable than it would have otherwise been without them.

So that's the first point of queerness. Then the second point:

If we adopted moral objectivism, we should have to regard the relations of supervenience which connect values and obligations with their natural grounds as synthetic. They would then be, in principle, something that a God might conceivably create. And since they would otherwise be a very odd sort of thing, the admitting of them would be an inductive ground for admitting also a God to create them.

This is Mackie talking. This is J. L. Mackie. Then the last point, on knowledge. This is a direct quote from Mackie:

Men cannot by observation and experiment discover exactly what life is ultimately most satisfying for them. But given that God knows this, desires that they should so live, and has somehow revealed corresponding explicit instructions to them, men can reasonably resort to such revelations to infer this indirectly, so as to complete their determination of this required and ultimately satisfying life.

So God could give us this knowledge if He so chooses.

There's just something profoundly honest, it seems to me, about Mackie when he says these things. Again, Mackie is not watering morality down. He's saying it involves these features. He doesn't deny that. He doesn't domesticate it. He admits it. Then he finds them a bad fit with a naturalistic world. Of course, we're in complete agreement with him on that.

It is interesting that he didn't say, "God would explain these things, so that gives me moral reason to believe that God exists." That's what we say. He doesn't do that. But that's the real point of departure.

Kevin Harris: Bill, any additions on error theory?

Dr. Craig: Well, just to step back a moment so that our listeners have a clear understanding of the difference between expressivism and error theory, which I think are sometimes blurred together.

Expressivism says that there are neither moral truths nor moral falsehoods, that these moral sentences simply have no truth value.

Moral error theory affirms that moral sentences do have an objective truth value and that they are all false. We are massively in error in making these moral judgments.

So that's the difference between the two theories. As Dave very helpfully pointed out, the features of morality that seem so queer, so strange, on naturalism are to be expected on theism. That gives us, I think, good grounds for rejecting error theory.

Kevin Harris: Next up, constructivism, which includes ethical relativism. Dave?

Dr. Baggett: Ethical relativism. Yeah. That's one of the examples of constructivism. Constructivism tries to steer a middle course between expressivism and moral realism. The constructivists say, "Well, there are moral truths, but they are mind-dependent, and specifically human mind-dependent."

So if we all agree on something being moral, then it is thereby rendered moral for us in some sense or other.

There are a bunch of variations of constructivism, and I won't get into the more complicated ones here, but ethical relativism is an example. The relativists use language like "morally right" and "morally wrong" and that sort of thing, so they're cognitivists in this sense. Unlike the error theorists, they do think that some moral propositions are true. Okay, so we're getting closer. I think we're getting closer to realism.

The challenge, it seems to me, is this human mind-dependence. I'm not, in principle, opposed to mind-dependence if we're talking about something like the divine mind. But human mind-dependence seems to be a very strange thing. Relativism gives us a nice example as to why. Ethical relativism says if the preponderance of folks in your culture think something is morally right or wrong or good or evil, then it is right in virtue of that consensus or preponderance, however you might define your version of ethical relativism. But that just seems to make morality a matter of taking a vote. Let's just take a poll here. Back when slavery, chattel slavery, horrific chattel slavery, was approved by the majority of people in a society, take the vote—most approved of it—therefore it was right in that situation. But it would be wrong today because most people would vote against it. That's just not how you do ethics at all. That's just transparently bad.

You might wonder why anyone is motivated to take this view. I suspect it's because people think it's an open-minded sort of view: "I want to be an ethical relativist because I want to give people space to come to their own conclusions." That, in principle, to a limited degree, is a real virtue.

But, of course, ethical relativism doesn't help it at all, because if you happen to be in a culture in which the majority view is intolerance of other views, then intolerance of other views would be, according to ethical relativism, the right view for you to take. And that just seems obviously wrong.

One last thing I might add about ethical relativism: it's a really bad theory. I hate to paint all the constructivists in this way because there are considerably better examples of constructivism, but it's also kind of fun to take down ethical relativism because some people do still claim to believe it. Since it really is about the worst theory that you can come up with, I'll say one last thing about it. It completely precludes the idea of something like moral progress.

Take the slavery example. Back when the preponderance of people supported it, it was right. Then, at a certain point, there was this tipping point, and the majority of people said, "We're opposed to it” in a particular culture. So we didn't go from being wrong to being right. We went from being right to being right. We were never wrong. So ethical relativism has all sorts of unpalatable implications.

In that sense, though, I do think that it points to the fundamental issue with constructivism: human mind-dependence is just not going to be enough to sustain and undergird the objectivity of morality.

Kevin Harris: Bill, I see your wheels turning. Any comments on constructivism?

Dr. Craig: Some constructivists try to avoid the personal and cultural relativism that Dave described by adopting a sort of ideal observer theory. For example, if there were a set of perfectly rational people, they would be able to draw up the list of objective moral values and duties that impose themselves upon us. Therefore, it's based upon this sort of ideal observer of the human situation.

I think the problem here is that it conflates the ontological foundation of moral values with the epistemic question of how we come to know them. It might well be the case that a perfectly rational set of people could correctly outline our moral duties and the moral values that exist, at least in rough measure. A perfectly rational group of people could come up with such a list.

But they don't construct the foundation for that list. They don't invent the list themselves, or if they do, then, as Dave says, it just becomes mind-dependent again, and therefore there's really no objectivity to it.

I think such a group of people could come to recognize the objective moral values and duties that exist, but the question of their ontological foundation still remains.

Kevin Harris: After looking at some rivals, you talk about the case for moral realism. What are some of the main considerations when building a robust case for moral realism? Again, starting with you, Dave, and then Bill, your thoughts.

Dr. Baggett: Jerry Walls and I wrote an entire book on this. It's called The Good, the Right, and the Real. It's a little funny, the background there, because we first did Good God years ago and defended theistic ethics against objections. Then we wrote God and Cosmos and critiqued secular ethics. Then we wrote a history of the moral argument.

Having done all of that, we realized we really ought to argue for moral realism since the whole dang thing is predicated on it, and we hadn't really touched on the issue.

Early on, I just thought everybody is going to agree with me about torturing children for the fun of it – that it's wrong. But it turns out there are people who are in need of an argument. So we thought we'd do a whole book on it. Then, in this book with Dr. Craig, that's the middle portion of the book. We give this case for moral realism, and we start by knocking down those alternatives. That's an important thing because, if the alternatives don't work, then you're going to be led inexorably toward moral realism.

Then we give a wide assortment of arguments in favor of it. Obviously, I can't summarize all of that here, but I'll point to one because it's kind of quick and easy to cite it and feel the force of it. It's motivated by G. E. Moore, and it's basically this idea: What are you going to point to in order to argue against moral realism that is more sure or more certain than the basic truths of morality itself?

We have a strong conviction, most all of us, about the wrongness of torturing children for fun. You might even call it moral common sense. I actually like doing that because I like Thomas Reid a lot, and that "common sense" phrase is tied to him so well. He was a significant moral apologist. He came right before Kant. He kind of led up to the first full-fledged moral apologist.

At any rate, I tend to agree. It is moral common sense. That explains our apprehension of these moral truths. But it's still underdetermined what accounts for the truth. Its self-evidence isn't the same as self-explanation.

I think these recognitions that all of us as human beings can have—that there are some things that are right and some things that are wrong, some things that are good and some things that are bad—and we are so sure of those things, most of us, this is exactly why those aforementioned atheists bristle and say, "Well, of course I can see that. I don't have to believe in God to see it." And they're right. They don't have to believe in God. But the question that we want to explore is whether God might provide the best explanation for the very existence of these things that they can see so clearly. The clear apprehension of the truths doesn't answer the question. It raises the question. These things that we can see so clearly, we can apprehend so clearly—what is going to provide an explanation of them?

Moreover, we can see them with such clarity. What are you going to point to if you want to be a skeptic that's more sure or clearer than this? Give me an argument whose premises are as sure as the wrongness of child torture for fun.

I think they're in an epistemic bind here, and that there's a genuine difficulty in sustaining skepticism when it comes to arguing against something so commonsensical as the basic tenets of morality.

Dr. Craig: I'd want to add to what Dave has said that part of the positive case for moral realism will not simply be the clarity of moral values and duties that we grasp in moral experience but, as Dave said, the ability to provide an explanation for this. This is where I think the real strength of what's called divine command theory comes to the fore.

I think Dave and I are both committed to the notion that God Himself is the paradigm of goodness. He is what Plato called the Good except, in this case, the Good is not some abstract object. It's a person. It's a concrete object. And moral obligations are the result of imperatives that are issued by a qualified authority, and God is such an authority. Therefore, His commands to us constitute our moral duties.

So moral values are rooted in God Himself, and our moral obligations are rooted in His commands to us.

That provides, I find, a really satisfying metaethical theory that goes hand in glove with a robust moral realism.

Kevin Harris: Now, the five-fold moral argument. Dave, talk about the five moral phenomena you cover for the argument, and Bill, any follow-up you might have after that. Then we'll look at some objections.

Dr. Baggett: Sure. Thanks. Let's start with what morality kind of points to. We've been talking about objective moral values and objective moral duties. That's very important. Virtues are also very important. That's sort of the goal in morality—that we become particular kinds of people exhibiting certain kinds of virtues and things like that. There are other things besides, and I'm going to get to those because those are the five points of the argument.

But I want to interject something quickly, if I could, because the last time that we all talked, this question of what morality points to, what morality involves, came up, and I had a thought afterward—which is always great. You know, "I should have said this." So I'm going to take the occasion, if you don't mind.

C. S. Lewis has this analogy of boats traveling along and how they can sort of be a metaphor for morality in three ways.

First, you want each boat to be sound. You don't want it springing leaks and sinking. That has to do with individual moral transformation. Each of us is to become a person of virtue over time. So that's that individualist element of morality. And that’s very nice.

But you also don't want the boats bumping into each other violently and risking going down for that reason. This is that element of morality that's kind of social. It conduces to social harmony and our getting along together well and loving one another, and so forth. So there’s that social component. That’s an important aspect of morality as well.

Then there's this teleological element because the boats are going somewhere. They have a goal. They have a destination. Morality is very much about that too. All of us as human beings, individually and together, have this kind of goal in mind of becoming particular kinds of people, arguably. This is that teleological component of morality that Aristotle talked about a great deal but that has been incorporated into a lot of Christian theology too, with Aquinas and others. Our telos—becoming the people we were meant to be.

All of those are dimensions of morality. I just wanted to interject that, and it's apropos here because, when it comes to moral arguments for God's existence, what a moral apologist has to decide is: What's my argument going to look like? They have to make a decision about which particular dimensions of morality they're going to focus on and then how they're going to couch the argument. We talked about that before. Is it going to be deductive, inductive, abductive, or is it going to be kind of a Reformed experiential thing or something else?

What we decided to do in this book was choose five aspects, or five dimensions, of morality and then construct the argument in an inductive way, where each component adds plausibility points to theism, and then altogether they add quite a powerful argument in favor of theism.

So, the five elements—we start with Dr. Craig's objective moral values and objective moral duties. Those are the first two prongs of our five-part moral argument.

There's a funny story about this. I’ll get back to what I was saying in a second. When Jerry and I wrote Good God, we had a book panel discussion out in California with Paul Copan and Dr. Craig. Dr. Craig discussed the first chapter of Good God where we had laid out all these ideas because it was kind of unwieldy. It just kind of went on and on. Jerry had less to do with it. I take full blame. The chapter was unwieldy, and it was kind of messy. I just couldn't quite get my mind around all these interesting elements of morality. I was saying, "God's relevant to all of these things." I tried my best—and it was pretty lame—to connect them and tie them together. It was this flimsy collection of ideas. I was naturally very pleased with it when I wrote it. Then, in retrospect, I look back and think “ugh.” It was Dr. Craig; I have to thank Dr. Craig for this. In that panel discussion, he said something like, "This first chapter was just extraordinarily labyrinthine." It wasn't a compliment. He was suggesting, "Let's get this under control. Let's handle this a little more efficiently." And he was right. So by the time we wrote our second book in the tetralogy, Jerry and I had come across this way of organizing things.

So we start—Dr. Craig and I (and Jerry and I did the same)—we start with objective moral values and objective moral duties, and then three more things.

We could have said ten things. We could have done it in ten. But we have to streamline it.

The third has to do with moral knowledge. So it's an epistemological argument. This is another version of the moral argument, and it's just one of the prongs of ours.

Interestingly enough, Richard Swinburne, who is otherwise a skeptic of the moral argument, says there's one variant of the moral argument that he thinks adds at least a little bit to the plausibility of theism, and it's the epistemic version.

So we have the epistemic version in there, and that's the third component.

The fourth and fifth components—we went with what John Hare calls the two aspects of Kantian moral faith. One involves an argument from grace, which we'll probably have occasion to discuss here momentarily. The other is an argument from providence, and that has to do with the coincidence of happiness and holiness, or virtue and fulfillment and flourishing, and things like this.

When I wrote The History of the Moral Argument, I found this to be such a recurring theme. We don't talk about it as much today, but it is throughout the entire history of the moral argument. It's fascinating.

So we have a whole chapter on that, tracing that history and arguing that it's another dimension to include.

So all five of those together make for our five-fold moral argument.

Dr. Craig: I would just say that those who are familiar with my own work will recognize how much fuller and richer the treatment is in this book.

I focused only on those first two aspects, but this book adds all of these additional aspects in which a theistic perspective helps to construct a robust ethics. So I think we're really in Dave's debt for his contribution in this.

Kevin Harris: The good and objective moral values seem to always be the first things that come up when talking with someone about this. Fortunately, you address both topics in this section. Discuss that and some other objections, Dave.

Dr. Baggett: The Good. We start there because, like Dr. Craig said earlier, if you want to be a divine command theorist—and you don't have to be a divine command theorist to be a theistic ethicist or to believe in the power of the moral argument—we happen to be divine command theorists. It's one among other approaches. I tend to like it for a number of reasons and so on. But it's based on something prior, which is God as the Good. Here we're heavily in debt to Robert Adams. His absolute landmark work, published in 1999, Finite and Infinite Goods, was a book we were waiting to come out for about twenty years.

I don't know if you know this, Dr. Craig, but I basically sat down to start my dissertation, and I was waiting for that book to come out. It came out just as I turned to my dissertation. That's one of the reasons Adams had such a huge influence on me. The work was just terrific. Finite and Infinite Goods is probably about the best thing that's ever been written on God and ethics.

He gives this account of God as best filling that role of the Good, as was suggested earlier. This is the Platonic Good as Plato conceived it, but it's not just an abstraction. It's a person—or is the triune God ultimately. We argue that.

But that can get a little abstract, and there's nothing wrong with that, but for present purposes let me shift to a particular kind of value, a particular kind of good that is one of my favorite things to do in discussing the moral argument. It's one of many things you could do, but I think this one really has a lot of punch packed into it.

Take the notion of intrinsic human worth or intrinsic human value. It's a specific good. It really helps you delimit the discussion pretty quickly, and it enables you to say to someone like an atheist interlocutor, "On my view, you are infinitely more valuable than you think you are." Because we believe that all of us as human beings have been created in God's image for reasons and purposes. There is this possibility of an infinitely glorious future ahead if we avail ourselves of God's love and grace.

Everyone—whether they believe in God yet or not—and none of us came into this world believing that God exists. We all have to go through that process. Not just believing in God, but submitting to Him and allowing Him to do His work in your life. You can reach your potential in this way. You can be lavished with all of God's love and grace, and you can be used by Him in this world. It's this marvelous thing. We're not particularly good as human beings. We're kind of broken morally. We need to be fixed. That's one issue. Right now, we're talking about the value of human beings. In our view, theism—and Christianity in particular—provides an impeccable explanation of our intuitive sense that people have infinite dignity, value, worth, and so forth. This is one of the big emphases in that particular chapter. We focus in, after discussing goodness per se and value per se, to the value – the distinctive, intrinsic, inestimable value – of human beings.

I think there's a real bridge-building opportunity when we have that sort of discussion with our interlocutors.

So much of apologetics today—not Dr. Craig's version—but so many people are treating atheist interlocutors as the enemy. We've got to take them down and all this sort of craziness. No. We're trying to persuade them. We're trying to invite them on board and get them excited about it. We're really on their side. We're saying there's this gloriously good news for us all. Part of that is that we've been made in God's image, and we are of infinite value and worth. There's a lot of work that has to be done to make us morally good, but we are morally valuable in virtue of our having been made in God's image.

Anyway, I think that that aspect of the moral argument has tremendous value—not just to win an argument, but to persuade people, to move people.

Dr. Craig: I think that this aspect of the moral argument is what makes the argument so inescapable. Because every day that you get up, you answer the question, "Are other people intrinsically valuable?" by how you treat them. Do you treat other people as ends in themselves, or do you treat them merely as means to be exploited for your own ends? The answer to that question is, as I say, inescapable and, I think, provides a great deal of the strength and force of the moral argument.

Kevin Harris: Okay, for those taking notes at home, like I am right now, summarize the argument, if you would, Dave.

Dr. Baggett: Okay. To reiterate, the five points are:

1. Objective moral values.
2. Objective moral duties.
3. Moral knowledge.

And then what we call the two dimensions of Kantian moral faith, following John Hare:

1. The argument from grace.
2. The argument from providence.

Again, the argument from grace we'll discuss here in a minute. The argument from providence has to do with that conspicuous coincidence between virtue and happiness, for which theism generally, but Christianity particularly, has an impeccable explanation.

Kevin Harris: Before we get to Part Four, give us a brief overview of the argument from grace. Dave, I find it personally very appealing.

Dr. Baggett: As do I. Another dimension of the moral argument that I think is so powerful.

By the way, for listeners, you can pick and choose in having a conversation with someone. Listen to where they're coming from and then choose from among these various pieces of the moral argument which to accentuate, which to emphasize. One aspect might be more relevant and germane to that particular individual than others.

This is one that I think can really speak to a lot of people. Yeah, the argument from grace.

The fellow to look at here, besides Kant—because it ultimately traces back to him—is our contemporary John Hare, who taught at Yale, son of R. M. Hare, the famous atheist philosopher of the twentieth century. Anyway, John Hare is wonderful. He's delightful.

By the way, he and I have edited a book together that's coming out with OUP in September, where we have, I think, twenty-five or so chapters from most of the leading theistic ethicists in the world today. It's really going to be groundbreaking and wonderful, I think. So be on the lookout for that. It's called Moral Arguments for God's Existence: Navigating the Terrain. Tell your friends!

John Hare is wonderful. He has written a trilogy on God and ethics. The first one is called The Moral Gap, and that's very important. That's the one I'm going to talk about. I'll just make mention of the second one. It's God's Commands or something. That book rivals Finite and Infinite Goods. It’s absolutely amazing. For the longest time I said, "Oh, Finite and Infinite Goods is by far the best book." But then I read that book by Hare and thought, "Oh boy, that's giving it a run for the money." But I want to talk about the first book in his trilogy, The Moral Gap.

So what does he mean by the moral gap? It’s this. And this is a whole other aspect of morality. I didn't touch on this hardly at all in Good God. And Hare pointed this out – “You never discuss this performative dimension!” I was grateful for the suggestion because it enabled me to sort of expand the repertoire of the thing.

Imagine the best that we can do as human beings is live at a certain level. I'm giving you a visual now. Let's say this level. But morality, as we all know, calls us to live at this level, somewhere above. This is the gap between the best that we can do and what morality demands. Morality says you ought to live at this level. We do the best we can do, and we're here. That's kind of a problem because you're all familiar with "ought implies can." It doesn't make a lot of sense to say you ought to do something if you can't. But the problem is that we really can't discharge all the duties of morality. We fall short, however hard we try, and the harder we try, the more viscerally aware we become of our inability to do it. So is it not the case that "ought implies can"? Hare addresses this. He says we have to consider this gap and ways in which to close that gap.

He considered two or three possibilities to begin with. We could exaggerate our capacities and say, "If we just try harder, we can do better." That's probably true. We can do marginally better, but we can't get all the way up here. So that doesn't really work.

We could lower the moral demand, but that just amounts to denying that morality is what it is. Immanuel Kant talked about the folly of lowering the moral demand. No, it is what it is. It's beyond our grasp, at least initially admittedly, but, still, it's there.This is just part of our moral experience—that we're always called to do better and more, and in our own strength we just can't do it.

So we need some kind of supplement, some kind of external assistance. There Hare considered a third possibility to close the moral gap by appealing to some sort of secular substitute for divine grace.

In The Moral Gap book, if you take a look at that, you'll see the very effective reasons he gives to think that's not going to work to close the moral gap. What's left, he thinks, is divine grace.

It's this idea that, like Augustine said, God calls us to do what we cannot so that we know what to ask God to help us with. By the way, that was a paraphrase. I thought it was going to be a quote. It turned out to be a paraphrase—not a particularly erudite one—but nevertheless, it's the idea. We're called to do this thing that we can't do on our own, but God can enable us to close that gap. It's a picture of divine grace.

Then I got to thinking: I like it. I like this a lot. This makes perfect sense. By the way, I was raised in the Wesleyan tradition, in the camp meeting tradition. In a few weeks, I'm going to Michigan, and I'm going to go to church camp. I haven't done this for years because I haven't been living close to there. My brother's coming up from Georgia. He lives right near you, Dr. Craig.

Dr. Craig: Really?

Dr. Baggett: We're going to meet there. We're going to go to church camp. That was my upbringing—the holiness tradition, the camp meeting tradition. My wife and I wrote a whole book on that. Anyway, I love it.

Because of that, I was always raised to believe, as a Christian, that how we live matters. Many times I fell short. We all do. Nevertheless, the standard doesn't change. We all know from the Christian gospel—and I'm shifting gears. I'm not just talking about theism here. I'm talking about something more distinctively Christian because I think this is a really distinctively Christian variant of the moral argument. We know from Christian teachings that God's grace can forgive us for our sins because we need that. Because we all fall short – we know that. We all fall short of the moral ideal, and we are in need of forgiveness for our sins, for our wrongdoing. We need our guilt to be taken away—and our shame, by the way.

I was giving a presentation on this some years ago, and someone in the audience said, "Well, I'm more from an Oriental tradition, and we talk a lot more about shame than guilt." I didn't know much about what to say at that time. Then I read Gregory Ten Elshof's book on guilt and worked on some other things and came to see that there's not just forgiveness for sins and alleviation of guilt. There's also deliverance from shame—deliverance from shame, either earned and deserved or unearned and undeserved. We can talk about that some more later if you want.

Anyway, God's grace can deal with that need for forgiveness.

Then I saw that we can actually extend this performative argument and talk about that moral gap—the best we can do and what morality requires, or what holiness requires, we might say as Christians. We're not going to be able to close that gap in our own strength. We know this. But traditional, classical Christian teaching is that, by God's grace, we can be transformed. We're not just forgiven. We're actually changed and incrementally sanctified. So we have justification to begin with. It's just Christian theology, isn't it? Sanctification—our being conformed to the image of Christ—and ultimately, entirely saved to the uttermost, we'll be perfected. Kant had a lot to say about this. This is why he believed there was an afterlife, because we'd never approach perfection asymptotically and we'd never reach it and all of that business. I actually think we do reach it in a real sense, according to Christian teaching. Maybe when we behold the beatific vision or whatever. But God will complete the good work that He has begun within us and entirely conform us to the image of Christ.

So this performative version of the moral argument, or this so-called argument from grace, says it's by grace that we are forgiven as we avail ourselves of God's overtures of love and offer of forgiveness because of what Christ did on the cross and His resurrection. We can be changed, transformed, and ultimately utterly transformed into the very image of Christ. All of these are moral impulses we feel. We want to be forgiven. We want to be changed. We want to get better. We want to meet the moral demand. We even want to be perfected. None of those things are possible though in our own resources and such. But part of the glorious good news of the gospel is that each of these strong moral impulses that we have within us can be met, can be achieved, by God's grace. That's the argument from grace.

Isn't that a good one?

Dr. Craig: I think that this argument serves to highlight two different conceptions of grace, both of which I think are biblical.

One is the concept of God's grace as His unmerited favor. That addresses the moral gap through God's forgiveness of us for failing to live up to our moral duties. He gives us a divine pardon when we repent and turn to Him for forgiveness.

But in addition to God's grace as His unmerited favor, there's also the concept of God's grace as His power. It is through infusing into us His power by the indwelling Holy Spirit that we are enabled to live better and better lives, and so to narrow that gap that Dave described.

So Christianity addresses that gap through these two different conceptions of grace. On the one hand, forgiveness for failing to close the gap, but then also empowerment, enabling us through a sanctified life to narrow that gap.

Kevin Harris: Bill, you wrote the bulk of Part Four on naturalism and Platonism. What's the relevance, and what did you include?

Dr. Craig: The relevance is that some people want to have a non-theistic moral realism. They want to affirm everything about moral values and duties that we do and yet not ground them in God in the way that we suggest. These folks are sometimes what I call atheistic moral Platonists. They think that the Good exists as a sort of abstract object and that there are certain necessary moral truths that impose themselves upon us. You don't really have them grounded in a concrete personal being.

So, in this chapter, I offer three criticisms of atheistic moral Platonism.

First, I think it's unintelligible. I do not understand what it means to say that things like loyalty, justice, and faithfulness just exist as abstractions. I understand what it is for a person to be faithful or loyal, but I draw a complete blank when I'm told that loyalty just exists.

Secondly, I don't think that atheistic moral Platonism provides an adequate foundation for moral obligations and prohibitions. They are just as strange on atheistic moral Platonism as they are on naturalism, as Mackie recognized. Presumably, if there are these moral virtues like loyalty, faithfulness, and goodness, there are also abstract moral vices like lethargy, avarice, and cruelty. So the question arises: Why do I have an obligation to align my life with one set of these abstract objects rather than another? Who or what imposes such an obligation upon me? It seems to me that on Platonism, where you have no moral lawgiver, there simply is no answer to that question.

The third criticism would be that theism provides a more integrated view of reality because, on theism, the natural world and the moral realm are both under the hegemony of a natural and moral lawgiver. The source of natural law is the same as the source of the moral law. Whereas on atheism, these two realms completely fall apart. It is an astounding coincidence that the blind evolutionary process has issued in a creature who exactly corresponds to this independently existing, non-causally related abstract realm of moral values and duties. That is an astonishing coincidence when you think about it.

So it does seem to me that a theistic worldview has more integrity in its view of the moral and the natural realm than does Platonism.

Kevin Harris: Well, let's wrap things up with some of the distinct Christian elements that can be added to a moral argument for God. Dave, start with you.

Dr. Baggett: We talk about this in the conclusion to the book. Right before that, we address some issues pertaining to non-philosophical reasons to take the moral argument seriously and moral realism seriously. I would encourage those who read the book not to skip that because I think it was important. We waited until the end to bring it up—lessons you can glean and discern from great literature and things like that. I'm married to an English professor. I've learned over time that they actually have a great deal to offer. There are philosophical considerations, but there are lots of other kinds of considerations, just as human beings, that we ought to take seriously. So don't skip that if you happen to get the book. Please get the book. That would be great.

Okay, so, distinctively Christian things. Again, this is something we waited all the way until the end to get to for the most part. There were little intimations earlier, but largely we had just been discussing theism per se. But there are several ways in which you can extend the moral argument to Christianity. Some people might want to do that sooner rather than later. Lewis, for example, first became a theist and then he became a Christian. That's the way some people's story goes. Other people go straight to Christianity. The order can vary. We identified, I think, seven or so ways in which the moral argument is strengthened by the teachings of Christianity, or extended in some sense, or fulfilled. I'll just quickly go through these. I've got the book in front of me. I won't read much. I just need to remind myself of the categories.

The first category was Christological. That really had to do with the person of Christ Himself, who really is the moral exemplar. That’s one of the ways in which we become sensitized to morality: to look at an example, and there's no better example. He's the supreme paradigmatic example—God the Son, who lived among us—and how He lived. This is, of course, an appeal to special revelation. That's one of the reasons why we saved it to the end because we were generally doing more general revelation stuff, but the special revelation component involving the life of Christ is a powerful piece to bring in at some point. That was the first one. There we sort of ended by saying that moral apologetics arguably works best when it's Christological.

Then, of course, on Christian theology, God is Trinitarian. God is triune. This reminds us, of course, of that famous line from C. S. Lewis.

He says:

All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that God is love. But they seem not to notice that the words 'God is love' have no real meaning unless God contains at least two persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made He was not love.

With respect to Trinitarianism, Adam Johnson, in his version of the moral argument and theistic ethics, puts forth an explicitly Trinitarian argument in his book Divine Love Theory. So you’ll want to take a look at that.

Thirdly, pertaining to soteriology, there's this issue of salvation. We've already talked about this with the performative or transformational variant of the moral argument and how there's this really conspicuous correspondence between this dimension of the moral argument and the three aspects of Christian salvation:

1. Forgiveness for our sins.
2. Deliverance from the power of sins.
3. Ultimately to be made entirely conformed to Christ's image.

All of these are moral impulses that we feel within us, and all of them Christianity answers impeccably and provides the resources for entirely.

Connected with that is this notion of individual transformation by God's grace to close that moral gap, as we discussed. I would extend that, by the way, beyond just an individualistic transformation to talk about cultural transformation, which is a vitally important piece of Christian theology.

Paul Copan, for example, has talked about the influence that's flowed from the Jewish-Christian worldview, leading to societies that are—and this is a quote now from him—"progress-prone rather than progress-resistant," including such signs of progress as the founding of modern science, poverty-diminishing free markets, equal rights for all before the law, religious liberty, women's suffrage, human rights initiatives, the abolition of slavery, widow burning, and foot binding.

There's a powerful case to be made here. You can sort of add a historical twist to the moral argument by looking at the influence of Christianity in its pure form historically.

Then there's an eschatological component. Here there's something to say briefly about the problem of evil. I've argued for years that I kind of see the problem of evil and the moral argument head-to-head because they're both trying to answer the same question: Look at the moral evidence in this world and where does it point—toward God or away? The problem of evil proponents will say it points away. But there's this great quote, and I have to be brief about it, from Marilyn McCord Adams, the wife of Robert Adams, that says:

If divine goodness is infinite, if intimate relation to it is thus incommensurably good for created persons, then we have identified a good big enough to defeat horrors in every case.

That's from her book on the problem of evil. That's a great promise to hold on to and another distinctive Christian contribution.

Finally, there's an anthropological point. Our value as human beings, being made in God's image, is infinite, as discussed. Christianity also says we're all alike in that way, but we're all also unique. Each and every one of us is unique. John Hare likes to use this vision of the white stone in the Book of Revelation on which is written our secret name that will be revealed to us. It will be a secret between us and God. It's somehow reflective of our deepest identity, our deepest vocation, or something along those lines. It's a little mysterious. But what it points to, among other things, I think, is that Christianity says we're not just all the same in having been made in God's image. That's a marvelous truth and the very reason why each of us has infinite dignity and value and worth. But we're also made unique. That's a powerful word as well.

Dr. Craig: Wow. I think that this just shows how attractive Christianity is when I hear Dave expound these moral features of the Christian worldview. So I want to encourage our listeners: there's a lot in this book—very rich, I think carefully argued. If you're interested in moral issues and moral apologetics, you'll find yourself greatly rewarded for working your way through this book.[1]

[1] Total Running Time: 1:03:08 (Copyright © 2026 William Lane Craig)