Wes Morriston: Problem of Evil and Moral Argument (Part 2)

KEVIN HARRIS: Welcome back to Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. Today is part two of an interview with philosopher Wes Morriston on the podcast Real Atheology. We are going to pick it up right where we left off last time as Ben Watkins asked Dr. Morriston a question:

INTERVIEWER: A lot of theists are committed to God's nature being unchanging in a sense. You have responded also to William Lane Craig's divine command theory type view where moral goodness itself is grounded in God's nature. So if God's nature can fluctuate – if he can change it – then it seems like there is another Euthyphro problem there.

DR. MORRISTON: I have written on this as well. You are talking about the view that God is the ultimate standard of goodness. That God or God's nature is the ultimate standard of goodness. At that point I find myself wanting to ask: What do you mean by God's moral nature when you say that it is the ultimate standard of goodness? Are you talking about things like love, being loving, being just, and so on? Are you talking about those properties? If so, then I want to ask: Are those properties good-making just because God has them? Really? Or is God good because he has them?

INTERVIEWER: A modified Euthyphro dilemma.

DR. MORRISTON: A sort of Son of Euthyphro problem. My instinct is, of course, to say if God exists and is good, he is good because he has these properties. That seems to me to be the commonsense view.

INTERVIEWER: That would require goodness to be something anterior to God. That would defeat the purpose of what the modified divine command theory is trying to achieve.

DR. MORRISTON: Exactly. Exactly. So if you say that God is good because he is loving, because he is just, well then in your moral theory what is doing all the work is those properties and it really doesn't make any difference that God exists. I mean, it is great if there is a being who has these properties to the maximum possible degree. That is great. Good news. But hey, we could still be good in virtue of being just or loving —  as just or loving as we could be — whether or not God exists.

INTERVIEWER: Suggesting that there is something about these properties that is itself good, itself worth pursuing for its own sake.

DR. MORRISTON: If you believe that goodness is objective at all then I am inclined to say that the properties themselves are just intrinsically good-making. That being loving is just an intrinsically good-making property.

INTERVIEWER: I know William Lane Craig retorts to that response saying that this is an Atheistic Moral Platonism and that it is utterly unintelligible. I don't find a whole lot of force to that retort. What are your thoughts on it?

DR. MORRISTON: He is a very strong anti-Platonist. I think that is above all because he thinks that if Platonism were true then there would be something – these Platonic entities, these properties, these truths – that God would be subject to. But he thinks that God is the ultimate creator of everything other than God so we can't have any Platonic properties. I think the best solution for people who want to say that God is the ultimate standard of goodness is to go with some sort of doctrine of divine simplicity according to which God is his nature, is identical to his nature. That brings us back to this other issue: if God is the ultimate cause, is God just stuck with his nature? Well, the theist might at this point say one or the other of two things. One would be to say God isn't just stuck with his nature because he is this nature. He just is it. God is his nature. I find this doctrine very hard to make sense of.

DR. CRAIG: When I speak of God's moral nature I am not obviously affirming some sort of Platonism because, as Morriston says, I am an anti-realist about the existence of abstract objects like properties, propositions, numbers, sets, and so forth. What I mean is that God himself is the Good and God is a concrete object. God is the standard of goodness in the same way that the meter bar in Paris was the standard of being a meter in length. It was a concrete object, and if something was the same length as this meter bar then it was a meter long.[1] It was that object itself which was the standard of length. Similarly, on the view I would defend, it is God himself who is what Plato called the Good.

By contrast, I do think that Morriston's Atheistic Moral Platonism faces really serious objections. First, I find it unintelligible. Now the interviewer didn't find this to be a good objection but to me it is extremely powerful. I understand what it means to say that a person is loving or perhaps even that someone's action is loving. But what does it mean to say that love is an abstract object that just exists? Or that loyalty is an abstract object that exists? Or Justice? Honestly, I just can't make any sense of that. I understand what it is for a person to be loyal or just, but to say that in the absence of any persons that there is just this abstract entity called loyalty to me is just unintelligible. Anyone who shares that puzzlement with Platonism I think will find this to be a very powerful objection to this Atheistic Moral Platonism. The second objection that I raised to it is that even if you grant that there are these abstract moral values that exists, like justice, loyalty, fidelity, veracity, and so forth, that doesn't give any foundation for moral duties – that is for moral obligations and prohibitions. Why am I obligated to align my life with these abstract objects? Presumably on Platonism there are also abstract vices that exist like lethargy, hatred, betrayal, and other sorts of abstract objects. Why am I obligated to align my life with one set of these abstract entities rather than the other?

KEVIN HARRIS: I haven't thought about that.

DR. CRAIG: It seems to me that theism is far more plausible that obligations arise from imperatives issued by a qualified authority. It is in virtue of God's moral commands that we have obligations and prohibitions. Finally, the third point is that on Moral Platonism it is a fantastic coincidence that the blind evolutionary process should yield just that type of being which corresponds to this causally unconnected abstract realm of objects existing beyond time and space. When you think about it, that is an absolutely fantastic coincidence. It seems to me far more plausible to think that the mortal realm and the natural realm are both under the hegemony (that is to say, the sovereignty) of a creator and moral lawgiver, and that is why these two realms mesh so nicely. So I don't find Moral Platonism to be as plausible as theism as a foundation for objective moral values and duties.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here is the final segment.

INTERVIEWER: I am certainly one of those atheists who thinks that morality is objective. Certainly I have in the past sympathized with a Platonic view of it, and have since kind of backed off those Platonic claims. Go ahead.

DR. MORRISTON: I was just going to say that if Craig thinks that your view is logically inconsistent then he needs to do a better job of explaining why. As far as I can see, Craig's moral argument is just this. If there were no God, there would be no objective moral standards. There are objective moral standards. Therefore, there is a God. That is it. Why is that better than this argument? If there were no God then 2 + 2 would not be 4. 2 + 2 is 4. Therefore, there is a God. Or a trillion other similar arguments that we could pull out of our hats.

INTERVIEWER: You are implying that basic moral truths or basic moral standards are necessary truths similar to the way mathematical truths are necessary truths.

DR. MORRISTON: The ultimate moral principles may well be just like that. That is what Swinburne, by the way, thinks. Craig needs to tell us what difference God makes. As far as I can see it amounts to nothing but two claims.[2] One is that there would be no duties if there were not a divine commander to give us duties. The second is that there would be nothing good at all if God didn't exist because God is, or his nature is . . . there's a kind of slipperiness between those two. Is it God or is it God's nature? Sometimes he says one or the other.

INTERVIEWER: What if God is analogous to a cosmic Hitler? Does that make anti-Semitism good? That to me seems like a plausible implication.

DR. MORRISTON: He would say that that is impossible. God couldn't have been like that. On the other hand, I can't refrain from mentioning that here is a person who is a biblical inerrantist and believes that God did every single one of the awful things that is recorded anywhere in some parts of the Bible including commanding the extermination of all peoples. So I'm not sure what standing he has to say that God couldn't have been like Hitler.

KEVIN HARRIS: A little dig there at the end.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I am open to an argument from the truth of mathematical principles to their being grounded in God, actually. I've never worked on this myself so I do not have such an argument, but it is not as though you can blow the moral argument away simply by asserting that mathematical truths don't need any kind of grounding in a supreme being. Besides that, there is a huge difference between moral truths and, I think, mathematical or arithmetic truth like 2+2=4.

KEVIN HARRIS: That's what I was thinking. These are two different categories, and he's trying to compare them.

DR. CRAIG: I think that is right. These mathematical or arithmetic truths, I think, are very plausibly what are called analytic truths. That is to say, once you define the terms then you see that it is just necessarily is true. Once you understand the meaning of the symbols + and = and you understand the terms 2 and 4 then given the way those are defined it follows that 2+2=4 just by definition. But that it is good for a mother to love her little child is not an analytic truth. This is a synthetic truth. It is not just true by definition. Therefore, it would seem to require some sort of explanation. What the atheist who simply asserts that these moral principles are necessary is assuming, I guess, that necessary truths cannot have explanations. That is clearly false. Think of arithmetic or set theory, for example – arithmetic truths like 2 is greater than 1, 2+2=4, 9 divided by 3 is 3. These are not explanatorily ultimate. They are theorems derived from the axioms of Peano arithmetic. Similarly with set theoretic truths, these are derived from the axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, for example. So there is an explanatory depth to those theories. Ultimately the axioms themselves are simply postulated, taken to be explanatorily ultimate, but nevertheless there is an explanatory depth there. If the atheist simply asserts without explanation the truth of these moral principles, which as I say are synthetic, then there is an absence of explanatory depth to his theory that theism by contrast provides. Because theism grounds values in God and duties in his imperatives (his commands). So there is an explanatory depth to a theistic moral theory that is lacking in what I think has been aptly called the “shopping list approach” to moral theory where the atheist just sort of helps himself to the necessary moral truths that he needs and wants. Many, many atheists have testified to the fact that these moral truths are just not self-evidently true. They are not true by definition. We want some sort of explanation of them. On the view that Morriston is defending here, there just is no explanatory depth at all. I think for that reason the theory is less plausible, less tenable, then a divine command theory.[3]

As for the point about biblical commands, if it is true that our moral duties are grounded in God's commands, then I think that means that God is free to command us to do things which would in the absence of a divine command be wrong for us to do on our own initiative. But given a divine command to do it, it becomes our moral duty. I have defended this view on the website in various questions of the week, and I have never yet seen any non-theist respond to my theory other than to just denounce it. Who is Craig to be qualified to talk about these moral things if this is what he holds? That is just an emotive ad hominem reaction. I want to know why the moral theory that I offer in defense of the historicity of these narratives is wrong, and I have yet to see such a response.[4]