back
05 / 06
bird bird

Can We Be Good Without God?

William Lane Craig at SOAS Christian Union, London

Time : 00:45:04

Transcript

INTRODUCTION: Dr. William Lane Craig is a renowned philosopher and academic author. He is currently a Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot University in California. He has debated with many well known atheists such as Peter Atkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. We are really honored to have him here tonight.

DR. CRAIG: Thank you very much. It is a delight to be with you this evening and to be addressing this very important and existentially significant subject.

Can we be good without God? Now at first the answer to this question may seem so obvious that even to pose it might arouse indignation. For while those of us who do believe in God undoubtedly find in Him a source of moral strength and resolve that helps us to lead better lives than we should live without Him, nevertheless it would seem arrogant and ignorant to claim that those who do not believe in God do not often also lead moral, praiseworthy lives – in fact, lives that sometimes, embarrassingly, put our own to shame.

But wait. It would, indeed, be arrogant and ignorant to claim that people cannot be good without belief in God. But that wasn’t the question. The question was: can we be good without God? And when we ask that question, we are posing in a provocative way meta-ethical questions about the objectivity of moral values and duties. Are the values that we hold dear and guide our lives by mere social conventions akin to driving on the left hand versus the right hand side of the road or are they mere expression of personal preference like having a taste for chocolate rather than vanilla? Or are they valid independently of our apprehension of them, and if so, what is their foundation? As a humanist philosopher, Paul Kurtz puts it, “The central question about moral and ethical principles concerns this ontological foundation.” – That is to say, their foundation in reality – “If they are neither derived from God nor anchored in some transcendent ground, are they purely ephemeral?” [1] In his book The Courage to Be, Kurtz helpfully distinguishes three main views in answer to this question: Theism maintains that moral values are grounded in God, Humanism maintains that moral values are grounded in human beings, and Nihilism maintains that moral values have no ground at all and therefore are ultimately illusory and non-binding.

Now, how we answer the question before us this evening is obviously going to depend on what we mean by morality. If by morality you simply mean a certain pattern of social behavior which is prevalent among human beings then obviously that sort of behavior could still go on even if God does not exist; God is not necessary in order for human beings to exhibit certain patterns of social behavior which they call acting morally. But if by morality you mean that certain things are really good or evil, that certain actions are unconditionally obligatory or forbidden, then many theists and non-theists alike agree that God is indeed necessary for morality. In the absence of God morality turns out to be just a human illusion. The same patterns of social behavior might still go in the absence of God but it would be a delusion to think that such behavior has any objective moral significance. [2]

Accordingly, I am going to argue tonight that if God exists, then the objectivity of moral values and duties is secured, but that in the absence of God, that is to say, if God does not exist, then morality is plausibly just a human convention, that is to say, morality is wholly subjective and non-binding. We might act in precisely the same ways that we do in fact act, but such actions would no longer count as good or evil since, if God does not exist, objective moral values and duties have no foundation and therefore do not exist. Thus, we cannot truly be good without God. On the other hand, if we do believe that moral values and duties are objective then that provides moral grounds for believing that God exists. Moreover, I shall raise the question, if morality is just an illusion then why should we act morally? Especially when it runs contrary to self-interest? Or are we in some way held accountable for our moral decisions and actions? I will argue that theism provides a more coherent view of morality by providing a basis of moral accountability.

Consider, then, first, the hypothesis that God exists, whereby “God” I mean a personal supreme being. First, if God exists, then objective moral values exist. When we talk about moral values we’re talking about whether something is good or evil. To say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is good or evil independently of whether anybody believes it to be so. It is to say, for example, that Nazi anti-Semitism was morally evil, even though the Nazis who carried out the Holocaust thought that it was good; and it would still have been evil even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in brainwashing or exterminating everyone who disagreed with them so that everybody believed that the Holocaust was good.

On the theistic view, objective values are grounded in God. God’s own holy and perfectly good nature supplies the absolute standard against which all actions and decisions are measured. God Himself is what Plato called the “Good.” He is the locus and source of moral value. He is by nature loving, generous, just, faithful, kind, and so forth. Sometimes people ask, does God will something because it is good, or is something good because God wills it? The question is a false dilemma. Traditional theism rejects both alternatives. The alternative taken traditionally by theists is that God wills something because He is good. That is to say, the good just is God Himself. He is the paradigm of goodness. Therefore, the good is not independent of God, rather God is the good. So, if God exists objective moral values exist.

Secondly, if God exists objective moral duties exist. Duties have to do with whether something is right or wrong. Now you might think at first that the distinction between right and wrong is the same as the distinction between good and evil. But if you think about it for a moment I think you’ll see that this isn’t the case. Duty has to do with moral obligation, what I ought or ought not to do. But obviously you are not morally obligated to do something just because it would be good for you to do it. For example, it would be good for you to become a doctor, but that doesn’t mean that you are morally obligated to become a doctor. After all, it would also be good for you to become a firefighter, or a homemaker, or a diplomat, or a farmer, but you can’t do them all! [3] So there is a difference between moral duties and moral values. And to say that we have objective moral duties is, again, to say that we have certain moral obligations independently of whether we believe that we do.

On theism, our moral duties are constituted by God’s commands. God’s moral nature is expressed in relation to us in the form of divine commands which constitute our moral duties or obligations. Far from being arbitrary, these commands are reflections of His moral nature. His commands to us are therefore not capricious but are rather the expression of His character. And therefore it makes no sense to ask, for example, if God were to command us to eat our children would we be morally obligated to eat them, because this proposition has an impossible antecedent and therefore no non-trivial truth value. It is like asking, if there were a square circle would its area be the square of one of its sides? The question has no meaningful answer because it is logically incoherent. Our duties, then, are constituted by God’s commandments and these, in turn, reflect His essential character. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the whole moral duty of man can be summed up in the two great commandments: first, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your mind and with all your strength and with all your soul, and, second, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On this foundation we can affirm the objective rightness of love, generosity, self-sacrifice, and equality, and condemn as objectivity wrong selfishness, hatred, abuse, discrimination, and oppression.

Finally, on the theistic hypothesis God holds all persons morally accountable for their actions. Evil and wrong will be punished; righteousness will be vindicated. Good ultimately triumphs over evil and we shall see that we do live in a moral universe after all. Despite the inequities in this life, in the end the scales of God’s justice will be balanced. And therefore the moral choices that we make in this life are infused with an eternal significance. We can, with consistency, make moral choices which run contrary to our own self-interest and even undertake acts of extreme self-sacrifice, knowing that such decisions are not ultimately empty and meaningless gestures. Rather our moral lives have a paramount significance. So I think it is evident that theism provides a sound foundation for morality.

Contrast this with the non-theistic hypothesis. First, if God does not exist, then what is the foundation for objective moral values? More particularly, what is the basis for the value of human beings? If God does not exist, then it is very difficult to see any reason to think that human beings are special or that their morality is objectively true. On the atheistic view human beings are just accidental byproducts of nature which have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal spec of dust, lost somewhere in a hostile and mindless universe, and which are doomed to perish individually and collectively in a relatively short time. On a naturalistic view, moral values are just the by-products of biological evolution and social conditioning. Just as a troupe of baboons exhibit cooperative and even self-sacrificial behavior because natural selection has determined it to be advantageous in the struggle for survival, so their primate cousins, homo sapiens, exhibit similar behavior for exactly the same reason. [4] As a result of socio-biological pressures there has emerged among homo sapiens a sort of “herd morality” which functions well in the perpetuation of our species. But on the atheistic view there doesn’t seem to be anything about homo sapiens that makes this morality objectively true and binding.

The philosopher of science Michael Ruse reports,

The position of the modern evolutionist . . . is that humans have an awareness of morality . . . because such an awareness is of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. . . . Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says ‘Love they neighbor as thyself,’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. . . . Nevertheless, . . . such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, . . . and any deeper meaning is illusory. [5]

If we were to rewind the film of human evolution back to the beginning and start anew, people with a very different set of moral values may well have evolved. As Darwin himself wrote in The Decent of Man, “If . . . men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be any doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering.” [6]

For us to think that human beings are special and that our morality is objectively true is to succumb to the temptation to species-ism, that is to say, an unjustifiable bias in favor of one’s own species.

The objective worthlessness of human beings on a naturalistic worldview is underscored by two implications of that worldview: materialism and determinism. Naturalists are typically materialists or physicalists who regard man as a purely animal organism. But if there is no mind or soul distinct from the brain then everything we think and do is determined by the input of our five senses and our genetic makeup. There is no personal agent who freely decides to do something. But without freedom none of our choices is morally significant, they are just like the jerks of a puppet’s limbs, controlled by the strings of sensory input and physical constitution. And what moral value does a puppet or its motions have?

Richard Dawkins’ assessment of human worth may be depressing but why, on atheism, is he mistaken when he says, “there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference. . . . We are machines for propagating DNA. . . . It is every living object’s sole reason for being.” [7]

If there is no God, then any basis for regarding the herd morality evolved by homo sapiens as objectively true seems to have been removed. Take God out of the picture and all you seem to be left with is an ape-like creature on a tiny spec of solar dust beset with delusions of moral grandeur.

Second, if God does not exist, then objective moral duties do not exist. If God does not exist then what source remains for objective moral duties? Traditionally, our moral duties were thought to spring from God’s commandments, such as the Ten Commandments. But if there is no God then what basis remains for objective moral duties? On the atheistic view, human beings are just animals, and animals have no moral obligations to one another. When a lion kills a zebra, it kills the zebra, but it does not murder the zebra. When a great white shark forcibly copulates with a female, it forcibly copulates with her, but it does not rape her – for there is no moral dimension to these actions. They are neither prohibited nor obligatory. [8]

So if God does not exist, why think that we have any moral obligations to do anything? Who or what imposes these moral duties upon us? Where do they come from? It is very hard to see how they would be anything more than just a subjective impression arising in us as a result of societal and parental conditioning. Richard Taylor, who is an eminent ethicist, writes,

The modern age, more or less repudiating the idea of a divine lawgiver, has nevertheless tried to retain the ideas of moral right and wrong, not noticing that, in casting God aside, they have also abolished the conditions of meaningfulness for moral right and wrong as well.

Thus, even educated persons sometimes declare that such things as war, or abortion, or the violation of certain human rights, are ‘morally wrong,’ and they imagine that they have said something true and significant.

Educated people do not need to be told, however, that questions such as these have never been answered outside of religion. [9]

Taylor concludes,

Contemporary writers in ethics, who blithely discourse upon moral right and wrong and moral obligation without any reference to religion, are really just weaving intellectual webs from thin air; which amounts to saying that they discourse without meaning. [10]

On the atheistic view, certain actions such as incest or rape may not be biologically and socially advantageous, and so in the course of human development they’ve become taboo. But that does absolutely nothing to prove that rape or incest is wrong. After all, such behavior goes on all the time in the animal kingdom. If, as Paul Kurtz states, “The moral principles that govern our behavior are rooted in habit and custom, feeling and fashion,” [11] then the rapist who goes against the herd morality is doing nothing more serious then acting unfashionably – the sort of moral equivalent of Lady Gaga, out of step with the herd. If there is no moral lawgiver then there is no objective moral law which we must obey.

Now, it is very important that we remain clear in understanding the question before us this evening. The question is not: Must we believe in God in order to live moral lives? There is no reason to think that non-theists and theists alike cannot live what we normally characterize as good and decent lives. Similarly, the question is not: Must we believe in God in order to recognize objective moral values? There is no reason to think that non-theists cannot recognize that we ought to, say, love our children rather than to harm them. Or again, the question is not: Can we formulate a system of ethics without reference to God? If the non-theist grants that human beings do have objective moral value then there is no reason to think that he cannot work out a system of ethics with which the theist will largely agree. Rather, the question is: If God does not exist, do objective moral values and duties exist? And I, frankly, see no reason to think that they would.

Thus, if God does not exist, this has profound implications. It becomes impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil. Nor can we praise love, equality, or self-sacrifice as good. It doesn’t matter what values you choose – for there is no right and wrong; good and evil do not exist. That means that an atrocity like the Holocaust was really morally indifferent. You may think that it is wrong, but the Nazi perpetrators who carried it out thought that it was good. In his book Morality After Auschwitz, Peter Haas asks how an entire society could have willingly participated in a state-sponsored program of mass torture and genocide for over a decade without any serious opposition. [12] He argues that,

far from being contemptuous of ethics, the perpetrators acted in strict conformity with an ethic which held that, however difficult and unpleasant the task might have been, mass extermination of the Jews and Gypsies was entirely justified. . . . the Holocaust as a sustained effort was possible only because a new ethic was in place that did not define the arrest and deportation of Jews as wrong and in fact defined it as ethically tolerable and even good. [13]

Moreover, Haas points out, because of its coherence and internal consistency, the Nazi ethic could not be discredited from within. Only from a transcendent vantage point which stands above relativistic, socio-cultural mores could such a critique be launched. But in the absence of God, it is precisely such a transcendent vantage point that we lack. One rabbi who was imprisoned at Auschwitz said that it was as though a world existed in which all the Ten Commandments were reversed: thou shalt kill, thou shalt steal, thou shalt lie. Mankind has never seen such a hell. And yet, in a real sense, if God does not exist, if naturalism is true, then our world is Auschwitz. There is no good and evil, no right and wrong. Objective moral values and duties do not exist.

Finally, my third point, if God does not exist then there is no moral accountability for one’s actions. Even if there were objective moral values and duties under atheism they are ultimately inconsequential because there is no moral accountability. If life ends at the grave, it makes no ultimate difference whether one lives as a Stalin or as a Mother Theresa. As the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky rightly said, “If there is no immortality, then all things are permitted.” [14]

The state torturers in Soviet prisons understood this all too well. Richard Wurmbrand, who was tortured for his faith in communist prisons, reports,

The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe when man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil. There is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man. The Communist torturers often said, ‘There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish.’ I have heard one torturer even say, ‘I thank God, in whom I don’t believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.’ He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflected on prisoners. [15]

Given the finality of death it really doesn’t matter how you live. So what are you to say to someone who concludes that we may as well just live as we please, out of pure self-interest? This presents a pretty grim picture for an atheist ethicist, like Kai Nielson of the University of Calgary. He writes,

We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons should not be individual egoists or classical amoralists. Reason doesn’t decide here. The picture I have painted for you is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me. . . . Pure practical reason, even with a good knowledge of the facts, will not take you to morality. [16]

Now, somebody might say, but look, it is in our best self-interest to adopt a moral lifestyle. But clearly, that is not always true: we all know situations where self-interest runs smack dab in the face of morality. [17] Moreover, if one is sufficiently powerful, like a Ferdinand Marcos or a Papa Doc Duvalier or even a Donald Trump, then one can pretty much ignore the dictates of conscience and live safely in self-indulgence. Historian Stewart C. Easton sums it up well when he writes, “There is no objective reason why man should be moral, unless morality ‘pays off’ in his social life or makes him ‘feel good.’ There is no objective reason why man should do anything save for the pleasure it affords him.” [18]

Acts of self-sacrifice become particularly imprudent on a naturalistic worldview. Why should you sacrifice your self-interest and especially your life for the sake of someone else? There can be no good reason for adopting such a self-negating course of action on the naturalistic world view. Considered from the socio-biological point of view, such altruistic behavior is merely the result of evolutionary conditioning which helps to perpetuate the species. A mother rushing into a burning house to save her child or a soldier throwing his body over a hand grenade to save his comrades is like a fighter ant which sacrifices itself for the sake of the ant hill. Common sense dictates that we should resist, if we can, the socio-biological pressures to such self-destructive activity and choose instead to act in our best self-interest. The philosopher of religion John Hick invites us to imagine an ant endowed suddenly with the insights of socio-biology and the freedom to make personal decisions. He writes:

Suppose him to be called upon to immolate himself for the sake of the ant-hill. He feels the powerful pressure of instinct pushing him towards this self-destruction. But he asks himself why he should voluntarily . . . carry out the suicidal programme to which instinct prompts him? Why should he regard the future existence of a million million other ants as more important to him than his own continued existence? . . . Since all that he is and has or ever can have is his own present existence, surely in so far as he is free from the domination of the blind force of instinct he will opt for life – his own life. [19]

Now why should we choose any differently? The absence of moral accountability from the philosophy of atheism makes an ethic of compassion and self-sacrifice a hollow abstraction. R. Z. Friedman, who is a philosopher at the University of Toronto, concludes, “Without religion the coherence of an ethic of compassion cannot be established. The principle of respect for persons and the principle of the survival of the fittest are mutually exclusive.” [20]

We thus come to radically different perspectives on morality depending on whether or not God exists. If God exists, there is a sound foundation for morality. If God does not exist, then it is plausible that there are no objective moral values, no objective moral duties, and no moral accountability; we are ultimately landed in nihilism. It seems to me therefore that God is vitally necessary to morality.

Now, as I said, this is actually a conclusion which is accepted by a good many atheist philosophers, including philosophers such as Nietzsche, Russell, and Sartre. Even though the conclusion is a painful one, these thinkers believe that honesty compels them to it. I would like to share with you the confession of a philosopher who recently came to understand this. Joel Marks is an atheist philosopher and a former advocate of animal rights. In an article published in August of this year entitled “Confessions of an Ex-Moralist”, Marks describes how he had a kind of anti-epiphany where he came to see that, on his own atheism, he could not affirm the objectivity of moral value and duties. [21] He says,

. . . could I believe that, say, the wrongness of a lie was any more intrinsic to an . . . utterance than beauty was to a sunset or wonderfulness to the universe? Does it not make far more sense to suppose that all of these phenomena arise in my breast, that they are the responses of a particular sensibility to otherwise valueless events and entities?

. . . someone else might respond completely differently from me, such that for him . . . the lie was permissible, the sunset banal, the universe nothing but atoms and the void.

. . . if there was one thing I knew in this entire universe, it was that some things are morally wrong. It is wrong to toss male chicks, alive and conscious, into a meat grinder, as happens in the egg industry. It is wrong to scorn homosexuals and deny them civil rights. It is wrong to massacre people in death camps. . . . I knew in my soul, with all of my conviction, with a passion, that they were wrong, wrong, wrong. I knew this with more certainty than I knew that the earth is round.

But suddenly I knew it no more. I was not merely skeptical or agnostic about it; I had come to believe, and do still, that these things are not wrong.

. . . I used to think that animal agriculture was wrong. Now I will call a spade a spade and declare simply that I very much dislike it and want it to stop.

. . . I am simply no longer in the business of trying to derive an ought from an is. I must accept that other people sometimes have opposed preferences, even when we are agreed on all the relevant facts and are reasoning correctly.

My outlook has therefore become more practical: I desire to influence the world in such a way that my desires have a greater likelihood of being realized. [22]

In the absence of objective moral values and duties we are simply launched into the will to power unsustained by moral obligations, and whoever has the power can see that his desires are the ones that have the likelihood of being realized.

The challenge confronting the non-theist philosopher who continues to cling to objective moral values and duties after letting go of God is, I think, threefold. One, to explain what is the basis for objective moral values on atheism; in particular, what is the basis for the intrinsic value of human beings? Second, to explain what is the source of objective moral duties on atheism; what makes certain acts obligatory or forbidden if there is no moral law giver to command or prohibit them? And thirdly, to explain how, on atheism, moral accountability exists or, alternatively, why it is not necessary to morality?

But the choice between theism and non-theism need not be arbitrarily made. On the contrary, the very considerations we’ve been discussing can constitute moral justification for the existence of God. For example, if we do believe that objective moral values exist then we shall be led logically to the conclusion that God exists. And could anything be more obvious than that objective moral values exist? This is what is so astonishing about the testimony of Joel Marks. He believed more than anything in all the world that certain acts were wrong and yet, to preserve his atheism, he gave up belief in the objectivity of moral values. There is no more reason to deny the objective reality of moral values than the objective reality of the physical world. The reasoning of somebody like Michael Ruse is at worst a textbook example of the genetic fallacy and at best only proves that our subjective apprehension of moral values and duties has evolved. But if moral values are gradually discovered, rather than invented, then our gradual and fallible apprehension of the moral realm no more undermines the objectivity of that realm than our gradual and fallible apprehension of the physical world undermines the objectivity of that realm. The fact is that in moral experience we do apprehend a realm of objective moral values that impose themselves upon us. Actions like rape and cruelty and child abuse and brutality are not just socially unacceptable behavior, they are truly evil. As Michael Ruse himself admits in another context, “The man who says that it is morally acceptable to rape little children is just as mistaken as the man who says, 2+2=5.” [23] Notice here that Ruse equates our certainty of the moral wrongness of that action with mathematical certainty. [24] By the same token, love, generosity, equality, and self-sacrifice are really good. People who fail to see this are just morally handicapped, and there is no reason to allow their impaired vision to call into question what we see clearly. Thus, the existence of objective moral values serves to demonstrate the existence of God.

Or consider the nature of moral obligation. In moral experience we sense that certain moral obligations or prohibitions are imposed upon us. I was speaking some time ago at a major Canadian university campus and I noticed a poster on the wall put up by the sexual assault and information center and it read, “Sexual assault: No one has the right to abuse a child, woman, or man.” Now I think most of us would recognize that statement as evidently true. But the atheist can make no sense of a person’s right not to be sexually abused by another. The best answer as to the question of the source of moral obligation is that moral rightness and wrongness consists in agreement or disagreement with the will or commands of a holy, loving God. But then it follows that if you do believe in objective moral duties, that some things are really right and wrong, then you should believe in God.

And finally, take the problem of moral accountability. Here we find a powerful practical argument for believing in God. According to the philosopher William James, practical arguments can be used only when theoretical arguments are insufficient to decide a question of urgent and pragmatic importance. But it seems obvious that a practical argument could also be used to back up or motivate the acceptance of the conclusion of a sound theoretical argument. To believe, then, that God does not exist and that there is thus no moral accountability would be quite literally de-moralizing, for then we should have to accept that our moral choices are ultimately insignificant, since both our fate and that of the universe will be the same regardless of what we do. By “de-moralization” I mean a deterioration of moral motivation. It is hard to do the right thing when that means sacrificing your own self-interest or when desire is strong, and the belief that ultimately it does not matter what you do or choose is apt to sap one’s moral strength and so undermine one’s moral life. As Robert Adams observes, “Having to regard it as very likely that the history of the universe will not be good on the whole, no matter what one does, seems apt to induce a cynical sense of futility about the moral life, undermining one’s moral resolve and one’s interest in moral considerations.” [25]By contrast there is nothing so likely to strengthen the moral life as the beliefs that one will be held accountable for one’s actions and that one’s choices do make a difference in bringing about the good. Theism is thus a morally advantageous belief, and this, in the absence of any theoretical argument establishing atheism to be the case, provides practical grounds for belief in God and motivation to accept the conclusions of the two theoretical arguments I just gave.

So in conclusion, theological meta-ethical foundations do seem to be necessary for morality. If God does not exist, then it is plausible to think that objective moral values and moral duties do not exist and that there is no moral accountability in the world. The horror of such a morally neutral world is obvious. If, on the other hand, we hold, as I think it is rational to do, that objective moral values and duties do exist, then we have good grounds for believing in the existence of God. In addition, we have powerful practical reasons for embracing theism in view of the morally bracing effects which belief in moral accountability produces. So, in conclusion, we cannot, then, truly be good without God; but if we can in some measure be good, then it follows logically that God exists. [26]

  • [1]

    Paul Kurtz, Forbidden Fruit (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1988) p. 65.

  • [2]

    5:11

  • [3]

    10:05

  • [4]

    14:57

  • [5]

    Michael Ruse, “Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics,” in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 262, 268-9.

  • [6]

    Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2d ed. (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1909), 100.

  • [7]

    Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow (London: Allen Lane, 1998), cited in Lewis Wolpert, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p. 215. Unfortunately, Wolpert’s reference is mistaken. The quotation seems to be a pastiche from Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1996), p. 133 and Richard Dawkins, “The Ultraviolet Garden,” Lecture 4 of 7 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures (1992).

  • [8]

    20:12

  • [9]

    Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith, and Reason (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1985), pp. 2-3.

  • [10]

    Ibid., p. 7.

  • [11]

    Kurtz, Forbidden Fruit, p. 73.

  • [12]

    25:14

  • [13]

    Critical notice of Peter Haas, Morality after Auschwitz: The Radical Challenge of the Nazi Ethic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), by R. L.Rubenstein, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 60 (1992): p. 158.

  • [14]

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. C. Garnett (New York: Signet Classics, 1957), bk. II, chap. 6; bk. V, chap. 4; bk. XI, chap. 8.

  • [15]

    Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1967), p. 34.

  • [16]

    Kai Nielsen, “Why Should I Be Moral?” American Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1984): p. 90.

  • [17]

    29:52

  • [18]

    Stewart C. Easton, The Western Heritage, 2d ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1966), p. 878.

  • [19]

    John Hick, Arguments for the Existence of God (New York: Herder & Herder, 1971), p. 63.

  • [20]

    R. Z. Friedman, “Does the ‘Death of God’ Really Matter?” International Philosophical Quarterly 23 (1983): p. 322.

  • [21]

    34:44

  • [22]

    Joel Marks, “Confessions of an Ex-Moralist,” The Stone (August 21, 2011) http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/confessions-of-an-ex-moralist/ (accessed July 31, 2013).

  • [23]

    Michael Ruse, Darwinism Defended (London: Addison-Wesley, 1982), p. 275.

  • [24]

    40:08

  • [25]

    Robert Merrihew Adams, “Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief,” in Rationality and Religious Belief, ed. C. F. Delaney (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre dame Press, 1979), p. 127.

  • [26]

    Total Running Time: 45:03 (Copyright © 2011 William Lane Craig)