#947 The Moral Argument—One More Time!

Dr. craig’s response

No offense taken, Corey—though your passionate denunciation of God’s actions sits very ill with your denial of the objectivity of moral values and duties! If God is not really doing anything evil or wrong in “starving children, allowing people to abuse children”, etc., then why are you so heated up about it?

The content of your letter cannot be the reason that you reject Christianity, since the failure of the moral argument for the existence of God in no way proves that God does not exist. Rather, it seems that the reason for your passionate rejection of Christianity has to do with God’s allowing all of the terrible evil and suffering in the world. While a successful moral argument would serve to counterbalance the problem of evil, that is not my main response to the problem of evil. See our Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (2017) for my reasons for thinking that the problem of evil fails to defeat Christian theism.

With regard to the moral argument for God’s existence, I do not think that you appreciate how radical a line you are taking in denying the objectivity of moral values and duties. Moral realism is a common, perhaps even dominant, view among even secular ethicists, who would find your claim that “there demonstrably is no such thing as ‘objective’ morality” to be ludicrous. Even moral anti-realists are not so brazen as to assert that moral realism is demonstrably wrong. So what is your argument for your claim that “Moral judgements are opinions and are entirely subjective -  they are not objective facts”?

Here it is: “If they were, you could prove them to be true using logic or empiricism, but no one can do this.” Corey, this is a really bad argument, to put it bluntly. Your assumption is that every objective fact is logically or empirically provable. The collapse of Verificationism in the first half of the 20^th century put that bugaboo permanently to rest. Can you prove that every objective fact is logically or empirically provable? Obviously not, in which case it is not an objective fact, which is self-defeating. Moreover, not only is science riddled with factual assumptions that cannot be empirically proven, even in principle, but more importantly, not every field of inquiry is open to empirical methods. You have embraced an untenable and self-defeating empiricism that virtually no philosopher today accepts.

Why should we accept the objectivity of moral values and duties? On the same sort of grounds on which we accept the reality of a world of physical objects around us! Just as it is impossible for us to get outside our sensory experiences to test the veridicality of our sense perceptions, there is no way to test independently of moral experience itself the veridicality of our moral perceptions. But just as we justifiably believe in a realm of objectively existing physical objects apprehended in sense experience, so we justifiably believe in a realm of objective moral values and duties apprehended in moral experience.

More precisely, we are epistemically justified in believing in the objectivity of moral values and duties on the ground of our moral experience unless and until we have a defeater of that experience, just as we are justified in believing that there is a world of physical objects around us on the ground of our sense experience unless and until we have a defeater of that experience. Such a defeater would have to show not merely that our moral experience itself is subjective and fallible (as is our sense experience!) but that it is utterly unreliable, that we may apprehend no objective moral values or duties whatsoever.

Our moral experience is so powerful, however, that such a defeater would have to be incredibly powerful in order to overcome our experience, just as our sense experience is so powerful that a defeater of my belief in the world of physical objects perceived by me would have to be incredibly powerful in order for me to believe that I may be, for example, a brain in a vat of chemicals being stimulated by some mad scientist. As atheist philosopher Louise Antony put it in our debate “Is God Necessary for Morality?”,[1] any argument for moral scepticism will inevitably be based on premises which are less obvious than the existence of objective moral values and duties themselves.

Such a defense of the objectivity of moral values and duties connects with a recent development in epistemology known as phenomenal conservatism, the view that if it seems to someone S that a proposition p is true, then S is prima facie justified in believing that p, more precisely,

Phenomenal conservatives nominalize how it seems to S as S’s “seemings,” which refers to experienced mental states with propositional content and a distinct phenomenal character. Seemings, like beliefs, have propositional content in that, just as S may believe that p, so it may seem to S that p. But whereas beliefs are true or false and typically corrigible, seemings are veridical or non-veridical and uniformly incorrigible. Moreover, seemings have a forceful phenomenal character: they have a sort of felt veridicality that inclines us to believe their propositional content. Seemings are thus causally and epistemically prior to beliefs in that they support beliefs.

The application to our moral beliefs is obvious. In moral experience we experience seemings with moral propositional content, for example, “It is wrong to starve a child” or “It is wrong to abuse a child.” In the absence of some defeater we are justified in holding such moral beliefs. Thus, agnostic philosopher Stephen Law in our debate “Does God Exist?” freely granted the objectivity of moral values and duties because certain things seem to him to be morally right or wrong, and he has no reason to doubt his experience.

Secular ethicist David Brink thinks that the objectivity of moral values and duties is thus the default position.  “There might be no objective moral standards. . . . But this would be a revisionary conclusion, to be accepted only as the result of extended and compelling argument that the commitments of ethical objectivity are unsustainable.”[2] Obviously, Corey, you have not offered such an extended and compelling argument!

Now, if objective moral values and duties do exist, then what are the prospects for grounding their objectivity in the existence of God? Your claim that theistic philosophers from Anselm and Aquinas to Robert Adams and Philip Quinn are “unserious” is silly and insulting. You are only showing your ignorance. As Anselm understood, the concept of God by definition is the concept of a maximally great being. If you could think of anything greater than God, then that would be God! Maximal greatness clearly includes moral perfection. So if God does exist, he is very plausibly the paradigm of goodness and so the basis of the objectivity of moral values and duties.

Again, your reply, “There is no logical or empirical proof showing that God is ‘good’, even if he does exist” recurs to your defective empiricist epistemology. If God does exist, then necessarily, he is perfectly good, otherwise he would not be worthy of worship. The question here is not whether the concept of God entails moral perfection, which it clearly does, but whether such a being actually exists.

You claim that the postulate of God’s moral perfection is a “self-serving” attempt “to reconcile God's goodness with malicious biblical commands for ethnic cleansing and such.” Such a claim is both philosophically and historically fatuous. Non-Christian philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle saw God as perfectly good independent of biblical knowledge, and grounding ethics in God is a philosophically respectable version of metaethics.

In fact, postulating God as the foundation of the objectivity of moral values and duties does nothing in itself to reconcile God's goodness with “malicious biblical commands.” Quite the contrary, the challenge for the biblical theist will be reconciling such commands with God’s perfectly good character. Ironically, it is precisely your moral subjectivism that would “absolve God of all moral responsibility,” for God cannot be held morally responsible if objective moral values and duties do not exist!

It’s obvious to me from the emotional tone of your letter that you really do believe in objective moral values and duties after all, Corey, otherwise you would not so harshly condemn God as you do. You think that it is morally wrong for God to command ethnic cleansing, starvation of children, etc.! You are, in fact, deeply conflicted. Far from defeating the moral argument, your passionate declamations only serve to support it. I don’t know what other reasons you have for rejecting Christianity, but if they are as weak as this I think you need to take a second look.