On Good and Evil: Discussing the Nature and Morality of God (from the Veritas Forum)

C. Stephen Evans (Baylor) and Gideon Rosen (Princeton) discuss the nature of morality and God in “On Good & Evil: Discussing the Nature of Morality and God.”

Forum hosted by The Veritas Forum at Princeton University (11/18/2021).

Speakers: C. Stephen Evans - Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Baylor University

Gideon Rosen - Stuart Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Princeton University

LINK

"Divine Command: Religion and Morality." John Hare, Yale Divinity School

From the University of Chicago’s Youtube page:

Questions about the relationship between God and the good and the right remain as urgent today as they did in ancient times. For example, what is the relationship between claims about the nature or character of God and the moral actions motivated by those claims? What is the relationship between moral codes underwritten by claims about God and the ethics espoused by the (ideally agnostic) civic sphere? Are beliefs about God open to moral critique by others who espouse different beliefs or no beliefs at all? Today answers to these questions must take into account factors such as cultural and religious pluralism, hybrid theologies that incorporate teachings and beliefs from a variety of religious traditions, and religiously motivated violence around the world.

This conference invites philosophers, theologians and religious ethicists to offer accounts of God relevant to the current state of affairs in the West while taking seriously the possibility of a relationship between God and ethics. This conference was supported by grants from the University of Chicago Divinity School, the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion, the University of Chicago Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Norman Wait Harris Fund of the University of Chicago Center for International Studies, and the Aronberg Fund of the University of Chicago Center for Jewish Studies.

Recorded in Swift Hall on April 9-11, 2014.

LINK

Robert Adams: Perfection, Justice, and Love in Leibniz's Theodicy

Robert Adams' talk "Perfection, Justice, and Love in Leibniz's Theodicy," delivered at the Leibniz's Theodicy: Context and Content Conference at the University of Notre Dame, September 16-18, 2010

J.P. Moreland: Finding Quiet: Learning to Handle Anxiety [Talbot Chapel]

A key part of moral apologetics is the notion of moral transformation. Moral transformation has to do with how we can be genuinely made good people and how we can live successfully according to the moral law. It also has to do with how we can be made to relate to the good and love rightly. In this chapel service from Biola University, Dr. J.P. Moreland explains a Christian approach to dealing with one part of moral transformation: overcoming anxiety and depression.

From Reasons to Believe: The Moral Argument: An Interview with Dr. David Baggett

In 2018, Dr. David Baggett had a great interview with the team over at “Reasons to Believe.” In this interview, Dr. Baggett and RTB discuss the nature of the moral argument, its history, and how to use it. Follow the link to listen.

Straight Thinking - The Moral Argument: An Interview with Dr. David Baggett - Reasons to Believe

Diving Deep into the Moral Argument with Dr. David Baggett

From Free Thinking Ministries:

Dr. David Baggett is often considered the world's foremost expert on the Moral Argument for God's Existence. Dr. Baggett sits down with Tim to discuss the philosophy, history, and theology of the Moral Argument.

Singer and Hare - What is the Source of Morality? - The Veritas Forum

What is the foundation for morality? Two philosophers, atheist Peter Singer and Christian John Hare, discuss where we must look to find a coherent ethical system.

Peter Singer, world-famous Princeton philosopher, ethicist, and atheist, discusses with John Hare, Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale. Watch the full recording at veritas.org: ‪http://www.veritas.org/Media.aspx#/v/10

Over the past two decades, The Veritas Forum has been hosting vibrant discussions on life's hardest questions and engaging the world's leading colleges and universities with Christian perspectives and the relevance of Jesus. Learn more at http://www.veritas.org, with upcoming events and over 600 pieces of media on topics including science, philosophy, music, business, medicine, and more!

Darwinism Can’t Account for Objective Morality

From Stand to Reason:

“Greg explains why Darwinism can’t account for objective morality, then he answers a question about whether our sins are covered or washed away and takes a follow-up call from a caller about the origin and development of the cosmos.”

Can God Ground Necessary Moral Truths?

Robert from Canada wrote to Reasonable Faith:
Dear Dr. Craig,

There have been a lot questions recently asked about grounding the existence of morality in God, and I have one as well. The Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne rejects the Moral Argument for God because, he thinks, moral truths are necessarily true, and so the existence of God cannot have an effect on their truth.

He comes to the conclusion that moral truths are necessary because certain events are thought to be morally good or bad; more than that, the moral goodness or badness of an event is inseparable from the state of affairs itself. So, Swinburne claims, there is no possible world in which the exact same things occur as occurred during the holocaust, and in which the holocaust is not morally abominable. It is the same with other events that are considered morally good or bad. There is no possible world in which the event is the same as in the actual world and in which the moral judgement of the event is different than in the actual world. Thus Swinburne concludes that the moral judgement of an event is necessary to the event itself. And this leads naturally to his conclusion that the existence or non-existence of God is irrelevant to the existence of the moral judgement since the moral judgement is necessary given the event.

Swinburne's argument would thus undercut one of the premises to your moral argument. I am a Christian philosophy student at a secular university where many of my professors take a view similar to Swinburne, holding that the objectivity of moral values does not depend on God's existence. I have read and heard your arguments about the absurdity of life without God, and I am currently undecided. What would be your response to Swinburne's argument?

Robert

My Response to William Lane Craig’s Critique of My Divine Love Theory

On October 17, 2022, William Lane Craig discussed an article of mine in which I explained my Divine Love Theory. My article was published in the Worldview Bulletin Newsletter here: Divine Love Theory: How the Trinity Is the Source and Foundation of Morality.

You can listen to Craig’s podcast about my Divine Love Theory here: Divine Love Theory and the Trinity | Podcast | Reasonable Faith.

First, I’ll provide key quotes from Craig’s podcast. Craig said he has reservations about my Divine Love Theory because “it proposes that the love between the members of the Trinity is the source and foundation of morality, and I think that is a distorted and lopsided view because, as important as divine love is, it also equally belongs to God’s moral perfection to be just and to be holy.”

Are You As Good As You Think?

Christian B. Miller | A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University, US, and author of The Character Gap

One summer day in the ocean off Panama City Beach, two boys out for a swim got caught in a rip current. When their mother heard their cries, she and several other family members dove into the ocean, only to be trapped in the current, too. Then, in a powerful display of character, complete strangers on the beach took action. Forming a human chain of 70 to 80 bodies, they stretched out into the ocean and rescued everyone.

Stories like this inspire me with hope about what human beings are capable of doing. Though we may face a daily barrage of depressing reports about sexual harassment, corruption, and child abuse, stories of human goodness help to give us another perspective on our human character. 

But, as we know too well, there is also a darker side to our character. Take, for example, the story of Walter Vance, 61, who was shopping in his local Target for Christmas decorations. It was Black Friday and the store was mobbed when Vance fell to the floor in cardiac arrest and lay motionless. The other shoppers did nothing. In fact, some people even stepped over his body to continue their bargain hunting. Eventually, a few nurses used cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but by then he was too far gone.

Continue reading at IAI News.

Debate: God & Morality: Craig vs Wielenberg (How to Go Deeper)

A Debate on God and Morality

By Craig, William Lane, Wielenberg, Erik J.

In 2018, William Lane Craig debated Erik Wielenberg. Both Craig and Wielenberg are influential in the current literature on the moral argument. Craig is well known for his defense of the deductive moral argument and the need for God in order to have an objectively meaningful life. Wielenberg is an atheist and a Platonic moral realist, who also specializes in the thought of C. S. Lewis.

You may have seen the debate (if not, you can find it below). But you may not know that Adam Johnson edited a volume on the debate with excellent essays from David Baggett, J.P. Moreland and others. If you liked the debate and want to explore the ideas further, be sure to check out this resource.

Thinking Matters Talk: Does Morality Need God? Part One

Editor’s note: This article was orignally posted here. It is shared with the author’s permission.

This year the New Zealand apologetics organization Thinking Matters, ran a “Confident Christianity Conference” in Auckland. I was asked to speak at this conference on the topic. Does Morality Need God? Below is a slightly streamlined version of the talk I gave.

“If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.” These words from Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers of Karamazov express a widely held intuition that moral requirements depend upon God’s existence. Most contemporary ethicists today would dismiss this intuition. In this talk, I will argue their dismissal is premature. I will defend what philosophers call a divine command theory of ethics. The thesis that moral wrongness is (identical to) the property of being contrary to God’s commands.[1] Where God is understood, in orthodox fashion, as a necessarily existent, all-powerful, all-knowing, essentially loving and just, immaterial person who created and providentially ordered the universe. 

Note three things about this thesis:

First, it is a thesis about the nature of moral requirements. It is not a thesis about the nature of goodness. The concept of “good, is ambiguous, as is seen by the following statements “I had a really good dip in the spa pool last night,” Or “going on a low carb diet is good for you.” Or “Carlos the Jakal was a good hitman.” The concept of the morally obligatory, or morally required, is not identical to the concept of what it is good to do. It might be good, even saintly, for me to give a kidney to benefit a stranger, but it is not an act I am obliged to do.[2] 

Second, my thesis is that the property of being morally required is “identical” to the property of being commanded by God.  I am not saying that people cannot know what is right and wrong unless they believe in God. Nor am I claiming that the word “wrong” means “contrary to God’s command.” These are distinct claims. Consider light; Light is identical to a certain visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum. But obviously, that isn’t the meaning of the word “light.” People knew how to use the word “light” long before discovering its physical nature. And they knew the difference between light and darkness long before they understood the physics of light. Analogously, we can know the meaning of moral terms like “right” and “wrong” and know the difference between right and wrong without being aware that the moral requirements are God’s commands.[3]

Third, this is a thesis about the relationship between God and morality. It is not a claim about the relationship between the bible and morality. The thesis I laid out does not mention any sacred text such as the Bible, Quran, Hadith, Torah, or Talmud. While many divine command theorists accept that God has revealed his commands in an infallible sacred text, some do not. The claim that God’s commands are contained in some sacred text is not part of or entailed by a divine command theory itself. It is the result of other theological commitments they have. One could consistently be a divine command theorist without holding this. Divine command theories are ecumenical; they have had advocates within the Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and even deist traditions.

Having clarified my thesis, I will defend three contentions.

• Secular accounts of morality cannot coherently account for our fundamental intuitions about moral requirements.

• If God exists, then a divine command theory can coherently account for our fundamental intuitions about moral requirements.

• Standard objections to divine command theories fail.

I. Four Assumptions about Moral Requirements

But first, what do I mean by fundamental assumptions? Moral theories are tested, in part, by how well they account for various assumptions about morality implicit in our moral thought and practice. [4] I will begin by listing four plausible assumptions about the type of requirements morality imposes upon us.

One is that moral requirements are inescapable: they apply to us irrespective of whether following them contributes to any ends or aims we currently desire.  Consider a criminal who stands in the dock convicted of a crime; he openly admits the crime, is unrepentant and informs us that he wanted to kill and torture. Doing so did not frustrate any of his desires. Does our moral condemnation of him depend on us assuming he does not have statistically abnormal desires so that we withdraw this judgment when we discover he really does desire to kill and maim?  Moral requirements can’t be escaped or begged off by noting they don’t fulfill one’s goals or ends. [5]

Second moral requirements are requirements that are justified from an impartial point of view. Peter Singer explains:

The ‘Golden Rule’ attributed to Moses, to be found in the book of Leviticus and subsequently repeated by Jesus, tells us to go beyond our own personal interests and ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ – in other words, give the same weight to the interests of others as one gives to one’s own interests. The same idea of putting oneself in the position of another is involved in the other Christian formulation of the commandment, that we do to others as we would have them do to us. The Stoics held that ethics derives from a universal natural law. Kant developed this idea into his famous formula: ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’ Kant’s theory has itself been modified and developed by R. M. Hare, who sees universalisability as a logical feature of moral judgments. The eighteenth -century British philosophers Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith appealed to an imaginary ‘impartial spectator’ as the test of a moral judgment, and this theory has its modem version in the Ideal Observer theory. Utilitarians, from Jeremy Bentham to J. J. C. Smart, take it as axiomatic that in deciding moral issues ‘each counts for one and none for more than one’; while John Rawls, a leading contemporary critic of utilitarianism, incorporates essentially the same axiom into his own theory by deriving basic ethical principles from an imaginary choice in which those choosing do not know whether they will be the ones who gain or lose by the principles they select…. One could argue endlessly about the merits of each of these characterisations of the ethical; but what they have in common is more important than their differences. They agree that an ethical principle cannot be justified in relation to any partial or sectional group. Ethics takes a universal point of view[6]

Third moral requirements have practical authority: agents always have conclusive reasons to do what is morally required and never have sufficiently good reasons for doing what is morally wrong. Someone has conclusive reasons to act in a certain way when the reasons in favor of acting, taken together, are stronger than any set of reasons we may have to act in some other way.  If we don’t always have conclusive reasons to do what is right, having total allegiance to morality will be arbitrary and, at worst irrational.   We will have no more reason to do what is right than wrong. Or doing the right thing will be doing what we have a most reason not to do.[7]

Moral requirements are supposed to answer questions about what we are to do. They are considerations that guide our actions.  When we learn something is wrong, that tells us what we are not to do. They cannot do this if we lack conclusive reasons to do what they say.  Suppose you and I are discussing whether it is my duty to donate to the red cross. You convinced me it is my duty to do so. The red cross knocks on my door. I refuse to donate. I suspect this would puzzle you; didn’t I concede that I had a duty to do it? If I responded with “yes, I am persuaded it is my duty to do it, but that doesn’t mean I have reasons to do it,” I suspect you would think I was missing something. I would deny moral requirements have any authority or claim on my behavior and don’t address the question, “what ought I do?”.[8]

Or suppose you heard that I had resigned from my high-paying job. You think I am nuts. How am I going to provide for my family? Why would I give up the career I always dreamt of? I tell you, I discovered the firm was engaging in unethical business practices, and I had to resign to avoid being complicit. On hearing this, wouldn’t it now make sense that I did this? I was justified in doing so. If you do, you are assuming that the fact an action is wrong justifies my refraining from doing it.[9]

Fourth, a final assumption is that if something is morally required, we are accountable for doing it in an important sense.  John Stuart Mill famously stated,

“We do not call anything wrong unless we mean to imply that a person ought to be punished in some way or other for doing it—if not by law, by the opinion of his fellow creatures, if not by opinion, by the reproaches of his own conscience. This seems the real turning point of the distinction between morality and simple expediency.”[10]

There is a conceptual link between something being morally obligatory and something being blameworthy. If we do what is morally wrong without excuse, others can legitimately blame us, and guilt is warranted. Moral requirements conceptually are demands people make upon one each, which we can hold each other accountable through demanding an excuse, practices of blaming, criticizing, and guilt.

Robert Adams asks us to imagine a situation in which there are compelling reasons to support you not walking on the lawn. However, these reasons give you no grounds for feeling guilty if you do, and they provide no reasons for other people to make you feel like you must stay off the lawn or to blame and reproach you for doing so. Adams concludes that while there would be a sense in which you ought not to walk on the lawn, you have no obligation not to do so.[11]

So, whatever property moral wrongness is, it is the property of being prohibited by certain standards: standards that are inescapable and justified from an impartial point of view. The fact these standards prohibit an action means agents have conclusive reasons not to do the action in question. Agents are also accountable for actions doing actions prohibited by these standards. Others can blame and sanction me if I act contrary to them without an adequate excuse. A plausible thesis about the nature of moral wrongness should account for these facts.

In my next post, I will defend my first contention: that secular accounts of morality struggle to coherently account for these four assumptions.

---

[1] Robert M. Adams, “Divine Command Meta-Ethics Modified Again,” Journal of Religious Ethics 7:1 (1979): 76.

[2] Example from C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 16.

[3] This illustration comes from William Lane Craig see “Is Is the Foundation of Morality Natural or Supernatural? The Craig-Harris Debate” available at  https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/debates/is-the-foundation-of-morality-natural-or-supernatural-the-craig-harris-deba/) accessed 19 August  2022.

[4] The implicit method here is described in Richard Joyce’s “Theistic Ethics and the Euthyphro Dilemma,” Journal of Religious Ethics 30 (2002): 68-69;”

[5] Richard Joyce, “Mackie’s Arguments for an Error Theory,” Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (available at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/moral-error-theory.html, accessed 20/4/17).

[6] Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 11

[7] This argument is adapted from C. Stephen Layman’s “God and the Moral Order” Faith and Philosophy, 23 (2006): 306- 307

[8] This example comes from Michael Smith’s The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing 1994) 6

[9] This example comes from C Stephen Layman’s “A Moral Argument for The Existence of God” Is Goodness without God Good Enough: A Debate on Faith, Secularism and Ethics eds Robert K Garcia and Nathan L King (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008) 53-54

[10] John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, chapter 5 available at https://www.utilitarianism.com/mill5.htm accessed 23 August 2022

[11] Robert M. Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 238.

Mailbag: The Best Argument for Now? A Question about the Abductive Moral Argument

James writes:

In Good God, and God & Cosmos, Baggett and Walls argue that William Lane Craig’s deductive argument for morality isn't as persuasive to intellectual atheists, and that abductive arguments are preferred because they are more persuasive to unbelievers as they avoid the problems with the atheological premise of the Deductive Argument. However, what if the atheist were to ask, "Do you mean that's the best argument FOR NOW, or is it possible that there could be a better explanation than your best explanation down the road?" Granted, this objection would be an argumentum ignorantium, but for the Abductivist himself has conceded that his own argument wasn't designed to provide certainty, so how can the Abductivist answer this objection without begging the question that his current explanation is the best explanation, and will ALWAYS be the best explanation?

For the record, I like both arguments. I, however, use the deductive argument more frequently because I haven't been able to have a quality conversation with an unbeliever for any longer than 5 minutes since the 2016 election LOL

In Christ, 

James A., PhD

---

Hi James,

Thanks for your e-mail to MoralApologetics. This is Dave Baggett, co-author of God and Cosmos & Good God. You note that in those books we issue a critical verdict on WLC's deductive moral argument. This is true. And that we talk about how abduction can avoid the atheological premise of the deductive variant. Yes. Then you write, what if the atheist were to ask, "Do you mean that's the best argument FOR NOW, or is it that there could be a better explanation than your best explanation down the road?" 

Yeah, I think this is a good question. The nature of abduction seems to leave open the possibility of a better explanation. If we're talking about the BEST explanation, a certain tentativeness seems built in. Otherwise we’d talk of the “best possible explanation,” which some students seem to think abduction means, before I point out that it’s not. If a better explanation comes along, it could unseat the current winner. That seems right.

Of course I can't imagine what that would be in the case of accounting for moral facts. Naturalistic accounts just seem inherently limited, axiarchic approaches seem deficient, pantheistic and panentheistic accounts seem wrongheaded, etc. So though it's theoretically possible there could be a better explanation, it's awfully hard to imagine what it would or could be. It's also the case that our analysis is predicated on Anselmianism, which literally involves a being than whom none greater can be conceived—which makes it all the harder to top when it comes to explanatory potential! 🙂

All that said, I've laid off criticizing Craig's approach in recent years. He and I co-taught a class on the moral argument at Houston Baptist, and I found that our approaches deeply dovetailed at so many points that the number of disagreements in approach seemed small by comparison. And we now have a contract with Baker Academic to write a book together on the subject, one in which we'll be mainly talking about the resonances of our perspectives, not any remaining differences, at least for the most part. (By the way, it was hearing Craig give an argument for the historicity of the resurrection in abductive terms years ago that most inspired me to go that route.)

I've also realized in recent years that talk of "best explanation" is awfully ambitious. I usually rest content with speaking of a robust account, or powerful account, or even adequate account.
Of course, all of this pertains to the matter of how best to couch the moral argument. As long as folks are intelligently pushing the moral argument, which can come in deductive, inductive, abductive, or even other forms (like Evans' Reformed-sounding "natural signs" approach)—or even embodying it by the life they live like Fred Rogers did—I'm happy to hear it and rejoice these important truths are being accentuated one way or another. (The fun aspect of inductive variants is distinguishing between what Swinburne calls P- and C-inductive arguments here: does the moral evidence increase the evidence for theism just a bit, or enough to make it more likely than not?)

Bottom line: What's really great is God himself, not any particular discursive analysis. Proponents of various stripes of the moral argument agree on a whole lot more than they might disagree on, and it’s vital we not lose the proverbial forest for the trees.

I've also seen, at the same time, that a helpful feature of abduction is that, when dealing with an individual, we don't have to take on every potential theory out there. We can just focus on contrasting a theist picture with the picture of morality that our interlocutor provides. This helps delimit the conversation and not have to do more than is practicable in a conversation or two. The ultimate aspirations of abduction when it comes to so heady a topic as ours is a human quest spanning generations to which any of us at most contributes but one voice. 

By the way, I’ve started reading a great book—McCain and Poston’s Best Explanations: New Essays on Inference to the Best Explanation. Highly recommended.
Every best wish in your work; thanks for the note.

Blessings,

Dave

Can Forgiveness Make Sense? (Part 2)

Author’s Note: This paper was written for and initially presented at the first annual symposium of the Society for Women of Letters (June 2022, Asheville, NC).

The Lord’s Prayer as Model and Means of Forgiveness

The Lord’s Prayer is the model that Christ offered his disciples when they asked for his instruction on how to pray. Wesley Hill’s primer on the prayer offers a helpful rundown of how the church has historically understood its import, and most of my discussion that follows is informed by that book.[1] The prayer consists of six petitions (or seven, depending on how the final section is handled). The opening three petitions center on God’s character and reign, and the others turn to the human condition, invoking God’s aid for what ails us. It’s a rich prayer, with quite a bit to unpack. But I want to focus primarily on how the full context can help us better appreciate and practice the difficult art of forgiveness.

Needy Creatures

We’ll start with the second half, the petitions aimed at the human condition. There we find Jesus acknowledging our agonizing need: our need for sustenance, both physical and spiritual; our need for grace, protection, and rescue. Regular recitation of this prayer, Hill explains, trains us to rightly envision our plight, as utterly dependent on God’s provision. Not just in the past as though God winds us up and leaves us to our own devices, but moment by moment, “this day,” we are sustained by God’s provision. What an antidote to the self-reliance enshrined in our contemporary American culture.

This reminder of who we are as God’s creatures is also a comfort as we consider the prayer’s appeal for forgiveness and deliverance from evil. Human beings are all in the same boat, we find—all, victims and victimizers alike, buoyed up only by God’s allowance. All of us are in dire need of saving from the sin that surrounds and infects us, the sin that’s “more pervasive and intractable than individual peccadilloes or improvable behaviors,” to use Hill’s language.[2] These petitions of The Lord’s Prayer strike at the very root of human corruption, the lie that tells us we are our own, that we can do as we please, and are unaccountable to anyone else. And most importantly for our purposes, the lie that the evil perpetuated against us cannot find refuge in our own hearts.

This is not to suggest a moral equivalence between large infractions and small. That bit of received wisdom often hampers our attempts at forgiveness, either asking us to minimize harm done to us or overestimating the harm we ourselves have done to others. As Cornelius Plantinga explains, “All sin is equally wrong, but not all sin is equally bad.”[3] He continues, “The badness or seriousness of sin depends to some degree on the amount and kind of damage it inflicts, including damage to the sinner, and to some degree on the personal investment and motive of the sinner.”[4]

If anything, The Lord’s Prayer is realistic about the nature and extent of sin in this world and the damage it does to God’s creation. Petition VII puts a face on the evil one who seeks to devour us, infiltrating and enlisting those who give themselves over to his service. “What we need to be rescued from,” Hill says, “isn’t just the devices and desires of our wayward hearts, as real and dangerous as those are, but also the malevolence of a personal being bent on our suffering.”[5] The temptation to revenge, as gratifying as it may feel, is to turn ourselves over to that destruction. Marilyn Adams explains, “To return horror for horror does not erase but doubles the individual’s participation in horrors—first as victim, then as the one whose injury occasions another’s prima facie ruin.”[6]

In Stump’s essay that I referenced earlier, she provides some language to help us think through these gradations of guilt. There she catalogues, on a sliding scale, the damaging effects sin has on the perpetrator him or herself, to include defects to the person’s psyche, memory, and empathic capacities, and sin’s harmful and unjust consequences in the world, whether resulting from the wrongdoer’s action or inaction.

Who God Is

These details matter to the one wrestling with forgiveness. A naïve understanding that jumps quickly to reconciliation can easily leave open the door for yet more harm, to both parties. It is not good either to sin or to be sinned against. The Lord’s Prayer dispels such naivety by virtue of its portrait of God, a loving Father who invites us into holy and flourishing fellowship with him. A world infected by sin and human corruption is incompatible with the promise we have in this prayer of God’s kingdom to come and his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Whatever forgiveness is, we can be sure that it is part and parcel of the resounding victory of the prayer’s final lines: God’s kingdom, power, and glory ultimately transcend and defeat whatever now is currently arrayed against them. This is the truth that The Lord’s Prayer opens our eyes up to, and the vision that enables us to enter into the spirit and process of forgiveness, trusting no less than God himself to bring it to completion. What Weisenthal could not be, as stand-in for the Jews that the Nazi soldier harmed, Christ himself can fulfill—both as the one to bear the harm done and the one to offer the ultimate absolution.

Prayer joins us in this process. It is a rebellion, as David Wells describes it, “against the world in its fallenness, the absolute and undying refusal to accept as normal what is pervasively abnormal.”[7] The Lord’s Prayer, then, is a clear-eyed, realistic assessment of our current status against the backdrop of what should—and ultimately what will—be, given God’s nature. Hill explains, “When we pray, ‘Your will be done, on earth as in heaven,’ we are aware of how God’s will is not being done in our world. We are asking God to overcome this contradiction, to act in such a way that life on earth increasingly resembles the peaceable and joyous life of God, of heaven.”[8]

Like the Persistent Widow in Jesus’ parable, when we fully embrace The Lord’s Prayer, we refuse “every agenda, every scheme, every interpretation that is at odds with the norm as originally established by God.”[9] We confess, along with Volf, that we cannot forgive on our own steam but that on Christ’s we can and should. We affirm that God’s kingdom is victorious over any and all attacks upon it, including the ones where we have found ourselves in the line of a perpetrator’s fire. Although this affirmation takes the form of a petition in The Lord’s Prayer, it’s functioning more as an alignment, of our purposes and spirit with God’s. Through recitation of the prayer, Hill says, we are “stretching our hearts so that we may learn to desire truer, greater realities.”[10]

This greater reality is our ultimate promise: deliverance from oppression, healing, and restoration from the disfiguration caused by sin and death.[11] Healing both for harm we have done and harm done to us. It is out of God’s character that his plan for salvation, his deliverance from guilt and the death and damage of sin in all of its instantiations, comes. And this is God’s plan, The Lord’s Prayer tells us, that is already underway and available for us right here and now, even if it is not yet fully realized. Only a God who has entered in to our suffering, who has taken on human flesh and dwelt among us can provide that remedy.

Christ as Our Deliverer

In Jesus Christ, God’s own son, we find all the resources that potential forgivers need. Christ is everywhere present in The Lord’s Prayer, both as the one inviting us into fellowship and as the very bridge we walk across to approach God’s throne. Christ is also the means by which God’s will is enacted in this world, the way the curse that we labor under is reversed, how our crisis of forgiveness is resolved. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ cries out to his Abba, Father, asking that the cup of suffering and death he is about to drink be passed from him. Even still, in an agonizing act of obedience and an illuminating echo of The Lord’s Prayer, Jesus declares, “Thy will be done.”

This divine action is the paradoxical linchpin of our faith and what ultimately makes sense of forgiveness’ counterintuitive demands. Hill explains it this way:

It’s clear to us that the will of God in heaven is the perfect, eternal love of Father, Son, and Spirit, unmarred by any suffering or dying. What is less intuitive—but what Gethsemane and, later, Calvary force us to notice—is that the will of God is also the way of the incarnate Lord into the far country of our suffering and dying, where he is mocked, spit upon, strung up, and left to suffocate. That is what it looks like for the will of God to be done on earth as it is in heaven because that is the only way our earth can be saved.[12]

Our forgiveness—whether enacted or received by us—our ability to heal and be healed, rests alone on the work of Christ on the cross. And that is the promise we must cling to as we undertake our own hard work of forgiveness. There’s a suffering involved in that process, to be sure, but we can know that that suffering is not in vain. Hill again: “God must also be at work in suffering, in darkness, in torment, because only if God confronts the horror we’ve made of the world, bears it, and bears it away can the triumph of God’s love be assured.”[13]

But let me not leave you with a promise of suffering. I recognize that’s not much of a comfort. My intention instead is to leave you with a word of hope, to help us fix in our minds the beautiful reality that lies on the other side of our earthly travails. Recently, I had the opportunity to hear N. T. Wright speak at Lanier Library in Houston, with a message that draws together the various threads of my argument and underscores the hope we have in our struggles to forgive. Turning to Romans 8, Wright highlighted how our own times of trial, our own Gethsemane moments—when we, like Christ, call out to our Abba, Father (Romans 8:15)—these are the precise places in which we can perceive, and even participate in, the divine life of God himself.

Those who have faced a crisis of forgiveness will certainly resonate with Paul’s acknowledgment that we often do not know how we are to pray. In trying to forgive painful hurts, we struggle to understand how justice can be achieved or why mercy must be extended. In that moment, Paul affirms, we can be sure that “the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans too deep for words” (Romans 8:26). This co-laboring with God in our prayers of deep sorrow is the backdrop for the glorious assurance of Romans 8:28, a verse that Wright translates in this clarifying way: "God works all things towards ultimate good with and through those who love him.”[14] That’s true for our crises of forgiveness. Lament in the face of our overwhelming challenges, the times when we most keenly feel our frailty and most desperately need deliverance, is the very seedbed of the hope we cry out for.[15]

The Lord’s Prayer is really a lifeline to that hope, which will not disappoint. It’s a promise bigger than we can even imagine, although Jesus invites us to try. The petitions of The Lord’s Prayer, when we enter fully into its mindset, we recognize as pointers, pointers to the life we are made for and that God longs to welcome us into. As Hill explains, “This is what the final praise in the Lord’s Prayer means to direct us toward: there is coming a time when we will have no more need to ask God for bread, for absolution, or for rescue. All of our tears will have been wiped away, death will have been finally defeated, and the earth and its people will be at peace and thriving.”[16] And that is a promise we can cling to, a story big enough to house justice and mercy, and a power strong enough to fuel our will to forgive.

[1] Wesley Hill, The Lord’s Prayer: A Guide to Praying to Our Father (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2019).

[2] Ibid., 61.

[3] Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 21.

[4] Ibid., 22.

[5] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 82.

[6] Marilyn Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2000),

[7] David Wells, “Prayer: Rebelling Against the Status Quo,” Summit Christian Fellowship, June 17, 2020, accessed May 29, 2022, https://summit-christian.org/blog/2020/06/17/prayer-rebelling-against-the-status-quo.

[8] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 42.

[9] Wells.

[10] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 45.

[11] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 34-35.

[12] Wesley Hill, “Praying the Lord’s Prayer in Gethsemane,” First Things, April 2, 2015, accessed May 29, 2022, https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2015/04/praying-the-lords-prayer-in-gethsemane.

[13] Ibid.

[14] You can find this translation in Wright’s God and the Pandemic (Zondervan, 2020). Glenn Packiam’s review of the book (found here: https://www.glennpackiam.com/post/n-t-wright-on-god-and-the-pandemic) also includes it.

[15] I’d love to claim credit for this phrasing, but it was all N. T. Wright. “Lament is the seedbed of hope” is a line from his talk that will stick with me for some time to come.

[16] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 94.

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Marybeth Baggett is professor of English and Cultural Apologetics at Houston Baptist University. She earned her PhD in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and — along with her husband— recently has published Telling Tales: Intimations of the Sacred in Popular Culture (Moral Apologetics Press, 2021).

Can Forgiveness Make Sense? (Part 1)

Author’s Note: This paper was written for and initially presented at the first annual symposium of the Society for Women of Letters (June 2022, Asheville, NC).

The Sunflower

Simon Wiesenthal is a Holocaust survivor renowned for his role in tracking down and bringing to justice fugitive Nazis who fled at the close of World War II. While still a prisoner, Wiesenthal was one day brought to the room of a dying SS member at the Nazi’s request. The soldier wanted to unburden himself of his guilty conscience and find absolution before his imminent demise. To that end, he hoped that Wiesenthal would serve as a stand-in for the specific Jews that he had directly harmed. Forgiveness from him, the logic went, would release the Nazi from his guilt and bring him much-needed peace.

Wiesenthal chronicles this encounter in his 1969 book The Sunflower, and his account is worth reading in its entirety, including the symposium that makes up the second half of the book. It’s difficult for me to convey either the brutality of the atrocities that the Nazi describes or the pathos of his confession. Wiesenthal does so masterfully and, importantly, the author contextualizes that deathbed scene within his own day-to-day horrors of life in the concentration camp. As we well know and as the book vividly reminds us, the Nazi’s confession is a mere drop in the bucket of the hell that Hitler’s forces unleashed on those the German fascists deemed undesirable.

The book’s title refers to the sunflowers planted on the graves of Nazi soldiers to honor them, a ghastly tableau that Wiesenthal could see across the way from the camp. That tribute was a painful contrast to the indignities heaped on the many deaths that daily surrounded Wiesenthal and his fellow prisoners, and this uncanny sense of shared humanity across a gulf of inhumane difference pervades the exchange between Wiesenthal and the dying Nazi.

That meeting also upended the given power dynamic of the Third Reich: the Nazi sought something from the Jew that could not be coerced. Forgiveness would be either freely given or withheld. While the SS man disclosed his secrets, Wiesenthal grappled with how to respond: “He sought my pity, but had he any right to pity? Did a man of this kind deserve anybody’s pity?”[1] It’s clear from the exchange that the Nazi has in fact repented and fully realized his need for the peace that comes only through forgiveness. But was that enough for Wiesenthal to bestow it upon him? And what difference would forgiveness make since, as Wiesenthal notes, “[h]e was confessing his crime to a man who perhaps tomorrow must die at the hands of these same murderers.”[2]

Ultimately, Wiesenthal could not bring himself to share words of forgiveness, leaving instead without opening his mouth. The decision was almost instinctual, involuntary, and it haunted Wiesenthal for many years. He sought counsel from others when he returned to the camp, hoping they might be able to explain and perhaps even justify his visceral rejection of the dying man’s pleas. As the years wore on, he wondered if his response was, in fact, cruel. Out of this mystery and Wiesenthal’s inability to solve it, even a quarter of a century later, came this question, which he posed to notable public figures to solicit their responses: “You,” he asks, “who have just read this sad and tragic episode in my life, can mentally change places with me and ask yourself the crucial question, ‘What would I have done?’”[3]

The Dilemma of Forgiveness

The fifty-three responses that came in were all over the map, though most (thirty four in the expanded edition) argued that Wiesenthal was right not to forgive. Only ten posited that forgiveness was necessary. The other nine were uncertain. Harshest among the denials was Jewish-American writer Cynthia Ozick who condemned the Nazi, seeing even his confession as manipulation and abuse of power. “Let the SS man die unshriven,” she exclaimed. “Let him go to hell.”[4] On the other side, South African bishop Desmond Tutu put a pragmatic spin on his Christian response: “It is clear that if we look only to retributive justice, then we could just as well close up shop. Forgiveness is not some nebulous thing. It is practical politics. Without forgiveness, there is no future.”[5]

Most of us will never be in the position of either the SS officer or the Holocaust survivor, neither needing to be forgiven for such unthinkably heinous wrongs nor needing to forgive such large-scale, unimaginable atrocities inflicted upon us or upon those we love. Nonetheless, reflecting on the extreme case of guilt and injustice that Wiesenthal’s story presents and the crisis of forgiveness it evokes is still worthwhile, doubly so for those of us who claim Christianity since forgiveness is deep down at the very root of our faith.

To begin, let’s think a bit about the impulses behind the different responses to Wiesenthal’s question. Reading them, one realizes the richness of this topic and the complexity of the question that he poses. His respondents dig into the nooks and crannies of what forgiveness is, they search out what it requires, consider the implications of forgiveness or its denial, and weigh the psychological struggle involved. Even if you already have a strong sense about which response is right, I’d encourage you to withhold judgment, just for now, and sit a while with the tension. In Exclusion and Embrace, theologian Miroslav Volf brings to bear the terms of the gospel to the weighty questions of alienation and injustice. Volf’s own history as a Croatian living through the Balkan warfare of the late twentieth century informs his reflections and prevents him from regurgitating simple answers.

Volf’s preface well captures the tension that I’m asking you to consider. The book, he says there, was prompted by a question that Jürgen Moltmann asked him after a talk he gave arguing that we have a moral obligation to embrace our enemies. Could Volf embrace a četnik, one of the Serbian fighters who had so thoroughly ravaged his country and its people? To put the question on Wiesenthal’s terms, could Volf muster fellow human feelings sufficient to forgive one who had done him and those close to him such harm?

“No, I cannot,” Volf finally answered, “but as a follower of Christ I think I should be able to.”[6]

While writing Exclusion and Embrace in an attempt to work out this struggle, Volf confesses, “My thought was pulled in two different directions by the blood of the innocent crying out to God and by the blood of God’s Lamb offered for the guilty.”[7] Herein lies the tension: “How does one remain loyal both to the demand of the oppressed for justice and to the gift of forgiveness that the Crucified offered to the perpetrators?”[8] To opt for one felt a betrayal of the other, either to further disenfranchise the already oppressed or to disavow his faith. Even worse, the longer Volf sat with the tension, the more it seemed that God was at odds with himself, at once delivering the needy and restoring the wrongdoer. Just what kind of toxic, dysfunctional family is God trying to make?

Can these two apparently irreconcilable divine actions somehow align? Surely the God who loves the wronged party also loves the one who hurt him, but mustn’t love of one require punishment of the other? Many of our doubts about the demands of forgiveness stem from our own psychological and imaginative limitations, which makes one wonder whether a rational case for our obligation to forgive matters if it’s simply impracticable for us to carry out.

Scripture’s Mandate

And yet scripture calls us time and again to forgiveness, even going as far as to bind our own forgiveness to the forgiveness we offer others. We see this link explicitly articulated in the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant in Matthew 18 and in The Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13, Luke 11:2-4). “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us,” so the fifth petition of the prayer goes. As C. S. Lewis explains in his classic Mere Christianity, “There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven.”[9]

A world without forgiveness, as Bishop Tutu noted, is unimaginable. This side of Eden, sin—and the death it entails—sadly is a persistent presence, at least that’s the case while we wait for God’s kingdom to reach its crescendo and bring to consummation the victory Christ inaugurated on the cross. Ever since Cain, human beings harm each other daily—in big and small ways. Lamech’s attitude to such mistreatment that we find in Genesis 4 makes a certain kind of sense: “I have killed a man for wounding me,” Lamech boasts to his wives. “[A] young man for striking me. If Cain’s revenge is sevenfold, then Lamech’s is seventy-sevenfold.”[10] On human terms, payback for wrongs is logical, necessary even. But who wants to live in a vortex of infinite vengeance, bound forever to lex talionis?

By contrast Jesus’ vision of unlimited forgiveness laid out in Matthew 18—seventy times seven—sure seems more appealing. But might it also feel, at least for some, like a burden, even for far more commonplace hurts than Wiesenthal experienced? Wouldn’t boundless forgiveness simply invite yet more harm? Wouldn’t unending grace exacerbate power imbalances and force the already exploited into deeper levels of oppression?

I confess that this is the burden I personally carried when I came up against my own crisis of forgiveness some years back. Someone I counted as a close friend had thoroughly betrayed me. To use Lewis Smedes’ rubric of the difficult cases of forgiveness, the hurt this person caused me was three-fold: personal, unfair, and deep.[11] No easy Band-aid could fix the problem. Compounding the suffering I endured in the wake of that betrayal was the support my friend garnered from mutual acquaintances who saw my grief and withdrawal from the relationship as the fruit of bitterness and a failure to forgive. The next few years proved a crucible for my faith as, much like Volf, I had to grapple existentially with the dilemma of forgiveness noted above. I didn’t have many resources to help and certainly could have used Smedes’ book, Forgive and Forget, as well as others I’ve more recently found. Instead, voices that flattened out forgiveness—seeing it as either anathema or a piece of cake—only made that process more difficult. Smedes frames the challenge this way: “Forgiving is love’s toughest work, and love’s biggest risk. If you twist it into something it was never meant to be, it can make you a doormat or an insufferable manipulator.”[12]

Love and Forgiveness

Sometimes a word can obscure the complexity of the reality behind it, and my personal experience tells me that’s often the case with forgiveness. I’m drawing my definition of forgiveness from an essay by philosopher Eleonore Stump, where she says forgiveness is an entailment of love, a human obligation.[13] Love, according to Aquinas, is two-fold: (1) a desire for the good of the other and (2) a desire for union with the other. Because these desires are located only within the person harmed, they can be accomplished without any action on the wrongdoer’s part. But Stump is quick to note that desire alone is not sufficient for the realization of the other’s good or for actual union with him or her. Another human agent is involved, and that person’s will and external circumstances may prevent those desires from coming to fruition. It is not good, for example, for either party to remain in a position that gives license for bad behavior to anyone involved. For that reason, forgiveness and reconciliation can, indeed, come apart. Ignoring this distinction is one of many ways that the concept of forgiveness can be watered down.

Before we turn to some more theological considerations, consider first some useful insights Smedes offers in his practical guide to forgiveness. First of all, Smedes emphasizes that forgiveness is a process, at least that’s the case for forgiveness of people who caused us personal, unfair, and deep hurt. Entering into that process requires uncompromising honesty. We cannot forgive harm that we do not acknowledge. As Smedes explains, “There is no real forgiving unless there is first relentless exposure and honest judgment. When we forgive evil we do not excuse it, we do not tolerate it, we do not smother it. We look evil full in the face, call it what it is, let its horror shock and stun and enrage us, and only then do we forgive it.”[14]

Smedes also acknowledges that forgiveness sometimes involves specialized cases—forgiving people who have died, for example. Life’s vagaries and vicissitudes preclude any one-size-fits-all approach that we might try to impose. The road to forgiveness, we find when we embark upon it, is unique to the harm done and to our current conditions. That is not to say we are thus on our own. We can certainly find solace and guidance in the testimony of others who have traveled their own paths of forgiveness, and his use of such stories is one of the best features of Smedes’ book.

When we undergo a crisis of forgiveness, it’s important then whose voices we listen to because of the many pitfalls that lie on that road. Even Christian voices, as previously noted, can sometimes unwittingly make the task of forgiveness much harder by thinning the concept out. I suggest that we see shades of this diminishment whenever the fifth petition of The Lord’s Prayer is isolated from its broader context and—intentionally or not—when it is launched as an accusation toward those who have been harmed. For all the reasons noted above, we need a bigger story of justice and mercy, one that reveals their inextricable link. We find that story in the full context of The Lord’s Prayer, through its bracing description of the human condition, its astonishing portrayal of the God who longs to liberate us, and its audacious plan for our salvation.

[1] Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, Revised and Expanded ed. (New York: Schocken, 1997), 52.

[2] Ibid., 53.

[3] Ibid., 98.

[4] Ibid., 220.

[5] Ibid., 268.

[6] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996), 9.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Revised and amplified ed. (New York: Harper, 2001), 116.

[10] Unless otherwise noted, all biblical passages referenced are in the English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001) biblegateway.com, accessed May 29, 2022.

[11] Lewis Smedes, Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve (New York: HarperOne, 1996).

[12] Ibid., xvi.

[13] Eleonore Stump, “The Sunflower: Guilt, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation,” in Forgiveness and Its Moral Dimensions, ed. Brandon Warmke, Dana Kay Nelkin, and Michael McKenna (New York: Oxford UP, 2021), 172-196.

[14] Smedes, 79.

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Marybeth Baggett (associate editor) is professor of English and Cultural Apologetics at Houston Baptist University. She earned her PhD in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and — along with her husband— recently has published Telling Tales: Intimations of the Sacred in Popular Culture (Moral Apologetics Press, 2021).

Mailbag: What about the Cudworth Objection?

Question:

I am writing to you because I am currently working on an article that is critical of certain versions of the moral argument and I am researching the work that you have done on the topic. I have read both Good God and God and Cosmos. Recently, as I was reviewing your arguments concerning moral obligation, I was re-reading a passage from chapter 9 of God and Cosmos, specifically the section titled, "Moral Obligations." What caught my attention is something that you say on p. 289: "[God's] commands would furnish powerful new reasons or performing various acts." 

I hope that you might have time to consider and respond to a couple of questions about what you say here. The focus of my article is precisely on the question of whether God's commands can provide us with additional reasons. My view, roughly, is that divine commands provide additional reasons only when there is an antecedent obligation to obey God. In the absence of such an antecedent obligation, divine commands are normatively impotent (i.e., they add nothing to our reasons to engage in any action). My question is this: Do you agree that God's commands provide additional reasons only given the existence of such a prior obligation or do you think that God's commands can provide such reasons without such a prior obligation? If the latter, do you have an argument for the conclusion that God's commands can provide additional reasons in the absence of any prior obligation to obey God (and have you provided such an argument in any of your published works?). 
Please forgive me if you have addressed these questions in your books or other writings. I have tried to track down answers, but I have not found anything that directly addresses these questions. If I have missed something, I sincerely apologize.

Thank you very much for you time,

Jason

 Answer:

Hi Jason! Thanks for the note. Hope you are well. I'll offer what I have, which isn't much!

What a fun project you're working on. Appreciate the question, and it's an important one, I think. I suspect the answer to your question is "yes," that DCT provides new reasons iff we're antecedently obligated to obey God. The question then boils down to why whether we're obligated to obey God and, if so, why. This is the "prior obligations objection," and it's a thorny challenge, I think. We first discussed it a bit on pp. 122-123 of Good God, though not by name. There we took up the question of God's authority--does he have the authority to give us binding commands? And we try tying our answer to his great-making properties. That was at least our first go trying to address what we considered the crux of the issue. 

In a later book that my wife and I wrote together called The Morals of the Story, we discuss it at a bit more length, though still altogether too briefly. Here we discuss it explicitly by name, on pages 147-149. The objection is tied to Cudworth historically, so sometimes gets dubbed the "Cudworth objection." At any rate, we mention what Jer and I said about it in Good God, but also discuss a half dozen possible solutions to the puzzle that Evans provides in God and Moral Obligation. We don't really discuss them at length as much as point readers to take a look at what he says on pages 98-101 of his book. We also mention Hare's solution echoing Scotus and Pufendorf that you can find on p. 58 of God's Command.

'm sure there's quite a bit more to say about this important objection, but so far those are the only places I've addressed it. I'm inclined to think that if we can answer the question of God's authority well, it will address the matter. Although Evans made mention of the possibility of bootstrapping, most worry that there's something circular to punting to God's command to account for the authority of God's command--even though God does tell us to obey him. I'm left wanting more, and understand others who do as well. So far I've rested somewhat content with the sketch of an answer provided by the considerations Evans, Hare, and Jer and I have offered, but as I say I'm sure quite a bit more can and should be said.

The reason I retain such openness to DCT is not because I think it's the only possible way to ground ethics in God, but just because, honestly, it strikes me as intuitive that God would be the one able to issue authoritative commands owing to who he is and who we are as creatures, and because the objections to it I've heard usually strike me as admitting to a solution. So it's never seemed an obviously bad theory to me, although I'm more strongly committed to a dependence relation of morality on God in one way or another than specifically this way. Regarding this objection, if bootstrapping isn't enough, as I suspect it isn't, it would show that a key foundational principle on which DCT is predicated is an obligation not attributable to DCT. But since I don't think that all moral realities are grounded in DCT, this doesn't bother me too much. Maybe it should bother me more than it does, but at least I console myself by the reminder that other moral theories, at their root, encounter a similar challenge. For example, the utilitarian is confronted with the question, Why maximize utility? Appealing to the maximization of utility doesn't help much. It makes some amount of sense, to me anyway, that so foundational a grounding principle might have a slightly different moral rationale than the rest of the theory. And if, for the DCT'ist, it comes down to something as foundational as good moral reasons, and even an obligation, to obey our Creator who loves us, is perfect, who desires our well-being, etc., then I feel like we're on the right track. 

As I say, I have tended to divide the two questions you're tying together, though I can see why you think them intimately connected: does God have authority to issue us binding commands, and does DCT offer us distinctive ("powerful new") reasons to perform various acts. I find that explicit connection intriguing, and wondering if there's something new you're pointing out there or if there are just two conceptually distinct questions here.

Blessings in your work! I look forward to what you come up with.

Best,

Dave

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Think About It!

What is theistic moral apologetics, what is its aim, what is its rationale, how does it work, and how does it fit into the broader field of Christian apologetics and metaethics? I take moral apologetics in the following way.

1. Contemporary theistic moral apologetics is a specialized field in the broader field of Christian apologetics that seeks to work within, to draw from and contribute to the broader field of theistic metaethics. Metaethics, broadly considered, is understood to be the critical and comparative theory of various ethical systems. It is theory of theory and is understood as a 2nd order[1] discipline in the field of ethical theory and is a relatively modern development in the field of ethical thinking. Theistic meta-ethics is a God-centered metaethics.

2. Theistic moral apologetics seeks to critically engage non-theistic metaethical thinkers of all persuasions on all fronts at the level of technical philosophy. These thinkers might be historical and/or contemporary thinkers. This engagement typically requires answering standard objections that are often leveled against theistic metaethics as well as developing some version or element of the moral argument for the existence of God in the context of such critical engagement. This would typically be considered a venture in natural theology.

3. Theistic moral apologetics seeks also to critically engage 1st order ethical disputes by making explicit and laying bare the moral and metaphysical assumptions that are often unstated in such disputes and developing a reasoned case for a theistic ethical and metaphysical perspective concerning such disputes if such a reasoned case is relevant.

4. Christian Theistic moral apologetics also seeks to develop a distinctively Trinitarian and Christ-centered metaethical way of understanding things. Such work takes the Christian apologist beyond a generalized theism to a distinctively Christian metaethical theism. This should involve…

   1. Working deliberately from the historical events of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ with the clear understanding that Christianity never reduces to a mere system of morality.

   2. Working deliberately from the revelation of God in the Scriptures.

   3. Engaging and thoroughly thinking through Christian ethical issues and questions that are unique to the believing Christian and Christian community.

   4. Engaging and thoroughly thinking through the various distinctive areas of Christian ethical practice both within the church and within the world in which the church is situated.

These tasks should be undertaken at two distinct but related levels. First, they should be developed at the level of technical philosophy and theology, as required, and secondly, they should be developed at the non-technical lay level. This second level involves taking the complex things of the first level and making them accessible for a lay audience.

Natural Theology and Christian Apologetics 

Natural theology and Christian apologetics are related but nevertheless distinct enterprises.[2] While natural theology arguably reaches all the way back to ancient Greek philosophy[3] and embraces a wider range of theological positions than traditional theism, Christian apologetics must trace its origins and purposes back to the beginnings of the person of Jesus Christ. Apologetics necessarily involves the defense of the veracity of the message and meaning of Jesus and the content of the Christian faith.[4] Theistic moral apologetics, although part of natural theology, is not necessarily distinctively Christian. It can certainly serve as an important step towards a distinctively Christian theism, but it deliberately limits its arguments to Theism proper.

This limit provides certain polemical advantages. As a part of natural theology the argument boasts a wide umbrella and could be endorsed by any theist whatsoever whether they are Jewish, Islamic,[5] even non-religious or non-traditional theists. In this respect the moral argument for God’s existence is broader than Christian theism and can be appropriated by a much larger audience. This makes the argument much more versatile and serviceable across the various areas of philosophy, metaethics, and various other disciplines. As such it can be pitted readily against various versions of atheism. It is versatile in that it can be joined with other arguments for God’s existence to generate a much stronger overall cumulative case for Theism. This also gives the argument a much wider applicability.[6] In any area wherein human moral concerns are central the moral argument for God’s existence is relevant; for example, in the various human sciences, as well as the field of political and economic philosophy. The argument fits well with questions involving the nature and basis for law and justice, or the basis for human rights, or endorsing human dignity, or our understanding of aesthetics and beauty, religious experience, and even engaging in the rough and tumble of the practice of politics and economics as well.

The moral argument, if successful, also fills in a considerable amount of detail concerning who God is and the kind of God the argument might endorse. A too vaguely thin Theism will not suffice for the moral argument. The thicker character and being of God that the argument leads to is strongly relevant to the whole content and nature of the human moral domain in which our lives and experience is immersed. Furthermore, given the intense debates concerning the moral order and the moral nature of humanity, it would be unconscionable that Christian philosophers would not challenge the current various secularist moral systems of our time as well as abandon our duty to guard fidelity, the content of the faith, and the pastoral responsibilities that are a regular and ongoing part of the life of the church in the world.

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[1] The distinction between 1st order and 2nd order moral theorizing is a common but important distinction in metaethics. The focus of a 1st order moral proposition is the question, what is moral? An example of a 1st order ethical/moral/normative truth would be that murder is wrong; it is immoral to murder, it is moral to refrain from murder. 2nd order metaethics focuses on the question of the nature of morality itself; what morality itself is and not particularly on the content of 1st order moral truths. Typically, metaethics concerns questions of moral ontology (the nature of morality), moral epistemology (knowledge of moral truths), moral language (the meaning of moral terms), and a cluster of related questions like the connection between morality and rationality, or morality and motivation.

[2] For useful overviews of the history and concepts of natural theology, see Russell Re Manning, John Hedley Brooke, and Fraser N. Watts, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013); James Brent, “Natural Theology,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, n.d., accessed September 11, 2021, https://iep.utm.edu/theo-nat/; Andrew Chignell and Derk Pereboom, “Natural Theology and Natural Religion,” ed. Edward N Zalta, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford, CA, Fall 2020), accessed September 11, 2021, URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/natural-theology/>; also see Charles Taliaferro, “The Project of Natural Theology,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, ed. William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 1–23. C. P. Ruloff and Peter Horban, eds., Contemporary Arguments in Natural Theology: God and Rational Belief (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).

[3] Werner Jaeger, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers: The Gifford Lectures, 1936, trans. Edward S Robinson (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003/1936).

[4] See Jude 3, where Jude exhorts Christians to “…contend earnestly for the faith once for all handed down to the saints” (NASB). For a good overview of the history of Christian apologetics see Benjamin K. Forrest, Joshua D. Chatraw, and Alister E. McGrath, eds., The History of Apologetics: A Biographical and Methodological Introduction (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Academic, 2020).

[5] Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2011). Reilly has shown that some of the elements of orthodox Islamic theology make it very difficult to square with a strong moral argument; particularly the tendency of reducing Allah to sheer divine will as well as a tendency, as a result of this, toward  impersonalism.

[6] For a very useful summary overview of the relation of the arguments concerning God and the moral order, see Anne Jeffrey, God and Morality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Peter Byrne and Stephen Evans, “Moral Arguments for the Existence of God,” ed. Edward N. Zalta, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford, CA: The Metaphysics Research Lab, Spring 2013).

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Sweeping Contingency Under the Rug (Part 4)

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A Response to the Speculative Notion that the Laws of Nature Might Be Necessary

First of all, it is interesting to note that Wielenberg seems to agree with theists that there must be a necessary foundation of some sort for the existence of objective moral principles and beliefs. For if something is necessary, then that provides the stability needed for morality to be objective as opposed to just a subjective accidental human construct. Theists argue that God provides such a necessary foundation whereas Wielenberg asks his readers to consider that the laws of nature may be necessary. He wrote that “[i]f there is no God but the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary, then the fact that there is no God to put in place just the right laws for moral knowledge to arise doesn’t make us any luckier to have moral knowledge than we would be if God did exist because the laws of nature couldn’t have been any different from what they are.”54 Whether one believes that God exists or not, it seems much easier to believe that, if He exists, then He exists necessarily, that is, easier than it is to believe that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary.  

Secondly, it is notoriously difficult to make the case that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary, as Wielenberg readily admits.55 But even if some laws of nature are metaphysically necessary, this would not mean that the evolutionary path that led to human beings was necessary. Therefore, Wielenberg had to go even further and speculate that the evolutionary process that led to the development of human beings may itself have been necessary in some sense. He summarized this possibility as follows:

These considerations are hardly decisive, but I think they do indicate that it is a mistake simply to assume that it is nomologically possible for us (or other beings) to have evolved to m-possess radically different moral principles than the ones we actually possess. For all we know, m-possessing the DDE [a particular moral principle] is an inevitable outcome of the evolutionary process that made us capable of forming moral judgments in the first place.56

Wielenberg is forced into this remarkable speculation because he realizes that if the evolutionary process which supposedly produced human beings was contingent, if it could have occurred differently, then our moral beliefs could have turned out to be vastly different as well. Charles Darwin himself noted that if our evolutionary path were more similar that of bees, then “there can hardly be a 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. Nevertheless, the bee, or any other social animal, would gain in our supposed case some feeling of right or wrong, or a conscience.”57

Wielenberg claimed that theists are not in a position to argue that the laws of nature, as well as the evolutionary path which produced human beings, could have been different based on the fact that we can easily imagine them as being different. He explained his concern as follows:

One might be tempted to argue that the fact that it is easy to imagine the laws of nature being different than they are is an indication of their metaphysical contingency. However, theists typically maintain that God’s existence is metaphysically necessary; yet it is easy to imagine the non-existence of God. Therefore, theists cannot consistently appeal to the conceivability of different laws of nature to support the metaphysical contingency of the actual laws of nature.58

He is correct; just because a person can think of other paths evolution could have taken does not mean that those paths are actually possible. On the other hand, the supposed evolutionary tree would seem to say that evolution not only could have, but in fact did sprout off in many different directions, leading to radically different organisms. Thus the only imagination required is to consider an evolutionary path that results in beings who develop cognitive faculties like ours but do not have similar moral beliefs. It is difficult to think of reasons why we should believe such paths are impossible.

What is more, Wielenberg himself seems to have regularly affirmed that human beings were produced by an evolutionary process that was contingent and accidental. He wrote that “evolutionary processes have endowed us with certain unalienable rights and duties. Evolution has given us these moral properties by giving us the non-moral properties that make such moral properties be instantiated. And if, as I believe, there is no God, then it is in some sense an accident that we have the moral properties that we do.”59 He also wrote that “contemporary atheists typically maintain that human beings are accidental, evolved, mortal, and relatively short-lived…”60 Realizing the implications of this statement, he explained in a footnote that ‘accidental’ should not be understood as a result of entirely random processes because “[a]ccording to contemporary evolutionary theory, evolutionary processes are not, contrary to popular mischaracterizations, entirely chance-driven. Rather, they are driven by a combination of chance and necessity; see Mayr 2001, 119-20.”61 It is important to note that Mayr actually stated that chance rules at the first step of evolution, with the production of variation through random mutation, and that determinism only comes in during the second step through non-random aspects of survival and reproduction based on a particular species’ fixed, or determined, environment.62 Thus, if evolution works as atheists claim, that it was driven by accidental random mutations (which Wielenberg affirms), as well as chance changes in the environment (the success or failure of other competing species, climate changes, meteorites, etc.), then it is very difficult to believe that evolution had to necessarily produce human beings just the way they are.

The suggestion that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary comes dangerously close, for an atheist such as Wielenberg that is, to another line of reasoning: fine-tuning arguments for the existence of God.63 Wielenberg himself admitted that “[t]here is… one view that might seem to require much less luck for moral knowledge than my view does. That is our old friend theism.”64 He continued by quoting the following comment by Parfit, another advocate of robust normative realism: “God might have designed our brains so that, without causal contact, we can reason in ways that lead us to reach true answers to mathematical questions. We might have similar God-given abilities to respond to reasons, and to form true beliefs about these reasons.”65 Mark Linville has even suggested a specific “moral fine-tuning argument… Certain of our moral beliefs – in particular, those that are presupposed in all moral reflection – are truth-aimed because human moral faculties are designed to guide human conduct in light of moral truth.”66 

Wielenberg explained that if it is metaphysically necessary that any being capable of forming moral beliefs at all possesses only true moral beliefs, then “there is no luck at all involved in the fact that Bart [a hypothetical person used as an example] m-possesses moral principles that correspond with moral reality rather than m-possessing radically different (and false) moral principles.”67 Possibly recognizing that this may be seen as a hint of fine tuning, he followed this up in a footnote by noting that “[p]erhaps Bart is lucky to exist at all, but that is a separate issue—one that connects with so-called ‘fine-tuning’ arguments, a topic I cannot engage in here.”68

The fine-tuning debate has sparked a lot of discussion over the last couple of decades, instigating a whole host of arguments for and against it. The fine-tuning argument itself, as well as the most common argument against it, the argument for a proposed multi-verse, are both based on the strong intuition that the laws of nature are contingent. Wielenberg’s suggestion that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary would thus effectively rebut the prominent positions on both sides of the fine-tuning debate. At the very least, this should give one pause in accepting Wielenberg’s speculative proposal that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary.

Conclusion

Erik Wielenberg has argued for a position which he calls “godless robust normative realism.” Many have pushed back against positions like this with an argument that I have referred to as the lucky coincidence objection; it seems quite a lucky coincidence that our moral beliefs happen to match up with the objective moral facts postulated by the realist. Wielenberg’s response to this objection was to propose that there is a third factor at play—our cognitive faculties. He proposed that our cognitive faculties both cause moral properties to be instantiated and generate our moral beliefs, thus explaining why it is that the two correspond. I argued that his third-factor model failed to rebut the lucky coincidence objection for two reasons. First, to explain his third-factor model, Wielenberg used several concepts he borrowed from theism, concepts that seem quite out of place within the belief system of atheism. Given atheism, robust causal making and brute ethical facts seem quite fantastical. Thus I argued that atheists, if they are consistent, should reject his model. Second, I argued that he did not rebut the lucky coincidence objection because he did not eliminate contingency, he only moved it to a different location in an attempt to sweep it under the rug. I explained that there is still contingency in his model, namely, in his proposed relationship between our cognitive faculties and our moral beliefs. And where there is contingency, there is luck.

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[54] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 174.

[55] Ibid., 169.

[56] Ibid., 172.

[57] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), 102.

[58] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 174.

[59] Ibid., 56.

[60] Ibid., 51.

[61] Ibid.

[62] Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 120–21.

[63] Robin Collins, “The teleological argument: an exploration of the fine-tuning of the universe” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (eds. William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland; Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 202–82.

[64] Ibid., 173.

[65] Derek Parfit, On What Matters, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 493.

[66] Mark D. Linville, “The moral argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (eds. William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland; Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 5.

[67] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 168.

[68] Ibid.

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Adam Lloyd Johnson serves as a university campus missionary with Ratio Christi. He also teaches classes for Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and spends one month each year living and teaching at Rhineland Theological Seminary in Wölmersen, Germany. Adam received his PhD in Theological Studies with an emphasis in Philosophy of Religion from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2020.

Adam grew up in Nebraska and became a Christian as a teenager in 1994. He graduated from the University of Nebraska and then worked in the field of actuarial science for ten years in Lincoln, Nebraska. While in his twenties, he went through a crisis of faith: are there good reasons and evidence to believe God exists and that the Bible is really from Him? His search for answers led him to apologetics and propelled him into ministry with a passion to serve others by equipping Christians and encouraging non-Christians to trust in Christ. Adam served as a Southern Baptist pastor for eight years (2009-2017) but stepped down from the pastorate to serve others full-time in the area of apologetics. He’s been married to his wife Kristin since 1996, and they have four children – Caroline, Will, Xander, and Ray.

Adam has presented his work at the National Apologetics Conference, the Society of Christian Philosophers, the Evangelical Philosophical Society, the International Society of Christian Apologetics, the Canadian Centre for Scholarship and the Christian Faith, the American Academy of Religion, and the Evangelical Theological Society. His work has been published in the Journal of the International Society of Christian Apologetics, Philosophia Christi, the Westminster Theological Journal, and the Canadian Journal for Scholarship and the Christian Faith. Adam has spoken at numerous churches and conferences in America and around the world – Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, Boston, Orlando, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. He is also the editor and co-author of the book A Debate on God and Morality: What is the Best Account of Objective Moral Values and Duties? published by Routledge and co-authored with William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, Erik Wielenberg, and others.

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