Podcast: David Baggett on Moral Knowledge
On this week's episode, we hear from Dr. David Baggett. Dr. Baggett and co-author Dr. Jerry Walls have just sent in their manuscript of God and Cosmos to the publisher. And in these next few podcasts, we get a little bit of preview of the book! God and Cosmos is a sequel to Christianity Today's 2012 Apologetics Book of the Year, Good God. In Good God, Walls and Baggett offer an abductive moral argument for the existence of God. In God and Cosmos, they focus their attention on various secular ethical theories and show why these theories do not provide as robust an explanation of morality as theism. One of the chapters in the book is "Moral Knowledge" and its that chapter we will be discussing today. This is a substantive topic, so we will be dividing the conversation up into two parts. The first part lays out some of the basic issues related to moral knowledge, including what exactly moral knowledge is, the kinds of moral knowledge available, and the general problems associated with saying we have moral knowledge. The second part aims to answer the question, "How do we have moral knowledge?" Dr. Baggett will discuss and critique some atheist explanations of how we have moral knowledge before offering his own theistic account.