Editor’s note: This article was originally published at Convincing Proof

How Erik Wielenberg’s Third Factor Model Fails to Rebut the Lucky Coincidence Objection

Erik Wielenberg describes his view as “godless robust normative realism,” a combination of holding that “robust normative realism is true and there is no God.”1 Enoch describes robust normative realism as the view that “there are response-independent, non-natural, irreducibly normative truths… objective ones, that when successful in our normative inquiries we discover rather than create or construct.”2 Adding ‘godless’ to this, Wielenberg’s position then is that objective moral values and obligations exist, even though God does not.

In his non-theistic model Wielenberg claims that moral facts and properties are objectively real and that we as human beings can have accurate moral knowledge of these facts and properties. These types of models have been critiqued by both theists and atheists alike. One common objection against such models is as follows: If there are such things as objective moral facts and properties, and assuming they are causally inert, it would be quite a lucky coincidence if our moral beliefs happened to correspond to them. Call this the “lucky coincidence” objection. Proponents of Evolutionary Debunking Arguments (EDA’s) point out that this objection is amplified for a person if she believes that our moral beliefs have developed contingently through a haphazard evolutionary process.

The lucky coincidence objection would never have been raised if moral facts and properties somehow caused our moral beliefs. However, most proponents of robust normative realism believe that this is not the case. For instance, Wielenberg explained that “[a]n important feature of my view is that while many of the non-moral properties upon which moral properties D-supervene can produce causal effects, the moral properties themselves are epiphenomenal—they have no causal impact on the rest of reality. That aspect of moral properties makes the question of how we could have knowledge of them particularly press.”3 He summarized the lucky coincidence objection well when he noted that “if moral facts do not explain the moral beliefs of human beings, then those beliefs being correct would involve a lucky coincidence that is incompatible with genuine knowledge.”4

Wielenberg attempted to address the lucky coincidence objection by proposing that a third factor, namely, our cognitive faculties, explains why there is a correspondence between objective moral properties and our moral beliefs. He argued that human cognitive faculties do two things: they make objective moral properties be instantiated and they also generate our moral beliefs. Because moral properties and moral beliefs both stem from the same thing, our cognitive faculties, this secures a correlation between them, while also allowing for the fact that moral properties themselves are causally inert. He explained that cognitive faculties “both entail certain moral facts and causally contribute to the presence of moral beliefs that correspond to those moral facts. On that model, it is not at all unlikely that moral beliefs and moral facts will correspond.”5 He used his third-factor model to deflect criticism from several prominent EDA proponents including Gilbert Harman, Michael Ruse, Sharon Street, and Richard Joyce.6

In this paper I argue that Wielenberg’s third-factor model fails to rebut the lucky coincidence objection for two reasons. First, those who reject theism, if they are consistent, should also reject Wielenberg’s notion that cognitive faculties make moral properties be instantiated. Second, Wielenberg does not eliminate the lucky coincidence objection with his third-factor model, but only moves it somewhere else as he attempts to sweep contingency under the rug. Even if cognitive faculties do make moral properties be instantiated, the correspondence between moral properties and moral beliefs breaks down because, while his proposed relationship between cognitive faculties and moral properties is necessary, his proposed relationship between cognitive faculties and moral beliefs is contingent. And where there is contingency, there is luck.

Atheists Like Wielenberg Who Argue for Objective Morality Have to Battle on Two Fronts

Theists often argue that the existence of objective morality is best explained by the existence of God. Robert Adams, one of the most well-known contemporary proponents of this moral argument for God, has made the following argument:

Morality is objective, “certain things are morally right and others are morally wrong.”7
Objective morality is best explained by theism, “the most adequate answer is provided by a theory that entails the existence of God.”8
Therefore, there is good reason to think theism is true, “my metaethical views provide me with a reason of some weight for believing in the existence of God.”9

Similarly, William Lane Craig has been an influential voice in this conversation. He has regularly argued for the following two contentions:10

If theism is true, we have a sound foundation for morality.
If theism is false, we do not have a sound foundation for morality.

Nearly all theists agree that theism provides a more sound foundation for objective morality than atheism, though they may disagree on exactly how God provides such a foundation. Though theists may disagree on the details, an immaterial and personal God, as the ultimate source of all things, provides a much more fitting explanation for objective morality, which itself is both immaterial and personal. For instance, Baggett and Walls argue that “[t]he authority of moral obligations needs an account… Theism—entailing a loving, perfect God who commands, who knows us better than we know ourselves, who knows truly what is in our ultimate best interest, and who desires the best for us—can, we submit, most effectively provide it.”11

Interestingly enough, many atheists agree with Craig’s two contentions. Let us call such individuals ROM atheists, that is, atheists who Reject Objective Morality (ROM). Of Craig’s two contentions, the second one is heard more often from ROM atheists. Bertrand Russell wrote that “Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms…”12 Jacques Monod lamented that ““…[m]an at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty.”13 Richard Dawkins wrote that:

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, and other people are going to get lucky; and you won’t find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good; nothing but blind pitiless indifference… DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.14

Michael Ruse, explained that “…Darwinian theory shows that in fact morality is a function of (subjective) feelings, but it shows also that we have (and must have) the illusion of objectivity… In a sense, therefore, morality is a collective illusion foisted upon us by our genes.”15

However, some ROM even express agreement with Craig’s first contention, that theism provides a better explanation for objective morality than atheism. J. L. Mackie wrote:

[W]e might well argue… that objective intrinsically prescriptive features, supervening upon natural ones, constitute so odd a cluster of qualities and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events, without an all-powerful God to create them. If, then, there are such intrinsically prescriptive objective values, they make the existence of a god more probable than it would have been without them.16

More recently, Paul Draper proposed that “…the probability that moral agents exist given naturalism is extremely low, much lower than it is given theism… [there] is the possibility that some ‘historical outcomes’ like the existence of embodied moral agents are much more probable on theism than on naturalism and hence significantly raise the ratio of the probability of theism to the probability of naturalism.”17

Thus, in making his case for godless robust normative realism, Wielenberg finds himself in a difficult minority position, having to argue against critiques from two sides—theists and ROM atheists. He began his book explaining that he is, in large part, responding to atheists such as Gilbert Harman, whom Wielenberg said “suggested that we ought to take seriously the possible truth of nihilism,” and J. L. Mackie, of whom Wielenberg wrote “[i]nterestingly, Mackie himself, although an atheist, suggested that theism might be able to answer his worries about the queerness of the alleged supervenience relation between moral and natural properties.”18 Wielenberg differs from ROM atheists in that he believes in the existence of non-natural moral facts and properties. He believes these properties “are sui generis, a fundamental type of property not reducible to or fully constituted by some other type of property. Contra the Thaleans, all is not water, or physical, or natural.”19 Most likely referring to ROM atheists, he admits that “some have found this sort of view to be deeply puzzling if not wildly implausible.”20

In particular, Wielenberg admits that “it is not only theistic philosophers who have found robust normative realism to be problematic. A number of contemporary non-theist philosophers charge that robust normative realism runs into trouble when it comes to accounting for human moral knowledge.”21 Sharon Street’s colorful articulation of the lucky coincidence objection below is quite memorable:

[A]llowing our evaluative judgments to be shaped by evolutionary influences is analogous to setting out for Bermuda and letting the course of your boat be determined by the wind and tides: just as the push of wind and tides on your boat has nothing to do with where you want to go, so the historical push of natural selection on the content of our evaluative judgments has nothing to do with evaluative truth… Of course it’s possible that as a matter of sheer chance, some large portion of our evaluative judgments ended up true, due to a happy coincidence between the realist’s independent evaluative truths and the evaluative directions in which natural selection tended to push us, but this would require a fluke of luck that’s not only extremely unlikely, in view of the huge universe of logically possible evaluative judgments and truths, but also astoundingly convenient to the realist.22

Street’s concern is that if there are such things as objective moral facts and properties, then it would be quite the lucky coincidence if our moral beliefs corresponded to them, given that our moral beliefs developed haphazardly through an evolutionary process which selected for survival and reproduction, not an ability to know truth correctly. While discussing the difficulty of explaining why we should think objective moral facts and our moral beliefs correspond, Wielenberg reminded his readers that robust normative realists like himself are “hamstrung in this task by the fact that there is no causal connection between moral facts and moral beliefs.”23 In response to this lucky coincidence objection, he proposed his third-factor model.

Table of Contents

Footnotes

[1] Erik J. Wielenberg, Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 57. Other proponents of robust normative realism include Michael Huemer, Ethical Intuitionism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Derek Parfit, On What Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), David Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), and Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

[2] David Enoch, “An Outline of an Argument for Robust Metanormative Realism,” in Oxford Studies in Metaethics (ed. Russ Shafer-Landau; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 21.

[3] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 13–14.

[4] Ibid., 153.

[5] Ibid., 154.

[6] Ibid., 146–64.

[7] Robert M. Adams, “Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief,” in Rationality and Religious Belief (ed. C. F. Delaney; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 116.

[8] Ibid., 117.

[9] Ibid.

[10] William Lane Craig, “Opening Statement by William Lane Craig,” in Is Goodness without God Good Enough?: A Debate on Faith, Secularism, and Ethics (eds. Nathan L. King and Robert K. Garcia; Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009), 30.

[11] David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2016), 290.

[12] Bertrand Russell, “The Free Man’s Worship,” The Independent Review 1 (1903): 416.

[13] Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology (New York: Knopf, 1971), 180.

[14] Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, Repr. (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 133.

[15] Michael Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philosophy (New York: Blackwell, 1986), 253.

[16] J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 115–16.

[17] Paul Draper, “Cosmic Fine-Tuning and Terrestrial Suffering: Parallel Problems for Naturalism and Theism,” American Philosophical Quarterly 41.4 (2004): 311.

[18] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, viii.

[19] Ibid., 14.

[20] Ibid., 16.

[21] Ibid., 85.

[22] Sharon Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,” Philosophical Studies 127 (2006): 121–22.

[23] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 155.

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.