Good God: Interview with David Baggett

From Logically Faithful

What logical reason is there that God is good? In this episode, I Interview David Baggett. Dr. Baggett author of Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality. The book won Christianity Today’s 2012 apologetics book of the year of the award. He published a sequel with Walls that critiques naturalistic ethics, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning. A third book in the series, The Moral Argument: A History, chronicles the history of moral arguments for God’s existence. Dr. Baggett has also co-edited a collection of essays exploring the philosophy of C.S. Lewis, and edited the third debate between Gary Habermas and Antony Flew on the resurrection of Jesus. Dr. Baggett currently is a professor at Houston Baptist University

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Good God Panel Discussion with Baggett, Walls, Copan, and Craig

At the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, Dr. Baggett and Dr. Walls were invited to participate in a panel discussion of their book Good God with Paul Copan and William Lane Craig offering some critique and feedback on their work. Baggett and Walls provide a concise summary of the book, which is a cumulative and abductive moral argument for theism, while Copan and Craig offer insightful analysis. If you are interested in better understanding the moral argument in general or its abductive version in particular, this discussion will be well worth your time.

In Part 1, moderator Mark Foreman introduces the panelists and explains the context of the book. David Baggett provides a summary of their moral argument. Paul Copan offers what he thinks are the major highlights, a response to John Hare's criticisms, as well as some criticisms of his own.

In Part 2, Jerry Walls explains why it was necessary to address Calvinism in their moral argument. In Part 3, William Lane Craig responds to the critique of the deductive moral argument in Good God. And David Baggett responds to Craig by offering a defense of the abductive moral argument in Part 4.

In Part 5, the panelists (Baggett, Craig, Copan, and Walls) field questions about the effectiveness of abduction, the consistency of the abductive moral argument, and a few more on the subject of Calvinism.

John Hare's Review of Good God

John Hare is one of the most important philosophers in the area of theistic ethics. Hare has written many important books on moral philosophy including The Moral Gap and God and Morality. He has penned a mostly positive review of Good God which is available here.

Here's a short excerpt:

Having said all of this by way of criticism, I want to end by reaffirming that the book is, on the whole, a very good book. I do not want to give a predominantly negative impression. Making points of disagreement is usually more helpful and more interesting than simply agreeing. Nonetheless, the book does an excellent job of supporting the moral argument for belief in God, an argument that has been unjustly neglected in favor of other parts of natural theology, such as the arguments from the origin of the universe or fine-tuning.

Photo: ginnerobot/Flickr 

EPS Interview with David Baggett and Jerry Walls

There's a great interview with Dr. David Baggett and Dr. Jerry Walls  by Joseph E. Gorra available at the blog of the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Gorra's interview allows Walls and Baggett to go a little deeper on certain topics and explain the motivation of some of the positions taken in Good God. Gorra asks some great questions about the overall approach of the book, the objection to Calvinism, and the role of natural law, among other things. It's well worth the read. You can find  the interview here.