Is God Necessary for Morality? Evaluating the Exchange Between Linville and Antony

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

1. What is the Issue?

Mark D. Linville and Louise Antony recently participated in written debate titled “Is God Necessary for Morality?”1 Linville argued that God is necessary for morality whereas Antony argued that God is not necessary for morality. In this paper I will interact with the arguments made by these two authors. Throughout I will also put forth my case that God is the best explanation for objective morality.

The first thing I want to cover is how this debate was framed. Developing a title for a debate is very important because it frames the debate by setting forth what each side will be arguing for. I believe it was unfortunate to frame the debate with the title “Is God Necessary for Morality?” because it puts the theist in a tough spot in that he has to argue that it’s impossible for morality to exist if there is no God, which, though I believe this is true, is a daunting task to try and argue. It’s very difficult to make the case that something is ‘necessary.’ Even though we believe that many things are necessary, it’s difficult to make the case that something is in fact necessary.

For example, one reason that it’s such a daunting task in this context is that the atheist doesn’t have to argue that her position is the best explanation for morality, but only that it’s ‘possible’ for morality to exist without God. In other words, she doesn’t have to argue that there is no God to defeat the theist in such an argument, but merely that it’s ‘possible’ for morality to exist without God. In order to defeat the ‘God is necessary for morality’ position, she doesn’t have to argue that ‘morality exists without God’ is the actual situation in reality but merely that it’s a possible situation. In other words, framing the debate this way just puts the bar too high for the theist and too low for the atheist.

A better approach would be to title the debate “What Is the Best Explanation for Morality?” because the issue under consideration is how to explain an important part of reality: objective moral truth. Since Linville, a theist, and Antony, an atheist, are both moral realists, they agree that there are real objective moral truths. But they disagree as to what is the best explanation for these real objective moral truths, that is, where they come from, what constitutes them, and how they can even be real and objective in the first place.      

1.1. How do we determine who is correct?

Several advocates on both sides of this disagreement agree with me that this issue should be evaluated as an inference to the best explanation, that is, abductively. David Baggett, a proponent of theistic metaethical explanations, explained,

An inquiry into the ‘best explanation’ invokes the process of abduction, a common form of reasoning that distinguishes itself from deduction in a few ways. Most importantly, whereas a deductive argument makes an effort at forging an airtight evidential connection between premises and conclusion, an abductive approach asks, less ambitiously, what the best explanation of the relevant phenomena is. It typically uses criteria like explanatory scope and power (along with plausibility, conformity with other beliefs, etc.) to narrow down the explanation candidates to the best explanation, and warrants, potentially anyway, to infer that the best explanation is likely the true explanation.2

Similarly, Enoch, a proponent of non-theistic non-natural moral realism, argued that inference to the best explanation is a viable approach for this issue.3 He explicitly noted the importance of plausibility when he wrote that “the game being played is … that of overall plausibility points ….”4 and that “… the plausibility-points game is comparative: the view that we should endorse is the one that has–when all considerations are taken into account–the most plausibility points overall.”5 Which model has more plausibility points, the theist’s or the atheist’s?

Here’s a simple example of how this process works. Let’s say you are a farmer, your crops have produced a harvest 10 times greater than you’ve ever seen, and you don’t know why. Your friend Toni comes to you and presents a possible explanation: the weather conditions this year (sun, rain, wind, etc.) were just so perfect that they caused your crops to produce this tremendous amount. Another friend, Lenny, approaches you with an alternative explanation: a local scientist developed a new super-fertilizer and secretly put it on your crops to test its effectiveness. Now you have two explanations to consider. Which one best fits the evidence? It will take some work on your part to fully explore both explanations and see which one is most plausible and best fits the evidence. This is called abductive reasoning and it’s basically an inference to the best explanation.

There’s a sense in which Linville began his argument by framing it along these lines, that is, as an inference to the best explanation. He explained that he was going to argue that objective morality does not find a good ‘fit’ within the sort of word in which the atheist thinks we find ourselves in (p. 55). He also explained that he was going to argue that objective morality finds a more natural ‘fit’ within a theistic framework (p. 55). However, Antony recognized that, because the debate was framed the way it was, all she had to do was show that atheism doesn’t conflict in any way with morality (p. 67). In other words, she didn’t have to argue that the ‘actual’ situation was that there is no God and morality is objectively real, all she had to do is argue that it’s possible (there’s no conflict between these two things) for morality to be objectively real even if there is no God. However, even she noted how she was going to go one step further and sketch a promising beginning to a naturalistic explanation of morality (p. 66). So there’s a sense in which Antony too is arguing this issue as an inference to the best explanation, even though the debate wasn’t framed this way via the title.

Before I move on, I want to affirm Antony’s explanation of the differences between the definitions of atheism, materialism, and naturalism (p. 67). Sometimes people use those three terms interchangeably to mean the same thing (there is no God) but technically they have different definitions. Atheism is the belief that there is no God. Materialism is the belief that the only thing that exists is the material universe (space, time, and matter). Naturalism is the belief that everything can be explained in terms of natural processes. Now atheism, materialism, and naturalism are obviously related and connected, but they are not all one and the same. For example, as Antony notes, most atheists affirm materialism and naturalism but not all atheists do. For example, I wrote my dissertation against an atheist, Erik Wielenberg, who rejects naturalism and materialism because he believes certain thing exist beyond the material universe, namely, what he describes as platonic abstract objects. Now it seems like Antony herself does affirm naturalism because she wrote that she was going to focus on Linville’s arguments that were directed at naturalism.

This raises another issue. At one level this debate between Linville and Antony has to do with a debate between theism and atheism—which is the better explanation for objective morality? Craig has often framed the theist’s side of this debate as follows: “I. If theism is true, we have a sound foundation for morality. II. If theism is false, we do not have a sound foundation for morality.”6 While we can make some general arguments about how atheism and objective morality don’t seem to fit well together, a comprehensive case for these contentions would involve evaluating and debunking all the atheistic explanations for how objective morality could exist without God. Therefore yes, at one level this debate is between theism and atheism, but at another level, it is specifically between a particular theistic model (Linville’s) and a particular atheistic model (Antony’s naturalistic atheism), both of which are trying to describe reality, how things really are. The point is that even if we can show how Antony’s particular naturalistic atheistic explanation of morality is not a plausible explanation of morality, it only rules out her particular atheistic explanation for objective morality, not necessarily all atheistic explanations for morality, such as Wielenberg’s non-naturalistic atheistic model. The same is true of Linville’s theistic explanation of objective morality; even if Antony can show that Linville’s particular theistic explanation of morality isn’t a plausible explanation, it only rules out his particular theistic explanation, not necessarily all theistic explanations. That’s one of the reasons this topic is so vast and interesting!

1.2. Considering All the Evidence For and Against Theism

Before I start considering the objections Antony raised against theistic explanations of objective morality, there is one more topic to consider, a topic that both Antony and Linville mentioned. Antony was the first one to mention it (p. 69) when she explained she was confident that if we were to consider the total evidence, that there would be more evidence overall for atheism than theism. In other words, she maintained that atheism, as opposed to theism, does a better job explaining the total evidence we have before us – scientific evidence, moral evidence, historical evidence, philosophical evidence, etc. She’s still doing an abductive inference to the best explanation here but she’s talking about what’s the best explanation for all of reality and existence. Thus, instead of asking what the best explanation of morality is, we could ask what’s the best explanation overall for all of reality – morality, the universe, human beings, free will, consciousness, mathematics, etc. Linville responded to her assertion by saying that, based on the total evidence, and especially all the good evidence for the existence of God, he’d place his money on theism (p. 80). In other words, he maintained that theism, as opposed to atheism, is a better explanation for all that we see in reality – morality, the universe, human beings, free will, consciousness, mathematics, etc.

There’s a sense in which it’s important to separate these two conversations:

1. What is the better explanation for morality, theism or atheism?

2. What is the better explanation for all of reality, theism or atheism?

The first question is more narrow and has to do with a specific aspect of reality, i.e. morality, and the question ‘What is the best explanation for this part of reality?’ The second question is more broad and focuses on whether or not God exists. It’s important to separate these two issues conceptually because we could imagine a situation where, hypothetically, we conclude that atheism is a better explanation for morality (a particular aspect of reality), but overall theism is a better explanation for the vast majority of the other aspects of reality (the universe, human beings, free will, consciousness, mathematics, etc.). In such a hypothetical situation we’d conclude that theism is true, even though atheism seems to be a better explanation for objective morality. Thus, this conversation concerning which is the better explanation for morality, theism or atheism, is just a small part of the much longer discussion concerning whether the overall evidence points to the existence or nonexistence of God.    

The moral argument is a common argument for the existence of God. Most moral arguments for God have the following structure:7 

1. Morality is objective, “certain things are morally right and others are morally wrong.”8

2. Objective morality is best explained by theism, “the most adequate answer is provided by a theory that entails the existence of God.”9

3. Therefore, there is good reason to think theism is true, and so “my metaethical views provide me with a reason of some weight for believing in the existence of God.”10

I believe the moral argument for God is a strong argument. However, even if the moral argument for God is somehow shown to be wrong, there are many other arguments for the existence of God. If all that theists had was the moral argument, their overall case for God’s existence would be fairly weak. But that is not the case; the moral argument for God is merely one among many arguments that theists have provided for God’s existence. Theists from various cultures throughout the ages have developed several different lines of evidence and arguments for their belief in God—cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, contingency arguments, and ontological arguments, just to name a few.

2. Objections to Theistic Explanations of Objective Morality

In this section I’ll discuss the two objections that Antony raised against theistic explanations of objective morality – the Euthyphro Dilemma and the Competing Supernatural Explanations objection. I’ll also defend theistic explanations of objective morality by refuting these objections. 

2.1. The Euthyphro Dilemma

The Euthyphro Dilemma is often presented as a rebuttal to the moral argument for God’s existence or theistic explanations of objective morality. In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates asked “Is that which is holy loved by the gods because it is holy, or is it holy because it is loved by the gods?”11 The dilemma can be restated in monotheistic terms as follows: Either 1. Morality is based on God’s commands; thus He could have arbitrarily commanded any heinous act and it would be morally right, or 2. Morality is based on necessary truths that even God cannot change; thus morality is independent of God and out of His control.12 I trust you can see how theists would want to avoid both horns. But the key question is, are these the only two horns? In other words, is it a false dilemma to say that these are the only two options?

Linville claimed his argument bypassed the Euthyphro Dilemma because it “appeals to God not as the ground of morality but as the agent and architect of a kind of moral teleology that is unavailable on garden-variety atheism” (p. 79). I’m not exactly sure what Linville is getting at here. I’m sure he was constrained by a certain word count limit in his debate with Antony so unfortunately he couldn’t elaborate. However, in order to avoid both horns of the Euthyphfro Dilemma, many theists, possibly even including Plato himself, have proposed that morality is dependent upon God’s nature in such a way that He could not command something that violates His moral nature.13 For example, Robert M. Adams’s version of the Divine Command Theory is an important contemporary example of grounding morality in God’s nature. He explained that “[t]he part played by God in my account of the nature of the good is similar to that of the Form of the Beautiful or the Good in Plato’s Symposium and Republic. God is the supreme Good, and the goodness of other things consists in a sort of resemblance to God.”14 His view is Platonic in the sense that “[t]he role that belongs to the Form of the Good in Plato’s thought is assigned to God, and the goodness of other things is understood in terms of their standing in some relation, usually conceived as a sort of resemblance, to God.”[15] This is not a new idea; in the first chapter of Monologian, Anselm argued that there must be one thing through which all good things are good, and that it alone is supremely good.[16] Also, Thomas Aquinas wrote that “Nothing… will be called good except in so far as it has a certain likeness of the divine goodness.”17

If morality is dependent upon God’s nature in this way, then both horns of the Euthyphro Dilemma are avoided. First, His commands would not be arbitrary because they would have to be consistent with His moral nature. Second, morality would not be independent of God, but dependent upon Him, that is, upon His moral nature. However, this proposed solution agrees with the Euthyphro Dilemma that morality is based on necessary truths that God cannot change or control. However, these necessary truths that God cannot change are truths concerning His moral nature, thus these moral truths which constrain God are not independent of God but are ‘within’ God Himself in a sense. Baggett and Walls noted that “a careful distinction between questions of dependence and control allows an answer to the Euthyphro Dilemma that can serve as an important component of any thoroughly theistic metaphysic with a strong commitment to moral realism… Moral truths can be objective, unalterable, and necessary, and yet still dependent on God.”18 They concluded that “if such dependence or even identity obtains or is even possible, then the Euthyphro Dilemma is effectively defused and the moral argument for God’s existence accordingly gains strength.”19 Many atheists, including Erik Wielenberg, agree that this solution successfully refutes the Euthyphro Dilemma objection against theistic explanations of objective morality and the moral argument for the existence of God. Wielenberg even encourages his fellow atheists to move beyond the Euthyphro Dilemma in their attempt to critique theistic metaethical models.

2.2. Competing Supernatural Explanations

The second objection that Antony raised against theistic explanations of objective morality is an objection that she called “Competing Supernatural Explanations.” She noted that this problem is hardly ever discussed (p. 68). I agree that this problem is hardly ever discussed. The reason it’s hardly ever discussed is that it is a very poor objection. Basically her complaint is that a person can’t, or at least shouldn’t, immediately jump from the evidence under consideration (objective morality) to the conclusion that there is an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-benevolent being who created the universe. According to this objection, the reason a person can’t make this jump is because there are many other alternative hypotheses as well. She listed just four of them:

1. There is an all-powerful, all-knowing, malevolent being who created the universe.

2. There is an all-powerful, all-knowing, morally indifferent being who created the universe.

3. There is a very powerful, but not omnipotent, benevolent being who created the universe.

4. There are two competing beings, one a very powerful, but not omnipotent, benevolent being who created the universe, and the other an equally powerful malevolent being who constantly interferes in the affairs of the creatures created by the benevolent being.

Linville addressed this objection well when he explained that it’s similar to when some religious fideists dislike arguments for the existence of God because they don’t get us all the way to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (p. 79). He then went on to rhetorically ask “whoever expected that any one argument should accomplish all that?” (p. 79) In other words, Antony doesn’t understand Linville’s (and most theist’s, including myself) position here. Theists aren’t saying that, starting with objective morality, we can build a case for a specific concept of what God is like (say, the Christian concept of God). Instead, what we’re doing is bringing a particular concept of God (in this case, the Christian concept) to the table and saying that God, as Christians understand Him, is the best explanation for the evidence under consideration (objective morality). This is another reason it’s important to frame this debate as an inference to the best explanation.

Consider again my silly example of a farmer whose harvest is 10 times greater this year then ever before. As a reminder, Toni presented a possible explanation for this—the weather conditions this year (sun, rain, wind, etc.) were just so perfect that they caused your crops to produce this tremendous amount. Lenny, on the other hand, had an alternative explanation—a local scientist developed a new super-fertilizer and secretly put it on your crops to test its effectiveness. Imagine if Toni raised the following objection to Lenny’s explanation: Lenny’s explanation is a bad explanation because there are millions of scientists in the world. Well, what does that have to do with anything? Of course there are millions of scientists in the world, but so what? Now, if you think another scientist is the one who did it, great, present your case for that. But just because there are millions of possible scientists in the world who could of don this, that doesn’t mean that Lenny’s hypothesis that a particular scientist is the one who did it is a bad explanation.

In such a scenario Toni, just like Antony, is confused about Lenny’s position. Lenny isn’t constructing a concept about this scientist ‘merely’ from the direct evidence at hand (increased harvest). No, Lenny has all sorts of information about this particular scientist from other sources. For example, Lenny knows that this scientist lives nearby, that he focuses his research on helping crops produce more, and that this scientist has done this to other farmers nearby in the recent past. He takes all that information from other sources, say newspapers, interviews, television, etc. and then puts his hypothesis forth as the best explanation for this particular situation, that is, this farmer’s crops producing a harvest 10 times greater than ever before.

Similarly, Linville and other theists aren’t building an idea of God ‘merely’ from the direct evidence at hand (objective morality). If they were doing that, then Antony’s objection would be viable. But no, Linville and other theists have a fairly thorough concept of God based on all sorts of other evidence, reasoning, Scripture, etc. and they are bringing that concept to the table and saying that this particular concept of God seems to be the best explanation for objective morality. Surely, if someone else wants to come along and argue for one of the other four possible hypothesis that Antony mentioned, they’re certainly free to do so. But that doesn’t have any impact whatsoever on the strength, or weakness, of the explanation that Linville is putting forth.

Further, imagine the argument in reverse. What if Linville said, well, there’s just so many different atheistic explanations of objective morality that have been put forth by different atheists. Therefore, we must conclude that any one atheistic explanation must be wrong. That would be completely illogical and Antony would rightly dismiss any such argument.

3. Objections to Atheistic Explanations of Objective Morality

In this section I’ll discuss the main objection that Linville raised against atheistic explanations of objective morality – Evolutionary Debunking Arguments. Then I’ll address four attempts that atheists have made to deflect this objection, the first two of which were covered by Antony in her debate with Linville. I will argue that none of these four attempts to deflect this objection are successful.

3.1. Evolutionary Debunking Arguments

Evolutionary Debunking Arguments are merely a small part of a larger objection to atheistic explanations of objective morality, an objection I call the Lucky Coincidence Objection. Linville also frames his evolutionary debunking argument in terms of a lucky coincidence on p. 63. The Lucky Coincidence Objection can be summarized as follows: Granting, for the sake of argument, that there are such things as objective moral truths, it would be quite a lucky coincidence if our moral beliefs happened to match up with them. Both theists and atheists have raised the Lucky Coincidence Objection against atheistic models of objective morality. Wielenberg himself admitted 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.”20

Proponents of evolutionary debunking arguments merely point out that this lucky coincidence objection is amplified for a person if she believes our moral beliefs have developed contingently through a haphazard evolutionary process. In other words, if God does not exist and evolution is true, then it is unlikely our moral beliefs reliably correspond with objective moral truth, again, assuming there is such a thing. These proponents claim that our moral beliefs are not true but are merely human constructs that nature selected because they increased our prospects for survival and reproduction. As the television show Survivor has entertainingly illustrated, a group that works together well—which involves moral aspects such as fairness, reciprocity, and self sacrifice—is better able to outwit, outplay, and outlast a group that does not. Similarly, as the story is often told, there was an evolutionary advantage to groups that adopted these made up moral principles; working together well, they could better compete against other groups in the battle for scarce resources.21 

In response to this issue, some have concluded that there’s more than merely an epistemological problem here, that is, a problem with how humans can know moral truth. These folks have gone one step further and concluded that evolutionary debunking arguments show us not only that we should we doubt we have accurate moral knowledge, but that they should also cause us to doubt that there are objective moral truths in the first place. This extension of the objection extends it beyond an epistemological problem (how can we know something) to be an ontological problem (what does and does not exist). For example, noted atheist and evolutionary debunking argument proponent, Michael Ruse, turned this issue into more of an ontological argument when he wrote 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.”22 He also wrote,

The position of the modern evolutionist … is that humans have an awareness of morality … because such an awareness is of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth.… Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves.… Nevertheless … such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction … and any deeper meaning is illusory….23

Linville explained this distinction between the epistemological and ontological aspects of evolutionary debunking arguments and explained that he was only going to argue the epistemological issue here and not the further ontological issue. For example, Linville wrote that “perhaps Ruse is right, but I’ll argue for a weaker claim that on evolutionary naturalism, even if there are objective moral facts we are never in a position to know them” (p. 56). Linville also wrote that a “Darwinian genealogy of human morality strongly suggests either a non-realist account of morality (Ruse) or at least the skeptical conclusion that we can’t know whether our moral beliefs are true, which is the burden of this essay” (p. 65). Thus Linville acknowledged the potential ontological problem here but chose to only focus on the epistemological problem raised by evolutionary debunking arguments.

I think Ruse’s ontological conclusions, that evolutionary debunking arguments should cause us to doubt that there are objective moral truths in the first place, are appropriate and I affirm them. But it’s much more difficult to make such an ontological argument against the existence of moral truth than it is to merely make an epistemological argument against our ability to know moral truth. That’s why most people, including Linville in this debate, only went after the epistemological aspect and didn’t make any ontological conclusions, even though he did mention Ruse’s ontological conclusions concerning evolutionary debunking arguments.

Even though the basic framework of evolutionary debunking arguments might be as old as the theory of evolution itself (it seems even Darwin made such arguments), most contemporary versions follow Gilbert Harman’s approach in his 1977 work The Nature of Morality.24 For example, Richard Joyce specifically acknowledged his argument’s connection with Harman’s.25 Wielenberg noted that “… Harman was perhaps the first contemporary philosopher to outline a case against moral knowledge based on the claim that human moral beliefs can be explained without appealing to any moral truths.… [M]any epistemological evolutionary debunking arguments can be understood as variations on Harman’s basic idea.”26 Since Harman, evolutionary debunking arguments have grown in popularity, due in part to the rise of sociobiology, now commonly called evolutionary psychology, which began with E. O. Wilson’s 1975 work Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.27 Other well-known proponents of evolutionary debunking arguments include Joshua Greene, Peter Singer, Sharon Street, and Richard Joyce.28

Sharon Street provided a memorable summary of her evolutionary debunking argument when she wrote:

[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.29

Street’s concern is that if there are such things as objective moral truths, then it would be quite the lucky coincidence if our moral beliefs corresponded to them, given that such beliefs developed haphazardly through an evolutionary process which selected for survival and reproduction, not for an ability to know truth. If evolution works as many claim, that it was driven by accidental random mutations, as well as chance changes in the environment (climate changes, meteorites, etc.), then it would be quite a lucky coincidence if it just so happened to shape our moral judgments such that they matched up with what atheistic moral realists claim are independent objective moral truths.

The lucky coincidence objection would lose much of its bite if moral facts and properties somehow played a causal role in forming our moral beliefs. However, most proponents of atheistic moral realism reject the idea that objective moral truth has such causal power. For instance, Wielenberg explained that an “… 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 pressing.”30 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.”31 He summed up this objection remarkably 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.”32

Atheistic moral realists, including Wielenberg, have tried to refute evolutionary debunking arguments because such arguments aim to show that our moral convictions are the result of an accidental random process, rendering such convictions arbitrary and potentially meaningless. Thus these realists maintain that morality is objectively real, and that we can have true moral knowledge, even if atheism and evolution are true.33

Below I will present an evolutionary debunking argument using Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism as a base. I use Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism as the basis for my evolutionary debunking argument because, first, his argument is about the reliability of our cognitive faculties, which, as Wielenberg points out, is the crux of all evolutionary debunking arguments.34 Second, because Plantinga is a theist like myself, he and I agree that our cognitive faculties, including those that produce our moral beliefs are, for the most part, reliable.35 This position is in contrast to atheists who usually use evolutionary debunking arguments to argue that our moral intuitions really are unreliable. Instead, Plantinga and I only argue that if atheism and evolution were true, then our cognitive faculties would be unreliable. Third, Plantinga’s evolutionary argument is broader in that it applies, not just to moral intuitions, but to all cognitive faculties; for this reason it is a more consistent position. Again, this position is in contrast with atheists who often apply evolutionary debunking arguments only to moral and religious beliefs while maintaining that our cognitive faculties provide us with reliable beliefs in other areas. I’ll have more to say about this below in section 3.2.4 when I discuss the Modal Security Response.

As for constructing an evolutionary debunking argument based on Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism, the first three premises of his argument can be summarized as follows:36

1. The probability of our cognitive faculties being reliable, given atheism and evolution, is low.

2. If someone believes atheism and evolution, and sees that the probability of our cognitive faculties being reliable, given atheism and evolution, is low, then they have a defeater for their belief that our cognitive faculties are reliable.

3. If someone has a defeater for the reliability of their cognitive faculties, then they have a defeater for any belief produced by their cognitive faculties.

This argument can be applied explicitly to our moral beliefs as follows:

1. Our moral beliefs are produced by our cognitive faculties.

2. Therefore, if someone believes atheism and evolution, then they have a defeater for their belief that their moral beliefs are reliable.

Given atheism and evolution, there is no good reason to think our moral intuitions point to, or are connected with, moral truth that exists beyond our own subjective preferences. If the origination of our moral beliefs can be explained by their evolutionary survival value, then what reason is there to think they also happen to be objectively true? Surely there is no objective evidence for them; all we have to go on is our subjective intuitions and there is no reason to think those are reliable, given atheism and evolution.

3.2. Responses to Evolutionary Debunking Arguments

In this section I will discuss four attempts that atheists have made to deflect evolutionary debunking arguments. The first two attempts were presented by Antony in her debate with Linville but others, including Wielenberg, have presented similar attempts. The third attempt is Wielenberg’s third-factor model and the fourth attempt is the modal security response. I will argue that none of these four attempts are successful in deflecting the force of evolutionary debunking arguments.

3.2.1. Our Moral Beliefs Are Accurate

Antony attempted to deflect evolutionary debunking arguments by claiming that we have ample evidence that our moral beliefs are in fact accurate. She called this attempt of hers an Argument from Arbitrariness (p. 70) but that seemed to me a strange and awkward name for her argument. Regardless, she explained that “if we have direct evidence that an extant capacity [in this case our capacity for accurate moral beliefs] is reliable, then the fact that its origin was chancy [because it was developed via the haphazard evolutionary process] should do nothing to reduce our confidence in it” (p. 72).

Wielenberg made a very similar argument in an article he wrote concerning Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism in which he presented two critiques.37 First, he argued that Plantinga’s first premise (the probability of our cognitive faculties, given atheism and evolution, is low) should be rejected in light of the substantial evidence that our cognitive faculties are reliable. He admitted that if all we knew was that some creatures developed by way of an evolutionary process, then it “seems right that it would be unreasonable for us to believe that the cognitive faculties of such creatures are reliable.”38 However, he continued by claiming we know much more than that, for instance, we know these creatures have reliable cognitive faculties. He wrote that, for instance, “… I have all sorts of evidence for the reliability of my faculties. For example, most of my perceptual beliefs about medium-sized physical objects turn out to be true; such beliefs are deliverances of perception, so perception seems to be reliable. I know all sorts of things, and I wouldn’t know these things if I weren’t reliable.”39 I trust that you can see the similarities between Wielenberg’s pushback to Plantinga’s argument and Antony’s pushback to Linville’s argument.

Similar to Antony, Wielenberg argued that, even if Plantinga’s first premise was granted, this still should not lead to premise two (if someone believes atheism and evolution are true, and sees that the probability of our cognitive faculties being reliable, given atheism and evolution, is low, then they have a defeater for their belief that our cognitive faculties are in fact reliable). Again, because we have so much evidence that our cognitive faculties are reliable, even if we came to see that the probability of this, given atheism and evolution, is low, we would have to conclude that, though it was unlikely, evolution must have indeed pulled it off and produced for us reliable cognitive faculties. This is almost the exact same strategy Antony took and she used two examples to make her point – arriving at Bermuda and winning the lottery, which I’ll discuss below.

In response to this idea that we have a lot of evidence for the reliability of our cognitive faculties, including our moral faculty that generates our moral beliefs, I must point out that there is a great problem with Wielenberg and Antony’s strategy here. If someone believes atheism and evolution, and then comes to see that the probability of their cognitive faculties being reliable is low in this scenario, it would not be possible for them to use arguments or evidence to try and prove their cognitive faculties are reliable. Any such attempt would fail because, to even begin such a move, they would have to first assume their cognitive faculties were reliable, which is the very issue under consideration.40 As Plantinga pointed out, “any such procedure would therefore be viciously circular.”41 In attempting such a strategy, one would be utilizing the very cognitive faculties under question in order to evaluate their reliability. Thus it does Wielenberg no good in this context to try and argue for, or provide evidence of, the reliability of our cognitive faculties.

Similarly, it does Antony no good in this context to try and argue for, or provide evidence of, the reliability of our capacity to form moral beliefs. And this driven by the fact that the only way we have to “verify” the accuracy of our moral beliefs is to use the very moral-belief-generating capacity that we have doubts about in the first place. It would be similar to if we had doubts that a particular yard stick was really 36 inches long and then we used that exact same yard stick to measure itself and prove that yes, see, it is 36 inches long, because it says it is. Antony is doing the exact same thing because, given atheism and evolution, there is nothing objective for us as humans to ‘check’ our moral beliefs against except our very own moral beliefs, which is the very thing being questioned.

This point was driven home for me when I learned that the argument Wielenberg provided for objective morality, ironically, centers on subjective thought experiments. To try and make his case that some activities are intrinsically good, which he admitted is “notoriously difficult to prove,” he echoed G. E. Moore’s claim that we have a special form of cognition called moral intuition which gives us access to moral properties. Following Moore, Wielenberg appealed to “thought experiments as a source of intuitions about which things might be intrinsically valuable.”42

After encouraging his readers to participate in a thought experiment where they consider a universe consisting of only two people in a loving relationship, he asks “Does it seem to you that something good happens in such a universe?”43 Since it does seem good to us, he concluded that it is, though at the same time acknowledging, “I do not see any way of proving that a given thing is intrinsically good.”44 Yet he goes on to conclude that by “… engaging in intrinsically valuable activities a person can make her life meaningful in one important sense: she can make her life good for her.”45 This line of reasoning seems to be a subjective, possibly relative, foundation for meaning and purpose, a shaky foundation indeed for the model of objective morality Wielenberg attempted to build. He ended this section, titled “Intrinsic Value and the Meaning of Life,” with the comment that his concept of intrinsic value “is central to my approach to ethics.”46 In this section, which is the second section of his book after a brief two-paragraph introduction, he then began building his model on top of this foundation of subjective intuitions.

Thus Wielenberg’s entire model, which claims brute ethical facts are the best explanation for objective morality, is based on subjective intuitions that some situations are morally better than others. Most atheists readily dismiss theists who base their belief in God on subjective intuitions. To be consistent, such atheists should also dismiss Wielenberg’s brute ethical facts, which he claims are part of the best explanation for objective morality, since the only evidence he gives for them are these subjective intuitions. In other words, it seems as though all that atheists have to go on for their belief in objective morality is our moral intuitions. But, given atheism and evolution, why trust that our moral intuition is reliable in the first place? Thus, given atheism and evolution, there seems to be no good reason to believe that our moral beliefs match up with objective moral truth, assuming there is such a thing.

In addition, as I’ve been explaining in this section, it is important to note that atheists have good reason to doubt the reliability of their moral intuition. As I’ve been showing, evolutionary debunking arguments make the case that those who believe in atheism and evolution have good reason not to trust their intuitions as a guide for what is true because, according to evolutionary theory, nature selected beliefs, feelings, and intuitions because they resulted in greater chances of survival or reproduction, not because they were true. Given atheism and evolution, it seems much more likely that our intuitive subjective belief in objective morality was merely something nature selected because it led to greater chances of survival and reproduction, not because it is true.

The major problem here is that, given atheism and evolution, we don’t have anything objective to verify whether our moral beliefs, or our moral intuition which generates our moral beliefs, are correct or not. It seems as though Antony doesn’t quite grasp this point considering the various examples that she used to push back against evolutionary debunking arguments. For example, when she tried to refute Sharon Street’s memorable Bermuda example, she said well, while we’re on the sea on our way to Bermuda we would have no basis for thinking we’ll wind up in Bermuda. However, once we’ve arrived at Bermuda we’d have to assume, by jove, that we got lucky and made it because here we are! (p. 73) Now that we’re at Bermuda, there can be little doubt that we’ve arrived at Bermuda, even if we must marvel at our good fortune (p. 73).

The problem with Antony’s analogy is that it doesn’t fit the scenario that evolutionary debunking arguments are describing. According to evolutionary debunking arguments, there’s no way to verify our moral beliefs are correct because there’s nothing objective we have to compare them with. To fit this scenario better, Antony would have to have her hypothetical people arrive on an island that had no signs, no people, and no way for them to verify that in fact Bermuda is the island they arrived at. Antony claims that we can assess the judgments our moral intuition produce in the normal way, through reason and evidence (p. 73). But she fails to realize that in trying to assess the judgments of our moral intuition we invariably must use our moral intuitions, the very thing we have doubts about in the first place. It’s circular to use our moral reasoning to verify that our moral reasoning is accurate!

Similarly, Antony’s lottery winner analogy also fails. Antony said to consider someone who won the lottery but then realizes her chances of winning were very slim. Should she therefore doubt that she did in fact win? Not at all says Antony (p. 81). Again, Antony is assuming we are in a situation where we can somehow verify our moral intuition is reliable and therefore trust our moral beliefs. But, given atheism and evolution, how could we verify they are correct without using our very moral intuition that is being doubted? The better lottery analogy would be a situation where the person had no way of verifying whether her lottery ticket number was the winner or not. In such a situation, she should very much doubt she has the winning ticket because the chances of that are extremely small.

Of course another way to look at this is to start out assuming our moral intuitions are reliable and thus our moral beliefs are correct. In other words, we could start out assuming we in fact did make it to Bermuda. But then if we use the inference to the best explanation, we could ask: which is the more plausible explanation for the fact that we in fact did arrive in Bermuda? Is it more plausible that we got here accidently through the random process of wind and waves? Or is it more plausible that someone guided us somehow here, either a human person or a supernatural person? Linville makes a similar move when he talked about finding a working watch – the present argument wouldn’t be whether or not the watch works, but assuming it does, would it be more plausible to think a monkey created it or that a human watchmaker did? (p. 80)

Antony seems to anticipate this response to her argument. In other words, she wrote that a theist might object that she is question begging to appeal to the evidence and reasoning that we ordinarily take to support our moral judgments (p. 73). But she went on to claim that doing this would undercut the theist’s own argument (p. 73). She explained that the argument which Linville seemed to present began by assuming in the first premise that our cognitive faculties, including the ones that generate our moral beliefs, are reliable but then goes on to show that if evolution and atheism is true then they aren’t reliable. But, according to premise one our cognitive faculties are reliable, thus we do have true moral knowledge and therefore there is a contradiction with believing we have accurate moral beliefs and believing that atheism and evolution are true. Antony said that this was the argument that Linville was making and she pointed out that whatever theists use to support that first premise, that we do in fact have true moral knowledge, the atheist can co-opt and use as well. Antony is correct that this specific argument that Linville presented does rest on such a premise, that we do in fact have reliable cognitive abilities that generate moral knowledge.

Of course Linville, and other theists, could, and sometimes do, make their evolutionary debunking argument in a different way such that they would avoid relying on such an initial premise that affirms our moral knowledge is accurate. However, the following question could be asked here: In this endeavor, is it appropriate to start out assuming that our cognitive faculties are reliable, and specifically our cognitive ability that generates our moral beliefs (which some call our moral intuition)? I believe the answer is yes, it is appropriate to begin with the initial assumption that our moral intuition is, for the most part, reliable. We seem to all do this; we believe that we are correct when we conclude that rape is wrong, that strangling babies for fun is wrong, that loving others is right, etc. Both sides in this debate, the atheists such as Antony and the theists such as Linville, do begin from the position that our moral intuitions are reliable. But the question becomes, which side’s theory best explains why these moral intuitions are reliable? In other words, even though both sides begin by assuming our moral intuitions are reliable, which side’s explanation better confirms that yes, in fact, we can and should trust our initial moral intuitions?

It seems to me that the atheistic position raises serious doubts about the reliability of our moral intuition. This is especially true if atheism is paired with a belief in evolution. Then I think there is a great amount of justified concern that our moral intuitions are really reliable. Linville drove this point home when he talked about C. S. Lewis’ remark about naturalists who followed their naturalism all the way to its likely implications (p. 80-81). It’d be similar if we found ourselves believing that looticoffliers (a term I just made up that represents entities that don’t exist but that we believe do exist) are real, but then we came to understand that atheism and evolution are true, and that a haphazard evolutionary process is what produced our beliefs in looticoffliers. Certainly in such a scenario we’d have a strong reason to doubt the reliability of our belief in looticoffliers. The same applies to our belief in objective morality. 

Lastly, it’s important to note that Plantinga’s evolutionary debunking argument is not arguing about how things actually are, but how things would be if evolution and atheism were true. As noted above, because Plantinga does not believe atheism is true, he does not face the implications of his argument and so can safely maintain our cognitive faculties are reliable; he wrote, “Of course we all commonsensically assume that our cognitive faculties are for the most part reliable, at least over a large area of their functioning.… I don’t mean to argue that this natural assumption is false; like everyone else, I believe that our cognitive faculties are, in fact, mostly reliable.”47 He even pointed out that this belief in the reliability of our cognitive faculties is properly basic.48 However, the scenario under question is how things would be if atheism and evolution were true. Plantinga noted that “… in this context we can’t just assume, of course, that if N&E [atheism and evolution], N [atheism] including materialism, were true, then things would still be the way they are.”49 In other words, if someone is convinced their cognitive faculties are reliable, and comes to see the probability of having reliable cognitive faculties is low given atheism and evolution, then this would be a good reason to doubt evolution and/or atheism. As we’ll see in the next section, raising doubts about the evolutionary process is the strategy Antony and Wielenberg took, but maybe what they should doubt instead is their atheism. 

3.2.2. Our Moral Beliefs Did Not Come from Evolution

Antony also attempted to deflect evolutionary debunking arguments by claiming that we don’t even have substantial evidence that our moral beliefs really came from evolutionary processes (p. 83). She called this attempt of hers an Argument from Screening Off (p. 70) but that seems to me a strange and awkward name for her argument. Regardless, she explained that “morality is just one of several capacities specific to human beings – language and mathematics being others – for which no adequate evolutionary account exists … I must protest again that we do not have any reason to suppose that we know the evolutionary history of our moral attitudes. The hypothesis that a trait is the product of natural selections is an empirical hypothesis that must be constructed with biological detail and supported by evidence. A superficially plausible story is simply not enough” (p. 83).

Antony went further and even speculated that, possibly, our moral reasoning and intuition that generates our moral beliefs is a spandrel of evolution (p. 74). This doesn’t help her position at all. If I understand the concept of evolutionary spandrels correctly, they are just accidental byproducts of the haphazard random evolutionary process. If we have concerns about the reliability of our moral reasoning if it came about via the haphazard random evolutionary process, then we should have, not less, but more concerns if our moral reasoning was merely an accidental byproduct of this haphazard process. It doesn’t seem to me that it would help her case at all to suppose our moral reasoning is a spandrel of evolution instead of a direct result of evolution.

In his second critique of Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism, Wielenberg similarly argued that we do not know enough about how evolution worked to confidently assert Plantinga’s first premise (the probability of our cognitive faculties being reliable, given atheism and evolution, is low). He admitted there are cases where, despite having lots of good evidence for the reliability of their cognitive faculties, a person could become convinced concerning certain claims about his origin that would require him to doubt the reliability of his cognitive faculties. However, the theory of evolution does not meet this threshold because it is missing too much crucial information. He explained that “… while a typical reflective naturalist [atheist] believes that he has an understanding of some of the basic principles of evolution, he also believes that there are important causal factors of the actual process of evolution that led to the development of human cognitive faculties here on earth of which he is unaware.”50 In sum, the less we know about how the actual evolutionary process took place, the less confidence we should place in Plantinga’s first premise.

Wielenberg argued that, because our knowledge about how the evolutionary process formed our cognitive faculties is so incomplete, it should not undercut the vast amount of positive evidence we have for the reliability of our cognitive faculties. Therefore, we should place less confidence in Plantinga’s first premise and more confidence in the evaluation of our own cognitive faculties. He concluded that “… it would take a lot of information about one’s origin–it takes a developed, detailed, fleshed-out scenario that is not missing any crucial information, before the grounds for doubt are serious enough to annihilate or undercut all one’s evidence for the reliability of one’s faculties.”51 In other words, the evidence that our cognitive faculties are reliable is much greater than the evidence for Plantinga’s first premise (the probability of our cognitive faculties, given atheism and evolution, is low).      

In response to Antonty and Wielenberg’s critique that we do not know enough about how evolution worked, it should be noted that most evolutionary debunking arguments, including Plantinga’s, are based on what contemporary scientists have reported about the process of evolution. Plantinga makes it clear that his argument only applies to someone who believes that atheism and evolution are true. Therefore, the hypothetical person in Plantinga’s argument does believe what contemporary scientists currently say about the evolutionary process that developed our cognitive faculties. If someone does not believe evolution is true, or believes there are a lot of holes in the theory, like the skeptic Wielenberg described, then this argument does not apply to that person. As I mentioned above though, evolutionary debunking arguments are merely a subset of a larger objection for atheistic explanations of objective morality, that is, the lucky coincidence objection. Thus, even if an atheist rejected evolutionary debunking arguments because they reject evolution, they’d still have to deal with the lucky coincidence objection.

Certainly there are various aspects about the theory of evolution that many do not find very credible; Plantinga himself has concerns with it.52 Regardless, the force of evolutionary debunking arguments depend, not on whether the contemporary theory of evolution is true, but on how much credibility a particular atheist attributes to it. The more an atheist believes in evolution, the more force that evolutionary debunking arguments have against them. The fact is that evolutionary scientists do claim to understand how evolution worked, and many atheists are confident that they are correct. In fact, the theory of evolution is, for many atheists, a key part of their belief system. It is to this type of atheist that evolutionary debunking arguments most strongly apply.

In his article against Plantinga’s argument, Wielenberg presents several hypothetical scenarios about someone finding out how he originated and then claims these scenarios more accurately reflect the position an atheist finds himself in when considering evolution. In the first scenario, the hypothetical person discovers that he came about “… by some process or other and have no idea at all what the process may be.”53 Each consecutive scenario increases the amount of information the person knows about how he originated. The fifth and final scenario, the one Wielenberg claims most resembles the situation of a reflective atheist concerning evolution, is as follows:

I believe I was created by a certain machine. I believe that the machine operates according to certain principles, and I understand all or most of these principles. I cannot make a very good estimate of the probability of such a machine producing cognitively reliable creatures, but I suspect the probability is relatively low. I cannot make a very good estimate of the probability in question because I believe that whether or not a given being is cognitively reliable depends on the initial condition of the machine at the start of the creation process and I have no idea what the initial conditions of the machine were at the start of the process that created me. Now I realize that all the creatures around me were created in this machine as well. I further notice that the vast majority of them are cognitively reliable.54

The problem with this scenario is that it does not represent the typical atheist. It may represent how Wielenberg understands evolution, but most atheists believe they understand fairly well how evolution played out. It seems the more scientific or educated an atheist is, the louder he claims he can explain how evolution produced us and our beliefs.55 It is the very cornerstone of their explanation—that nature selects for the ability to survive and reproduce, not the ability to know truth—which has led many, including Thomas Nagel, Barry Stroud, Patricia Churchland, and even Charles Darwin himself, to doubt the reliability of our cognitive faculties.56

With respect to our moral beliefs in particular, naturalist Joshua Greene, whom Wielenberg described as one of the central figures in contemporary moral psychology,57 and whose work Wielenberg highly praised,58 wrote, 

I view science as offering a “behind the scenes” look at human morality. Just as a well-researched biography can, depending on what it reveals, boost or deflate one’s esteem for its subject, the scientific investigation of human morality can help us to understand human moral nature, and in so doing change our opinion of it…. Understanding where our moral instincts come from and how they work can … lead us to doubt that our moral convictions stem from perceptions of moral truth rather than projections of moral attitudes.59

The contention here is that Greene, Darwin, Dawkins, Nagel, Stroud, and Churchland more closely represent the typical atheist than Wielenberg’s hypothetical so-called reflective atheist.

In order to drive home how arbitrary our moral beliefs would be if they were developed by a haphazard evolutionary process, proponents of evolutionary debunking arguments often point out that if our evolutionary path would have taken a different direction, then our moral beliefs would be radically different. Linville made such an argument using wolves and Antony noted how Ruse made such an argument with termites – “instead of evolving from ‘savannah-dwelling primates,’ we, like termites, could have evolved needing to “dwell in darkness, eat each other’s feces, and cannibalize the dead.’ If the latter were the case, we would ‘extol such as beautiful and moral’ and ‘find it morally disgusting to live in the open air, dispose of body waste and bury the dead.’” (p. 76). Antony’s response to these examples of termites and wolves was to exclaim that “I think that Linville’s wolves would surprise him …. If they developed the cognitive tools to notice and reflect upon their social practice, it might occur to a few of them that the benefits of their rigid hierarchical social system could be realized without granting absolute power to any one wolf” (p. 76).

Antony’s strategy here is very close to one that Wielenberg took. Wielenberg, in an attempt to remove all contingency (and therefore luck) from his model, spent the last few pages of his book Robust Ethics asking readers to entertain the idea that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary. By ‘necessary’ he meant that something must be the case in all possible worlds, whereas something is ‘contingent’ if it is possible for it not to be the case.60 If the laws of nature were necessary in this sense, he argued, then any being with cognitive faculties like ours would necessarily have moral beliefs similar to ours.61 I trust you see how similar this move is to the move Antony made. Wielenberg made this move because he understands that eliminating all contingency is the only way to ultimately rebut the lucky coincidence objection.

It is interesting to note that Wielenberg seems to agree with theists that there must be a necessary foundation of some sort for objective morality. Both sides then, theists and atheists, recognize that contingent things are not enough, there must be something necessary that provides the stability needed for morality to be objective as opposed to just a subjective, accidental human belief. Theists argue that God provides such a necessary foundation whereas Wielenberg asked his readers here to consider that the laws of nature may be necessary.

In his attempt to deflect the lucky coincidence objection made by theists who argue that the existence of God is the best explanation for why our moral beliefs correspond to moral truth, Wielenberg wrote that “… the question of whether God’s existence would decrease how lucky we would have to be to possess moral knowledge depends on the modal status of the laws of nature.”62 He continued by considering two possible scenarios. First, if the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary, then it would not matter if God does not exist. 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.”63 He argued that, “[c]onsequently, to make the case that the truth of theism would make our possession of moral knowledge less lucky than atheism, one would need to make the case that the laws of nature are not metaphysically necessary.”64

Wielenberg seems to ignore the fact that the inverse is also true: To make the case that the truth of atheism would make our possession of moral knowledge no more lucky than if theism were true, which is what Wielenberg is trying to do, one would need to make the case that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary. But Wielenberg makes no such attempt. Certainly one can speculate that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary, but such an assertion is notoriously difficult to prove, as Wielenberg himself admits.65

Also, even if some of the 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.66

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 cognitive faculties could be different, which in turn may have resulted in vastly different moral beliefs. Similar to the termites and wolves already discussed, Charles Darwin himself recognized this and used bees as an example:

If … men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, 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. For each individual would have an inward sense of possessing certain stronger or enduring instincts, and others less strong or enduring.… In this case an inward monitor would tell the animal that it would have been better to have followed the one impulse rather than the other. The one course ought to have been followed, and the other ought not; the one would have been right and the other wrong.…67

Fellow moral robust realist David Enoch agreed that “[i]t is indeed true that had the causal forces shaping our intellectual and other normative faculties been very different, had they ‘aimed’ at things that are of no value at all or that are of disvalue, we would have been systematically mistaken in our normative beliefs. And we are indeed epistemically lucky that this (presumably) isn’t the case…. So yes, some brute luck may remain.”68 He went on to call the fact that our moral beliefs do line up with objective moral truth a miracle, albeit, in his estimation, a small miracle. After presenting a third-factor model similar to Wielenberg’s, he concluded his discussion as follows: “Let me not give the impression that this suggested way of coping with the epistemological challenge is ideal. Indeed, because of the (perhaps) remaining small miracle perhaps Robust Realism [his non-naturalist atheistic explanation of objective morality] does lose some plausibility points here.”69

As for Wielenberg’s speculative solution that our evolutionary path might have been necessary, he wrote that the amount of lucky coincidence involved in having moral beliefs that are correlated with objective moral truth depends on the answer to this question: “[T]o what extent do the actual laws of nature permit the emergence of species of beings that m-possess moral principles radically different from the moral principles we m-possess?”70 He began his answer to this question with the following hypothetical claim, which he called Extreme Specificity (ES): “The actual laws of nature entail that any being capable of forming moral beliefs at all m-possess all and only the principles included in Moral Truth.”71 He argued that if the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary in this regard then “… there is no luck at all involved in the fact that Bart [a hypothetical person he used as an example] m-possesses moral principles that correspond with moral reality rather than m-possessing radically different (and false) moral principles.”72 This is the same strategy Antony used when surmised that Linville’s wolves would surprise him.

Wielenberg is clear that he does not believe Extreme Specificity is true; he admitted that “we simply lack the knowledge required to warrant a clear and confident answer” concerning Extreme Specificity, but he did suggest that “… we may be relatively close to ES [Extreme Specificity]—or at least, closer to ES than some philosophers have suggested.”73 He even postulated that “[f]or 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.”74 He understands that the closer we are to Extreme Specificity in the actual world, the smaller amount of luck is entailed by our having moral beliefs that correspond to objective moral truth. He concluded his book by stating that “[a]s far as I can tell, a certain degree of agnosticism is called for with respect to just how lucky we are to have moral knowledge on a view like mine.”75

Anticipating how some would respond to this speculation, Wielenberg preemptively argued that just because one can think of other ways evolution could have played out (possibly more like the evolutionary paths of wolves, termites, or bees) does not mean that those ways are actually possible. He explained his point 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.76

In response, it should be noted that 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 wildly different organisms. In addition, since he is the one suggesting that the laws of nature and the evolutionary path which led to human beings may be necessary, the onus would be on him to provide evidence for this claim. 

In addition, Wielenberg himself inconsistently affirmed that human beings were produced by an evolutionary process that was accidental and thus contingent. 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.”77 He also wrote that “contemporary atheists typically maintain that human beings are accidental, evolved, mortal, and relatively short-lived….”78

Realizing the implications of these statements, Wielenberg explained in a footnote that, in the context of evolution, ‘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.”79 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.80 Thus, if evolution worked as many claim, that it was driven by accidental random mutations, which Wielenberg agrees to,81 as well as chance changes in the environment, such as the success of other organisms, climate changes, meteorites, etc., then it is very difficult to think that evolution had to necessarily produce human beings just the way they are and to have the moral beliefs they do.

Lastly, 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.82 Wielenberg recognized this when he 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 he used as an example] m-possesses moral principles that correspond with moral reality rather than m-possessing radically different (and false) moral principles.”83 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.”84

The important point is that 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 multiverse, are both based on the strong intuition that the laws of nature are not necessary but 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. Whether one believes that God exists or not, it seems much more plausible that, if He does exist, then He exists necessarily, that is, more plausible than the idea that the laws of nature are necessary.

3.2.3. Erik Wielenberg’s Third Factor Model

One of the ways that Erik Wielenberg attempted to address Evolutionary Debunking Arguments was by proposing that a third factor, namely, our cognitive faculties, explains why there is a correspondence between objective moral truth and our moral beliefs. He used this third factor model to try and show why it is not a lucky coincidence that moral truth and moral beliefs correspond; they correspond because they both stem from our cognitive faculties. He summarized this idea as follows:

[T]here is a necessary connection between the cognitive faculties and moral rights [those who have such cognitive faculties necessarily have moral rights]. Those very cognitive faculties also generate moral beliefs, including the relevant beliefs about rights. The connection between the cognitive faculties and beliefs about moral rights is causal. In this way, the relevant cognitive faculties are responsible for both moral rights and beliefs about those rights, and so the cognitive faculties explain the correlation between moral rights and beliefs about those rights.85

In other words, he posited that our cognitive faculties do more than generate our moral knowledge, they also instantiate ontologically our moral rights and obligations in the first place. Thus, our cognitive faculties explain why there is a match between our moral beliefs and objective moral truth. He wrote that

… the presence of the very cognitive faculties that cause (or at least causally contribute to) my belief that I have certain rights also entails that I have those very rights.… [C]ertain non-moral features of the world [our cognitive faculties] both entail certain moral facts and causally contribute to the presence of moral beliefs that correspond to those moral facts.86

Thus he argued that there is a correlation between our beliefs about moral rights and the fact that we do indeed have these rights in that both stem from a third factor–our cognitive faculties.87 He noted that “[i]f these claims are correct, then we have explained the ‘remarkable fact’ [that moral properties and moral beliefs correspond].… [I]t seems to me that if we can explain why (i) x causes y and (ii) x entails z, then we have explained why y and z tend to go together.”88

To summarize, Wielenberg claimed that this third factor (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.”89 He used his third-factor model to try to deflect criticism from several prominent evolutionary debunking arguments from Gilbert Harman, Michael Ruse, Sharon Street, and Richard Joyce.90  

Let me take some time and more fully explain the part of this third factor model that Wielenberg refers to as hi proposed making relationship in which natural non-moral properties are responsible for making moral properties to be instantiated. The importance of this proposal to his model is made clear by his explanation that “the making relation is the cement of the foundation of normative reality.”91 He construed this relationship as a type of causation when he wrote that “… whatever moral properties are instantiated are conserved or sustained by various underlying non-moral properties via a robust causal relation that holds between the relevant non-moral and moral properties.”92 Wielenberg summarized this making relationship well when he responded to the question: What is the source of human moral rights and obligations?

I propose the following answer: any being that can reason, suffer, experience happiness, tell the difference between right and wrong, choose between right and wrong, and set goals for itself has certain rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and certain obligations, including the duty to refrain from rape (in typical circumstances). Having such cognitive capacities makes one have such rights and duties. Evolutionary processes have produced human beings that can reason, suffer, experience happiness, tell the difference between right and wrong, choose between right and wrong, and set goals for themselves. In this way, 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. But that they are accidental in origin does not make these moral properties unreal or unimportant.93

Wielenberg claimed this making relationship is brute in that it has no ontological explanation and no foundation external to itself.94 Though this making relationship has always necessarily existed timelessly as a brute fact, moral goodness itself was not exemplified until the correct non-moral properties arose. He explained that

… if a given entity is good, it is good in virtue of or because of certain non-moral properties of that entity. Pleasure, for instance, is good because of the qualitative feel that pleasure has. Persons are valuable, and possess certain rights, because of certain capacities they have—for instance, the capacity to experience pain, and to reason. When an entity possessing the right sort of non-moral properties comes into existence, that entity will also possess the property of being good. When such entities are produced by entities or processes that do not possess moral properties, then value arises from valuelessness. More precisely, in such cases, entities that have the property of being good arise from entities or processes that do not have this property. For example, for many years the universe was devoid of sentient life. Eventually, valueless processes produced beings that could experience pleasure, and, at some point, the first episode of pleasure occurred. At that moment, the property of goodness was exemplified for the first time.95

In this section I will argue that Wielenberg’s third-factor model fails to rebut the lucky coincidence objection. First I will argue against the first part of his third-factor model, his idea that cognitive faculties make moral properties to be instantiated. Second, I will point out that the second part of his third-factor model, his idea that our cognitive faculties generate our moral beliefs, is contingent and thus is still vulnerable to the lucky coincidence objection.

First I will argue against Wielenberg’s suggestion that cognitive faculties make moral properties to be instantiated. Given atheism, why think that cognitive faculties are anything more than instrumental accidents of evolution that nature selected for because they led to greater chances of survival or reproduction? Mark Linville has argued that human cognitive faculties are not a viable source of moral properties such as moral value, rights, or duties if they are merely instrumental abilities developed from a haphazard evolutionary process, much like opposable thumbs. He wrote that “… it is better for a human to have a pair of thumbs than not. But that is because having them allows people to open beer bottles and play the tuba. It does not follow (obviously), that thumbed creatures enjoy some special value not shared by their thumbless companions. To get anything like a real rights view up and running would seem to require more than appeal to such instrumentally valuable human characteristics.”96 Linville makes a similar point in his debate with Antony (p. 61). Peter Singer famously claimed that our insistence of human moral rights is an unwarranted species-ist type of chauvinism on our part.97 Given atheism, it is hard to see why he is wrong. If our cognitive faculties arose accidentally as helpful adaptions to our environment then, as James Rachels pointed out, we “… are not entitled … to regard our own adaptive behavior as ‘better’ or ‘higher’ than that of a cockroach, who, after all, is adapted equally well to life in its own environmental niche.”98

Another problem with Wielenberg’s idea that our cognitive faculties instantiate moral properties is that different human beings have different levels of cognitive abilities. Wielenberg’s model would seem to indicate then that we should attribute less moral rights and duties to those who have lesser cognitive faculties such as infants or those with mental handicaps. This is a very precarious path that could be used to justify all sorts of horrendous practices such as eugenics, forced sterilizations, and involuntary euthanasia. Angus Menuge summarized his concern with this part of Wielenberg’s model as follows: “[I]t is obvious that even amongst those who have the relevant cognitive faculties, there is wide variation in cognitive powers and capacities. Human rights are supposed to be equal, but it is implausible … to claim that all of these human beings would have the same human rights: if cognitive powers and capacities come in degrees, so would human rights.”99

John Hare contrasted a notion like Wielenberg’s to a common belief among theists concerning the moral value of all human beings; he wrote,

It is unclear why we should give status to members of a species who do not themselves have the relevant capacities … for example, infants born with severe mental retardation, if it is the existence of just those capacities in some of its members that is supposed to make the species valuable in the particular way that moral status implies. I myself do not see how to overcome this difficulty [however] [w]ithin the Abrahamic faiths we do have a way to do this, starting from the premise that humans are created in the image of God.100

While considering a similar notion, that we should ascribe value to human beings because they have the capacity for rational reflection, Evans made the point that “many people believe that young infants and people suffering from dementia still have … intrinsic dignity, but in both cases there is no capacity for rational reflection.”101 In other words, Wielenberg’s model seems to imply that if a particular human being does not have sufficient cognitive faculties, then they have less moral rights, or none at all. Surely Wielenberg himself does not believe that infants and people suffering from dementia have less moral rights, but the fact that his model seems to minimize, if not eradicate, such rights is an indication that his model is dangerously wrong.

Also, Wielenberg’s proposed making relationship between moral and natural properties is suspect because it is an extravagant ontological claim. Wielenberg has conceded “… that the appeal to the making relation makes robust normative realism less attractive in some respects than at least some of its competitors…. [I]t is plausible that, everything else being equal, a theory that posits more kinds of properties and relations is less attractive than a theory that posits fewer kinds of theories and relations.”102 Platonists have historically struggled to explain how their proposed abstract objects are able to connect with concrete objects in the physical world. Sometimes known as the problem of exemplification, this issue dates all the way back to Plato and his critics. It is fairly well agreed upon that abstract objects, if they exist, are non-causal entities; so much so that being non-causal is usually part of the definition of abstract objects. Therefore, the abstract objects themselves are unable to cause their connection with concrete objects. Many Platonists, including Plato himself, have even suggested a theistic being as the agent that causes abstract objects to be exemplified in concrete objects.103

At least when it comes to understanding how moral properties can be connected to non-moral properties, the idea that the former supervenes on the latter is currently the most popular explanation. However, some have criticized the idea of supervenience by claiming it is not an explanation at all but merely a filler word used to signify something for which we have no explanation.104 In addition, as Wielenberg noted, some have “suggested that such supervenience is more at home in a theistic universe than in a non-theistic one.”105 He went on to quote William Wainwright’s comment that “… the connection between the base property and the supervenient property can seem mysterious. For, in the absence of further explanation, the (necessary) connection between these radically different sorts of properties … is just an inexplicable brute fact.”106 

Wielenberg rejects the three explanations discussed above for how moral properties connect with the physical world—that the moral properties themselves cause the connection, that a theistic being causes the connection, or that moral properties simply supervene upon natural properties. Instead, he has proposed that it is the concrete objects which cause this connection. Craig summarized his position as follows: “Wielenberg recognizes that it would be implausible to say that this just happens, as if by magic. Rather he claims that the physical objects cause the abstract objects to supervene on physical situations.”107

While Wielenberg sometimes uses the term supervenience to explain this phenomenon, his explanation of the process makes it clear he is proposing something much more elaborate than simple supervenience. He explained that his proposed making relationship is a form of robust causal D-supervenience where the concrete natural properties (our cognitive faculties) actually cause the abstract moral properties to be instantiated. He coined the term D-supervenience as a way to refer to Michael DePaul’s version of supervenience.108 He explained that “… given DePaul’s understanding of dependency, if M depends on some base properties B, then M is not identical with, reducible to, or entirely constituted by B, but the instantiation of B explains the instantiation of M; it is B’s instantiation that makes M be instantiated…. This making relation (as I shall henceforth refer to it) is distinct from supervenience.”109 His proposed D-supervenience, or making relationship, is distinct because supervenience, as it is normally understood, is merely a relationship of correlation whereas making is actually explanatory and causal. Thus he construes the making relationship involved in D-supervenience as a sort of robust causation, thus describing making as type of causation.110

William Lane Craig has been one of the most vocal critics of Wielenberg’s proposed making relationship between natural properties and moral properties. First, since natural properties are not agents, how do they know which moral properties to instantiate? Craig rhetorically asked “What if instead of picking out moral goodness, some physical situation might pick out moral badness? Indeed, what if it picks out some other abstract object like √2 to instantiate, so that two people’s loving each other has the property of being √2 instead of being good?”111 In addition, Craig pointed out that Wielenberg “imputes to physical objects causal powers that are mysterious and completely unknown to contemporary physics.”112   

In response, Wielenberg pointed out that in his model this

… relation is a causal relation of a robust sort: the act’s being a case of causing pain just for fun necessarily causes the act’s wrongness. This causal relation holds between instances of properties—property-tokens—and so does not involve causation between concrete and abstract entities. This point is important because it means that Craig’s objections to causation between concrete and abstract entities are directed against a doctrine that is not part of my view.113

This seems to be a distinction without a difference that does not help Wielenberg’s case at all. He admits as much in a footnote to the above quote where he wrote,

I should note, however, that some of Craig’s concerns about my theory of robust causation are relevant to causation between property tokens. E.g., I offer no account of how such causation works nor do I offer an explanation of why certain nonmoral property tokens cause one moral property token rather than another. While I don’t see these as serious weaknesses in my view, I want to make clear that I am not suggesting that Craig’s misunderstanding of my account of robust causation renders all of his objections to such causation irrelevant.114

In several places he claimed that this causal relationship is brute, unexplained, and necessary, and that he does not see this as a serious weakness of his model. He argued that “[e]xplanation, as they say, must come to an end somewhere. Why does being an instance of torturing someone just for fun entail moral wrongness? Because being an instance of torturing someone just for fun makes an act wrong.… Eventually we hit bottom; no further explanation is available. But I don’t see why possessing this sort of explanatory bottom is a problematic feature for a view to have.”115 Later he added that this causal relationship is necessary: “There is a necessary connection between the cognitive faculties and moral rights.”116

Wielenberg’s insistence on these unexplained necessary connections between non-moral properties and moral properties has caused some to accuse his model of being conveniently ad hoc. First, consider the following quote by Shelly Kagan:

An adequate justification for a set of principles requires an explanation of those principles—an explanation of why exactly these goals, restrictions, and so on, should be given weight, and not others. Short of this, the principles will not be free of the taint of arbitrariness which led us to move beyond our … ad hoc shopping lists.… Unless we can offer a coherent explanation of our principles (or show that they need no further justification), we cannot consider them justified, and we may have reason to reject them.… This need for explanation in moral theory cannot be overemphasized.117

For instance, concerning models like Wielenberg’s, Craig, reflecting Kagan’s concern above, wrote that “[i]f our approach to metaethical theory is to be serious metaphysics rather than just a ‘shopping list’ approach, whereby one simply helps oneself to the supervenient moral properties or principles needed to do the job, then some sort of explanation is required for why moral properties supervene on certain natural states or why such principles are true.”118

Second, now that I’ve critiqued the first part of Wielenberg’s third-factor model, his idea that cognitive faculties make moral properties to be instantiated, I will now point out that the second part of his third-factor model, his idea that our cognitive faculties generate our moral beliefs, is contingent and thus remains vulnerable to the overall lucky coincidence objection. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that Wielenberg is correct in that cognitive faculties do necessarily make moral properties to be instantiated (see my concerns about this claim above), 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. There is no good reason to think that beings with cognitive faculties like ours would come to have the same moral beliefs we do. We can easily imagine beings with similar cognitive faculties as our own but with radically different types of moral beliefs.

As noted earlier, this point is amplified if one believes, as most atheists do, that our cognitive faculties and moral beliefs came about haphazardly through a random evolutionary process. Wielenberg himself does not take a position on whether all our moral beliefs can be explained in evolutionary terms but he is “sympathetic to the view that at least some of our moral beliefs can be given evolutionary explanations.”119 In particular, he sketched an evolutionary explanation of how we came to have our beliefs about moral rights.120 

The reason that beings with cognitive faculties like ours may not have the belief that they have moral properties such as rights is that the causal connection between cognitive faculties and moral beliefs is contingent, not necessary. Thus his model still includes contingency, that is, the contingency in the relationship between our cognitive faculties and our moral beliefs. This contingency still leaves his third factor model open to the lucky coincidence objection because, as Wielenberg himself admitted, where there is contingency, there is luck.121 Thus he 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.

It is important to note that Wielenberg describes this making relationship between cognitive faculties and moral properties, the first part of his third-factor model, as a necessary relationship, that it obtains in all possible worlds.122 This is the key difference to note between the first and second part of his third-factor model. While he proposed that the first part, the making relationship between cognitive faculties and moral properties, is necessary, he proposed that the second part of his third-factor model, the relationship between cognitive faculties and our moral beliefs, is contingent. Wielenberg admitted that “… because the basic ethical facts are necessary truths, if there is any luck in the correspondence between our psychological dispositions and moral reality, it must lie entirely on the psychological side of the equation.”123 His proposed correspondence between moral properties and moral beliefs breaks down because of this difference in causal necessity between the first and second part of his third-factor model.

Consider the following refutation by analogy. If Wielenberg’s model works in the realm of moral knowledge, then it should also work in other realms of knowledge generated by our cognitive faculties, realms such as science and mathematics. Let us consider his third factor in the context of Fermat’s Last Theorem.124 For the purpose of this analogy, it is sufficient to note that Fermat’s Last Theorem is a mathematical theorem proposed by Pierre de Fermat in 1637. He claimed he had developed a proof of this theorem but such a proof was never found in any of his writings. Despite numerous attempts by mathematicians, there were no published successful proofs of this theorem until 1994. If we insert Fermat’s Last Theorem in Wielenberg’s third-factor model, the two parts of the model would be as follows:

1. Our cognitive faculties make the property of ‘being able to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem’ be instantiated.

2. Our cognitive faculties cause us to believe we can prove Fermat’s Last Theorem.

It is easy to imagine beings like us who have the cognitive faculties which make them able to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem, but who do not have the belief that they can. Similarly, it is easy to imagine beings like us who have cognitive faculties which make them have moral properties such as rights and obligations (assuming the first part of Wielenberg’s third factor model is correct), but who do not have the belief that they have such properties. Our imagination is not even necessary, for there are in fact such people, that is, humans who do not think they, or others, have moral rights and obligations. The reason that beings with cognitive faculties like ours may not believe that they have moral properties is that the causal connection between cognitive faculties and moral beliefs is contingent, not necessary.      

To summarize, it has been argued in this section that Wielenberg does not avoid the lucky coincidence objection with his third-factor model. First, there are serious problems with the first part of his third factor model, his proposed making relationship between moral and nonmoral properties. Second, there is still contingency in the second part of this third factor model, that is, the idea that our cognitive faculties generate our moral beliefs. For this second issue, I showed that Wielenberg did not eliminate contingency, he only moved it to a different location in an attempt to sweep it under the rug. Therefore there is still contingency in his third-factor model, namely, in the second part, his proposed relationship between our cognitive faculties and our moral beliefs. And where there is contingency, there is luck.

3.2.4. The Modal Security Response

Justin Clarke-Doane wrote a paper titled “Debunking Arguments: Mathematics, Logic, and Modal Security” that will be published in Robert Richards and Michael Ruse (eds.), Cambridge Companion to Evolutionary Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In this paper Clarke-Doane presented a response to evolutionary debunking arguments concerning objective morality. It seems to me that his argument can be summarized as follows:

1. If evolutionary debunking arguments undermine our moral beliefs, then they also undermine all our other beliefs, such as our mathematical beliefs.

2. We are confident that our cognitive faculties that produce our beliefs, specifically our mathematical beliefs, are reliable for the most part.

3. Since we don’t allow evolutionary debunking arguments to undermine many of our beliefs, such as our mathematical beliefs, then we shouldn’t allow them to undermine our moral beliefs either.

In a nutshell, he is arguing that if we allow evolutionary debunking arguments to undermine our moral beliefs, then, to be consistent, we have to allow them to undermine all our beliefs, including our mathematical beliefs. But we are so very confident that many of our beliefs, and especially our mathematical beliefs, are accurate. Therefore, we should reject any evolutionary debunking arguments that attempt to undermine our beliefs, including our moral beliefs.

Clarke-Doane gives several examples of proponents of evolutionary debunking arguments that selectively apply their argument to only certain beliefs, namely, our moral beliefs, but inconsistently don’t apply them to our other beliefs (p. 4). In this I agree with Clarke-Doane; it is inconsistent to apply evolutionary debunking arguments to only some of our beliefs. That is why I affirmed Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary debunking argument above, because he consistently applied it to all of our beliefs. As I explained above, Plantinga’s evolutionary argument is broader in that it applies, not just to our moral intuitions, but to all of our cognitive faculties; for this reason it is a more consistent position. This position is in contrast with atheists who often apply evolutionary debunking arguments only to moral and religious beliefs while maintaining that our cognitive faculties provide us with reliable beliefs in other areas.

Telling such an evolutionary story is a common tactic employed by atheists, including Wielenberg, to try and explain away religious beliefs as false. In an effort to brush off C. S. Lewis’s argument for God’s existence from human desire for, and belief in, ultimate joy, Wielenberg wrote of such desires that “evolutionary psychology … predicts that human beings will tend to hold a number of false beliefs.… ”125 Wielenberg has spent a considerable amount of time trying to defend his assertion that we have true moral beliefs from evolutionary debunking arguments. Clearly Wielenberg did not realize his inconsistency in affirming evolutionary debunking arguments to dismiss the reliability of our religious beliefs while rejecting such arguments when it comes to the reliability of our moral beliefs. Shafer-Landau rightly pointed out the inconsistency of applying evolutionary debunking arguments to only some of our beliefs when he wrote,

If we are required to suspend judgment about all perceptual beliefs—as we must, if required to do so in the moral case—then we will most likely not be in a position to confirm the reliability of our perceptual faculties. We must presuppose the truth of at least some central, widely uncontroversial perceptual beliefs in order to get the confirmation of our perceptual faculties off the ground. But if we are allowed such liberties in the perceptual realm, then we should be given similar license for morality. And then the debunking game is up.126

Thus I wholeheartedly affirm the first premise of Clarke-Doane’s argument as I summarized it above. Given atheism and evolution, there is no good reason to assume any of our cognitive faculties are reliable and thus we have reason to question all of our beliefs. Thus, given atheism and evolution, there results a certain global skepticism about all our beliefs. This is famously known as “Darwin’s Doubt” because Darwin himself seems to be the first to recognize this predicament. For instance, he began to doubt the reliability of his own cognitive faculties when he became convinced humans had come about through an evolutionary process. In 1881 he wrote to W. Graham, in response to his Creed of Science, that “… you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance. But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”127

Where I disagree with Clarke-Doane’s argument is in his premise 2 and 3 as I summarized it above. I would maintain that, given evolution and atheism, we should rightfully doubt the reliability of our cognitive faculties and thus doubt that all of our beliefs are accurate, including our mathematical beliefs. Someone might claim that we could simply check the accuracy of our mathematical beliefs by comparing it to objective mathematical truths. However, such a strategy would be viciously circular because, as discussed above, we’d be using our own mathematical abilities to verify our own mathematical abilities, which is the very thing being doubted. If we have doubts about the length of a yard stick, we don’t want to use that yard stick to measure itself to see if it really is indeed 36 inches.

Footnotes

[1] Michael L. Peterson and Raymond J. VanArragon, eds., Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2020), 55–84. When quoting Linville and Antony from this book, I’ll simply put the page number in parenthesis within my text.

[2] David Baggett, “Psychopathy and Supererogation,” in God and Morality: What Is the Best Account of Objective Moral Values and Duties? (New York: Routledge, 2020), forthcoming.

[3] David Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 57–58.

[4] Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously, 14–15.

[5] Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously, 267.

[6] William Lane Craig, Is Goodness without God Good Enough?: A Debate on Faith, Secularism, and Ethics, ed. Nathan L. King and Robert K. Garcia (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009), 30.

[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), 116–140.   

[8] Adams, Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief, 116.

[9] Adams, Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief, 117.

[10] Adams, Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief, 117.

[11] Plato, Euthyphro, 9e.

[12] For a brief summary see C. Stephen Evans, God and Moral Obligation (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2014), 89–91. For a fuller treatment see John Milliken, “Euthyphro, the Good, and the Right,” Philosophia Christi 11.1 (2009): 145–55.

[13] William Lane Craig, “The Most Gruesome of Guests,” 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), 171–73.

[14] Robert Merrihew Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; repr., 2002), 7.

[15] Ibid., 14.

[16] Anselm, “Monologion,” in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works (eds. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans; Oxford World’s Classics, New York: Oxford University Press), 5–82.

[17] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book I, Chapter 40.

[18] David Baggett and Jerry Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 91.

[19] Baggett and Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality, 93.

[20] Erik J. Wielenberg, Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 85.

[21] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012), 189–220. See also Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Vintage, 1998), 282.

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

[23] Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Paradigm: Essays on Its History, Philosophy and Religious Implications (New York: Routledge, 1989), 261–69.

[24] Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

[25] Joyce, The Evolution of Morality, 184.

[26] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 147.

[27] Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975).

[28] Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (New York: Penguin Press, 2013). Peter Singer, “Ethics and Sociobiology,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 11:1 (1982): 40–64. Sharon Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,” Philosophical Studies 127 (2006): 109–166. Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 184.     

[29] Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,” 121–22.

[30] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 13–14.

[31] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 155.

[32] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 153.

[33] See Michael Martin, Atheism, Morality, and Meaning (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2003); Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Morality without God? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); David Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Michael Huemer, Ethical Intuitionism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Russ Shafer-Landau, “Evolutionary Debunking, Moral Realism and Moral Knowledge, ” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 7:1 (2012): 1–37.

[34] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 163.

[35] Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 313, 326, 335.

[36] Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 314. Though Plantinga’s argument uses naturalism in place of atheism, atheism is being used here because, as explained previously, Wielenberg is not a naturalist.

[37] Erik Wielenberg, “How to Be an Alethically Rational Naturalist,” Synthese 131:1 (2002): 81–98.

[38] Wielenberg, “How to Be an Alethically Rational Naturalist,” 85.

[39] Wielenberg, “How to Be an Alethically Rational Naturalist,” 90.

[40] Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 346.

[41] Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 341.

[42] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 3.

[43] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 4.

[44] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 4.

[45] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 5.

[46] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 6.

[47] Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 326.

[48] Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 341.

[49] Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 336.

[50] Wielenberg, “How to Be an Alethically Rational Naturalist,” 91.

[51] Wielenberg, “How to Be an Alethically Rational Naturalist,” 93.

[52] Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 225–64.

[53] Wielenberg, “How to Be an Alethically Rational Naturalist,” 87.

[54] Wielenberg, “How to Be an Alethically Rational Naturalist,” 95.

[55] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

[56] See quotes by these contemporary thinkers pointing out their doubts about our cognitive faculties in Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 315.

[57] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 110.

[58] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 123.

[59] Joshua Greene, “From Neural ‘Is’ to Moral ‘Ought’: What Are the Moral Implications of Neuroscientific Moral Psychology?” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4 (2003): 848–849.

[60] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 36, explained that he adopted these from Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 44–45.

[61] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 166–75.

[62] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 174.

[63] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 174.

[64] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 174.

[65] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 69.

[66] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 172.

[67] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed. (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1909), 100–101.

[68] David Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 173.

[69] Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously, 175.

[70] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 167.

[71] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 168. Moral Truth is the set of all necessarily true general moral principles, which, as has been noted, are what he claims are brute ethical facts.

[72] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 168.

[73] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 169.

[74] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 172.

[75] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 175.

[76] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 174. Emphasis added.

[77] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 56. Emphasis added.

[78] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 51. Emphasis added.

[79] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 51.

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

[81] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 51, 56.

[82] 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, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 202–82.

[83] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 168.

[84] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 168.

[85] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 145.

[86] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 153–54.

[87] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 56.

[88] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 156.

[89] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 154.

[90] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 146–64.

[91] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 38.

[92] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 20.

[93] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 56.

[94] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 37.

[95] Erik J. Wielenberg, “Objective Morality and the Nature of Morality,” American Theological Inquiry 3.2 (2010): 80.

[96] Mark Linville, God and Morality: What Is the Best Account of Objective Moral Values and Duties?, ed. Adam Lloyd Johnson (New York: Routledge, 2020), forthcoming.

[97] Peter Singer, Animal Rights and Human Obligations (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976).

[98] James Rachels, Created From Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 70.

[99] Angus Menuge, “Vindicating the Dilemma for Evolutionary Ethics: A Response to Erik Wielenberg” (presented at the Evangelical Philosophical Society Annual Meeting, Denver, CO, November 2018), 11.

[100] John Hare, God’s Command, Oxford Studies in Theological Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 27.

[101] C. Stephen Evans, “Moral Arguments for the Existence of God,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1.

[102] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 35.

[103] F. C. Copleston, Greece and Rome, vol. 1 of A History of Philosophy (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1946), Part 1, 214-217; Part 2, 33, 38.

[104] J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin, 1977), 41.

[105] Erik J. Wielenberg, “In Defense of Non-Natural, Non-Theistic Moral Realism,” Faith and Philosophy 26.1 (2009): 27.

[106] William J. Wainwright, Religion and Morality (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 66.

[107] Craig, “Erik Wielenberg’s Metaphysics of Morals,” 336.

[108] Michael R. DePaul, “Supervenience and Moral Dependence,” Philosophical Studies 51 (1987): 425–39. 

[109] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 10–11.

[110] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 19.

[111] Craig, “Erik Wielenberg’s Metaphysics of Morals,” 337.

[112] Craig, “Erik Wielenberg’s Metaphysics of Morals,” 337.

[113] Wielenberg, “Reply to Craig, Murphy, McNabb, and Johnson,” 366.

[114] Wielenberg, “Reply to Craig, Murphy, McNabb, and Johnson,” 366.

[115] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 24.

[116] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 145.

[117] Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 13.

[118] Craig, Is Goodness without God Good Enough?, 180.

[119] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 148.

[120] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 135–44.

[121] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 167.

[122] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 36, 145, 156.

[123] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 167.

[124] This particular refutation by analogy was suggested by Dr. Greg Welty.

[125] Erik Wielenberg, God and the Reach of Reason: C.S. Lewis, David Hume, and Bertrand Russell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 118–19.

[126] Russ Shafer-Landau, “Evolutionary Debunking, Moral Realism and Moral Knowledge,” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 7:1 (2012): 23.

[127] Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter, and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters, ed. Francis Darwin (London: J. Murray, 1902), 64.

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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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What Does the Euthyphro Dilemma Reveal about the Moral System of Islam? Part 2

Part 1

A second example about divine subjectivity in Islam is the story of Zaynab bent Jahsh. Zaynab was prophet Mohammad’s first cousin. He wanted her to marry his adopted son, Zayd bin Haritha. In the beginning, Zaynab and her family refused this marriage because of the low social status of Zayd. Allah had to interfere to defend Zayd by giving Mohammad Surah 33:36 “It is not for a believer, man or woman, when Allah and His Messenger have decreed a matter that they should have any option in their decision. And whoever disobeys Allah and His Messenger, he has indeed strayed into a plain error.” This verse gives Mohammad a great authority—similar to the authority of Allah himself. Zaynab finally accepts and marries Zayd.

According to Islamic sources, after some time, prophet Mohammad sees Zaynab and is captivated by her beauty. Zayd takes notice and asks Mohammad if he should divorce her. Ibn Ishaq writes Zayd’s question: “Should I divorce her for you, O Prophet of Allah? The Prophet says no, then Surah 33:37 came down and Allah’s command was accomplished.”[1] This is to say that after Zayd had married Zaynab, Allah issued another command to allow prophet Mohammad to marry Zaynab. “But when Zayd had accomplished his want of her, We [Allah] gave her to you [Mohammad] as a wife, so that there should be no difficulty for the believers in respect of the wives of their adopted sons, when they have accomplished their want of them; and Allah's command shall be performed.” In other words, Allah issues a command for Zayd to marry Zaynab, then he changes it by issuing another command having Zayd to divorce her and allowing Mohammad to marry her.

 This incident might have several social and psychological implications for Muslim women; however, for present purposes, we will concentrate on Allah’s command. This story shows that Allah’s truth is not objective or final. His commands alter to accommodate a private situation. At one point he instructs Zaynab to marry Zayd, and at a later time, he orders her to marry the prophet himself. It seems as if Allah is accommodating the preference of his prophet (playing favoritism), or he is changing his mind and commands based on new circumstances.

Allah’s command changed regarding adoption as well. Both Sunni and Shi’ite scholars agree that adoption is prohibited in Islam. They rely on Surah 33:5 in their legislation, “Nor has He (Allâh) made your adopted sons your sons. Such is (only) your (manner of) speech by your mouths. But God tells the truth, and He shows the way. Call them by (the names of) their fathers, that is better in the sight of God.”[2] Zayd was Mohammad’s adopted son until Mohammad fell in love with Zaynab and asked her to marry him. At that point, Allah changed his decree and declared adoption is wrong.

This is another example which shows morality is subjective in Islam because it is completely dependent on Allah’s commands. His discretion changes with time, and also his decree. While morality is due to Allah’s fiat, it is grounded in his mutable nature. Thus, it is subjective, and Allah’s commands seem to benefit some [the prophet] and dismiss others [like Zaynab].

The Divine Command Theory reveals a great weakness in Allah’s moral character because his commands look arbitrary. There is no reason to think that Allah will not issue an abhorrent command simply because he can make right and good bad or vice versa. In the example of adoption, Mohammad adopted Zayd because adoption was good, but then Allah changed his discretion and made adoption bad. Consequently, Mohammad forbids it. The Judeo-Christian worldview, on the other hand, believes that “the moral truth in question would be a reflection of his [God] very nature, upheld by his faithfulness to it in this and all possible circumstances. It’s potentially a veridical window of insight into an aspect of his own holy and loving character. To issue a command at variance with it would be to deny himself, which God simply can’t do.”[3] God in Christianity cannot deny himself; he is restrained by his ultimate goodness because he is the Good. God does not change his mind; whatever he pronounces as good and right remains unchanging because of the immutable good nature of God.

In the Judeo-Christian faith, morality is based on the good nature of God, not on “no reason” for God’s command nor for the benefit of certain people. God has reasons for each command and the reasons are based on his loving nature. The command “to love your neighbor as yourself” resonates with God’s relational character. God in the Judeo-Christian faith wants to establish a relationship with all humanity, not only certain people—who obey him blindly.

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[1] Muhammad Ibn Ishaq Al-Matlbi, Kitab al-Siyar wa-l-Maghazi (Damascus, Syria: Dar al-Fikir, 1978), 262.

[2] Sayyid Muhammad Rizvi, "Dear Maulana Questions" section of Shama newsletter (Vancouver, B.C., Canada) 1990, accessed January 24, 2021. URL: https://www.al-islam.org/articles/adoption-islam-sayyid-muhammad-rizvi. Dar al-Ifta Al-Missiyyah, “Is it permissible for an unmarried woman adopt a child?,” accessed January 24, 2021. URL: https://www.dar-alifta.org/Foreign/ViewFatwa.aspx?ID=4845.

[3] David Baggett & Jerry Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (Oxford University Press, 2011), 131.

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Sherene Khouri was born into a religiously diverse family in Damascus, Syria. She became a believer when she was 11 years old. Sherene and her husband were missionaries in Saudi Arabia. Their house was open for meetings and they were involved with the locals until the government knew about their ministry and gave them three days’ notice to leave the country. In 2006, they went back to Syria and started serving the Lord with RZIM International ministry. They travel around the Middle Eastern region—Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and United Arab Emirates. Sherene was also involved in her local church among the young youth, young adults, and women’s ministry. In 2013, the civil war broke out in Syria. Sherene and her husband’s car was vandalized 3 times and they had to immigrate to the United States of America. In 2019, Shere became an American citizen.

Sherene holds a Ph.D. candidate in Apologetics and Theology at Liberty University. She holds a Master of Art in Christian Apologetics from Liberty University and a Bachelor of Science in Biblical Studies from Moody Bible Institute. She is also working on a Master of Theology in Global Studies at Liberty University. Her specialty is answering Islamic objections to the Christian faith.

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What Does the Euthyphro Dilemma Reveal about the Moral System of Islam? Part 1

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Many people believe that all religions are the same, that they all have the same goal, and they all aim at the same end, namely, to encourage their followers to do what is good. Islam as a religion has a unique ethical system, which relies mainly on Allah’s commands. This article will link Divine Command Theory (one horn of the Euthyphro Dilemma), particularly a strong version of voluntarism, to the Islamic understanding of morality.

The Euthyphro Dilemma, in contemporary terms, asks this question? Is something moral because God commands it, or does God command what is moral?

In other words, who defines the standard of goodness/rightness? Is it God because he is higher and above the standard of goodness and rightness—making goodness a function of divine caprice? Or is the standard of goodness/rightness above God— making Him submissive to it?

Most Muslims will likely agree with the first horn of the dilemma, the Divine Command Theory. God is above all standards, He has the complete freedom to mandate any law, and every ethical norm is defined by His will and command. He does not succumb to any condition or standard because he defines the specifications and the guidelines of goodness/rightness. In other words, the difference between right and wrong, and good and evil for that matter, is a function of God’s discretion.  

Confining our attention for the moment to axiological matters, the first horn of the dilemma makes goodness arbitrary if God does not have a good nature. If good and bad are due to God’s mandate, can God’s fiat render theft and adultery to be good things? Shifting our focus to deontic questions, can God simply make torturing children for fun to be right? The Islamic literature, taken at face value, reveals that analogously abhorrent commands are not only possible under the Islamic worldview, but real. 

Since goodness is defined by Allah, on a strongly voluntarist reading, then he can command adultery and thereby make it good. It is known in Islam that polygamy is permissible. Not only permissible, but it is also ordered to prevent evil. Allah tells Muslims, “if you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly with the orphan-girls then marry (other) women of your choice, two or three, or four; but if you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly (with them), then only one or (the slaves) that your right hands possess. That is nearer to prevent you from doing injustice” (Surah 4:3 Al-Hilali & Khan). In the Qur’an Polygamy is given to Muslim men to prevent adultery. Polygamy is ordered in the Qur’an; therefore, it is not considered bad or wrong (Surah 4:3). Most Muslims do not discuss whether marrying four wives is considered an adulterous act because Allah commands it. Whatever Allah commands is halal (permissible).

The conversation about this topic seems like a dead-end. Many female TV anchors have broached this topic with various Arab Imams in interviews. They asked the Imams, “Does not God care about my feelings?” The answers of the Imams were, “Do you know better than Allah? Do you dare to question Allah?” Allah is the ultimate authority in the world, and he knows what is best and right for humanity. Therefore, women should obey the Qur’an without questioning Allah’s decree. “O you who believe! do not put questions about things which if declared to you may trouble you” (Surah 5:101). Asking Muslims not to question Allah and just obey him blindly is a great weakness in Islamic theology because God created human beings with the faculty of thinking. So, to create them with rational capacity and ask them not to use it is a contradictory matter.

Polygamy in Islam shows favoritism to men against women. It is true that this decree was given in a male dominating culture; however, it implies divine subjectivity because It dismisses women’s human’s worth, rights, and dignity. It is still the official practice in all Islamic majority countries, and is allowed under Shari’a law. Divine favoritism displays subjective morality in Islam because permitting polygamy for men and dismissing women’s feelings and rights is completely dependent on Allah’s commands.

In the Judeo-Christian faith, morality is objective because it is based on the immutable character of God. God does not change his mind. He did not order monogamy, then changed his mind and allowed polygyny/polygamy. Monogamy was and is the official practice in Christianity. God did not approve polygamy despite the fact that it was practiced in the Old Testament. He created one man and one woman as his suitable helper (Gen 2:18), but things changed after the fall. Lamech, for instance, was the first man who started practicing polygyny (Gen 4:19). It was not God who intended it, neither included it in his original design. Moreover, Lamech was a criminal, he killed a man for wounding him and a young man for injuring him. This is to say that the first person who originated this act was a violent selfish killer who did not care about his wives’ feelings, thus following his model is morally imprudent. Additionally, Moses’s law never encouraged polygamy. On the contrary, polygyny was detestable (Deut 17:17). Patriarchs and kings who practiced polygyny did it according to their own discretions, and not according to God’s commands or design.

Part 2

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Sherene Khouri was born into a religiously diverse family in Damascus, Syria. She became a believer when she was 11 years old. Sherene and her husband were missionaries in Saudi Arabia. Their house was open for meetings and they were involved with the locals until the government knew about their ministry and gave them three days’ notice to leave the country. In 2006, they went back to Syria and started serving the Lord with RZIM International ministry. They travel around the Middle Eastern region—Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and United Arab Emirates. Sherene was also involved in her local church among the young youth, young adults, and women’s ministry. In 2013, the civil war broke out in Syria. Sherene and her husband’s car was vandalized 3 times and they had to immigrate to the United States of America. In 2019, Shere became an American citizen.

Sherene is a Ph.D. candidate in Apologetics and Theology at Liberty University. She holds a Master of Art in Christian Apologetics from Liberty University and a Bachelor of Science in Biblical Studies from Moody Bible Institute. She is also working on a Master of Theology in Global Studies at Liberty University. Her specialty is answering Islamic objections to the Christian faith.

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Defusing the Euthyphro Dilemma

Editor’s note: Adam Johnson has graciously allowed us to republish this article. Find the original publication here.

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How a Concretist Position on Properties Salvages Divine Simplicity

Why salvage divine simplicity? Consider the Euthyphro Dilemma, often presented as a rebuttal to the moral argument for God’s existence. In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates asked “Is that which is holy loved by the gods because it is holy, or is it holy because it is loved by the gods?”1 The dilemma can be restated in monotheistic terms as follows: Either 1. Morality is based on God’s commands; thus, He could have arbitrarily commanded any heinous act and it would be morally right, or 2. Morality is based on necessary truths that even God cannot change; thus morality is independent of God and out of His control.2

In order to avoid both horns of the dilemma, theists have proposed that morality is dependent upon God’s nature in such a way that He could not command something that violates His moral nature.3 Robert M. Adams’s version of the Divine Command Theory is an important contemporary example of grounding morality in God’s nature. He explained that “[t]he part played by God in my account of the nature of the good is similar to that of the Form of the Beautiful or the Good in Plato’s Symposium and Republic. God is the supreme Good, and the goodness of other things consists in a sort of resemblance to God.”4 His view is Platonic in the sense that “[t]he role that belongs to the Form of the Good in Plato’s thought is assigned to God, and the goodness of other things is understood in terms of their standing in some relation, usually conceived as a sort of resemblance, to God.”5 This is not a new idea; in the first chapter of Monologion, Anselm argued that there must be one thing through which all good things are good, and that it alone is supremely good.6 Aquinas wrote that “Nothing… will be called good except in so far as it has a certain likeness of the divine goodness.”7

If morality is dependent upon God’s nature in this way, then both horns of the Euthyphro Dilemma are avoided. First, His commands would not be arbitrary because they would have to be consistent with His moral nature. Second, morality would not be independent of God, but dependent upon Him, that is, upon His moral nature. However, this proposed solution agrees with the Euthyphro Dilemma that morality is based on necessary truths that God cannot change or control, that is, truths concerning His moral nature. Baggett and Walls noted that “a careful distinction between questions of dependence and control allows an answer to the Euthyphro Dilemma that can serve as an important component of any thoroughly theistic metaphysic with a strong commitment to moral realism… Moral truths can be objective, unalterable, and necessary, and yet still dependent on God.”8 They concluded that “if such dependence or even identity obtains or is even possible, then the Euthyphro Dilemma is effectively defused and the moral argument for God’s existence accordingly gains strength.”9

However, this proposal concerning God’s moral nature raises a whole host of knotty questions. If we claim that something is morally good if it images God in a morally pertinent sense, then in effect we are discussing God’s nature, that is, His properties—and in particular, His property of moral goodness. But what is God’s nature? Is it ontologically prior to God Himself? Would such a notion violate God’s aseity? Is God dependent upon His nature? If not, then what is God’s relationship to His nature? If God is not able to choose His nature, does this violate His sovereignty? Some have criticized this solution to the Euthyphro Dilemma because it raises these additional difficulties. Atheist Erik Wielenberg argued that Christians inconsistently critique his model of ethics for positing unexplained necessary connections while they themselves also posit unexplained necessary connections, that is, between God’s moral nature, His commands, and His other attributes.10 Thus it behooves us as Christians to provide a fuller explanation of how God’s moral nature provides the foundation of objective morality, to fill in the details of our model as much as possible.

How is divine simplicity pertinent to this conversation? Interestingly, while critiquing the idea that an appeal to God’s nature solves the Euthyphro dilemma, Wielenberg wrote that “any theist who rejects the doctrine of divine simplicity seems committed to the existence of necessary connections between some of God’s attributes. Unless such theists can adequately explain all such connections, they, too, cannot consistently wield P1.”11 P1 is Wielenberg’s summary of the critique often leveled at his model by theists—“P1: Any approach to metaethics that posits logically necessary connections without adequately explaining why such connections hold is unacceptable.”12 Later he surmised that “…on a sufficiently strong doctrine of divine simplicity… there isn’t a necessary link between the divine nature and God issuing [a command] that needs explaining so perhaps a theist of this sort can consistently wield P1. [I]f sense can be made of it [divine simplicity] and if it is plausible it does seem to allow the theist to avoid having to explain lots of necessary connections between distinct divine attributes and actions.”13

In a similar critique of the notion that God’s moral nature solves the Euthyphro Dilemma, Jeremy Koons argued that the proposed solution just pushes the dilemma back one level beyond God’s commands to His nature: Is God’s moral nature good because He has it or does He have it because it is good?14 The resulting dilemma is as follows: Either 1. If God’s moral nature is good because He has it, then no matter what type of nature He had, even a heinous one, it would be considered good, or 2. If God’s moral nature is based on necessary truths that even God cannot change (He just has the nature He has), then His moral nature is independent of God and out of His control. Interestingly, without developing the idea fully, Koons merely mentioned that “[a]n alternate solution to the Euthyphro problem… requires embracing some potentially contentious notions, such as that of divine simplicity…”15

Here then are two critics of the standard answer to the Euthyphro Dilemma, that morality is grounded in God’s moral nature, who suggest that divine simplicity might be a possible solution to their critique. However, Koons is correct in noting that this notion is contentious; in fact, many theologians today have rejected divine simplicity. Thus, in this paper, in order to defuse the Euthyphro Dilemma and strengthen the moral argument for God’s existence, I will argue that taking a concretist position on properties allows us to salvage the key concepts of divine simplicity which are pertinent to this Euthyphro conversation. I will begin by first explaining what it means to take the position that properties are concrete objects.

And Now for Something Completely Different: Properties as Abstract Objects

In Does God Have a Nature? Alvin Plantinga tackled the issue of God’s relationship to His properties and argued that God has a nature which is not identical with Him.16 In this book he connected God’s nature with abstract objects as follows:

…if the number 7 or the proposition all men are mortal exist necessarily, then God has essentially the property of affirming their existence. That property, therefore, will be part of his nature. Indeed, for any necessarily existing abstract object O, the property of affirming the existence of O is part of God’s nature… God hasn’t created the numbers; a thing is created only if its existence had a beginning, and no number ever began to exist… [they] are necessary beings and have been created neither by God nor by anyone else. And of course the same goes for other necessarily existing abstract objects.17

He continued by noting that “[f]rom this point of view, then, exploring the realm of abstract objects can be seen as exploring the nature of God.”18 He concluded his book as follows:

(70)     Necessarily 7 + 5 = 12
(71)     It is part of God’s nature to believe that 7 + 5 = 12.
…is there a sensible sense of ‘explain’ such that in that sense (71) is the explanation of (70)… Or could we say, perhaps, that what makes (70) true is the fact that (71) is true? …Could we say, perhaps, that (70) is grounded in (71)? If so, what are the relevant senses of ‘explains,’ ‘makes true’ and ‘grounded in?’ These are good questions, and good topics for further study. If we can answer them affirmatively, then perhaps we can point to an important dependence of abstract objects upon God, even though necessary truths about these objects are not within his control.19

To summarize then, Plantinga described abstract objects as beings that exist necessarily, are uncreated, had no beginning, and the truths of which are not within God’s control, though they might be dependent upon Him in some way. This is a common theistic view of abstract objects; one additional characteristic many assign to them is that they are non-causal, that is, they cannot enter into the causal chain of events. But should properties be thought of as abstract objects?

Plantinga himself recognized the problems with such a position. He wrote that “if he [God] has aseity, he depends upon nothing for his existence and character; and if he is sovereign, everything depends upon him. Abstract objects seem to compromise both…”20 While discussing God’s properties as abstract objects, he noted that God “seems to be somehow conditioned and limited by these properties, and dependent upon them.”21 According to Plantinga, these concerns make up the best argument for nominalism. He explained that:

…we have been speaking only of his [God’s] own properties; but of course there is the rest of the Platonic menagerie—the propositions, properties, numbers, sets, possible worlds and all the rest. If these things are distinct from God, if they exist necessarily and have their characters essentially, then there is a vast and enormous structure that seems to be independent of God… That this swarm of Platonic paraphernalia infringes on the sovereignty of God is the best argument I know for nominalism.22

What would such a nominalism look like? According to Plantinga, the nominalist claims we should get rid of the “Platonic horde of propositions, states of affairs, numbers, sets and the like—in a word, abstract objects… So perhaps the truth is there are only concrete objects—God, other persons, and physical objects such as stars, trees and protons. ‘Concretism’ would be a more accurate if less euphonious name for this position than the usual ‘nominalism’: the claim that everything is a concrete object.”23

It should be noted that Plantinga rejects concretism because he argues that it does not solve, in his opinion, the key problem with abstract objects—that they seem to violate God’s sovereignty. He argued that even concretism results in many truths that are not in God’s control.24 However, William Lane Craig, a prominent critic of abstract objects, argued that the key problem with abstract objects is not that they violate God’s sovereignty, but that they violate His aseity. The term aseity comes from a Latin word meaning ‘of itself’; as Richards explained, it means that God “exists from and of himself and does not depend on anything outside himself for his nature or existence. Everything else, in contrast, depends upon God for its existence.”25

Christians have traditionally believed that God is a self-existent being that does not exist through, or in dependence upon, anything else; He is the sole ultimate reality. Craig argued that if there are abstract objects which are, like God, uncreated and eternal, then God is not the sole ultimate reality. Craig maintains therefore that the idea of abstract objects is a serious challenge to orthodox theology because it makes God out to be just one of a vast number of eternal and uncreated beings. He wrote that “[i]nsofar as these abstract objects are taken to be uncreated, necessary, and eternal, contemporary Platonism also comes into conflict with the traditional doctrines of divine aseity and creation.”26

The issue of God and abstract objects is critically important when it comes to the moral argument for God’s existence. For example, atheist Erik Wielenberg claims that moral truths exist as brute facts, thus concluding that morality can be real and objective even if there is no God. His description of these brute facts makes them sound very similar to abstract objects:

…my version of non-theistic robust normative realism has an ontological commitment shared by many theists: it implies the obtaining of substantive, metaphysically necessary, brute facts… Such facts are the foundation of (the rest of) objective morality and rest on no foundation themselves. To ask of such facts, “where do they come from?” or “on what foundation do they rest?” is misguided in much the way that, according to many theists, it is misguided to ask of God, “where does He come from?” or “on what foundation does He rest?” The answer is the same in both cases: they come from nowhere, and nothing external to themselves grounds their existence; rather, they are fundamental features of the universe that ground other truths.27

If Christian theologians are not careful, their promotion of abstract objects may do more harm than good. For instance, they might unknowingly be promoting a position that grounds morality in properties which are abstract objects, while positing God just as a being that exemplifies the moral properties in question. The consequence of such a position, as seen in Wielenberg’s work, is that it eventually views God as an unnecessary hypothesis.

How to Be a Nominalist Without Being a Nominalist

One concern that might be raised against concretism is that it entails a rejection of universals. Unfortunately, the term “nominalist” has been used to describe someone who rejects abstract objects, and it has also been used to describe someone who rejects universals. While it is possible for someone to adopt both forms of nominalism, this is not necessarily the case. For instance, Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra explained, using the Aristotelian realist as an example, that a person can deny abstract objects and still affirm universals.28 To avoid this confusion, Craig prefers to call his position against abstract objects ‘anti-realist’ instead of nominalist.29

How could one affirm universals while believing that only concrete objects exist? The category of concrete objects is not limited to just physical objects, nor is it limited to just particulars. First, a concretist views non-physical objects such as angels, thoughts, and God as concrete objects. Second, while describing concretism (though he uses a different term for it), Paul Gould wrote that such a position “is not to be understood necessarily as the rejection of properties, relations, propositions, possible worlds, and so on, rather, what is required of those who believe in such entities is that they think of them as concrete objects.”30

For an example of a position that rejects abstract objects but affirms universals, Craig described a person who identifies universals as thoughts in someone’s mind yet considers those thoughts to be concrete objects.31 That is the position that I am advocating for in this paper, with the added proviso that the mind in question is God’s—thus I affirm a concretist interpretation of Divine Conceptualism. Robert Adams notes that divine conceptualism achieves two of our deeply held intuitions—that truth exists beyond our human minds and that truth seems to be something that can only exist in minds.32 It should be noted that Craig himself rejects divine conceptualism, though he sees it as the “most promising concretist view” and admits it is his “fallback position.”33 As an anti-realist, he rejects that abstract objects are real as well as the concretist interpretation of divine conceptualism (which he classifies as another form of realism).34

Should God’s thoughts be considered as abstract or concrete objects? Greg Welty, a proponent of divine conceptualism, laments that “the abstract/concrete distinction is in disarray, ontologically speaking.”35 However, he continued by noting that “…if divine ideas are ‘concrete objects,’ then my position is that abstract objects functionally speaking are concrete objects ontologically speaking.”36 In other words, God’s thoughts (as concrete objects) can play the functional role people often assign to abstract objects. Welty described this interpretation of divine conceptualism as follows:

It would be a version of nominalism [towards abstract objects that is] insofar as the divine concepts are (presumably) concrete entities, perhaps mental events (images, dispositions, or intentions). An advocate of this interpretation of TCR [Theistic Conceptual Realism] could hold the traditional nominalist view that the only things which exist are concrete substances. But insofar as the thoughts of one concrete substance in particular (God) satisfy the functional concept of universals, this is a nominalism that concedes, interestingly enough, that universals really exist. And so this interpretation of TCR would still be a realism about universals, insofar as the divine concepts exist independently of any human cognitive activity, and would exist even if there were no human thinkers at all. Indeed, they would exist even if there were no concrete substances in existence (besides God, of course).37  

As a reminder, the motivation for taking the position that God’s thoughts are concrete objects, rather than abstract objects is twofold: to protect God’s aseity, as discussed above, and to salvage divine simplicity, as discussed below.38   

What Divine Concepts Cannot Do

While I have shown how properties can be considered as concrete objects in the mind of God, this cannot be the case for all properties. The exceptions I have in mind are God’s essential properties. I affirm that all other properties, besides God’s essential properties, are ideas in the mind of God.39 But why could God’s essential properties not also be properties that merely exist in God’s mind? The problem with such a position is that it runs into the bootstrapping objection. The bootstrapping objection is most well known as a problem for Absolute Creationism.

Absolute Creationism is yet another position on God and abstract objects which maintains that God created all concrete objects and all abstract objects (including all properties).40 Many have rejected Absolute Creationism because it ends up being viciously circular. The circularity comes into play when one recognizes that some properties must exist prior to God’s creation of them, for instance, God’s property of being able to create properties. As Craig and J. P. Moreland explained, “God cannot coherently be said to create his own properties, since in order to create them, he must already possess them.”41 Gould noted that “[m]any (including myself) think this [bootstrapping] problem fatal for the absolute creationism of Morris and Menzel.”42

Though the bootstrapping objection is most well known as a problem for Absolute Creationism, it also presents a problem for the divine conceptualist who claims that all properties are ideas in God’s mind. Divine Conceptualism runs into the bootstrapping circularity as well because some properties must exist prior to God conceiving of them, for example, God’s property of being able to conceive of properties.43 Jay Richards explained the problem for Divine Conceptualism as follows:

…the bootstrapping problem rears its ugly head again… this would entail, for example, that God is all-powerful just because, from eternity, God has reflected on the fact that he is all-powerful. But clearly for this to be possible, God would have had to have the Property P01 of being able to think his omnipotence into existence. But perhaps, one might retort, God also thought that property into existence from eternity. Well, then he would have had to have another property P02, and off, once again, goes an infinite regress.44

The bootstrapping objection does not have to be the death knell for concretism however. A concretist can view some properties as ideas in God’s minds and other properties as essential properties of God Himself. The important notion for the concretist is that all properties are concrete, not that they are all ideas in God’s mind. Though they note that such a distinction among properties might appear ad hoc, Craig and Moreland describe a similar position as follows: “Perhaps… [someone] might maintain that all the properties that God exemplifies as part of his nature—for example, being loving, being powerful and so on—do not exist… as do other properties. Rather, as a brute fact, God, along with his nature, simply exists a se. Other properties, such as being red, are sustained by God, either by his intellect, will or in some other way.”45

Before we turn to the topic of simplicity, it is worth noting something that was only briefly mentioned above; a concretist also understands God to be a concrete object. For example, Richards describes God as “the one necessarily existing, personal, concrete being and causal agent.”46 Within Adams’ metaethical model, he is explicit that “[i]f God is the Good itself, then the Good is not an abstract object but a concrete (though not a physical) individual. Indeed it is a person, or importantly like a person.”47  

Salvaging Divine Simplicity

Simplicity was the standard position among Christian theologians from at least as early as Augustine up through the early modern era. Simplicity, as understood by these theologians, should not be thought of as a property of God, but rather as the way God is related to His properties. That is why Thomas Aquinas began his discussion of God’s attributes by first explaining divine simplicity.48 Today however, the doctrine of simplicity has fallen on hard times; many contemporary theologians have flat out rejected it. For instance, Plantinga wrote that “…the simplicity doctrine seems an utter mistake.”49 Even Adams, whose entire metaethical model is built around the idea that God is the Good itself, wrote that “…the extreme doctrine of divine simplicity… which grounded much medieval thought about the otherness of God, offers much too formal a conception of that otherness… and I think it can be given up without insult to the divine transcendence.”50

Why has divine simplicity been thrown on the trash heap? I will argue below that the most common reasons given for the rejection of divine simplicity stem from the mistake of viewing properties as abstract objects instead of concrete objects. If one takes a concretist view of properties, then one can affirm the essential elements of divine simplicity while avoiding the absurdities that result from trying to affirm both ‘simplicity’ and ‘properties as abstract objects’. In order to do this I will use Richards’ list of eight senses of divine simplicity that appear in Christian theology.51

1. All divine properties are possessed by the same self-identical God.

2. God is not composite, in the sense that he is made up of elements or properties more fundamental than he is. He has no external cause(s), such as Platonic Forms.

3. God’s essence is “identical with” his act of existing.

4. All God’s essential properties are coexstensive.

5. All God’s perfections are identical.

6. All God’s properties are coexstensive.

7. God’s essential properties and essence are (strictly) identical with God himself.

8. All of God’s properties are (strictly) identical with God himself.

Senses (1) and (4) are relatively uncontroversial aspects of simplicity that nearly all theologians affirm, even if they reject other senses of simplicity. Sense (1) merely affirms that the divine attributes refer to one and the same being, an uncontroversial statement about God’s unity. As for sense (4), William Mann explained that all that is being affirmed here is that “…it would be impossible for any being to instantiate the attribute being omniscient, say, without also instantiating the attribute being omnipotent, and vice versa.”52

Richards and I both reject (6) and (8), but doing so has little to no implications for applying simplicity to the Euthyphro Dilemma. The issue here has to do with the distinction between God’s essential properties and His contingent properties; someone who affirms (6) and (8) makes no such distinction, which I believe is a mistake. As Richards explained, Aquinas held that God did not have any contingent properties (sometimes referred to as accidental properties) because he viewed them as potentialities and did not want to assign any potentiality to God.53 However, claiming that God has no contingent properties violates God’s divine freedom because it entails that everything God does, He must do necessarily.54

I will discuss Richards’ (2) by itself because it seems to be the key motivation behind divine simplicity and, as I see it, the heart of the doctrine. The rest of the senses discussed below, though more difficult to understand and explain, are only possible implications from this proposition. As a reminder, sense (2) is that ‘God is not composite, in the sense that he is made up of elements or properties more fundamental than he is. He has no external cause(s), such as Platonic Forms.’ This sense of simplicity asserts that God is not dependent on anything outside Himself. A concretist can easily affirm this assertation while someone who views properties as abstract objects struggles to do so. Those who have a strong ontological view of abstract objects tend to think of properties as metaphysical parts, causing the artificial worry that God is a composite being dependent upon such parts.  

As opposed to a position like Plantinga’s, which views properties as abstract objects, a concretist can more clearly, and with less qualifications, say, along with Jay Richards, that “[t]here is no abstract essence that in any way precedes God’s concrete actuality.”55 This allows the concretist to maintain, again, along with Richards, that “God’s essence and properties are not parts of God, however, but fundamental facts about him.”56 In other words, the concretist has less difficulty saying that God ontologically ‘comes first’ before His properties. The advantage to the concretist here is well articulated by Richards when he wrote that “…by defining these things minimally as facts or truths… I think I have circumvented most of the problems that a more strongly Platonic view of abstract entities poses for God’s sovereignty and aseity.”57

Some theologians who reject simplicity acknowledge that the motivations behind it, such as this sense (2), were commendable. For example, Baggett and Walls wrote that “…while we retain the prerogative to refrain from affirming divine simplicity, we think it important to capture the insight inspiring it and to affirm God’s perfection and supreme ontological status.”58 Ronald Nash also rejected simplicity but noted that it “…resulted from attempts to avoid two extreme movements that were considered threats to Christian theology during the Middle Ages: extreme realism (or hyperrealism) and nominalism.”59 He explained extreme realism as the “tendency to take properties like wisdom and goodness and hypostatize them into existing entities. With respect to the properties of God, the problem was obvious. If the properties or attributes of God are hypostatized existents, then God is a composite being… This effectively made God’s nature a construct of more basic building blocks, namely, the hypostatized attributes.”60 This is an artificial problem, a problem resulting from the mistake of viewing properties as abstract objects.

Alternatively, Nash explained that nominalism had the advantage of “eliminating in one fell swoop all of the problems raised by the extreme realists. It is no longer possible to think of God as composed of parts (viz., the attributes) since the ‘parts’ do not exist.”61 That is, they do not exist in the ontologically heavyweight sense that extreme realists maintain. Unfortunately Nash himself affirmed “the existence of a whole host of abstract objects that… exist eternally and necessarily, including properties, relations, propositions, states of affairs, and numbers.”62 He dismissed nominalism because it rejected universals, but, as I explained above, a concretist can be a nominalist concerning abstract objects while still affirming the existence of universals.  

Addressing the Most Difficult Senses of Divine Simplicity

Richards’ (3), (5), and (7) all have to do with the ‘identity absurdities’ that supposedly result from divine simplicity.63 I will address them one at a time and contend that such absurdities mostly result when one views properties as abstract objects instead of concrete objects. First let us consider ‘(3) God’s essence is “identical with” his act of existing.’ By definition, for all finite contingent beings, existence is a contingent property; it is possible that they might not have existed at all. Thus all contingent beings, such as human beings, apples, the planet Saturn, etc., are a composite of essence (their essential properties) and existence. However, God, as a necessary being, necessarily exists and therefore for Him, existence is an essential property. Richards notes, colloquially though instructively, that “[w]e cannot get the daylight between God’s essence and existence as we can with finite creatures.”64 God is not composed of existence and essence but is simple in the sense that existence is an essential property for Him. Adams wrote that “…the most plausible form of the doctrine of divine necessity is the Thomistic view that God’s existence follows necessarily from his essence but… we do not understand God’s essence well enough to see how his existence follows from it.”65

Now let us consider ‘(5) All God’s perfections are identical.’ Plantinga explained this implication of simplicity is the first of two reasons he rejects this doctrine; he wrote that “…if God is identical with each of his properties, then each of his properties is identical with each of his properties, so that God has but one property. This seems flatly incompatible with the obvious fact that God has several properties.”66 One who views properties as abstract objects may claim that those who hold to divine simplicity can only speak as though God has one property, not several. Yet, as Plantinga says, we clearly think of God, and describe Him, as having several properties. Divine simplicity by itself does not result in the absurd notion that we can only speak of God as having one property. This absurdity only arises if one tries to combine ‘divine simplicity’ with the position that ‘properties are abstract objects.’ However, Richards explained that this criticism “against speaking of divine properties in the plural may stem from insufficient care in avoiding the connotation that properties are physical parts.”67 In other words, viewing properties as abstract objects gives them the connotation of being metaphysical parts, and trying to combine this with divine simplicity causes the absurdity Plantinga pointed out.

On the other hand, a concretist who holds to Divine Conceptualism maintains that we can consider God’s properties separately because God eternally ‘abstracts’ them by reflecting on the concrete actuality of His own being. Richards’ explanation of this worth quoting in full:

God’s being precedes the discrete universal properties, though universals eternally exist and are relevantly distinct, in the sense that God eternally abstracts them by reflecting on his own being. When we say that Socrates is wise, the claim is meaningful and true because of this prior act of God abstracting the concept of Wisdom by reflecting on the concrete actuality of his own being, one aspect of which is perfect wisdom. God’s eternal thought also allows us to speak much more easily about God, using the language of properties and essences. It is God’s intellectual activity that makes our intellectual and linguistic activity possible, not only in everyday contexts but also in theology.68

In addition, while defending divine simplicity, Brian Leftow responded to Plantinga’s critique here as follows: “Omniscience is or supervenes on that state which is God’s knowing what He does. Omnipotence is or supervenes on that state which is God’s having the abilities He has. The terms “omniscience” and “omnipotence” of course carry distinct senses, but what reason is there to find it odd that God satisfies them in virtue of the same inner state?”69

Now let us consider ‘(7) God’s essential properties and essence are (strictly) identical with God himself.’ Plantinga explained this supposed implication of simplicity is the second of two reasons he rejects this doctrine:

…if God is identical with each of his properties, then, since each of his properties is a property, he is a property… This view is subject to a difficulty both obvious and overwhelming. No property could have created the world; no property could be omniscient, or, indeed, know anything at all. If God is a property, then he isn’t a person but a mere abstract object; he has no knowledge, awareness, power, love or life.70  

Notice Plantinga’s assumption lurking in the background, the assumption that properties are abstract objects. It is this assumption which leads him to the conclusion that the doctrine of divine simplicity results in the absurd view that God is “a mere abstract object.” Because a concretist rejects the notion that God’s properties are abstract objects, she can thus embrace simplicity while avoiding this absurdity.

Craig and Moreland explain that those who view properties as abstract objects run into the difficult “…problem of the causal or explanatory priority of God relative to abstract objects… Some contemporary Christian philosophers have appealed to divine simplicity as a solution, for if God is identical to his properties, they are not explanatorily prior to him. But the classical doctrine of divine simplicity never envisioned making God identical with his properties as the Platonist construes them, for that would be to turn God into an abstract object.”71 However, if one does not, with the Platonist, construe properties are abstract objects, then one is not forced into the absurd conclusion that God is an abstract object.

While defending Robert Adams’ notion that God is The Good against the charge that this results in the implausible notion that God is identical to some abstract object, Baggett and Walls note that there is a “recurring debate among Plato scholars as to whether the Forms are best understood as archetypes, properties, or universals on the one hand, or standards, paradigms, or exemplars on the other.” They point out that Adams’ approach, thinking of God functioning as the exemplar of Goodness makes “better sense of God constituting Goodness, in the sense of being its exemplar, perfect standard, ultimate paradigm, and final source.” By viewing Plato’s Forms this way, as concrete instead of abstract, “…a person like God might function more paradigmatically as the ultimate Good than would some abstract principle or impersonal truth.” The result is that “[t]he tension between person and universal, or substance and property, is thus avoided.”72 In fact, Leftow, in his defense of divine simplicity, makes the case that, even though God is a person, He may play the functional role people often assign to abstract objects.73

Conclusion

God is a weighty topic, to say the least. As finite creatures, there is a limit to how much we can understand, and explain, God and His properties. However, the more implausible or incoherent a position is, the more strikes against it, all else equal. In that regard, broadly speaking, this paper is an attempt at the coherence of theism, that is, an attempt to show how theism is metaphysically intelligible and does not entail any logical contradictions. In particular though, in the context of trying to defuse the Euthyphro Dilemma, I argued that taking a concretist position on properties allows us to salvage the key aspects of divine simplicity. Certainly this is not the last word concerning simplicity; for instance, one large controversial issue that I left outstanding was how simplicity can be reconciled with the Trinity. However, I believe, along with Richards, that “we are now in the neighborhood of preserving the essential core of the doctrine of divine simplicity,” at least the core that is pertinent to the Euthyphro Dilemma.

Footnotes

[1] Plato, Euthyphro, 9e.

[2] For a brief summary see C. Stephen Evans, God and Moral Obligation (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2014), 89–91. For a fuller treatment see John Milliken, “Euthyphro, the Good, and the Right,” Philosophia Christi 11.1 (2009): 145–55.

[3] William Lane Craig, “The Most Gruesome of Guests,” 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), 171–73.

[4] Robert Merrihew Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; repr., 2002), 7.

[5] Ibid., 14.

[6] Anselm, “Monologion,” in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works (eds. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans; Oxford World’s Classics, New York: Oxford University Press), 5–82.

[7] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book I, Chapter 40.

[8] David Baggett and Jerry Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 91.

[9] Baggett and Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality, 93.

[10] Erik J. Wielenberg, “An Inconsistency in Craig’s Defence of the Moral Argument,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4/4 (2012): 65–74.

[11] Erik Wielenberg, “Reply to Craig, Murphy, McNabb, and Johnson” (presented at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Boston, Mass., November 20, 2017), 14. Forthcoming in Philosophia Christi.

[12] Ibid., 11.

[13] Erik J. Wielenberg, personal correspondence.

[14] Jeremy Koons, “Can God’s Goodness Save the Divine Command Theory from Euthyphro?,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4.1 (2012): 177–95.

[15] Ibid., 194.

[16] Alvin Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature? (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980), 10.

[17] Ibid., 142-143.

[18] Ibid., 144.

[19] Ibid., 145–46.

[20] Ibid., 68.

[21] Ibid., 6.

[22] Ibid., 35–36.

[23] Ibid., 65.

[24] Ibid., 89.

[25] Jay Wesley Richards, The Untamed God (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 15.

[26] William Lane Craig, God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3.

[27] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 38.

[28] Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra, “Nominalism in Metaphysics,” ed. Edward N. Zalta, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nominalism-metaphysics.

[29] Craig, God Over All, 8.

[30] Paul M. Gould, “Introduction to the Problem of God and Abstract Objects,” in Beyond the Control of God? Six Views on the Problem of God and Abstract Objects, ed. Paul M. Gould (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 12.

[31] Craig, God Over All, 8.

[32] Robert Merrihew Adams, The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 218.

[33] Craig, God Over All, 51, 206.

[34] Ibid., 72.

[35] Greg Welty, “Theistic Conceptual Realism,” in Beyond the Control of God? Six Views on the Problem of God and Abstract Objects, ed. Paul M. Gould (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 94.

[36] Ibid., 95.

[37] Greg Welty, “Truth As Divine Ideas,” Southwestern Journal of Theology 47.1 (2004): 59–60.

[38] For a dialogue about whether or not Thomas Aquinas should be considered a concretist in this regard, see J. Thomas Bridges, “A Moderate-Realist Perspective on God and Abstract Objects,” Philosophia Christi 17.2 (2015): 283. See also William Lane Craig’s response 292-293 and Bridges response back to Craig 309-310, 312.

[39] Of course there are incidental properties that humans conceive/create such as hipness, or the property of scoring a touchdown. However, these should not be considered universals.

[40] See Thomas V. Morris and Christopher Menzel, “Absolute Creation,” American Philosophical Quarterly 23 (1986): 353–62. Christopher Menzel, “Theism, Platonism, and the Metaphysics of Mathematics,” Faith and Philosophy 4 (1987): 365–82. For a fuller treatment, see Brian Leftow, God and Necessity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

[41] William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2003), 505.

[42] Gould, “Introduction to the Problem of God and Abstract Objects,” 10.

[43] Craig and J. P. Moreland, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 506.

[44] Richards, The Untamed God, 245. In a footnote Richards thanks Greg Welty for helping him see this point clearly.

[45] Craig and J. P. Moreland, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 505.

[46] Richards, The Untamed God, 95.

[47] Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 42.

[48] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Question 3.

[49] Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature?, 47.

[50] Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 52.

[51] Richards, The Untamed God, 217.

[52] William E. Mann, “Simplicity and Immutability in God,” in The Concept of God, ed. Thomas V. Morris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 256.

[53] Richards, The Untamed God, 234–35.

[54] Craig and J. P. Moreland, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 525.

[55] Richards, The Untamed God, 95.

[56] Ibid., 18.

[57] Ibid., 246.

[58] David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2016), 56.

[59] Ronald H. Nash, The Concept of God: An Exploration of Contemporary Difficulties with the Attributes of God (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1983), 86–87.

[60] Ibid., 87–88.

[61] Ibid., 88.

[62] Ibid., 96.

[63] For an interesting argument that these identity absurdities are actually erroneous implications resulting from of a misreading of simplicity, “carried into the present by contemporary defenders of simplicity who mistakenly take the traditional identity claims of, say, Thomas to mean strict identity” that is, a Leibnizian view of identity which the medieval theologians did not use, see Richards, The Untamed God, 217, 224, 227, 232, 248.

[64] Ibid., 222.

[65] Adams, The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology, 209.

[66] Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature?, 47. The two reasons Plantinga gives here for rejecting simplicity represent well the most common reasons people give for rejecting this doctrine. For a fuller treatment on objections to divine simplicity, see James E. Dolezal, God Without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God’s Absoluteness (Eugene, Or.: Pickwick Publications, 2011), 11-29.

[67] Richards, The Untamed God, 241.

[68] Ibid., 247.

[69] Brian Leftow, “Is God an Abstract Object?,” Nous 24 (1990): 598.

[70] Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature?, 47. 

[71] Craig and J. P. Moreland, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 505.

[72] Baggett and Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality, 94.

[73] Leftow, “Is God an Abstract Object?,” 581–98.

Bibliography

Adams, Robert Merrihew. Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; repr., 2002.

———. The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Anselm. Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works. Edited by Brian Davies and G. R. Evans. Oxford World’s Classics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Contra Gentiles.

———. Summa Theologica.

Baggett, David, and Jerry Walls. Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Baggett, David, and Jerry L. Walls. God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Bridges, J. Thomas. “A Moderate-Realist Perspective on God and Abstract Objects.” Philosophia Christi 17.2 (2015): 277–85.

Craig, William Lane. God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

———. Is Goodness without God Good Enough?: A Debate on Faith, Secularism, and Ethics. Edited by Nathan L. King and Robert K. Garcia. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009.

Craig, William Lane, and J. P. Moreland. Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview. Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2003.

Dolezal, James E. God Without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God’s Absoluteness. Eugene, Or.: Pickwick Publications, 2011.

Evans, C. Stephen. God and Moral Obligation. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Gould, Paul M. “Introduction to the Problem of God and Abstract Objects.” Beyond the Control of God? Six Views on the Problem of God and Abstract Objects. Edited by Paul M. Gould. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

Koons, Jeremy. “Can God’s Goodness Save the Divine Command Theory from Euthyphro?” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4.1 (2012): 177–95.

Leftow, Brian. God and Necessity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

———. “Is God an Abstract Object?” Nous 24 (1990): 581–98.

Mann, William E. “Simplicity and Immutability in God.” The Concept of God. Edited by Thomas V. Morris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Menzel, Christopher. “Theism, Platonism, and the Metaphysics of Mathematics.” Faith and Philosophy 4 (1987): 365–82.

Milliken, John. “Euthyphro, the Good, and the Right.” Philosophia Christi 11.1 (2009): 145–55.

Morris, Thomas V., and Christopher Menzel. “Absolute Creation.” American Philosophical Quarterly 23 (1986): 353–62.

Nash, Ronald H. The Concept of God: An Exploration of Contemporary Difficulties with the Attributes of God. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1983.

Plantinga, Alvin. Does God Have a Nature? Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980.

Plato. Euthyphro.

Richards, Jay Wesley. The Untamed God. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2003.

Rodriguez-Pereyra, Gonzalo. “Nominalism in Metaphysics.” Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nominalism-metaphysics.

Welty, Greg. “Theistic Conceptual Realism.” Beyond the Control of God? Six Views on the Problem of God and Abstract Objects. Edited by Paul M. Gould. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

———. “Truth As Divine Ideas.” Southwestern Journal of Theology 47.1 (2004): 56–68.

Wielenberg, Erik. “Reply to Craig, Murphy, McNabb, and Johnson” presented at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Boston, Mass., November 20, 2017.

———. “An Inconsistency in Craig’s Defence of the Moral Argument.” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4/4 (2012): 65–74.

———. Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Lord’s Supper Meditation – Jesus as Host

a Twilight Musing

          The Lord’s Supper is a meal of acceptance, the supreme symbol of divine hospitality.  In gathering around the table, we are the guests of Jesus.  We have not invited Him to join us; rather, we sit at the feast He has prepared.  Whenever we are invited to dinner, we expect the host or hostess to welcome us warmly when we enter, to make us comfortable, to put himself or herself to some trouble to help us overcome the strangeness of being for a while a part of another family.  But how astonished we would be if the host, in addition to giving us the comforts of his home and the nourishment of his food, said to us, “In order to make it possible for you to eat this meal—indeed, in order for you to continue to live at all—I must offer up my life.”  That was Jesus’ message to His disciples at the Last Supper, and He continues to serve as the ultimately self-sacrificing host at each observance of it.  He serves us not with the fruits of a few hours’ cooking, but with Himself. 

          How can Jesus be both the host and that which is eaten?  There is the mystery which draws us together.  The Lord took the form of our human bodies for a time to assure that we, His handiwork, would not come to an end.  The wonder of it is that in leaving His divine invulnerability, in sacrificing His human body and all the human desires that went with it, in giving so excruciatingly much, He was not diminished.  That truth is the eternal substance behind the Eucharistic symbols of His body and blood.  It takes the shocking image of guests solemnly eating the flesh of their host and drinking his blood, while he yet lives, to make us realize the inexhaustible intimacy of God’s gift through Christ.  The Son reaches out His hands to us, as we must to each other, and every occasion at His table opens the door into the heart of God.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.

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Making Sense of Morality: Objections from Euthyphro and Evil

Editor’s note: R. Scott Smith has graciously allowed us to republish his series, “Making Sense of Morality.” You can find the original post here.

Introduction

In the previous post, I argued that there is another explanation for the ground of core morals, such as justice and love are good, and murder and rape are wrong: they are grounded in God. However, there are a couple serious objections that I will address here, and then I will summarize several of my findings.

Euthyphro Dilemma

“Euthyphro” poses a dilemma: are morals good because God commands them, or does God command them because they are good? If the former, it seems God’s will alone is the ground of morals. But, it seems God could will whatever God wanted, and it would be moral. If so, God could will things we clearly know are wrong, even evil, such as justice being bad, and rape being permissible. Earlier, I suggested this issue seems to face Allah, due to the supremacy of Allah’s sovereignty.

If the latter, it seems God’s commands are redundant, for we already should know morals are valid. Also, they seem to be valid independently of God; if so, God is not needed to ground morals. Moreover, God must consult these morals before commanding them.

 Regarding the former, the Scriptures of Judaism and Christianity portray God as being morally perfect and good. That is, God is bound by God’s character, so God would not will something that is contrary to that character. Moreover, that God is good fits with what we may know by reason and reflection (i.e., what many have called natural law), including our core morals and others too (e.g., we should not torture babies for fun).

On the latter, we may need to have some understanding of goodness before we can know God is good. But, it does not follow from that that morals are independent of God. Further, just because we can know some moral truths without God’s commands (e.g., by reason), still we possess a remarkable ability to suppress or rationalize away what we know morally. In that case, God’s commanding something we can know via reason would not be redundant, but a reinforcement and clarification of that knowledge. 

Back to Evil

So far, I’ve suggested that the best explanation of our core morals is that they are grounded in God’s moral character. But, is there more we can infer by reason?

Suppose we consider evil. Many think evil provides one of the strongest arguments against God’s existence. Yet, what kind of thing is evil? Earlier, I suggested that evil is a privation (or perversion) of goodness. Indeed, it seems hard to define evil is some way other than the way things should not be.

If that is the case, evil presupposes goodness, like Augustine suggested. What then is the best explanation for this standard of goodness? Above, I suggested it is God’s own character. Yet, we can infer more, I think. To be truly good, God must be love. This suggests God is personal. Furthermore, to be truly good, God must be truly just.

Together, these two findings suggest that God would deal with evil, yet in love and care for humans. This in turn raises questions for consideration that are beyond the scope of this book: which God is this? And, has God done this? If so, how? What are implications for us?

Final Thoughts

We have completed our survey of the major moral views in the west. I’ve argued that the best explanation for our core morals is that they are universals that are grounded in God’s morally good character. I’ve argued for this while also arguing for several more key points; e.g.:

• Nominalism is false, and Platonic-like universals exist;

• There are essences, including of core morals, human beings, and mental states (they have intentionality); and

• We can know reality directly, even though our situatedness does affect us in significant ways. So, historicism is mistaken.

Notice too that from our findings, the fact-value split, the deeply held belief that science uniquely gives us knowledge of the facts, whereas ethics and religion give us just opinions and preferences, is false. Science, if grounded in naturalism and nominalism, cannot give us knowledge at all. On the other hand, we do have ethical knowledge of at least our four core morals. Maybe there are more we can know. We also have justified reasons to believe it is true that God is ground of morals – another item of knowledge.

For Further Reading

William Alston, “What Euthyphro Should Have Said,” in Philosophy of Religion: A Reader and Guide, gen. ed. William Lane Craig

R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, chs. 12-13

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R. Scott Smith is a Christian philosopher and apologist, with special interests in ethics, knowledge, and seeing the body of Christ live in the fullness of the Spirit and truth.

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A Critical Review of Is Goodness without God Good Enough?

Chapter Three: Louise Antony, “Atheism as Perfect Piety”

 Louise Antony, professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), begins her essay with the admirably lucid statement that William Lane Craig is wrong to say that God’s existence is sufficient to ground morality and that there would be no morality without God.  To explain why she thinks this is the case, she enters into a discussion of the reasons that compelled her to abandon her religious beliefs during college. 

In addition to citing the problem of suffering as a reason that motivated her to give up theistic belief, she recounts how she developed (while in college) another argument that helped to separate (in her mind) morality from religion and God.  Given this separation, the truths of morality are derived neither from theism nor from religious belief (p. 68).  The argument turns on a distinction between two kinds of piety: imperfect contrition (which is contrition due to fear of punishment) and perfect contrition (which is contrition motivated by a desire for what is morally right).  The argument, formally stated, runs as follows:

(1)  Perfect contrition (even without belief in God) is more pleasing to God than imperfect contrition (even with belief in God). 

(2)  The only psychologically possible way for human beings to achieve perfect contrition is to cease believing in God. 

(3)  Human beings ought to do that which is most pleasing to God.

Therefore: 

(4)  Human beings ought to cease believing in God.  (From 1-3)

The assumption behind premise (2) is that humans are contrite (at least in part) due to fear of punishment by God or for the desire for reward from God.  However, this assumption is questionable.  On what grounds does Antony claim that perfect contrition is psychologically impossible for a theist?  It is not at all clear that theistic conviction makes perfect contrition psychologically impossible.  However, we can set that problem aside for there is a much more serious issue facing this argument.  Antony herself recognized that the argument contains a contradiction insofar as it implies both that God does not exist and that God will refrain from punishing someone for believing that God does not exist.  Obviously, a non-existent God cannot do (or refrain from doing) anything.  While Antony eventually abandoned this admittedly incoherent argument, she explains that it was this argument that first helped her to see the independence of morality and theism.  Specifically, the argument caused her to ask this question: Why would God prefer perfect contrition to imperfect contrition?  On one hand, if there were no reason, then God’s preference would be arbitrary.  This result seems unacceptable.  On the other hand, if there is a reason that God should prefer one to the other, then that reason is something independent of God – and, so, the moral rightness of preferring perfect contrition to imperfect contrition is a moral standard independent of God.  Of course, the line of reasoning that Antony stumbled into here is similar to that found in Plato’s classic argument known as the Euthyphro Dilemma. 

Antony explains that the relevant question posed by Socrates in his dilemma is this: Do the gods love pious actions because they are pious – or are actions pious simply as the result of being loved by the gods?  She says that translating the question into modern terms yields the following question:  Are some actions moral simply in virtue of God’s choice to favor them – or does God favor those actions because they are morally good independently of what God favors?  Either answer to this question is supposed to constitute a problem for theists who want to say that ethics depends on God.  According to the first option (which she calls Divine Command Theory), if God commands us to torture children, then it would be right and morally obligatory for us to do so.  However, this cuts strongly against the moral intuitions of most people (p. 71).  According to the second option (which she calls Divine Independence Theory), that which is morally right or wrong does not depend on God.  In fact, she says that if Craig claims it is impossible or inconceivable for God to command something like torturing children, then even Craig should be considered a Divine Independence Theorist.  She adds that only “the theorist who believes that right and wrong are independent of God’s commands could have any basis for thinking that she or he knows in advance what God would or would not command” (pp. 72-73).  She then points out that if Divine Command Theory were correct, then it would reduce morality to a set of rules that is no less arbitrary than the rules of etiquette (pp. 72-73).  She illustrates the arbitrary nature of morality on Divine Command Theory with an extended discussion of the Biblical account of Abraham being commanded by God to sacrifice Isaac – and she suggests that the attempts of theists to resolve the problem presented in this text actually suggest the truth of Divine Independence Theory (pp. 77-79).  She then suggests that Divine Independence Theory appears to be at odds with saying that God (at least as described in the Old Testament) is a moral agent. 

Now all of this is very interesting, but it turns out that she has missed Craig’s fundamental point – namely, that God’s nature is the Good itself.  Further, according to Craig, given that God and the Good are identical, God cannot simply give any arbitrary command (but can only issue commands consistent with the divine nature).  Craig explicitly states in the debate that, “on the theistic view, objective moral values are rooted in God” (p. 30).  Craig adds, “He is the locus and source of moral value. … He is by nature loving, generous, just, faithful, kind, and so forth” (p. 30).  On this approach, Craig is free to say that God cannot command anything in an arbitrary fashion (despite Antony’s insistence otherwise).  Moreover, on Craig’s approach, he can still maintain that morality is dependent on God insofar as the paradigm of moral goodness is located in God’s nature (so that, had there been no God, there would be no moral truths).  If Craig’s view is right, then morality is nothing like arbitrary rules of etiquette.  Further, on this approach, there is no reason for Antony to maintain that we could not predict what God would command (at least in some cases) – especially if God makes some of those commands known to us by way of conscience or various other mechanisms.  This is a much more plausible reading of Craig’s position than what Antony provides.  Beyond this failure to engage Craig’s position, there are three particular claims made by Antony towards the end of her essay that need to be addressed.

First, Antony claims that a glaring problem with Craig’s view is that “he offers no argument for the particular claims that there is no morality without God.  What he does instead is cite authorities” (p. 81).  Somehow, she crucially misses the point that the ideas supporting Craig’s claim are found in the cited materials – even if they are not spelled out as formal arguments.  So, one may ask why Craig thinks that naturalistic forms of atheism entail that there is no morality.  Craig specifically answers this question.  He says, “After all, on the atheistic view, there’s nothing special about human beings.  They’re just accidental by-products of nature that have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust called the planet Earth” (p. 31).  Craig adds, “On an atheistic view, moral values are just by-products of sociobiological evolution” and that such values might be “advantageous in the struggle for survival,” but that “on the atheistic view” there is nothing that would lead one to think that such values are “objectively true” (pp. 31-32).  To state Craig’s argument with greater precision, we get the following:

(5)  If atheistic naturalism is true, then human values are only subjective judgments brought about as by-products of our sociobiological evolution.  

(6)  If human values are only subjective judgements brought about as the by-products of our sociobiological evolution, then there is no objective morality. 

Therefore:

(7)  If atheistic naturalism is true, then there is no objective morality.  (From 5 & 6 by Hypothetical Syllogism)

 Now, this argument might be unconvincing to Antony.  This argument might even be entirely dubious.  However, whether or not it is a good or bad argument, it is mystifying why Antony would say that Craig offers no supporting reasons for his claim that there is no morality without God – and this was not the only supporting reason he offered for his position.  The fact that Craig drew the content of these premises from the citation of other authors is manifestly irrelevant.  

Second, toward the end of the essay, Antony says that Craig does not “acknowledge, much less endeavor to answer, the main objection to his own position, the objection found in the Euthyphro” (p. 81).  Given that Craig has formulated a position that avoids the typical problems associated with the Euthyphro Dilemma, it seems odd that Antony would make this claim.  It appears as if she is committing the straw man fallacy against Craig’s position.  In other words, Antony is criticizing a view similar to Craig’s but which is not, in fact, Craig’s position.  To see why this is the case, we need to review Antony’s presentation of the Euthyphro Dilemma.   Specifically, we need to focus on that horn of the dilemma that says that morality being dependent on God would make it arbitrary.  Antony suggests that if Divine Command Theory is true, then God could command heinous acts (like torturing animals and killing children for pleasure) and then those acts would be morally required – or God could just as easily command the opposite (so that heinous acts would be morally prohibited).  However, she thinks that such actions are so obviously wrong that not even God commanding those actions could make them morally right or obligatory.  In other words, she appears to hold that the truth of Divine Command Theory would make the truths of morality contingent rather than necessarily true.  She thinks that this result counts as evidence against the truth of Divine Command Theory.  However, there are some significant problems with this line of thought.  

To begin, there is not just one version of Divine Command Theory.  There are versions of Divine Command Theory that are vulnerable to this line of thought – namely, those versions of Divine Command Theory that explicitly stipulate that if God were to command heinous acts, then we would be morally obligated to do those actions.  We can refer to that sort of Divine Command Theory as Radically Voluntarist Divine Command Theory.  So, applying Antony’s objection, we get the following argument: 

(8)  If Radically Voluntarist Divine Command Theory is true, then heinous actions could be morally obligatory. 

(9)  Morally heinous actions could never be morally obligatory.  

Therefore: 

(10)  Radically Voluntarist Divine Command Theory is not true.  (From 8 & 9 by Modus Tollens)

In this argument, the conclusion follows from the premises, but are its premises true?  Some defenders of Radically Voluntarist Divine Command Theory think that this argument can be overcome.  In particular, one may consult Paul Rooney’s book, Divine Command Morality (Avebury, 1996; especially Chapter 6).  However, as we have already mentioned, this is not the only version of Divine Command Theory, and in fact it is quite rare.  Since it is Craig’s view of Divine Command Theory that is being discussed here, the only relevant question is whether Craig endorses Radically Voluntarist Divine Command Theory.  The answer to that is “no.”  One could hardly fault Craig if he were to look at the conclusions expressed in (10) and ask, “What does that have to do with me?”  Further, Craig could point out that the divine nature is loving and merciful and add that the divine nature just is the standard of the Good from which God issues divine commands.  In short, Antony seems to be misrepresenting Craig’s view.  Louise Antony needs to demonstrate that Craig’s version of Divine Command Theory is (despite appearances) radically voluntarist.  It clearly is not; in answer to the Euthyphro Dilemma, Craig splits the horns and distinguishes between the good and the right, embracing a divine nature theory of goodness and a Divine Command Theory of the right.  Until Antony can show why Craig’s view is vulnerable to her arbitrariness objection, Craig would be justified in dismissing this criticism as an irrelevant misrepresentation (because it is aimed at a different version of Divine Command Theory).

However, Antony could try to change the argument above to include Craig’s position.  She might be thinking that all versions of Divine Command Theory entail the moral permissibility of heinous acts.  If so, then her argument amounts to the claim that any version of Divine Command Theory somehow dissolves or cancels out the necessary status of moral truths.  If this is her argument, then she is committing a different fallacy – namely, the fallacy of begging the question (that is, assuming what needs to be proved).  David Baggett and Jerry Walls explain the problem Antony faces in their book, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (Oxford, 2011): 

What seems to be going on in the argument is that Antony and Sinnott-Armstrong are attempting to drive a subtle wedge between God and necessary [moral] truth.  …  One suspects, then, that she’s implicitly assuming without argument that the necessary truth of morality, if such there be, is independent of God.  But this is question begging and, though not an uncommon assumption, is open to dispute.  (p. 211; Appendix A)

In other words, Antony needs to provide some sort of compelling reason to dispute the idea that the necessity of moral truth resides in (or depends on, or is identical to) the divine nature.  Until she (or someone else) does so, Craig is justified in dismissing her assumption against his view as ineffectual.  In concert with such contemporary thinkers as Thomas Morris, Chris Menzel, Robert Adams, and many others (not to mention several luminaries from the history of philosophy), Craig affirms that necessary moral truths can plausibly be thought to depend essentially on God.

Third, at the end of the essay, Antony begins to engage in character assassination (or the ad hominem fallacy).  She writes, “I have the dark suspicion that Dr. Craig is not really interested in engaging with atheists in rational discussion, but rather is speaking exclusively to his theistic contingency, with the aim of reinforcing for them the vile stereotype of atheists so prevalent in American society” (p. 81).  So, rather than engaging Craig on the substance of his arguments, Antony (without the slightest evidence) chooses to waste time by raising dubious and unfounded questions about Craig’s alleged motives.  Further, she says nothing that would reconcile her dark suspicions that Craig wants to reinforce vile stereotypes about atheists with Craig’s clear and explicit assertion, “Let me just say at the outset, as clearly as I can, that I agree that a person can be moral without having belief in God” (p. 29).  Craig states this as the very first sentence of his opening statement in the debate.  This fact does not boost one’s confidence that Antony read carefully (or even understood) the case that Craig makes.  So, how does Craig’s claim (that atheists can be moral without believing in God) reinforce stereotypes about the immorality of atheists?  Antony does not say.  If Craig is trying to reinforce vile stereotypes about how evil atheists are, then he is rather bad at it.  Antony’s choice to end her essay by focusing on Craig’s alleged motives (rather than his arguments) is more than a little disappointing, and likely predicated on her uncharitable failure to distinguish between what Craig said of atheists themselves (on one hand) and of the position of atheism itself (on the other hand).

Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro Dilemma: Part IV

Editor’s note: This article was originally posted at MandM. It has been posted here with permission of author.

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This is a talk I gave to the Philosophy Club at Glendale Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, this weekend. The talk was followed by a long discussion with some faculty, students at the college, and others who zoomed in.

In this talk, I introduced and defended a divine command theory of ethics. I divided the talk into three parts. In section I, I set out what modern divine command theories of ethics typically contend. I distinguished this from some common misunderstandings in section II. In Section III, I discussed the Euthyphro dilemma. I argued this objection is not the conclusive rebuttal it is often assumed to be. In my first post, I reproduced sections I and II. My second post began my discussion of the Euthyphro objection in section III. Focusing on the Anything Goes Objection. My third post examined the claim that a divine command theory would, if true, entail that morality is arbitrary. This post concludes this discussion. 

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In my last post, I argued that divine command theories do not entail that morality is arbitrary. If anything, the opposite is the case. A divine command theory entails that actions will be wrong in virtue of those actions’ non-moral properties, properties that would provide an informed, loving and just person with reasons for prohibiting those actions.

The Vacuity Objection

Finally, critics press what is known as the vacuity objection. A divine command theory entails that “the doctrine of the goodness of God is rendered meaningless”[1]  Oppy puts the objection forcefully: “It cannot be…that God’s commands or decisions determine what is morally good because God is morally good prior to the giving of those commands or the making of those decisions.”[2]  If God is essentially good, he must be good prior to the issue any commands. However, this means that goodness cannot depend upon the existence of these commands. If it did, goodness would exist prior to itself. 

Like the previous objection, I think this one is based on an equivalent. In the first section of this talk, I pointed out that the word “good” is ambiguous”. I stated that a divine command theory is an account of moral requirements, not an account of goodness in general. This observation is essential here. When divine command theorists say God’s commands determine what is good, they mean only that the existence of moral obligations or moral requirements depends upon God. By contrast, when a divine command theorist says God is good, he means by this that God has certain character traits: God is loving, just, impartial, faithful, in all possible worlds.  

But the question of whether someone has certain character traits is distinct from whether they have moral requirements to behave in a certain way. 

Consider a nihilist who denies the existence of objective moral requirements. This nihilist could, if he wanted, choose to live in accord with the norms of justice and could decide to be a faithful, loving and impartial person. What he could not do is claim that there exists any moral obligation to live this way.[3] 

This distinction removes the sting from Oppy’s objection. God’s commands determine the existence and content of moral requirements. This does not mean his commands determine whether people can have certain character traits. Consequently, God can have these character traits prior to giving any commands.

Even if, antecedent to commanding, God has no moral duties, it does not follow that he can’t have certain character traits. Traits such as being truthful, benevolent, loving, gracious, merciful. Nor does it mean he is not opposed to actions such as murder, rape, torturing people for fun, and so on. If God has no duties, he is not under any obligation to love others or tell the truth, but that does not mean he cannot love others or be truthful. God does not have to have a duty to do something to do it.

 Conclusion

The “anything goes,” “arbitrariness,” and “vacuity” objections, therefore, all fail. This is significant because these are the three reasons commonly given for rejecting Divine command theories. Almost everyone who dismisses the claim that morality is dependent upon God cites these three objections as decisive. Seeing that these objections all fail, in the absence of further argument, one cannot proclaim with any confidence that a divine command theory is a flawed theory.

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[1] James Rachels, Elements of Moral Philosophy (New York: Mcgraw-hill Education, 2003), 50.

[2]Graham Oppy, “Morality Does Not Depend Upon God,” in Problems in Philosophy: An Introduction to the Major Debates on Knowledge, Reality, Values, and Government, ed. Steve Cowan (Bloomsbury Publishing House, Forthcoming 2018).

[3] For this point, see John L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), 26-27.  

Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro Dilemma: Part 3

Editor’s note: This article was originally posted at MandM. It has been posted here with permission of author.

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This is a talk I gave to the Philosophy Club at Glendale Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, this weekend. The talk was followed by a long discussion with some faculty, students at the college, and others who zoomed in.

In this talk, I introduced and defended a divine command theory of ethics. I divided the talk into three parts. In section I, I set out what modern divine command theories of ethics typically contend. I distinguished this from some common misunderstandings in section II. In Section III, I discussed the Euthyphro dilemma. I will suggest this objection is not the conclusive rebuttal it is often assumed to be. In my first post, I reproduced sections I and II. My second post began my discussion of the Euthyphro objection in section III. This post continues that discussion. 

In my last post, I argued that a divine command theory does not entail the content of morality is arbitrary, in the sense that anything at all could be right or wrong. It entails that an action can only be permissible, only in situations where it is possible for a fully informed, rational, loving and just person to command it knowingly. Far from being absurd, this implication is entirely plausible. 

Some have objected that divine command theory makes morality arbitrary in a different sense. It means there is no reason why one action is right or wrong rather than another. Russ Shafer-Landau presses the following dilemma: “Either there are, or there are not, excellent reasons that support God’s prohibitions. If there are no such reasons, then God’s choice is arbitrary, i.e. insufficiently well supported by reason and argument.” [1] Alternatively:

If God is, in fact, issuing commands based on excellent reasons, then it is those excellent reasons and not the fact of God’s having commanded various actions, that make those actions right. The excellent reasons that support the requirements of charity and kindness are what make it right to be charitable and kind.[2]

We can summarise this argument as follows, take a paradigmatically immoral action such as rape.

(P1) Either (a) God has a reason for prohibiting rape, or (b) God has no reason for prohibiting rape. 

(P2) If God has no reason for prohibiting rape, then God’s commands are arbitrary. 

(P3) If God has a reason for prohibiting rape, then that reason is what makes rape morally wrong. 

(P4) If something distinct from God’s commands is what makes rape morally wrong, then the divine command theory is false.  

(C1) Either morality is arbitrary, or the divine command theory is false 

This argument is based on a subtle equivocation. (P3) and (P4) refer to what “makes” something morally right. But the word “makes” is ambiguous. 

In this context, Stephen Sullivan has argued that the word “make” can be used in two different senses.[3] The first sense refers to what Sullivan calls a constitutive explanation: On a hot February day, I pour a glass of water to drink it and quench my thirst. There is a legitimate sense in which I can say that what makes me pour a glass of water is the fact that I am pouring a glass of H20. When I speak like this, I use the word “makes” to refer to a relationship of identity. I am explaining one thing (the pouring of the water) but citing the existence of another thing that I take to be identical with it.

The second sense involves what Sullivan calls a motivational explanation, such as when I state that what makes me pour a glass of water is the fact that I am thirsty. Motivational explanations do not explain an action by referring to something taken to be identical with it. Instead, they attempt to tell us why an agent acted the way they did by giving us the reasons and motivations the agent acted upon. 

Let’s assume that Landau is using the word “makes” in the “motivational” sense. The inference is:

(P1) Either (a) God has reasons for prohibiting rape, or (b) God doesn’t have reasons for prohibiting rape. 

(P2) If God doesn’t have reasons for prohibiting rape, then God’s commands are arbitrary. 

(P3)’ If God has reasons for prohibiting rape, then those reasons motivationally explain why rape is morally wrong.  

(P4)’ If something distinct from God’s commands motivationally explain why rape is morally wrong, then a divine command theory is false.  

(C1) Either morality is arbitrary, or the divine command theory is false. 

On this interpretation of the argument (P3)’ is plausible. Suppose God has reasons for issuing the commands he does, and the property of being wrong is identical with the property of being contrary to God’s commands. In that case, these reasons do provide a motivational explanation as to why rape is wrong. However, (P4′) is false. The fact that God’s prohibition does not motivationally explain the wrongness of rape is wrong does not entail that the prohibition is not identical to the moral wrongness of rape. Divine command theories contend that wrongness is identical with the property of being contrary to God’s commands. So it only in the constitutive sense of the word “makes” that they deny anything other than God’s commands “make” actions wrong. 

Consequently, For Shafer-Landau’s argument to have a bite, he must use the word “makes” to refer to a constitutional explanation. So interpreted, the argument is:

(P1) Either: (a) God has reasons for prohibiting rape, or (b) God doesn’t have reasons for prohibiting rape. 

(P2) If God doesn’t have reasons for prohibiting rape, then God’s commands are arbitrary. 

(P3)” If God has reasons for prohibiting rape, then those reasons are identical with the property of moral wrongness.   

(P4)” If something distinct from God’s commands is identical with the property of moral wrongness, then a divine command theory is false.  

(C1) Either morality is arbitrary, or the divine command theory is false. 

On this interpretation (P4)” is plausible, if something distinct from God’s prohibition is identical with wrongness. God’s prohibition cannot be identical with wrongness.

However, now (P3)” turns out to be implausible. Why should the fact that God has reasons for issuing a command mean that those reasons are identical with the property of being morally wrong? The Landau seems to assume the following inference: If A is identical to B, and someone has reasons r for bringing about B, then A is identical with r.  However, this inference is invalid. An analogy will show this; A Batchelor is identical to an unmarried man, John has reasons for being unmarried, he dislikes women. Does it follow that the property of being a Bachelor is identical with the property of disliking women?[4]

Landau’s argument, therefore, is unsound. Graham Oppy proposes a more direct argument for the conclusion that a divine command theory makes morality arbitrary:

Could it have been, for example, that murder, rape, lying, stealing and cheating were good because God proclaimed them so? Surely not! But what could explain God’s inability to bring it about, that murder, rape, lying, stealing and cheating are good by proclaiming them so, other than its being the case that murder, rape, lying, stealing and cheating are wrong quite apart from any proclamations that God might make?[5]

However, this is implausible. Suppose God has character traits such as being essentially loving and just. In that case, God can and would have reasons for prohibiting actions like rape, murder, or cheating, quite apart from whether these actions are antecedently wrong. Antecedent to any command on God’s part, these actions won’t have the property of being morally prohibited. But they could still have other properties such as being cruel or harmful or unjust or detrimental to human happiness— or being expressions of hatred, for example. And a loving and just God could prohibit these actions because these actions have these non-moral properties.

Consequently, divine command theories do not entail that morality is arbitrary. If anything, the opposite is the case. A divine command theory entails that actions will be wrong in virtue of certain non-moral properties those actions have. Non-moral properties that would provide an informed, loving and just person with reasons for prohibiting those actions.

[1] Russ Shafer-Landau, “Introduction to Part IV,” in Ethical Theory: An Anthology, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 237.

[2]Ibid., 238.

[3] Stephen Sullivan, “Arbitrariness, Divine Commands, and Morality,” International Journal of Philosophy of Religion 33:1 (1993): 33-45.

[4] These points are made cogently by Stephen Sullivan, “Arbitrariness, Divine Commands, and Morality,” 37-39. See also Matthew Flannagan’s, “Is Ethical Naturalism More Plausible than Supernaturalism: A Reply to Walter Sinnott-Armstrong,” Philo 15:1 (2012): 19-37.

[5]  Graham. Oppy, Best Argument against God (Hampshire: Palgrave Pivot, 2014), 44.

Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro Dilemma: Part 2

Editor’s note: This article was originally posted at MandM. It has been posted here with permission of author.

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This is a talk I gave to the Philosophy Club at Glendale Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, this weekend. The talk was followed by a long discussion with some faculty, students at the college, and others who zoomed in.

 In this talk, I introduced and defended a divine command theory of ethics. The talk was divided into three parts. In section I, I set out what modern divine command theories of ethics typically contend. I distinguished this from some common misunderstandings in section II. In Section III, I discussed the Euthyphro dilemma. I will suggest this objection is not the conclusive rebuttal it is often assumed to be. In my first post, I reproduced sections I and II. This post will begin my discussion of the Euthyphro objection in section III. 

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In my last post, I argued that semantic and epistemic objections to a divine command theory fail. However, the most famous and important objection to divine command theories is an argument known as “The Euthyphro Objection”. After a dialogue written by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato in the 4th century BC. Plato’s original argument is somewhat obscure and applied only to polytheistic religions (those religions that believe in many gods). However, the version used by philosophers today is an adaptation of Plato’s argument for use against monotheistic faiths. Critics of divine command theories appeal to three arguments that are loosely associated with Plato’s dialogue. These are (1) the anything goes objection, (2) the arbitrariness objection, and (3) the vacuity objection. I will take each in turn.

The Anything Goes Objection

One objection is that a divine command theory makes morality arbitrary in the sense that anything at all could be right or wrong. King and Garcia explain the alleged problem in this way:

[Divine command theory] implies that it is possible for any kind of action, such as rape, not to be wrong. But it seems intuitively impossible for rape not to be wrong. So [Divine command theory] is at odds with our common-sense intuitions about rape.[1]

We can formalise the objection as follows:

(P1) If the divine command theory is true, then whatever God commands is morally required.

(P2) God could command rape.

(C1) So, if the divine command theory is true, rape could be morally obligatory.

(P3) But rape could not be morally obligatory.

(C2) Therefore, the divine command theory is false.

In response, divine command theorists have contested (P2) Divine command theorists do not contend that moral requirements are dependent upon the commands of just anyone. They base moral obligations on the commands of God conceived in a particular way. God is an all-powerful, all-knowing, essentially loving, just, immaterial person who created the universe on their conception. Once we realize this, the horrendous deeds objection appears to be unsound.

We can put this in terms of a dilemma: consider (P2): (P2) only holds if it is possible for a fully informed, rational, loving and just person to knowingly command rape. However, this is unlikely. Critics cite examples of rape because they view it as an action that no virtuous person could ever knowingly entertain. So (P2) appears to be false. However, suppose; I am mistaken about this. It is possible for an essentially loving and just person to command rape. Rape, then, would only be commanded in situations where a just and loving person aware of all the relevant facts could endorse it. Under these circumstances, it is hard to see how (P3) could be maintained.

Once we realize that God, as conceived by the divine command theorist, is essentially loving and just, it is difficult, if not impossible, to see how both (P2) and (P3) can be true. Whatever reasons we have for thinking (P2) is true seem to undermine (P3). By contrast, whatever reasons we have for accepting (P3) undermine (P2).

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[1]Nathan L King, “Introduction”, in Is Goodness without God Good Enough: A Debate on Faith, Secularism and Ethics, eds. Robert K Garcia and Nathan L King (Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 2008), 11.

Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro Dilemma: Part I

Editor’s note: This article was originally posted at MandM. It has been posted here with permission of author.

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This is a talk I gave to the Philosophy Club at Glendale Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, this weekend. The talk was followed by a long discussion with some faculty, students at the college, and others who zoomed in.

In this talk, I introduced and defended a divine command theory of ethics. The talk was divided into three parts. In section I, I set out what modern divine command theories of ethics typically contend. I distinguished this from some common misunderstandings in section II. In Section III, I discussed the Euthyphro dilemma. I will suggest this objection is not the conclusive rebuttal it is often assumed to be. This first post will contain sections I and II. 

I. What is a Divine Command Theory 

For purposes of this talk, the term “divine command theory” will refer to the divine command meta-ethics defended by Robert Adam’s, William Lane Craig, William Alston, and C Stephen Evan’s. This theory contends that the property of being morally required is identical to the property of being commanded by God. [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, not about the nature of goodness in general. 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] To be obligatory, an action must be more than just good or praiseworthy in some sense. Obligatory actions are actions we are required to do; another person can legitimately demand we do them. Omitting to do them without an adequate excuse renders one guilty and blameworthy. Others can justifiably blame you, censure you, and sanction you in various ways. 

Nor is this is an idiosyncratic limitation of theory. While some critics of divine command theories characterize it as an account of “goodness” or of all “all evaluative properties.”  Almost all contemporary defenders of divine command theories; Quinn, Adams, Alston, Craig, Wierenga, Hare, and  Plantinga present a divine command theory of obligation, not goodness per se. Nor is this unique to modern divine command theorists; older divine command theorists such as William Paley, John Locke, George Berkeley, and Francisco Suarez limited divine command theories to accounts of moral obligations or requirements, not to goodness in general. 

Second, the postulated relationship between moral requirements and God’s commands is one of identity. Mark Murphy refers to this sort of explanation as “informative identification”. Such as when “we explain the nature of water by identifying it with H2O or explain the nature of heat by identifying it with molecular motion”. We are aware of something we refer to as “water” and want to understand its nature. We answer this question by postulating that what we refer to as water is identical with H20; by doing this, we answer the question, “what is the nature of water?”. In this instance, divine command theorists attempt to explain the nature of a particular kind of moral property, the property of being morally required. The theory is that the property we refer to when we say “X morally required” is the property of being commanded by God.

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. To claim that moral requirements are identical with God’s commands is not to claim our moral requirements are identical with the commandments laid down in a particular sacred text. The thesis I laid out makes no mention of 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.

Moreover, the claim that God’s commands are contained in some particular 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.

Of course, what role sacred texts should play in our moral thinking and decision-making is important. Whether God has infallibly revealed himself in such text is a question of great interest. However, it is not the question that the divine command theorist is addressing when he says moral requirements are identical with Gods commands.

II What the Divine Command Theory is Not: Avoiding Strawman

These clarifications as to what a divine command theory enable us to address two common objections to the theory: semantic and epistemic objections.

 1. Semantic Objections

Harry Gensler expresses one common objection to a divine command theory. Gensler writes:

 “Imagine an atheist who says the following: “kindness is good, but there is no God”. If “x is good” meant “God desires x”, then this claim would be self-contradictory (since it would mean “God desires kindness, but there is no God”). But it isn’t self contradictory. So “x is good” doesn’t mean “God desires x”.[3]

Gensler concludes that the phrases “X is good” and “desired by God” are not synonymous phrases. This is a conclusion about the meaning of moral terms and words. However, a divine command theory isn’t a theory about the meaning of moral terms. It is a thesis about the nature of moral properties. It contends that the property of being morally required is identical with the property of being commanded by God.

Consequently, Gensler’s argument has an implicit assumption. If two phrases such as “x is wrong” and “X is contrary to Gods commands” are not synonymous in meaning, they cannot refer to the same property. 

 This assumption is questionable. Consider the example of water and H20; the phrase “x is a cup of water” is not synonymous with the words “x is a cup of H20”. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle could, without self-contradiction, claim “this cup is full of water and atoms don’t exist”. Yet that doesn’t entail that water is not identical to H20. “water” and “H20” are distinct non-synonymous ways of referring to what turns out to be the same property. The fact two phrases are not synonymous does not entail they are not referring to the same property. 

Gensler’s argument appears to conflate two separate questions. The question of whether the words “x is morally required” has the same meaning as the phrase “God commands x” and the question of whether those words pick out the same or distinct properties. He mistakenly takes a divine command theory as answering the first of these questions, when it is proposed as an answer to the second.

 2. Epistemic Objections

Many critics of divine command theories object that we know the truth of moral claims independently and prior to any beliefs they have about divine commands. This idea figures prominently in criticisms posed by Nowell Smith.[4], Lehrer and Corman[5], Louise Anthony[6]. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong[7]. Paul Kurtz provides an example:  

 If God is essential, then how can it be that millions of people who do not believe in God, nevertheless behave morally. On [the divine command] view they should not and so God is not essential to the moral life[8]

Like the semantic objection I just discussed, this one is based on a confusion. This objection takes a divine command theory to entail that people cannot know what is right and wrong unless they first know what God has commanded. 

 However, this is incorrect. Divine command theorists contend the property of being morally required is identical with the property of being contrary to God’s commands. If two descriptions refer to the same property, that doesn’t entail we cannot know something answers one description unless we believe something answers the other. 

 It is a fact that water is identical to H20. This does not mean that we cannot know about the existence of water unless we first know about hydrogen and oxygen. The Polynesians who first settled New Zealand around 1300 AD were very good at navigating water: they knew what water was, what rain was, and how to discern currents and tides. They had lots of justified belief about water. However, they knew nothing about atomic or molecular theory. 

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[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]Harry Gensler Ethics: A Contemporary Introduction (London: Routledge Publishing, 1988) 39.

[4]Patrick H. Nowell-Smith, “Morality: Religious and Secular,” in Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Ian T. Ramsey (London: SCM Press, 1966) 97.

 [5]James W. Cornman & Keith Lehrer, Philosophical Problems and Arguments (New York: MacMillan, 1979), 429.

 [6]Louise Anthony “Atheism as Perfect Piety” in Is Goodness without God Good Enough: A Debate on Faith, Secularism and Ethics, Eds. Robert K Garcia and Nathan L King (Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 2008),67-84

 [7]  Armstrong writes, “The divine command theory makes morality unknowable [because such theories entail] we cannot know what is morally wrong, if we cannot know what God commanded … we have no sound way to determine what God commanded.” For critique, See my “Is Ethical Naturalism more Plausible than Supernaturalism: A Reply to Walter Sinnott Armstrong” Philo 15:1 (2012):19-37

 [8]Ibid 33-33, note the slippage in Kurtz statement; he goes from the claim that belief in God is unnecessary to live a moral life to the claim that God is unessential to morality. This is like arguing that; because people can fly successfully in planes without believing in the laws of aerodynamics, it follows, the laws of aerodynamics are not essential for flight.

On The Third Option to the Euthyphro Dilemma: A Reply to Real Atheology

Photo by Brendan Church on Unsplash

In a previous post, I argued that the Euthypro Dilemma (ED) was a false dilemma against Divine Command Theory (DCT).

The ED I am concerned with can be summarized as saying:

Either

(1) God has no reasons for His commands,

or

(2) God has reasons for His commands but these reasons are sufficient by themselves in explaining moral obligations.

I proposed a third option which DCT proponents can well affirm:

(3) God has reasons for His commands but these reasons are not sufficient by themselves in explaining moral obligations without God’s commands.

Recently Real Atheology posted a reply on Facebook as follows:

First, I don’t think this is actually a genuine third option- it’s merely a modified second horn (that morality is independent of God). By admitting that God has reasons for not issuing certain commands, Choo is admitting that there is something independent of God which constrains God’s will. He is admitting that there are facts about certain actions which make it the case that God should, ought, or must not command us to perform those actions. If these reasons are sufficient to obligate God from not commanding certain actions, then they are sufficient to obligate us from not performing those same actions. What matters morally would still be independent of God. So all Choo does in his (3) is add a divine legislature and enforcer to the concept of wrongness. In fact, he only ever argues for his (3) by way of analogy to finite legislatures and the laws they enforce. He’s right to point out that morality constrains our legal system. Laws can be morally unjust after all. And laws can also incentivize people to conform to moral norms. A defender of a Euthyphro objection could concede all of this, but the point would still remain that reasons are what make it the case that some acts should not be willed either by human agents or divine agents. These reasons may not be sufficient for a divine legislature and enforcer, but that’s no objection, because reasons also aren’t sufficient for finite legislatures and enforcers. It can only constrain them. Finite legislatures and the demands of a divine commander are both constrained by the logical space of reasons (to borrow Wilfred Sellars term). What matters morally is part of the space of reasons and not the will of a being in the causal order. That is the lesson of the Euthyphro.

I’d recommend thinking of the Euthyphro dilemma differently. Either,

(a) Reasons are more fundamental than God’s will (and nature).

or

(b) God’s will (and nature) is more fundamental than reasons.

If (a) is true, then reasons constrain what God could will. His commands would not be arbitrary, because he could justify all of his commands with those more fundamental reasons. This would imply that morality is independent of God. If reasons are sufficient to obligate God not to issue certain commands, then those same reasons are sufficient to obligate us not to perform those same actions. Morality would be an autonomous (or self-directed) decision process.

But if (b) is true, then God’s will determines what reasons there are. There would be no justification for God’s commands on this view. They will always have to face a charge of arbitrariness, because there is no further reasons which justify God’s will. Morality would be about an unqualified claim on our obedience to divine commands. It would not be about reasons for action and autonomous decision-making.

Notice that adding a divine legislature and enforcer to (a) does not give us a genuine third option distinct from (a) and (b) either. It’s just something further added on. This is the difference between the reason-implying sense of moral wrongness and the command-implying sense of moral wrongness. If the reason-implying sense of moral wrongness is sufficient to constrain or obligate the command-implying sense of moral wrongness, then the command-implying sense of moral wrongness is superfluous. This is because the reason-implying sense of moral wrongness would also constrain and obligate what actions we should, ought, or must perform or not perform.

Reply:

First, I am in no way admitting that there are facts about certain actions which make it the case that God should not command us to perform those actions. To do so would be to say that God has moral obligations. As far as I can see, I have not stated this anywhere and this does not follow from anything I previously wrote. Given that most DCT proponents are motivated by the idea that obligations must come from an obligator, I think that most DCT proponents are committed to saying that God does not have moral obligations. If the opponent of DCT asserts that the facts of an act must constitute an obligation for God not to command it, then the opponent is just asserting that the major motivation for DCT is false. If so, the problem is with DCT’s motivation, not the ED.

Now, I do think that God, being loving, kind, good (and so forth), would not command certain actions. Take for example the act of torturing babies for fun. Given the badness of such an act, a loving God would not command it to be done. This claim differs from saying ‘given the badness of such an act, a loving God should not command it to be done.’

One might worry that there is something independent of God which constrains God’s will. Here are three short replies. First, some DCT proponents such as Robert Adams and William Lane Craig argue that God is the Good. If God’s commands are constrained by reasons based on goodness and God is the Good, then there is nothing independent of God which constrains God’s will after all. So this is not a problem for DCT proponents who hold such a theory of goodness. Second, even if one drops Adams’ theory of goodness, it is not true that something independent of God’s will can by itself constrain God’s will. Based on what I said last paragraph, what constrains God’s will is partly explained by God’s character and partly explained by the badness of the act. So part of what explains God’s will is His character, not solely the features of the act alone. Something independent of God only plays a partial role in constraining God’s will. Lastly, the notion of constraining needs to be explained in order to pose a problem. If by ‘constrain,’ one means that the features of an act make it wrong for God to command the act, then I agree this would be problematic. But as I said above, the DCT proponent is not committed to this. If by ‘constrain,’ one means that the features of an act determines what God would not command, then it is not clear why this is problematic. One might however think that if the features of an act determine God’s commands, and God’s commands determine our moral obligations, then it is the features of an act alone that is sufficient to determine our moral obligations. This however is wrong. If X because of Y, and Y because of Z, it does not follow that X solely because of Z. All that follows is that X because of Y and Z.  

To end off, I would again appeal to an analogy. Suppose that there is a political authority (be it a single person or a government) which is legitimate (justified by whatever theory of political authority you hold to). Now, one might hold political authority command theory (PACT) which states that if a legitimate political theory issues commands (or institutes laws) and has good reasons for those commands, then those commands would result in our legal obligations.

Now imagine one raises the ED against PACT:

Either

(1) The political authority has no reasons for His commands,

or

(2) The political authority has reasons for His commands but these reasons are sufficient by themselves in explaining legal obligations.

The defender of PACT can well affirm a third option:

(3) The political authority has reasons for its commands but these reasons are not sufficient by themselves in explaining legal obligations without its commands.

For example, the political authority may have good reasons to command people not to smoke in a certain area and to smoke in another area. This creates our legal obligation to smoke only at the designated areas. But independent of the political authority’s commanding, the good reasons alone are not sufficient to create such a legal obligation. Now also suppose, there are things that the political authority would not command as the authority is wise, loving, etc. With this, we have a close analogy to DCT. I take it that most would not think the ED is a good objection to PACT. As far as we think that the ED is not problematic for PACT, I think the same can be said for DCT. If any ED style objection is to be raised against DCT, then it should also be a good objection against PACT.

Response to Chapter 15 of Russ Shafer-Landau’s book Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? “Does Ethical Objectivity Require God?” Part VIII

We’re discussing Russ Shafer-Landau (SL), and his critique of theistic ethics. He started with the Euthyphro Dilemma, and then uses analogies to make his point better. He asks us to envision a referee at a sporting match. A good referee is good in virtue of following the rules of the game, rather than making up new rules willy-nilly. A good referee can cite reasons for his calls, and reasons that aren’t merely ad hoc, made up on the spot, lacking rationale.

He admits it may sound odd, or mildly blasphemous, to liken God to a sports referee, but he doesn’t think there’s much harm in it. “The Divine Command Theory has us picture a God who controls our game in its entirety, making up all the rules, perhaps continually, and having no need to cite any reasons on their behalf.” For what other reasons could there be? “If there are not moral rules or reasons prior to God’s commands, then there is nothing God could rely on to justify the divine commands. So any choice is arbitrary.” Had God chosen differently, “we’d be saddled with a morality that encourages torture, pederasty, perjury, and all sorts of other things we now recognize to be evil.”

Recall, though, that on a view like that of Adams’, God typically commands something that’s good. He may have had plenty of reasons to provide the additional moral reasons to perform a particular action that we already had moral reasons to perform. The goodness of the action is one reason for God to command it, and the additional motivation for us that the command would provide is another, and those are just two examples. DCT makes an action right, not good, to the thinking of leading DCT’ists today. Presumably, in his infinite wisdom and knowledge, God has compelling reason to issue the command, rendering an already good action morally obligatory. But this is not to say that he couldn’t have done otherwise, at least on some occasions. It’s plausible to many, including me, that at least some of God’s commands are contingent. Not all of them follow ineluctably with necessity from his nature; he retains, at least with respect to certain actions, to command them or not to command them. The goodness of the action isn’t affected, but rather whether it’s obligatory or not. Perhaps God might even speak to me personally, commanding me to perform an action, that otherwise wouldn’t be obligatory—like help a particular homeless person. It becomes my duty once he issues the command.

Another important point to remember here is that if we’re dealing with a God of perfect love, there are some things God simply would never command. They would be inconsistent with his character. To say God is essentially loving, for these words to retain their meaning, is to suggest that some actions—those that are irremediably hideous and treacherous, for example—are ruled out. The ascription of love and goodness to God has determinate content, ruling some things out. So though God may retain a measure of divine prerogative in issuing various commands, there are still some commands outside his character he would never command. In fact, it’s right to say he can’t, in the sense, to put it into the terms of modal logic, there’s no metaphysically possible world in which he does issue such a command. As the delimiter of possible worlds, on an Anselmian conception, there are likely worlds and states of affairs we can vaguely conceive of or imagine that nevertheless don’t constitute genuine possibilities.

Now, when we say God is good, SL thinks the only sense we can make of such an ascription is that God follows the moral rules. But this is where the long tradition of analogical predication in the history of the Christian church may prove handy. When we say God is good, we’re not saying God is good in exactly the same sense that we attribute goodness to people. Human beings may be good to one degree or another, but God is, on a view like that of Adams’, goodness itself, the paradigm, the exemplar, the archetype of the good. Ultimate goodness is a person, not a set of principles. In fact, there’s something deeply intuitive about making persons the locus of goodness. States of affairs may be pleasant or unpleasant, but aren’t morally good or bad. People are. It makes sense to think of persons as the primary subjects of goodness, but no merely human person is perfectly good. God, though, almost by definition, is perfectly good. Whether we predicate perfect goodness of God or identify God with goodness, or both, God’s goodness is nonnegotiable on Anselmianism. But his goodness isn’t univocal with our own; ours is the imperfect wheel; his is the perfect circle. There’s relevant resemblance, but also infinite distance, as God is perfect and we are far from it.

So this isn’t equivocation, but analogical predication, with which we can still meaningfully, in a sort of analogically extended sense, ascribe goodness, indeed perfect goodness, to God. If A. C. Ewing was right—and I think he was—this is also consistent with God functioning at the foundation of ethics, for the source of the good is also most plausibly taken to be perfectly good. Obviously, though, all of this is a far cry from SL’s simplistic and minimally charitable analogies and caricatures.

SL anticipates that some will object and say God’s command of rape or torture is impossible. “A good God would never allow such a thing.” Right enough, SL replies. “But what does it mean to be good? If the Divine Command Theory is correct, then something is good just in case it is favored by God. But then look what happens: to say that God is good is just to say that God is favored by God.” That’s not very informative, and in fact wouldn’t preclude a self-loving being from issuing hideous commands.

True enough, except note that SL is offering a DCT account of goodness, having earlier confined it to rightness. This may not have been intentionally duplicitous; he may have just used rightness as a generic term for morality, a penumbral term under which falls both goodness and rightness. But for present purposes, the distinction is a crucial one. DCT nowadays is nearly always delimited to deontic matters, rightness rather than goodness. For extended accounts of how and why God is aptly thought of as good, see the work of Evans, Hare, Adams, etc.

SL is convinced he knows exactly from what an ascription of goodness to God must derive: “A good God, like a good referee, is one who plays by the rules. When we speak of God as morally good—indeed, as morally perfect—what we really mean is that God cannot fail to uphold and respect all moral rules.” SL seems to be operating on the assumption that a perfect God either is perfect in virtue of following all the moral rules or is a vacuous conception because it means he can change the moral rules at will. But surely those don’t exhaust the alternatives. Recall the earlier point that God indeed can’t change the moral rules at will; there are indeed constraints on his behavior if he’s perfect; it’s just that the constraints happen to be entirely internal to his character. They’re a feature of his perfection. A God who could commit suicide, deny himself, or lie would be imperfect. The constraints don’t threaten his omnipotence or sovereignty, but help reveal it. Recall that on an Anselmian picture God possesses all the great-making properties to the maximally compossible degree, which admit of intrinsic maxima.

SL is convinced the analogy is close between referees and games, on the one hand, and God and morality on the other. But I am not. SL’s insistence is on a God who is not the ultimate reality, but distinctly secondary. He refuses to acknowledge relevant disanalogies between human referees and the divine, and he thinks that constraints on God’s actions necessitate that morality doesn’t find its foundation or locus in God. He does much of this by illegitimately assuming the only theistic ethic on offer is a radically voluntarist version of DCT, and he ignores the illuminating good/right distinction in the process.

Again, he argues that if the moral character of torture is fixed prior to God’s reaction to it, then God is not the author of the moral law. But the moral character of an action is not just based on divine commands. Its goodness or badness traces to a different foundation (on Adams’ view, and that of most DCT’ists). The action may already have lots of moral features to it besides being obligatory, permissible, or forbidden. Its moral hideousness, for example, might already obtain. And God’s command against an action in certain cases, I’ve argued, isn’t contingent, but necessary, meaning such commands couldn’t have been otherwise. This actually makes good sense of necessary moral truths even in deontic matters—and a better explanation of them, to my thinking, than what (nontheistic) nonnaturalists can offer. This resonates nicely with Plantinga’s suggestion in “How to be an Anti-Realist” that the necessary truths can offer an insight into God’s unchanging character.

In the next blog, at long last, I’ll wrap up my response to this chapter of SL’s.

Response to Chapter 15 of Russ Shafer-Landau’s book Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? “Does Ethical Objectivity Require God?” Part VII

Shafer-Landau (SL) admits that the most natural, straightforward way of getting God into the picture of morality is by thinking that if God exists, then God is the author of morality, and that morality is objective. But he then adds that it’s also deeply problematic. “In fact,” he writes, “it turns out that even if you believe in God, you should have serious reservations about tying the objectivity of morality to God’s existence.” Why does he think this, and what’s my assessment of his case?

First, let’s clarify what’s within his cross hairs: the view according to which God decides what’s right and wrong; that God communicated that information to us, as he worked out his divine plan, and it’s our job to do our part and aspire to live in accordance with the divine decrees. He thinks that seeing what’s wrong with such a story is to see why ethical objectivists—even theists—should insist on the existence of a ream of moral truths that have not been created by God.

Before we begin, note the language of “creation” here. Such language surely carries the connotation of dependence, but arguably something more—something like complete open-ended invention. This will be important to bear in mind as we examine his analysis.

Unsurprisingly, SL directs readers’ attention to Plato’s Euthyphro, and in particular the famous dilemma contained therein: is an action pious because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is pious? SL then gives a contemporary formulation focusing on rightness rather than piety, and polytheism rather than monotheism: Is an act right because God loves it, or does God love it because it is right?

SL then treads well-trod territory by reviewing the two horns: to embrace the second horn of the dilemma and say God loves an act because it is right is to suggest that divine love wouldn’t endow an action with its moral character; rather, such love would be an unerring response to the moral qualities that await divine appreciation. Many theists resist this notion because it suggests morality has an autonomous existence apart from God; at most, God would perform an epistemic function in cluing us in as to its contents. (Perhaps a prudential function too of warning us that he’ll burn our cosmic rear ends if we don’t comply.) SL characterizes the worry as one of disparaging or denying God’s omnipotence, but I suspect the bigger concern among most thoughtful theists is one of disparaging God’s sovereignty and ontological primacy. Whether this is a distinction without a difference remains to be seen.

SL encourages theists to find a way past their reservations, though, because the other horn of the dilemma is far worse. For this alternative says acts are right because God loves or commands them. “Now it is God’s say-so that makes it so, transforming something that was previously morally neutral into something that is good or evil, right or wrong.” This is not congenial, but rather a “quite problematic picture of how God relates to morality.”

To make his case, SL likens such a picture to Divine Command Theory (DCT), which tells us that actions are right because (and only because) God commands them. But if a divine command lies at the heart of ethics, then ethics is arbitrary, “an implausible collection of ungrounded moral rules.” Here is a fuller description of DCT that SL says is guilty of only a bit of caricature: God awakes one morning, “yawns and stretches, decides to create a morality, and then picks a few dos and don’ts from column A and column B. . . . this is the picture we are left with on the assumptions that drive the Divine Command Theory.”

SL asks whether God commands and loves thing for reasons, or just arbitrarily? If arbitrarily, then this is hardly a God worthy of worship. “The caricature would be right in all essentials. God would be the inventor of the moral law, and so God’s omnipotence wouldn’t be threatened.” But if there were nothing that justified God’s commands, no reasons for those commands, then the choices would really be baseless.

If there were reasons for God’s love or commands, then “these reasons, and not the commands themselves, are what justify the schedule of duties. God’s commands would not create the standards of good and evil; instead, they would codify the standards that are sustained by whatever reasons God has relied upon to support the divine choices.”

Before proceeding, it’s worth pointing a few things out. All of this is pretty standard stuff when it comes to a critique of the most simplistic version of divine command theory. Much of it is entirely right as an effort to refute such a theory. But one problem is that very few divine command theorists embrace that variant of the theory any more. This book of SL’s was written five years after Robert Adams’ seminal Finite and Infinite Goods, for example, which features a divine command theory defense that bears little resemblance to the  most radically voluntarist version that’s the target of SL’s critique.

A small observation: having said he would replace piety with rightness, SL then proceeds to conflate goodness and rightness and badness with wrongness. Adams, though—following the advice William Alston had given to divine command theorists—rigidly distinguished the axiological matter of goodness from the deontic matter of rightness, which pertains to a cluster of concepts like permissibility, forbiddenness, and obligatoriness. Arguably the central deontic concept is one of obligation. But goodness and rightness (in the sense of obligation) are clearly not the same. Arguably goodness, in fact, is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of moral obligation. It’s not sufficient because we might have an obligation to choose the lesser of two evils, and it’s not necessary because there are, arguably, supererogatory actions.

Moreover, Adams (like Hare, Evans, and just about every other leading divine command theorist today) predicates his DCT on a theory of the good. In his case, he opts for a theistic Platonic account, whereas Evans opts for a theistic natural law account. If DCT is limited to deontic matters, it says little or nothing about what is morally good or bad, which means that actions might have ever so many moral features apart from being obligatory.

Even if we were to assume that moral goodness is a necessary condition for an act to be morally obligatory, recall it’s not sufficient. Not all good actions are obligatory. Thus some means of demarcation is necessary to identify which among the good actions are also obligatory. DCT’ists believe that divine commands serve that function. Perhaps they’re wrong, but note that, on a view like Adams’, God’s commands are anything but arbitrary. Typically God wouldn’t imbue a previously morally neutral action with obligatoriness, but a previously good but not required action with obligatoriness. We still may have ever so many good moral reasons to perform such an action before it’s rendered obligatory—it may well be an action that’s good, exemplary, loving, kind, etc. Until God’s command renders it obligatory, though, its performance would go above and beyond the call of duty. Duties are just one part of morality, not the whole kettle of fish.

DCT’ists are just one stripe of theistic ethicists—on the issue of moral obligation. Lots of variants are out there: natural law theorists, divine nature theorists of the good, divine will theorists of the right, divine desire theorists, etc. Delimiting a discussion of theistic ethics to DCT is problematic; confining it exclusively to the most radically and rabidly voluntarist version of DCT is tantamount to relegating it to the obscure periphery. This might be rhetorically effective, but it doesn’t earn high marks in intellectual honesty.

A big motivation of DCT, incidentally, is to account for the distinctive features of moral obligations: their authority, their person-centeredness, the guilt we experience when we fail to discharge them, etc. Often those skeptical of theistic ethics tend to domesticate moral obligations, subtly watering down their prescriptive force and binding authority, but these important features—which we glean by careful examination of the logic, language, and phenomenology of morality—are important clues that need adequate explanation. DCT’ists think divine commands are up to the job. Plenty of secular thinkers lower the bar so moral obligations become more amenable to the meager resources at their disposal. Nonnaturalists like SL, to their credit, tend not to water them down; they acknowledge their force and authority, but then chalk them up to synthetic a priori, sui generis moral properties that exist as brute facts. But retaining their distinctive features is only part of the explanatory task; by not watering down their authority and power, the need for adequate explanation becomes all the more pressing. DCT’ists try to answer this challenge, and shouldn’t be saddled with simplistic charges that entirely miss the mark of their formidable and impressive efforts.

Finally, harkening back to the “creation” point, the operative theology in DCT is an important variable in need of fleshing out. Obviously, the fallible, fickle, quarrelsome gods of Euthyphro found in the Greek pantheon were inadequate for task of serving as the foundation of ethics. But Anselm’s God—a God of perfect love, in whom there’s no shadow of turning, a God not even possibly susceptible to temptation, the ground of being, etc.—is a very different matter indeed. Conflating all such theistic proposals is eminently unjustified. So, whereas arbitrariness concerns invariably attach themselves to the gods of Euthyphro, a God of perfect love simply, by his nature, can’t do certain things, which includes certain commands he can’t issue. But the “constraints” are assuredly not external to God, but internal to his nature, if indeed God is perfect love, the very exemplar of goodness, essentially holy, impeccable, etc. There’s more to say, and we’ll have occasion as we continue exploring SL’s treatment when we resume our discussion in the next installment.

Image: Sunset by  T. Newton-Syms. Creative Commons. 

Chapter 5 of God and Cosmos, “Moral Obligations.” (Part 1)

In this chapter, Baggett and Walls focus on deontic moral concepts, which include moral permissibility, moral obligation, and moral forbiddenness. Such are also expressed as moral duties (right/wrong). First, they point out that moral obligations are not identical to feelings of obligation. The feelings of obligation are neither necessary nor sufficient for moral obligations. One might have a moral obligation to do X without feeling so. One could also feel obligated to do X without actually having a moral obligation to do X. Hence explaining one's feeling of moral obligations is not sufficient to explain moral obligations themselves.

Baggett and Walls start by visiting a few ways of understanding the nature of moral obligations. Scott M. James lists these truths about moral judgments: (1) Moral creatures understand prohibitions; (2) moral prohibitions appear independent of human desires and (3) human conventions; (4) moral judgments are tightly linked to motivation; (5) moral judgments imply notions of dessert (punishment is justified); (6) moral creatures experience a distinctive affective response to our own wrongdoing, and this response often prompts us to make amends for the wrongdoing.

Robert Adams identifies two features responsible for guilt. The first is based on the harm caused to, and the second is alienation from, people. He regards obligations as a species of social requirement, and guilt consists in alienation from those who have required of us what we did not do. Adams of course does not think that every social bond results in obligations, only a morally good one. How good the demand is, who the demander is, and the consequences of the demand all plays a role.

C. Stephen Evans similarly lists four features of moral obligations: (1) A judgment about a moral obligation is a kind of verdict on my action; (2) a moral obligation brings reflection to closure; (3) a moral obligation involves accountability or responsibility; and (4) a moral obligation holds for persons simply as persons.

In sum, moral duties are not mere suggestions, or merely prescriptions there are excellent reasons to fulfill. Moral obligations possess authority (which gives us decisive reasons for action) and are inescapable (applying to persons with few exceptions). Moral laws are what we must do, not in the sense of the causal must (like the physical laws), but of the moral must. Violating moral duties also results in an experience of guilt (rather than shame or degradation).

Now Baggett and Walls move to various accounts that attempt to explain moral obligations. First is the functionalist approach advanced by primatologist Frans de Waal. De Waal argues that social primates have tendencies to prosociality, altruistic behaviors, community concern, and aversion to inequality. He thinks that the weight of morality comes not from above but from inside of us. So he thinks that morality has its origin in evolutionary history. What distinguishes human morality from the prosociality, altruism, and empathy with other primates is our capacity as humans to reflect about such things.

The problem is that when it comes to accounting for moral obligations, de Waal either (1) eschews their importance, by arguing that moral feelings provide better moral reasons to act than do obligations; or (2) does not explain moral obligations at all, but merely our feelings or sense of moral obligations. Regarding the first strategy, while he may be right to say that moral motivation should come from higher moral impulses (as most virtue theorists would agree), he still needs to explain the existence of moral obligations themselves. The second strategy also does nothing to provide an explanation of moral obligations themselves, only a feeling of obligation.

What he calls "morality" isn't moral truths; rather, they are moral beliefs, feelings, and practices at most. He has fallaciously conflated feeling obligated with being obligated. Even moral skeptics can affirm what he has said. In fact many moral skeptics argue that since naturalistic evolution can explain why we have moral beliefs, without any reference to their truth, there is no reason to affirm moral realism. Furthermore, others like E. O. Wilson and Michael Ruse have argued based on a naturalistic evolutionary account that if humans had evolved differently, we could have quite different ethical beliefs. Hence this leaves morality redundant.

Another evolutionary account comes from Philip Kitcher, who offers a naturalized virtue ethic. On his view, evolution gave us certain capacities to empathize with others. These faculties are limited and morality has for its function to extend such empathy. What we morally ought to do follows from the traits we ought to develop, which depends on the sorts of creatures that we are. Rather than explaining moral obligations, however, Kitcher explains them away. On his account, it is a good idea to follow certain rules, and to coerce the unwilling to follow them, in order to maintain functional harmony. This is merely prudential and far from moral obligations.

Scott M. James offers yet another evolutionary account. He takes on a response-dependency view, allowing him to affirm that moral facts are real, though mind-dependent. He thinks that this can be done in a way that makes moral facts objective. He adopts a tracking account that says our minds evolved in the way they did because they were tracking moral facts. His proposal has two parts. The first part talks about how we developed a special sensitivity to how others would view our behavior. He thinks the evolution of our particular moral sense was the result of the recognition of facts about hypothetical agreement. He claims that we first evolved a disposition to consider how others would likely react to our behavior. This allowed cooperation. However, keeping track of the responses of others would be a challenge. The solution is to ask this hypothetical question: if your counterpart were only seeking principles that all could agree to live by, would he have any reason to condemn your behavior? Over time, we became only concerned with the evaluations of a hypothetical observer. By the time modern humans evolved, we had moral minds that place special weight on how others would respond to proposed courses of action. Second, many primate societies and extant hunter-gather tribes have a strong tendency towards egalitarianism (the view that supports equality). Third, certain studies suggest that the earliest (recognizably) moral communities exemplify the social contract tradition of morality. Finally, there is cross-cultural evidence of this.

In the second part, he lays out a metaethical story about what moral judgments are and about what makes them true. On his view, an action is wrong just in case others (who have an interest in general rules governing behavior) would tend to object to that action.

Baggett and Walls have a few worries. First is a Euthyphro dilemma problem. Is an action right because hypothetical observers say so, or do hypothetical observers say so because it is right? Baggett and Walls are skeptical that what hypothetical observers say becomes true because they say it. Rather, hypothetical observers would say it because it is true. Second, some empirical evidence that James cites underdetermine the answer to what is at question here. Even if something that externally looks like a social contract is empirically verified in the earliest moral communities, the question of what makes something right/wrong has still not been answered. The social contract can be based on a shared recognition of objectively true moral principles (independent of the social contract). Lastly, this still does not account for the strong sense of moral obligations which includes, guilt for violation, its binding authority, and the like.

The Third Option to the Euthyphro Dilemma

In general, Divine Command Theory (DCT) says that “If God commands X, then X is a moral obligation for us.” I will limit my discussion of DCT to moral obligations and prohibitions, which are used synonymously with rightness and wrongness. These are deontic properties which is distinct from goodness, which is axiological. For example, something can be good to do, such as becoming a lifeguard to save lives, but we do not have a moral obligation to do so. So I will use DCT as a theory of rightness that presupposes a theory of the good.

The Euthyphro Dilemma (ED) is often raised against DCT. For example, in the case of rape Walter Sinnott-Armstrong asks, “Did God have any reason to command this? If not, his command was arbitrary, and then it can’t make anything morally wrong. On the other hand, if God did have a reason to command us not to rape, then that reason is what makes rape morally wrong. The command itself is superfluous. Either way, morality cannot depend on God’s commands.” In short, the ED says:

Either

(1) God has no reasons for His commands,

or

(2) God has reasons for His commands but these reasons are sufficient by themselves in explaining moral obligations.

Embracing (1) leads to objections such as God’s commands being arbitrary which makes morality arbitrary. Furthermore, this means that God’s commands could possibly be what we consider abhorrent, such as commanding that we ought to torture babies solely for fun resulting in a moral obligation to do so. Any objection to this that says God has reasons is a move away from (1).

Embracing (2), shows that actions are morally obligatory prior to and independent of God’s commands, making God at most an epistemic authority who is just conveying His perfect moral knowledge to us. However DCT proponents want God’s commands to explain moral obligations instead.

From the ED, I think a third option is clear, which DCT proponents can well affirm:

(3) God has reasons for His commands but these reasons are not sufficient by themselves in explaining moral obligations without God’s commands.

God just needs good reasons to make an act morally obligatory. An act itself does not have the property of being morally obligatory prior to God’s command, but can have other relevant properties, such as being morally good or even “non-moral considerations ultimately based in God’s nature.” God’s commanding however adds certain properties that make the act obligatory. To use an analogy, let us think of other obligations. Consider a legal obligation not to smoke in a certain area when implemented by law. For the obligation to arise, there must be good reasons behind why it is implemented by law. Yet those reasons by themselves are not sufficient to give us legal obligations unless it is actually implemented by law. Hence a legal obligation arises because it is implemented by the law and there are good reasons for it being implemented. Likewise, DCT proponents say that a moral obligation arises because it is commanded by God and God has good reasons to command it.

One objection to (3) is based on a principle that moral properties strongly supervene on non-moral properties necessarily. Matthew Jordan says, “The doctrine of global moral supervenience, the uncontroversial thesis that any two possible worlds that are identical in all non-moral respects must be identical in all moral respects, implies that moral truths – at least the most fundamental ones – are metaphysically necessary.” So moral obligations are in some way determined and fixed by their non-moral properties. How exactly does moral supervenience amount to an objection to (3) exactly?

In “An Essay on Divine Authority”, Mark C. Murphy argues that DCT “must be false, for it, in conjunction with a very weak and plausible claim about God's freedom in commanding, entails that the moral does not supervene on the non-moral.” To show this, he argues that according to voluntaristic versions of DCT, where God is free to choose what to command, there can be two possible worlds exactly the same in their natural features, but God gives different commands and thus we have different moral obligations in two possible worlds that have the same natural features. This seems to violate the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral, since two worlds with the same natural features should have the same moral obligations.

How may a proponent of a voluntaristic version of DCT reply? C. Stephen Evans points out that for the theist, non-moral properties can include both natural and supernatural properties. Supernatural properties are “properties possessed because what has the properties has a certain kind of relation to God,” such as “being commanded by God”, “being preferred by God,” or “being pleasing to God” or “being conducive to a better relation to God.” If an act is commanded by God, then it will have the further properties mentioned, such as “being conducive to a better relation to God” which is a non-moral property. These non-moral properties may even be linked to natural properties such as “being conducive to the agent’s happiness.” If a relationship with God is conducive to our happiness, and such a relationship requires that we follow what He commands, then the property of “being commanded by God” would be one that could alter the moral status of an act, especially for those who think that the moral status of an act is linked to whether the act is conducive to an agent’s happiness. Hence on DCT, it is both natural and supernatural properties that make up non-moral properties which moral properties supervene on. If so, then there can be two worlds alike in all their natural properties but differ in their supernatural properties, and hence moral properties can be different as it supervenes on both. So moral supervenience along with God’s freedom does not amount to an objection against (3).

---

Bibliography

Evans, C. Stephen. God and Moral Obligation. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Jordan, Matthew Carey. "“Theism, Naturalism, and Meta-Ethics”." Philosophy Compass 8, 2013, 373-380.

Miller, Christian B. “Euthyphro Dilemma.” In Blackwell International Encyclopedia of Ethics, edited by Hugh LaFollette. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013

Murphy, Mark C. An Essay on Divine Authority. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002.

Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, “Why Traditional Theism Cannot Provide an Adequate Foundation for Morality”, in Is Goodness without God Good Enough: A Debate on Faith, Secularism and Ethics, edited by Robert K Garcia and Nathan L King, 101-115. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008.

Smith, Michael. The Moral Problem. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.

How Kantian Ethics Helps to Demonstrate the Attractiveness of Biblical Ethics: Part II

BIBLICAL ETHICS SUCCEEDS WHERE KANT FALLS SHORT

In comparing the three proposed biblical principles of ethics with Kantian ethics, it is evident that both Kant and the biblical principles attempt to achieve many of the same objectives despite having different foundations to ground morality. Kant’s ethic, however, proves to be less plausible when his justification for objective morality, his requirements for moral worth, and his argument that humans possess inherent value are compared with a biblical view of ethics.

Kant departs from the first biblical principle by grounding objective morality in the “good will” that is produced by reason in every rational creature. In accord with the Enlightenment ideals of human autonomy and reason, humans can legislate morality apart from God. Assessing the philosophical merit of Kantian ethics versus the biblical ethic on this point deserves careful attention because both views stand or fall with the ability that their intrinsic “good” has to ground objective morality.

The classic problem that confronts any moral system that claims some absolute standard as the ground of objective morality is the Euthyphro dilemma. This dilemma, which goes back to the time of Plato, questions whether God’s commands could really determine what is good (or “pious”). The dilemma is stated: “Is the pious being loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is being loved by the gods?”[1]

Both horns of the dilemma are a challenge to any proposed absolute standard of goodness. For any purported standard of objective morality, one can ask whether that standard merely recognizes goodness (i.e., goodness is external to the standard) or whether that standard determines goodness arbitrarily. Consider first whether the biblical ethic is able to defend that the Christian God is plausibly the ground of objective morality in the face of this challenge. It will not do for objective morality to be arbitrary (if good is merely what God says), and God cannot ground objective morality if there is a standard of morality outside of God (if God simply affirms what is independently good). Fortunately for biblical ethics, there is a third alternative—God Himself is the “Good.” The third alternative is that “God’s own holy and perfectly good nature supplies the absolute standard against which all actions and decisions are measured. God’s moral nature is what Plato called the ‘Good.’ He is the locus and source of moral value.”[2] So God is the Good. God’s will and essentially holy nature are fused such that God only wills that which consistently flows from His nature. God is not an arbitrary “stopping point” for morality’s foundation, as there are “principled reasons to think that God’s existence is necessary and that God functions as the very ground of being.” If God is the “primordial good of unsurpassable value,” then goodness is anchored in an unchanging, personal, and necessarily perfect source.[3] It is reasonable that the ground of objective morality would have these properties; morality seems to be essentially bound up with personhood, and anything that would ground objective morality would have to be unchanging and beyond human opinion.

Although the biblical grounding of objective morality in God’s holy nature appears to survive the Euthyphro dilemma, Kant’s “good will” does not fare as well. Kant may seem to split the horns of the dilemma by claiming that the good will is intrinsically and necessarily good. The problem, however, is that there is no reason why the good will must be good “without qualification” in the way Kant says it is. Louis Pojman raises the problem that the good will itself—the rational faculty that recognizes the CI as the supreme moral principle—could potentially be “put to bad uses.” Although the good will seems to be a good, Pojman insightfully recognizes that it is “not obvious” that the good will is necessarily good or that it is “the only inherently good thing” since a “misguided do-gooder” could act in accordance with what he believes is good and yet carry out what most of us regard as bad actions. Perhaps the good will is a “necessary condition to any morally good action,” but it does not seem to be sufficient.[4]

Ultimately, for Kant, the good will is intimately tied to the principle that it produces—the CI and its requirement of universalizability. The problem is that universalizability is unable to stand as the ultimate moral criterion. For one thing, Kant does not adequately specify parameters for the characteristics of a maxim that is appropriate to universalize as moral law. Aside from the limitation that a maxim must not violate the Principle of Ends, Kant “provides no guide for determining what features must be included in the maxim.” This leaves open the door for morally problematic actions “to be based on a maxim that a person would universalize.”[5] Also, it is highly dubious that reason necessarily produces the same conclusions in all rational beings. For example, one could justifiably will to universalize the maxim that “one should always tell the truth no matter what consequence might come about as a result.” Indeed, Kant believed that reason demands the acceptance of this maxim. Yet many would argue that reason demands the acceptance of the maxim that “one should tell the truth unless doing so would harm others.” It is unclear which maxim is necessitated by reason, and both positions have defenders. This example also highlights the difficulty the CI has in handling moral conflicts.[6]

If, however, God’s unchanging and necessarily good character is the intrinsic “Good,” then there is no concern about disagreements among rational human persons as to what should be universalized—that is, what is good. Only God, out of His necessarily holy nature, stands as the ontological ground of goodness, and conflicting human beliefs are irrelevant to the existence of objective morality. With biblical ethics, the existence of moral values and duties (moral ontology) does not depend upon the conclusions we reach as we try to know what these moral values and duties are (moral epistemology). What happens when two maxims that appear to be legitimately justifiable according to our best human reason disagree with each other? If objective morality is rooted in God, then such a situation is irrelevant to moral ontology.

In addition to providing a better foundation for objective moral values, having a biblical ground of ethics can adequately justify moral duties while the Kantian ground of ethics cannot. Since biblical ethics grounds objective morality in God, God’s commands are justifiably our moral duties because they are derived from His essentially holy nature.[7] Biblical ethics is able to sustain itself as a truly deontological ethical system. On the other hand, although Kant would deny it, significant voices have charged that Kant’s good will is unable to produce true moral duties without appealing to a more subjective consequentialist justification for them. The famous utilitarian ethicist John Stuart Mill, for example, claims that the CI does not avoid seemingly “immoral” actions on purely logical grounds; rather, he says Kant merely shows “that the consequences of their universal adoption would be such as no one would choose to incur.”[8] Mill has a valid point. Some seemingly immoral maxims do not lead to any obvious contradiction if universalized, though we can see that the consequences of universalizing it would be morally bad and may produce a negative result. For example, consider the maxim that “two consenting adults who are not already in a committed relationship should always have sex with each other if they desire to do so.” The universal acceptance of this maxim would not in any way lead to a logical contradiction that would undermine the very practice of the maxim, and it is not obvious that the Principle of Ends is being violated since both individuals are consenting and may well have a legitimate interest in the wellbeing of the other person; however, one can reasonably will that this maxim should not be universalized because of the consequences it would have. Such promiscuity is known to carry a heavy emotional weight for those who engage in it, and it also raises the likelihood of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Such behavior also makes it more difficult to form meaningful committed relationships, which one can reasonably argue have significant value. In fact, there are actually “Kantian consequentialists,” such as R. M. Hare[9] and David Cummiskey. Cummiskey argues that Kant’s ethical system “is consistent with and supports a consequentialist normative principle” even though Kant sought a fully deontological ethic.[10] If that is the case, then it is hard to see how Kant’s good will allows for objective moral duties; however, because God Himself is the necessary “Good” and His nature produces moral truth that is essential and binding upon us, moral duties transcend humans, and their existence does not depend upon our own assessment of what actions will probably produce “good” consequences. It is not clear that Kant’s CI is able to account for the full range of objective duties that are binding on us and that it can do this without recourse to subjective human considerations of consequences.

Moreover, the authority and bindingness of moral duties seems to be much stronger and more plausible if the source of these duties is a person rather than something impersonal, such as “reason.” Merely “acting and thinking rationally does not constitute a full explanation of moral belief and practice. Moral obligation carries extra clout and punch, which needs accounting for.”[11] When we fall short of our moral duties, we sense that we are guilty in a sense that goes beyond simply violating a principle of reason. Locating the source of moral authority in an essentially holy personal God better explains the objective guilt that seems to accompany violating one’s moral duty. In view of all these considerations, the biblical ethical principle that the standard and basis of all goodness is found in God is quite plausible, and this fact is highlighted by the apparent problems that Kant’s system has in establishing the good will as the one intrinsic good that grounds objective morality.

Moving to the second principle of biblical ethics, Kant’s insight in agreeing with the biblical principle that moral worth depends on our motives as well as our actions has been noted; however, Kant’s view of moral worth proves to be too narrow when compared to the biblical assessment of moral worth. As Joseph Kotva points out, Kantian ethics and all ethical theories that are based strictly upon “rules or duty” are at a disadvantage in accounting for the biblical recognition that the moral life is more than rules. Kant fails to see that life is a “race” that requires ongoing character development. While Scripture goes beyond virtue ethics, it captures its insights. We are constantly to “run with perseverance the race marked out for us” as we model ourselves after Jesus (Heb 12:1-2). Paul emphasizes the need to develop such virtues as “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Gal 5:22-23), and he exhorts others to grow in character by following his example as he follows Christ (1 Cor 11:1). While Christian ethics certainly has a strong deontological component, Kotva rightly points out the biblical emphasis on developing virtues and constantly struggling for moral growth in order to become a person of greater character.[12]

The key shortfall of Kant’s view of moral worth is that he does not credit moral worth to a person who grows in character such that she no longer does an action out of rational duty but out of modified and improved inclination. We have seen that Kant is clear that there can be no moral worth involved when an agent is “so sympathetically constituted” that she performs kind acts out of the pure joy of doing them rather than a sense of duty.[13] While biblical ethics would applaud someone of such character who enjoys doing virtuous things, Kant does not recognize such a person as morally praiseworthy. He thus fails to capture the value of moral growth and the fact that one should strive both to “will and act” according to what is good (Phil 2:13). While feeling joy from doing what is good should not be our sole moral motivation, “normal healthy human considerations of self-interest are a perfectly legitimate part of moral motivation.”[14]

Therefore, although Kant is certainly right that duties such as the command to love others should be done regardless of inclination, loving others is something that we ought to work towards wanting to do so that the duty does not have to be against inclination. Finding joy in doing what is good is a mark of moral development and personal character, and the Bible more completely captures this. Such character is exemplified in Jesus, who, though He dreaded it, even found joy in sacrificing Himself on the cross for others (Heb 12:2).

Finally, Kant’s ethic falls short of the third biblical ethical principle in terms of justifying the idea that humans possess value. We have seen that Kant attempts to ground the intrinsic value of humanity in our rationality. Kant argues that pure reason forces us to the conclusion that humans must have value because nothing can be valued without rational beings to do the valuing. In contrast, biblical ethics holds that humans have value in virtue of being made in the “image of God” (Gen. 1:26-27). Human value is based on “the relationship for which we were created” rather than because of any “distinguishing characteristic” that is found in human capabilities.[15] This is attractive; for if human value is rooted in a capacity like reason or rationality, then how can the value of babies or the brain damaged be upheld?[16] The reason that the biblical justification for the value of humans is superior to Kant’s follows from the earlier point that God is a far more credible “stopping point” for objective morality than the good will.

If God truly is the ultimate “Good,” then perhaps human rationality is an instrumental good rather than an intrinsic good. Rather than agreeing with Kant that the “rational nature” of humans is itself sufficient for regarding humans as “ends in themselves,”[17] it may be that rationality functions as an instrumental good in so far as it allows us to have a relationship with the one true source of ultimate value—God Himself. If that is the case, then Kant is correct in valuing rationality but wrong in thinking that it has intrinsic value.

Beyond the automatic implications that locating objective morality in God has for human value, careful consideration of the question of human value by itself reveals that humans, if they are to justify having truly objective value, must justify their value by appealing to something outside of themselves. If humans consider themselves intrinsically valuable merely because they value themselves, then how can David Hume’s is-ought problem be avoided? Just because it is the case that humans tend to ascribe value to their own lives and the lives of other people does not mean that we necessarily ought to do so.

Finally, there is a sort of argument from contingency that points to God as the proper justification for human value and dignity. Kant and many others have claimed that we are the sort of beings who have intrinsic value.[18] But even if Kant were right that our rationality provides a basis for intrinsic human value, this would not negate the fact that God is necessary for us to have value because “relationality and intrinsicality are neither at odds nor mutually exclusive.”[19] If there is no possible world in which beings like us could exist apart from God, then there is no reason in principle why our value could not come from both our relationship to God as well the intrinsic qualities God has given us. Paul Copan argues that morality and value are “necessarily connected” with personhood. Since an essential attribute of God is that He exists necessarily and is the ontological ground of all other persons, morality and value would be impossible without God.[20] Using this logic, it is plausible that the source of intrinsic value can only be found in a necessarily existing person. Thus, in response to Kant’s view that the mere possession of rationality endows all rational creatures with intrinsic value, one must ask on what basis humans persons exist to have rationality. God, if He does exist as Kant himself believed, is the only reason that there is rationality. Even if it were true, as Kant claims, that rationality brings about value, God is the source of rationality. Ultimately, in view of these considerations, the biblical justification for human value appears more plausible and legitimate than Kant’s justification.

CONCLUSION

The three biblical principles of ethics proposed in this paper appear to be eminently plausible when held up to philosophical scrutiny. Because Kant, without grounding morality in God, sought to achieve many of the same goals that these biblical principles accomplish, Kantian ethics serves as an instructive litmus test of the plausibility of biblical ethics. Morality must be objective and universal if it is to avoid the total collapse that relativism ensures. Kant is undoubtedly correct in recognizing this. Furthermore, we have seen that objective morality—to be truly objective—must have a plausible absolute standard of intrinsic value and goodness that grounds it. Biblical ethics provides a philosophically justifiable basis for accomplishing this by identifying God as that source. In contrast, Kant is unable to legitimize the “good will” as being “good without qualification” and able to produce moral principles and binding duties that are defensibly objective and have an ontological basis that is fully independent of humanity. Biblical ethics also legitimizes the attractive conviction that humans really do have intrinsic value. Kant is right to recognize the truth that humans are “objects of respect” and should be “treated as ends,” but he is unable to objectively ground this apparent truth in a justifiable source. God Himself is the ultimate standard of goodness and value, and it is only by way of our relationship with God that we, as creatures made in God’s image, can have intimate connection to the ultimate source of value and can ourselves be endowed with objective value.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sources Cited:

Baggett, David, and Jerry L. Walls. God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning. Oxford: University Press, 2016.

Copan, Paul.  “A Moral Argument.”  In To Everyone an Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview.  Edited by Francis Beckwith, William Lane Craig, and James Porter Moreland.  Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004.

Craig, William Lane.  Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics.  3rd ed.  Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2008.

Cummiskey, David.  Kantian Consequentialism.  New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Driver, Julia.  Ethics: The Fundamentals.  Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.

Gert, Bernard.  Morality: Its Nature and Justification.  New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Grenz, Stanley.  The Moral Quest.  Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998.

Hare, John E.  The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Kant, Immanuel.  Critique of Pure Reason.  In Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: In Commemoration of the Centenary of its First Publication.  2nd ed.  Translated by F. Max Müller.  London: Macmillan, 1907.

--------.  Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals.  In Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What is Enlightenment?  Translated by Lewis White Beck.  Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959.

--------.  “What is Enlightenment?”  In Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What is Enlightenment?  Translated by Lewis White Beck.  Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959.

Kotva, Joseph J.  The Christian Case for Virtue Ethics.  Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1996.

Lewis, C. S.  Mere Christianity.  San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 2001.

Mill, John Stuart.  Utilitarianism.  Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1906.

Moreland, J. P., and William Lane Craig.  Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2003.

Plato.  “Euthyphro.”  In The Trial and Death of Socrates.  3rd ed.  Translated by George Maximilian Anthony Grube and John M. Cooper.  Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2000.

--------.  Plato’s Republic.  Translated by George Maximilian Anthony Grube and C. D. C. Reeve.  Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992.

Pojman, Louis.  Ethics: Discovering Right and Wrong.  6th ed.  Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2009.

Porter, Burton Frederick.  The Good Life: Alternatives in Ethics.  3rd ed.  Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001.

Smith, R. Scott.  In Search of Moral Knowledge: Overcoming the Fact-Value Dichotomy.  Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014.

Tiffany, Evan.  “How Kantian Must Kantian Constructivists Be?”  Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 49, no. 6 (December 2006): 524-546.

Wielenberg, Erik.  Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Additional Sources:

Craig, William Lane.  “The Indispensability of Theological Meta-ethical Foundations for Morality.”  Foundations 5 (1997): 9-12.  http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5175 (accessed February 12, 2016).

Kant, Immanuel.  “Critique of Practical Reason.”  In Great Books of the Western World.  Vol. 42.  Translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott.  Chicago, IL: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952.

McElreath, Scott.  “The Inadequacy of Kant’s View of Moral Worth.”  Philosophical Writings, 19-20 (Spring/Summer 2002): 23-42.

Ritchie, Angus.  From Morality to Metaphysics: The Theistic Implications of Our Ethical Commitments.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Notes:

1. Plato, “Euthyphro,” in The Trial and Death of Socrates, 3rd ed., trans. George Maximilian Anthony Grube and John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2000), 11.

1. J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2003), 491.

1. Baggett and Walls, God and Cosmos, 286.

1. Pojman, Discovering Right and Wrong, 127.

1. Bernard Gert, Morality: Its Nature and Justification (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006), 306.

1. Baggett and Walls, God and Cosmos, 167.

1. William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2008), 182.

1. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1906), 5.

2. John E. Hare, The Moral Gap, 18-19. Hare notes that R. M. Hare is a Kantian who believes he is consistent with Kant in applying act-utilitarianism to Kant’s CI to determine whether an act should be universalized.

1. David Cummiskey, Kantian Consequentialism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996), 9.

1. Baggett and Walls, God and Cosmos, 176. This quote is in the context of showing a limitation of Erik Wielenberg’s secular approach to ethics, but this particular criticism applies to Kantian ethics as well.

2. Joseph J. Kotva, The Christian Case for Virtue Ethics (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1996), 156.

1. Kant, Foundations, 14. Kant believed happiness must result from moral living for us to press on in the moral life, but our motivation to be moral must be duty and not happiness. See Hare, The Moral Gap, 76-78.

1. Baggett and Walls, God and Cosmos, 266.

1. Stanley Grenz, The Moral Quest (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 217.

1. Baggett and Walls, God and Cosmos, 117.

1. Kant, Foundations, 46.

1. Erik Wielenberg, Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 83-84. Wielenberg, a secular moral realist, contends that rooting human value in God devalues the intrinsic human value that common sense tells us we have.

1. Baggett and Walls, God and Cosmos, 286.

1. Paul Copan, “A Moral Argument,” in To Everyone an Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview, ed. Francis Beckwith, William Lane Craig, and James Porter Moreland (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 113.

Chapter 4, Part I, of C. Stephen Evans’ God and Moral Obligation: “Objections to Divine Command Theory”

In this chapter Evans raises and attempts to answer several common objections to Divine Command Theory. This post will cover the first three objections discussed; following posts in the series will cover the last four objections.

The Euthyphro Problem

From an early Socratic dialogue the question came, “Is what is holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is holy?” Either way we seem to have a problem: either the gods are arbitrary or holiness is independent of the gods. We can extend the dilemma to morality and ask if God approves what’s moral because it’s moral or if something is moral because God approves it. If the latter, this leads to two undesirable results: it looks as if things like hatred and cruelty would be good if God approved of them, and it looks as if it will be impossible meaningfully to praise God as good, since goodness is whatever God says it is.

Evans thinks the Dilemma poses a problem for a universal voluntaristic ethical theory that tries to base all ethical properties in God’s commands or will, but not his theory that delimits DCT to moral duties based on some theory of the good, in his case a natural law conception. For then God’s commands aren’t arbitrary, and God can be rightly praised for his goodness.

Since Evans opts for the divine discretion thesis, he thinks God has some latitude in the commands he issues. Does this reintroduce arbitrariness? Evans doesn’t think so, since the commands would provide a special test of devotion to God, and perhaps be especially conducive to practices that would nourish such devotion.

Evans concludes that the Euthyphro problem is not a problem for a DCT of his type.

The Horrible Acts Objection

Another objection is that DCT violates deep moral intuitions about what’s morally right. If God had commanded us to torture innocent children, then it would have been morally right to do so, for example. The standard response to this charge is that God is necessarily good. It follows from this that God could not possibly give commands to do what is morally horrible because of the intrinsic badness of such acts. Louise Antony is mistaken in claiming that this move abandons DCT.

Recently some critics have extended the argument by saying that if, counterfactually, God were to issue such horrible commands (even if he never actually would or could), DCT would entail our obligation to engage in such horrible acts. Such critics provide no logical semantical theory to explain and justify these claims, but rather seem to rely on intuitions. But Evans plays along and says there’s no problem here, because (following Pruss on this score) such an argument would apply to any and every moral theory. For example, if the categorical imperative required us to torture innocents, it would be morally obligatory to torture innocents (on that theory). Someone might say the categorical imperative never would or could require us to do any such thing, but of course the DCT’ist says the same of DCT. Perhaps in fact the impossibility of God making such a command would be even more intuitively obvious than the impossibility of deriving an obligation to torture innocents from the categorical imperative.

The Autonomy Objection

Other critics object that a DCT of moral obligations is objectionable because it undermines the autonomy of humans as moral agents, and they believe that such autonomy is essential to morality. In one form, the charge is that morality, to be recognized as morality at all, must be based on reasons or arguments that humans can recognize for themselves. James Rachels argues this. For him DCT doesn’t even qualify as a moral theory. Other critics admit DCT is a moral theory, but argue it’s a bad one, because it infantilizes humans, conceiving of us as childlike creatures incapable of deciding important matters for ourselves, needing to be told what to do.

Let’s start with the claim that DCT does not even count as a moral theory because a genuine moral theory must ground morality in principles and/or arguments that an agent can recognize as true and/or sound for herself. Evans’ first point is that his DCT does not have to recognize a moral obligation as a divine command in order to have knowledge or at least justified belief that he or she has the obligation. Such people recognize their moral obligations, presumably in the same ways as other people, and it is hard to see how the fact that those obligations are really divine commands could undermine their autonomy, since they are ignorant of that fact.

So Rachels’ argument must be intended to show that it is coming to believe that one’s moral obligations are divine commands that undermines authority. But why should this follow? If one supposes that an individual has come to accept a DCT on the basis of a philosophical argument, then it is hard to see how this could undermine the moral agent’s autonomy. Rachels’ requirement that the individual form moral beliefs on the basis of reason and/or arguments that the individual has considered for herself would seem to be met.

Maybe Rachels or someone else could push the point by insisting that following the dictates of another person would not count as following moral principles at all. But sometimes following the dictates of human persons does result in moral obligations (think of an air raid warden during wartime). In God’s case, Evans has argued that he has genuine moral authority which enables his commands to create moral obligations. This is perfectly consistent with autonomy in Rachels’ sense.

Now consider the second version of the autonomy objection, which does not claim that divine commands are incompatible with the kind of autonomy a moral agent must have, but rather that following divine commands would be a kind of childish version of morality. Evans admits that even if God gives us commands, by giving us freedom to obey or disobey his commands he treats us as moral beings who have the opportunity freely to follow his principles.

Beyond that, though, Evans thinks it’s easy to show that God does not necessarily infantilize humans by giving them commands as to how they should live. Whether something like that is true would depend on the nature of the commands God gives. Perhaps if God gave humans detailed instructions on a minute by minute basis for every detail of their lives then this criticism would have weight. For in that case human persons would not need to use their rational faculties or develop them in order to know how to live. The task would simply be to listen to God’s continuing instructions and follow them. But if we assume that God does not give such commands, but rather gives humans commands that are at least somewhat general in nature, this would not follow. God’s commands need to be interpreted and applied, and their implications thought through. God might well decide to give commands of just this nature so as to require humans to develop the capacities he has given them.

Summary of Chapter Two of God and Morality: Four Views, edited by R. Keith Loftin.

In the second chapter of Keith Loftin’s God and Morality: Four Views, philosopher Michael Ruse presents a case for what he calls naturalist moral nonrealism. This is a metaethical view that combines atheism with a form of moral subjectivism. On this view, all facts are natural facts, there is no supernatural reality, and moral principles depend on what people believe.

Ruse first argues that there are connections between natural selection and altruism. Our brains are subject to genetically determined rules. Related to this, we are social beings who must get along with one another in order to survive. As Ruse puts it,

“What evolutionary biologists believe, therefore, is that nature has given our brains certain genetically determined, strategic rules or directives, which we bring into play when dealing with new awkward situations. Rather like a self-correcting machine…we humans can adjust and go in different directions when faced with obstacles to our well-being. The rules are fixed, but how we use the rules is not” (p. 60).

This leads to a discussion of the origin of morality. Some of the rules that we’ve inherited from our ancestors are moral rules. We take them to be moral norms. For example, the belief that we ought to help one another is such a rule, and is genetically determined. Substantive moral beliefs, then, are adaptations. Non-human animals have similar adaptations, insofar as they exhibit altruistic behavior related to kin selection. An animal’s relatives share the same genes. Given this, altruism serves as reproduction by proxy. There is also “reciprocal altruism,” where help is given in expectation that it will be returned.  And these mechanisms are also at work in humans.

Ruse, then, is an advocate of evolutionary ethics, but rejects the traditional view that includes belief in the progressive nature of evolution. He accepts ethical skepticism, which is the view that there is no justification for our moral beliefs. Such beliefs are merely “psychological beliefs put in place by natural selection in order to maintain and improve our reproductive fitness” (p. 65). He contends that this follows from his views about evolution. We could have evolved a very different set of moral beliefs, and for him this is a challenge to those who argue for objective morality.

The upshot is that morality can be explained, but it cannot be justified. Yet morality is such a strong impulse in human beings, and is very difficult to ignore. We think that morality has an objective basis because this is evolutionarily advantageous, but it is still not true. It seems to be objective, but it simply is not. Interestingly, Ruse states that like Hume, he will forget about his skepticism when he goes back into the real world.

Ruse also argues that Christians must be careful when appealing to God as a justification for their metaethical views, because of the well-known Euthyphro problem. He does discuss a natural law reply to Euthyphro, stating that

“The Christian says that loving your neighbor as yourself is right because the feeling that one should love one’s neighbor as oneself is something built into human nature by God…The Darwinian says loving your neighbor as yourself is right because the feeling that one should love one’s neighbor as oneself is something built into human nature by natural selection” (p. 73).

There are several criticism worth considering related to evolutionary ethical skepticism. First, it is unclear to me how “reciprocal altruism” is genuine altruism, given that it is given in order to get something in return.

Second, there is a vast discussion of the Euthyphro dilemma, with many options on offer for Christian theists that are intended to resolve it. I take the natural law response as described by Ruse to be one of the weaker theistic replies. The replies given by William Alston and Robert Adams, for example, are much stronger.[1]

Third, moral realists, naturalistic or theistic, will be dissatisfied with the views espoused by Ruse in this chapter. They will agree that for Ruse, as Keith Yandell puts it, “[t]here are no obligations, only feelings of obligation. Such feelings have no more relation to reality than a strong sense of being surrounded by unicorns” (p. 82). There is no correspondence to reality here, only groundless moral feeling that is selected for via Darwinian processes. Morality is merely an adaptive feature of our evolutionary history.

This leads to a serious problem. Yandell points out that on this view, no set of morals is better than any other:

“Better and worse, insofar as they have any sense, are relative to the propensities built into the survivors. If the propensities lead to murder and rape, then our mores will come to favor these, and in no objective sense will this be any worse than if the propensities led to love and peace” (p. 85).

Finally, Mark Linville points out in his reply that Ruse ends up saying that he believes something (morality) that he knows is not true. Once you know that morality is not true in any objective sense, why continue to follow it, especially when it frustrates other desires you possess? There are reasons, good reasons, to be moral. But Ruse’s view does not possess the resources to ground a robust form of moral motivation. This is one of the many serious flaws it contains.

[1] See my “Divine Command Theory” at http://www.iep.utm.edu/divine-c/.

Image: "Evolved" by thezombiesaid. CC License.