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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Wielenberg on Evolutionary Debunking Arguments

Photo by Bruno Martins on Unsplash

[Excerpt from a larger essay--my side of a printed debate on God and morality with Louise Antony--forthcoming in a new edition of Michael Peterson and Ray VanArragon, eds., Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion (Blackwell). --MDL]

As a part of a larger project of defending an atheistic accounting of “robust ethics,” Erik Wielenberg has recently taken on such arguments and suggested a model for reconciling an evolutionary account of morality with his view that morality is objective (even “robust”).  One assumption of my argument so far has been that unless there is a direct connection between the reproductive advantage of our moral beliefs and their truth--so that their being true is responsible for their being fitness conferring--then we’ve no reason to assume their truth.  But as Nagel says, “value realism” is like an unattached spinning wheel.  It does no such explanatory work, and so we are left merely with the view that we have the moral beliefs we do because of their reproductive advantage--they have been fobbed off on us by our genes, as Ruse says.  Wielenberg instead posits an indirect connection that is routed through a “third factor”[1]-- a set of evolved human cognitive faculties (e.g., reason).  It is plausible that certain cognitive faculties have evolved because they confer fitness upon their possessors.  Further, there is “wide agreement” that “if rights exist at all, their presence is guaranteed by certain cognitive faculties.”[2]  Suppose, then, that there are rights and that such rights are based upon those cognitive faculties.  It will follow that any creature with such cognitive faculties possesses rights, and any such creature who exercises those faculties to believe There are rights believes truly.  This, of course, is because having the cognitive faculties is both necessary for having the belief and sufficient for having the rights. 

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.[3]

This is a neat way of explaining how evolution might ultimately be responsible for our having true moral beliefs, even if those beliefs are about non-natural truths.  Does it succeed?
            Wielenberg is entitled to the assumption of rights due to the rhetorical context of his argument.  After all, I and others have argued that there would not be moral knowledge even if there were moral truths, and so his strategy--positing some moral truth and determining whether it could be known given the conditions laid down--is the natural way to proceed.  And his proposed model is, so far as I can tell, internally consistent.  After all, if our cognitive faculties are a product of our evolution, and if having such faculties is sufficient for having rights, then anyone capable of believing that there are rights is in possession of both the faculties and the rights. 

But one wonders whether the assumption is safely lifted from the paper and transferred to the world itself.  Indeed, there are two assumptions at work: there are rights, and rights are based upon the possession of certain cognitive faculties.  Wielenberg cites “wide agreement” regarding the connection between those faculties and the possession of rights.  But the entrenched evolutionary skeptic might suggest that our belief in rights is just a part of that fobbed-off illusion.  When Bertrand Russell appealed to “wide agreement” regarding certain moral beliefs, George Santayana replied--no doubt with Darwin in mind--that such appeals are little better than “the inevitable and hygienic bias of one race of animals.”[4]  Further, given the background assumption of evolutionary naturalism, we might expect that such faculties themselves emerged as an evolutionary solution to the problem of survival and reproduction.  As such, they are of instrumental value as a means to such ends, much like opposable thumbs.  Can we rest the case for the intrinsic value of persons upon their possession of extrinsically valuable properties?  Human rationality is certainly good for humans just as arboreal acrobatic skills are good for rhesus monkeys, but beyond bald assumptions, does Wielenberg’s view provide the conceptual resources for thinking that it is a good in itself as would seem to be required for it to do the work assigned to it?

            Wielenberg’s strategy may go some distance towards reducing the improbability of our possessing moral knowledge given the emergence of rational and moral agents who have both rights and a tendency to believe that they do.  But the model in itself fails to address a more astonishing cosmic coincidence to which Santayana pointed in his critique of Russell.  As an atheist and naturalist, Russell famously said, “Man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving.”[5]   The forces of nature are not goal-oriented, and we should not think of the emergence of homo sapiens as the achievement of cosmic purposes.  We are here because nature “in her secular hurryings”[6] happened in at least one corner of the universe to throw spinning matter into the right recipe for things such as ourselves to form. But at the same time, Russell defended a view of morality that includes objective and intrinsic values--a form of Platonism not far from Wielenberg’s robust ethics. Santayana argued that these two commitments are mutually at odds.  As he saw, Russell’s moral philosophy implied that “In the realm of essences, before anything exists, there are certain essences that have this remarkable property, that they ought to exist, or at least, that, if anything exists, it ought to conform to them.”[7]  But Russell’s naturalism--and rejection of cosmic purpose--implies, “What exists…is deaf to this moral emphasis in the eternal; nature exists for no reason.”[8]   It would be marvelous indeed if, in the accidental world that Russell described, the very things that ought to exist should have come to be.  It would be as though among the eternal verities a special premium had forever been placed upon, say, conscious moral agents, and, despite the countless possibilities, and because of sheer dumb luck, the same had been fashioned and formed of Big Bang debris.  Presumably, Beings with cognitive faculties have rights is a necessary truth--if a truth at all--and, as such, it was inscribed in the Platonic empyrean long before the Big Bang.  How astonishing it seems that such things with that “remarkable property” of being such that they ought to exist--should have appeared at all when the things responsible for their emergence had no prevision of such an end.  Did we win the cosmic lottery?  Santayana observed that at least Plato had an explanation for such things because the Good that he conceived was a “power,” influencing the world of people and things so that the course that nature has in fact taken is determined at least in part by moral values.[9] It is for such reasons that Thomas Nagel has posited the idea that “value is not just an accidental side effect of life; rather, there is life because life is a necessary condition of value.”[10]  Nagel’s good is a power, unlike Russell’s, and as such it plays a role in explaining the moral shape that the world has taken.  But presumably no such moral guidance was at work in Wielenberg’s universe, seeing to it that portions of the material world should be fashioned and formed into moral agents.  Yet here we are!
            I think this point remains despite Wielenberg’s further ruminations on whether Darwinian Counterfactuals are, in fact, likely or even possible.  He suggests that if physical law does not strictly require that emergent moral agents should have developed moral sensibilities something like our own, so that evolution would naturally narrow the range of possible outcomes, it is highly likely--at least “for all we know.”  Daniel Dennett has suggested that there may be certain “forced moves” in evolutionary design space.  For instance, given locomotion, stereoscopic vision is predictable.[11]  Wielenberg seems to be suggesting a forced move of his own.  But both moves are forced--if at all--only once certain conditions are in place.  Nagel has a relevant observation here on precisely the example Dennett cites.

Once conscious organisms appear on the scene, we can see how it would go. For Example … certain structures necessarily have visual experience, in a sense that inextricably combines phenomenology and capacities for discrimination in the control of action, and that there are no possible structures capable of the same control without the phenomenology. If such structures appeared on the evolutionary menu, they would presumably enhance the fitness of the resulting organisms.... But that would not explain why such structures formed in the first place.[12]

Even if we think it likely that the evolution of moral agents such as ourselves should drop into a predictable groove, we are still left to explain why the natural world should be deeply structured in such a way that its natural processes and algorithms should produce such agents at all.  The whole thing is quite wonderful, and without the guidance of God, a Platonic demiurge, or Nagel’s guiding values, it seems an astonishing bit of luck.  It adds an additional epicycle of coincidence to the so-called “anthropic coincidences” in that not only have we beat astonishing odds simply by arriving on the scene--because of the mind-boggling improbability that the universe should have permitted and sustained life of any kind--but that it is also the achievement of ends eternally declared to be good and morally desirable by necessarily true but causally impotent moral standards. It is a called shot, but without a Babe Ruth to place it.  To base one’s argument on an assumption that defies such odds seems a bit like planning one’s retirement on the assumption that one will win the lottery.  One might suggest that Wielenberg help himself to the additional unjustified assumption of Nagel’s causally effective guiding values, for this would fill a void in his view, and anyone with the liberality to grant the one (i.e., rights) is likely to grant the other.

[1] To illustrate, suppose we notice a strong--even exceptionless--correlation between chilly weather and the turning of fall leaves.  But suppose we are told that the chill in the air is not the cause of the colorful leaves.  But then we consider a third factor--the earth’s tilt from the sun resulting in both less light and colder weather--which is responsible for both the color (due to the light) and the chill.

[2] Wielenberg, p. 145.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., p. 274.

[5] Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” in Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), p. 107.

[6] Ibid., p. 108.

[7] George Santayana, Winds of Doctrine and Platonism and the Spiritual Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), p. 153.

[8] Ibid., p. 153.

[9] “Plato attributes a single vital direction and a single narrow source to the cosmos. This is what determines and narrows the source of the true good; for the true good is that relevant to nature. Plato would not have been a dogmatic moralist had he not been a theist.” Santayana, Winds of Doctrine, p. 143.

[10] Thomas Nagel, Mind and Consciousness, p. 116.

[11] Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).

[12] Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, p. 60. 

Image: "Darwin" by I. Dolphin. CC License. 

Review of Angus Ritchie's From Morality to Metaphysics

From Morality to Metaphysics: The Theistic Implications of our Ethical Commitments, by Angus Ritchie, Oxford University Press, 2012, 198 pages.

In this excellent and tightly argued book, Angus Ritchie offers a moral argument for theism, or at least a vital piece of a bigger argument to that effect. Theism, he argues cogently, explains the human capacity for moral cognition better than various secular rivals. For his pool of alternative candidates, he canvasses the field of meta-ethics. In this way he cuts to the heart of much of the contemporary ethical debate, and in so doing he highlights a serious and systemic problem facing secular positions that attempt to accommodate our pre-theoretical moral commitments. He also sketches a teleological and theistic alternative that he argues avoids such objections that prove intractable to the secular theories.

In my estimation Ritchie’s work is one of the more important books written in ethics in recent years. In terms of building a moral apologetic, it does three central tasks: it presses the distinction between justification and explanation of moral truths (a recurring and integrating motif of the book); it takes secular alternatives seriously enough to engage them with real seriousness (at sufficient length with arguments suitably generalizable); and spells out the theistic alternative (though a bit briefly, inviting others to extend the discussion). Despite its lamentable number of distracting typos that should have been fixed in editing, and its failure to discuss Railton, Joyce, or Parfit, I recommend this book with enthusiasm. I have every confidence it will be an important contributor to the resurgence of interest in moral arguments for God in both natural theology and popular apologetics.

Ritchie offers an inference to the best explanation (IBE); his argument is that classical theism better explains objective moral ontology and epistemology. His primary argument for the moral objectivism in need of explanation is its deliberative indispensability. Humans are committed to moral norms for much the same reason we believe norms underwrite practices indispensable to human thought and action in the arena of theoretical reasoning. It is impossible to engage in moral deliberation without taking oneself to be aiming at a normative truth that goes beyond personal preference or cultural custom.

Among the secular explanation candidates of moral cognition Ritchie considers are those provided by Blackburn, Gibbard, Korsgaard, and the early Scanlon, who argue that our fundamental moral convictions can be accommodated without objectivism; and those of Foot, Crisp, and the later Scanlon who seek to combine a fully objectivist account of moral norms with no purposive agent or force. What all of these secular accounts have in common is their systemic flaw. In the case of the less objectivist theories the concessions made to reductionism leave them unable to do justice to our most fundamental moral convictions; those that accommodate the pull of objectivism generate an ‘explanatory gap’. The book’s central contention is that all secular theories that do justice to our most fundamental moral convictions go on to generate an insoluble ‘explanatory gap’ that consists in their inability to answer the following question: How do human beings, developing in a physical universe which is not itself shaped by any purposive force, come to have the capacity to apprehend objective moral norms?

Secular (nonteleological) theories only escape the explanatory gap by failing to vindicate our pre-philosophical moral commitments. The gap arises when the following commitments are combined: (1) Robust moral objectivism, (2) secularism, and (3) the belief that humans, through the exercise of their normal belief-generating and belief-evaluating capacities, are able to apprehend the objective moral order. While secular theories can explain humans’ acquisition of moral sensibilities and practices of reasoning, this does not tell us why those practices and sensibilities have the property of tracking the truth.

Regarding cognitive capacities (perceptual, theoretical, practical), three questions can be asked about their genesis and justification: (1) What is the justification for our faith in their reliability? (2) What is the historical explanation of their development? And (3) what is theexplanation for their capacity for tracking truth? It is just because Ritchie takes the fundamental convictions that emerge from reflective equilibrium to be justified (to have non-accidental correlation with objective moral norms) that the third question arises. So Ritchie stresses the importance that we not confuse the demand for an explanation for the reliability of our moral beliefs with the demand for a justification of our trust in the human capacity to acquire and modify our moral beliefs in a way that tracks truth.

In terms of what sort of explanation is needed, what is most promising, he thinks, is a teleological form of explanation that explains a particular event or state of affairs by showing that it is either (1) part of the end-state which a system brings about or (2) part of the means by which a system brings about the end-state. To be an intelligible account, the teleological explanation will also have made it intelligible why the system yields the outcome and of the means by which the system is capable of generating those outcomes and why it tends to generate them.

Ritchie’s overall claim is that it is legitimate to raise questions of explanation with respect to the truth-tracking quality of humans’ moral faculties because we see in natural selection a way in which explanation can be answered for our truth-tracking capacities for theoretical reasoning and with respect to the physical world. The ability to track truth is selectively advantageous in those cases (unless Plantinga is right, which should prove no comfort to naturalists). Natural selection is the obvious candidate for an explanation of the development within humans of truth-tracking capacities regarding fundamental principles of deduction, IBE, and induction. It is highly probable that we will be better able to survive if we can come to true beliefs. So natural selection offers a story of how humans come to have truth-tracking capacities for theoretical reasoning; likewise for both physical perception and theoretical reasoning.

No such correlation is plausible in the moral case. On the account given by evolutionary biology, it is not the fact that moral beliefs are correct which leads to them being selected for. Rather, it is the fact that they are conducive to the flourishing of the collective. There is no guarantee that the qualities which lead to multiplication will have any other excellence about them. Any value system based on survival, replication, and pleasure alone is inadequate. If there is not a less obvious way in which moral valuations promote survival, replication, and pleasure, then they’re spandrels, lacking any direct connection with genetic survival and multiplication. Unless we have a wider teleological account, we have no reason to suppose that these valuations have any non-random connective with that moral order.

Beyond such a prima facie case, Ritchie turns to specific meta-ethical theories, beginning with quasi-realism (‘QR’). Gibbard respects what Blackburn calls the ‘realist-seeming grammar’ of practical deliberation, but they both seek to minimize its metaphysical implications. Both respond to an impulse to both reductionism and objectivism. They want to offer the best of both worlds while avoiding objections. Moral quasi-realism is designed to avoid the following kind of morally obnoxious counterfactuals:

(CF) If we approved of torturing the child it would be a good act,

while keeping the ontology to a minimum. In moral deliberations, we judge desires and the prevailing attitudes of our society by a standard which is independent of those desires and attitudes.

QR claims that (CF) should be read as a statement within ethics. They deny that it need be taken as a higher-order, metaethical assertion. When we consider counterfactuals, they insist, we cannot help but evaluate them from within our commitments. And as such, all decent people will obviously reject (CF). Blackburn insists that we have no conception of the nature of an independent order of reason. Ritchie disagrees, insisting that the existence of objective norms of theoretical reasoning shows that we do have a conception of what ‘an independent order of reason’ would be.

Ritchie thinks QR can answer various objections, but that it runs into difficulty when it has to account for the provisionality with which all human beings hold their ethical views. We simply do not regard moral truth as being fixed completely by our current views. In its efforts to accommodate such an objection, QR faces two challenges: tying morality too closely to current beliefs, precluding progress, or tying it to whatever we come to believe, thus introducing problematic counterfactuals.

The early Scanlon tried to accommodate the pull of reductionism by stressing rational procedures rather than an ontologically distinct moral reality, using the meta-ethics of Korsgaard.  Korsgaard says the procedural moral realist thinks there are correct answers to moral questions because there are correct procedures for arriving at them. Thus she tries to secure objectivity without ontological commitments. Ritchie responds that both Blackburn and Korsgaard locate moral value in a feature of the agent’s attitudes, but these only make sense as responses to an external order of value. Unlike Kant, Korsgaard says the way we choose between the different candidates for universalizable moral norms is an agent’s existential commitments. What, though, about someone who’s a member of the Mafiaso? In one sense this produces obligations, but Korsgaard says the Mafioso should, given sufficient reflection, come to see that obedience to the honor code is the wrong law to make for himself. Ritchie argues that agents’ valuations only have the wider implications her argument requires if they are understood as responses to an objective order of value. Korsgaard may disapprove of his existential choice, but it is hard to see why (on her account) the Mafiaso’s settled choice threatens his grip on himself as having any reason to do one thing rather than another, and with it his grip on himself as having any reason to live and act at all.

Later Scanlon moved toward a more objectivist position, describing himself as a ‘Reasons Fundamentalist’, contrasting the position with Korsgaard’s. Reasons Fundamentalism (RF) insists on the irreducible character of normativity. Scanlon has answered justification, but not of explanation of reliability. Once more, secular accounts fall foul of our most fundamental moral commitments, or in vindicating them they generate an explanatory gap.

Likewise Foot’s theory using ‘Aristotelian categoricals’ is trapped in this dilemma: we can define ‘good’ naturalistically, in which case it is reduced to that which enables the species to replicate and perhaps increase in complexity, but then what we call good we do not have good reason to promote. Or define ‘good’ to include evaluative judgments, but then we have gone far beyond anything those ‘Aristotelian categoricals’ could justify. To make this choice is to concede that the idea of ‘flourishing’ is itself heavily moralized, and there is no longer any sign of a purely biological story of natural normativity from which morality might emerge.

McDowell wants to defend moral realism. Instead of seeking to ground ethics in a non-moralized account of the natural world, McDowell urges Foot to acknowledge that ethical reasons are themselves part of any adequate account of nature. Ritchie insists, though, that there remains an explanatory question which McDowell is unwilling to answer, which is distinct from justificatory issues. Unless McDowell is urging a return to a fundamentally purposive account of the universe, the question of how we explain (rather than justify) the reliability of our belief-generating and belief-correcting processes will arise for him in a way it did not for Aristotle—who, incidentally, contrasted the natural not with the supernatural but the artificial.

Ritchie argues that theistic and teleological explanation is better than nomothetic explanation that is given in terms of causal laws. Natural selection has led to resistance of teleology. Natural selection can’t offer the explanation of our capacity for moral cognition, however, and nomothetic explanation is also unsuited to task. Teleological explanation accounts for an event or class of events by laws in terms of which an event’s occurring is held to be dependent on that event’s being required for some end. A paradigmatic teleological explanation involves a goal G of objective worth, the agent knows this to be so, the agent pursues G because of its value, and the agent has the power through X-ing to bring G about.

Theism explains the truth-tracking nature of human moral capacities by God’s understanding the value of such a state of affairs and intentionally bringing it about. Such an account avoids the explanatory gap, and the problems cited (raised by Rice and Hume) are far from intractable. A theistic explanation of the emergence of moral knowledge also need not conflict with a version of the theory of natural selection. All that the theist needs to add to the account given by evolutionary biology is the claim that the world is providentially ordered so that the interaction of the quasi-teleological process of natural selection and of the spandrel-like features it generates yield an outcome which enables human beings to apprehend that which is of objective value.

At this juncture the book left me slightly disappointed, but only because I had grown accustomed to seeing more. I could imagine a critic saying “God made it happen because he knew the value of its happening” does not so much explain as beg the question that God has or could. Although I might know that something happening in my head is making my hands type right now without my being able to explain that mechanism, the appeal to divine intentions to account for the truth-tracking ability of our moral faculties requires further analysis. It remains, in a sense, a promissory note and framework in need of fleshing out. If contemporary work on the moral argument is going to rival in quality the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments, more articulation of theism’s epistemic narrative of moral cognition is essential—particularly to answer the challenge posed by Harman and Joyce. Joyce, for example, echoes the case that the success of evolutionary moral psychology provides a stiff challenge to naturalistic ethics by explaining the formation of our moral beliefs without reference to their truth. Unlike Ritchie, though, he adds that “if the naturalist cannot make her case, Harman’s challenge seems to make non-naturalism and supernaturalism obsolete. . . . if moral naturalism fails non-naturalism and supernaturalism are sunk. Thus non-naturalism and supernaturalism suffer most in this argumentative fray.”[1]Although it is not clear why Joyce insists on this, beyond an earlier reference to parsimony, what is clear is that positing the possibility and, even more so, plausibility of a teleological explanation rooted in divine intentionality—however hopeful such a move promises to safeguard what ordinary speakers believe about morality—remains in need of careful articulation and strong cumulative evidential support in this emerging dialectic.

Throughout his excellent book, Ritchie is at pains to stress that theism is the most satisfying explanation of the human capacity for moral cognition. Theism can explain it simply better than the rivals can. As such he’s been doing philosophy as an autonomous enterprise to show the power of apologetic argument. Our moral commitments pull us to a supernatural source for our knowledge of what is good and evil. Philosophy, he argues and demonstrates, has a significant part to play, in helping us respond to the important and legitimate worry that the faith journey may be an exercise in wish fulfillment rather than a response to a genuine reality. Philosophy can create the intellectual space for an encounter of the heart. Apologetic arguments can show that unless our thought is open to the supernatural there are a number of correlations which are, by its own lights, inexplicable. Such arguments remind us of our need for God; they call us to humility rather than hubris.

[1] Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), p. 210