The Paradox of Moral Tolerance: Exposing Normative Relativism's Blind Spot

One does not have to look far to notice that the moral beliefs of individuals vary widely. For some, abortion is a morally thoughtful venture on the part of the mother. For others, it is regarded as the abhorrent murder of a human being. For some, homosexuality and transgenderism are beautiful expressions of one’s authentic self. For others, these practices are considered defamatory to the body and disrespectful to human dignity. Of course, there are many intricacies to these moral considerations, but ultimately, these views and many others seem to stand in stark contrast to one another.

How do we best handle this disparity of moral viewpoints? A common way is to adopt the universal principle of moral tolerance. Moral tolerance refers to the capacity or willingness of one to respect and coexist with the moral beliefs, values, and practices of others which one personally disagrees with or finds objectionable without interfering with the beliefs, values, or practices themselves. The principle of moral tolerance, in this way, is rooted in open-mindedness, empathy, and respect for individual autonomy, allowing for a peaceful coexistence of diverse moral viewpoints within a pluralistic society. Its aim is to foster social harmony and cooperation by promoting a moral climate of understanding and courteous dialogue rather than contemptuous condemnation.

Adopting the universal principle of moral tolerance seems like a reasonable way to handle the diversity of views we encounter. Even though some of our moral beliefs conflict, we should nonetheless respect the autonomy of one another to hold such beliefs. The desire for social cohesion through moral tolerance is one of the most prominent motivations for adopting the moral theory known as normative relativism (NR).

NR holds that the truth of a moral proposition is relative to the belief of a given individual.[1] What makes a moral proposition (i.e., that “homosexuality is good” or “homosexuality is bad”) true is whether one believes it to be so. The belief in these moral propositions, then, makes them substantively true for that individual, and the individual therefore has an obligation to act in accord with them.

Prima facie, NR appears to provide an ideal basis for moral tolerance by justifying each individual’s moral beliefs in virtue of the beliefs themselves. After all, given the disparity of moral viewpoints, who’s to say one individual’s moral beliefs are more valid than another’s? NR validates the moral beliefs of each individual and thus creates a level ground, ripe for moral tolerance. This serves as a prominent motivator for adopting such a theory. Upon closer examination, however, this motive seems built on a fractured relationship between moral tolerance and NR. This deep-rooted incoherence is what I will call the paradox of moral tolerance.

The paradox of moral tolerance: Moral tolerance is a prominent motivator for adopting NR but is ultimately unaccounted for by the theory.

Despite its apparent merits, moral tolerance—properly understood—is logically impossible on NR. For if Agent 1’s moral belief is not morally false or opposed to Agent 2’s moral belief in a substantive way, then there is nothing for Agent 1 to tolerate. Furthermore, for moral tolerance to be successful in handling the disparity of moral viewpoints peacefully, we would need to universalize the principle, allowing individuals to hold one another accountable to it. However, universal moral tolerance would imply an objective exception to NR which falsely elevates the principle of tolerance above that which is accounted for by the theory.[2]

The argument from the paradox of moral tolerance can be hashed out in the following way:

1.     NR cannot account for objective moral obligations.

2.     The notion of universal moral tolerance implies an objective moral obligation.

3.     Therefore, NR cannot account for universal moral tolerance.

 What might the proponent of NR say in response to this argument?

 One could imagine the normative relativist attempting to sidestep the argument by replying that, even if the principle of moral tolerance is not universal, one ought to be tolerant of the moral beliefs of other individuals if their own moral code accounts for it. However, we might respond by asking what it is they are tolerating. Tolerance, in this sense, requires that one’s views are opposed by their counterpart in a substantive way. If each individual defines morality for himself, as NR affirms, then what exactly is one tolerating? We might run the argument as follows:

1.     Moral tolerance requires the moral beliefs of individuals to conflict in some substantive way.

2.     On NR, the moral beliefs of individuals might be different, but do not conflict in some substantive way.

3.     Therefore, moral tolerance is not possible on NR.

But can't the normative relativist simply say that some moral truths, even if they are not objective, must be obeyed to allow for social cohesion? That is, tolerance towards other individuals’ moral beliefs is not an objective moral principle but must be adhered to in order to maintain some form of a social contract which keeps us from chaos. It seems this, again, holds tolerance as the tacit exception to the theory itself. The language of “must be obeyed” in this context would imply an objective moral obligation. However, on NR, according to what basis must these moral beliefs be respected, and on what basis is social cohesion more morally desirable than chaos?

Another reply the proponent of NR might give to the argument from the paradox of moral tolerance is one based on the nature of the justification of moral beliefs on NR. Because Agent 2’s moral beliefs are often different from Agent 1’s moral beliefs—at least to some extent—yet are justified in virtue of Agent 2’s beliefs in and of themselves, these differing principles are necessarily tolerated. In other words, we recognize that those who hold beliefs which differ from our own are justified in doing so, and thus we exercise moral tolerance necessarily. However, there is a distinction to be made between what is different and what conflicts in some substantive way. Just because a belief is different does not mean it conflicts in this manner. For example, if I believe that I have brown hair and my friend believes he has blonde hair, I do not have grounds to “tolerate” his belief, for our beliefs do not conflict in a substantive way—tolerance would seem to require this sort of conflict. To elucidate this concept, moral tolerance would require that Agent 1’s moral belief, “A is good” conflict Agent 2’s moral belief, “A is bad” in some substantive way. But on NR, Agent 1 would define what is good in virtue of his own belief, so even though Agent 1’s belief might be different than Agent 2’s, it would not conflict with Agent 2’s belief in some substantive way, and thus tolerance would not be possible.

One last objection we might consider from the normative relativist is that the assertion of relative morality does not imply that there are no moral obligations. Furthermore, there is no need for the proponent of NR to affirm tolerance as a universal principle to hold others accountable for tolerance, for it is possible that all individuals could independently assert tolerance as a moral principle regardless. But the argument from the paradox of moral tolerance does not claim that normative relativists have no moral principles to abide by. In fact, according to NR, one ought to act in accordance with their own individual code. And it is logically possible that all individuals could affirm the same moral code, which happens to promote the principle of moral tolerance, but do so relatively. We might imagine, however, a possible world where one individual deviates from this code by revoking tolerance as a moral principle without violating the code itself, for their beliefs determine it. Moral progress or regress would not be made by the individual in this possible world, just a change in their moral landscape. The mere potentiality for intolerance to become morally permissible in a possible world where everyone believes tolerance to be a moral principle reveals the inability for NR to account for the universal obligation of such a principle, or any moral principle for that matter.

I believe there is potential for the argument from the paradox of moral tolerance to be extended beyond the scope of NR to other moral anti-realist theories. When I consider anti-realist theories here, I mean any theory which does not identify goodness even minimally with nonmoral properties, such as in weaker forms of moral realism. Anti-realist theories, then, would refer to only those theories which use goodness in a predicative sense to refer to that which is true about an individual’s own dispositions or the dispositions of the culture in which they abide. It is also worth noting that the argument from the paradox of moral tolerance seems to have utility for both cognitivist and non-cognitivist theories, as I say, IFF they don’t affirm an identity relation between goodness and a nonmoral property or affirm goodness as a mind-independent property. Lastly, the purpose of this argument is not meant to undercut anti-realist theories entirely or even NR but is rather meant to reveal how one of the more attractive underlying motivations for adopting such theories—namely, moral tolerance—is unaccounted for by previous anti-realist commitments, with particular attention drawn to NR.

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[1] “Individual” could also be considered a culture or society, as with normative cultural relativism. For the sake of simplicity, however, I use the term “individual” throughout this article.

[2] On NR there is also no inherent basis for equality (which seems to undergird the principle of tolerance) other than that which we have constructed on our own, though this is a separate—yet related—discussion.

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Hunter Kallay is a Ph.D. student at the University of Tennessee and holds a MA in Apologetics from Houston Christian University. His primary interests include moral epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of religion. In his spare time, he enjoys fitness, sports, and exploring new restaurants.

The Inherent Disorder of Social Media Friendships

Editor’s note: This article is republished with permission of the author. The original article is available here.

I want you to think back to childhood and remember when you met one of your best friends. You may not remember all the exact words, but you might be able to recall the situation. Maybe you were in the same classroom and got partnered up for some activity. Maybe you were at recess and were part of the same kickball game. Perhaps your parents were friends already, so you met at some party or event.

Your first interaction was very surface-level. I do not mean that in a derogatory fashion. That is how most relationships start. It is a low-stakes situation; you talked about drawing a picture, playing a game, or what was for dinner when you were a kid. Even as an adult, when someone new starts to work in your office, you ask about their last job, their family, or talk about the weather. You do not dive right into their hopes, dreams, fears, and vulnerabilities. That would be incredibly awkward and would be considered prying by most people.

Now I would like you to consider a conversation you may have had with your best friend or inner circle of friends recently. Perhaps you started talking about things that were much more personal or even controversial. You might have talked about political or religious matters. You might have talked about problems you are having with your job or family. You may have disclosed an area in which you are struggling. Because these people have proven themselves to be your closest friends and you have a relationship already built, you probably felt comfortable opening up without fear of ridicule or antipathy. A more developed relationship allows for a greater level of emotional intimacy.

Many of my close friends have very different political and religious beliefs than I do. We talk about these things from time to time, and we disagree, but we have a friendship already built. We already like each other, so our relationship is resilient enough to handle the disagreement. It is almost like a pyramid; we have a base of things that we enjoy doing together, so the structure survives.

However, when I think about these friends with whom I have substantial disagreements, none of our friendships really started talking about these areas of disagreement. I don’t know what would have happened if we had jumped right into a debate the first time we met. Maybe we would have gotten sick of each other and never talked again. Maybe we would have gotten extremely frustrated and just decided to go our separate ways rather than finding time to find other areas of common interest. Perhaps you are different from me, but I don’t tend to run headfirst into conflict if I can help it. I’m not afraid of conflict, but I would rather sit around and laugh and enjoy people’s company than always fight with them. I am willing to have good-natured conflicts with people I like because I understand that, at the end of the day, despite our disagreements, we can still be friends.

I think that we all understand that this is the natural way relationships ought to develop. It feels right to us intuitively. Even in a romantic relationship, you begin by casually going out with someone, and ideally, that relationship develops more and more intimacy until it becomes a lifelong marriage. Although there are reality shows that have people get married in thirty days, most of us would be uncomfortable with becoming that close to someone so quickly.

“Whether the relationship is platonic or romantic, there are levels of disclosure depending on the proximity of that relationship.”

Social media turns this dynamic upside down, and I believe that this is one of the reasons why social media tends to become so toxic.

Many of us view social media as an outlet for our thoughts and opinions. Because we view our walls as a place for self-expression, we tend to share things that are important to us. We don’t normally talk about the boring things that begin relationships. Although I have posted about extreme weather conditions before, I rarely post about something like that. I am much more likely to post about something I feel is really important and want other people to know about. In other words, I tend to post about things much closer to the deeper parts of my being, the things that are much more personally significant.

The people who see my Facebook posts range from my best friends to people I hardly know. Perhaps you could criticize my tendency to accept Facebook friendships from people I do not know, and there is a case to be made for not doing that. However, I have been involved in public ministry projects like An Unexpected Journal. If people want to connect with me and if it helps spread the word about good projects, I don’t like to turn people away very often.

You can see the problem with this dynamic almost immediately. I sometimes share very personal thoughts and core beliefs with a group of people who hardly know me. To use the imagery from the beginning of this piece, I am having a conversation with a bunch of new acquaintances that I should be having with my close friends.

When one of these people I barely know takes issue with one of my closely held beliefs that I have decided to share because I believe it is important, I have very little investment in wanting to maintain that friendship. After all, this is not one of my close friends that I am going to want to hold onto, despite my disagreement. If we picture a scale, there is nothing on the side of good times and good memories to offset the frustration that comes with conflict and ideological contradiction. Therefore, I might tend to lash out. I might tend to want to slam that ridiculous belief. After all, that person came after my beliefs on my wall; I have to show my friends that my way is the right way.

Escalation is inevitable in this situation. The conflict escalates until we have toxicity. We are quick to blame so many different things, but I hope you understand that the model of social media friendship is disordered.

“We live in a world that ought to be ordered, and with disorder ultimately comes chaos. Social media brings our acquaintances to a level of relational intimacy that ought to be reserved for our closest friends. ”

No wonder we get so frustrated with people and talk about other people trolling our page. I don’t know anyone who calls their friend a troll, but I know many people who accuse their Facebook “friends” of trolling them. Would your friend troll you? Not one of your best friends, even if you disagree with them, because you know them on a deeper level than just as an Internet provocateur.

You might be wondering how to handle this problem. You might be wondering what we can do to reorder friendships appropriately in the social media age.

First, I think private messages are great. Yes, I still post things publicly, but a great deal of my social media activity takes place on Facebook Messenger. I talk to people about all kinds of things. Some are serious; some are not. Some are controversial, while some are bland. Having this kind of correspondence friendship is superior to debating on public walls. I find there is less grandstanding. I also find that I can approach my friendships in the proper order. Am I talking to someone I barely know? I talk about surface-level things. I get to know them and develop a friendship that might develop into a closer friendship. Am I talking to someone I have known for several years? We can talk about heavier things, understanding that our friendship will survive even if we disagree. Rather than broadcasting our every thought, private messages are a great way of utilizing social media to associate with people on the appropriate relational level.

Second, we need to decide if we want to be public figures. Some people are called to be public intellectuals. They want to put their ideas out there. If you want to do that, you need to be comfortable with the fact that some people will not agree with you. You can’t be offended that people decide to troll you. Being a public intellectual is not for you if your skin is thin. If you are actively trying to promote ideas, then on some level, you are working as a public intellectual (insert joke about a lot of us being more or less intellectual than others, which is true).

That being said, being a public intellectual is also different than developing friendships. If you are a public intellectual, you develop a following. Your followers are not the same as your friends. I would argue that public intellectuals still need to develop friendships in the same order as I have outlined above. I have a feeling that if you went out to dinner with Patrick Deneen, you might not dive into a deep political debate the first time you met. You would probably get to know each other and might become friends. You might ideologically disagree with him and enjoy his company as a friend. Robert George and Cornel West are rather famous for this, as were Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Even public intellectuals make friends in the order I suggested, even though because of their platforms, many people just yell about them.

As a result, if you want to be a public figure, recognize that you still need to follow the formula to make friends. Your friends are going to be those you build a relationship with, not those who idolize or despise you.

Finally, treat social media for what it is. With its fundamentally flawed friendship order, it cannot do the job of making friends for you. It is not well suited for that. However, I have developed some amazing friendships with people I have never met in person. Social media has helped me facilitate that. I am not going to sit here and say that you cannot make friends on social media. That would be demonstrably false in my life and probably in yours. Nevertheless, we became friends in the proper order. We chatted about basic things, realized we had areas of common interest, developed our friendship more deeply, and became great friends in the process who were able to talk about all kinds of things without threatening the existence of that friendship.

We live in a world that is desperate for friendship, and we look for it on social media. However, suppose we do that without considering the true development of friendships. In that case, we will be frustrated when they continually burn out due to getting too deep too fast.

*NOTE*

I have been wrestling with this conception of social media friendship for some time and would love to hear your experiences and stories. I am considering expanding this theory into a book-length treatment, but that is in a very early stage. If you think it would be interesting, I would love to hear some encouragement to motivate me to start working.

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About Dr. Schmoll

Dr. Zachary D. Schmoll earned his Ph.D. in Humanities from Faulkner University after defending his dissertation entitled, Great Men? Considering Chesterton and Belloc’s Role in the History of the Distributist Movement. He also earned his M.A. in Apologetics at Houston Baptist University and was an Honors College Scholar while double majoring in Business Administration and Statistics at the University of Vermont.

Schmoll is honored to have served as the Managing Editor of An Unexpected Journal from its inception until the end of 2022. An Unexpected Journal is a quarterly publication that seeks to demonstrate the truth of Christianity through both reason and the imagination to engage the culture from a Christian worldview. What began as an informal discussion among friends about the need for a journal of cultural apologetics has developed into a respected publication that has received contributions from some of the most important scholars in the field.

Within the field of cultural apologetics, Schmoll's main research interest is the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. Specifically, he is interested in studying Samwise Gamgee as Tolkien's "chief hero," the role of the supernatural in Tolkien's legendarium, and the importance of community chiefly in the Shire but also throughout Middle-earth. Some of his other research interests include the work of G.K. Chesterton, the role of Christianity in the public square, and the development of Western Civilization from Athens and Jerusalem.

Schmoll lives in rural Vermont where he enjoys power soccer, bonfires, and, sadly, the Philadelphia Phillies.

Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 1)

John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part I, Introduction

David Baggett

In the introduction of this book, Hare points out that there will be three chapters, corresponding to the three lectures he gave at Calvin College in 1999. Taken together, the chapters are after an account of God’s authority in human morality.

In this book Hare will defend what he calls “prescriptive realism,” which is the view that when a person judges that something is good, he is endorsing (from inside) an attraction (from outside) which he feels towards it. But even if there is some call from outside, why bring God into it? Is the appeal to God redundant, or worse (corrupting our notions of morality by tying it to self-interest in a problematic way)? Finally, does this talk of God threaten our autonomy—turning us into children trying to please our father? Hare will undertake addressing these questions.

In the first chapter Hare gives a selective history of a sustained debate within Anglo-American philosophy over the last century between moral realists and moral expressivists. Moral realism is the view that moral properties such as moral goodness are real. Moral expressivism is the view that moral judgments are orectic. This is a Greek term that covers the whole family of emotion, desire, and will. Expressivism locates the role of moral judgment as expressing some act or disposition that belongs within this family.

Hare thinks that theists in particular have good reason to consider these questions that pertain to how objectivity and subjectivity are related in value judgment. For they want to say that value is created by God and is there whether we realize it or not. In that sense value is objective, and we feel pulled towards some form of realism. But we also want to say that when we value something, our hearts’ fundamental commitments are involved. In that sense our valuation is subjective, and we feel pulled towards some kind of expressivism. We have to find a way of saying both of these things together, and Hare is going to try to suggest a way. [Hare’s project bears a resemblance to Dooyeweerd’s view that for every modality there is a law side and a subject side—but he was approaching things from the vantage point of German idealism. Hare’s will be a different philosophical tradition.]

God's Call: Moral Realism, God's Commands, and Human Autonomy

By Hare, John E.

The second chapter harkens back to the Middle Ages and in particular to the divine command theory of John Duns Scotus. Hare’s interested in the connections Scotus forged between God’s commands, human nature, and human will. Hare will try to show that a Reformed version of a DCT of moral obligation can be defended via Scotus against natural law theory as well as contemporary challenges. He thinks it will become apparent how such a theory fits the account he gives in the first chapter. One theme will be that after the Fall our natural inclinations are disordered, and we can’t use them as an authoritative source of guidance for how we must and must not live.

In the third chapter, Hare moves to what he sees as a key juncture between the medieval discussion and our own times, namely, the moral theory of Immanuel Kant in the late eighteenth century. Kant has given us a central text that’s been taken in modern moral philosophy to refute divine command theory. It’s a text about human autonomy. Hare will attempt to show that Kant is not in fact arguing against the kind of divine command theory Hare wants to support. Hare will discuss what Kant means by saying that we should recognize our duties as God’s commands, and he will defend a notion of human autonomy as appropriation.

Throughout the book Hare will be trying to do philosophy through its history. He thinks just doing the history ends up being unfaithful to what makes the history important in the first place. And just doing the philosophy ends up making half-baked references to the history in which the topic is in fact embedded. Somehow we have to do both at the same time, and Hare will attempt to do that here, despite the limitations of a short book—by plucking what he considers are three moments from a larger history and three thoughts abstracted from a larger framework.

 Part 2

Saving Moral Knowledge: A Debunking Argument and Theistic Alternative

Immanuel Kant famously said, “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe … the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”[1] Regardless of one’s religious background or political standing, there are some fundamental acts which seem inherently wrong, independent of human opinion. We might imagine the murder of nineteen innocent school students in Uvalde or the kidnapping and raping of two teenage girls at knifepoint in the Bronx. It seems quite difficult to avoid our conviction that such acts are wrong. The underlying concern, however, is whether we can trust these moral convictions to be accurate and thus be counted as genuine knowledge. For if we cannot possess moral knowledge, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain moral realism. For to save moral realism, one must first save moral knowledge

Let’s begin with defining what moral knowledge is. Knowledge exists in a variety of forms. We might consider competence or know-how knowledge, such as how to juggle, or acquaintance knowledge, such as knowledge of a person, like Adam knowing Eve. However, these forms of knowledge are not of core relevance to the discussion of moral knowledge. Rather, the focus here is on propositional knowledge; for example, our knowledge that one added to one is two or that the United States of America is a country. More specifically, the relevant concern is with moral propositions. These would be statements such as, “Torturing children for the fun of it is morally bad,” or “Helping those in need is morally good.” Moral realism affirms that such moral propositions are objectively true or false in the same way that the statement, “one added to one is two” is objectively true or false. The question is, if these moral facts exist, how might we know them? There are two criteria necessary for any account of moral knowledge to fulfill:

1.     Objective moral truth exists.

2.     Humans have the capacity to acquire moral truths to some extent.

Regarding C1, if we are to have moral knowledge—knowledge of true mind-independent moral propositions—objective moral truth must exist. If we forfeit moral realism, then moral knowledge of this sort is rendered irrational and this discussion need not be had. Yet, a contribution to the debate over moral realism is not my prerogative here, as I am most concerned with the reliability of our moral convictions for knowledge given the affirmation of C1. On C2, granted that we might not all agree on what moral truth is, we must believe that our epistemic capacities provide room for improvement over time (e.g. through rational argument or through the refinement of our sensibilities). For this reason, it seems only fair that an account of moral knowledge does not require a full acquisition of moral truths, but rather a tracking which to some extent reflects the moral order. In other words, we might not know all moral truths that exist, but we can agree and track some of them—those which are more obvious, like, “torturing children for fun is morally bad.” Given these criteria for moral knowledge, it becomes clear that to possess knowledge of this sort, we need an explanation for why we have the capacity to acquire mind-independent moral truths, at least to some extent.

We might consider two possible explanatory accounts for this asymmetric dependence relation between our moral convictions and mind-independent moral truths:

1.     Natural explanation

2.     Supernatural explanation

On one hand, we might consider a natural explanation. As I use the term “natural,” I mean it in the way Democritus understood it—simply all that exists are “atoms in the void.” Natural explanations of moral knowledge are explanations which attempt to fulfill or deny the criteria for moral knowledge using purely natural, nonpurposive theories. I will consider evolutionary naturalism (EN) as the belief-producing method here, which is widely accepted by prominent naturalistic philosophers.[2] On the other hand, we might consider supernatural explanations of moral knowledge which attempt to fulfill the criteria for moral knowledge by appealing to a purposive story via a supernatural agent or abstract entities. Here, I will discuss how asserting the existence of a supernatural agent might explain our moral knowledge. As Mark Linville says, “Both the evolutionary naturalist and the theist may be found saying that certain of our moral beliefs are by-products of the human constitution: we think as we do largely as a result of our programming. Whether such beliefs are warranted would seem to depend upon who or what is responsible for the program.”[3]

To begin, let’s turn to a natural explanation. The first thing to consider when assessing a natural explanation is that when I use the term “evolutionary naturalism,” I am not addressing evolution as a scientific theory but rather the idea that evolution was a natural, non-purposive process consisting of purely natural events. When discussing EN, it is important to understand the driving force of belief-development: natural selection. Natural selection is rooted in the concept of random mutation. The idea here is that if we assume the genes of a species undergo “random”[4] mutations, selective pressures will ensure that, in the long run, those mutations which are conducive to the survival and replication of the species will prevail. Here comes the kicker … according to evolutionary biology, the fact that moral beliefs are correct has no influence on their selective potential. The determining factor, rather, is their conduciveness to the flourishing of the species. This sets the stage for my debunking argument against evolutionary naturalism as an explanation for moral knowledge. The debunking argument can be formulated as follows:

Premise 1:       Our moral convictions were naturally selected for via their adaptiveness, not their truth value.

Premise 2:       If (1), we don’t hold our moral convictions because they are true, but because they are adaptive

Conclusion:     Therefore, we cannot trust our moral convictions to be true.

The idea here is that even if our moral convictions about mind-independent moral facts are accurate, these beliefs cannot be counted as knowledge in virtue of the undercutting, potentially misleading nature of EN. It seems the most plausible alternative, given this debunking argument, is to abandon EN as an explanation for moral knowledge and accept the necessary conclusion that knowledge of such moral truths, if they exist, is rendered impossible. Sharon Street concludes, “If the fund of evaluative judgments with which human reflection began was thoroughly contaminated with illegitimate influence … then the tools of rational reflection were equally contaminated, for the latter are always just a subset of the former.”[5] This seems to be the case on EN, for the proponent of such an alternative is left concluding that even if some act is objectively wrong, such as the torturing of innocent children, we would never be able to know!

Now, let’s turn to the alternative explanation. Is the supernatural, agent explanation (AE) any better at accounting for moral knowledge? Upon reflection of the debunking argument, it seems so. The proponent of AE might avoid the assertion of P1 of the debunking argument by appealing to a purposive evolutionary story or avoid the implications of the debunking argument by proposing some version of agent revelation.

P1 asserts that our moral beliefs were selected for via their adaptiveness, not their truth value. But given a purposive evolutionary story, we might imagine that the agent in question would have guided us towards true moral convictions so that our convictions would not be aimed merely at adaptiveness, but at truth. Therefore, P1 would be inaccurate. Even if it is granted that our moral beliefs were aimed merely at adaptiveness and not truth, however, it would seem the proponent of AE could avoid the inference from P1 to P2 by inserting some theory of agent revelation—the idea that the agent in question communicated to us directly via our conscience or used special revelation to allow us to apprehend these moral facts—to avoid debunking concerns. Therefore, the proponent of AE can pick his avenue to avoid these debunking challenges in a way the naturalist cannot. Thus, given the debunking argument I have laid out, it seems AE provides a firmer foundation for moral knowledge than EN.

This conclusion has not meant to prove the existence of God, let alone the Christian God. Rather, my conclusion is meant to show that knowledge of mind-independent moral facts is better explained by a supernatural explanation, AE, than by a natural explanation, EN.  My hope is that this abductive analysis will serve as a firm foundation for the moral argument for God’s existence and reveal the shortcomings of naturalism to the willing and searching so they might discover a worldview consistent with their moral convictions. For the theist, I hope this argument strengthens their intellect and broadens their concept of our good God.

Notes:

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956 [1788]), 166.

Linville, Mark. “The Moral Argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2012) 415.

Street, Sharon. “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,” Philosophical Studies 127 (2006): 125.

[1] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956 [1788]), 166.

[2] Proponents include Michael Ruse, Sharon Street, Richard Dawkins, Alexander Rosenburg, Richard Joyce, Daniel Dennett, among others.

[3] Mark Linville, “The Moral Argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2012) 415.

[4] “Random” in such a context can be traditionally defined as: without special interest towards the benefit of the host organism.

[5] Sharon Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,” Philosophical Studies 127 (2006): 125.

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Hunter Kallay is a Ph.D. student at the University of Tennessee and holds a MA in Apologetics from Houston Christian University. His primary interests include moral epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of religion. In his spare time, he enjoys fitness, sports, and exploring new restaurants.

On Good and Evil: Discussing the Nature and Morality of God (from the Veritas Forum)

C. Stephen Evans (Baylor) and Gideon Rosen (Princeton) discuss the nature of morality and God in “On Good & Evil: Discussing the Nature of Morality and God.”

Forum hosted by The Veritas Forum at Princeton University (11/18/2021).

Speakers: C. Stephen Evans - Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Baylor University

Gideon Rosen - Stuart Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Princeton University

LINK

"Divine Command: Religion and Morality." John Hare, Yale Divinity School

From the University of Chicago’s Youtube page:

Questions about the relationship between God and the good and the right remain as urgent today as they did in ancient times. For example, what is the relationship between claims about the nature or character of God and the moral actions motivated by those claims? What is the relationship between moral codes underwritten by claims about God and the ethics espoused by the (ideally agnostic) civic sphere? Are beliefs about God open to moral critique by others who espouse different beliefs or no beliefs at all? Today answers to these questions must take into account factors such as cultural and religious pluralism, hybrid theologies that incorporate teachings and beliefs from a variety of religious traditions, and religiously motivated violence around the world.

This conference invites philosophers, theologians and religious ethicists to offer accounts of God relevant to the current state of affairs in the West while taking seriously the possibility of a relationship between God and ethics. This conference was supported by grants from the University of Chicago Divinity School, the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion, the University of Chicago Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Norman Wait Harris Fund of the University of Chicago Center for International Studies, and the Aronberg Fund of the University of Chicago Center for Jewish Studies.

Recorded in Swift Hall on April 9-11, 2014.

LINK

Robert Adams: Perfection, Justice, and Love in Leibniz's Theodicy

Robert Adams' talk "Perfection, Justice, and Love in Leibniz's Theodicy," delivered at the Leibniz's Theodicy: Context and Content Conference at the University of Notre Dame, September 16-18, 2010

J.P. Moreland: Finding Quiet: Learning to Handle Anxiety [Talbot Chapel]

A key part of moral apologetics is the notion of moral transformation. Moral transformation has to do with how we can be genuinely made good people and how we can live successfully according to the moral law. It also has to do with how we can be made to relate to the good and love rightly. In this chapel service from Biola University, Dr. J.P. Moreland explains a Christian approach to dealing with one part of moral transformation: overcoming anxiety and depression.

From Reasons to Believe: The Moral Argument: An Interview with Dr. David Baggett

In 2018, Dr. David Baggett had a great interview with the team over at “Reasons to Believe.” In this interview, Dr. Baggett and RTB discuss the nature of the moral argument, its history, and how to use it. Follow the link to listen.

Straight Thinking - The Moral Argument: An Interview with Dr. David Baggett - Reasons to Believe

Diving Deep into the Moral Argument with Dr. David Baggett

From Free Thinking Ministries:

Dr. David Baggett is often considered the world's foremost expert on the Moral Argument for God's Existence. Dr. Baggett sits down with Tim to discuss the philosophy, history, and theology of the Moral Argument.

Singer and Hare - What is the Source of Morality? - The Veritas Forum

What is the foundation for morality? Two philosophers, atheist Peter Singer and Christian John Hare, discuss where we must look to find a coherent ethical system.

Peter Singer, world-famous Princeton philosopher, ethicist, and atheist, discusses with John Hare, Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale. Watch the full recording at veritas.org: ‪http://www.veritas.org/Media.aspx#/v/10

Over the past two decades, The Veritas Forum has been hosting vibrant discussions on life's hardest questions and engaging the world's leading colleges and universities with Christian perspectives and the relevance of Jesus. Learn more at http://www.veritas.org, with upcoming events and over 600 pieces of media on topics including science, philosophy, music, business, medicine, and more!

Darwinism Can’t Account for Objective Morality

From Stand to Reason:

“Greg explains why Darwinism can’t account for objective morality, then he answers a question about whether our sins are covered or washed away and takes a follow-up call from a caller about the origin and development of the cosmos.”

Can God Ground Necessary Moral Truths?

Robert from Canada wrote to Reasonable Faith:
Dear Dr. Craig,

There have been a lot questions recently asked about grounding the existence of morality in God, and I have one as well. The Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne rejects the Moral Argument for God because, he thinks, moral truths are necessarily true, and so the existence of God cannot have an effect on their truth.

He comes to the conclusion that moral truths are necessary because certain events are thought to be morally good or bad; more than that, the moral goodness or badness of an event is inseparable from the state of affairs itself. So, Swinburne claims, there is no possible world in which the exact same things occur as occurred during the holocaust, and in which the holocaust is not morally abominable. It is the same with other events that are considered morally good or bad. There is no possible world in which the event is the same as in the actual world and in which the moral judgement of the event is different than in the actual world. Thus Swinburne concludes that the moral judgement of an event is necessary to the event itself. And this leads naturally to his conclusion that the existence or non-existence of God is irrelevant to the existence of the moral judgement since the moral judgement is necessary given the event.

Swinburne's argument would thus undercut one of the premises to your moral argument. I am a Christian philosophy student at a secular university where many of my professors take a view similar to Swinburne, holding that the objectivity of moral values does not depend on God's existence. I have read and heard your arguments about the absurdity of life without God, and I am currently undecided. What would be your response to Swinburne's argument?

Robert

My Response to William Lane Craig’s Critique of My Divine Love Theory

On October 17, 2022, William Lane Craig discussed an article of mine in which I explained my Divine Love Theory. My article was published in the Worldview Bulletin Newsletter here: Divine Love Theory: How the Trinity Is the Source and Foundation of Morality.

You can listen to Craig’s podcast about my Divine Love Theory here: Divine Love Theory and the Trinity | Podcast | Reasonable Faith.

First, I’ll provide key quotes from Craig’s podcast. Craig said he has reservations about my Divine Love Theory because “it proposes that the love between the members of the Trinity is the source and foundation of morality, and I think that is a distorted and lopsided view because, as important as divine love is, it also equally belongs to God’s moral perfection to be just and to be holy.”

Are You As Good As You Think?

Christian B. Miller | A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University, US, and author of The Character Gap

One summer day in the ocean off Panama City Beach, two boys out for a swim got caught in a rip current. When their mother heard their cries, she and several other family members dove into the ocean, only to be trapped in the current, too. Then, in a powerful display of character, complete strangers on the beach took action. Forming a human chain of 70 to 80 bodies, they stretched out into the ocean and rescued everyone.

Stories like this inspire me with hope about what human beings are capable of doing. Though we may face a daily barrage of depressing reports about sexual harassment, corruption, and child abuse, stories of human goodness help to give us another perspective on our human character. 

But, as we know too well, there is also a darker side to our character. Take, for example, the story of Walter Vance, 61, who was shopping in his local Target for Christmas decorations. It was Black Friday and the store was mobbed when Vance fell to the floor in cardiac arrest and lay motionless. The other shoppers did nothing. In fact, some people even stepped over his body to continue their bargain hunting. Eventually, a few nurses used cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but by then he was too far gone.

Continue reading at IAI News.

Debate: God & Morality: Craig vs Wielenberg (How to Go Deeper)

A Debate on God and Morality

By Craig, William Lane, Wielenberg, Erik J.

In 2018, William Lane Craig debated Erik Wielenberg. Both Craig and Wielenberg are influential in the current literature on the moral argument. Craig is well known for his defense of the deductive moral argument and the need for God in order to have an objectively meaningful life. Wielenberg is an atheist and a Platonic moral realist, who also specializes in the thought of C. S. Lewis.

You may have seen the debate (if not, you can find it below). But you may not know that Adam Johnson edited a volume on the debate with excellent essays from David Baggett, J.P. Moreland and others. If you liked the debate and want to explore the ideas further, be sure to check out this resource.

Thinking Matters Talk: Does Morality Need God? Part One

Editor’s note: This article was orignally posted here. It is shared with the author’s permission.

This year the New Zealand apologetics organization Thinking Matters, ran a “Confident Christianity Conference” in Auckland. I was asked to speak at this conference on the topic. Does Morality Need God? Below is a slightly streamlined version of the talk I gave.

“If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.” These words from Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers of Karamazov express a widely held intuition that moral requirements depend upon God’s existence. Most contemporary ethicists today would dismiss this intuition. In this talk, I will argue their dismissal is premature. I will defend what philosophers call a divine command theory of ethics. The thesis that moral wrongness is (identical to) the property of being contrary to God’s commands.[1] Where God is understood, in orthodox fashion, as a necessarily existent, all-powerful, all-knowing, essentially loving and just, immaterial person who created and providentially ordered the universe. 

Note three things about this thesis:

First, it is a thesis about the nature of moral requirements. It is not a thesis about the nature of goodness. The concept of “good, is ambiguous, as is seen by the following statements “I had a really good dip in the spa pool last night,” Or “going on a low carb diet is good for you.” Or “Carlos the Jakal was a good hitman.” The concept of the morally obligatory, or morally required, is not identical to the concept of what it is good to do. It might be good, even saintly, for me to give a kidney to benefit a stranger, but it is not an act I am obliged to do.[2] 

Second, my thesis is that the property of being morally required is “identical” to the property of being commanded by God.  I am not saying that people cannot know what is right and wrong unless they believe in God. Nor am I claiming that the word “wrong” means “contrary to God’s command.” These are distinct claims. Consider light; Light is identical to a certain visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum. But obviously, that isn’t the meaning of the word “light.” People knew how to use the word “light” long before discovering its physical nature. And they knew the difference between light and darkness long before they understood the physics of light. Analogously, we can know the meaning of moral terms like “right” and “wrong” and know the difference between right and wrong without being aware that the moral requirements are God’s commands.[3]

Third, this is a thesis about the relationship between God and morality. It is not a claim about the relationship between the bible and morality. The thesis I laid out does not mention any sacred text such as the Bible, Quran, Hadith, Torah, or Talmud. While many divine command theorists accept that God has revealed his commands in an infallible sacred text, some do not. The claim that God’s commands are contained in some sacred text is not part of or entailed by a divine command theory itself. It is the result of other theological commitments they have. One could consistently be a divine command theorist without holding this. Divine command theories are ecumenical; they have had advocates within the Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and even deist traditions.

Having clarified my thesis, I will defend three contentions.

• Secular accounts of morality cannot coherently account for our fundamental intuitions about moral requirements.

• If God exists, then a divine command theory can coherently account for our fundamental intuitions about moral requirements.

• Standard objections to divine command theories fail.

I. Four Assumptions about Moral Requirements

But first, what do I mean by fundamental assumptions? Moral theories are tested, in part, by how well they account for various assumptions about morality implicit in our moral thought and practice. [4] I will begin by listing four plausible assumptions about the type of requirements morality imposes upon us.

One is that moral requirements are inescapable: they apply to us irrespective of whether following them contributes to any ends or aims we currently desire.  Consider a criminal who stands in the dock convicted of a crime; he openly admits the crime, is unrepentant and informs us that he wanted to kill and torture. Doing so did not frustrate any of his desires. Does our moral condemnation of him depend on us assuming he does not have statistically abnormal desires so that we withdraw this judgment when we discover he really does desire to kill and maim?  Moral requirements can’t be escaped or begged off by noting they don’t fulfill one’s goals or ends. [5]

Second moral requirements are requirements that are justified from an impartial point of view. Peter Singer explains:

The ‘Golden Rule’ attributed to Moses, to be found in the book of Leviticus and subsequently repeated by Jesus, tells us to go beyond our own personal interests and ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ – in other words, give the same weight to the interests of others as one gives to one’s own interests. The same idea of putting oneself in the position of another is involved in the other Christian formulation of the commandment, that we do to others as we would have them do to us. The Stoics held that ethics derives from a universal natural law. Kant developed this idea into his famous formula: ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’ Kant’s theory has itself been modified and developed by R. M. Hare, who sees universalisability as a logical feature of moral judgments. The eighteenth -century British philosophers Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith appealed to an imaginary ‘impartial spectator’ as the test of a moral judgment, and this theory has its modem version in the Ideal Observer theory. Utilitarians, from Jeremy Bentham to J. J. C. Smart, take it as axiomatic that in deciding moral issues ‘each counts for one and none for more than one’; while John Rawls, a leading contemporary critic of utilitarianism, incorporates essentially the same axiom into his own theory by deriving basic ethical principles from an imaginary choice in which those choosing do not know whether they will be the ones who gain or lose by the principles they select…. One could argue endlessly about the merits of each of these characterisations of the ethical; but what they have in common is more important than their differences. They agree that an ethical principle cannot be justified in relation to any partial or sectional group. Ethics takes a universal point of view[6]

Third moral requirements have practical authority: agents always have conclusive reasons to do what is morally required and never have sufficiently good reasons for doing what is morally wrong. Someone has conclusive reasons to act in a certain way when the reasons in favor of acting, taken together, are stronger than any set of reasons we may have to act in some other way.  If we don’t always have conclusive reasons to do what is right, having total allegiance to morality will be arbitrary and, at worst irrational.   We will have no more reason to do what is right than wrong. Or doing the right thing will be doing what we have a most reason not to do.[7]

Moral requirements are supposed to answer questions about what we are to do. They are considerations that guide our actions.  When we learn something is wrong, that tells us what we are not to do. They cannot do this if we lack conclusive reasons to do what they say.  Suppose you and I are discussing whether it is my duty to donate to the red cross. You convinced me it is my duty to do so. The red cross knocks on my door. I refuse to donate. I suspect this would puzzle you; didn’t I concede that I had a duty to do it? If I responded with “yes, I am persuaded it is my duty to do it, but that doesn’t mean I have reasons to do it,” I suspect you would think I was missing something. I would deny moral requirements have any authority or claim on my behavior and don’t address the question, “what ought I do?”.[8]

Or suppose you heard that I had resigned from my high-paying job. You think I am nuts. How am I going to provide for my family? Why would I give up the career I always dreamt of? I tell you, I discovered the firm was engaging in unethical business practices, and I had to resign to avoid being complicit. On hearing this, wouldn’t it now make sense that I did this? I was justified in doing so. If you do, you are assuming that the fact an action is wrong justifies my refraining from doing it.[9]

Fourth, a final assumption is that if something is morally required, we are accountable for doing it in an important sense.  John Stuart Mill famously stated,

“We do not call anything wrong unless we mean to imply that a person ought to be punished in some way or other for doing it—if not by law, by the opinion of his fellow creatures, if not by opinion, by the reproaches of his own conscience. This seems the real turning point of the distinction between morality and simple expediency.”[10]

There is a conceptual link between something being morally obligatory and something being blameworthy. If we do what is morally wrong without excuse, others can legitimately blame us, and guilt is warranted. Moral requirements conceptually are demands people make upon one each, which we can hold each other accountable through demanding an excuse, practices of blaming, criticizing, and guilt.

Robert Adams asks us to imagine a situation in which there are compelling reasons to support you not walking on the lawn. However, these reasons give you no grounds for feeling guilty if you do, and they provide no reasons for other people to make you feel like you must stay off the lawn or to blame and reproach you for doing so. Adams concludes that while there would be a sense in which you ought not to walk on the lawn, you have no obligation not to do so.[11]

So, whatever property moral wrongness is, it is the property of being prohibited by certain standards: standards that are inescapable and justified from an impartial point of view. The fact these standards prohibit an action means agents have conclusive reasons not to do the action in question. Agents are also accountable for actions doing actions prohibited by these standards. Others can blame and sanction me if I act contrary to them without an adequate excuse. A plausible thesis about the nature of moral wrongness should account for these facts.

In my next post, I will defend my first contention: that secular accounts of morality struggle to coherently account for these four assumptions.

---

[1] Robert M. Adams, “Divine Command Meta-Ethics Modified Again,” Journal of Religious Ethics 7:1 (1979): 76.

[2] Example from C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 16.

[3] This illustration comes from William Lane Craig see “Is Is the Foundation of Morality Natural or Supernatural? The Craig-Harris Debate” available at  https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/debates/is-the-foundation-of-morality-natural-or-supernatural-the-craig-harris-deba/) accessed 19 August  2022.

[4] The implicit method here is described in Richard Joyce’s “Theistic Ethics and the Euthyphro Dilemma,” Journal of Religious Ethics 30 (2002): 68-69;”

[5] Richard Joyce, “Mackie’s Arguments for an Error Theory,” Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (available at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/moral-error-theory.html, accessed 20/4/17).

[6] Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 11

[7] This argument is adapted from C. Stephen Layman’s “God and the Moral Order” Faith and Philosophy, 23 (2006): 306- 307

[8] This example comes from Michael Smith’s The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing 1994) 6

[9] This example comes from C Stephen Layman’s “A Moral Argument for The Existence of God” Is Goodness without God Good Enough: A Debate on Faith, Secularism and Ethics eds Robert K Garcia and Nathan L King (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008) 53-54

[10] John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, chapter 5 available at https://www.utilitarianism.com/mill5.htm accessed 23 August 2022

[11] Robert M. Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 238.

Mailbag: The Best Argument for Now? A Question about the Abductive Moral Argument

James writes:

In Good God, and God & Cosmos, Baggett and Walls argue that William Lane Craig’s deductive argument for morality isn't as persuasive to intellectual atheists, and that abductive arguments are preferred because they are more persuasive to unbelievers as they avoid the problems with the atheological premise of the Deductive Argument. However, what if the atheist were to ask, "Do you mean that's the best argument FOR NOW, or is it possible that there could be a better explanation than your best explanation down the road?" Granted, this objection would be an argumentum ignorantium, but for the Abductivist himself has conceded that his own argument wasn't designed to provide certainty, so how can the Abductivist answer this objection without begging the question that his current explanation is the best explanation, and will ALWAYS be the best explanation?

For the record, I like both arguments. I, however, use the deductive argument more frequently because I haven't been able to have a quality conversation with an unbeliever for any longer than 5 minutes since the 2016 election LOL

In Christ, 

James A., PhD

---

Hi James,

Thanks for your e-mail to MoralApologetics. This is Dave Baggett, co-author of God and Cosmos & Good God. You note that in those books we issue a critical verdict on WLC's deductive moral argument. This is true. And that we talk about how abduction can avoid the atheological premise of the deductive variant. Yes. Then you write, what if the atheist were to ask, "Do you mean that's the best argument FOR NOW, or is it that there could be a better explanation than your best explanation down the road?" 

Yeah, I think this is a good question. The nature of abduction seems to leave open the possibility of a better explanation. If we're talking about the BEST explanation, a certain tentativeness seems built in. Otherwise we’d talk of the “best possible explanation,” which some students seem to think abduction means, before I point out that it’s not. If a better explanation comes along, it could unseat the current winner. That seems right.

Of course I can't imagine what that would be in the case of accounting for moral facts. Naturalistic accounts just seem inherently limited, axiarchic approaches seem deficient, pantheistic and panentheistic accounts seem wrongheaded, etc. So though it's theoretically possible there could be a better explanation, it's awfully hard to imagine what it would or could be. It's also the case that our analysis is predicated on Anselmianism, which literally involves a being than whom none greater can be conceived—which makes it all the harder to top when it comes to explanatory potential! 🙂

All that said, I've laid off criticizing Craig's approach in recent years. He and I co-taught a class on the moral argument at Houston Baptist, and I found that our approaches deeply dovetailed at so many points that the number of disagreements in approach seemed small by comparison. And we now have a contract with Baker Academic to write a book together on the subject, one in which we'll be mainly talking about the resonances of our perspectives, not any remaining differences, at least for the most part. (By the way, it was hearing Craig give an argument for the historicity of the resurrection in abductive terms years ago that most inspired me to go that route.)

I've also realized in recent years that talk of "best explanation" is awfully ambitious. I usually rest content with speaking of a robust account, or powerful account, or even adequate account.
Of course, all of this pertains to the matter of how best to couch the moral argument. As long as folks are intelligently pushing the moral argument, which can come in deductive, inductive, abductive, or even other forms (like Evans' Reformed-sounding "natural signs" approach)—or even embodying it by the life they live like Fred Rogers did—I'm happy to hear it and rejoice these important truths are being accentuated one way or another. (The fun aspect of inductive variants is distinguishing between what Swinburne calls P- and C-inductive arguments here: does the moral evidence increase the evidence for theism just a bit, or enough to make it more likely than not?)

Bottom line: What's really great is God himself, not any particular discursive analysis. Proponents of various stripes of the moral argument agree on a whole lot more than they might disagree on, and it’s vital we not lose the proverbial forest for the trees.

I've also seen, at the same time, that a helpful feature of abduction is that, when dealing with an individual, we don't have to take on every potential theory out there. We can just focus on contrasting a theist picture with the picture of morality that our interlocutor provides. This helps delimit the conversation and not have to do more than is practicable in a conversation or two. The ultimate aspirations of abduction when it comes to so heady a topic as ours is a human quest spanning generations to which any of us at most contributes but one voice. 

By the way, I’ve started reading a great book—McCain and Poston’s Best Explanations: New Essays on Inference to the Best Explanation. Highly recommended.
Every best wish in your work; thanks for the note.

Blessings,

Dave

Can Forgiveness Make Sense? (Part 2)

Author’s Note: This paper was written for and initially presented at the first annual symposium of the Society for Women of Letters (June 2022, Asheville, NC).

The Lord’s Prayer as Model and Means of Forgiveness

The Lord’s Prayer is the model that Christ offered his disciples when they asked for his instruction on how to pray. Wesley Hill’s primer on the prayer offers a helpful rundown of how the church has historically understood its import, and most of my discussion that follows is informed by that book.[1] The prayer consists of six petitions (or seven, depending on how the final section is handled). The opening three petitions center on God’s character and reign, and the others turn to the human condition, invoking God’s aid for what ails us. It’s a rich prayer, with quite a bit to unpack. But I want to focus primarily on how the full context can help us better appreciate and practice the difficult art of forgiveness.

Needy Creatures

We’ll start with the second half, the petitions aimed at the human condition. There we find Jesus acknowledging our agonizing need: our need for sustenance, both physical and spiritual; our need for grace, protection, and rescue. Regular recitation of this prayer, Hill explains, trains us to rightly envision our plight, as utterly dependent on God’s provision. Not just in the past as though God winds us up and leaves us to our own devices, but moment by moment, “this day,” we are sustained by God’s provision. What an antidote to the self-reliance enshrined in our contemporary American culture.

This reminder of who we are as God’s creatures is also a comfort as we consider the prayer’s appeal for forgiveness and deliverance from evil. Human beings are all in the same boat, we find—all, victims and victimizers alike, buoyed up only by God’s allowance. All of us are in dire need of saving from the sin that surrounds and infects us, the sin that’s “more pervasive and intractable than individual peccadilloes or improvable behaviors,” to use Hill’s language.[2] These petitions of The Lord’s Prayer strike at the very root of human corruption, the lie that tells us we are our own, that we can do as we please, and are unaccountable to anyone else. And most importantly for our purposes, the lie that the evil perpetuated against us cannot find refuge in our own hearts.

This is not to suggest a moral equivalence between large infractions and small. That bit of received wisdom often hampers our attempts at forgiveness, either asking us to minimize harm done to us or overestimating the harm we ourselves have done to others. As Cornelius Plantinga explains, “All sin is equally wrong, but not all sin is equally bad.”[3] He continues, “The badness or seriousness of sin depends to some degree on the amount and kind of damage it inflicts, including damage to the sinner, and to some degree on the personal investment and motive of the sinner.”[4]

If anything, The Lord’s Prayer is realistic about the nature and extent of sin in this world and the damage it does to God’s creation. Petition VII puts a face on the evil one who seeks to devour us, infiltrating and enlisting those who give themselves over to his service. “What we need to be rescued from,” Hill says, “isn’t just the devices and desires of our wayward hearts, as real and dangerous as those are, but also the malevolence of a personal being bent on our suffering.”[5] The temptation to revenge, as gratifying as it may feel, is to turn ourselves over to that destruction. Marilyn Adams explains, “To return horror for horror does not erase but doubles the individual’s participation in horrors—first as victim, then as the one whose injury occasions another’s prima facie ruin.”[6]

In Stump’s essay that I referenced earlier, she provides some language to help us think through these gradations of guilt. There she catalogues, on a sliding scale, the damaging effects sin has on the perpetrator him or herself, to include defects to the person’s psyche, memory, and empathic capacities, and sin’s harmful and unjust consequences in the world, whether resulting from the wrongdoer’s action or inaction.

Who God Is

These details matter to the one wrestling with forgiveness. A naïve understanding that jumps quickly to reconciliation can easily leave open the door for yet more harm, to both parties. It is not good either to sin or to be sinned against. The Lord’s Prayer dispels such naivety by virtue of its portrait of God, a loving Father who invites us into holy and flourishing fellowship with him. A world infected by sin and human corruption is incompatible with the promise we have in this prayer of God’s kingdom to come and his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Whatever forgiveness is, we can be sure that it is part and parcel of the resounding victory of the prayer’s final lines: God’s kingdom, power, and glory ultimately transcend and defeat whatever now is currently arrayed against them. This is the truth that The Lord’s Prayer opens our eyes up to, and the vision that enables us to enter into the spirit and process of forgiveness, trusting no less than God himself to bring it to completion. What Weisenthal could not be, as stand-in for the Jews that the Nazi soldier harmed, Christ himself can fulfill—both as the one to bear the harm done and the one to offer the ultimate absolution.

Prayer joins us in this process. It is a rebellion, as David Wells describes it, “against the world in its fallenness, the absolute and undying refusal to accept as normal what is pervasively abnormal.”[7] The Lord’s Prayer, then, is a clear-eyed, realistic assessment of our current status against the backdrop of what should—and ultimately what will—be, given God’s nature. Hill explains, “When we pray, ‘Your will be done, on earth as in heaven,’ we are aware of how God’s will is not being done in our world. We are asking God to overcome this contradiction, to act in such a way that life on earth increasingly resembles the peaceable and joyous life of God, of heaven.”[8]

Like the Persistent Widow in Jesus’ parable, when we fully embrace The Lord’s Prayer, we refuse “every agenda, every scheme, every interpretation that is at odds with the norm as originally established by God.”[9] We confess, along with Volf, that we cannot forgive on our own steam but that on Christ’s we can and should. We affirm that God’s kingdom is victorious over any and all attacks upon it, including the ones where we have found ourselves in the line of a perpetrator’s fire. Although this affirmation takes the form of a petition in The Lord’s Prayer, it’s functioning more as an alignment, of our purposes and spirit with God’s. Through recitation of the prayer, Hill says, we are “stretching our hearts so that we may learn to desire truer, greater realities.”[10]

This greater reality is our ultimate promise: deliverance from oppression, healing, and restoration from the disfiguration caused by sin and death.[11] Healing both for harm we have done and harm done to us. It is out of God’s character that his plan for salvation, his deliverance from guilt and the death and damage of sin in all of its instantiations, comes. And this is God’s plan, The Lord’s Prayer tells us, that is already underway and available for us right here and now, even if it is not yet fully realized. Only a God who has entered in to our suffering, who has taken on human flesh and dwelt among us can provide that remedy.

Christ as Our Deliverer

In Jesus Christ, God’s own son, we find all the resources that potential forgivers need. Christ is everywhere present in The Lord’s Prayer, both as the one inviting us into fellowship and as the very bridge we walk across to approach God’s throne. Christ is also the means by which God’s will is enacted in this world, the way the curse that we labor under is reversed, how our crisis of forgiveness is resolved. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ cries out to his Abba, Father, asking that the cup of suffering and death he is about to drink be passed from him. Even still, in an agonizing act of obedience and an illuminating echo of The Lord’s Prayer, Jesus declares, “Thy will be done.”

This divine action is the paradoxical linchpin of our faith and what ultimately makes sense of forgiveness’ counterintuitive demands. Hill explains it this way:

It’s clear to us that the will of God in heaven is the perfect, eternal love of Father, Son, and Spirit, unmarred by any suffering or dying. What is less intuitive—but what Gethsemane and, later, Calvary force us to notice—is that the will of God is also the way of the incarnate Lord into the far country of our suffering and dying, where he is mocked, spit upon, strung up, and left to suffocate. That is what it looks like for the will of God to be done on earth as it is in heaven because that is the only way our earth can be saved.[12]

Our forgiveness—whether enacted or received by us—our ability to heal and be healed, rests alone on the work of Christ on the cross. And that is the promise we must cling to as we undertake our own hard work of forgiveness. There’s a suffering involved in that process, to be sure, but we can know that that suffering is not in vain. Hill again: “God must also be at work in suffering, in darkness, in torment, because only if God confronts the horror we’ve made of the world, bears it, and bears it away can the triumph of God’s love be assured.”[13]

But let me not leave you with a promise of suffering. I recognize that’s not much of a comfort. My intention instead is to leave you with a word of hope, to help us fix in our minds the beautiful reality that lies on the other side of our earthly travails. Recently, I had the opportunity to hear N. T. Wright speak at Lanier Library in Houston, with a message that draws together the various threads of my argument and underscores the hope we have in our struggles to forgive. Turning to Romans 8, Wright highlighted how our own times of trial, our own Gethsemane moments—when we, like Christ, call out to our Abba, Father (Romans 8:15)—these are the precise places in which we can perceive, and even participate in, the divine life of God himself.

Those who have faced a crisis of forgiveness will certainly resonate with Paul’s acknowledgment that we often do not know how we are to pray. In trying to forgive painful hurts, we struggle to understand how justice can be achieved or why mercy must be extended. In that moment, Paul affirms, we can be sure that “the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans too deep for words” (Romans 8:26). This co-laboring with God in our prayers of deep sorrow is the backdrop for the glorious assurance of Romans 8:28, a verse that Wright translates in this clarifying way: "God works all things towards ultimate good with and through those who love him.”[14] That’s true for our crises of forgiveness. Lament in the face of our overwhelming challenges, the times when we most keenly feel our frailty and most desperately need deliverance, is the very seedbed of the hope we cry out for.[15]

The Lord’s Prayer is really a lifeline to that hope, which will not disappoint. It’s a promise bigger than we can even imagine, although Jesus invites us to try. The petitions of The Lord’s Prayer, when we enter fully into its mindset, we recognize as pointers, pointers to the life we are made for and that God longs to welcome us into. As Hill explains, “This is what the final praise in the Lord’s Prayer means to direct us toward: there is coming a time when we will have no more need to ask God for bread, for absolution, or for rescue. All of our tears will have been wiped away, death will have been finally defeated, and the earth and its people will be at peace and thriving.”[16] And that is a promise we can cling to, a story big enough to house justice and mercy, and a power strong enough to fuel our will to forgive.

[1] Wesley Hill, The Lord’s Prayer: A Guide to Praying to Our Father (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2019).

[2] Ibid., 61.

[3] Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 21.

[4] Ibid., 22.

[5] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 82.

[6] Marilyn Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2000),

[7] David Wells, “Prayer: Rebelling Against the Status Quo,” Summit Christian Fellowship, June 17, 2020, accessed May 29, 2022, https://summit-christian.org/blog/2020/06/17/prayer-rebelling-against-the-status-quo.

[8] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 42.

[9] Wells.

[10] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 45.

[11] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 34-35.

[12] Wesley Hill, “Praying the Lord’s Prayer in Gethsemane,” First Things, April 2, 2015, accessed May 29, 2022, https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2015/04/praying-the-lords-prayer-in-gethsemane.

[13] Ibid.

[14] You can find this translation in Wright’s God and the Pandemic (Zondervan, 2020). Glenn Packiam’s review of the book (found here: https://www.glennpackiam.com/post/n-t-wright-on-god-and-the-pandemic) also includes it.

[15] I’d love to claim credit for this phrasing, but it was all N. T. Wright. “Lament is the seedbed of hope” is a line from his talk that will stick with me for some time to come.

[16] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 94.

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Marybeth Baggett is professor of English and Cultural Apologetics at Houston Baptist University. She earned her PhD in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and — along with her husband— recently has published Telling Tales: Intimations of the Sacred in Popular Culture (Moral Apologetics Press, 2021).