May 04, 2022

Sweeping Contingency Under the Rug (Part 3)

May 04, 2022/ Adam Johnson

Contingency in the Relationship Between Cognitive Faculties and Moral Beliefs

Wielenberg used his third factor model to try and show why it is not a lucky coincidence that moral properties and moral beliefs correspond; they correspond because they both come from our cognitive faculties. He summarized his strategy as follows:

Thus, there is a necessary connection between the cognitive faculties and 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.41

However, including this third-factor in his model does not successfully rebut the lucky coincidence objection because 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 model open to the lucky coincidence objection because, as Wielenberg himself admitted, where there is contingency, there is luck.42

In Wielenberg’s third factor model, he claims our cognitive faculties both make moral properties be instantiated and generate our moral beliefs. He noted that “[i]f these claims are correct, then we have explained the ‘remarkable fact’ [that moral properties and moral beliefs correspond]… it 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.”43 Assuming for the sake of argument that the first part of his model is correct, that cognitive faculties necessarily make moral properties be instantiated, his model does not avoid the lucky coincidence objection because of the contingency found in the second part, the relationship between cognitive faculties and moral beliefs. His proposed correspondence between moral properties and moral beliefs breaks down because of this difference in causal necessity. There is no good reason to think that beings with cognitive faculties like ours would have the same moral beliefs we do. In addition, 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 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.”44 In particular, he sketched an evolutionary explanation of how we came to have our beliefs about moral rights.45

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.46 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:

Our cognitive faculties make the property of ‘being able to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem’ be instantiated.
Our cognitive faculties cause us to believe we can prove Fermat’s Last Theorem.

We can easily 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, we can easily 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 model is correct), but who do not have the belief that they do. We do not even have to use our imagination because there are such people, that is, human beings who do not think they have moral rights and obligations. The reason that beings with cognitive faculties like ours may not have the belief that they have moral properties is that the causal connection between cognitive faculties and moral beliefs is contingent, not necessary.

Attempting to Avoid Contingency by Claiming That the Laws of Nature are Necessary

Wielenberg understands that, because his model still contains contingency, it remains vulnerable to the lucky coincidence objection. The issue under consideration is how lucky it is for our moral beliefs and objective moral facts to correspond. He noted 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.”47 Therefore, in a final attempt to remove all contingency, he spent the last few pages of his book asking his readers to entertain the idea that laws of nature are metaphysically necessary. If this were the case, he argued, then any being with cognitive faculties like ours would necessarily have moral beliefs similar to ours.48 Eliminating contingency is the only way to ultimately rebut the lucky coincidence objection.

He noted that the amount of lucky coincidence involved in having moral beliefs that correspond with objective moral facts 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?”49 He began his answer to this question with the following hypothetical claim, which he calls 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 [all the necessarily true general moral principles, or brute ethical facts].”50 He argues 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.”51

Wielenberg concluded that ES must be false and he admitted that “we simply lack the knowledge required to warrant a clear and confident answer” concerning ES, but he did suggest that “we may be relatively close to ES—or at least, closer to ES than some philosophers have suggested.”52 He understands that the closer we are to ES in real life, the smaller amount of luck is entailed by our having moral beliefs that correspond to objective moral facts and properties. 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.”53

Table of Contents

[40] Ibid., 36, 145, 156.

[41] Ibid., 145.

[42] Wielenberg agreed that contingency entails luck when he noted that “Where there is no contingency, there is no luck.” Ibid., 167.

[43] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 156.

[44] Ibid., 148.

[45] Ibid., 135–44.

[46] This particular refutation by analogy was developed by Dr. Greg Welty.

[47] Ibid., 167.

[48] Ibid., 166–75.

[49] Ibid., 167.

[50] Ibid., 168. Moral Truth is the set of all necessarily true general moral principles, which, as I have noted, are what he claims are BEFs.

[51] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 168.

[52] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 169.

[53] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 175.

How the Moral Outrage Over Will Smith Slapping Chris Rock Points to the Moral Argument for God’s Existence

April 12, 2022/ Eric Chabot

A week from last Sunday provided a memorable experience for those that tuned in to the live television broadcast of the 94th Academy Awards. I have not personally watched the Academy Awards for several years now. The low ratings at the Academy Awards shows that I am not the only one who has lost interest in it. But whether one watched it live or not, social media quickly spread the news about the undoubtedly low point of the show.
During the ceremony, actor Will Smith, the then-nominee and eventual winner of the Academy Award for Best Actor, walked on stage and proceeded to violently slap comedian Chris Rock across the face as he presented the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The reason for the slap by Smith was in response to Rock mentioning Smith's wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, who was also in the audience. Rock made a joke which referenced Pinkett Smith’s shaved head, likening her appearance to Demi Moore in the film G.I. Jane.

Apparently, Rock didn’t know that Pinkett Smith had been outspoken about her battle with the hair loss condition alopecia. What was more than a little ironic was that Will Smith was seen initially laughing at the joke until he saw the disapproval on his wife’s face about Rock’s joke about her. So the audience proceeded to watch a morally outraged Will Smith get up from his seat, march up to Chris Rock on stage, and slap him. Smith then proceeded to by return to his seat, but the moral outrage went even further, as Smith yelled profanities at Rock for making jokes about his struggling wife.

The responses and opinions about the incident have only demonstrated the ease with which we all appeal to a moral standard. Naturally, some people and the Hollywood community were mortified by Smith’s actions and condemned his slapping of Rock as a violent action. The Academy President David Rubin and CEO Dawn Hudson released a statement confirming it had “initiated disciplinary proceedings against Mr. Smith for violations of the Academy’s Standards of Conduct, including inappropriate physical contact, abusive or threatening behavior, and compromising the integrity of the Academy.” For them the bottom line was that Smith had done something wrong, in violation of both the Academy’s standards and moral strictures. As I write this article, Smith has resigned from the Academy and acknowledged his wrongdoing, and he has now been banned from attending the Academy Awards for ten years.

So how might this incident point to the evidential significance of morality? Allow me to identify three ways:

1. People’s reactions to the Smith incident show their conviction that a moral law has been violated:

How we react when we or others are treated unfairly shows, whatever our professions, a strong tendency to appeal to an objective and binding moral standard. A moral law is nearly always the standard to which we hold ourselves and other accountable, and this point isn’t vitiated by what disagreement in analysis there may have been on this particular matter. For we see moral outrage on both sides of the debate—a debate that’s been lessened somewhat by Will’s mea culpa and admission of gross wrongdoing, which has significantly weakened any case for something like a moral equivalence in wrongdoing between Will and Chris. Some of course were, quite rightly, morally outraged by what Smith did, which involved nothing less than a physical assault of a much smaller man. Others were morally outraged by what Rock had said that apparently triggered Smith. Behind both sides of the argument, note, is thought to be an authoritative moral standard providing a measure of what is good or bad and right or wrong. Where, though, does this moral standard come from? And is there someone that has the right to impose this standard and enforce adherence?

2. Without a Moral Law, There Are No Moral Grounds for Disagreement Over Smith’s Actions:

The initial disagreements in the cauldron of social media over how best to analyze and assess the situation are telling in another regard. Since Rock made a joke about Smith’s wife, who has a health condition, some commentators defended Smith’s right to slap Rock because, apparently, this was the “moral” thing to do. Or if this rationale didn’t excuse Smith’s behavior, it was thought at least to help explain it. Some went so far as to cast Smith’s behavior as noble—a man defending his wife’s honor or something in that vicinity. Of course, others have said Smith was in the wrong, violating a moral standard and meriting accountability. Although I have my own judgment on how to adjudicate this disagreement, the point here is this: if there is no Moral Law, then no position on this moral issue would qualify as objectively right or wrong. Even treating the divergent perspectives on the matter as a genuine moral disagreement would be fundamentally confused if there is no moral fact of the matter by which to advance the discussion, come to a meeting of the mind, and settle the dispute.

3. The Smith Incident Demonstrates the Depth of Conviction in Objective Moral Values and Moral Duties:

Moral values are what matter to us—love, justice, mercy, justice. They are often what motivate our behavior and ground our judgments about what is good or bad, desirable or undesirable. Moral duties indicate oughtness of action, whether or not an act is morally obligatory (blameworthy for not performing and the like). Duties and value alike are among our beliefs with the most ingression: beliefs that have a wide impact on many of our other beliefs and convictions, and beliefs about which we are about as sure as anything, and rightly so. They are among our convictions that, as J. Budziszewski puts is, we can’t not know. They are plausibly thought to be among our “properly basic beliefs,” beliefs we argue from rather than feel a need to argue to. At least the clearest and most obvious among them are such that they invariably seem to be so, and, in the views of some, are eminently justified to believe as a result.

What is the best, or perhaps even only, explanation for these stubborn and persistent features of reality? Do the impersonal laws of nature account for these things? That seems unlikely—the laws of nature presumably how the natural world operates, which is descriptive, whereas morality is ineliminably prescriptive. Or are the moral realities of the world better explained by a personal God? Following William Lane Craig’s deductive variant of the moral argument, we can put it like this:

1. Objective values and duties are valid and binding, independent of human opinion.

2. If a personal God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.

3. Objective moral values and duties do exist.

4. Therefore, a personal God exists.

We might instead couch it in less ambitious terms like so:

1. Objective values and duties are valid and binding, independent of human opinion.

2. A personal God provides a ready, robust, and powerful explanation of such values and duties.

3. A naturalistic perspective is hard pressed to provide as good of an explanation of them.

4. So, such values and duties give us reasons to take theism more seriously.

Given that so many people passionately hold and wish to share their opinion about the Smith incident, perhaps such talking points can be utilized by Christians in discussions with others. Let’s take advantage of the opportunity before us to speak a redemptive word of moral clarity into a situation like this, including the good news that, when we fall short of the moral standard, as we all invariably do, there is deliverance from both our shame and guilt, and both our sinful acts and sinful conditions, in the saving blood of Christ.

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

April 06, 2022/ Adam Johnson

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:

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

Morality is objective, “certain things are morally right and others are morally wrong.”8
Objective morality is best explained by theism, “the most adequate answer is provided by a theory that entails the existence of God.”9
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:

There is an all-powerful, all-knowing, malevolent being who created the universe.
There is an all-powerful, all-knowing, morally indifferent being who created the universe.
There is a very powerful, but not omnipotent, benevolent being who created the universe.
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

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

Our moral beliefs are produced by our cognitive faculties.
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:

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

If evolutionary debunking arguments undermine our moral beliefs, then they also undermine all our other beliefs, such as our mathematical beliefs.
We are confident that our cognitive faculties that produce our beliefs, specifically our mathematical beliefs, are reliable for the most part.
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.

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 14

March 02, 2022/ David Baggett

Continuing our perusal of Bart’s chapter called “Life on the Other Side: The Happy Reality of Secular Humanism,” we left off discussing Bart’s secular chaplaincy at USC, geared toward those who hunger for a secular spirituality. The fact that Sam Harris a few years ago wrote a book on spirituality is testament to the reality of this movement among certain secularists. As Bart puts it, “If you want to fully actualize your noblest values, you’ve got to find like-minded people and band together. Nobody becomes or remains good in isolation. We have to help one another grow.”

Much of this seems to be a recognition of our communal nature as human beings, something that fellowship with like-minded believers and various shared habits and rituals can help facilitate and fulfill. Christians often speak of various “means of grace,” regular fellowship among them, as means by which to appropriate God’s grace for encouragement, support, direction, and the like. Undoubtedly there is a sociological component to this that can be isolated and pursued apart from explicit references to divine activity, and this seems to be the space that one like Bart has carved out for himself. Of course, such possibilities underdetermine whether relegating the divine element to obscurity or irrelevance is correct.

In fact, it’s likely predictable that some would look at church activities and religious practice and come to think that the sociological dimension is really the only actual dynamic in operation. Of course Christians shouldn’t succumb to this temptation, and rather they should bear in mind that the horizontal relationships, though vital, are not the only or even the most important relationships at play. To treat God as eliminable from the equation might seem to Bart a relatively small change, but potentially it’s quite a spectacular missing of the point. Investing our hopes in human relationships to fill the vacuum in our hearts that only God can fill is a pipedream. That said, though, to emphasize the relationship with God to such an extent that we neglect the relationships with our neighbors, is to misunderstand some of the import of our religious faith.

Bart doesn’t pursue a negative approach in his secular ministry. Rather, he writes that, first, “you have to teach your friends to love one another, and then you have to teach them how to attract and include outsiders by loving them as well. That’s why my new ideal ministry is practically identical to my old one, except that these days I rely on reason, science, and common sense to convince people that love is the most excellent way.”

Reason, science, and common sense. Perhaps this is a useful juncture to pause and subject this claim to a bit of critical scrutiny. The implicit suggestion here seems to be that reason, science, and common sense can be enlisted to the cause of an atheistic worldview and even of assigning primacy to love, and that somehow these sources, divorced from theism, provide enough resources for the job. I have my doubts about that.

Why I Left, Why I Stayed: Conversations on Christianity Between an Evangelical Father and His Humanist Son

By Campolo, Tony, Campolo, Bart

The notion that reason and religious faith are at odds is of course practically a mantra among many of the deconverted, but as a Christian philosopher I find such claims, either explicit or tacit, to strain my credulity. Time and again in this book both Tony and Bart say their dialogue is not going to be yet one more debate about the evidential merits of theism or atheism. In an earlier post we discussed their allergy to wade into those waters too deeply. Yet the result of this mutual dialectical choice seems to confer permission to advance large assertions without evidence. So it’s unsurprising that Bart seems to subscribe to the notion that reason is on the side of unbelief. The occasional times when Bart does at least gesture toward arguments in favor of naturalism or against theism, he invokes names like Dawkins and Harris, which do little to instill confidence that he’s considered the best thinkers on the topic. As for my own views, I think the case for theism generally and Christianity particularly can be made on several strong evidential grounds—from historical to scientific to philosophical.

I suppose that someone could suggest that all that Bart is advancing here is that his argument for the primacy of love is confined to resources garnered from science, reason, and common sense—and not that this triad collectively points evidentially toward atheism rather than theism. But even so, this less ambitious agenda would raise a serious question of whether science, reason, and common sense would be enough to bolster an assignment of primacy to love.

If love is understood in substantive fashion, involving essentially a deep regard for the well-being of others, even if on occasion such regard entails self-sacrificial behaviors, is this sort of phenomenon somehow a deliverance of science, reason, or common sense, either individually or severally? Science largely seems to be an effort at describing the physical facts of the world. Reason and rationality can mean a variety of things, but it’s unclear why it would entail the superiority of a life of sacrificial love. Superior in what sense? Reproductive advantage, peace of mind, flourishing? Does science confer on one of these anything like normative priority? Are there not times when sacrificial love would militate against such things? And what of common sense? Is it common sensical to sacrifice, if need be, one’s own interests for the sake of others? That would quite a hard sell to one not already convinced that love is the better alternative.

In all three cases, although I am not suggesting that science, reason, or common sense necessarily rule out the central importance or value of a life of self-giving love, I rather doubt they comprise the primordial source of such importance or value. And in fact, elsewhere in the book Bart concedes that on his worldview he’s no longer warranted to believe in objective values of any sort, so one is left wondering how deep his commitment to a life of love can really be.

It’s of course eminently possible that he’s better than his worldview—I suspect he is—but for him somehow to think that his commitment to a life of love is a function of his emaciated worldview strikes me as a mistake. Bart is an atheist who values love, but that doesn’t mean that atheism can make much sense of doing so, or of love as an objective value, much less anything like a best explanation of why, normatively speaking, we ought to pursue such a life. Bart seems content to speak of love as the most excellent way, in some sense, but pretty clearly not in anything like a metaphysical sense; perhaps he’s simply after emphasizing the instrumental value of such a lifestyle. Surely he’s not wrong to see some of that value, but once more this seems to show that he seems more at home in the realm of social science than anything like philosophy, which pushes us to ask about the ontological foundations and metaphysical reality of something like sacrificial love and genuine altruism.

A Christian perspective, in contrast, explains how something like love really can and does function at the foundation of reality. It’s not merely instrumentally valuable, but intrinsically so, and evidentially significant in pointing us to the right understanding of reality and the human condition. But so long as Bart remains averse to following where the evidence of the most excellent way might lead, it would seem he will remain content with merely preaching to the choir of secularists whose preference (laudably enough) is to gravitate toward pro-social attitudes, but without implying that those whose preferences are quite different are in any sense deeply mistaken.

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David Baggett is professor of philosophy and director of The Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Baptist University. Author or editor of about fifteen books, he’s a two-time winner of Christianity Today book awards. He’s currently under contract for his fourth and fifth books with Oxford University Press: a book on moral realism with Jerry Walls, and a collection on the moral argument with Yale’s John Hare.

February 22, 2022

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 13

February 22, 2022/ David Baggett

We have now arrived at Bart’s chapter called “Life on the Other Side: The Happy Reality of Secular Humanism.” There’s quite a bit of material to unpack, engage, and be engaged by in this chapter, so let’s see how this goes. It may take three or four blogs to encapsulate my salient responses and reflections.

He begins by talking about the time, after losing his faith, during which he ran into plenty of other post-Christians who had left behind the “friendly confines” of their former orthodoxy. Just a small point about this: when I was in graduate school at a state university, religious convictions hardly always conduced to a friendly environment. I rather felt like my faith was under fire every day from certain zealous secular professors who took every opportunity to impugn the intelligence of religious believers and from certain fellow graduate students who relished emulating those professors.

I was studying philosophy, a field in which quite a bit of intellectual jousting takes place all the time, and learning the tools to engage unfriendly audiences with discussions about faith and its alleged irrationality took place in a rather hostile environment. It could sometimes be profoundly uncomfortable. In fact, I know several folks who kept their religious convictions under their hat to avoid finding themselves in the cross hairs of outspoken secularists, and others who abandoned faith altogether in the hotbed of graduate philosophy programs.

I make mention of all this just as a small observation. It may well be that atheists in the larger culture do have to endure challenges to be seen as normal and healthy, but there are also plenty of enclaves in which secularism enables people to feel like they fit in far more comfortably than they would if they espoused sincere religious conviction, whatever “friendly confines” the latter may have felt on Sunday mornings.

What many of these post-Christians told Bart they missed the most were the social dimensions of their religious experience—the music, the hymn sings, the potluck dinners, and the like. They encouraged Bart, knowing his background, to organize a church for people like them, “who want to be good and don’t believe in God.”

Bart endeavors to distance himself from angry, confrontational secularists and atheists, claiming no animus toward faith or people of faith. Indeed he writes, “I think Christianity has been one of the greatest community-building forces in human history.” So he claims it’s not his goal to trash the church, but rather to learn from it and offer a new and improved version of it, without the theological baggage, for people who genuinely want to be, again, good without God.

Not coincidentally, Greg Epstein’s Good without God was one of the most encouraging books Bart read through this time. Some months ago there was a bit of a dustup around Epstein when he, a secular humanist, was chosen to be the President of the Harvard chaplains. Christian chaplain Pete Williamson wrote a piece for Christianity Today defending his vote for Epstein and why it may not be as scandalous as many seemed to think when they heard it.

At any rate, Bart gives Greg’s book credit for introducing him to the logic and language of secular humanism, as well as opening his eyes to the possibility of engaging in the same vocation as a secular chaplain. After reading his book, Bart visited Greg to see his work firsthand and found students discussing cognitive science, vegetarianism, TED talks, racial politics, an upcoming LGBTQ solidarity march, and coming out to family. And in Greg Bart found a kindred spirit.

So Bart then reached out to USC to see what they thought of his idea of building missional communities for people who don’t believe in God, and they were open to the idea. Part of the reason for their openness was their definition of religion not in terms of specific belief systems, but rather as the quest to answer life’s ultimate questions. “What is the nature of the universe? Where do we come from and what happens when we die? What defines good and evil? How can we make the most of our lives?”

Allow me to say a word about this, and draw this entry to a close, saving the rest of this chapter for later. In Where the Conflict Really Lies, Alvin Plantinga writes this concerning naturalism (which entails atheism):

Naturalism is what we could call a worldview, a sort of total way of looking at ourselves and our world. It isn’t clearly a religion: the term “religion” is vague, and naturalism falls into the vague area of its application. Still, naturalism plays many of the same roles as a religion. In particular, it gives answers to the great human questions: Is there such a person as God? How should we live? Can we look forward to life after death? What is our place in the universe? How are we related to other creatures? Naturalism gives answers here: there is no God, and it makes no sense to hope for life after death. As to our place in the grand scheme of things, we human beings are just another animal with a peculiar way of making a living. Naturalism isn’t clearly a religion; but since it plays some of the same roles as a religion, we could properly call it a quasi-religion.

I’m inclined to agree with Plantinga here, which is why something like a “secular chaplain” makes more than a little sense to me. At the least I don’t think we can have it both ways and insist both that atheism is a religion and that secular chaplains make no sense.

So Bart came aboard at USC as a secular chaplain, though he would have to raise his own funds, and started his new career, addressing the communal needs of USC’s rapidly growing secular population. Practically speaking, he does much of what he used to do when he was a Christian minister, and much of what other university chaplains do—showing up at campus events, speaking in classes and dorms, hosting community gatherings, and encouraging and supporting students’ and professors’ “spiritual growth.” If that seems a bit odd, tune in next time for more.

More from this series

Mar 2, 2022

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 14

Mar 2, 2022

Feb 22, 2022

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 13

Feb 22, 2022

Feb 2, 2022

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 12

Feb 2, 2022

Jan 26, 2022

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 11

Jan 26, 2022

Jan 12, 2022

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 10

Jan 12, 2022

Jan 5, 2022

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 9

Jan 5, 2022

Dec 22, 2021

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 8

Dec 22, 2021

Dec 8, 2021

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 7

Dec 8, 2021

Dec 1, 2021

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 6

Dec 1, 2021

Nov 17, 2021

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 5

Nov 17, 2021

February 09, 2022

Humans of New York and Philosophy: How to See a Face

February 09, 2022/ Managing Editor

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at AndPhilosophy.com.

By Roberto Sirvent and Duncan Reyburn

Even in our image-saturated world, the face remains the primary signal of identity. From infancy, the face initiates that all-important moment of genuine recognition. We find ourselves mirrored in the lives of others as they welcome us into the world. “Meaning is a physiognomy,” says Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations; which is to say that the face is a gateway not only to understanding people but to actually understanding anything at all. Even our idioms express this: we face up to the truth or even face the music; we can put on a brave face, lose face, or save face; and we consider the face of things even while we recognize that there is more to everything than what the face on its own reveals.

The face is a challenge to quite a lot of the philosophy that can be overly preoccupied with the communion of mind and mind and of thought with thought. The face is a stark reminder of our raw materiality. Those of us who would like to live in a bubble detached from our flesh and blood have only to look at the faces of others to discover that life in a bubble simply will not work. We have to face the facts.

Read the full article at AndPhilosophy.com.

February 03, 2022

Simply Natural: Three Reasons We Need Natural Theology

February 03, 2022/ T.J. Gentry

An old acquaintance of mine recently published a book-length attack on natural theology. The book’s cover includes a painting of Thomas Aquinas, the target of the book’s attempted critique, except the author defaced the painting by blacking out Aquinas’s eyes. What is the point of the cheeky vandalism on the picture? The author concludes that Aquinas and the generations of faithful Christians before and since him who hold to a classical view of natural theology’s legitimacy as a vox Dei, voice of God, in nature are blind. There may be two books of God’s self-revelation, the Bible and nature, but the latter is not what Christians have long thought it was. According to the author, Aquinas, and by extension all classical theists are not seeing things as they really are. Instead, Aquinas and those who hold views like his are misreading and misleading others concerning natural theology. So, what is the author’s solution to the problems he has with Aquinas? What he and others of the same “extreme Calvinist camp”[i] he represents argue for is a variation of the presuppositionalism that Cornelius Van Til and like-minded representatives from within a narrow slice of the Reformed camp include in their constellation of beliefs about God, man, and salvation. I know this firsthand, as one who for two decades affirmed and taught those same views. While it is beyond the scope of what I write here to develop fully those views and why I left them (see my forthcoming book with Moral Apologetics Press entitled Leaving Calvinism, Finding Grace for more on that score), what I do hope to offer in short compass is why natural theology in its classical theist form is nothing close to an instance of the blind leading the blind. Rather, the approach to natural theology historically appreciated and taught within orthodox Christianity is illuminating and helpful, even essential to a full-orbed and robust doctrine of divine revelation. In the end, it is those who think Aquinas and those like him are blind that cannot see. Here, then, are three fundamental reasons we need natural theology as classically understood to help us better see God’s gracious revelation. I will use the acrostic SEE to frame my remaining presentation.

S - Scripture teaches that God speaks through nature and that all can and do hear the message as it resounds in natural theology. My point here is two-fold, and both are essential to a classical theist view of our topic. First, God speaks through nature vis-à-vis creation (cf. Ps. 19), the conscience (what John Henry Newman describes as the “aboriginal vicar of Christ”;[ii] cf. Rom. 1), and judicial sentiment (which is our sense of when others have done wrong to us; cf. Rom. 2). This should not be a point of real dispute, as all who read the Bible find its teaching clearly put forth on these matters. However, the second aspect of my point is that all can and do hear the message of nature, conscience, and judicial sentiment. It on this point that the divergence of opinion arises between the classical theists and those of the Van Tillian persuasion. While both groups know the message is broadcast by God, the latter conclude that the effect of sin on the mind of man reaches so far to make him deaf to it but accountable for it. God speaks, man can’t hear it, but God still holds man accountable for not receiving the message. The view of classical theism is not that the effects of the fall are without pernicious effect but that the prevenient grace of a loving God has efficaciously enabled all persons to hear and understand what natural theology communicates. This is because the fall of man into sin is not greater than the love of God for man. Yes, the fall has marred the image of God, but it has not erased it. Further, through His work of prevenient grace in natural theology (among other means), God has taken the first move in bringing man back into His family. Since God “making the first move” is so fundamental to “extreme Calvinists,” this should be a point of celebrated unity. At least it should be.

E – Evangelism and its counterpart, apologetics, issue forth from natural theology. One need only look at Paul’s message in Acts 17 as he presented the gospel on Mars Hill in Athens to find the interweaving of evangelism, apologetics, and natural theology. Undeniably, Paul’s appeal to natural theology as a segue to the proclamation of Christ’s resurrection and future judgment of the world occupies most of his message. Amazingly, out of the ten verses in Paul’s message totaling 269 words, eight deal with themes from general revelation, accounting for a whopping total of 218 of the 269 words. Here is a breakdown of how Paul uses natural theology and pagan culture in his message.

1. There is an innate human sense of the divine. (vv. 22-23)

2. God is Creator. (v. 24)

3. God is sovereign. (v. 24)

4. God is not an idol. (vv. 24-25; v. 29)

5. God is the source of all life. (v. 25)

6. God is the origin of all peoples and nations. (v. 26)

7. God is personal and directs history. (v. 26)

8. God is immanent. (v. 27)

9. Known poetry from pagan culture provides a reference to God. (v. 28)

10. God is the source and sustainer of all life. (v. 28)[iii]

We see here how Paul begins with a universal human sense of the divine, appeals to creation and conscience, and concludes with the gospel. Without natural theology where would Paul’s message have started and how would it have progressed? Thankfully for classic theists, the Bible does contain this example, and its not the exception but a frequent pattern in Pauline apologetics. I can see it. Why can’t those who think Aquinas and others are blind?

E – Ethical considerations which lay at the heart of human experience are inextricably tied to natural theology.[iv] To summarize and focus on a particular aspect of what I said above, two of the three means by which natural theology communicates God’s message have to do with ethical concerns, with morality. The human conscience and judicial sentiment are not obliterated by the fall nor are they unable to hear. Rather, in keeping with the biblical account and the philosophically rich history of human morality and its divine intimations, natural theology in its axiological (i.e., having to do with ethics) dimension is an open causeway from darkness to light, a starting place to speak to those outside the family of faith as we invite them into the living room of the Father’s home. When we recognize that a shared moral sense, even when it is darkly colored and warped in its expression, remains a part of every person as the common thread of our co-existence we begin to see the importance of the classical theist’s claim of the light available to all in natural theology. Far from leading to blindness, the conscience cannot escape the irradiant light of God’s brightness and the revelation of His goodness. While I don’t think that Aquinas should have his eyes blacked out, it does seem to me that someone else is not seeing the true picture of God that emerges from morality as expressed in natural theology.

[i] A paraphrase drawn from Norman Geisler’s book, Chosen but Free: A Balanced View of God’s Sovereignty and Free Will (Bethany House, 2010).

[ii] Letter to the Duke of Norfolk

[iii] Adapted from my previously published article, “Proclaiming Faith from the Pulpit: The Essential Relationship between Preaching and Apologetics” in Aletheias 4.1 (Spring 2019), p. 71.

[iv] Such ethical consideration are prime motivators for the work of MoralApologetics.com and like-minded ministries such as BellatorChristi.com,

Dr. Thomas J. Gentry (aka., TJ Gentry) serves as the pastor of First Christian Church of West Frankfort, Illinois, the Executive Editor of MoralApologetics.com, and Executive VP of Bellator Christi Ministries. Dr. Gentry is a world-class scholar holding 5 doctorate degrees and 6 masters degrees. Additionally, he is a prolific writer as he has published 7 books including Pulpit Apologist, Absent from the Body, Present with the Lord, and You Shall Be My Witnesses: Reflections on Sharing the Gospel. Be on the lookout for two additional books that he will soon publish. In addition to his impressive resume, Dr. Gentry proudly served his country as an officer in the United States Army and serves as a martial arts instructor.

February 01, 2022

Should We Believe What Jesus Said?

February 01, 2022/ Brian Chilton

If you want to be perfect (Christ and the rich young man). 2010. Canvas, oil. 85 x 120. Artist A.N. Mironov

As anyone who has followed apologetics knows, the resurrection was transformative for the earliest Christians. Those who witnessed the resurrection were willing to give their lives for what they knew to be true. But was it only the resurrection that transformed them? Most assuredly, the resurrection verified the claims of Jesus and solidified his teachings. If it were not for the resurrection, it is highly doubtful that the early church would have worshiped Jesus as they did. While the resurrection solidified and verified the ministry of Jesus, the teachings of Jesus impacted the way the disciples viewed the ministry of Jesus and what God was doing through him. Jesus had thoroughly taught the disciples what would happen to him. He taught what they would eventually abandon him. He taught what the Old Testament said about his ministry. And he also extensively trained them about an already-not-yet kingdom.[1] The Christology of Jesus impacted the disciples so much that they preserved his teachings, even before the resurrection, and passed them along after the ministry of Jesus was vindicated by the resurrection. As Paul Barnett points out, “It was [C]hristology that gave birth to Christianity, not the reverse. Furthermore, Christ gave birth to [C]hristology. The chronology drives this conclusion.”[2] If the Christological teachings of Jesus gave rise to Christian doctrine—because as Richard Bauckham notes, the “earliest Christology was already in nuce the highest Christology”[3]—then should it not behoove modern believers to pay close attention to what Jesus said? The teachings of Jesus not only impacted the early believers’ Christology, but they paid close attention to other aspects of the didactic of Jesus, as well. Thus, the modern believer should take the ethical, historical, and theological/philosophical teachings of Jesus into consideration as they live out, research, and build a biblical worldview.

The Ethical Teachings of Jesus

The Sermon on the Mount is just as controversial today as it was when Jesus first uttered it. Jesus taught such things as showing mercy unto others (Matt. 5:7), having a purity of the heart (Matt. 5:8), and maintaining one’s role as a peacemaker (Matt. 5:9). He taught that believers were to stand for the truth by remaining the salt of the earth (Matt. 5:13) while also maintaining a compassionate heart by being the light of the world (Matt. 5:14). He also taught that angry bitterness and lust made one as guilty as committing murder or adultery (Matt. 5:21–30). One of the most forgotten teachings of Jesus in modern times is his call to love one’s enemies and pray for those who may mistreat a person (Matt. 5:43–48). If Jesus rose from the dead, and he did, then the believer must take seriously the ethical commitments to which he calls his disciples to live. If one chooses to reject his moral standards, then one must ask, “Whose standards am I following—Jesus’s or my own?”

The Historical Teachings of Jesus

Here again, it is common for one to dismiss the teachings of Jesus when it comes to uncomfortable historical matters. Granted, the issue with Jesus mentioning Abiathar being the high priest when Ahimelech held the position in Mark 2:26 poses some issues. But one finds good reasons to think that something in the transmission from Aramaic to Greek could have been left off as the teaching/text was being translated. James Brooks avers that the best explanation to describe the hiccup is that the Aramaic word abba (meaning father) was originally added to Abiathar (abba-Abiathar) in the original teaching. Thus, the teaching would say “he entered the house of God in the time of abba-Abiathar” (Mark 2:26), which would be correct as Ahimelech was the father of Abiathar.[4]

Nonetheless, if Jesus is truly the divine Son of God—and the resurrection confirmed that he was—then, it stands to reason that Jesus would know perfectly whether such people existed when he referred to a historical Adam and Eve (implied in Matt. 19:4–6), Abraham and the early patriarchs (Matt. 22:32), and even Noah (Matt. 24:37). In our age of skepticism, it is easy to cast doubt on these figures of the past. But at the end of it all, we must ask ourselves whether we can take Jesus at his word.

The Theological/Philosophical Teachings of Jesus

Finally, one will ask whether a person can trust what Jesus says about the world, the kingdom of God, heaven and hell, and the direction of history. While there are a plethora of viewpoints concerning eschatology, the arrow of history is undebatable when it comes to the teachings of Jesus. In his Olivet Discourse (Matt. 24–25), Jesus warned that such things as wars, false prophets, famines,[5] earthquakes, and various disasters would come. Yet he noted that such things only serve as labor pains, indicating that the coming of the Son of Man was nigh (Matt. 24:8). Much more could be added to this eschatologically rich message. However, the most important aspect of his message is that despite the troubles that would come, God would move the arrow of history toward a time when he delivers the people of God and recreates the heavens and the earth. The kingdom of God would reach its ultimate and complete actualization when the “Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne” (Matt. 25:31).[6] Some may call this fanciful thinking. But this came from one who actually defeated death itself.

Conclusion

Many things are difficult to believe. It is difficult for me to wrap my mind around the fact that light travels at 186,000 miles a second. Likewise, some of the things mentioned in this article may be like the speed of light—very difficult to fathom. However, at the end of the day, we must all ask ourselves who we trust. Who is trustworthy? Who is a reliable witness? For me, the thing that led me back to Christianity after a time of doubt was the amazing amount of evidence supporting the literal resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. If Jesus truly raised from the dead and defeated death, then that is One whose opinion is worth trusting. Some may call it naïve. Well and good. When you are able to conquer death, then let’s talk.

About the Author

Brian G. Chilton is the founder of BellatorChristi.com, the host of The Bellator Christi Podcast, and the author of the Layman’s Manual on Christian Apologetics. Brian is a Ph.D. Candidate of the Theology and Apologetics program at Liberty University. He received his Master of Divinity in Theology from Liberty University (with high distinction); his Bachelor of Science in Religious Studies and Philosophy from Gardner-Webb University (with honors); and received certification in Christian Apologetics from Biola University. Brian is a member of the Evangelical Theological Society and the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Brian has served in pastoral ministry for nearly 20 years and currently serves as a clinical chaplain.

https://www.amazon.com/Laymans-Manual-Christian-Apologetics-Essentials/dp/1532697104

[1] This is especially true in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus taught that the kingdom was being ushered in through his ministry (thus, it was already here) and would fully be actualized in the eschaton (not yet).

[2] Paul Barnett, The Birth of Christianity: The First Twenty Years (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2005), 26.

[3] Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 235.

[4] James Brooks, Matthew, New American Commentary, David S. Dockery, ed (Nashville, TN: B&H, 1992), 66.

[5] Some translations add “epidemics.”

[6] Unless otherwise noted, all quoted Scripture comes from the Christian Standard Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman, 2020).

January 26, 2022

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 11

January 26, 2022/ David Baggett

The next installment in the Campolo father/son book is Bart’s chapter called “Can’t, Not Won’t: Losing Faith is Not a Choice.” Bart begins by saying that he encourages the newly de-converted, when sharing their story with friends and family, to begin by listing all the cherished values they learned in church, all the teachings of Jesus they love most dearly, and all the commitments to social justice and community building they still share. Only then talk about why they can no longer believe.

Rhetorically this is perhaps most helpful, but I do find myself wondering about a potential equivocation. In Bart’s case, anyway, he has abandoned moral realism. He no longer thinks there’s adequate foundation for believing in objective moral truths. So it remains unclear what’s meant by his “cherished values” unless he’s just presupposing a deep fact/value divide, but in which case, how stable is his professed love for such “values”? It largely seems as if he’s admitting that his worldview lacks foundations for such values, but because he remains personally committed to them, he takes them seriously still.

However, he could have easily gone in another direction, it would seem, as some atheists do. I’m not suggesting that all or most atheists do so, but the question of ontological foundations for our cherished convictions seems eliminable only at great peril. Why remain committed to such values when, say, doing so becomes costly—if one genuinely thinks they are not objectively true, prescriptively binding, or anything of the kind? It makes one’s value commitments a purely subjective and personal preference that, in principle, could vary from one day to the next.

Why I Left, Why I Stayed: Conversations on Christianity Between an Evangelical Father and His Humanist Son

By Campolo, Tony, Campolo, Bart

Bart admits that early on, when he shared his de-conversion with others, he would get into the various reasons why he had grown skeptical of Christianity, which had the effect of putting believers on the defensive. He says he didn’t actually want to spoil anyone else’s faith, but it seemed that way when he took that approach. So eventually he says he learned to cut to the chase and claim something like this: “For reasons beyond my control, I simply stopped believing in God. The rest are just details.” In his case, “all that really matters is that over many years my ability to believe in any kind of supernatural reality gradually faded away, until I finally became convinced that the natural universe—matter, energy, and time—is all that exists.”

Bart claims he couldn’t retain his faith, and means to be taken seriously. “I didn’t choose not to believe in God; I just stopped believing.” He says it wasn’t willful. He had plenty of motivations to retain his faith. He says it didn’t happen on purpose; it happened to him, slowly but surely. God “disappeared before my eyes.”

The issue to which Bart is pointing here is quite an important one, pertaining to the matter of belief. It’s quite true that, for the most part, we don’t have direct volitional control over our beliefs. As I type this, my cat Mitty is lounging on my desk, partially behind the computer I’m writing on. Even if I were offered a hundred buck not to believe she’s there, I couldn’t do it. Beliefs don’t tend to work that way. We tend to be more doxastically passive than that; beliefs have a way of insisting on themselves, on the one hand, or exceeding our reach, on the other.

Then again, I resist Bart’s depiction of his de-conversion in wholly passive terms. I don’t think that’s true to life, either. Although we may not have direct volitional control over our beliefs, we surely, for at least a range of our beliefs, have indirect volitional control over them, it would seem. Pascal recognized this near the end of his Pensées, after offering several reasons to take faith seriously. Recognizing the challenge, he then pointed out that there are indirect ways of building faith. Our practices, our friends, our habits, our choices—all of these have an impact over time.

There are also indirect ways of undermining faith—bad theology, bad exegesis, bad hermeneutics, refraining from engaging in fellowship with fellow believers, living sinfully, etc. In a later essay Tony will suggest that Bart’s neglect of local Christian fellowship likely detracted from his faith.

But Bart seems to think that his volition and choices had little to nothing to do with his loss of faith. This seems monumentally unlikely. Having seen already some of the ways in which he processed the faith of his upbringing, for example, makes it, to my thinking, not unlikely that he would lose his faith. At least not a big surprise. Yet he persists in the claim: “For better or worse … none of us really chooses what we believe. No matter how motivated we might be, our sense of what is real is beyond our control.” Again, direct volitional control? Granted. Not even indirect volitional control? I doubt it.

So committed is Bart to this narrative that he expresses confusion that old Christian friends call and express their concerns and “hold me responsible for my obviously sincere lack of faith. After all, if Christianity is true, and there really is a God in heaven, he’s the one to blame.” Here he cites Paul in Ephesians 2:8-9 for evidence: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”

Again, I find Bart’s appeal to a biblical teaching the way he does quite misleading. That Ephesians passage, rightly understood, does not suggest that we play no volitional role in the acceptance of faith. Faith indeed is a gift, but gifts can be accepted or rejected, either explicitly or implicitly, in big ways and an aggregate of small ways. But Bart reads it this way (without much of any recognition that he could be wrong): “That faith is the gift of God, plain and simple. Which means, of course, that if there’s anyone my dear Christian friends, those concerned folks who keep reaching out to me, and especially my still-believing parents ought to be imploring, it is God, not me.”

Although I believe we can and should pray for our unbelieving friends and family, my theology is simply not this sort of monergistic picture of God according to which Bart’s decisions played no role in where he’s currently at. I think such a picture is defensible on neither biblical nor philosophical grounds; and in fact, I think there are hermeneutical, exegetical, and rational reasons to resist such a depiction. From what I’ve seen so far, I think Bart played a far bigger role in his de-conversion than he thinks.

More from this series

Mar 2, 2022

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 14

Mar 2, 2022

Feb 22, 2022

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 13

Feb 22, 2022

Feb 2, 2022

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 12

Feb 2, 2022

Jan 26, 2022

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 11

Jan 26, 2022

Jan 12, 2022

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 10

Jan 12, 2022

Jan 5, 2022

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 9

Jan 5, 2022

Dec 22, 2021

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 8

Dec 22, 2021

Dec 8, 2021

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 7

Dec 8, 2021

Dec 1, 2021

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 6

Dec 1, 2021

Nov 17, 2021

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 5

Nov 17, 2021

January 20, 2022

Do You Follow?

January 20, 2022/ T.J. Gentry

I once read a quote, I think it was from Martin Luther but I cannot be sure, and the gist of it is that one of the most important things to help you grow as a Christian is to find a teacher and follow them, read them, learn from them, become so familiar with their thought that you find yourself thinking like them. Obviously, Luther wasn’t simply talking about following Jesus (which is a given, I think). Rather, he was talking about mentors, those we give the sacred place of influencers in our lives. In Luther’s case, he was particularly fond of William of Ockham (1285-1347), the Franciscan philosopher and theologian he referred to as mein lieber meister, “my dear master.” Truly, Ockham’s influence was profound for Luther, and it is unlikely that anything he ever wrote or said was untouched by him.

As an apologist, I try to take seriously Luther’s encouragement. While I don’t necessarily follow Ockham, I have found that I need key influencers in my life, substantive teachers from the past and present to help shape and form my soul to better understand, live, and defend my faith. Bearing this in mind, I’d like to share with you three of my apologetic mentors, hoping that you consider them for yourself. I suspect their names are known to most, especially those who regularly follow MoralApologetics.com. You will notice that the first two are men from the Christian past, important figures for their influence on the study and practice of apologetics. The third is a contemporary philosopher and apologist, and the weight of his influence on me is hard to calculate, but it’s immense. In discussing each of these men, I will share what I deem the three most important lessons I have learned from each thus far in my journey.

My first apologetic mentor is Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), the important Roman Catholic thinker dubbed the Angelic Doctor. My first serious engagement with Aquinas was through the lens of the late Norman Geisler’s work, who was arguably the greatest Thomistic evangelical to date. I also had the privilege of earning a master’s degree in philosophy from Thomist scholars at a Roman Catholic college, and I wrote the thesis for that program on Aquinas’s argument from gradation of being. From Aquinas I learned: 1) faith and reason are the closest of friends, and far from enemies: 2) taking the time to learn an opponent’s position is just as important as being able to answer it; and 3) never lose a sense of wonder for God’s great goodness amid the study of His particulars. On this last lesson, I find Aquinas’s reported mystical experience near the end of his life, an experience that led him to stop writing, to be just delightful as a reminder to look beyond my learning to the Source of knowledge. When pressed by his brother friar, Reginald, about why he stopped writing his Summa Theologiae, Aquinas replied, “The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.” Amen, Thomas. Amen.

My second apologetic mentor is C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), who described himself as something of a dinosaur. As a literary scholar, philosophical adept, and apologetic popularizer (a compliment, by the way), I am drawn repeatedly to the well of Lewis’s writings for insight, comfort, and nurture. From Lewis I learned: 1) think broadly and write narrowly, never attempting the one without the other; 2) learn to see segues to the divine in everything, for everything (and everyone) is a means of seeing and hearing God’s voice; and 3) the world always needs apologetics, especially when everything but apologetics seems apropos. I take this third lesson from Lewis from his commitment to deliver the radio talks that would later be compiled into Mere Christianity at a time when his island home of England was under attack by Nazi bombers as the world was plunging into a terrible war. Lewis’s answer to the cry of his time? Heartfelt, brilliant apologetic engagement. Indeed, Lewis. Indeed.

My third apologetic mentor is Dave Baggett, author of numerous erudite and timely books, founder of MoralApologetics.com, and director of the Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Baptist University. My relationship with Dave began when he was my professor, and it has since flourished and grown into what I consider among the rarest blessings in my life. This delightful friendship aside, what Dave has taught me thus far about apologetics, and specifically moral apologetics, comes down to three things: 1) the fabric of all existence is interwoven with moral clues revealing divine commands issuing forth from God’s intrinsic goodness which makes moral transformation possible and morality rational; 2) learn to argue without being argumentative, and abductive arguments are usually the best way to do this by making a winsome case and keeping a genuine relationship with your interlocutor; and 3) at the center of all that matters in the world is God’s love, and this is a non-negotiable. It was Dave who taught me that God not only loves me but He also even likes me. Thank you, doc. I needed to hear that.

What about you, friend? Are you teachable? Who are your traveling partners along the apologetic road, your mentors, your influencers? You need them. I need them. We all need them. Do you follow?

January 12, 2022

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 10

January 12, 2022/ David Baggett

Having devoted several blogs to Bart’s opening salvo in the Campolo book, I now move on to Tony’s description of his own background and Christian conversion. Admittedly this will be a bit of an easier installment for me to write, because where I may demur from Tony here and there, it will be by only a little and not a lot.

Tony was raised in a strong Christian home, and doesn’t much remember a time when he was an unbeliever. Before getting into subsequent developments in his narrative, he makes a point of emphasizing that his faith today “remains grounded in personal experience” that began as a kid. “I’m still a fairly good Christian apologist, but at the end of the day, I have to admit that the primary foundation of my faith is not what I know, but rather what I feel. As Blaise Pascal once observed, ‘The heart has reasons that reason will never know.’”

I think I understand the import of what he’s getting at here, but admit to a bit of ambivalence over the way he puts it. He seems to press the parallel between knowledge and reason, on the one hand, and between the heart and feelings, on the other, whereas I’m inclined to think the picture of how things actually go doesn’t lend itself to quite so neat a demarcation. I suspect knowledge involves both the head and heart, as it were, and certain deep experiences, which may (or may not) involve our emotions, can fall within the category of rationality broadly construed. William Wainwright and William James (and ever so many others, including Pascal) have pointed to a phenomenon like passional reason—an integrated amalgam of reason and emotion, of experience and rationality. In my work in moral apologetics, owing to the ineliminably experiential aspect of morality, there’s an almost constant blending of cognitive and affective dimensions.

I don’t mean, though, to belabor what is perhaps more of a semantic concern than anything else in this case, but I retain at least a bit of worry that it might be or become more than that—if not in Tony’s case, surely in others whose operative understanding of reason leaves no room for affective, relational, aesthetic, moral, or interpersonal factors, or who associate feelings with nothing but unreliable, non-veridical emotions. My view is, truth be told, probably not too distant from Tony’s, but I might have tried avoiding a misunderstanding here by not referring merely to feelings, but to, say, “heartfelt and well-evidenced beliefs of deep ingression.” But then again, that’s just dang wordy. (Much of what he has to say, incidentally, likely also comports with a Reformed epistemology paradigm.)

Time and again Tony is reticent to move the discussion into apologetic territory. I don’t presume to know exactly why, but I suspect his heart generally seems to be in the eminently right place. He wants to keep the discussion warmly personal and relational and not allow it become a merely intellectual exercise to try winning an argument. But of course this is just where predicating apologetics on a model of passional reason and an expansive rationality can avoid its becoming what Tony wants to avoid.

One more word about this passage. In the context of discussing how the Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are his disciples, Tony writes that by “the grace of God I have been given the gift of faith.” Surely our capacity for faith is a gift, a provision made possible by God’s grace, but as I’ve mentioned before I think it’s unfortunate to take from this important truth anything like the notion that those with faith have been given the gift and those without it have not. Gifts presumably can be rejected. Of course here my theology is a distinct departure from Calvinism, but it’s an interpretation that I think bears up best under critical scrutiny and exegetical analysis, and avoids the utterly unpalatable implications otherwise (an issue we have discussed and to which we will return).

It was during high school that faith came alive for Tony even more. In through this part of his story he shares a touching account of his ongoing and growing relationship with God. Then he wonders how folks like Bart, who no longer believe in God, are able to handle their guilt. As a social scientist, Tony is aware of how, say, Freud thought guilt, after suppression, emerges from the subconscious in the form of phobias and neurotic behavior. But for Tony the Christian faith offers a much more effective solution to guilt via God’s grace and forgiveness.

When I discuss the performative variant of the moral argument, I have taken in recent years to do more than address what John Hare calls the “moral gap” between the best we can do and what we are called to do—by morality or God. I back up and first discuss our need for forgiveness, then for moral change, and finally for moral perfection, and then emphasize how Christian salvation provides for all three: justification for our forgiveness, sanctification for our moral transformation, and glorification for our moral perfection. This is one of those junctures where moral apologetics, it seems to me, lends itself impeccably well not just to an argument for theism per se, but Christianity in particular. So I resonate with Tony here quite a bit in this strong emphasis on divine grace at every step of our journey.

Then he shares how his vision of what his Christian vocation was to be expanded in the ensuing years, as he became increasingly cognizant of his call to fight for social justice, “changing the world from what it is into what Jesus called the Kingdom of God.” Although I admit to finding such language a bit grandiose, I don’t want to be dogmatic in eschewing it too quickly. Surely we are called to pray for God’s will to be done in this world, and for his kingdom to come. And we are indeed called, all of us, to fight injustices, feed the hungry, and promote love. Too often evangelicals, at least as popularly conceived, can fall into the trap of holding too small a view of what salvation looks like in this world. If we neglect the least of these, we are neglecting Jesus himself. It’s an important reminder that there is some special sense in which God identifies with the poor and needy, oppressed and marginalized.

Still, a danger of overly politicizing this looms, if we assume the means by which these tasks are done are centrally political. Surely on occasion this is true—Wilberforce’s lifetime political mission is a marvelous example. Still, politically liberal professing Christian believers can fall into the trap of lionizing the Democratic party every bit as much as certain conservative Christians can do so with the Republicans, and this is no small worry where Tony is concerned.

With what realistic expectations can we expect to see a “reconstructed society” here in this world? Surely strides can be made; the evangelical view of sin arguably brought slavery to its knees, for example. Christian convictions and principles functioned at the foundation of the Civil Rights movement, women’s suffrage, and a whole range of social improvements. Paul Copan has done a nice job in years past chronicling such historical twists on the moral argument. But the idea that we can expect to see God’s kingdom ushered into this world prior to the eschaton—save for within the church itself—strikes me as a bit naïve. The temptation to assign a kind of primacy to political solutions has been a temptation of the church since her inception.

So after admitting that he had come to see his faith as a call to be involved in a revolutionary movement that can transform the world into the kind of society God wants it to be, Tony anticipates my sort of objection by denying he is motivated by anything like utopian idealism. He admits his ultimate hope resides beyond the grave and not here and now. And sure enough, Tony’s always been an interesting figure in this way by conjoining his liberal political proclivities with orthodox theology—at least until his change of mind on homosexuality, previously discussed.

Tony’s chapter touches briefly on a few more interesting issues, but since they will come up again later, I’ll defer discussing them until then. One last point for now: Tony notes the way Bart’s inspired by certain of life’s realities, what Maslow might call “peak experiences.” Then he adds this: “It just might be that what Bart has really rejected is not God, but rather the way so many of us Christians usually talk about God.”

Tony has a point here, although he’s tempted, I think, to overly press it and let Bart off the hook too quickly. It wasn’t just the way others talked about God that might have contributed to Bart’s departure; I’ve argued that some of his own bad theology mistakenly made him think that he had to depart from the faith. But the larger point for now is even more important: not every ostensible rejection of God and Christianity is likely a pure rejection of the true gospel of Christ. I suspect, as Tony intimates, that on occasion and perhaps not infrequently what is getting rejected is something of a garbled version of the truth, a twisted conception of Christianity, a warped view of God.

Of course we are not the judge; it’s a bit beyond our pay grade, but this is, I think, a good reminder for us to bear in mind: the importance not to presume to know more than we do as we observe the spiritual pilgrimage, stumbles, and struggles of others. This is why coming alongside of them and listening carefully and attentively to what they have to say can often prove more than a little illuminating.

More from this series

Mar 2, 2022

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 14

Mar 2, 2022

Feb 22, 2022

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 13

Feb 22, 2022

Feb 2, 2022

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 12

Feb 2, 2022

Jan 26, 2022

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 11

Jan 26, 2022

Jan 12, 2022

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 10

Jan 12, 2022

Jan 5, 2022

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 9

Jan 5, 2022

Dec 22, 2021

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 8

Dec 22, 2021

Dec 8, 2021

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 7

Dec 8, 2021

Dec 1, 2021

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 6

Dec 1, 2021

Nov 17, 2021

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 5

Nov 17, 2021

Nov 3, 2021

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 4

Nov 3, 2021

Oct 13, 2021

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 3

Oct 13, 2021

Oct 6, 2021

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 2

Oct 6, 2021

Sep 29, 2021

Response #1 to Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo

Sep 29, 2021

January 10, 2022

The Case That Our Moral Knowledge Points Toward God: Part 4

January 10, 2022/ Zach Breitenbach

PART 1

pART 2

pART 3

INTRODUCTION

This is the fourth and final article in a series on how one might offer several different moral arguments that all (1) focus on our knowledge of moral truth and (2) reinforce each other so that their joint force is even stronger than that of each individual argument.[1] This series of articles has focused specifically on three well-known arguments for God’s existence that have to do with our moral knowledge: the similar arguments of Mark Linville and Alvin Plantinga, an argument by Scott Smith, and an argument put forth by Angus Ritchie. In this article, the series concludes by offering a strategy for how these arguments can be used in conjunction so that they reinforce each other.

A CUMULATIVE CASE MORAL KNOWLEDGE ARGUMENT

Although there are differences between each of the moral knowledge arguments described in this article, there are also many similarities; moreover, the differences are not such that the Christian moral apologist must choose one to the exclusion of the others. Instead, these versions are complementary and can be used in conjunction to make an even stronger moral argument for God’s existence—one that is sturdier than any one of these versions by itself. In this final section, we will consider how these different arguments may be used in combination and explore a strategy for making this work. To accomplish this, it is helpful to begin by comparing and contrasting these views before integrating them into a cumulative argument.

It is clear that Plantinga and Smith make the most ambitious claim, as they argue that there is reason to doubt that we could have any knowledge at all in a naturalistic world. Nevertheless, Plantinga and Smith make their cases entirely differently, since Plantinga argues that the evolutionary aspect of naturalism provides a defeater for moral knowledge and Smith attempts to show that the physicalist aspect of naturalism removes any basis for the personhood and mental states that would be needed for knowledge. Linville’s point is somewhat less bold, arguing that on naturalism we have a defeater for moral knowledge but not other types of knowledge. In doing so, his approach is more similar to Plantinga’s than Smith’s in terms of arguing that the evolutionary aspect of naturalism undermines knowledge; however, unlike both Plantinga and Smith, Linville does not deny that all knowledge is undermined on naturalism. Ritchie’s claim is the least ambitious, since he grants that moral knowledge is possible even on naturalism. Ritchie takes moral knowledge as a fact that requires explanation and makes the more modest claim that naturalism cannot adequately explain moral knowledge. In terms of how he goes about this, we have seen that his approach is more similar to that of Plantinga and Linville than to that of Smith, as Ritchie’s focus is on the evolutionary aspect of naturalism.

With these differences and similarities in mind, let us now consider how to integrate them into a cumulative moral argument. It is reasonable to begin with the most ambitious claims first. The arguments of both Plantinga and Smith lend themselves well to being the first line of argumentation for two reasons. First, if successful, they raise the sharpest challenge against naturalism by providing a defeater for all knowledge on naturalism. The naturalist who sees the force of either—or both—of these arguments thus has reason to doubt whether naturalism can be rationally affirmed; moreover, if the naturalist finds either of these arguments to be sound and also finds it plausible that we do have knowledge in the actual world, then he has good reason to doubt the truth of naturalism. Second, there is the advantage that these two arguments have an entirely different focus. If the moral apologist’s secular interlocuter is unconvinced by one of them, that does not weaken the force of the other; thus, using these two arguments as the first line of argumentation has an initial cumulative benefit.

Linville’s argument can be used next in order to make a more modest case in the event that the unbeliever sees merit in Plantinga’s argument but finds it implausible that all knowledge would be undermined on evolutionary naturalism. As we have seen, Plantinga rightly contends that it is irrelevant to his argument whether we seem to have knowledge in the actual world, and he argues persuasively that there is no reason to think that adaptive behavior requires the truthfulness of any of our beliefs; however, some may find it more plausible that holding true beliefs would provide a survival advantage. It is at this juncture that Linville’s more modest approach can be used, as he differentiates between moral and nonmoral beliefs by allowing that holding true nonmoral beliefs will often provide a survival advantage whereas the truthfulness of moral beliefs does not seem to provide a survival advantage. Linville makes a good case for why it is not arbitrary to exclude moral knowledge on naturalism even if one allows other knowledge.

If the skeptic of theism is still unconvinced and simply finds it unreasonable to doubt that we would have moral knowledge on naturalism, one can utilize Ritchie’s even more modest argument. Even if the defender of our cumulative moral knowledge argument does not agree with Ritchie that moral knowledge is justified on naturalism, one can grant this for the sake of argument and make the case along with Ritchie that naturalism cannot adequately explain how we have this knowledge. The moral apologist can defend Ritchie’s claim that any viable worldview must be able to explain moral knowledge and point out that Ritchie himself even goes so far as to accept that our nonmoral beliefs can be not only justified but explained by natural selection on naturalism. Ritchie’s dilemma can then be posed to the skeptic to show the difficulty of explaining moral knowledge on naturalism. If the skeptic recognizes that there is no evolutionary advantage to some of our moral beliefs, then she should be able to see that naturalism cannot explain those moral beliefs; however, if she claims that all of our moral beliefs do carry an evolutionary advantage then she faces the problem that some actions that are favorable for the survival and effective replication of the human species seem to be immoral (e.g., killing the weak, disabled, and diseased; mandating rape if the only women left on earth refused to procreate).

In this way, all of these arguments are complementary and fit nicely into a cumulative case strategy. For both apologetic and moral reasons, one does not want a naturalist to give up on thinking that there is objective moral truth or to hold onto her naturalism while abandoning her belief that she has genuine moral knowledge. It is therefore critical when making this case to encourage her to give up naturalism and not give up on moral knowledge. The intent of this cumulative moral argument is to show that naturalism cannot adequately justify—or at least explain—moral knowledge. This can in turn be used as part of an even broader cumulative moral argument that seeks to show that naturalism cannot justify other aspects of morality, such as the existence of objective moral values and duties, moral transformation, and moral rationality.

1. These articles are adapted for a popular audience from an article that I published in the Journal of the International Society of Christian Apologetics (Volume 12, 2019, pp. 49-64) that is titled “Toward a Cumulative Epistemic Moral Argument for God’s Existence.”

January 06, 2022

Models of Oral Tradition and the Ethics Behind Accurate Transmission

January 06, 2022/ Brian Chilton

In a heartfelt testimony, Bart Ehrman describes the origins of his descent from a fundamentalist Christian to an atheist-leaning-agnostic in his book Misquoting Jesus. The central factor in Ehrman’s doubt was the differences found in the Gospel texts. The catalyst of his departure was an apparent error in Jesus’s quotation of 1 Samuel 21:1–6 along with apparent differences in the Gospels’ presentation of the life of Jesus.[1] Ehrman is not alone. While Ehrman is correct in that Christianity and Judaism are “bookish religions,”[2] James D. G. Dunn is also correct in noting that properly understanding the transmission of early Jesus requires a shift in one’s default thinking to an “oral mind-set.”[3] At the end of the day, it must be asked how much liberty early writers were given to report the deeds and teachings of Jesus. If the writers of the New Testament intentionally tried to mislead individuals, then there lies an ethical problem behind the formation of the New Testament Gospels. Let us look at the three models of oral traditions and which one most closely aligns with the New Testament texts.

Informal Uncontrolled Model—Bultmannian Viewpoint

The first model is advocated by German scholar Rudolf Bultmann and is called the informal uncontrolled model. In his book Jesus and the Word, Bultmann shows a striking similarity to Ehrman’s concepts as he writes, “I do indeed think that we can know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources show no interest in either, are moreover fragmentary, and often legendary; and other sources about Jesus do not exist.”[4] Bultmann does not deny that a genuine Jesus tradition is found in the Gospels, but holds that they have faded from view. In this model, the transmission of the Jesus traditions was informal because of the lack of an official teacher to pass along (i.e., παραδιδωμι) the information, and it was uncontrolled since the community exercised great fluidity as the data was changed and shaped according to the needs of the time.[5]

Formal Controlled Model—Scandinavian School

In stark contrast with the informal uncontrolled model, Scandinavian scholars such as Birger Gerhardsson, Harald Riesenfeld, and Samuel Byrskog contend that the church had far more control over the Jesus traditions than the Bultmannian school conveyed. As Riesenfeld and the Scandinavian school deduced, the παραδιδωμι of the Jesus tradition was formal in the sense that it was entrusted to a special school of disciples, and it was controlled in the sense that the key features were memorized and preserved.[6] In his classic yet controversial book Memory and Manuscript, Gerhardsson compares the early transmission of the Jesus traditions to the παραδιδωμι (i.e., handing down) of the Oral Torah,[7] which was set forth with care using mnemonic devices, written notes, repetitions, and with a great concern for accuracy.[8] Thus, “Jesus is the object and subject of a tradition of authoritative and holy words which he himself created and entrusted to his disciples for its later transmission in the epoch between his death and the Parousia.”[9] But what about the portions of Scripture that seem to present variations in the material? Gerhardsson holds that the traditions were more comparable to haggadic material than halakhic material[10] which permits a wider margin of variation. Thus, one should anticipate some variations in the retelling of the material while also maintaining a high scrutiny for truth and accuracy.[11]

Informal Controlled Model—Kenneth Bailey

A third model is provided by Kenneth Bailey in an article written for Themelios Journal, which he calls the “informal controlled model.”[12] The informal controlled model is an ancient methodology are transmitted by a community called the haflat samar.[13] Certain individuals of the community memorize the material and recite it to the community. The elders of the community also memorize the material and offer correction if the reciter should err in his retelling of the story or teachings. While the storytellers were given some license to adapt the material, the core essential data must remain the same. Bailey estimates that no more than 15 percent of the story could be changed to permit interpretations and applications, but even then, the essential markers of the material could not be altered.[14] Thus, for Bailey, the material is informal in the sense that the community is involved with the preservation of the material and controlled due to the insistence of the community to accurately convey and παραδιδωμι truthful information that accurately conveys what one said and did.

Conclusion

From my continued research, the New Testament Gospels seem to convey a blend of the Scandinavian formal controlled model and Bailey’s informal controlled model. The early credal material assuredly matches Gerhardsson’s and the Scandinavian model. However, the parables seem to hold a greater similarity with Bailey’s informal controlled model allowing for greater flexibility. It may be that different portions of the New Testament Gospels swing from one side of the pendulum to the other. Regardless of whether a passage is found in Gerhardsson’s or Bailey’s model, both emphasize the early Christian community’s commitment to accuracy and truthfulness. Therefore, one can take confidence in the early church’s commitment to ethical integrity and truthful transmission. The early Christians believed that they were preserving the message of Jesus whom they believed was the Son of God. As such, models such as Bultmann’s do not consider the early ethical standards of the first church. Also, Bultmann’s model does not seem to cohere with the biblical data. Craig Blomberg puts it best by saying, “we may confidently declare that the approach to oral tradition (that is, the formal controlled and informal controlled models) is far more likely to approximate historical realities than those of Funk, the Jesus Seminar, and others who promote the model of informal, uncontrolled tradition.”[15]

About the Author

https://www.amazon.com/Laymans-Manual-Christian-Apologetics-Essentials/dp/1532697104

[1] Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2009), 9.

[2] Ibid., 20.

[3] James D. G. Dunn, The Oral Gospel Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2013), 49.

[4] Like Ehrman, Bultmann argues that the earliest community was not interested in preserving historical information about Jesus and his messages, but they were rather more interested in the situations facing the evolving church. Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word (New York, NY: Scribners, 1958), 8.

[5] Historical accuracy was not the primary focus in this model. While Ehrman and the Jesus Seminar popularized this model, this is far from the only one.

[6] Riesenfeld argued that the “words and deeds of Jesus are a holy word, comparable with that of the Old Testament, and a handing down of this precious material is entrusted to special persons.” Harald Riesenfeld, “The Gospel Tradition and Its Beginnings,” in The Gospel Tradition (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1970), 19.

[7] Oral traditions associated with the Torah and the memorization of the written texts.

[8] Birger Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 335.

[9] Riesenfeld, “Gospel Tradition and Its Beginnings,” Gospel Tradition, 29.

[10] Halakhic material (Heb. “the way”) contained the totality of the laws that were passed down since biblical times and largely from written sources. Haggadic material—haggadah meaning “tales”—contains non-legal material that was offered to preserve historical events, folklore, and moral teachings that were part of the Jewish Oral Law (תורה שבעל פה). The Haggadah has passed along important teachings and interpretations, while also allowing for a more spiritual and allegorical dimension.

[11] Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, 335.

[12] Kenneth E. Bailey, “Informal Controlled Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels,” Themelios 20, 2 (1995): 5.

[13] Samar is an Arabic cognate of the Hebrew shamar which means “to preserve.” Ibid., 6.

[14] Ibid., 7.

[15] Craig L. Blomberg, “Orality and the Parables: With Special Reference to James D. G. Dunn’s Jesus Remembered,” in Memories of Jesus: A Critical Appraisal of James D. G. Dunn’s Jesus Remembered, Robert B. Stewart and Gary R. Habermas, eds (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2010), 125–126.

January 03, 2022

The Case That Our Moral Knowledge Points Toward God: Part 3

January 03, 2022/ Zach Breitenbach

Part 1

Part 2

INTRODUCTION

This is the third article in a series on how one might offer several different moral arguments that all (1) focus on our knowledge of moral truth and (2) reinforce each other so that their joint force is even stronger than that of each individual argument.[1] This series of articles focuses specifically on three well-known arguments for God’s existence that have to do with our moral knowledge. After examining the third argument (one given by Angus Ritchie) in this article, the series will conclude next time by offering a strategy for how the arguments can be used in conjunction so that they reinforce each other.

ANGUS RITCHIE’S ARGUMENT

Unlike Linville, Plantinga, and Smith, Angus Ritchie grants that naturalism allows for moral knowledge and treats it as a fact in need of explanation. Although he allows for moral knowledge in a naturalistic world, his view is similar to that of Linville and Plantinga in the sense that he focuses on the challenge to moral knowledge faced by evolutionary naturalism (EN). He contends that “purposive accounts of the universe” are the only accounts that can explain our moral truth-tracking abilities and show why we have moral knowledge, and theism is the best of such accounts. Ultimately, Ritchie’s “central contention” is that “all secular theories which do justice to our most fundamental moral convictions” by affirming that we have objective moral knowledge leave an “explanatory gap” in terms of justifying adequately how humans “developing in a physical universe which is not itself shaped by any purposive force” are able to “apprehend objective moral norms.”[2] Let us examine Ritchie’s view.

Ritchie first makes the case for why he is willing to grant that genuine moral knowledge would be possible even if naturalism were true. Ritchie thinks that the process by which we form moral beliefs seems similar to how we form nonmoral beliefs, and this process seems to be reliable. He thinks that excluding moral beliefs from being true would be arbitrary and unjustified. While Linville and Plantinga have no problem with holding that our moral beliefs would be undermined on EN because such beliefs would have a defeater, Ritchie disagrees. Not only in ethics but also in math and science, we make intuitive judgments and systematize them into rules, and this process appears to be “indispensible.” Abandoning this kind of reasoning, he thinks, means rejecting “objectivism in all areas of knowledge,” which is a self-refuting position.[3] Ritchie thus is not inclined to deny that moral knowledge would be justified if naturalism were true, opting instead to contend that such knowledge cannot be adequately explained. While one might disagree with Ritchie at this juncture by recalling Plantinga’s point (from Part I of this series) that the features of the actual world (e.g., the fact that we seem to have knowledge and that this knowledge might seem indispensible to us) are irrelevant to his case that we have a defeater for knowledge in a naturalistic world, let us not be concerned with this at the present. For regardless of whether or not Ritchie is correct that moral knowledge is justified on naturalism, one could grant this point for the sake of argument and endeavor to show, as Ritchie attempts to do, that this knowledge cannot be adequately explained on naturalism.

While Ritchie allows that one is justified in having knowledge regardless of whether one can explain why he has it, he emphasizes that it is nevertheless problematic for a worldview if it cannot explain why we have moral knowledge.[4] Ritchie stresses that demanding a naturalistic explanation for why we have the capacity to track moral truth is a legitimate and essential demand to make. This is because natural selection is routinely put forth by naturalists as the explanation for our cognitive ability to track truth, since it is claimed that holding true beliefs would provide a survival advantage. Indeed, Ritchie himself—contra Plantinga—grants that natural selection is perfectly able both to justify and explain our beliefs when it comes to “physical perception and theoretical reasoning.” But, argues Ritchie, natural selection does not have the same power to explain why we can track moral truth. This is because “whereas there is a plausible correlation between maximal survival value and truth in the case of perceptual and theoretical reasoning, no such correlation is plausible in the moral case.”[5] This is because some things valued as moral by our cognitive faculties do not aid in survival. So if the naturalist admits that there is no evolutionary advantage to some of our moral beliefs, then those moral beliefs cannot be explained well by naturalism; however, if the naturalist claims that all of our moral beliefs do aim at survival and species replication, then this is morally problematic because some actions that are conducive to survival seem to be immoral (e.g., using eugenics to purify the human race).[6]

Ritchie rebuts four sorts of objections to this reasoning. Let us consider them in brief. First, there is the objection made by Richard Dawkins that natural selection allowed us to evolve consciousness, which in turn allows us to reason to moral truths that transcend natural selection and survival-aimed beliefs.[7] But Ritchie points out that natural selection does not explain the apparent truth “of those of our capacities which generate moral judgments which conflict with the imperatives to maximize species-replication.”[8] Second, a naturalist may contend that “all true moral judgments are analytic statements” (true by definition) so that “our capacity for moral knowledge would flow directly from our capacity for deductive reasoning.” However, analytic statements “lack the substantive content which moral judgments so clearly contain.” For example, there is nothing logically necessary about the claim that “one ought to care for one’s children.”[9] Third, Roger Crisp argues that we should seek pleasure and avoid pain. He claims this benefits survival and is the foundational explanation for all our moral beliefs. But the problem is that humans value things like accomplishment, personhood, and authentic understanding that do not depend on how we subjectively feel inside.[10] Finally, one may argue that evolving theoretical reasoning skills has survival advantage, and the ability to morally reason results from having general theoretical reasoning skills even though moral reasoning itself has no survival advantage. But “moral reasoning involves cognitive processes that are very clearly distinct from theoretical reasoning.” For example, “one can be an excellent theoretical reasoner and have the moral sensibilities of a sociopath.”[11]

Ritchie also evaluates prominent secular ethical theories and shows how they each fail to explain moral knowledge. He makes a good case that “all secular accounts either” allow for “insufficient objectivity” or suffer from “the explanatory gap (that is to say, they are unable to account for the human ability to track moral truth in our moral reasoning).”[12] He concludes that the explanatory gap either cannot be explained or the explanation involves design/purpose, and he gives a seven-premise argument that God is the best explanation of human moral knowledge.[13] Ritchie contends that regardless of whether God used guided evolution or some other method of designing humans, a guided process is needed to explain adequately our moral knowledge.

Part 4

2. Angus Ritchie, From Morality to Metaphysics: The Theistic Implications of Our Ethical Commitments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4.

3. Ibid., 16-18.

4. Ibid., 44-47.

5. Ibid., 54-55.

6. Ibid., 56-58.

7. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Random House, 2006), 222.

8. Ritchie, From Morality to Metaphysics, 58-59.

9. Ibid., 59-61.

10. Ibid., 61-64.

11. Ibid., 65.

12. Ibid., 110. Ritchie deals with the “quasi-realism” of Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard; the “rational procedures” view of Christine Korsgaard and “reasons fundamentalism” of Tim Scanlon; Philippa Foot’s natural law theory involving “Aristotelian categoricals”; and the “second nature” view of John McDowell along with the similar view held by David Wiggins.

13. Ibid., 164.

December 27, 2021

The Case That Our Moral Knowledge Points Toward God: Part 2

December 27, 2021/ Zach Breitenbach

This is the second article in a series on how one might offer several different moral arguments that all (1) focus on our knowledge of moral truth and (2) reinforce each other so that their joint force is even stronger than that of each individual argument.[1] This series of articles focuses specifically on three well-known arguments for God’s existence that have to do with our moral knowledge. After examining each argument, the series will conclude by offering a strategy for how they can be used in conjunction so that they reinforce each other. Last time we examined the similar (but different) arguments given by Mark Linville and Alvin Plantinga concerning evolutionary naturalism (EN). Now we will inspect an argument from Scott Smith.

SCOTT SMITH’S ARGUMENT

Like Plantinga, Smith concludes that we would have no knowledge—moral or otherwise—if naturalism were true, but Smith arrives at this conclusion quite differently. Instead of arguing that EN would give us a defeater for all of our knowledge because we would have evolved for adaptive behavior rather than holding true beliefs, Smith focuses on the fact that naturalism eliminates any basis for humans having an immaterial essence, or soul, that can allow for genuine mental events—intentional thoughts “of” or “about” things in the world. If a human person is only a physical brain that receives and processes inputs, then Smith argues that such intentionality is impossible. This, he believes, unavoidably undermines any basis for us having knowledge. Let us examine Smith’s view more closely.

Smith makes his case largely by laying out some key implications that the atheist Daniel Dennett believes follow from naturalism, since Smith believes much of Dennett’s perspective is an accurate representation of what would be true in a naturalistic world. Smith perceives Dennett as one of the few philosophers of science working in cognitive science who takes seriously “the implications of naturalism—and naturalistic evolution.”[2] Dennett denies that there is an enduring self (a “you” that continues to exist over time); instead, the brain has been shaped by evolution to give us the illusion that there is a self and that the self has mental content such as “beliefs, desires, fears, and hopes.” Humans are just biological machines and have no intentionality, but we have come to regard ourselves and others as intentional agents because it is useful for predicting behavior.[3] Just as this allows us to predict what a “chess-playing computer will do,” it is efficient for us to view humans and animals in the same way and attribute intentionality to them; however, in reality, there is no such intentionality. We live in a physical world with no metaphysical persons who have real intentional states, so we do not really think “of or about something.”[4]

Dennett admits that genuine mental states must be “of” or “about” some particular thing. One cannot have a thought or experience that is not about something. This “ofness” or “intentionality” is essential to every mental state. A thought about a particular thing (e.g., a cat) could not be about something else (e.g., a dog) and “still be the thought that it is.” Dennett recognizes that true mental states must be nonphysical in nature in order to be “of their intended objects.” Since Dennett realizes that naturalism leaves no room for nonphysical essences, Smith agrees with Dennett that naturalism merely allows us to “take (interpret, conceive) a mental state to be about something.”[5] But Smith argues that this does not constitute knowledge, as the “denial of the existence of essences results in our inability to have knowledge.”[6] Naturalism requires that mental states must be “reduced to physical stuff or denied.” Since our mental states have no essence and no “ofness,” our “experiences” are merely “the last state in a long, causal, physical chain.” But this means we can never get past experiencing our “last physical state” so as to know whether we are perceiving the object of our experience as it is. Only if mental states are nonphysical can they “escape the physical limitations of causal chains.”[7] Natural selection entails that our thoughts are no different from a computer program. A computer’s intentionality is not original but is derived from its programmer, and any intentionality (“ofness” or “aboutness”) that we have in our thinking is similarly derived from natural selection.[8] Although our mental states, sense of self, and moral beliefs seem evident to us, these things would not have any basis in reality. In terms of morality, “evil” merely becomes our “interpretations of physical events.” There are no “intrinsically mental (or moral) entities” that could have a “good or bad quality” or an “essence.”[9] For there to be objective moral truths that we can know, there would have to be “essences involved both in our mental states, the moral principles and virtues, and in persons.”[10]

Smith also emphasizes that the “self must somehow remain essentially the same through time and change, such that the identical person owns these thoughts and experiences, grows in understanding and learning, even if over a span of many years.”[11] Smith thus thinks that the reality of the soul, which clearly is beyond the resources of naturalism, is essential to us having knowledge. It is problematic if “I” am not an enduring self with true mental properties and if there are no essences for me to know. But with naturalism, the most we can do is merely attribute moral motivations to others while the actual processes going on in the human machine are purely physical and lack intentionality.[12]

Smith rightly points out that Dennett’s claim that we attribute intentionality to others is problematic. This is because one would seem to require real thoughts and intentional beliefs that are “about” or “of” another person in order to attribute intentionality to that person. Although Dennett does claim we can know things, his view undermines any basis for knowledge because our brain merely receives inputs and processes them. So, Dennett fails to realize that without any basis for intentionality and the self, it is self-refuting for him to claim true knowledge of his theory or of anything else.[13] We can never have a “conscious awareness” of reality as it is; ultimately, “everything is interpretation all the way down.”[14] Smith thus takes the firm position that “naturalism cannot give us knowledge.” This means that “all the various naturalists’ proposals for ethics also must fail due to their inability to offer any knowledge.”[15]

Smith’s argument has much force. He is surely correct that the mental events necessary for knowledge are different from physical events because physical events are not about anything.[16] A soul seems necessary in order for human persons to be more than biological machines that simply process inputs and produce mechanistic outputs. If mental events are nonphysical, as they seemingly must be, then it is hard to see how purely physical things could have them. Having surveyed Smith’s view, next time we will consider one final argument concerning moral knowledge.

Part 1

Part 3

Part 4

2. R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge: Overcoming the Fact-Value Dichotomy (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 137.

3. Ibid., 138-139. This idea of viewing ourselves and others as intentional, rational agents allows us to predict behavior, and Dennett calls it the “intentional stance.” This concept is laid out by Dennett in his book by the same name. See: Daniel Clement Dennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).

4. Ibid., 140-142.

5. Ibid., 293.

6. Ibid., 294.

7. Ibid., 303.

8. Ibid., 143.

9. Ibid., 145.

10. Ibid., 322.

11. Ibid., 309-310.

12. Ibid., 146.

13. Ibid., 147-151.

14. Ibid., 151.

15. Ibid., 153.

16. J. P. Moreland has highlighted many other evidences that mental and physical events are not identical. These include: mental events, unlike physical events, are known and experienced only by the person having them; mental events, unlike physical events, have no parts; only mental events can be vague or pleasurable; one only has direct access to one’s mental states but physical states can be accessed by multiple people; and mental states, unlike the physical, are necessarily owned by a specific person. See: James Porter Moreland, The Soul: How We Know It's Real and Why It Matters (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2014) 80-81.

December 20, 2021

The Case That Our Moral Knowledge Points Toward God: Part 1

December 20, 2021/ Zach Breitenbach

INTRODUCTION

This is the first article in a series on how one might offer several different moral arguments that all (1) focus on our knowledge of moral truth and (2) reinforce each other so that their joint force is even stronger than the force of each individual argument.[1] There are different kinds of moral arguments for the existence of God. Some aim to show that God is needed for objective moral truth to exist; others focus on the advantage that God offers for justifying other aspects of morality, such as: moral knowledge, moral transformation, or moral rationality. This series of articles focuses specifically on three well-known arguments for God’s existence that have to do with our moral knowledge. I will make the case that these arguments, while different, are complementary. After examining each argument, the series concludes by offering a strategy for how they can be used in conjunction so that they reinforce each other. In this first article of the series, I examine Mark Linville’s “Argument from Evolutionary Naturalism” (AEN), which is similar to an argument given by Alvin Plantinga.

THE ARGUMENTS OF MARK LINVILLE AND ALVIN PLANTINGA

Mark Linville’s AEN is a deductive argument which aims to show that naturalism is false because evolutionary naturalism (EN) undermines any basis for humans having moral knowledge, yet we seem to have moral knowledge.[2] Since Darwinian evolution is the “only game in town” for naturalists in terms of accounting for the diversity of biological life, Linville justifiably lumps evolution and naturalism together.[3] Linville is hardly the first to make the claim that EN cannot justify moral knowledge; many secular ethicists recognize this,[4] and a number of theists, like Linville, have also reached this conclusion—perhaps none more notable than Alvin Plantinga. Let us first examine Linville’s argument and then compare it with Plantinga’s. Linville argues:

(1) If EN is true, then human morality is a by-product of natural selection.

(2) If human morality is a by-product of natural selection, then there is no moral knowledge.

(3) There is moral knowledge.

(4) Therefore, EN is false.[5]

Premise (1) contends that through the process of natural selection we have evolved with a sort of programming to hold moral beliefs that are conducive to survival. Morality is crucial to our “survival and reproductive success,” so we cannot think it is independent of natural selection. All rational moral deliberation must be within the boundaries of that programming.[6] Linville points out that Darwin himself held that our moral programming would have been much different had we evolved under different conditions; if humans had evolved under the sort of conditions in which hive-bees evolved, then “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.”[7] If EN were true, we surely could not escape the bounds of our evolutionary moral programming. So we should accept (1).

Premise (2) recognizes that just because our moral beliefs help us to survive, that does not require that the beliefs track any moral truth. The evolutionary processes involved in the development of our moral beliefs are independent of these beliefs being true, and if EN were true then a plausible account of our moral beliefs can be given by appealing to the survival value of us holding them.[8] This means that “our moral beliefs are without warrant” and “do not amount to knowledge.”[9] By contrast, a theist can appeal to God’s design of our minds to recognize moral truth, providing a basis to justify our moral knowledge. Premise (3) holds that we do seem to have genuine moral knowledge, thus (4) concludes that EN is false.

Alvin Plantinga’s argument is slightly different. While Linville argues that, if EN were true, our moral knowledge would be aimed at adaptiveness for survival, Plantinga emphasizes the adaptiveness of our behavior and argues that all of our beliefs are unimportant apart from their being consistent with adaptive behavior. In a world where EN is true, our beliefs essentially go along for the ride, and their truth or falsity makes no difference so long as they do not get in the way of adaptive behaviors. Plantinga’s argument is that we have reason to doubt the reliability of our “cognitive faculties” (e.g., memory, perception, sympathy, introspection, induction, moral sense).[10] What EN ensures is that we behave in ways that lead to survival and reproduction; thus, the role of our cognitive faculties is not producing true beliefs, but instead “contributing to survival by getting the body parts in the right place.” Natural selection guarantees adaptive behavior, but why think our cognitive faculties produce true beliefs?[11]

Plantinga’s argument goes as follows. Premise (P1) holds that “the conditional probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable, given [EN], is low.”[12] Premise (P2) is that “anyone who accepts (believes)” EN and also realizes that (P1) is true “has a defeater for” thinking that her cognitive faculties are reliable.[13] Premise (P3) then states that “anyone who has a defeater for [the reliability of her cognitive faculties] has a defeater for any other belief she thinks she has, including [EN] itself.”[14] (If one’s cognitive faculties are unreliable, then all beliefs produced by them—which are all of one’s beliefs—are unreliable.) Finally, Premise (P4) concludes that: “If one who accepts [EN] thereby acquires a defeater for [EN], [EN] is self-defeating and can’t be rationally accepted.”[15]

Clearly (P1) is the crucial premise. Linville notes that many intuitively find Plantinga’s first premise implausible because “the link between true belief and adaptive behavior” seems credible when it comes to nonmoral behaviors, such as hunting for food. Linville prefers the more modest claim that EN only calls into question our moral beliefs because the adaptive success of many nonmoral behaviors seem to be tied to the truth of our beliefs.[16]

Despite Linville’s concern, Plantinga makes a solid case for P1. Plantinga recognizes that most of us assume our cognitive faculties are mostly reliable. But “the naturalist has a powerful reason against this assumption, and should give it up” if he also accepts evolution. When a frog eats an insect, it does not matter what the frog believes or whether those beliefs are true so long as the frog engages in the right behavior to eat the insect and thus survive.[17] In response to the sort of concern raised by Linville that “true beliefs will facilitate adaptive action” better than false beliefs, Plantinga agrees but contends that it is “irrelevant” because “we are not asking about how things are, but about what things would be like if both evolution and naturalism (construed as including materialism) were true.”[18] Plantinga is not arguing that our cognitive faculties are unreliable in the actual world; he is only arguing that they would be unreliable if EN were true. Moreover, no test could demonstrate the reliability of one’s cognitive faculties because such a test would require the use of one’s cognitive faculties. Plantinga rightly concludes that “this defeater, therefore, can’t be defeated.”[19]

If Plantinga’s argument succeeds, then it expands the scope of the knowledge problem faced by EN beyond Linville’s argument: All of our beliefs are dubious. Next time, we will look at a second kind of moral knowledge argument.

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

2. Naturalism is the view that the natural world is all that exists (i.e., there is no God or supernatural realm). Evolutionary naturalism is the view that both naturalism and Darwinian evolution are true.

3. Mark Linville, “The Moral Argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, eds. William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2009), 392-395.

4. Ibid., 393. Secular ethicists such as E. O. Wilson and Michael Ruse have similarly concluded that EN reduces ethics to an illusion and requires that any belief we have that we are apprehending some real and objective moral truth is merely a “useful fiction” that has survival benefits.

5. Ibid., 394-398. On pages 397-398, Linville frames the argument he laid out on page 394 in epistemic terms by modifying Premises (2) and (3) to refer to “moral knowledge” rather than “moral facts.”

6. Ibid., 400-403.

7. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed. (New York: D. Appleton & Co, 1882), 99.

8. Linville, “The Moral Argument,” 394-398.

9. Ibid., 397.

10. Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 311-312.

11. Ibid., 315-316.

12. Ibid., 317.

13. Ibid., 340.

14. Ibid., 343.

15. Ibid., 344.

16. Linville, “The Moral Argument,” 408.

17. Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 328.

18. Ibid., 335.

19. Ibid., 346.

March 24, 2021

Reasons to Accept the Empty Tomb

March 24, 2021/ Brian Chilton

Gary Habermas is no stranger to those who study the historicity of Jesus’s resurrection. He is a world-renowned scholar on the resurrection who serves as a Research Scholar who teaches in the Ph.D. program in Theology and Apologetics at Liberty University’s School of Divinity. Habermas’s claim to fame is his six minimal facts concerning the resurrection of Jesus. His minimal facts are not the only facts available to defend the resurrection. However, they do serve as the six facts that over 90% of historical scholars accept as valid. Surprising to some, he also adds a seventh minimal fact which holds greater than 75% acceptance among historical scholars. The seventh minimal fact is that the tomb was discovered to be empty on the first Easter Sunday.[1] Yet, one may ask, is there any evidence that the tomb was discovered empty on the first Easter Sunday?

The historian holds solid historical reasons to accept the empty tomb as a historical fact. Stemming from the research I conducted in one of Habermas’s classes, I would like to submit to you twelve reasons to accept that the disciples discovered the tomb to be empty on the first Easter Sunday morning.

1. The Gospel was first preached in Jerusalem, the very place where Jesus was crucified, which would have made it easy for an inquirer to check the tomb. If a person desired to invent a story, the last place they would tell the story would be in the very location where the event supposedly occurred. The enemies of Jesus would only need to check the tomb to see if it was empty.

2. If Jesus’s disciples had only hallucinated, Jesus’s body would have still been in the tomb.[2] Because Jesus’s body was never retrieved and Christianity continued, then one must assume that the tomb of Jesus was empty. Hallucinations cannot account for an empty tomb.

3. The message that Jesus had risen from the dead is extremely early. The creed of 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 dates early (within months to a couple of years after Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection) and to the Jerusalem church.[3] Given that the resurrection message began in Jerusalem and that it began early, people could have easily checked to see if the tomb was empty. Some may inquire, “Would the people have known where the tomb was located?” To answer that question, see the next point.

4. Joseph of Arimathea was a popular person in first-century Israel. Being a prominent member of the Sanhedrin (Mk. 15:43), everyone would have known where his tomb was located, and where Jesus’s body was placed. Remember, the crucifixion of Jesus was a very public event. The tomb was not found very far from the crucifixion site.

5. That women were reported to be the first to have seen the tomb empty strengthens the case for an empty tomb as the testimony of women was not trusted as much as the testimony of men.[4] This has been mentioned before, and for good reason. The women’s testimony not only strengthens the resurrection message, but their testimony also intensifies the validity that the tomb was found empty.

6. Jewish authorities did not respond to the claim that Jesus’s tomb was empty. Rather, they concocted a rebuttal which argued that the disciples stole the body (Mt. 28:11-15). Ironically, their rebuttal actually strengthens the claim that the tomb was found empty.[5] Why concoct a story that the body of Jesus had been stolen if the body of Jesus was placed in a shallow grave, as suggested by John Dominick Crossan, or still remained entombed?

7. The early creeds of Acts 13:29-31 and Acts 13:36-37 indicate more clearly than 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 that Jesus was buried in a tomb, raised, and appeared without experiencing bodily decay.[6] The book of Acts contains sermon summaries that are almost as early as the 1 Corinthians 15 creed—depending on the date given to the creed. These texts denote that the body of Jesus was no longer found in the tomb.

8. Historian Paul Meier indicates that two or three sources render a historical fact “unimpeachable.”[7] The empty tomb is verified in four sources Mark, M (Matthew), John, and L (Luke),[8] with 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 and Acts 13’s sermon summary adding two more. Historically, the more sources one holds, the greater probability that the event in question occurred. In this case, at least 6 sources suggest that the tomb was empty, doubling what historians would call “unimpeachable.”

9. The Jewish and Roman leaders never produced a body which at least implies an empty tomb.[9] If they were opposed to Christianity and possessed the body, why would they not expose it? Even if the Jews wouldn’t, the Romans would squelch what would be perceived as a new uprising.

10. While the empty tomb does not enjoy unanimous support from scholarship, a strong majority still consider the empty tomb hypothesis valid including Michael Grant, James D. G. Dunn, and Thomas Torrance.[10] Habermas notes that over one-hundred contemporary scholars accept at least some of the arguments for the empty tomb.[11]

11. The story of Jesus’s burial is simple without any form of theological development. Its simplicity argues for the empty tomb’s authenticity.[12] Signs of legendary development are simply not found in the empty tomb hypothesis.

12. The resurrection story and the empty tomb are part of the pre-Markan passion story which is extremely early which precludes any time for legendary development.[13] Legendary claims do not apply to the empty tomb hypothesis. This suggests that the tomb was not something that came later in the Christian story but was rather found at ground zero.

Conclusion

The twelve points noted in this article are not the only lines of defense that could be construed. However, they strongly indicate that the story of the empty tomb was not something that developed over time, but it was rather a component that accompanied the earliest stories of the Messiah’s resurrection. Perhaps time will see more contemporary scholars accepting and adopting the empty tomb as part of the historian’s scholarly consensus. But even if they do not, 75% of the scholarly agreement is strong. Furthermore, the historical data concerning the empty tomb hypothesis cannot simply be ignored. No matter the consensus of agreement, the empty tomb is as steadfast a historical fact of antiquity as any other. If the Church of the Holy Sepulchre contains the actual burial place of Jesus, then not only can it be known that Jesus’s tomb was found empty, but it can also be visited. If people realized that the tomb was literally found empty, then maybe churches wouldn’t.

About the Author

Brian G. Chilton is the founder of BellatorChristi.com, the host of The Bellator Christi Podcast, and the author of the Layman’s Manual on Christian Apologetics. Brian is a Ph.D. Candidate of the Theology and Apologetics program at Liberty University. He received his Master of Divinity in Theology from Liberty University (with high distinction); his Bachelor of Science in Religious Studies and Philosophy from Gardner-Webb University (with honors); and received certification in Christian Apologetics from Biola University. Brian is enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Theology and Apologetics at Liberty University and is a member of the Evangelical Theological Society and the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Brian has served in pastoral ministry for nearly 20 years. He currently serves as a clinical chaplain.

https://www.amazon.com/Laymans-Manual-Christian-Apologetics-Essentials/dp/1532697104

[1] Gary R. Habermas, The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ (Joplin, MO: College Press, 1996), 158.

[2] Gary R. Habermas, The Risen Jesus & Future Hope (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 11.

[3] Michael R. Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove; Nottingham, U.K.: IVP; Apollos, 2010), 227-228.

[4] Habermas, 23.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Paul L. Maier, In the Fullness of Time: A Historian Looks at Christmas, Easter, and the Early Church (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1997), 197.

[8] Habermas, 23.

[9] Ibid., 25.

[10] Ibid., 24.

[11] Ibid., 45, fn127.

[12] William Lane Craig, “The Empty Tomb of Jesus,” In Defense of Miracles: A Comprehensive Case for God’s Action in History, R. Douglas Geivett and Gary R. Habermas, eds (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 1997), 250.

[13] Ibid., 254.

December 14, 2020

Making Sense of Morality: Shifts from the Scientific Revolution

December 14, 2020/ R. Scott Smith

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

Introduction

Like we have seen with Thomas Aquinas, the Scholastics’ Aristotelianism in the Middle Ages stressed metaphysics, especially real, immaterial, and universal qualities. This applied not only to human nature, but also to virtues and moral principles. As universals, many particular, individual humans can exemplify the very same quality (a one-in-many).

The Shift

With this stress upon universals and their essential natures, Aristotelianism lent itself to a more a priori (in-principle), deductive approach to science. But, this position started to shift with William of Ockham (d. 1347). Ockham rejected universals, and in its place embraced nominalism. Unlike universals, nominalism maintains that everything is particular. For instance, while we may speak of the virtue of justice, each instance of justice is particular, and they do not share literally the identical quality. Now, Plato’s universals, which held that universals (or forms) themselves are not located in space and time, and this would fit with their being immaterial. But, nominalism rejects that view. On it, all particulars are located in space and time. That implies that they are material and sense perceptible.

About two and one-half centuries later, two key philosophers in the early modern period, Pierre Gassendi (d. 1655) and Thomas Hobbes (d. 1679), embraced nominalism. Gassendi also revived Democritus’ atomism, on which the material world is made up of atoms in the void. Hobbes and Gassendi also adopted a mechanical view of the universe: it is a large-scale machine, and so are the things within it. These views shift away the reality of immaterial things and embrace instead materialism.

These philosophers helped set a basis for natural philosophy (science) in the emerging modern era. Johannes Kepler (d. 1630) adopted the mechanical view, and scientists such as Francis Bacon (d. 1626), Galileo Galilei (d. 1642), Robert Boyle (d. 1691), and Isaac Newton (d. 1727) endorsed mechanical atomism. Yet, there was a key difference in the atomism of this period from that of Democritus. Probably due to the influence of Christianity in Europe in this time, people tended to think that atomism applied only to the material realm, but not the spiritual one. They still had room for the reality of minds, souls, angels, and God.

The qualities of matter (e.g., size, shape, quantity, and location) were thought to be primary qualities. In contrast, the qualities of the spiritual realm (e.g., colors, tastes, or odors) were considered to be secondary qualities. Secondary qualities either were subjective qualities in the mind of an observer, or words that people used. In other words, they did not exist objectively.

Here, we must note something of immense importance. It was not scientific discoveries which drove this shift away from universals and a dualistic view of reality. Instead, it largely was due to the adoption of philosophical theories, namely, nominalism and mechanical atomism.

The Rise of a New Scientific Methodology

What is the significance of this shift? Boyle illustrates it well; he thought secondary qualities and Aristotelian universals were unintelligible due to what he conceived to be real in the material world. Of course, that conception was informed deeply by mechanical atomism and nominalism.

Instead of the Aristotelian paradigm, a new scientific methodology developed. It stressed empirical observation of particular, material things. On the new paradigm, things did not have essences that necessitated certain causal effects. Instead, the new scientific methodology focused on contingent causes and induction. While Aristotelianism had encountered empirical problems (e.g., the discovery of new species of which he did not know), the new methodology provided an advancement. Instead of relying overly on metaphysical theories, it emphasized the importance of empirical observation of the world.

Conclusion

These shifts in the nature of what is real, and how we know it, became deeply entrenched, and they affected ethics too. Next, I will look at Hobbes’s ethics. The key question will be: can his ethics preserve core morals?

For Further Reading

Alan Chalmers, “Atomism from the 17th to the 20th Century,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/atomism-modern/

Eva Del Soldato, “Natural Philosophy in the Renaissance,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natphil-ren/.

Galileo Galilei, Il Saggiatore [The Assayer], in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo. https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/h291/assayer.htm#_ftn19. Jürgen Klein, “Francis Bacon.” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/francis-bacon/

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

More from this series

Making Sense of Morality: Where Do We Go from Here?

Making Sense of Morality: A Brief Assessment of MacIntyre’s Ethics

Making Sense of Morality: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Ethics

Making Sense of Morality: An Introduction to Postmodernism

Making Sense of Morality: A Brief Assessment of Critical Theory

Making Sense of Morality: Liberation, Feminist, & Queer Ethics

Making Sense of Morality: Critical Theory Overview

Making Sense of Morality: Problems with Naturalism 3

Making Sense of Morality: Problems with Naturalism 2

Making Sense of Morality: Problems with Naturalism I

Making Sense of Morality: Wielenberg’s Naturalistic Ethics

Making Sense of Morality: Singer’s Ethics

Making Sense of Morality: John Rawls’s Ethics

Making Sense of Morality: Christine Korsgaard’s Naturalistic Ethics

Making Sense of Morality: Naturalism and Objectivist Ethics

Making Sense of Morality: Naturalism and Moral Cognitivist Options: Subjectivism

Making Sense of Morality: An Introduction to Naturalism

Making Sense of Morality: Bentham, Mill, and Utilitarianism

Making Sense of Morality: Shifts from the Scientific Revolution

Making Sense of Morality: Islamic Ethics

Making Sense of Morality: Plato and Aristotle

Making Sense of Morality: Judeo-Christian Ethics

November 09, 2020

Making Sense of Morality: Introduction

November 09, 2020/ R. Scott Smith

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

Our Moral Landscape

Today, in the west, we live in a time with many different moral “voices” and competing claims. When I was a graduate student in Religion and Social Ethics at the University of Southern California from 1995-2000, this was quickly apparent. Many of my fellow grad students rejected any kind of objectively real morals. Instead, they saw morals as their own construct, which were based on a wide range of preferred views. One person, a Reformed Jew, tried to integrate her religious tradition with the insights of Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism and the sociology of knowledge. Many rejected their Catholic roots and instead embraced some form of critical theory, which is deeply liberationist in spirit. Some followed Foucault and queer theory, while others embraced Nietzsche. Still others followed various feminist theorists.

Like them, many people think morality is simply “up to us”; morals are just particular to individuals or communities. Indeed, they are deeply suspicious of any claims that there are morals that transcend and exist independently of us. They think that to impose others’ morals, including “objective” ones, on people is deeply imperialistic and oppressive. After all, who are you to say what is right or wrong?

There also are different social visions that align with these moral viewpoints. For example, progressives seem to be secular, such that morals for society should be based on secular, public reasons, not narrow, sectarian, or religious reasons. Otherwise, how could we come together and be a society in which there are so many different, private moral visions?

Shaping Influences

Now, for those influenced by western thought, and especially those who have grown up in the west, it easily can seem that not only is this moral diversity the way things are, but also the way things should be. After all, in the west (and especially the U. S.), we prize the value of autonomy, which we understand as being free to determine our own lives. Coupled with the view that morals are basically “up to us,” we should expect there to be an irreducible plurality of viewpoints, norms, and values.

Over time, in the west a large number of competing moral theories have been advanced. But these did not come out of a vacuum. They have a history with many shaping influences, leading even to the mindset that morals are up to us. One of the things I will do in this series is to explore those shaping factors. Two of them are the Scientific Revolution, and the “fact-value split” in the late 1700s.

Core Morals

Despite this great plurality of ethical views, it still seems there are at least some core morals all people simply know to be valid. For instance, people want justice to be done. They may disagree about what constitutes justice, or their theories about justice. But, it seems people know that justice is good and should be done. Love is another virtue people know to be good. They may disagree about what the loving action should be, but they still seem to agree that we should be loving.

Besides these virtues, there are some principles that people simply seem to know are right. For instance, it seems people simply know murder is wrong. While some may disagree about what act should count as murder, nevertheless, we know that murder (as the intentional taking of an innocent person’s life) is wrong. I would add that rape is wrong too. These four morals seem to be core –we simply seem to know they are valid.

Some might add other moral principles and values to that short list. For example, for many, it is clear that genocide and chattel slavery are wrong. In this series, I will focus on those four core morals. I will look at the various types of ethical views in western historical context, to see if they can preserve those core morals. If a theory cannot do that, then it seems we should reject it. In that process, a key question I will ask is this: what kind of thing are these core morals? But, before I start that survey, I will explore the influences from the Scientific Revolution on our ethical thinking.

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

September 21, 2020

Moral Apologetics and Biography, Part I

September 21, 2020/ David Baggett

When I was in graduate school, a very good teacher of mine once suggested that I “purge the personal” from my work. It was generally good advice, which I tried to follow, and I was appreciative of his insight. It is indeed often best to do so as we strive to write about a topic objectively and dispassionately. But when it comes to moral apologetics, it is not always easy or even possible for me and others to do so at a distance, and sometimes it does well for us to consider some of the reasons why.

So in series of short posts I intend to discuss moral apologetics and various ways in which it has reverberated in my life and the lives of others. This is important, I suspect, for several reasons, one of which is this. In order for something like morality to be taken as importantly evidential in a person’s life, something about morality must seem especially striking. Unlike a geometric proof that need not engage one’s affective or imaginative sides (though for some it may), the moral argument, to have purchase in a person’s life, likely requires a requisite prior experience of goodness. Likewise with an aesthetic apologetic, requiring enough prior experience of beauty. Goodness and Beauty are quite analogous in this way, which makes a great deal of sense if anything in the vicinity of Plato’s view is right that they are practically flip sides of the same coin. Both of these “Transcendentals” are deeply experiential realities.[1]

The anecdotes in this post, then, are designed to illuminate an aspect of moral apologetics that logically and often chronologically precedes close examination of a formal moral argument. These are the sorts of experiences that prepare the ground, as it were, make fertile the soil of our hearts and minds to hear the argument and feel its force. Perhaps the reason why some remain largely unmoved by the moral argument is that they lack the requisite experience of goodness, and as a result the argument lacks purchase for them. In the same way some raised without a loving father in their life have a harder time believing in a loving Heavenly Father—while, interestingly, some with missing or unloving parents naturally gravitate to a loving God like a ravenous man to a delicious meal.

Acknowledging the contours of our personal stories is not the same as reducing questions of evidence to psychology. It’s rather simply to apprehend how various aspects of our past have helped shape us, sometimes giving us eyes with which to discern what’s there, and sometimes serving as blinders or obstructions impeding our vision. Just as good intellectual habits make more likely our acquisition of truth, and a rule of reason is a bad one that prevents us from discerning truth and evidence that are really there, likewise our formative experiences can either help or hinder our quest for reality.

In my own life story, three episodes in particular stand out as shaping my vocation as a natural theologian and moral apologist. One is that I was a child of the holiness tradition. To this day I can still smell the sawdust trails of camp meetings from my earliest years. We often attended more than one camp meeting a year, and any summer season I now experience bereft of a visit to camp meeting strikes me as emaciated somehow. A few years ago Marybeth and I wrote a history of a camp meeting in Michigan I attended for many years, and it started like this:

Eaton Rapids Camp Meeting has touched my life profoundly. One of my earliest memories, in fact, was looking high into the air at the windows near the top of the tabernacle. It was after an evening service, if my faint memory serves, and I must have been herded back to the main auditorium after the youth service was done. People were milling about and darting in various directions. I still recall seeing some tables set up with various advertisements (likely from Bible schools and the like) at the back of the tabernacle, and the outstanding impression I experienced at that age was the sheer enormity of the structure. It was simple but elegant—it seemed well-nigh ornate to me—with doors propped up all around its perimeter. Its capacious wooden canopy was enough to mesmerize my imagination for quite some time. I am guessing I was around five or six years of age. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was smack dab in the center of a vintage piece of classic Americana. This was camp meeting, in Eaton Rapids, Michigan, and it was, to my best guess, 1971 or 1972.[2]

Camp meeting shaped my soul. I had been taught many of the same things in church, of course, but camp meeting was like church on steroids, and it drove home a great many lessons. God is love, for example—essentially, perfectly love—and God desires the very best for each of us. He loves us enough to send Jesus to die for us. God does not merely want us to believe in him, or treat him like a miracle dispenser to bail us out of trouble. He want us to know him, find our vocation in him, and love him. God’s grace is sufficient for us, and enough both to forgive for our committed sins, and deliver us from our condition of sinfulness.

Longtime Asbury College president Dennis Kinlaw once wrote that even our good deeds, done for Christ and in his strength, can be tinged with self-centered self-interest that permeates the depths of our psyches and defiles even our best. “This raises the question of a clean heart and of an undivided heart full of the love of God…. That is why the experience of a clean heart and of a perfect love for God is often described as ‘a second work of grace.’ The identification of this need in the believer’s life and the provision in Christ for a pure heart is the special mission of the camp meeting.”[3]

When Kinlaw was in his nineties, Marybeth and I went to visit him in Wilmore and were able to pummel him with questions for a few hours. Still sharp as a tack, he regaled us with stories as college president, presiding over the famous 1970 revival at Asbury, pastor, professor, administrator, camp meeting preacher. He was an eminently impressive person, just brilliant, but something about him struck me as particularly interesting. He didn’t point to his tenure as college president as central to his identity, nor his PhD in Old Testament from Brandeis, but to an experience he had as a thirteen year old boy at Indian Springs Camp Meeting in Georgia. In the twilight of his life, with the benefit of all the hindsight afforded a 90-year-old man, he pointed to those altar experiences he had as a boy, when he met God in person—under the preaching of another longtime Asbury college president, its founder Henry Morrison, no less—as what was at the heart of who he was. More than anything else from his experiences, that was what he saw as defining him.

My next post will discuss a second feature of my childhood that softened my heart and opened my mind to the moral argument.

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

[1] Readers are strongly encouraged to listen to David Horner’s remarkable talk “Too Good Not to be True,” accessible here: https://www.moralapologetics.com/wordpress/video-too-good-not-to-be-true-the-shape-of-moral-apologetics-david-horner.

[2] David & Marybeth Baggett, At the Bend of the River Grand (Wilmore, KY: Emeth Press, 2016), xi.

[3] Ibid., 265.

More from this series

Oct 19, 2020

Moral Apologetics and Biography, Part II

Oct 19, 2020

Sep 21, 2020

Moral Apologetics and Biography, Part I

Sep 21, 2020

Articles

1. People’s reactions to the Smith incident show their conviction that a moral law has been violated:

2. Without a Moral Law, There Are No Moral Grounds for Disagreement Over Smith’s Actions:

3. The Smith Incident Demonstrates the Depth of Conviction in Objective Moral Values and Moral Duties:

1. What is the Issue?

1.1. How do we determine who is correct?

1.2. Considering All the Evidence For and Against Theism

2. Objections to Theistic Explanations of Objective Morality

2.1. The Euthyphro Dilemma

2.2. Competing Supernatural Explanations

3. Objections to Atheistic Explanations of Objective Morality

3.1. Evolutionary Debunking Arguments

3.2. Responses to Evolutionary Debunking Arguments

3.2.1. Our Moral Beliefs Are Accurate

3.2.2. Our Moral Beliefs Did Not Come from Evolution

3.2.3. Erik Wielenberg’s Third Factor Model

3.2.4. The Modal Security Response

Footnotes

By Roberto Sirvent and Duncan Reyburn

Introduction

The Shift

The Rise of a New Scientific Methodology

Conclusion

For Further Reading

Our Moral Landscape

Shaping Influences

Core Morals

Moral Apologetics

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