Michael Egnor: Snarky, Arrogant, Confused, and Full of Errors
The moral argument is not a simple knock-down argument against atheism
“For an atheist, denying God’s existence appears to be more important than consistency, logic and evidence,” proclaims Michael Egnor in a short, confused screed about morality, in which he claims that atheists can’t believe in objective morality. What makes this particularly notable is the confidence with which he utters the claim — as Egnor often does for false claims — combined with the paucity of real argument.
Egnor argues (allegedly — his vapid claims seem to be as far from argument as pluto is from the sun) that there must be a god for there to be objective morality. He disregards all criticisms of theistic morality — the real problems with arbitrariness that come from morality being merely the whims or arbitrary character traits of a divine despot, euthyphro’s dilemma, modified euthyphro’s dilemmas about whether god acts for reasons, the fact that theistic metaethics must posit as brute the moral fact that we should follow gods command which is no less parsimonious than positing atheistic moral realism, and the fact that it misidentifies facts about morality for it’s clearly not god’s disapproval that made the holocaust immoral, it’s facts about the suffering caused — to proclaim that theistic meta-ethics is correct and atheistic meta-ethics is insoluble.
What argument does he give for such a strong conclusion, which should allegedly lead us to conclude that the atheist must deny consistency, logic, and evidence? The closest he gets to an argument is as follows
Of course, if a value judgement prevails over other human value judgements, there must be Someone whose opinion is Objective Moral Law. There must be a Law-Giver. That is the one whom all men call God.
But he gives no argument for the claim that a value judgment that prevails over human judgment must be someone’s judgment. Indeed, it is antithetical to the notion of judgment-independent moral facts that morality depends entirely on the judgments of some entity. The problem with false moral views like cultural relativism isn’t that they say that morality depends on human judgments — it’s instead that they depend on judgments. No one’s judgments could make it true that tormenting people is good, that pain is worth seeking out and pleasure worth avoiding. No individual, culture, or divine whimsical despot — who’s morality has no external tether, for morality is allegedly entirely dictated by their beliefs — can declare right wrong and wrong right.
Egnor gives no reason to think that we can’t have laws without law givers. The moral “law,” just like mathematical laws, requires no lawgiver. The word law is ambiguous. It can mean law as in a written legal document that clearly requires a progenitor — but that’s not what the moral law means. If it just means a description of things, that doesn’t require a lawgiver.
In fact, morality is the type of thing that can’t have a lawgiver. With the laws of physics, there are at least possible worlds in which it has a lawgiver. But the same isn’t true of morality — there is no possible world in which lawgivers deliver the moral law, because the moral law is necessary, true in all possible worlds, and is fully uncaused, much like the mathematical facts.
Egnor next makes a gesture in the direction of the is/ought problem — treating it as a damning objection to atheistic morality with no argument. Egnor also can’t get an ought from an is — he just thinks there are irreducible oughts; one always ought to follow god’s command. But the atheist can think that too! In each case, we just posit irreducible moral facts — the theist has no advantage there.
But if one is a moral naturalist, they think that moral facts are a type of natural fact. If that’s true, you can get an ought from an is — ought facts are a type of is fact. So no one should be troubled by the is/ought problem — if you’re a non-naturalist an ought doesn’t come from an is but there are irreducible ought facts; if you’re a naturalist oughts are a type of is statements so they can come from an is. Egnor next bizarrely proclaims
Myers, as you might expect, is a moral scold, which is odd, coming from an atheist who by definition denies any Source for objective moral standards.
Egnor just tries to shoehorn in by definition the claim that atheists don’t believe in objective morality. This is absurd — I’m an atheist and I believe in objective morality. He gives no reason at all to think this — he just declares that it’s part of the definition, clearly falsely.
Egnor’s article is really quite a dud. He asserts with no coherent argument that atheists can’t have objective morality. He then just assumes that god given morality is cogent and is a satisfactory moral model while examining no challenges to it. This is not how good philosophy is done. It makes sense to compare various theories and accounts given, rather than falsely assume that there’s no account given. Egnor seems pathologically incapable of comparing various models or providing genuinely hard-to-answer critiques. He’s a testament to the tendency for people to not call out their own side, to champion those who are merely snarky yet say nothing that is even remotely impressive, and nothing that should move the views of even a single person.
> The moral “law,” just like mathematical laws, requires no lawgiver.
Someone had to come up with the axioms of math. And the justification for those at bottom is purely instrumental: Having axioms that seem to always work is pretty darn convenient.
> because the moral law is necessary, true in all possible worlds, and is fully uncaused, much like the mathematical facts.
This is just an assertion. Everything is just an assertion. Nothing is true! Woe is truth.
Thanks for the Post.