Why I Don't Buy The Moral Argument

Moral facts need God like fish need bicycles

Earlier today, I chatted with writer, theologian, and Christian apologist Gavin Ortlund, about hell. I thought it was a very good conversation (one hell of a conversation, one might say), quite worth watching. We’ll be chatting again at some point, largely about the moral argument, so I thought it would be worth explaining why I don’t think the moral argument works.

Before I explain that, it’s worth noting that there are arguments for theism about morality that I think do, in fact, work. I think, for example, that the argument from moral knowledge is quite convincing. Our knowledge more broadly of the various non-natural facts is better explained by theism than atheism. There’s even an argument from infinite ethics that I might unveil soon that I think, while not the best argument in the world, might be okay.

I do not think, however, that the traditional moral argument is remotely successful. The argument generally is syllogized in the following way:

1. If there is no God, objective moral values and duties do not exist.

2. But objective moral values and duties do exist.

3. Therefore, God exists.

I accept premise 2, but I don’t think that premise 1 is remotely plausible. Lots of people seem to think there’s some special feature of atheism that entails moral nihilism. But I don’t know what that would be. The atheist who accepts modal, mathematical, and logical truths will accept that there are some non-natural facts with some foundation. Whatever explanation there is for those facts, there is also for the moral facts. Some facts are not just facts about the physical world.

This is the view I hold. It’s a broadly non-naturalist picture of normativity. But if one is a moral naturalist, then they also have a perfectly good solution—they think the moral facts are a species of natural fact. If so, then the mystery of how there can be good while theism is false isn’t any more difficult than the mystery of how there can be trees. If moral facts are just a species of physical fact, then it’s not hard to see how they can be deduced from various other physical facts.

Premise 1 also is just super implausible. Suppose you found out that God didn’t exist. Would that really make torture no longer wrong? It doesn’t seem so.

So for this reason, I reject premise 1. In fact, proving premise 1 would seem to require a fairly extraordinary task—going through, in detail, all the naturalistic proposals for grounding normativity and showing that none succeed. No one has, to the best of my knowledge, undertaken this momentous task. Apologists like Frank Turek forego this, preferring to shout platitudes about moist robots (okay, here I’m just talking about Frank Turek).

But I think the most fundamental problem with the argument is that God doesn’t provide a satisfactory grounding for morality. If there is a God, then God requires morality, not the other way around. This is for four basic reasons.

First, moral features seem to be intrinsic to a situation. If we ask why pain is bad, the reason seems to reside in the qualitative feature of pain, rather than in any external source. The badness of torturing children resides in what it does to the children, not in anyone else’s judgment about child torture. Yet theism locates the badness of pain in some external source—with that source being God. If you think that all you need for torture to be wrong or helping others to be right is the torture or the help, then it can’t be grounded in some external source like God.

You might worry that this same feature avails moral platonism. Doesn’t moral platonism also posit that some external feature—the platonic moral facts—determines the wrongness of various acts. However, as

Richard Y Chappell

has convincingly argued, the platonic moral facts are not what make acts wrong. Rather, they serve to summarize the intrinsic features of the act that make it wrong. The abstract objects are facts about which particular things have intrinsically bad features, rather than what makes acts wrong themselves. If this is right, then atheistic moral realism has an advantage in explaining the moral facts: it locates them in the features of an act itself.

Second, theism has no explanatory advantage. All moral views will have to posit some moral facts that are just brute, with no further explanation. The theist will have to posit the goodness of God as explanatorily brute. If the theist posits that God is good and you should follow his commands, with no deeper explanation, then that has no advantage over positing that, for example, pleasure is good and pain is bad. Thus, as Jeff Lowder has said, this involves explaining the existence of moral facts by brutely positing at least one moral fact.

Third, theism is subject to a version of the Euthyphro’s dilemma. Suppose that God commands some act. Did God have a reason to command it? If so, then morality can be located in external reasons. If not, then it’s objectionably arbitrary.

Theists usually reply by claiming that this is a false dichotomy: it’s good because it corresponds to God’s good nature. Yet suppose that opposing torture is part of God’s nature. Is there a reason for that? If so, then there’s a moral reason outside of God. If not then it’s objectionably arbitrary.

What explanation can the theist who accepts the moral argument give for God having the features he does? Theists who reject the moral argument can explain why God is loving: because it’s good. Yet if God is the good by definition, if all his properties necessarily will be good properties, then the goodness of certain properties can’t explain why God has them. Explanation only goes one way—it can’t be that God is loving because he’s good and love is good because God is loving.

If the good is just whatever God’s nature happens to be, then it seems objectionably arbitrary. Furthermore, it can’t explain why God is loving, psychophysically harmonious, or why he cares about others, because the good is whatever God’s character happens to be. Theism only has explanatory power if we start with a conception of what’s good, and then argue that God explains why there is so much good stuff.

Finally, this view struggles to explain why, even if God is loving, he has those properties necessarily. I think that if God exists, he must be loving because that’s required for goodness. However, defenders of the moral argument can’t go that route, because they think that goodness is grounded in God. Thus, it seems that God’s love on such a view would be incidental properties, like which particular possible worlds of equal value he chooses to create. But only rejection of the moral argument enables one to explain why God is good.

Fourth, I don’t think that God can ground abstract objects at all, for the reasons given here. Theism’s ability to explain morality doesn’t seem any better than its ability to explain the other abstract objects. The argument from morality seems no better than the argument from the truth of mathematical claims or logical claims, for example.

I’m sort of with Michael Huemer on this one. I don’t understand why people think that God has any special ability to ground morality, any more than other things like math or other things that theism obviously doesn’t uniquely explain like chairs. Am I missing something?