Linville's The Moral Poverty of Evolutionary Naturalism

Here. 

On Kant's Moral Argument

A redated post.

Kant doesn't say that in order to be moral, you have to be religious. He is someone who thinks that other sorts of rational arguments about God don't decide the question either way (first cause arguments, arguments from evil, etc.) So, on his view, we are left with a choice of believing the world to contain a God, of believing in free will or not , and in believing that humans survive death.
On earth as we know it, virtue and happiness are not proportional. Virtuous people are sometimes miserable, nasty people are sometimes happy. (Think of all the murder cases which are never solved.)
Religious world-views presume the existence of a universe in which there is a future life in which happiness is apportioned according to virtue. Whether it is through a last judgment, or through a law of karma that puts you back on this earth either in good shape or in bad shape depending on your deeds, good prevails and evil fails, eventually.
Or you can accept a naturalistic world-view in which there is no mechanism for balancing the cosmic scales of justice. If wrong triumphs in the course of a lifetime, which is certainly seems to, then the story ends, people die, and feed the worms with no recompense for injustice. Hitler and Mother Teresa are in the same condition. They are dead.
The Kantian argument here strikes me as a distant cousin to Pascal's Wager. In Pascal's wager, you are looking at your own prospects, and "betting" on the world-view that pays off better. (Pascal, like Kant, was addressing the undecided. If your belief system is like that of Richard Dawkins, making yourself believe for either Pascalian or Kantian reasons is not an issue). The difference between the Kantian wager and the Pascalian is that you are "betting" on the world-view that will give you the most moral encouragement. You are not just betting on your own self-interest,, as you are in Pascal's Wager. Kant doesn't assume that you can't be moral without God. Pure practical reason tells you what is right and wrong, according to Kant. However, Kant maintains that you since can't settle the question of God any other way, you ought to choose based on the moral encouragement provided by each world-view.

Sometimes being moral is hard. In fact, all actions with moral worth are, according to Kant, done from duty as opposed to being done in accordance with duty, which means that when you do those actions, your inclinations or emotions are pulling you the other way. In other words, perfoming actions of moral worth, like breaking up, is hard to do. Is it more conducive to making the hard moral decisions we have to make to believe that there is no cosmic justice, or to believe that there is cosmic justice. Kant thinks the choice is a no-brainer, practical reason enjoins us to view the world as cosmically just, and therefore to accept the doctrines of God, freedom, and immortality.

Kant's moral argument for God

Here is Kant's version of the moral argument.

The Moral Argument that Christians don't use, but atheists always rebut

Does William Lane Craig ever say that we need to be believers in God to lead moral lives?

Guess what. He does NOT.

This is from the opening speech to his 1996 debate with Doug Jesseph:

Friedrich Nietzsche, the great atheist of the last century who proclaimed the death of God, understood that the death of God meant the destruction of all meaning and value in life. I think that Friedrich Nietzsche was right. But we've got to be very careful here. The question here is not: Must we believe in God in order to live moral lives? I am not claiming that we must. Nor is the question: Can we recognize objective moral values without believing in God? I certainly think that we can. Rather the question is: If God does not exist, do objective moral values exist?


Yet, when I hear atheists talking about moral arguments, they always assume that the advocate of the moral argument is saying that we have to believe in God to lead moral lives, (and indignantly argue that we don't have to believe in God to lead moral lives) in spite of the fact that Christian advocates of moral arguments, at least the ones I am familiar with NEVER say that.

Why?

Moderate scarcity, and secular and religious bases for the moral life

There may be a certain modicum of decent behavior that we need to engage in in order to function socially. But sometimes people have a lot of money thrust into their hands, and so don't have to have the ordinary middle-class pressures. Or one can be very poor and desperate for money. If you are moderately privileged, you need morality to get along, but if you are really poor, you can't afford it, and if you are really rich, you don't need it.

Professional athletes and singing stars often find themselves with a lot of money, power, and acclaim that is beyond their maturity to deal with, and they often wreck their lives because of it. (Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, etc.) Kurt Warner seems to want to use his position for the benefit of others, but he is motivated, quite obviously, by religion.

To sum up, certain situations give us a reason to be moral, but those reasons don't hold up if the situation changes. A belief in moral theism, on the other hand, provides a moral motivation that transcends the situations in which we find ourselves.

Kant's moral argument for God

Suppose you can't decide whether or not God exists. (Kant thinks he has arguments that show that, looking at the world around us, you can't tell one way or the other whether or not there is a God). You therefore have to choose either a theistic world-view in which it is thought that there is a God, there is free will, and there is an everlasting life, or a world in which there is no God, no free will, and when we die we feed the worms. You then ask "Which world-view will best undergird my moral life, the theistic world-view or the atheist world-view?" And Kant concludes that the only rational choice for someone seeking to be moral is to select the theistic world-view.

A quote from Richard Wurmbrand's Tortured For Christ

This is quoted in William Lane Craig's "The Indispensability of Theological Meta-Ethical Foundations for Morality," to which I link.

The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe when man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil. There is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man. The Communist torturers often said, 'There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish.' I have heard one torturer even say, 'I thank God, in whom I don't believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.' He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflected on prisoners.8

Admittedly, persons with that kind of power over others often mistreat them, because they can. But does atheism, or just the failure to recognize God, remove a barrier to human depravity for those who are put in that kind of a power situation.

I realize that we don't have a controlled experiment here.

Lovell on the Euthyphro

The Euthyphro objection keeps showing up, so even though I had it up on a previous site, I am making a special thread to deal with Lovell on the Euthyphro.

More on the moral argument

First of all, I have an argument addressed to people who are moral relativists, but who nonetheless think there are real human rights. That is, on some moral questions, they give all the relativist responses (who's to say?), but when basic human rights are violated, they say that is wrong. I teach ethics classes, and I can tell you there are plenty of people like that. What they don't realize is that the position is logically inconsistent. If the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are absolute, then there is an objective standard of moral value according to which they are absolute. I'm betting that when you point this out to them, they will admit that they believe in objective moral values, as opposed to relativism.

Premise 1 is a little more complex, in there are obviously moral philosophies do not directly ground ethics in God which are nonentheless objective. However, these systems, as I pointed out in a previous post, make metaphysical commitments that conflict with contemporary naturalism, (Plato's forms which we knew in a past life, and recollect now, is a good example, Aristotelian entelechies would be another), and these world-views lend themselves to theistic arguments in a way that contemporary materialism does not. I do think that attempting to work out these metaphysical systems in a consistent way is going to lead one at least in the direction of theism.

Objects in a naturalistic world are not supposed to have moral properties. That is ruled out by any reasonable definition of naturalism. Particle arrangements are just not going to get you there.

So if we accept the idea of objectively binding human rights, we reduce the number of world-views which are acceptable, and enhance the probability of theism, on which the existence of these values can be easily understood.

A moral argument for God

Here is a moral argument I have developed, based on some ideas that I have presented here earlier.

1. Probably, if there is no God, then there cannot be objective moral values.

2. If there are no objective moral values, then there are no inalienable human rights. A society could either give people rights or not given them rights. In some societies it is considered permissible to enslave other persons. In some societies old people are exposed to death. In still others women are treated like chattel. Unless there are objective moral values, then there are no absolute rights that people in these societies are trampling upon.

3. But these people do have rights, whether their society recognizes those rights or not.

4. From 3 and 2, we must conclude that there are objecctive moral values.

5. 1 and 4, we must conclude that, probably, God exists.

Robert Adams on Moral Arguments for God

This is a classic essay, and a personal favorite.

Stanford Encyclopedia Article on Moral Arguments for Theism

Kant's moral argument for God

A redated post. The link it to a philosophy of religion information site.

Suppose you have been trying to decide whether to believe in God or not and you can't figure it out. The philosopher Immanuel Kant thought that we are all in that situation. Kant argued that we must then choose the beliefs that will best facilitate our efforts to be moral persons, and he argued that a world-view with an infinite future ahead of us, a world-view where our choices are really up to us, and a world-view that sees the world governed by a moral God is preferable from that standpoint that a world-view where we die and rot, where the scales of justice are not balanced in the end. So if our goal is to be moral, then given a choice, we should believe in God.

Is Kant right about this?

On the Queerness of Morality

Perhaps one way of making sense of the "queerness" argument is this. Suppose you are a materialist. That is, what you believe is that everything that is real has a particular location in space and time, and that if a state is real it is a state of physical particles or a conglomeration of physical particles. Thus although the word "planet" does not occur in basic physics, it is a bunch of physical particles put together, and given some arrangement of physical particles, you can't deny that you have a planet there. But what about a "morally wrong act." It looks as if nothing about the physical world can entail that something, even a sadistic, cold-blooded Jeffrey Dahmer killing, is really wrong. Wrongness can't be added up from basic physical particles the way planethood can. Therefore, if materialism is true, there can't be any moral facts.

This of course can run in two directions.

1. If physicalism is true, then there can be no moral facts.
2. Physicalism is true.
3. Therefore, there are no moral facts.

or

1. If physicalism is true, then there can be no moral facts.
2. There are moral facts.
3. Therefore physicalism is false.

an attack on the idea of natural rights

Here's an argument against Jefferson's claim that we have inalienable rights.
Natural Rights Don't Exist

The Argument from Inalienable Rights

This is a redated post from a couple of years ago.

In the series on inalienable human rights, I have been working on the possibility of a moral argument for theism based on the idea that we have inalienable human rights. The argument is a spinoff of a more typical type of moral argument, found in people like C. S. Lewis and C. Stephen Evans, which goes as follows:

1. (Probably) unless there is a God, there cannot be objectively binding moral obligations.
2. But there are objectively binding moral obligations.
3. Therefore (probably) there is a God.

Now, why do I introduce the idea of inalienable rights? Because I think some people who might be inclined to deny premise 2 in the argument might be strongly inclined to accept the idea that we have inalienable rights. And because the Declaration of Independence says that we have these rights in virtue of our having been created equal.

Now I think I can use successfully argue that someone who rejects 2 must reject Jefferson's statement that we have inalienable rights. What Jefferson is claiming is that is that if the King deprives a citizen of life, liberty, or the opportunity to pursue happiness, if the laws of the State permit the king to do this, and the king gets away with it and goes unpunished, the king nevertheless has acted wrongly. It implies that there is a "natural law" over and above the laws of the state or the decrees of the king.

Perhaps the first time we see this kind of a claim made is in story of David and Bathsheba. David impregnates Bathsheba, arranges her husband Uriah's death in battle, and then admits Bathsheba to his harem. The prophet Nathan gets David to admit that he violated Uriah's rights and therefore deserved to die, based on the claim that the law of God stands above the acts of the king. In polytheistic countries, no such Divine law would have been recognized. The king would have arranged a neck operation for Nathan's foolish effrontery, and that would have been the end of it. What sets David apart from other kings of the time is not the fact that he took the woman he wanted, but that he recognized a law above his own decrees.

Do natural inalienable rights exist if atheism is true? To borrow J. L. Mackie's terminology, this seems to be a queer kind of fact to exist in a naturalistic universe. Typically naturalists claim that what is true about the world can be discovered by some variant of the natural sciences. Physics looks at the really basic stuff, chemistry looks at chemically bonded physical stuff, biology looks at living systems of matter, psychology looks at living systems when they have mental states, sociology looks at systems of creatures with mental states as the relate to one another socially. It's hard to see how anything discoverable by any of these sciences entails the claim that we have inalienable human rights.

So it seems to be that a theistic argument could be forumated as follows;

1. (Probably) unless there is a God, there cannot be inalienable human rights.
2. There are inalienable human rights.
Therefore 3. (Probably) there is a God.

But of course the argument can go the other way. Someone could use the following argument:
1. same as above
2. There is not God.
Therefore 3. Probably there are no inalienable human rights. See the Wallace article I reference in the previous post.

We hold these truths to be self-evident

I am redating this post as well.

This is one of two posts I did last February, redating so as to come up on the blog now.

Perhaps some of the best-known words from our American heritage are the words from the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain Inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

But, if you are an atheist, there is no Creator, so we couldn't be created equal. Advanced thinker that he was for his time, TJ seems to have imbibed some creationist nonsense. Hence to reflect what an atheist really believes, it would have to be rewritten as follows:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men have evolved equally, and that they are endowed by Evolution with certain Inalienable Rights, that among these are Life , Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But thus altered, isn't this statement howlingly false? Evolution doesn't make people equal, it doesn't endow anyone with inalienable rights, and among these is certainly not life, or liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.

I'm not going to argue that atheists are bad citizens. But my question is what sense an atheist can make of these statements in the Preamble. Doesn't it conflict, profoundly, with what an atheist believes?

We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident Part II

we hold these truths II post Redating this post once again.

And here is the other post. Please make note of the referenced paper by Steve Lovell on this one. I made the link to Lovell's site under "link". The other link to him on this page is broken. Since Euthyphro keeps coming up here, Lovell answer is once again required reading.

I took the passage from the Declaration of Independence because I am convinced that it captures some powerful moral intuitions that all of us have (at least we Americans and others who live in democratic countries). I realize even those who have those moral intuitions fail sometimes to fully act out their commitment to those intuitions; witness Jefferson himself with respect to slavery. (I have read that he went before Congress and denied his affair with Sally Hemmings. Somehow whenever I try to picture that, I keep coming up with a wagging index finger and an Arkansas accent. But I digress.) However, these intuitions seem to imply at least deism, and it looks as if the deism required, while it might (as it did for Jefferson) exclude miraculous intervention of the type we find in the Resurrection, it does require God to have enough providential control over the world to "endow" us with inalienable rights. The "Deism" of the founding fathers, from what I have read of them allows for providential governance of human affairs, even if it does not allow for miracles.

The fact that, as the Un-Apologetic Atheist reminds us, he was attacking divine right monarchy, doesn't change the ontological commitments of the actual statement. Fat George would no doubt have actually replied that he ruled by divine right; he could easily have replied, if that had been his position, that it's a dog eat dog world and he's top dog. As an old chess friend of mine used to say, "Might does not make right, but might does what it wants to."

It would take a considerable amount of evidence to show that Jefferson did not intend the references to a Creator to be taken literally. Rakshasas perhaps has such evidence, or someone else does. I haven't seen it. I don't know how the "lexical force" of Jefferson's statements are going to work if the ontolgoical commitments of the assertion are incorrect.

UAA's rewrite of Jefferson's argument therefore must be a revision of what he said; it suggests that we have rights just in virtue of the fact that we exist. You now have to supplant the reasons given in Jefferson's statement for why we have these rights with some other reasons.

Careful examination of the concept of a right, for starters, implies the existence of an objectively binding moral obligation. Think about it. When the police say "You have the right to remain silent," it implies that the police are under an absolutely binding moral obligation not to beat a confession out of the suspect. Othewise, the right does not exist. But objective moral values are denied by many modern atheists. Consider Michael Ruse, for example:

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 they 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 . . . .

Michael Ruse, "Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics," in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 262, 268-9.

Now if you are an ethical subjectivist, it seems to me that you have to say that Jefferson was just wrong when he said we have inalienable rights. So at least some (but surely not all) atheists would have to say this, people like Bertrand Russell (see previous post), J. L. Mackie, and Ruse. But if that is what an atheist believes, then he should be honest enough to say so. As I discussed in my previous post on moral objectivity, people are sometimes inclined to be subjectivists in considering highly controversial, vexed issues, not realizing that this implies that the claim "We have inalienable rights" comes out false.

Now, in response to Chris, I never said that only theists have a claim to morality. What I did say was that apparently in this statement Jefferson explains the existence of our inalienable rights in terms of our having been created in such a way as to possess them. Of course agnostics and atheists have had plenty to say about ethics, but it simply doesn't follow that what they had to say is consistent with atheism. Atheists can be ethical; they often have and live by moral values, they write about morality, but nevertheless it might be still true that if atheism of the naturalistic variety is true, there cannot be objective moral values.

Second, I am not especially persuaded by Euthypro-style arguments--see the Lovell paper you linked by the title.

Stanford Encyclopedia on Moral Relativism

Craig vs. Kai Nielsen on Moral Values

This is a debate between Bill Craig and Kai Nielsen on morality and objective moral values.