I recently had a conversation with another co-worker about how objective morality points to God’s existence. He was an evolutionary naturalist–someone who believes that nature is all that exists. They believe that somehow our universe and life accidentally came into existence by chance, and that humans have evolved accidentally from those events. Nothing exists outside of time and space, and everything in our universe is composed of matter.
He was confident that we developed our morality through the evolutionary process, but he was also sure that morality was objective–true independent of what we think or feel. He said morality is not subjective–a belief that is based on our feelings and personal preference. I had the opportunity to explain some major challenges to this theory, and how it better makes sense to understand the objectivity of morality by positing God’s existence.
Could this be true? If God doesn’t exist, could objective moral values and duties still exist? In the previous article (Part 1), I laid out a basic deductive model of the moral argument that points to God’s existence due to the reality of objective morality.
In this article (Part 2), I am going to briefly review some alternative non-theistic moral theories that fail to account for all of the moral facts which theism (belief in God) best explains. These theories fall into two main categories: Non-naturalism and Evolutionary naturalism. Non-naturalism says that morality is objectively real, but that it exists independent of humans in abstract ways. Evolutionary naturalism (moral naturalism) says that morality is objectively real, and that it exists within natural properties which is dependent upon humans.
Objective Morality Without God?
Some might be surprised to find that many theistic philosophers believe moral truths exist necessarily and are independent of God. These moral truths are said to exist, even if God doesn’t, and therefore do not need an explanation. Because moral truths are defined as necessary truths, they are said to exist with or without God. A necessary truth is something like 2 + 2 = 4, or a square has four sides. Prominent philosopher Richard Swinburne holds a view like this.
Swinburne explains his concept of the moral “is such that it makes no sense to suppose both that there is a world W in which a is wrong and a world W* exactly the same as W except that in W* a is good.”[1]
In other words, there is no possible world[2] in which an action a, such as rape, would be morally good, even a world in which God doesn’t exist; hence, necessary moral truths exist. This means God is not needed to ground morality or be its foundation. Rape would always be wrong with or without God.
Swinburne also believes that “the existence and commands of God make acting morally always more important and sometimes very much more important than it would otherwise be.”[3]
However, as I mentioned in Part 1, classical theism holds to the “God of Anselm” who is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good and is metaphysically necessary for our existence. It’s impossible for God not to exist, and there has never been a time in which he began to exist, nor will there be a time in which he ceases to exist. If God didn’t exist, how could our universe exist? God is the grounding source for all of reality and sustains its existence every moment.
Philosopher William Lane Craig and others have argued that God is a necessary truth which is explanatorily prior to necessary moral truths. Because morality is derived from God and God exists in every possible world, then it follows that moral truths will exist in every possible world (he explains that necessary truths can have asymmetrical relations of explanatory priority; for example, it’s necessarily true that “states of consciousness exist,” since “God exists,” or that it’s necessarily true that “mathematics is possible” because “numbers exist”).[4]
Moral truths exist necessarily, precisely because God exists. Craig notes that in classical theism there is no possible world in which God fails to exist since he’s a metaphysically necessary being, and because “his character is essential to him, there is no world in which moral values fail to exist.”[5]
Brute Facts?
Brute facts are facts that have no explanation. Could moral truths just be brute facts within a godless universe? Many atheists believe that objective moral values exist without God. Some atheist philosophers have claimed that murder is objectively wrong because it hurts people, and no further explanation is needed. Full stop. But is this an adequate explanation?
To say that a wrong action is what makes something wrong, is still in need of an explanation! Simply stating an obvious moral fact about a wrong action is not enough to provide an adequate explanation for why the action is truly wrong.
But what would be the ontological (being or existence of something) source to ground these objective moral values? They can’t be reduced to the physical, so they would have to transcend our material realm. This is why some philosophers believe moral truths can only exist if God is there to make them exist.
Moreover, if these moral values are not grounded in a mind and are not personal, then how can they interact with us? As philosopher Douglas Groothuis points out, “They cannot communicate their truth to humans through any kind of intentional cognitive agency.”[6] In other words, it makes a lot more sense to have these values rooted in a personal mind, i.e. God, who can choose to communicate these truths into our mind.
In order to make sense of this dilemma, many moral philosophers who do not believe that God exists, but do believe objective morality exists, have appealed to Moral Platonism in order to provide a foundation and grounding source for objective moral values and duties. They are called non-naturalists because they appeal to abstract objects which are not a part of our natural world and exist independently of God and humans.
Atheistic Moral Platonism (Non-Naturalism) Fails
Abstract objects are a strange concept in philosophy, so I’m going to do my best to simplify and briefly explain them.
Philosophers usually classify objects as either concrete or abstract. Concrete objects are material things like humans, cats, bananas, and so on. Abstract objects, however, do not exist in time or space. They are immaterial entities that are just as real as you and I. For example, if you counted 3 cats in a room, you would have 3 concrete objects, but there would also be an abstract object called the number “3” representing the 3 cats.
So, if abstract objects exist, numbers would be considered abstract objects. Or if you had a concrete object like a banana, then you would also have an abstract object, such as the property “Yellowness.” Or if a person unjustly takes the life of another and justice is served in a court of law, then there would be an abstract object called “Justice.” These are non-material objects; we obviously can’t bump into the property “Yellowness.”
Because abstract objects do not stand in causal relation to concrete objects, the Atheistic Moral Platonist has a very difficult job in trying to make sense of how these abstract objects can interact with our lives. For example, the number “9” cannot cause me to do anything.
Craig gives a good reason to think that abstract objects don’t exist. He points out that Justice seems to exist only if persons exist because persons can be just–but how can Justice be just? That seems illogical. He notes,
“Curiously, since the abstract object Justice is not itself just, it would seem to follow that in the absence of any people justice does not exist…. Atheistic Moral Platonists seem to lack any adequate foundation in reality for moral values but just leave them floating in an unintelligible way.”[7]
Let’s imagine for a second that the Atheistic Moral Platonists are right, and that abstract objects do exist. If these things did exist, how are they able to interact with us? How can they directly attach themselves to our physical state of affairs? How does the mysterious non-physical and non-personal property of moral badness link itself to a person cheating on an exam?
In his debate with Eric Wielenberg (Atheistic Moral Platonist), Craig emphasizes the implausibility of abstract objects attaching themselves to physical situations. This is because abstract objects are non-agents, so it is implausible to suggest they can somehow select the correct actions to assign the appropriate value to.
However, Wielenberg claims physical objects cause abstract objects to supervene on physical situations.[8] But how can a physical object somehow reach out to causally connect to some transcended isolated abstract object?
Again, suppose abstract objects did exist; on what basis am I obligated to obey them? They can’t prescribe our moral duties and what we ought to do in certain situations. What about abstract objects like Love or Forgiveness? When it comes to my moral duties, what authority do they have over my life?
What if I rather obey the abstract objects like Hatred or Bitterness instead? A lot of people seem to choose the latter. It’s very strange to think abstract and impersonal things can somehow provide a foundation for objective moral values and duties.
Abstract Objects and Physical Determinism Don’t Mix
Another predicament the Atheistic Moral Platonist faces concerns physical determinism. If God doesn’t exist, then we have accidentally evolved from a blind, unguided, and random process determined by the laws of physics. If we are all causally determined to perform every action, then how do abstract moral objects correlate to what we do?
In a deterministic framework, we cannot make free moral choices (in the libertarian sense). Moreover, just because certain actions, say, a person helping an elderly lady load groceries into her car, align with certain moral principles, it does not entail that the person made a free moral choice to perform this kind act.
Notable philosophers David Baggett and Jerry Walls note,
“If the determinists are right, we couldn’t have done differently, ever. And if we do behave in accord with morality, it is because of physiological causes in our brain, not because of the persuasive power of abstract entities.”[9]
Evolutionary Naturalism (Naturalism) Fails
An Evolutionary Naturalist is someone who believes that everything in the universe is composed of physical particles, meaning nothing exists beyond the physical universe. They would deny the existence of abstract objects and reject non-natural theories like Moral Platonism. I’ve already explained many problems that naturalism faces when trying to account for objective moral values and duties in Part 1, but I want to cover a few more difficulties their theory faces.
There are evolutionary naturalists who are also moral realists. They believe that our moral values and duties are objective (true independent of our thoughts). These moral naturalists, whom I will refer to interchangeably as evolutionary naturalists and naturalists, will often claim what humans call “morality,” really originated within primates from our evolutionary past.
They say we exhibit the same behavior as our primate ancestors and that we’re merely social primates. To them, objective morality is created in our daily interactions and grounded in our emotions. Can we really ground objective morality in these things?
To say something is “grounded” means there is a source that accounts for the existence of something else; i.e., language is grounded in humans. If morality is not grounded, then they would be brute facts (facts with no explanation) which I’ve already showed to be problematic.
Naturalists will claim that certain actions and psychological conditioning can lead us to behave ethically, but they do not provide an adequate foundation for this behavior to be grounded in. Providing descriptions of behavior that you find attractive and attributing it to evolutionary processes, does nothing to address what makes morality objectively true, nor explain how we intuitively sense the binding prescriptive forces for our moral duties.
On naturalism, humans do not possess intrinsic value, rather, it’s extrinsic and instrumental. An ontological (nature of existence or being) foundation which can act as a grounding source is needed to make humans intrinsically valuable and to account for the objectivity of our moral values and duties.
If moral values and duties are not objective and do not transcend humanity, then morality is subjective (matter of preference and opinion), because there is not an ontologically existing thing apart from humanity that we can reference as our ultimate standard. It would be dependent upon humans for its existence.
So, if we have evolved to create our own morality, then what is the grounding source for it? It would be our brains, so it’s mind-dependent and not a necessary truth. It can be reduced to parts and pieces within our cognitive faculties, which means if we didn’t exist, then morality wouldn’t exist because it’s rooted in ourselves; therefore, it is subjective and not true independent of ourselves.
However, the evidence shows that morality is true independent of what any person thinks or feels, meaning it’s objective. In order for this objective morality to exist within reality and be true independent from our brains, it requires its own grounding involving a separate ontological (being) foundation.
For example, child sex-trafficking is objectively wrong, regardless of anyone’s thoughts or feelings about it. Suppose the entire world was somehow brainwashed into thinking this activity was good, and it even became legalized and everyone was doing it; we still know this is hideous and objectively wrong. Our feelings are irrelevant to the truth value of the proposition.
However, our brains can’t produce an inescapable, universal, authoritative and objective thing like moral values and duties, because it already has its own ontology (being) independent from our own. So, if we did invent morality, it couldn’t exist within reality in an objective way. Moreland and Craig explain,
“When something comes-to-be, it does not get a partial foothold in existence, and slide into being until it is fully real.”[10]
Just because we’ve evolved to conceptualize certain principles, does not mean it can somehow objectively exist within reality.
So, had we evolved in a different way, we could have evolved to hold different moral beliefs since they are subjective and not objective. What if our entire species evolved to believe that bestiality and incest were okay? Our species could still go on to thrive because it would specifically be geared towards pleasure and not reproduction. Or what about enjoying the feeling of torturing other animals for fun? This would just be part of our evolved moral beliefs.
What an absurd thing to think, because we know innately–no matter how we have evolved–doing such actions is beyond hideous. But in order to actually make these things hideous, morality would need some kind of objectivity that requires it to be true that in every case it is morally wrong to do those things.
So, in order for objective moral values to exist, there needs to be an ontological foundation that makes it objectively true independent of what humans think. This foundation would be the perfectly good nature of God. He is the Good we’re referencing, which means God and goodness are ontologically inseparable.
Although I’ve already mentioned this in Part 1, it’s worth reminding that even if naturalism could somehow account for objective moral values, it still cannot answer the question of what grounds our moral duties. Just because something is good, does not mean that I have a duty to perform it. It may be good that you volunteer at a homeless shelter 3 days per week, but you are not obligated to do so, and if you don’t, you are not blameworthy for failing to do it.
Evolutionary naturalism cannot provide authoritative, prescriptively binding moral obligations, and this is why some naturalists have looked to ethical contracts to help solve this dilemma.
Social Contracts Fail
A social contract is an ethical/moral framework that society creates in order to promote human flourishing and social harmony. This was my co-worker’s position. He believed that we somehow came to produce objective morality through a type of social contract as we evolved to live more civilly. Some naturalists claim that moral facts are real but mind-dependent, yet they insist they’re still objective.
There’s a major problem with this moral theory, though. Baggett and Walls explain,
“Even if, for example, something that externally looks like a social contract could be empirically verified in the earliest recognizable moral communities, the question of what makes something morally right or wrong has not been answered.”[11]
The naturalist is using moral language, but there is no real substance or adequate foundation beneath that moral language.
In other words, descriptions of our behavior and what we do, are not the same as the objectivity of prescriptions for what we should do. This view is missing explanatory power and scope for the major features of morality that we all experience, especially concerning our moral duties. These social contracts lack the binding authority that creates genuine remorse/guilt in our lives for when we fail to perform certain duties, regardless of your culture.
Now, someone could argue that this is evidence that a universal and objectively true moral law exists unrelated to human-made social contracts, and that humans have simply evolved to discover this objective moral law, rather than inventing it; and so humans went on to make ethical contracts based on that transcendent law.
But then, the naturalist would have to give up her naturalism and become a non-naturalist, because that theory would involve a universal law that is not found within time and space and doesn’t depend on humans for its existence. Regardless, another problem remains for each scenario: They still cannot adequately account for objective moral obligations/duties.
In moral philosophy, in order for someone to be morally obligated to do something, there must be a strong and overriding reason to do it. To best understand this, many theistic moral philosophers see our moral duties coming from a qualified authority involving a law-like system, meaning we’re guilty for violating them.
This would be the Divine Lawgiver, i.e., God. C. Stephen Evans holds to this view and explains that moral obligations are peculiar in that they don’t simply give good reasons for someone to perform X, but rather that one must do X without consideration and is blameworthy for failing to do so.[12]
Superficial Obligations Are Not Enough
On a social contract view, at most, you only have superficial obligations that have been agreed upon by a group in order to benefit society within the social contract, but it hasn’t explained the objectivity of authoritative, prescriptively binding moral duties that forcefully emerge within ourselves during certain ought moments we experience.
Why do we have this innate sense to help those who cannot return the favor? Why do we feel so compelled to sacrifice our own resources for someone we’ve never met in a different part of the world? These people are not part of our herd and are outside of our social contract.
My brother does incredible missionary work in Panama, and he has shown videos of very poor people in villages that he’s helping. When he shows these videos in churches, people are moved by compassion to help these impoverished souls they’ve never met and will sacrificially give their own resources to help them.
I have been moved by these videos as well. Does that mean my causally determined brain is simply reacting to the images, and now my animal instincts are leading me to give aid only to perpetuate the survival of my species? Or is something much deeper going on here?
Additionally, human-made social contracts cannot adequately explain why we would be willing to endanger our lives to help others. This isn’t merely a herd instinct like we see in other animal species. Instead, humans can contemplate the decision and then act sacrificially. It is deeper than an animal’s reaction to a potential threat to protect the colony, pack or herd.
Why do we feel guilt for failing to perform certain moral duties? Social contracts cannot account for this. There are many who have been raised in a part of the world where their social contract was developed to promote stealing from others so they can flourish and preserve their herd; yet, many of these individuals who have left their society will testify that they felt guilty for committing some of those actions despite their culture’s endorsement of it. Why would they feel remorse for doing what they’ve been taught is good and right from their earliest years of life?
Moral wrongness is seen as a binding duty that restricts someone from doing certain things, but human-made ethical contracts cannot adequately provide the moral authority needed here. What if I want to steal something from the store? Suppose I hardly have any money, but I need that particular item which I cannot get anywhere else. Even if I have reasons not to steal it, say, because it brings minor distress to the owner’s inventory, that does not mean it was morally wrong. Philosopher Richard Joyce notes,
“It is very hard to see how naturalistic facts could possibly provide the inescapable authority we apparently expect and require of moral values.”[13]
What if thousands of people decide to break a good contractual agreement they made with society? This happens regularly across the globe. Are they no longer obligated to perform certain duties? What gives a different social group with various beliefs the right to legislate laws and regulations that oppose my beliefs and human rights?
These evolutionary naturalists cannot provide a proper grounding source for objective moral values and duties because contracts continuously change, meaning they are not objective. There would have to be multiple moral frameworks developed by multiple social groups in various parts of society and the world.
By definition, those contracts cannot be objective or universal, and they lack the proper authority to produce objective moral duties that we sense within us. They can use the same moral language, but there is no real foundation beneath it.
Suppose Moral Truths Do Exist: How Can We Identify Them Through Natural Selection?
Many moral philosophers have acknowledged the problem that evolutionary naturalists have in justifying our moral beliefs and understanding how we could have obtained moral knowledge based on natural selection, which is a blind unguided process of random mutations that is aimed at survival rather than discovering moral truths.
Just because we can discover truths of the physical world, does not entail we can do the same with moral truths. It may very well be that in our biological development geared towards reproduction, we may have missed important moral facts along the way. Our brains weren’t tracking them, and we don’t need moral knowledge to perpetuate our species. “Might can make right,” or at least it has for other civilizations throughout millennia.
On evolutionary naturalism, my brain is a bundle of physical particles and neurochemicals that are determined by the laws of physics. If I have evolved to survive, how do I know I have also evolved to gain accurate knowledge of moral truths? This means that many of our current moral beliefs are false! It’s hard to believe on evolutionary naturalism that our moral beliefs are justified.
Atheist philosopher Sharon Street is a moral skeptic who argues that we cannot have knowledge of moral truths on evolutionary naturalism, because our moral beliefs were not aimed at truth, but rather at survival which doesn’t entail moral truths.[14]
Joyce is also skeptical that evolution can grant us the ability to recognize moral truths, and he believes we have evolved in such a way that we can’t have moral knowledge. He explains,
“We have no reason to think in the case of the moral sense that natural selection is likely to have produced true beliefs.”[15]
Many philosophers believe that evolutionary naturalism can’t explain how our moral beliefs correlate with the relevant moral truths–even if those truths exist–which means we have no justification for our moral beliefs nor knowledge of objective moral truths.[16]
Even if we did have justification for moral knowledge and our brains somehow evolved to track moral truths, we still don’t have a good explanation for how this could be possible on evolutionary naturalism. Baggett and Walls point out that humans all over the world possess moral knowledge, but having moral knowledge is not the same as explaining how with the resources available in a person’s worldview, which demonstrates theism to be the worldview with greater explanatory power and scope.[17]
Again, Theism Just Makes Sense
In my previous article (Part 1), I ended it with “Theism just makes sense,” and the conclusion remains the same for this article. Theism just makes sense of all the moral data pertaining to the discussion.
After briefly reviewing how Atheistic Moral Platonism and Evolutionary Naturalism lack the explanatory scope and power needed to adequately explain all of the unique features of morality, we can find satisfaction in a theistic framework which affords us these explanations and makes much better sense of the data.
We can argue with a logically airtight deductive argument (Craig), or take an abductive approach by making an inference to the best explanation (Baggett and Walls). But either way, theism is the solution to the moral dilemma that non-theists struggle with.
Theism provides a robust understanding of how objective moral values and duties can be grounded in a concrete reality. This makes sense because this concrete reality, i.e. personal God, has the ability to interact with other concrete realities, i.e. human persons.
It just doesn’t make sense to think abstract objects are interacting with concrete ones. It also doesn’t make sense to think that natural properties can somehow ground objective morality, or that we somehow caused it to come into being via our brains through evolutionary naturalism.
Theism best explains the objectivity of moral values and duties. This is possible because moral values are grounded in the perfect nature of God since he is the Maximally Great Being and the Ultimate Good; and our moral duties are grounded in God’s commands which align with, and flow from, his perfect nature.
And why shouldn’t we obey the commands of an infinitely wise, good, and powerful being? We owe our very existence to him! God is sustaining our universe and everything in it (including you) this very moment.
Many theistic moral philosophers hold to some form of Divine Command Theory (DCT), which I have written an article on here. In my opinion, DCT makes the best sense of all the data we’re considering, and it will give you a deeper understanding of how God can be the foundation for objective moral values and duties.
With this information, it wasn’t very difficult explaining to my co-worker that on naturalism, it is highly unlikely that we can have objective moral values and duties. It doesn’t seem possible that moral truths could be brute facts, or that morality is grounded in non-natural properties like abstract objects, or natural properties like our emotions, social contracts, and our brains. By the way, my co-worker abandoned his former belief and accepted my argument. After more discussions, he eventually came to believe in the God of Christianity. Now, he’s getting closer to accepting Christ. Amen!
Lastly, on theism, we can have justification for our moral beliefs and knowledge because God has created us in his image with reliable cognitive faculties and minds that could track moral truths and know them intuitively. God has revealed them to us through our conscience because the moral law has been “written on our hearts” (Romans 2:14-15). God has also given general commands to humanity which constitute as our moral duties, and special revelation which has been implemented into societies, preserved, and passed down to us today.
The idea of moral accountability is another piece of evidence that can be used for the moral argument which I have written on here.
Blessings,
Andrew Drinkard
[1] Richard Swinburne, What Difference Does God Make to Morality?, in Robert K. Garcia, and Nathan L. King, Is Goodness without God Good Enough?: A Debate on Faith, Secularism, and Ethics (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009), 152.
[2] Possible worlds are what philosophers use as tools of thought to contemplate what other realities could possibly hold if they were true, but they cannot include logically impossible scenarios. It is not actually referring to other physical worlds, such as Earth 2, 3, 4, and so on. For example, there could be a possible world in which I am 6’6” tall instead of 5’9”; but there can’t be a world where I am 6’6” and 5’9” tall, at the same time and in the same sense, because that is logically impossible.
[3] Swinburne, What Difference Does God Make to Morality?, 157.
[4] William Lane Craig, The Most Gruesome of Guests, in Robert K. Garcia, and Nathan L. King, Is Goodness without God Good Enough?: A Debate on Faith, Secularism, and Ethics (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009), 170.
[5] Craig, The Most Gruesome of Guests, 170.
[6] Douglas R. Groothuis, Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2011), 359.
[7] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, 3rd ed (Wheaton: Crossway Publishing, 2008), 178.
[8] William Lane Craig and Eric Wielenberg, “God and Morality,” Reasonable Faith, February 23, 2018, accessed September 12, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHhmuqBW6Dw&t=6840s.
[9] David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 24.
[10] J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations For A Christian Worldview, (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2003), 193.
[11] David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 163.
[12] C. Stephen Evans, God & Moral Obligation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 26-27.
[13] Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 191.
[14] Baggett and Walls, God and Cosmos, 201.
[15] Joyce, The Evolution of Morality, 182.
[16] Baggett and Walls, God and Cosmos, 202.
[17] Ibid, 293.
