Yesterday, I was informed that the book Problems in Value Theory An Introduction to Contemporary Debates has finally been published. The book is now available both on amazon on Bloomsbury’s website. Chapter 3 of this book “Does Morality Depend on God?” is co-authored by myself and Graham Oppy (Monash University). Both Graham and I each wrote […]
Entries Tagged as 'Ethics'
Problems in Value Theory An Introduction to Contemporary Debates: My Chapter with Graham Oppy is finally published
February 10th, 2020 Comments Off on Problems in Value Theory An Introduction to Contemporary Debates: My Chapter with Graham Oppy is finally published
Tags: Divine Command Theory · God and Morality · Graham Oppy
Divine Command Theory: answering classic and contemporary objections
February 3rd, 2020 Comments Off on Divine Command Theory: answering classic and contemporary objections
Last week Jordan Hampton from Crash Course Apologetics interviewed me about chapters 12-13 of my book Did God Really Command Genocide. In this is the section of the book, I discuss divine command metaethics and critique some of the most important objections raised against divine command theories. The interview is nearly two and a half hours long. We […]
Tags: Arbitrariness Objection · Divine Command Theory · Erik Wielenberg · God and Morality · Michael Tooley · Russ Shafer Landau · Sam Harris · Wes Morriston
The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory: Another Response to Erik Wielenberg (Part three)
October 8th, 2019 Comments Off on The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory: Another Response to Erik Wielenberg (Part three)
In Part One, I expounded the Psychopath objection to divine command meta-ethics (DCM) that has recently been defended by Erik Wielenberg. Wielenberg argues as follows: R1) If God commands a person S to do act A, this command imposes an obligation on S to do A, only if S is capable of recognising the requirement […]
Tags: C Stephen Evans · Erik Wielenberg · Psychopathy · Robert Adams
The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory: Another Response to Erik Wielenberg (Part two)
September 11th, 2019 Comments Off on The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory: Another Response to Erik Wielenberg (Part two)
In my last post, I expounded the Psychopath objection to divine command meta-ethics (DCM) that has recently been defended by Erik Wielenberg. To recap. Wielenberg suggests that my response to his earlier “reasonable unbeliever’s objection” relies on the following principle: R) God commands person S to do act A only if S is capable of […]
Tags: C Stephen Evans · Divine Command Theory · Erik Wielenberg · God and Morality · Wes Morriston
The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory: Another Response to Erik Wielenberg (part one)
September 3rd, 2019 Comments Off on The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory: Another Response to Erik Wielenberg (part one)
Recently, Erik Wielenberg has developed a novel objection to divine command meta-ethics (DCM). DCM “has the implausible implication that psychopaths have no moral obligations and hence their evil acts, no matter how evil, are morally permissible” (Wielenberg (2008), 1). Wielenberg develops this argument in response to some criticisms of his earlier work. One of the […]
Tags: C Stephen Evans · Divine Command Theory · Erik Wielenberg · God and Morality · Psychopathy · Robert Adams · William Lane Craig
FETICIDE IN CHRISTIAN MORAL THOUGHT (Part Four) : Feticide in the Reformed Protestant Tradition
May 28th, 2019 Comments Off on FETICIDE IN CHRISTIAN MORAL THOUGHT (Part Four) : Feticide in the Reformed Protestant Tradition
In our last post we saw how Medieval Christian’s adopted the same position on abortion we saw developed in Alexandrian Judaism and by Patristic theologians. We also saw how this position found its way into European and English law. Of course during the medieval period, Christian’s in Europe were Catholic. However, during the sixteenth and […]
Tags: Abortion · Feticide · John Calvin · Martin Luther · Melanchthon · Puritans · William Gouge

A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.





IS A FETUS A HUMAN BEING? Part one: Viability
June 7th, 2019 1 Comment
This is one of a series of posts based on a class I teach for level 3 NCEA Religious Studies. In the last few posts we saw that most of the Christian religious tradition sketched the following argument against feticide; Premise [1] Killing a human being without justification violates the law of God. Premise [2] […]
Tags: Abortion · David Oderberg · Feticide · Michael Tooley · Peter Singer · Susan Sherwin · Viability