In his bestselling book, the God Delusion, Richard Dawkin’s responds to the question: “If there is no God, Why be good?” Posed like that, the question sounds positively ignoble. When a religious person puts it to me in this way (and many of them do), my immediate temptation is to issue the following challenge: ‘Do you really mean […]
Entries Tagged as 'Philosophy of Religion'
Dawkin’s dilemma: How not to answer the question “Why Be Moral?”
January 21st, 2021 Comments Off on Dawkin’s dilemma: How not to answer the question “Why Be Moral?”
Tags: God and Morality · Henry Sidgwick · Richard Dawkins · The God Delusion · Thomas Reid · Why be Moral?
The question “Why Be Moral?” and the book of Proverbs.
January 12th, 2021 1 Comment
I gave a brief talk at Orewa Community Church on 10 January 2020. The talk was part of a short series OCC are doing on the book of proverbs. It is available here.
The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory: Presentation
December 15th, 2020 Comments Off on The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory: Presentation
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHhmuqBW6Dw”>dialogue
Last year, I presented a talk entitled “The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory: Another Reply to Erik Wielenberg” to the New Zealand Association of Philosophers conference in Auckland. This was a follow up to interaction I have had with the work of Erik Wielenberg. In 2017 I wrote a critical response to Wielenberg’s book Robust […]
Tags: Divine Command Theory · Erik Wielenberg · Psychopath Objection · Wes Morriston · William Lane Craig
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
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 […]
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
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.
