In many of his addresses and debates William Lane Craig has defended a Divine Command Theory of moral obligation (“DCT”). In a recent article Walter Sinnott-Armstrong has criticized this contention.[1] Armstrong contends that even if theism is true then a particular form of ethical naturalism is a more plausible account of the nature of moral obligations than a DCT is. This paper critiques Armstrong’s argument.

Craig’s contention
Craig’s contention is that if theism is true then we can plausibly explain the nature of moral obligation by identifying obligations with God’s commands analogous to the way “we explain the nature of water by identifying it with H2O, or explain the nature of heat by identifying it with molecular motion.”[2] By “God” Craig means a necessarily existent, all-powerful, all-knowing, loving and just, immaterial person who created the universe.

This emphasis, both on God as a loving and just being and identifying moral obligations with God’s commands suggests that Craig defends a version of the modified DCT defended by Robert Adams,[3] William Alston[4] and C Stephen Evans[5]. Both Adams and Evans have argued, like Craig, that if God exists then his commands “best fill the role assigned to wrongness by the concept”.[6] Much of Craig’s arguments can be seen as an appropriation and popularisation of Adams.[7]

Armstrong’s Argument from Harm
Armstrong contends that such a position is “incredible”[8], he states:

There is a much more plausible foundation for morality. It seems obvious to me, and to everyone who does not start with peculiarly religious assumptions, that what makes rape morally wrong is the extreme harm that rape causes to rape victims.[9]

We do not need a “new supernatural level” for morality because a natural property, the property of harming others without an adequate reason, fulfils the role assigned to wrongness by the concept better than divine commands do. Armstrong provides two arguments for this conclusion.

(a) The harm account makes moral obligations more objective than a DCT does;

(b) The harm account is more economical than a DCT.

Armstrong contends that his argument refutes, not just Craig, but any theistic account of ethics, “Other theists might try to give better arguments for a religious view of morality. I don’t see how they could avoid all the problems in Craig’s account without leaving traditional Christianity far behind.”[10]

I will address arguments (a) and (b) below. However, it is worth noting that, as stated, Armstrong’s conclusion here misses the point. He contends that everyone who does not start with peculiarly religious assumptions will see that the harm-based account is more plausible than a DCT. But Craig’s contention is that if God exists then a DCT is a plausible account of the nature of moral obligations. Neither Craig nor Adams contend that a DCT is the most plausible theory in the absence of religious assumptions. They contend that a DCT is the more “attractive theory, given those [theistic] beliefs, than any other meta-ethical theory is, given non-theistic beliefs”.[11] Note that this is not the conditional Armstrong addresses in his paper.[12]

Armstrong’s Arguments for the Superiority of the Harm-Account
Turning to Armstrong’s two main arguments in favour of the harm-account:

Objectivity
Armstrong’s first argument is that his harm account of moral obligations makes moral obligations more objective than a DCT does. He distinguishes between two “levels of objectivity”; a strong sense, where the wrongness of an action does not depend on whether anyone thinks or wants it to be wrong, and a weaker sense where the wrongness of an action does not depend on whether we think or want it to be wrong. Armstrong contends that divine commands are objective only in the first sense. God, after all, is “someone”. However, the natural property of causing harm is objective in both senses. Hence, his harm account provides a better explanation of the objectivity of moral obligations.

I will make three comments in response to this.

First, Armstrong’s harm account is not, in fact, more objective than a DCT.  If God exists then natural properties are not objective in the first sense. God is omniscient and is the creator and sustainer of the universe; hence, no natural property exists independently of his beliefs and desires. Natural properties can only be objective in the strong sense if theism is false but Craig is not arguing that a DCT is plausible if theism is false. His claim is that if God exists then there is a sound ontological basis for moral duties.

Second, the property of harming others is not objective in the weak sense either. In a later elaboration of his account Armstrong states that the badness of harm consists in it being “irrational to seek it (or not to avoid it) without an adequate reason”[13] and “to call such acts irrational is then, at least partly, to say that you and other normal people would never advise your friends (or anyone you care about) to do them”.[14] This entails that the badness of harming others, and the reason-giving force of the obligation, depends on what we (normal people) believe and desire and so it is not objective even in Armstrong’s weak sense.

Third, even if Armstrong’s harm account does make moral obligations objective in the strong sense. It does not follow that it is a better explanation of the objectivity of moral obligations. That follows only if strong objectivity is part of the “the role assigned to wrongness by the concept”, and hence, is the type of objectivity an account of moral obligations must explain. However, Armstrong provides no argument for this.[15] Moreover, Adams’ reason for claiming that objectivity is part of this role assigned to moral obligations is that “‘wrong’ has the syntax of an ordinary predicate, and we worry we may be mistaken in our moral judgments”.[16] We worry that, neither we nor society can “eliminate all moral requirements just by not making any demands”[17] and that “what the Nazi’s did to the Jews was horribly wrong whether or not the Nazi’s thought so and it would have been more horribly wrong if they had managed to persuade the Jews that it was not wrong”; these features of the concept only require weak objectivity.

Ockhams Razor
Armstrong’s second argument appealed to Ockham’s Razor; he stated “We should prefer simpler views when we have no reason to complicate matters.” However, “the divine command view adds a new supernatural level to its theory of morality. That added complication brings no benefits for the objectivity of morality”.[18]

In response to this argument I will make three points.

First, it is unclear that in the relevant dialectical context a DCT does violate Ockham’s Razor. Consider a related point by Alvin Plantinga:

Suppose we land a space ship on a planet we know is inhabited by intelligent creatures.  We find something that looks exactly like a stone arrowhead, complete with grooves and indentations made in the process of shaping and sharpening it.  Two possibilities suggest themselves: one, that it acquired these characteristics by way of erosion, let’s say, and the other, that it was intentionally designed and fashioned by the inhabitants.  Someone with a couple of courses in philosophy might suggest that the former hypothesis is to be preferred because it posits fewer entities than the latter.  He’d be wrong, of course; since we already know that the planet contains intelligent creatures, there is no Ockhamistic cost involved in thinking those structures designed.[19] 

Plantinga’s comments are aimed at debate over divine design. But something analogous occurs here. Craig and Adams are assuming for the sake of argument that God and his commands exist and asking what theory best explains the nature of moral obligation given these assumptions. One does not postulate a new supernatural level by explaining obligations in terms of divine commands. Armstrong’s appeal to Ockham’s Razor might[20] have “teeth”[21] if the naturalist and divine command theorist were starting from an agnostic position, and if the divine command theorist postulated the existence of God’s commands to explain the nature of moral obligation.  But Craig and Adams are not doing this.  They are assuming, for the sake of argument, that God and his commands exist and they are then asking which theory best explains the nature of moral obligation given these assumptions.[22]

Second, even if Armstrong’s naturalism is simpler than a DCT, it doesn’t follow it is a better account, all-things-considered. Simplicity is one relevant consideration. Another is which property best fits the role assigned to wrongness by the concept. Armstrong does not provide a reason for thinking his account does this. He argued it is a simpler account of the objectivity of moral obligations. However, objectivity is only one feature of moral obligations that a viable account must explain.

This is important because defenders of DCT contend it provides a better explanation of all the relevant features. Adams argued that if God exists then divine commands “best fill the role assigned to wrongness by the concept”.[23] He argued that if moral obligations are divine commands then this explains the fact that “wrongness is an objective property of actions”;[24] it also accounts for “the wrongness of a major portion of the types of action that we have believed to be wrong”;[25] It can explain how this property “plays a causal role … in their coming to be regarded as wrong.”[26]  And how moral obligations constitute a “supremely weighty reason” for doing or refraining from an action. Similarly, he contends that a DCT accounts for the intuition that our moral duties comprise “a standard that has a sanctity greater than that of any merely human will or institution”.[27] To conclude, his arguments call into question any theistic account of ethics that Armstrong needs to argue that his account provides a simpler account of all these features.

Part II coming soon…

A good example can be seen in a recent USA Today article by influential biologist Jerry Coyne entitled, As atheists know, you can be good without God. Coyne, an outspoken atheist, is disturbed that many Americans, including some prominent scientists, believe that our instinctive sense of right and wrong is “strong evidence for [God’s] existence.” He ventures into moral philosophy to explain why this is clearly mistaken.

From the get-go Coyne demonstrates he does not understand the issues.

It is necessary to accurately understand the position Coyne is criticising before we look at the paucity of his critique. The argument that our instinctive sense of right and wrong “is strong evidence for [God’s] existence” found its most important formulation in a 1979 article by Yale Philosopher Robert Adams. In it, Adams noted that we instinctively grasp that certain actions, like torturing children for fun, are wrong; hence, he reasoned, we are intuitively aware of the existence of moral obligations. According to Adams, the best account of the nature of such obligations is that they are commands issued by a loving and just God. Identifying obligations with God’s commands can explain all the features of moral obligation better than any secular alternative. Consequently, the existence of moral obligations provides evidence for God’s existence.

It is important to note what Adams did not claim. Central to Adams’ argument, and to pretty much every author who follows him, is a vital distinction; this is the distinction between the claim that moral obligations are, in fact, divine commands and the claim that one cannot recognise what our moral obligations are unless one believes in divine commands or some form of divine revelation. Adams illustrates this distinction with the example of H₂0 and water.

Contemporary chemistry tells us that the best account of the nature of water is that water is, in fact, H₂0 molecules. This, of course, means that water cannot exist unless H₂0 does. However, it does not mean that people who do not know about or believe in the existence of H₂0 cannot recognise water when they see it. For centuries people recognised, swam in, sailed on and drank water before they knew anything about modern chemistry.

This distinction has important implications. The claim that moral obligations are, in fact, commands issued by God does not entail that people must believe that God exists and has issued commands in order to be able to recognise right and wrong. These are separate and logically distinct claims.

Coyne conflates this distinction from the outset. After noting that some people believe that moral obligations provide strong evidence for God’s existence, he claims that this is an oft-heard argument, “‘Evolution,’ many argue, ‘could never have given us feelings of kindness, altruism and morality…’;” to this he rejoins that, “scientists studying our primate relatives, such as chimpanzees, see evolutionary rudiments of morality: behaviours that look for all the world like altruism, sympathy, moral disapproval, sharing — even notions of fairness.”

This is confused. Apart from the fact that no one who cites morality as evidence for God actually makes the argument about evolution that Coyne sets out, the claim that moral obligations cannot exist independently of God is not the claim that without God people would not have moral feelings. Feeling that one has an obligation to do something and actually having an obligation to do it are clearly different things. People can feel that they have a certain obligation without it actually being the case that they do.

Coyne makes a similar mistake when he argues that secular European countries like Sweden and Denmark “are full of well-behaved and well-meaning citizens, not criminals and sociopaths running amok.” This may well be true but all it shows is that people can recognise moral obligations and live in accord with them without believing in God. That no more shows that moral obligations can exist without God or that moral obligations are not divine commands than the fact that for centuries people could recognise water and swim without knowing anything about modern chemistry shows that water can exist without hydrogen.

Coyne equally fails to address the issue when he asserts that the bible endorses beating slaves, genocide, killing homosexuals, torturing people for eternity, killing children for being cheeky and so on; texts he claims Christians pass over “with judicious silence”. Apart from the fact that Coyne’s interpretation of these texts is in many places dubious and that far from passing over them in silence, Christian theologians working in the field of Old Testament ethics have written voluminous works on how these passages are to be understood, Coyne’s argument here misses the point. The claim that moral obligations cannot exist independently from the existence of a just and loving God is not the claim that the bible is an accurate source of information about what God commands. Someone could, for example, argue that the wrongness of an action is constituted by God’s commands but that we know and recognise what is right and wrong from our conscience and not from a written revelation. Some leading writers on theological ethics have suggested precisely this.

The only time Coyne is remotely on point is when he argues that if moral obligations are constituted by God’s commands then morality becomes arbitrary; anything at all could be deemed ‘right’ as long as God has commanded it – even stealing or infanticide. Coyne suggests this argument is devastating and has known to be so by philosophers for hundreds of years.

In fact, since Adams’ publication, this argument has been subject to extensive criticism in the philosophical literature. So much so that today even Adams’ leading critics grant that it fails. Adams contended that moral obligations are, in fact, the commands of a loving and just God; therefore, it is possible for infanticide or theft to be right only if a fully informed, loving and just person could command things like infanticide and stealing. The assumption that this is possible seems dubious. The very reason Coyne cites examples such as infanticide and theft is because he considers them to be paradigms of conduct that no morally good person could ever knowingly entertain or endorse.

Coyne seems vaguely aware of the response, stating “Of course, you can argue that God would never sanction something like that because he’s a completely moral being, but then you’re still using some idea of morality that is independent of God.” Here he again falls into confusion. What his response shows is that people can have ideas about and recognise what counts as loving and just independently of their beliefs about God and his commands. Now this is true but this does not show that moral obligations can exist independently of the commands of a loving and just God. Coyne again fails to grasp the basic distinctions involved in discussions of God and morality.

Not only does this argument not refute Adams position but precisely analogous reasoning provides a serious challenge to Coyne’s own secular account of morality.  After claiming that moral obligations cannot be constituted by God’s commands, Coyne offers an alternative: morality comes from “evolution”, humans evolved a capacity to instinctively feel certain actions are wrong and others are right. But couldn’t evolution have produced rational beings that felt that infanticide and theft were obligatory or that rape was, in certain circumstances, ok? As Darwin himself noted,

“If men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think  of interfering.”

Coyne faces a dilemma. If the fact that it is possible for God to have commanded that infanticide is permissible proves that morality is not based on God’s commands then the fact it is possible for evolution to have produced rational beings who feel infanticide is permissible must prove that morality is not dependent on evolution.

Believers of God can avoid this conclusion for the reasons I pointed to above; it is unlikely that a loving and just person could command actions such as infanticide or rape whereas, evolution, guided only by the impersonal forces of nature, is not subject to such constraints. Coyne’s argument does not refute Adams’ position but it does appear to refute his own.

Now nothing I say in response to Coyne here is new, much of it has been said in the voluminous literature on God and Morality written and published over the last forty years. All Coyne had to do to realise this was actually read it. Of course, like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and a host of other popular writers, Coyne has not bothered to actually read the literature on contemporary theological ethics before wading in. Instead he hopes that his stature as a biologist and his confident tone will convince many unfamiliar with the field that he has offered a devastating criticism.  He has not and pretending he has is about as sensible as pretending that because I am a theologian I can offer informed commentary on contemporary genetics off the top of my head.

Matt writes a monthly column for Investigate Magazine entitled “Contra Mundum.” This blog post was published in the October 2011 issue and is reproduced here with permission. Contra Mundum is Latin for ‘against the world;’ the phrase is usually attributed to Athanasius who was exiled for defending Christian orthodoxy.

Letters to the editor should be sent to:
editorial@investigatemagazine.DELETE.com

RELATED POSTS:
Contra Mundum: Separating Church and State
Contra Mundum: Consenting Adults and Harm
Contra Mundum: Pacifism and Just Wars
Contra Mundum: Religion and Violence
Contra Mundum: Stoning Adulterers
Contra Mundum: Why Does God Allow Suffering?
Contra Mundum: “Till Death do us Part” Christ’s Teachings on Abuse, Divorce and Remarriage
Contra Mundum: Is God a 21st Century Western Liberal?
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Here is one line of argument he gives for this conclusion:

“Consider the fact that we try to teach our children to be moral. We also want them to be happy. If we thought that being virtuous would make them miserable, we would be more ambivalent about teaching them virtue than we actually are. But many people persevere in the attempt to bring up their children to be morally good people even though they do not think their children will be living in a society in which most of their fellows are morally good people. … What lies behind such perseverance is surely a belief that the world is so ordered that when their children grow up, they can be both morally good and happy, and that this is secured not by general human virtue but by something else. The nature of this something else is often, I think, left indeterminate.”[²]

This example is interesting because it focuses not on one’s own happiness but on the happiness of others. Appeals to self-interest and one’s own happiness are often dismissed as corruptions to moral motivation. In Hare’s example, one is concerned about the happiness of others, in particular one’s children, so the concerns he highlights are altruistic as opposed to egoistic.

I am inclined to think there is something to Hare’s argument.  I do think that if we thought being virtuous would make our children miserable then a lot of parents might be less disposed towards bringing up their children to be pursue good. Most I talk to agree;  it is hard to comprehend how a loving and caring parent could teach children to be virtuous if doing so would result in their unhappiness. However, our practice of trying to teach our children to be moral suggests we do not believe being virtuous and being happy are incompatible.

This has me wondering, does commitment to morality as an institution, where we attempt to follow its precepts and encourage them in others, commit us to assumptions about some kind of moral providential order to the world? What would happen to morality if we rejected this? Would there be something sadistic about inculcating moral virtue in our children or encouraging it in others?

This transcript is the result of some 32 playbacks of the debate and is accurate down to the “uhs” and “oks”.

UPDATE:
Since publishing this transcript, William Lane Craig has emailed us and asked us to adjust the paragraph breaks and punctuation in his sections of the transcript in accord with where he placed them — something he conceded was very hard to get right when one is transcribing from audio. He also provided us with the footnotes for his sources which we have also included below.

If Sam Harris wishes us to adjust his sections of this transcript in the same manner we are very happy to do so.

- Madeleine

Transcript of the Harris v Craig debate

MODERATOR:

Welcome to the second installment of “The God Debate”. My name is Michael Rea. I’m a professor of philosophy here at the University of Notre Dame, and the director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion, one of the sponsors of tonight’s event. The Center for Philosophy of Religion was founded in the late 1970s with the aim of promoting cutting-edge research on topics in the philosophy of religion, and in distinctively Christian philosophy. One of our goals in sponsoring the “God Debate” series is to try to bring some of the very issues discussed among our research fellows to a wider, non-academic audience, and in a format that will hopefully be fun and engaging.

Our show tonight, as you already know, is a debate between William Lane Craig and Sam Harris, coming together for the very first time to discuss the question, “Are the foundations of moral values natural or supernatural?”

William Lane Craig is Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. He is best-known among philosophers for his extensive and influential work in the philosophy of time and the philosophy of religion. He is known to the wider public as someone who is able to articulate and defend the doctrines of the Christian faith in a way that is highly accessible but also philosophically and theologically rigorous. He became a Christian at the age of 16, pursued undergraduate studies at Wheaton College, and holds two earned doctorates: one in philosophy from the University of Birmingham, and one in theology from the University of Munich. He has authored or edited over 30 books, as well as over a hundred articles in professional journals of philosophy and theology.

Known as one of the “Four Horsemen” of the New Atheist movement, Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times best sellers: The Moral Landscape, The End of Faith, and Letter to a Christian Nation. The End of Faith won the 2005 Pen Award for non-fiction. Mr. Harris’s writing has been published in over 15 languages. He and his work have been discussed in Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, Scientific American, Nature, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Times London, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, the Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere. Mr. Harris is a co-founder and CEO of Project Reason, a non-profit foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society. He received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University, and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA.

The structure of tonight’s debate will be as follows: Each debater will take 20 minutes for his opening speech, followed by rebuttals of 12 minutes and 8 minutes respectively, and then closing speeches of 5 minutes each. At the conclusion of the debate, we will have about 30 minutes for questions from the audience. If you would like to ask a question, line up behind one of the two microphones in front, or in the balcony. We’re letting Notre Dame students ask the first four questions tonight, so if you are not a Notre Dame student, and somehow find yourself at the front of the Q&A line, please allow a student to go ahead of you.

Time will be kept strictly. There is a timekeeper in the front who can be seen by both speakers, and once each speaker’s time has elapsed, he will be given at most 15 seconds to finish his final sentence before being rudely interrupted by me, the time enforcer. Because we are keeping the time strict, we ask you to hold all applause and other indications of agreement or disagreement, cheering, crowd-surfing, and the like, until the very end of the debate. Please remember that flash photography, video taping, and active cell phones are all prohibited.

Finally, remember that Notre Dame is the world’s number one institution in the philosophy of religion, and also has one of the world’s best theology departments. Any questions you don’t get to ask during the 25 or 30 minute Q&A, you can ask of your local faculty in the days and weeks to come. And now, on with the show.

CRAIG:

Well, good evening. It’s wonderful to be here at the University of Notre Dame, and I want to begin by

MODERATOR:

Bill

CRAIG:

thank—

MODERATOR:

Sorry.

CRAIG:

Sorry.

MODERATOR:

I need to—We’re gonna begin each speech with me checking with the timekeeper to make sure that he’s ready, and then the timekeeper is gonna hit “Go”, and then you get to go—

CRAIG:

Alright.

MODERATOR:

So, so you go—

CRAIG:

Sorry—

MODERATOR:

—when I say “Begin”.

CRAIG:

Sorry for jumping the gun.

MODERATOR:

Professor Craig gets, uh, gets the first word in the debate, uh, Dr. Harris gets the last word. Timekeeper, are you ready? This is 20 minutes. Begin.

CRAIG:

I want to begin by thanking the Center for Philosophy of Religion for the invitation to participate in tonight’s debate. The question of the correct foundation of morality is one that is not only of tremendous academic interest, but also one that has enormous practical application for our lives.

Now to begin with an important point of agreement: Dr. Harris and I agree that there are objective moral values and duties. To say that moral values and duties are objective is to say that they are valid and binding independent of human opinion. For example, to say that the Holocaust was objectively evil is to say that it was evil, even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was good, and it would still have been evil even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in brainwashing or exterminating everyone who disagreed with them, so that everybody thought the Holocaust was good.

One of the great merits of Dr. Harris’ recent book The Moral Landscape is his bold affirmation of the objectivity of moral values and duties. He inveighs against what he calls “the over-educated atheistic moral nihilist[s]” and relativists who refuse to condemn as objectively wrong terrible atrocities like the genital mutilation of little girls.[1] He rightly declares, “If only one person in the world held down a terrified, struggling, screaming little girl, cut off her genitals with a septic blade, and sewed her back up, … the only question would be how severely that person should be punished. …”[2] What is not in question is that such a person has done something horribly, objectively, wrong.

The question before us this evening, then, is, “what is the best foundation for the existence of objective moral values and duties? What grounds them? What makes certain actions objectively good or evil, right or wrong?” In tonight’s debate I’m going to defend two basic contentions:

1. If God exists, then we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties.
2. If God does not exist, then we do not have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties.

Now notice that these are conditional claims. I shall not be arguing tonight that God exists. Maybe Dr. Harris is right that atheism is true. That wouldn’t affect the truth of my two contentions. All that would follow is that objective moral values and duties would, then, contrary to Dr. Harris, not exist.

So, let’s look at that first contention together: If God exists, then we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties. Here, I want to examine two subpoints with you.

First, theism provides a sound foundation for objective moral values. Moral values have to do with what is good or evil. On the theistic view objective moral values are grounded in God. As St. Anselm saw, God is by definition the greatest conceivable being and therefore the highest Good. Indeed, He is not merely perfectly good, He is the locus and paradigm of moral value. God’s own holy and loving nature provides the absolute standard against which all actions are measured. He is by nature loving, generous, faithful, kind, and so forth. Thus if God exists, objective moral values exist, wholly independent of human beings.

Second, theism provides a sound foundation for objective moral duties. On a theistic view objective moral duties are constituted by God’s commands. God’s moral nature is expressed in relation to us in the form of divine commandments which constitute our moral duties or obligations. Far from being arbitrary, God’s commandments must be consistent with His holy and loving nature. Our duties, then, are constituted by God’s commandments and these in turn reflect his essential character. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the whole moral duty of man can be summed up in the two great commandments: First, you shall love the Lord your God with all your strength and with all your soul and with all your heart and with all your mind, and, second, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On this foundation we can affirm the objective rightness of love, generosity, self-sacrifice, and equality, and condemn as objectively wrong selfishness, hatred, abuse, discrimination, and oppression.

In summary, then, theism has the resources for a sound foundation for morality: it grounds both objective moral values and objective moral duties; and hence, I think it’s evident that if God exists, we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties.

Let’s turn, then, to my second contention, that if God does not exist, then we do not have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties.

Consider first the question of objective moral values. If God does not exist, then what basis remains for the existence of objective moral values? In particular, why think that human beings would have objective moral worth? On the atheistic view human beings are just accidental byproducts of nature which have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust called the planet Earth, and which are doomed to perish individually and collectively in a relatively short time. On atheism it’s hard to see any reason to think that human well-being is objectively good, anymore than insect well-being or rat well-being or hyena well-being. This is what Dr. Harris calls “The Value Problem”.[3]

The purpose of Dr. Harris’ book The Moral Landscape is to explain the basis, on atheism, of the existence of objective moral values.[4] He explicitly rejects the view that moral values are Platonic objects existing independent of the world.[5] So his only recourse is to try to ground moral values in the natural world. But how can you do that, since nature in and of itself is just morally neutral?

On a naturalistic view moral values are just the behavioral byproducts of biological evolution and social conditioning. Just as a troop of baboons exhibit cooperative and even self-sacrificial behavior because natural selection has determined it to be advantageous in the struggle for survival, so their primate cousins homo sapiens have evolved a sort of herd morality for precisely the same reasons. As a result of socio-biological pressures there has evolved among homo sapiens a sort of herd morality which functions well in the perpetuation of our species. But on the atheistic view there doesn’t seem to be anything that makes this morality objectively binding and true.

The philosopher of science Michael Ruse reports,

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 thy 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 …[6]

If we were to rewind the film of human evolution and start anew, people with a very different set of moral values might well have evolved. As Darwin himself wrote in The Descent of Man,

If … men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering.[7]

For us to think that human beings are special and our morality is objectively true is to succumb to the temptation to species-ism, that is to say an unjustified bias in favor of one’s own species.

If there is no God, then any reason for regarding the herd morality evolved by homo sapiens on this planet as objectively true seems to have been removed. Take God out of the picture, and all you seem to be left with is an ape-like creature on a speck of dust beset with delusions of moral grandeur.

Richard Dawkins’ assessment of human worth may be depressing, but why, on atheism, is he mistaken, when he says, “there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference. … We are machines for propagating DNA. … It is every living object’s sole reason for being”?[8]

So how does Sam Harris propose to solve the Value Problem? The trick he proposes is simply to re-define what he means by “good” and “evil”, in non-moral terms. He says, “We should “define ‘good’ as that which supports [the] well-being” of conscious creatures.[9] So, he says, “questions about values … are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures.”[10] And therefore, he concludes, “it makes no sense … to ask whether maximizing well-being is ‘good’.”[11] Why not? Because he’s redefined the word “good” to mean the well-being of conscious creatures. So to ask, “Why is maximizing creatures’ well-being good?” is on his definition the same as asking, “Why does maximizing creatures’ well-being maximize creatures’ well-being?” It’s just a tautology. It’s just talking in circles! So, Dr. Harris has quote-unquote “solved” the Value Problem just by re-defining his terms. It’s nothing but wordplay.

At the end of the day Dr. Harris isn’t really talking about moral values at all. He’s just talking about what’s conducive to the flourishing of sentient life on this planet. Seen in this light, his claim that science can tell us a great deal about what contributes to human flourishing is hardly controversial. Of course, it can–just as it can tell us what is conducive to the flourishing of corn or mosquitoes or bacteria. His so-called “moral landscape”, which features the highs and lows of human flourishing isn’t really a moral landscape at all.

Thus Dr. Harris has failed to solve the Value Problem. He hasn’t provided any justification or explanation for why, on atheism, moral values would objectively exist at all. His so-called “solution” is just a semantical trick of an arbitrary and idiosyncratic re-definition of the terms “good” and “evil” in non-moral vocabulary.

Second question: does atheism provide a sound foundation for objective moral duties? Duty has to do with moral obligation or prohibition, what I ought or ought not to do. Here, the reviewers of The Moral Landscape have been merciless in pounding Dr. Harris’s attempt to provide a naturalistic account of moral obligation. Two problems stand out.

First, natural science tells us only what is, not what ought to be, the case. As the philosopher Jerry Fodor has written, “Science is about facts, not norms; it might tell us how we are, but it wouldn’t tell us what is wrong with how we are.”[12] In particular it cannot tell us that we have a moral obligation to take actions which are conducive to human flourishing.

So, if there is no God, what foundation remains for objective moral duties? On the naturalistic view, human beings are just animals, and animals have no moral obligation to one another. When a lion kills a zebra, it kills the zebra, but it doesn’t murder the zebra. When a great white shark forcibly copulates with a female, it forcibly copulates with her but it doesn’t rape her–for none of these actions is forbidden or obligatory. There is no moral dimension to these actions.

So if God does not exist, why think that we have any moral obligations to do anything? Who or what imposes these obligations upon us? Where do they come from? It’s very hard to see why they would be anything more than a subjective impression ingrained into us by societal and parental conditioning.

On the atheistic view, certain actions such as rape and incest may not be biologically and socially advantageous, and so in the course of human development have become taboo, that is, socially unacceptable behavior. But, that does absolutely nothing to prove that such acts are really wrong. Such behavior goes on all the time in the animal kingdom. On the atheistic view the rapist who chooses to flout the “herd morality” is doing nothing more serious than acting unfashionably, the moral equivalent, if you will, of Lady Gaga. If there is no moral lawgiver, then there is no objective moral law, and if there is no objective moral law, then we have no objective moral duties.

Thus, Dr. Harris’s view lacks any source for objective moral duty.

Second problem: “ought” implies “can.” A person is not morally responsible for an action which he is unable to avoid. For example, if somebody shoves you into another person, you’re not responsible for bumping into him. You had no choice. But Sam Harris believes that all of our actions are causally determined and that there is no free will.[13] Dr. Harris rejects not only libertarian accounts of free will but also compatibilistic accounts of freedom. But, if there is no free will, then no one is morally responsible for anything! In the end, Dr. Harris admits this, though it’s tucked away in the endnotes of his volume. Moral responsibility, he says, and I quote, “is a social construct,” not an objective reality: I quote: “in neuroscientific terms no person is more or less responsible than any other” for the actions they perform.[14] His thoroughgoing determinism spells the end of any hope or possibility of objective moral duties because on his worldview we have no control over what we do.

Thus, on Dr. Harris’ view there is no source of objective moral duties because there is no moral law-giver, and no possibility of objective moral duty, because there is no free will. Therefore, on his view, despite his protestations to the contrary, right and wrong do not really exist.

Thus, Dr. Harris’s naturalistic view fails to provide a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties. Hence, if God does not exist, we do not have a sound foundation for objective morality, which is my second contention.

In conclusion then, we’ve seen that if God exists, we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and objective moral duties, but that if God does not exist, then we do not have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties. Dr. Harris’ atheism thus sits very ill with his ethical theory.

What I’m offering Dr. Harris tonight is not a new set of moral values–I think by and large we share the same applied ethics–rather what I’m offering is a sound foundation for the objective moral values and duties that we both hold dear.

Thank you very much.

MODERATOR:

Dr. Harris now has 20 minutes. Timekeeper, are you ready? Begin.

HARRIS:

I just want to say, it’s an honor to be here at Notre Dame, and I’m very happy to be debating Dr. Craig, the one Christian apologist who seems to have put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists. I’ve actually gotten more than a few emails this week, that more or less read, “Brother, please, don’t blow this.” So, you will be the judge.

Now, as many of you know, I’ve spent a fair amount of time criticizing religion. And one of the perks of this job is that you immediately hear from all the people who think that criticizing religion is a terrible thing to do. And, strangely, the reason people rise to the defense of God is not that there’s so much evidence that God exists, but that they believe that belief in God is the only intellectual framework for an objective morality. And, clearly, Dr. Craig is among their number.

Now, the sense is, that without the conviction that moral truths exist, that words like “right” and “wrong”, “good” and “evil”, actually mean something, humanity will just lose its way. That’s the fear. And I actually share that fear. I’ve come to believe that this, this concern that many religious people have, of the erosion of secular morality, is not an entirely empty one.

Now I once spoke at an academic meeting on these themes, and I, and I said, as I will say tonight, that once we understand morality in terms of human well-being, we’ll be able to make strong claims about which behaviors and ways of life are good for us and which aren’t. And I cited, as an example, the sadism and misogyny of the Taliban as an example of a worldview that was less than perfectly conducive to human flourishing. And it turns out, that to denigrate the Taliban at a scientific meeting is to court controversy, and after my remarks I, I fell into debate with another uh, invited speaker, and this is more or less exactly how our conversation went.

She said, “How could you ever say that forcing women to wear burqas is wrong from the point of view of science?” I said, “Well, because I think it’s pretty clear that right and wrong relate to human well-being, and it’s just as clear that forcing half the population to live in cloth bags and beating them, or killing them when they try to get out, is not a way of maximizing human well-being.”

And she said, “Well, that’s just your opinion.” And I said, “Well, okay, let’s make it even easier. Let’s say we found a culture that was literally removing the eyeballs of every third child, ok, at birth. Would you then agree that we have found a culture that is not perfectly maximizing well-being?”

And she said, “It would depend on why they were doing it.” So after my eyebrows returned from the back of my head, I said, “Okay, well say they were doing it for religious reasons. Let’s say they have a scripture which says, ‘Every third should walk in darkness.’ or some such nonsense.” And then she said, “Well, then you could never say that they were wrong.” Okay, and so I, I—you should know, I was talking to someone who has a deep background in science and philosophy. She’s actually since been appointed to the President’s Council on Bioethics. She’s one of thirteen people advising the President on the ethical implications of advances in medicine and, and uh, related sciences and technology, and she had just delivered a perfectly lucid lecture on the moral implications of neuroscience for the courts. And she was especially concerned that we could be subjecting captured terrorists to lie-detection neuro-imaging technology–—and she viewed this as, as really an unconscionable violation of cognitive liberty. So on the one hand, her moral scruples were very finely calibrated to recoil from the slightest perceived misstep in ethical terms in our War on Terror; and yet she was quite willing to forgive some primitive culture its fondness for removing the eyeballs of children in its religious rituals. And she seemed to me quite terrifyingly detached from the real suffering of millions of women in Afghanistan at this moment. So, I see this double standard as a problem. And strangely, this is precisely the erosion of basic common sense that many religious people are worried about. I hope it’ll be clear to you, at the end of this hour, that religion is not an answer to this problem, ok. Belief in God is not only unnecessary for a universal morality, it’s, it’s, it’s, it is itself a source of moral blindness.

Now, it’s widely believed that there are two quantities in this universe—there are facts, on the one hand, and of course science can give us our most rigorous discussion of these; but then there are values, which many people, like Dr. Craig, think science can’t touch; questions of meaning, and morality, and what life is good for. Now of course, everyone thinks that science can help us get what we value, ok, but it can never tell us what we ought to value, ok, and therefore it cannot, in principle, be applied to the most important questions in human life–—questions like how we should raise our children, or what constitutes a good life. Now, it’s thought, from the point of view of science, and Dr. Craig just gave voice to this opinion, that when we look at the universe, all we see are patterns of events–—just one thing follows another–—and there’s no corner of the universe that declares certain of its events to be good or evil, or right or wrong apart from us. I mean, our minds—–we declare certain events to be better than others. But in doing that, it seems that we’re merely projecting our own values and desires onto a reality that is intrinsically value-free. And where do our notions of right and wrong come from? Well clearly they’ve been drummed into us by evolution. They’re the product of these apish urges and social emotions; and then they get modulated by culture. If you take sexual jealousy, for instance. This is an attitude that has been bred into us, over millions of years, ok. Our ancestors were highly covetous of one another, despite the fact that everyone was covered with hair, and had terrible teeth; and this, this possessiveness now gets enshrined in various cultural institutions like the institution of marriage, ok. So therefore, a statement like, “It’s wrong to cheat on one’s spouse”, ok, seems a mere summation of these contingencies. It seems like it, it, it’s an improvisation on the back of biology, ok. It seems that, that, that from the point of view of science, it can’t really be wrong to cheat on your spouse, ok. This is just, just how apes like ourselves worry, when we learn to worry with words, ok.

Now here is where religious people, like Dr. Craig, begin to get a little queasy, as I think they should. And many see no alternative but to insert the God of Abraham—–an Iron Age god of war–—into the clockwork, as an invisible arbiter of moral truth. It is wrong to cheat on your spouse because Yahweh deems that it is so. Which is curious, because in other moods, Yahweh is perfectly fond of genocide, and slavery, and human sacrifice. I must say, it’s pretty amusing to hear Dr. Craig in his opening remarks say that I’m merely focused on the flourishing of sentient creatures on this planet. If that’s a sin, I’ll take it. One wonders what Dr. Craig is focused on.

Now, incidentally, you should not trust Dr. Craig’s reading of me. Half the quotes he provided “from me” as though I wrote them were quotes from people I was quoting in my book and often to different effect. So you’ll have to read the book.

Now, in claiming that values reduce to the well-being of conscious creatures—–as I will–—uh, I’m introducing two concepts: Consciousness and well-being. Now, let’s start with consciousness—–this is not an arbitrary starting point. Imagine a universe devoid of the possibility of consciousness–—imagine a universe entirely constituted of rocks. Ok, there’s clearly no happiness or suffering in this universe; there’s no good or evil; value judgments don’t apply. For, for changes in the universe to matter, they have to matter, at least potentially, to some conscious system.

Ok, what about well-being? Well, the well-being of conscious creatures, and the, and the link between that and morality, may seem open to doubt, but it shouldn’t. Ok, here’s the only assumption you have to make. Imagine a universe in which every conscious creatures suffers as much as it possibly can, for as long as it can. Ok, I call this “the worst possible misery for everyone”. Ok, the worst possible misery for everyone is bad. Ok, if, if, if the word “bad” applies anywhere, it applies here. Now, if you think the worst possible misery for everyone isn’t bad, or maybe it has a silver lining, or maybe there’s something worse, I don’t know what you’re talking about. And what’s more, I’m pretty sure you don’t know what you’re talking about either.

The—what I’m saying is, the minimum standard of moral goodness is to avoid the worst possible misery for everyone. If we should do anything in this universe, if we ought to do anything, if we have a moral duty to do anything, it’s to avoid the worst possible misery for everyone. And the moment you admit this, you admit that, that, that all other possible states of the universe are better than the worst possible misery for everyone. You have the worst possible misery for everyone over here, and all these other constellation of experiences arrayed out here, and because the experience of conscious creatures is dependent in some way on the laws of nature, there will be right and wrong ways to move along this continuum. It will be possible to think that you’re avoiding the worst possible misery for everyone—–and to fail. You can be wrong in your beliefs about how to navigate this space.

So here’s my argument, for moral truth in the context of science. Questions of right and wrong, and good and evil, depend upon minds. They depend upon the possibility of experience. Minds are natural phenomena. They depend upon the laws of nature in some way. Morality and human values, therefore, can be understood through science, because in talking about these things, we are talking about all of the facts that influence the well-being of conscious creatures. In our case, we’re talking about genetics, and neurobiology, and psychology, and sociology, and economics.

Now, I view this space of all possible experience as a kind of moral landscape, with peaks that correspond to the heights of well-being, and valleys that correspond to the lowest suffering. And the first thing to realize, is that there may be many equivalent peaks on this landscape. There may be many different, but morally-equivalent ways for human beings to thrive. But there will be many more ways not to thrive. There will be many more ways to fail to be on a peak. There are clearly many more ways to suffer unnecessarily in this world than to be sublimely happy.

Now, the Taliban are still my favorite example, of a culture that is struggling mightily to build a society that’s clearly less good than many other societies on offer. Ok, the average lifespan for women in Afghanistan is 44 years. Ok, they have a 12% literacy rate. They have the highest, almost the highest infant mortality and maternal mortality in the world—–and also almost the highest fertility—–so this is one of the best places on Earth to watch women and infants die. Ok, it seems to me perfectly obvious that the, the best response to this dire situation—–which is to say the most moral response—–is not to throw battery acid in the faces of little girls for the crime of learning to read. Now of course, this is common sense to us, unless you happen to be a bioethicist on the President’s commission at this moment. But I’m saying, at bottom, it is also, these are also truths about biology, and neurology, and psychology, and sociology, and economics. It is not unscientific to say that the Taliban are wrong about morality, that the moment we notice that we know anything at all about human well-being, we have to say this.

Ok, now some people with a little philosophical training may be tempted to say, “What if a father wants to burn off his daughter’s face with battery acid? Who are you to say that he’s not as moral as we are? What if he has an alternate conception of well-being that’s just as legitimate?” or, “Who’s to say that we should care about the well-being of little girls?” This is the kind of email I get, incidentally. Now, moral skeptics of this kind, and Dr. Craig has essentially endorsed this position, in a way, without God, think that the only way to judge one person’s values to be wrong are with respect to another person’s values, and all such judgments have to be on a par. Ok, this is not true. There, there are many ways for my values to be objectively wrong. They can be, they can be wrong with respect to deeper values that I hold. They can be wrong with respect to deeper values that I would hold if I were only a deeper person. It’s clearly possible to value things that reliably make you miserable in this life. Ok, it’s clearly possible to be cognitively and emotionally closed to experiences that you would want if you were only intelligent and knowledgeable enough to want them. It is possible not to know what one is missing in life. So things can be right or wrong, or good and evil, quite independent of a person’s opinions.

Now, some of you might worry that I haven’t defined “well-being” enough. How can something this loose as a concept be the, the, the benchmark of, of, uh, objective values? Well, consider by analogy the concept of physical health. Physical health is very difficult to define, you know. It used to be that if you were “healthy” you could expect to live to the ripe old age of forty. Even now, our lifespan, our life expectancy has doubled in the last 150 years. What, what does “health” mean? Well, it has something to do with not always vomiting, ok, not being in excruciating pain, not running a fever. Ok but how fast should a “healthy” person be able to run? That question might not have an answer, but this does not make the question of health vacuous. Ok, it doesn’t make it merely a matter of opinion, or of cultural construction. The distinction between a healthy person and a dead one is about as clear and consequential as any we ever make in science. Ok, and notice that no one is ever tempted to attack the philosophical underpinnings of medicine with questions like, “Well, who are you to say that not always vomiting is healthy? What if you meet someone who wants to vomit, and he wants to vomit until he dies, ok? How could you argue that he is not as healthy as you are?” In talking about morality and human values, I think we really are talking about mental health and the health of societies.

And the truth is, science has always been in the values business. We simply cannot speak of facts without resorting to values. Consider the simplest statement of scientific fact: Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. This seems as value-free an utterance as human beings ever make. But what do we do when someone doubts the truth of this proposition? Ok, all we can do is appeal to scientific values. The value of understanding the world. The value of evidence. The value of logical consistency. What if someone says, “Well, that’s not how I choose to think about water. Ok, I’m Biblical chemist, and I read in Genesis 1 that God created water before he created light. So I take that to mean that there were no stars. So there were no stars to fuse hydrogen and helium into heavier elements like oxygen; therefore there was no oxygen to put in the water, so either God created, either water has no oxygen, or God created special oxygen to put in the water—but I don’t think he would do that, because that would be Biblically inelegant.” Ok, what can we say to such a person? Ok, all we can do is appeal to scientific values. And if he doesn’t share those values, the conversation is over. Ok, if someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?

Ok, so this, this, I think this split between facts and values should look really strange to you on its face. I mean, what are we really saying when we say that science can’t be applied to the most important questions in human life? Ok, we’re saying that when we get our biases out of the way, when we, when we most fully rely on clear reasoning and honest observation, when, when intellectual honesty is at its zenith, well, then those efforts have no application whatsoever to the most important questions of human life. That is precisely the mood you cannot be in to answer the most important questions in human life. It would be very strange if that were so.

MODERATOR:

Professor Craig now has 12 minutes for rebuttal. Timekeeper, are you ready? Begin.

CRAIG:

You’ll recall in my first speech that I said I was going to defend two basic contentions tonight. First, that if God exists, then we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties.

First, I explained that if God exists, then objective moral values are grounded in the character of God himself, who is essentially compassionate, fair, kind, generous, and so forth.

Here Dr. Harris didn’t have anything by way of disagreement to say, but I do want to clear up a possible confusion. He represented this by saying that if religion were not true, then words like “right” and “wrong” and “good” and “evil” would have no meaning. I’m not maintaining that. That is to confuse moral ontology with moral semantics. Moral ontology asks, “What is the foundation of objective moral values and duties?” Moral semantics asks, “What is the meaning of moral terms?” And I am not making any kind of semantical claim tonight that “good” means something like “commanded by God”. Rather, my concern is moral ontology: What is the ground, or foundation, of moral values and duties?

To give an illustration, think of light. Light is a certain visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum. But obviously, that isn’t the meaning of the word “light”. People knew how to use the word “light” long before they discovered its physical nature. And, I might also add, they certainly knew the difference between light and darkness long before they understood the physics of light. Now, in exactly the same way, we can know the meaning of moral terms like “good” and “evil”, “right” and “wrong”, and know the difference between good and evil, without being aware that the good is grounded in God ontologically.

So, that is the position I am defending tonight, that moral values are grounded ontologically in God.

Second, that our moral duties are grounded by God’s commandments, which are a necessary reflection of his nature. Here the only response that I detected from Dr. Harris was to refer to the atrocities in the Hebrew Bible. But I think this is quite irrelevant to tonight’s discussion; there are plenty of Divine Command theorists who are not Jews or Christians and place no stock whatsoever in the Bible. So this isn’t an objection to Divine Command theory that I’m defending tonight.  Now, if you are interested in biblical ethics, I want to highly recommend Paul Copan’s new book Is God a Moral Monster?, which examines those passages in the Hebrew Bible in light of the Ancient Near East.[15] And I can guarantee you, it will be a very enlightening and interesting read. But this issue is strictly irrelevant in tonight’s debate.

So we’ve not heard any objection to a theistic grounding for ethics.  If God does exist, it’s clear, I think—obvious even—that we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties.

Now, what if God does not exist? Is there a sound foundation, first of all, for objective moral values? Now here, Dr. Harris said, “You don’t need religion in order to have universal morality.” Again, that’s a confusion. Of course, you don’t! Remember, the Nazis, for example, could have won World War II and established a universal morality. The issue isn’t universality, the issue is objectivity.  And I’m maintaining that in the absence of God, there isn’t any reason, any explanation, for the existence of objective moral values.

Now Dr. Harris says, “But we can imagine creatures being in the worst possible misery, and it’s obviously better for creatures to be flourishing—the well-being of conscious creatures is good.” Well, of course, it is. That’s not the question. We agree that, all things being equal, flourishing of conscious creatures is good. The question is rather, if atheism were true, what would make the flourishing of conscious creatures objectively good?  Conscious creatures might like to flourish, but there’s no reason on atheism to think that it would really be objectively good.

Now here Dr. Harris, I think, is guilty of misusing, uh, terms like “good” and “bad”, “right” and “wrong”, in equivocal ways. He will often use them in non-moral senses. For example, he’ll say there are objectively good and bad moves in chess.[16] Now that’s clearly not a moral use of the terms “good” and “bad”. You just mean they’re not apt to win or produce a winning strategy.  It’s not evil, what you’ve done. And similarly, in ordinary English, we use the words “good” and “bad” in a number of non-moral ways.  For example, we say Notre Dame has a “good” team. Now we can hope it’s an ethical team, but that’s not what’s indicated by the win-loss record! That—that is a different meaning of “good”. Or we say, “That’s a good way to get yourself killed!” or “That’s a good game plan” or “The sunshine felt good” or “That’s a good route to East Lansing” or “There’s no good reason to do that” or “She’s in good health”. All of these are non-moral uses of the word “good”. And Dr. Harris’s contrast of the good life and the bad life is not an ethical contrast between a morally good life and an evil life. It’s a contrast between a pleasurable life and a miserable life. And there’s no reason to equate “pleasure/misery” with “good” and “evil”–especially on atheism! So there’s just no reason that’s been given, on atheism, for thinking the flourishing of conscious creatures is objectively good.

But Dr. Harris has to defend an even more radical claim than that: Uh, he claims that the property of being good is identical with the property of creaturely flourishing. And he’s not offered any defense of this radical identity claim. In fact, I think we have a knock-down argument against it. Now bear with me here; this is a little technical. On the next-to-last page of his book, Dr. Harris makes the telling admission that if people like rapists, liars, and thieves could be just as happy as good people, then his “moral landscape” would no longer be a moral landscape.[17] Rather, it would just be a continuum of well-being whose peaks are occupied by good and bad people, or evil people, alike.

Now what’s interesting about this is that earlier in the book, Dr. Harris explained that about three million Americans are psychopathic.[18] That is to say, they don’t care about the mental states of others. They enjoy inflicting pain on other people. But that implies that there’s a possible world, which we can conceive, in which the continuum of human well-being is not a moral landscape. The peaks of well-being could be occupied by evil people. But that entails that in the actual world, the continuum of well-being and the moral landscape are not identical either. For identity is a necessary relation. There is no possible world in which some entity A is not identical to A. So if there’s any possible world in which A is not identical to B, then it follows that A is not in fact identical to B.

Now since it’s possible that human well-being and moral goodness are not identical, it follows necessarily that human well-being and goodness are not the same, as Dr. Harris has asserted in his book.

Now it’s not often in philosophy that you get a knock-down argument against a position. But I think we’ve got one here.  Uh, by granting that it’s possible that the continuum of well-being is not identical to the moral landscape, Dr. Harris’s view becomes logically incoherent.

And all of this goes to underline my fundamental point that on atheism, there’s just no reason to identify the well-being of conscious creatures with moral goodness. Atheism cannot explain the reality—the objective reality—of moral values.

What about objective moral duties? I first argued from the is/ought distinction that there is no basis on, uh, atheism, for thinking that we have any moral val—uh, duties. And here Dr. Harris says, “If we have a moral duty to do anything, we have a duty, uh, to avoid the worst possible misery”. But the question is the antecedent of that conditional: “If we have a moral duty to do anything.” What I’m arguing is that on atheism, I don’t see any reason to think we have any moral duties to do anything.

Moral obligations or prohibitions arise in response to imperatives from a competent authority. For example, if a policeman tells you to pull over, then because of his authority, who he is, you are legally obligated to pull over. But if some random stranger tells you to pull over, you’re not legally obligated to do so. Now, in the absence of God, what authority is there to issue moral commands or prohibitions? There is none on atheism, and therefore there are no moral imperatives for us to obey. In the absence of God there just isn’t any sort of moral obligation or prohibition that characterizes our lives. In particular, we’re not morally obligated to promote the flourishing of conscious creatures. So this is/ought distinction seems to me to be one that’s fatal to Dr. Harris’s position and has been widely recognized as such by reviewers of The Moral Landscape.

But secondly, the problem that’s even worse is the “ought implies can” problem. In the absence of the ability to do otherwise, there is no moral responsibility. In the absence of freedom of the will, we are just puppets or electro-chemical machines. And puppets do not have moral responsibilities. Machines are not moral agents. But on Dr. Harris’s view, there is no freedom of the will, either in a libertarian or a compatibilistic sense, and therefore, there is no moral responsibility. So there isn’t even the possibility of moral duty on his view.

So while I can affirm and applaud Dr. Harris’s affirmation of the objectivity of moral values and moral duties, at the end of the day his philosophical worldview just doesn’t ground these entities that we both want to affirm. If God exists, then we clearly have a sound foundation for objective moral values and moral duties. But if God does not exist, that is, if atheism is true, then there is no basis for the affirmation of objective moral values; and there is no ground for objective moral duties because there is no moral lawgiver and there is no freedom of the will. And therefore it seems to me that atheism is simply bereft of the adequate ontological foundations to establish the moral life.

MODERATOR:

Dr. Harris now has 12 minutes. Timekeeper, are you ready? Begin.

HARRIS:

Well, that was all very interesting. Ask yourselves, what is wrong with spending eternity in Hell? Well, I, I’m told it’s rather hot there, for one. Dr. Craig is not offering an alternative view of morality. Ok, the whole point of Christianity, or so it is imagined, is to safeguard the eternal well-being of human souls. Now, happily, there’s absolutely no evidence that the Christian Hell exists. I think we should look at the consequences of believing in this framework, this theistic framework, in this world, and what these moral underpinnings actually would be.

Alright, nine million children die every year before they reach the age of five. ok, picture, picture a, a a Asian tsunami of the sort we saw in 2004, that killed a quarter of a million people. One of those, every ten days, killing children only under five. Ok, that’s 20, 24,000 children a day, a thousand an hour, 17 or so a minute. That means before I can get to the end of this sentence, some few children, very likely, will have died in terror and agony. Ok,, think of, think of the parents of these children. Think of the fact that most of these men and women believe in God, and are praying at this moment for their children to be spared. And their prayers will not be answered. Ok, but according to Dr. Craig, this is all part of God’s plan. Any God who would allow children by the millions to suffer and die in this way, and their parents to grieve in this way, either can do nothing to help them, or doesn’t care to. He is therefore either impotent or evil.

And worse than that, on Dr. Craig’s view, most of these people—–many of these people, certainly—–will be going to Hell because they’re praying to the wrong God. Just think about that. Ok, through no fault of their own, they were born into the wrong culture, where they got the wrong theology, and they missed the revelation. Ok, there are 1.2 billion people in India at this moment. Most of them are Hindus, most of them therefore are polytheists. Ok, in Dr. Craig’s universe, no matter how good these people are, they are doomed. If you are, if you are praying to the Monkey God Hanuman, you are doomed, ok. You’ll be tortured in Hell for eternity. Now, is there the slightest evidence for this? No. It just says so in Mark 9, and Matthew 13, and Revelation 14. Ok, perhaps you’ll remember from The Lord of the Rings, it says when the elves die, they go to Valanor, but they can be reborn in Middle Earth. I say that just as a point of comparison.

Ok, so God created the cultural isolation of the Hindus, ok. He engineered the circumstance of their deaths in ignorance of revelation, and then he created the penalty for this ignorance, which is an eternity of conscious torment in fire. Ok, on the other hand, on Dr. Craig’s account, your run-of-the-mill serial killer in America, ok, who spent his life raping and torturing children, need only come to God, come to Jesus, on Death Row, and after a final meal of fried chicken, he’s going to spend an eternity in Heaven after death, ok. One thing should be crystal clear to you: This vision of life has absolutely nothing to do with moral accountability.

Ok, and please notice the double standard that people like Dr. Craig use to exonerate God from all this evil, ok. We’re told that God is loving, and kind, and just, and intrinsically good; but when someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust, because he visits suffering on innocent people, of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, we’re told that God is mysterious, ok. “Who can understand God’s will?” Ok and yet, this is precisely—this, this, this “merely human” understanding of God’s will, is precisely what believers use to establish his goodness in the first place. You know, something good happens to a Christian, he feels some bliss while praying, say, or he sees some positive change in his life, and we’re told that God is good. But when children by the tens of thousands are torn from their parents’ arms and drowned, we’re told that God is mysterious, ok. This is how you play tennis without the net.

And I want to suggest to you, that it is not only tiresome when otherwise-intelligent people speak this way, it is morally reprehensible. Ok, this kind of faith, is, is really the perfection of narcissism. “God loves me, dontcha know. He, he cured me of my eczema. He makes me feel so good while singing in church, and, and just when we had given up hope, we found a banker who was willing to reduce my mother’s mortgage.”

Ok given all the good—all that this God of yours does not accomplish in the lives of others, given, given the, the misery that’s being imposed on some helpless child at this instant, this kind of faith is obscene. Ok, to think in this way is to fail to reason honestly, or to care sufficiently about the suffering of other human beings. And if God is good and loving and just and kind, and he wanted to guide us morally with a book, why give us a book that supports slavery? Why give us a book that admonishes us to kill people for imaginary crimes, like witchcraft. Now, of course, there is a way of not taking these questions to heart, ok. According to Dr. Craig’s Divine Command theory, God is not bound by moral duties; God doesn’t have to be good. Whatever he commands is good, so when he commands that the Israelites to slaughter the Amalekites, that behavior becomes intrinsically good because he commanded it.

Ok, well here we’re being offered—I’m glad he raised the issue of psychopathy—we are being offered a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude. It’s psychotic because this is completely delusional. There’s no reason to believe that we live in a universe ruled by an invisible monster Yahweh. But it is, it is psychopathic because this is a total detachment from the, from the well-being of human beings. It, this so easily rationalizes the slaughter of children. Ok, just think about the Muslims at this moment who are blowing themselves up, convinced that they are agents of God’s will. There is absolutely nothing that Dr. Craig can s—can say against their behavior, in moral terms, apart from his own faith-based claim that they’re praying to the wrong God. If they had the right God, what they were doing would be good, on Divine Command theory.

Now, I’m obviously not saying that all that Dr. Craig, or all religious people, are psychopaths and psychotics, but this to me is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own. If you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is gonna turn them into the body of Elvis Presley, ok, you have lost your mind. But if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you’re just a Catholic.

And, and I’m not the first person to notice that it’s a, it’s a very strange sort of loving God who would make salvation depend on believing in him on bad evidence. Ok, it’s, it’s, I mean, if you lived 2,000 years ago, there was evidence galore, I mean, he was just performing miracles. But apparently, he got tired of being so helpful. And so now, we all inherit this very heavy burden of the doctrine’s implausibility. And, and, and, and the effort to square it with what we now know about the cosmos and what we know about the all-too-human origins of Scripture becomes more and more difficult. Ok, and, and, and it’s not just the generic God that Dr. Craig is recommending; it is God the Father and Jesus the Son. Christianity, on Dr. Craig’s account, is the true moral wealth of the world.

Well, I hate to break it to you, here at Notre Dame, but Christianity is a cult of human sacrifice. Christianity is not a religion that cel—that repudiates human sacrifice. It is a religion that celebrates a single human sacrifice as though it were effective. “God so loved the world that he gave his only son.” John 3:16. Okay, the idea is that Jesus suffered the crucifixion so that none need suffer Hell—except those billions in India, and billions like them throughout history. Ok, this is, this is, this is astride, this doctrine is astride a contemptible history of scientific ignorance and religious barbarism. We come from people who used to bury children under the foundations of new buildings as offerings to their imaginary gods. Ok, just think about that. There, in vast numbers of societies, people would bury children in postholes–—people like ourselves—–thinking that this would prevent an invisible being from knocking down their buildings. These are the sorts of people who wrote the Bible. Ok, if there is a less moral, moral framework than the one Dr. Craig is proposing, I haven’t heard of it.

MODERATOR:

Professor Craig now has 8 minutes for a rebuttal. Timekeeper, are you ready? Begin.

CRAIG:

The less moral framework is atheism! Atheism has no grounds for objective moral values or duties. And it’s interesting that in that last speech, I was disappointed to hear no defense given of that crucial, uh, second contention that I offered against Dr. Harris’s view. Remember, we talked about the Value Problem. I gave what I consider a knock-down argument to show that the moral landscape is not identical to the continuum of human flourishing. We talked about objective moral duties, the “is vs. ought” distinction, the “ought implies can” problem. None of these have been responded to. So if you want a really desperate moral system, try atheism. There’s no foundation for objective moral values and duties there.

Now, what about theism? Does it do any better? Well, in the last speech, we heard some attacks on my first contention, that God provides a sound foundation for morality. Unfortunately, it seems to me that most of these were red herrings. A red herring is a smelly old fish that’s dragged across the path of the bloodhounds to distract them from their true quarry, so they get distracted and go off following the dead fish. And I’m not going to be distracted by the red herrings that were offered in that speech!

For example, in response to my claim that if God exists, then objective moral values exist, we heard that I haven’t truly offered an alternative to his view because the goal on theism is to avoid Hell. Honestly, that just simply shows how poorly Sam Harris understands Christianity. You don’t believe in God to avoid going to Hell. Belief in God isn’t some kind of fire insurance. You believe in God because God, as the supreme Good, is the appropriate object of adoration and love. He is Goodness itself, to be desired for its own sake. And so the fulfillment of human existence is to be found in relation to God. It’s because of who God is and his moral worth that he is worthy of worship. It has nothing to do with avoiding Hell, or promoting your own well-being.

He then responds, “But there’s no good reason to believe that such a being exists. Look at the problem of evil and the problem of the unevangelized.” Both of these, as I explained in my opening, are irrelevant in tonight’s debate because I’m not arguing that God exists. Maybe he’s right; maybe these are insuperable objections to Christianity or to theism. It wouldn’t affect either of my contentions: that if God exists, then we have a sound foundation for moral values and duties; if God does not exist, then we have no foundation for objective moral values and duties. So these are red herrings.

Now I have written on each of these problems, the problem of evil and the problem of the unevangelized, and you can find much of what I’ve said at our website reasonablefaith.org. If you’re interested, go ahead and look at that. Or, as Michael Rea suggested, talk to one of your philosophy professors. Michael has written extensively on the problem of evil, and I’m sure he’d love to have a conversation with you about, uh, those things.

Notice, uh, secondly, I would want to say, evil actually proves that God exists because if God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist! If evil exists, it follows that moral values and duties do exist, namely, some things are evil. So evil actually proves the existence of God, since in the absence of God, good and evil as such would not exist. So you cannot press both the problem of evil and agree with my, uh, contention that if God does not exist, then objective moral values and duties do not exist because evil will actually be an argument for the existence of God.

Notice that Dr. Harris has no moral foundation for saying that Christian beliefs are morally execrable, because he has no foundation for making such a judgment. If atheism is true, what objective foundation is there for affirming that one view is execrable and another is not? There’s simply no basis for such judgments. So if he wants to have a debate on theism, I will happily, uh, engage in one with him; but that’s not the debate for tonight.

He also says it’s “psychopathic” to believe these things. Now, that remark is just as stupid as it is insulting. It is absurd to think that Peter van Inwagen here at the University of Notre Dame is psychopathic, or that a guy like Dr. Tom Flint, who is as gracious a Christian gentlemen as I could have ever met, is psychopathic. Uh, this is simply, uh, below the belt.

So it seems to me that we’ve not been given any refutation of the view that if God does exist, then his essence, his character, is determinative for the existence of objective moral values.

What about objective moral duties? Here I explained that God’s commands must be consistent with his nature. And Dr. Harris continues to press the point, “Oh, but the Bible supports slavery”. Again I’ll refer you to Professor Copan’s book,[19] which shows that that is a gross misrepresentation of ancient Israel, which did not in fact promote slavery as we understand it, uh, in light of the experience in the American South.

But, again, that’s simply not relevant, ’cause I’m not—uh, that isn’t relevant because I’m not defending, uh, the Bible tonight! I’m saying that, uh, for a theist—whether Jew, Christian, deist, Hindu—uh, moral duties will be grounded in the divine commands, which are based in his nature.

He says, “But then what about people like the Taliban, who say that God has commanded them to do certain atrocities?” I would say the very same thing to the Taliban that Dr. Harris says, namely, “God did not command you to do those things.” That’s exactly what Dr. Harris would say. The reason he thinks that is that he doesn’t believe that God exists, but I would say that because I think that the Taliban has got the wrong God, that in fact God hasn’t commanded them to commit these atrocities, and, indeed, God will only issue such commands are—as are consistent with his moral nature and for which he has morally sufficient reasons.

So I don’t think this first contention is really in much dispute tonight. I think it’s obvious that if God exists, then obviously objective moral values exist, independently of human opinion—they’re grounded in the character of God—and there would be objective moral duties, if God exists, because our duties arise in response to the moral imperatives that God issues to us.

So the real debate is on that second contention: can atheism provide a foundation for objective moral values and duties? And I think we’ve seen powerful reasons to think that it cannot.

MODERATOR:

Dr. Harris now has 8 minutes. Timekeeper, are you ready? Begin.

HARRIS:

Well, you, uh, perhaps you’ve noticed Dr. Craig has a charming habit of summarizing his opponent’s points in a way in which they were not actually given, so I will leave it to you to sort it out on Youtube. Needless to say, I didn’t call those esteemed colleagues of his psychopaths, as I made clear.

Uh, in any case, Dr. Craig has merely defined God as being intrinsically good. It’s, if you want to charge someone with merely semantic games, it ap—the shoe’s on, on the other foot as well. There is, there is no reason that I can see why there couldn’t be an evil God, uh, or several. Ok, he, but his God is intrinsically good, goodness is grounded in his very nature. That is a, a, a definitional move that he has made.

Now, I have presented a positive case for grounding an objective morality in the context of science. And thinking about moral truth in the context of science should only pose a problem for you, if you imagine that a science of morality has to be absolutely self-justifying in a way that no science ever could be. Ok, every branch of science must rely on certain axiomatic assumptions, ok, certain core values. And a science of morality would be on the same footing as a science of medicine, or physics, or chemistry. You need only assume that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad and worth avoiding, and indeed, the worst-case scenario for conscious life. And if science is unscientific, if this, if, if, if, if having a value assumption at the core renders science unscientific, what is scientific?

Now, Dr. Craig is confused about what it means to speak with scientific objectivity about the human condition. He says things like, “from the point of view of science, we’re just constellations of atoms, and we’re no more valuable than rats or insects”, ok, as though the only scientifically objective thing that could be said about us that we’re constellations of atoms. Ok there, there are two very different senses in which we, we use these terms, “subjective” and “objective”. Ok there, there is, the first is epistemological. It relates to how we know. And when we say we’re reasoning or thinking objectively in this sense, we’re talking about, about the style in which we’re thinking. We’re talking about the fact that we’re, we’re, we’re seeing through our biases, which is to say, trying to jettison bias. We are reasoning in a way that’s available to the data. Ok our minds are open to counter-arguments. Uh, now this is the, this is the absolute foundation of science, and this is what, this is what opens such an invidious gulf between science and religion, the difference, here, in the approach to objectivity. But science does not require that we ignore the fact that certain facts are subjective, ontologically subjective. Ok there are facts about the human condition that science can understand and study, that are first-person facts, facts about what it’s like to be you. Ok and, and we can study these facts, and our study of them reveals how much deeper and richer and more meaningful our lives are than the lives of cockroaches. Ok so this is a false reductionism that he’s purveying here.

Now, so there are subjective facts. If you happen to have an intact nervous system, being burned alive will be excruciatingly painful. The painfulness of pain is a subjective fact about you. Ok I’m—but what my argument, uh, entails is that there, there are, we can speak objectively about a certain class of subjective facts that go by the name of morality, that relate to questions of “good” and “evil”, and that these depend upon the well-being of conscious creatures, especially our own.

And by this light, we can see that it’s possible to value the wrong things. I mean, if you think you prefer to be neurotic and in pain, and incapable of creative work, and completely disconnected from other people, there’s something wrong with you, ok. Objectively wrong with you? Yes! In that you are closed to higher states of consciousness. Higher with respect to what? Higher as in further from the lowest possible state of consciousness, the worst possible misery for everyone.

Is the worst possible misery for everyone really bad? Once again, we have hit philosophical bedrock with the shovel of a stupid question. Now, I want to take a brief moment to speak about these higher possibilities, because it’s often thought that nonbelievers like myself are closed to some remarkable experiences that religious people have. That’s not true; that’s not true. There’s nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing self-transcending love and ecstasy, and rapture, and awe. There’s nothing that prevents an atheist from going into a cave for a year, like a proper mystic, and doing nothing but meditate on compassion. What atheists don’t tend to do is make unjustifiable and unjustified claims about the nature of the cosmos or about the divine origin of certain books on the basis of those experiences.

Now, the, the prospect of somebody becoming a true saint in life and, and inspiring people long after their deaths, is something that I take very seriously. I’ve, I’ve, I’ve spent a lot of time studying meditation with some very great wise old yogis and Tibetan lamas who’ve spent decades on retreat, I mean really remarkable people, ok. People who I actually consider to be spiritual geniuses, of a certain sort. And so I can well imagine that if Jesus was a spiritual genius, you know, a palpably non-neurotic, and charismatic and wise person, I can well imagine the experience of his disciples. I can well imagine the kind of influence he could have on their lives, ok. We do not have to presuppose anything on insufficient evidence in order to explore this higher terrain of human well-being. We don’t have to take anything on faith. We don’t have to lie to ourselves, or to, to our children, about the nature of reality. If we want to understand our situation in the world, along with these deeper possibilities, we have to do it in the spirit of science. Ok given, given that people have had these experiences in every context, while worshiping one God, while worshiping hundreds, while worshiping none, that proves, that a deeper principle is at work. That the sectarian claims of, of our various religions can’t possibly be true in that context. And all we have is human conversation to capture these possibilities. We can either have a first-century conversation, as dictated by the New Testament, or a seventh century conversation as dictated by the Qur’an—or a twenty-first century conversation that leaves us open to the full wealth of human learning.

Please think about these things.

MODERATOR:

We’re now moving to 5 minute closing speeches. Timekeeper, are you ready? Okay, begin.

CRAIG:

In my closing statement, I’d like to draw together some of the threads of the debate and see if we can come to some conclusions.

First, I argued that God, if he exists, provides a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties. By the time of last his rebuttal, the only argument that I heard Dr. Harris offering against this position is to say that you’re merely defining God as good, which is the same fallacy I accused him of committing. I don’t think this is the case at all. God is a being worthy of worship. Any being that is not worthy of worship is not God. And therefore God must be perfectly good and essentially good. More than that, as Anselm saw, God is the greatest conceivable being, and therefore he is, uh, the very paradigm of goodness itself. He is the greatest good. So once you understand the concept of God, you can see that asking, “Well, why is God good?” is sort of like asking, “Why are all bachelors unmarried?” Uh, it’s the very concept of the greatest conceivable being, of being worthy of worship that entails the essential goodness of God. And I think it’s evident, that if God exists, then, we do have objective moral values and duties.

Secondly, I argued if God does not exist, we have no foundation for objective moral values or objective moral duties. Um, I showed that on his view there is—it is logically impossible to say that the moral landscape is identical to the landscape of the flourishing of conscious beings, and that therefore his view is incoherent. We also looked at the is/ought distinction, and the “ought implies can”, to which Dr. Harris has never replied in the course of this evening’s debate.

In his last speech, he said, “But we simply must rely upon certain axioms”. Well, that’s the same as saying you’ve got to take it by faith! And if these axioms are moral axioms, then I think he’s admitting my point, that on atheism, there simply is no ground for believing in the objective moral values and duties. He just takes them by a leap of faith.

He says, “Well, there are different senses of the word objective.” Yes, of course; and in my opening speech I made clear the sense in which I was defining the term:  I mean “valid and binding independent of human opinion”. And moral values are not objectively binding and valid in that way on atheism. He says, “Science can study subjective facts; for example, pain is a subjective fact.” Granted, that’s certainly true. So my question is: Is the wrongness of an action a subjective fact? On atheism, it’s hard to see how it couldn’t be any more—anything more than a subjective fact, in which case you cannot say, as Dr. Harris wants to say, (and I agree with him) that the genital mutilation of little girls is objectively wrong, not just a subjective opinion.

He says, “Well, but, uh, if you’re psychopathic or neurotic, there’s something wrong with you!” Granted, I agree with that; there is something wrong with you!  But the question is, on atheism—if atheism were true—, would there be anything objectively morally wrong with doing what the psychopath does? He hasn’t been able to show that. Indeed, there are no moral duties on his view, and remember he himself admitted that psychopaths could occupy the peaks of well-being on his so-called “moral landscape”, and that therefore it is not a moral landscape at all.

To conclude, I want to quote from a remarkable article that appeared in the Duke Law Journal, by, uh, Arthur Allen Leff, called “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law.” Dr. Leff’s difficulty is the same as Dr. Harris’s. He wants to find a foundation for moral values and duties, in this case, for the law, that would be, uh, independent of human opinion—it would be objective and it would be in the world. And he can’t find one. He says any attempt to ground values is open to the playground bully’s retort, “Who says?” And this is how his article concludes:

All I can say is this: It looks as if we are all we have. . . . Only if ethics is something unspeakable by us [that is, something transcendent], could law be unnatural, and therefore unchallengeable.  As things now stand, everything is up for grabs.

Nevertheless:
Napalming babies is bad.
Starving the poor is wicked.
Buying and selling each other is depraved. . . .
There is in the world such a thing as evil.
[All together now:]  Sez who?
God help us.[20]

MODERATOR:

And now Dr. Harris has 5 minutes. Timekeeper, are you ready? Begin.

HARRIS:

I’m curious: How many of you consider yourselves to be devout Muslims? Let’s see a show of hands. Don’t mean to single anyone out, but not many. Now, you’re all aware, of course, that the Qur’an exists, and claims to be the perfect word of the creator of the universe? You’re aware that once having heard this possibility and rejecting it, you’re all going to Hell, for eternity? I mean, needless to say, Dr. Craig and I are both going to Hell if this vision of life is true. The problem is that everything Dr. Craig has said tonight, with a few modifications, could be said in defense of Islam, in fact has been said in defense of Islam, ok. The logic is exactly the same: We have a book that claims to be the word of the creator of the universe. It tells us about the nature of moral reality and how to live within it. But what if Muslims are right? What if Islam is true? How should we view God in moral terms? How would we view God in moral terms, or I should say, Allah? Ok, we have been born in the wrong place, to the wrong parents, given the wrong culture, given the wrong theology. Ok, needless to say, Dr. Craig is doomed. He’s been thoroughly confused by Christianity. I mean, just appreciate what a bad position he’s now in to appreciate the true word of God. I have been thoroughly misled by science. Ok, where is Allah’s compassion? And yet, an eter—He’s omni—He’s omnipotent; he could change this in an instant. He could give us a sign that would convince everyone in this room. And yet he’s not gonna do it. And Hell awaits. And Hell awaits our children, because we can’t help but mislead our children. Now, just hold this vision in mind, and first appreciate how little sleep you have lost over this possibility ok. Just feel in this moment how carefree you are, and will continue to be, in the face of this possibility. What are the chances that we’re all going to go Hell, for, for eternity, because we haven’t recognized the Qur’an to be the perfect word of the creator of the universe? Please know that this is exactly how Christianity appears to someone who’s not been indoctrinated by it.

Our scriptures were written by people, who by, by, by, by virtue of their placement in history, had less access to scientific information and facts, and basic common sense, than any person in this room. ok, in fact, there’s not a person in this room who has ever met a person whose worldview was as narrow as the worldview of Abraham, or Moses, or Jesus, or Muhammad. And most of the people, with a few exceptions, had, had a moral worldview that was more or less indistinguishable from that of an Afghan warlord today. Ok and yet, Dr. Craig insists that the authors of the Bible knew everything that they had to know about the nature of the cosmos, and about how to live within it, to guide us at this moment. Ok I want to suggest to you that this vision of life can’t possibly be true. Ok, it would, just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim algebra, there can be no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality. Whatever is true about our circumstance in moral terms, and in spiritual terms, is discoverable now, and can be talked about in, in language that is not an outright affront to everything that we’ve learned in the last 2000 years. What remains for us to discover are the facts, in every domain of knowledge, that will allow the greatest number of us to live lives truly worth living in this world. I mean, how is it that we can build a global civilization, a viable global civilization, of now destined to be 9 billion people, where the maximum number of people truly flourish. That is the challenge we face. Sectarian moral denominations, ok, a world shattered, Balkanized by competing claims about an invisible God, is not the way to do it. Apart from the fact that there’s no evidence in the first place that should be compelling to us to adopt that view.

The only tool we need is honest inquiry. And I would suggest to you that, if faith is ever right about anything in this domain, it’s right by accident. Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure to talk to all of you.

1. If God exists then we have a plausible account of (a) the nature of moral goodness and (b) the nature of moral obligation.

I noted that Harris’s attempt to refute this conditional failed miserably. However, he did not just offer a negative case; Harris contended that:

2. If atheism is true then we have a plausible account of (a) the nature of moral goodness and (b) the nature of moral obligation.

Harris defended 2(a) by contending that moral goodness could be identified with human well-being, which he “in turn” identified with physical states of the brain. Harris defended 2(b) by identifying our moral obligations with the property of promoting human well-being. Harris suggested that this means that moral questions are scientific questions that can be answered by science.

Harris’s Argument for Ethical Naturalism
Harris’s argument for 2(a) consisted of three claims. First, he proposed a thought experiment of a world without conscious beings. Intuitively, we judge that nothing is good or bad in this world because nothing matters to anyone in such a world, since there is no one for anything to matter to. Harris concluded that the existence of goodness is dependent on conscious beings.

Second, Harris asked us to imagine a world full of conscious creatures who live forever in excruciating pain. We intuitively judge this state of affairs to be bad and we intuitively assume a duty to avoid it.

Third, since states of consciousness are brain states, science can develop ways of promoting these states.

However, this argument fails to establish Harris’s conclusion. The first claim shows only that goodness depends on the existence of conscious beings. It does not show that goodness is a state of consciousness. Moreover, the second and third premises affirm that we have a duty to avoid maximising pain and that science can tell us how to fulfil this duty. It does not show that moral obligation is the property of promoting or enhancing human flourishing. Nor does the argument show that science can answer moral questions.

The argument, in fact, relies on people determining, by moral intuition, what things are good and what obligations we have prior to scientific investigation. After this is determined science is used to ascertain how to fulfil these duties. Nothing in Harris’s argument implies that science can discover what our duties are or what is good in the first place.

Moreover, as I noted in my previous post, this method involves accepting moral beliefs as properly basic. However, if it is the case that we can accept moral beliefs as properly basic then what is the problem with Alvin Plantinga’s contention that belief in God is properly basic? What exactly is it about religious beliefs that disqualifies them from being basic in the same way Harris contends moral beliefs are?

Craig’s response to Harris’s account of Goodness
Craig offered at least six different arguments in his critique of Harris’s naturalism.

Human Flourishing and ‘Speciesism’

First, Craig contended that,

“But if there is no God, what reason is there to regard human flourishing as in any way significant? … After all, on the atheistic view, there’s nothing special about human beings. They’re just accidental by-products of nature that have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust called the planet Earth, lost somewhere in a hostile and mindless universe, and doomed to perish individually and collectively in a relatively short time.

This is mere rhetoric. As Wes Morriston argues the conclusion that “there is nothing significant about human flourishing” simply does not follow from the premises that: (i) humans are tiny compared to the universe, (ii) they have not been around very long, (iii) they owe their existence to mindless natural processes, (iv) they die after a short time, (v) eventually all of them will become permanently dead.[1] In fact, it is hard to see how any of the premises (i)-(v) imply this at all.

Craig’s premises allude to John Hare’s[2] and Stephen Layman’s[3] arguments that atheism does not allow for the existence of a moral order where, ultimately, virtue and happiness are conjoined. They argue that such an order is important for the rational authority of moral obligation.

However, at the point Craig offered this argument in the debate he was not attacking Harris’s account of moral obligation, nor was he addressing the question of morality’s rational authority. His conclusion was that “human flourishing”, sans God, could not be “significant”. Craig’s argument seems confused here, given the imprecision of the word ‘significant’ and his failure to spell out the links to the premises mentioned. Despite this, however, Harris never responded to the argument.

Craig’s second argument was more on point. He argued that if naturalism is true, there is nothing significant about human flourishing given that, on naturalism, humans do not differ in any significant way from other animals. Past critics of Craig, such as Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, have tended to dismiss this argument. I think this is a mistake. Craig’s comments and his references to “speciesism” – a term associated with Peter Singer – allude to a serious point made by both Singer and Nicholas Wolterstorff. In Justice: Rights and Wrongs Wolterstorff challenges the secularist who believes in human rights to identify a non-theological or non-religious property that:

(a) is possessed by all members of the human family;
(b) is not possessed by a terrestrial non-human animal;
(c) can be plausibly said to give humans worth sufficient to account for the standard rights we grant to humans; and,
(d) is not a property that is possessed by different humans to different degrees.[4]

Criteria (a) and (b) are necessary if rights are going to be granted to all human beings and not to animals like cows or dogs; (c) is necessary for the property to ground the kinds of human rights we recognise; (d) is necessary if all people have “equal rights”. If the property that grounds rights comes in degrees, and some people have it more than others, then people will not have equal rights. The problem according to Wolterstorff is that no non-theological property we know of appears adequate to do this. Interestingly, Singer has made the same point, arguing that our moral codes must be radically revised so that the welfare of human infants is not given more importance than that of pigs.

Harris’s response to this was inadequate. He stated that if it is a sin to be concerned about sentient life on this planet then he’ll take being sinful. He then remarked, “One wonders what Dr Craig is focused on”. However, Craig never said that being concerned about sentient life is sinful. The real wonder was what Harris was focused on –  it was clearly not the arguments of his opponent.

Evolutionary Scepticism
Craig’s second objection alluded to an argument made by Mark Linville, Sharon Street[5], and others. In his opening argument, Harris relied on moral intuitions concerning, good, evil and duties. Linville has argued that if God does not exist then the theory of evolution leads to moral scepticism about our basic evaluative judgements and our other evaluative judgements by implication - given that our non-basic judgements derive from these.

Craig argued that contemporary evolutionary psychology teaches that our basic evaluative judgements have evolved from precursors in lower primates. Evolution, however, is unconcerned with truth per se; it merely selects adaptive behaviour. As Craig pointed out, if God does not exist then the process evolution took is the result of numerous chance contingencies. There are a huge number of different ways evolution could have occurred. Each different way offers the possibility that radically different evaluative judgements of humans or any other moral agents could have emerged. Consequently, it is highly unlikely that the evaluative judgements we actually ended up making, given how the evolution did occur, just happened to be objectively true; this entails that all possible judgements that could have been made just happened to be false. [6]

Once again, Harris gave no response to this argument.

Identity and Incoherence
In his rebuttal, Craig made a further argument Harris’s position. Harris claimed that well-being is identical to goodness; however, identity relations such as this are, in philosophical language, ‘necessarily’ true. If A is identical to B then there is no possible world or situation where A and B are not identical. Craig noted that, in his book, Harris appeared to admit it was possible that doing evil might enhance human well-being. He also appeared to say that if this occurred then the “landscape would not be a moral landscape”. But this admits that there is a possible world where human well-being is not identical with what is morally good, and hence, logically is not identical in the actual world. Harris’s only response was to state “that was interesting” and then change the subject to questions of hell and religious exclusivism – issues which were not the subject of the debate.

Craig’s response to Harris’s account of Obligation
Craig also offered several arguments against Harris’s account of obligation.

Moral  Lawgiver
The first was his argument that “moral laws require a lawgiver”. This argument is unpersuasive. As many have noted, it is not obvious that laws always require a lawgiver; the laws of mathematics and logic for example do not. For Harris, obligation could perhaps function a bit like laws of nature. Just as with gravity, if one drops something then that thing falls to the ground, so to with obligation – if one does X then it is a scientific fact that well-being will be enhanced.

Yet, again, Harris again said nothing in response.

A related argument Craig gave was that obligations arise in response to imperatives from a competent authority. I addressed this argument in my previous post, I suggested that it is not entirely cogent but that Craig was probably alluding to Robert Adams’s point that obligations can be plausibly construed as “social requirements”. Being obligated to do X differs from having a reason to do X or it being good to do X. If one is obligated to do X then one has to do X. Failure to comply brings censure, guilt, shame and alienation from other people. Adams observes, “having an obligation to do something consists in being required (in a certain way, under certain circumstances or conditions), by another person or group of persons, to do it”[7] This feature of obligation, moral or otherwise, makes obligations very different from laws of logic or natural laws. Once again, Harris offered no response to this argument.

Is-Ought Fallacy
Craig’s second argument against Harris’s account of obligation was that his position violates the “is-ought fallacy”. Harris’s position is that our moral obligations can be determined by scientific research. But while science can tell us descriptive facts, it simply cannot tell us whether these facts were good or were identical to goodness. Nor can it tell us which facts are identical with the property of being morally obligated.

Harris did respond to this argument but in a confused way. He argued that scientists often assume certain epistemological values and virtues in their research, and that there is no way to actually argue for these values. But even though this is true, the fact that scientists rely on certain virtues to conduct research does not show that one can validly infer a substantive evaluative answer from that research. The is-ought fallacy does not claim that you cannot rely on values when you discover facts, it claims that you cannot deduce values from facts. Harris’s own comments suggest that science often operates by making moral assumptions which it cannot itself validate or prove, and are therefore known from some source other than science itself.

Ought Implies Can
The last objection Craig offered was that moral obligations presuppose the ability to make morally responsible choices. Implicit in our moral discourse is the notion that “ought implies can”. A person can be morally required or obligated to do something and be culpable for not doing it only if they can choose to not do it. This is why, for example, we do not have laws requiring people in wheelchairs to walk and why we don’t hold small children or the insane responsible for crimes, and so forth. Craig noted that Harris himself rejects the notion of moral responsibility. Harris rejects libertarian free will, the idea that human beings have a will that is not determined by prior physical events. He also rejects compatibilism, the idea that human responsibility is compatible with physical determination. Consequently, Harris’s own view commits him to denying that human beings can have moral obligations.

Yet once again, Harris did not respond to the argument presented.

Conclusion
Concerning the issue of ethical naturalism, it seems clear that Craig made the better case. Harris opened with an argument that did not, in fact, establish what he thought it did – something Craig made obvious. Craig then responded with three arguments against Harris’s account of goodness and another three against his account of obligation. Granted, some of these arguments were rhetorical flourishes that on examination required more exposition but others alluded to or presented significant challenges to Harris’s ethical naturalism.

What was telling was that Harris did not respond adequately to any of them, and in most cases he did not respond at all. One challenge he responded to with a thinly-veiled insult; another he responded to by simply confusing the derivation of an ought from an is by presupposing an ought in order to act in a way that enables one to determine an is while nevertheless maintaining the reverse i.e. that the ought (moral) has been derived from the is (scientific).

With every other argument, Harris offered no rebuttal or reply whatsoever. He changed the subject, and often aggressively attacked the truth of various Christian beliefs that were irrelevant to the moot of the debate. But even aside from this, Harris never offered any rationale for accepting his own meta-ethical stance of ethical naturalism and did not even attempt to mount any remotely rational defence of it against Craig’s criticisms.

In this review I will analyse the debate in two parts. In Part I, I will look at the discussion of Craig’s contention that,

1. If God exists then we have a plausible account of (a) the nature of moral goodness and (b) the nature of moral obligation.

In Part II, I will examine Harris’s contention that,

2. If atheism is true then we have a plausible account of (a) the nature of moral goodness and (b) the nature of moral obligation.

A couple of definitions are necessary here; what both Craig and Harris are defending are rival accounts of what both goodness and moral obligation are. When Craig or Harris offers an account of the nature of goodness, each is offering an account of what moral values and obligation are, that is, their ontological or metaphysical nature. Similarly, when Craig refers to God, he is referring to a personal immaterial being who is necessarily existent, omniscient, omnipotent and morally perfect.

Craig’s Argument for a Divine Command Theory
In support of 1(a) Craig argued that if theism is true, goodness could be identified with God himself. His view is that goodness is best understood in terms of an exemplar, that good is identified with the perfect paradigm of a good person and that the goodness of everything else is measured by its resemblance to this paradigm. An analogy to this idea is the official “metre stick” that exists in France today. The metre stick is exactly one metre long, and the length in metres of every other length is determined by comparison with it. In the same way, God is both perfectly good and is the standard of goodness for everything else. God’s goodness, for Craig, is cashed out in terms of certain character traits. To claim God is good is to claim that he is truthful, benevolent, loving, gracious, merciful and just, and that he is opposed to certain actions such as murder, rape, torturing people for fun and so on.

In support of 1(b) Craig argued that if God exists, moral obligations can be identified with Gods commands. He therefore advocated the version of a divine command theory of obligation proposed by Robert Adams in Finite and Infinite Goods.

While Craig sketched his account of goodness and obligation in his opening statement, he never offered any actual argument for why he thinks that if theism is true, this account is correct; yet later in the debate he said it was obvious. While I myself agree with a certain version of divine command theory, I think this suggestion is inadequate. There have been many objections raised against such theories in the literature, and hardly any of them presuppose the non-existence of God. I think these objections fail, and most of them fail miserably. But it would be a gross overstatement to claim that, given the truth of theism, a divine command theory is obvious.

Later in the debate,Craig did offer an argument of sorts for a divine command theory. He contended that obligations arise only in response to imperatives or demands by an authority.  As moral obligations are a type of obligation, they share this feature, of which divine command theory is the best explanation. The obvious question here is, why should we think obligations arise only in response to imperatives from an authority? Craig does not say. Moreover, there do appear to be counter-examples to this claim. For instance, consider the non-moral social obligations people have to friends or hosts, these are not grounded in imperatives from an authority.

Consequently, considered by itself, Craig’s argument for a divine command theory seems insufficient. However, I suspect his comments at least suggest a more defensible argument. Robert Adams has persuasively argued that the role that guilt, censure, punishment, forgiveness and social inculcation play in morality suggests moral obligations are a form of social requirement; “being obligated to do something consists in being required (in a certain way under certain situations) by another person or groups of persons not to do it”[1]. If this is the case then a divine command theory plausibly explains, in a way that naturalistic and secular theories struggle to, how moral obligations can be objective and also how they can be a demand made by a person. Unfortunately, Craig did not develop this point.

Harris’s Response
Harris’s  first rebuttal ignored 1a) and raised four main objections to 1b), which I will outline below.

Abhorrent Commands
Harris objected that a divine command theory entails that any action at all could be right, no matter how abhorrent. However, Craig pointed out in his opening statement that this objection falsely assumes that God could command anything at all, including abhorrent acts. A divine command theory does not identify our obligations with the commands of just anyone but only with the commands of God defined as omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect. And it is impossible for a morally perfect being to command abhorrent acts. Consequently, this objection fails. Despite Craig pointing this out, Harris continued to allude to this objection several times. He never tried to demonstrate how an omniscient being that was perfectly good could command what is abhorrently evil.

Old Testament Barbarisms
A second line of argument Harris made against 1b) was his allegation that the Old Testament teaches the permissibility of genocide and slavery. While I disagree with this claim, and have argued for my views elsewhere on this blog [see my genocide and slavery tags], the major problem in this context is that even if the claim is true, it does not refute 1b). Contention 1b) simply asserts that if God, understood as an “essentially omniscient, omnipotent, morally perfect being”, exists then it is plausible to identify our moral obligations with God’s commands. Nothing in this thesis says anything or commits one to saying anything, about whether the Old Testament is an authentic revelation of this God’s commands. While many divine command theorists believe in biblical infallibility, many do not. A divine command theorist could claim that the wrongness of an action is determined by God but we know what is right and wrong from our conscience—not from a written revelation. Philip Quinn once suggested this kind of theory.[2] Similarly, a divine command theorist could reject some Old Testament stories as immoral, as Robert Adams appears to[3]. Hence, as a rebuttal of 1b) this argument is a red herring. Craig repeated this fact early on in the debate, yet Harris continued to ignore it, repeating the red herring over and over again.

Miscellaneous Objections to Christian Theology
Harris’s main rebuttal of 1b), however, was four-fold. He contended:

(i) that the existence of evil in the world suggests that God does not exist;
(ii) that the doctrine of hell as a place of eternal conscious torment is unjust;
(iii) that the doctrine of exclusivism is unjust;
(iv) that these beliefs are jointly psychopathic.

What is bizarre about this is that none of these arguments actually address Craig’s contention.

Consider (i), the claim that evil proves God does not exist. Craig’s contention in 1b) was a conditional statement that: If God exists then we have a plausible account of the nature of moral obligation. Arguing that God does not exist does not refute this conditional since the conditional does not claim that God exists. Again, this was pointed out by Craig repeatedly in the debate and Harris repeatedly ignored it.

Similarly, Harris’s arguments in (ii) and (iii) do not refute 1b). Hell and particularism are doctrines in Christian theology. But the moot was not about whether Christianity is true. Craig’s contention was that, if God exists then we have a plausible account the nature of moral obligation. Nothing in this conditional requires one to embrace a particular view of hell or Christian soteriology or even Christianity at all. In fact, one could accept 1b) without even being a theist. Once again, this was pointed out to Harris by Craig early on, yet Harris continued to ignore it and instead resort to making jibes at Christian doctrines.

In the same way, (iv) is equally beside the point. Apart from the fact that simply referring to a claim in pejorative terms is not a rebuttal, these claims were not what the debate was about anyway. Hence his comments were strictly irrelevant. The debate was not about whether Christianity is psychopathic.

Evidentialism
One final objection Harris alluded to was that there is no evidence for God’s existence. But again, this is irrelevant to 1b). The debate simply was not about whether there was evidence for God’s existence. Again, Craig’s first contention was only that: if God exists then we have a plausible account of the nature of moral obligation. Nothing in this claim requires one to believe there is evidence for God’s existence. At some point, the question can no longer be evaded – does Harris even understand conditional implication in a debate resolution?

It is worth noting that, in addition to being irrelevant, this objection has two other problems. First, it begs the question. If Craig is correct in holding that 1b) is true and 2) is false, then there is evidence for God’s existence. If moral obligation can be plausibly explained only on the assumption that God exists then the existence of moral obligations would be evidence for God’s existence. Consequently, to establish that there is no evidence for God’s existence, Harris would have to attack 1 and defend 2, something he spent almost the entire debate not doing.

A final point on this last issue. At several points in his opening statement, Harris appealed to intuitive moral judgements about the wrongness of causing suffering. He stated that he was justified in accepting them as “axioms” without any evidence. Now I think something like what Harris says here is correct. I accept that certain moral claims are properly basic and justified independently of any argument for their truth. The problem is, however, once you grant that substantive moral claims can be properly basic, it is hard to see how you can then  reject the arguments of people like Alvin Plantinga that God is rational in the absence of evidence. What exactly is it about religious beliefs that disqualifies them from being properly basic that does not apply to moral beliefs?

Harris never answered (or even bothered to raise) this question; the only time he came close to doing so was when he argued that one cannot have properly basic beliefs about God because people disagree radically over the nature of God. However, as the existence of this debate shows, people also disagree widely over the nature of morality.  So not only was the evidentialist objection irrelevant to the actual debate, Harris’s use of it was an obvious case of special pleading. Craig put his finger on this problem when he noted that Harris took morality on faith despite claiming to have proven it by science—an argument that Harris, true to form, consistently ignored.

Consequently, regarding contention 1, Craig clearly presented the better case. While Craig did not really offer any arguments for his contention untill late in the exchange, and even then the argument he gave was rather undeveloped, Harris never offered a response. He pretty much ignored 1a) and threw out one relevant point in argument against 1b) which Craig had already refuted in his opening statement and which has been rebutted in the philosophical literature ad nauseum. In every other argument Harris offered against a divine command theory, he ignored the theory altogether instead he offered objections to numerous other positions that were not divine command theory and which were not even pertinent to the debate.

Harris’s attitude appeared to be, “’in spite of the agreed-on subject of the debate, I’ll say whatever negative thing I like about Christianity and that will surely count as an awesome argument.” Unfortunately for the new atheists rational discussion does not function this way. Rational discussion involves listening to what your opponent actually contends, attempting to understand it, responding with reasoned arguments and sticking to the topic you agreed would be the focus of the discussion.

In Debate Review: Sam Harris and William Lane Craig on Divine Command Theory Part II, I will discuss Harris’s contention that morality can be grounded in the natural facts studied by science.

Plato refuted this argument over 2,000 years ago in his famous dialogue The Euthyphro. The Euthyphro argument is commonly appropriated in the form of a dilemma: “is an action right because it promotes human flourishing or does it promote human flourishing because it is right?

If ethical naturalists take the second horn of this dilemma and claim that something promotes human flourishing because it is right then things are right prior to, and hence independently of, whether they promote human welfare; so the ethical naturalists’ position here is false.

If the ethical naturalists take the former horn then morality is arbitrary. If rape or murder or cruelty for fun had the natural property of promoting happiness then rape and murder and cruelty for fun would be morally required but it is impossible for these things to be morally required; so ethical naturalism is clearly absurd.

Moreover, if things are right because they have natural properties, like promoting human flourishing, then one cannot meaningfully say that human flourishing is good. To say “human flourishing”  is good is just to say that  ”human flourishing is human flourishing,” which is just an empty tautology.

So in short, Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma refuted ethical naturalism 2,000 years ago. Contemporary ethical naturalists who say otherwise just have not read Plato and have never come across this argument before.

In any event, ethical naturalism is deeply problematic. Throughout history people have appealed to human flourishing and forms of ethical naturalism to justify atrocities. The Inquisition, for example, was often justified by Dominican Theologians on the basis that it was in accord with natural law, and natural law was understood to be grounded in human flourishing. Similarly, wars have been justified on the basis of moral theories based on human flourishing. Stalin and Lenin wanted to bring about human flourishing through a communist utopia and murdered millions in their pursuit of that. And the Americans dropped an atomic bomb on Japan because they wanted to promote the flourishing of American soldiers that were going to invade.

Finally, it is obviously insulting to suggest that right and wrong are grounded in scientifically verifiable properties like this. There are a large number of people who live morally upright lives who do not believe in ethical naturalism. The suggestion that these people are all immoral is obviously false. Name me one moral action a person who is not an ethical naturalist cannot do? This unanswerable question shows that ethical naturalism is clearly false.

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God, Morality and Abhorrent Commands: Part I Kant
God, Morality and Abhorrent Commands: Part II Robert Adams
God, Morality and Abhorrent Commands: Part III Philip Quinn
Video: Bradley v Flannagan “Is God the Source of Morality?
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Matthew Flannagan’s Opening Statement: Bradley v Flannagan Debate
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John W. Loftus on The Christian Illusion of Moral Superiority Part II
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The Euthyphro Objection Part II: Arbitrariness
Euthyphro Objection III: The Redundancy of God is Good

Note: This video only includes footage of the talk itself and not the Q&A that followed the talk.

There is a lot that can be said about these concerns and in a short column I cannot say everything. In many instances I think the sceptics fail to appreciate the context and genre of the passages they cite. They fail to appreciate, for example, that Ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts employ highly figurative rhetoric, which hyperbolically describe victories in terms of total annihilation of the enemy. They fail to appreciate that Ancient Near Eastern legal texts, as noted by Raymond Westbrook, “reflect the scribal compilers’ concern for perfect symmetry and delicious irony rather than the pragmatic experience of the law courts.” Or that, as JJ Finkelstein points out, they “were not meant to be complied with literally” but to “serve an admonitory function” and so probably do not command execution for the crimes mentioned. Sceptics can fail to grasp that claiming the bible is God’s word does not mean it did not come to us mediated through the writings of human beings who wrote in a particular time and place using the language, rhetoric and literary conventions of their time and so and frequently they fail to appreciate the bible is a Canon and that passages need to be read in their broader context i.e. taking into account the whole bible. A full articulation of these points, however, would take more space than I can here muster.

Instead I will address another feature of this issue which concerns the general method in play here. In each case the sceptic takes a purported divine command and compares it to a moral belief that he takes to be correct. The conclusion he draws is that the purported command is inauthentic. This is of course a possibility; there is, however, another possibility that on at least some occasions, moral statements these sceptics are relying on are mistaken.

This feature of the dialectic became clear to me after a public debate I had on these issues in August. A sceptic wrote to me claiming that even granting the issues about the genre of the biblical text, the bible still presents a picture of God who issues commands out of accord with contemporary modern understandings of morality.  Suppose one grants that when read in its literary context, the Torah does not literally prescribe the death penalty for adultery or sodomy, it still is condemning sexual activity between consenting adults. This raises an interesting question, why does the sceptic assume that God, if he existed, would be a contemporary western liberal? Why assume that he would never command anything politically incorrect or out of accord with trendy Western mores? The sceptic assumes that it is appropriate to assess purported divine commands with his own moral perspective. Why?

The most sustained argument for this method I know of comes from a Moral Philosopher at Yale University, Robert Adams, in his excellent book Finite and Infinite Goods. Adams states that “Our existing moral beliefs are bound in practise, and I think, ought in principle, to be a constraint on our beliefs about what God commands.”

Adams reasons that we can only accept the claim that Gods commands constitute our moral duties if God is understood as perfectly good; if God were evil or morally indifferent then it would be possible for him to command wrongdoing and we cannot have a duty to do wrong. Once this assumption is granted, however, one cannot coherently say that God has commanded just anything. We have some grasp of what goodness is, what counts as right and wrong, what kinds of things a good person does not command. Therefore, God cannot coherently be called good if what he commands is contrary to “our existing moral beliefs”. As Philosopher Raymond Bradley notes, to do so would be “playing word games which are intellectually dishonest” that deprive “the word ‘holy’ of its ordinary meaning and make it a synonym for ‘evil’.”

In response, I will simply note that critics of Adams’ argument have shown that as it stands it needs qualifying. It is true we have some grasp of what goodness is but this is mitigated by two factors.

First, our moral judgements are fallible. While God does not command wrongdoing it is likely that a perfectly good omniscient being would at some time command something contrary to what we think is wrong. To say otherwise dogmatically assumes that we are such good judges of morality that God could never disagree with us.

Second, our moral concepts are subject to revision. We change our opinions about the goodness and rightness of certain things without “playing word games which are intellectually dishonest” or depriving “the word ‘holy’ of its ordinary meaning and make it a synonym for ‘evil.’” If this were not the case then one could never honestly or rationally change one’s mind on an ethical issue.

Consequently, Adams’ argument does not show we cannot attribute to God’s commands contrary to “our existing moral beliefs”. Rather, as he says elsewhere, we cannot coherently ascribe to “God a set of commands that is too much at variance with the ethical outlook we bring to our ethical thinking.” Elsewhere he allows for “the possibility of a conversion in which one’s whole ethical outlook is revolutionized, and reorganized around a new center” but “we can hardly hold open the possibility of anything too closely approaching a revolution in which, so to speak, good and evil would trade places”.

Therefore, Adams does not establish the claim that “our existing moral beliefs must serve as a constraint on our beliefs about what God commands.” It does, on the other hand, suggest that we cannot coherently “accept a theological ethics that ascribes to God a set of commands that is too much at variance with the ethical outlook we bring to our ethical thinking.”  Adams argues that we cannot coherently or defensibly accept a theological ethics which, in effect, makes good and evil trade places and which so radically transforms our concept of goodness that it becomes a synonym for what we call evil. Nor could we accept an ethical system that calls our concept of goodness so radically into question that it breaks down.

Certain beliefs such as, “that killing, assault, theft and lying are in general wrong and can only be justified if some overriding moral reason applies” or that without special overriding reason it is wrong to inflict pain and suffering on others or treat them with contempt” are so central to our account of goodness that we cannot coherently accept that a perfectly good being has issued commands which negate them. However, many moral claims are highly controversial and such that people can debate them and change their minds on them and so on. When they do it is implausible to suggest that their concept of goodness was so radically at odds with previous beliefs that “good and evil would trade places” or that it is merely a word game that the position holding these things could be endorsed by a good person.

Consider, for example, the debate over whether the bombing of Hiroshima was justified because it saved a huge number of lives by ending a war early. While I myself do not share this opinion, I would not say that it is obviously self-contradictory.

Similarly, consider moral debates about capital punishment or euthanasia or affirmative action. While I believe there are defensible and justified answers to these questions, I doubt we can dismiss those views we disagree with as conceptually incoherent, as being so radically at odds with our understanding of good so as to be incomprehensible or merely semantic gymnastics. Even when we disagree with people on these issues in many instances we need to take what they say with real seriousness and be open to the possibility that they are right and we are wrong.

This means one should not be too quick to dismiss a purported divine command merely because it is contrary to a contemporary liberal morality. Obviously one cannot coherently attribute anything at all to God and claim he is good and Adams is correct that we cannot accept a theological ethics that ascribes to God a set of commands that is too much at variance with the ethical outlook we bring to our ethical thinking. However, one function of theological reflection is to critique our contemporary mores and an authentic encounter with God’s will is likely to contrast with some of our moral beliefs.  It is sheer hubris to suggest God would always agree with us. Is it really impossible for an all knowing, all good being to disagree with us on the seriousness of adultery or the propriety of capital punishment? To say no is to tacitly assume that modern 21^st century liberal westerners have made no mistakes and their understanding of morality is infallible and inerrant. Those who make such an assumption have a dogmatically certain faith in contemporary liberal mores. Such attitudes are normally attributed predominantly to religious fundamentalists and I think the irony of this speaks for itself.

I write a monthly column for Investigate Magazine entitled “Contra Mundum.” This blog post was published in the February 2011 issue and is reproduced here with permission. Contra Mundum is Latin for ‘against the world;’ the phrase is usually attributed to Athanasius who was exiled for defending Christian orthodoxy.

Letters to the editor should be sent to:
editorial@investigatemagazine.DELETE.com

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Contra Mundum: Secular Smoke Screens and Plato’s Euthyphro
Contra Mundum: What’s Wrong with Imposing your Beliefs onto Others?
Contra Mundum: God, Proof and Faith
Contra Mundum: “Bigoted Fundamentalist” as Orwellian Double-Speak
Contra Mundum: The Flat-Earth Myth
Contra Mundum: Confessions of an Anti-Choice Fanatic
Contra Mundum: The Judgmental Jesus

They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. They must rehabilitate themselves after ever little emancipation from religion by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring way what moral fanatics they are. That is their penance.

Friedrich Nietzsche