One thing you would have noticed was missing from my apologetics project was the moral argument as classically conceived. The moral argument roughly runs like this:
P1: If morality is only objective if God chooses what is right and wrong
P2: Morality is objective
C1: God chooses what is right and wrong
We need an added step to get the conclusion we actually want, so if C1 is correct then the following argument is also correct:
P1: God cannot choose what is right and wrong unless God exists
P2: God does choose what is right and wrong (Pace C1)
C2: God exists
The overarching philosophical theory that morality derives from God's command is called 'Divine Command Theory'. Most Christians are Divine Command theorists even if they don't realize it. Note that if the above arguments 'work' then Divine Command Theory is true necessarily. Further, if Divine Command Theory is false, then the above arguments cannot work.
Divine Command Theory has a big problem though, and it was pointed out by Plato a long time ago (399 BC, roughly) in a work known as EUTHYPHRO. It is set up as a dialogue between Socrates and an interlocutor named Euthyphro. Euthyphro essentially argues that the will of 'the gods' defines what is right and wrong. This is basically a Hellenized version of the Divine Command Theory. Socrates retorts by pointing out the following problem:
Why does God (or the gods) will what he (they) wills as good? Is something good BECAUSE God wills it? Or does God will it because it is good?
If God wills what He wills because it IS good, then goodness is something outside of God. God could be an expert in the good, and that is all well and fine, but then goodness is something independent of God. If, on the other hand, whatever God wills is good by Him willing it, then it is possible (in modal language, there is a possible world) that God could will rape to be good, and then it would be good. "But God would never do that" someone might retort. Ah, but WHY wouldn't God do that? Because it would be wrong to? You can see how problematic the Socratic dilemma is.
Additionally, we call God 'good'. The Bible certainly does. But how can we describe God as good if goodness is simply whatever God wills? If God can will rape to be good, then it makes little sense to call God good. God is beyond moral categories, in that case.
The truth is that though most Christians are tacitly divine command theorists, in reality the Christian community pictures God not as willing the good, but as being good. Goodness simply is a reflection of God. Whatever God IS, that is what is good. In this sense God is the Platonic 'form of the good'. But one might ask why we need God, then, to posit goodness. Why can't there just BE a 'form of the good'? Moral truths can exist just as mathematical truths do: necessarily and abstractly.
A further problem with the naive moral argument is it ignores the mountains of work done by various philosophers and other thinkers who find ways to justify objective moral discourse without talking about God at all. Virtues ethics, utilitarianism, deontology...all of these have a wonderful tradition that includes tons of great work. We ignore that work at our peril. Ah, but you may point out that none of this work is conclusive, that we have no reason to give these endeavors the level of certainty we do, to say, science. But so what? Apologetics is no better. If people who believe in God, with their own uncertain and risky grounds, have the right to believe in God, then certainly the atheistic moral objectivist has similar rights to believe in a moral order, and leave it at that.
Is there no answer to the Euthyphro problem? Is Divine Command Theory dead? To my mind, it is. And so is the naive or simple moral argument. But William Wainright came the closest to making me believe DCT was still viable in his wonderful, must-read book RELIGION AND MORALITY.
It is also in that book that I found much better, surer moral arguments that don't suffer from the weakness of being dependent on the DCT. Wainwright's version of Kant's Moral Argument, and his argument from the phenomenology of moral experience, I find much more persuasive. Indeed, the strongest moral argument I know is from Peter Berger in his book A RUMOR OF ANGELS. His inductive faith arguments are the best I've encountered anywhere.
But all of these argue not from the fact of morality, but from what it is like to BE moral, from moral experience. Such an argument lays claim to less certainty than the naive moral argument does. They aim not at proving God's existence, but to show that it is reasonable to believe in God, that we do have some evidence, however uncertain, that God exists. They aim to provide reasons to believe, not reasons to know. In the end, any good apologetic seeks this more modest end. It is the only way to speak to the risk and venture of the religious endeavor, without just willy-nilly accepting for no good reason the label of 'irrational' that non-believers are so apt to slap on those who believe.
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