Thanks for the response Gavin! I wish more people who engage in the scholarly Catholic-Protestant debate (on both sides of the issue) also had an interest in engaging robust, philosophical atheism.
Thanks! I am hoping to do more philosophy and general apologetics over the next year or so -- it will be fun to interact, Lord willing, on topics of agreement for change!
Clearly this is a sign that Trent and Dr. Ortlund should do a tag team discussion with joe schmid 🤷♂️. Y’all would be a strong force to be reckoned with just saying
@@TheCounselofTrent I love watching your channel. Although I am Protestant (Episcopalian to be precise) I enjoy watching you defend the Catholic Faith at the Scholarly level, refuting the "Popular Apologetics" that caricatures Roman Catholicism, and even Christianity, while also justifying the Magesterium for what it actually says.
This was great! Mere Christianity was the book that got me interested in apologetics - based on Lewis' moral argument! So because of that, this argument has a special place in my heart, but i also believe it's very powerful! It alone turned a friend of mine from atheism to theism. We shouldn't shy away from this argument!
*The Abolition of Man* was the book that *really* made me respect C.S. Lewis as a thinker, once I learned that he wrote an incredible philosophical book explaining objective morality, something he summed up in a few sentences in *Mere Christianity.*
consideirng how lewis said that christians should lie to potential converts about the religion, it seems that Lewis isn't much of a moral standard. "And secondly, I think we must admit that the discussion of these disputed points has no tendency at all to bring an outsider into the Christian fold. So long as we write and talk about them we are much more likely to deter him from entering any Christian communion than to draw him into our own. Our divisions should never be discussed except in the presence of those who have already come to believe that there is one God and that Jesus Christ is His only Son." - preface, Mere Christianity intentionally lying to someone so they can't make an informed decision isn't moral. And unfortuantely, for lewis, we know that humans dont' automatically know any morals, from the cases of feral children.
@@velkyn1 The moral argument doesn't require for theists to be moral or perfect persons. It simply requires the existence of objective moral values and duties to be dependent upon God.
@@natebozeman4510 Yep, I agree, the moral argument doesn't require anything from humans. Since you christians can't show that your god supports any set of moral values, you are all just liars when you claim this god wants "x" and that this god is the source of objective morality. "The moral argument doesn't require for theists to be moral or perfect persons. Lewis's claim in The Abolition of Man" is a baseless claim: "He says that there is a set of objective values that have been shared, with minor differences, by every culture, which he refers to as "the traditional moralities of East and West, the Christian, the Pagan, and the Jew..."." Curiously, commonality doesn't show that christians own or started what we know of as common moral ideas. Those are far older than the ignorance of Christianity, and are common because they help civlization exist. As often is the case, the presupposition of christian are just their greed to try to claim everything "good" came from their cult. It simply requires the existence of objective moral values and duties to be dependent upon God."
I’m an atheist and I often find apologist videos difficult to watch due to misrepresentations and straw men (something I also get frustrated by with some atheist channels), but I really enjoyed this video and think you presented the ideas very well. I’ll be checking out a few other videos from your channel.
Look into Taoism or Buddhism if you want to consider traditional, non-western philosophical systems that refute the moral argument out of the gate: no god required.
You quote Erik Wielenberg as a leading proponent of the view that objective morality does not need God as its foundation. For a response to Wielenberg's "brute ethical facts" line of thought, Adam Lloyd Johnson, a philosopher, has written a response to Wielenberg defending the moral argument in his book "Divine Love Theory." He has also debated Wielenberg on the question.
@bendecidospr It claims that if God does not exist that moral values and duties do not exist. When asked why the reasoning comes down to commands (and something isn't right or wrong just because someone commanded something) or it comes down to the nature of goodness itself which is good or bad independently of a God saying so. Attempts to say God is the good are laughable as God is not at all identical with the good. If the good is a part of God then it is this part of God that justifies itself and would so regardless of whether it was contained in God or approved by God or not.
Fantastic video, thank you! After watching 5 or 6 of your videos I was impressed by your clear thinking, charitable approach, careful distinctions etc. Finding out in this video that you have a background in philosophy explains a lot of that! Keep up the great work.
As an Atheist, he is mischaracterizing the modern position on this. If you want something relevant you should listen to the actual arguments of Atheists and not strawmen.
To cultivate your children's curiosity, you could try responding "I don't know, why don't we try to find out!?" May lead to a fun little research project together. Keep up the great work Gavin!
I've really been chewing on this idea of trying to account for moral facts on Atheism. The idea that moral facts are just "brute" or "obvious" just really hasn't been sitting well with me. It's get's arbitrary really quick. But even if moral facts were brute, or we could account for them based on our acquaintance with them, that really only solves the problem of Moral epistemology, which the theist using the moral argument will gladly grant. It does nothing to answer the question of why those things are wrong in the first place. I find it very difficult to accept that morality can be ontologcally grounded in ones acquaintance with a moral fact. It only gets us as far as the Atheist who says "So you're saying I can't know right and wrong unless I believe in your sky fairy?" Great video Gavin, looking forward to the inevitable responses :)
It also seems to follow that just because one affirms as an atheist that murder is wrong as a brute fact, that this is sufficient to give it meaning in the broad sense. Moral meaning seems to entail, not just the judgment “that is universally wrong for everyone in the same circumstance” but also a sanction for the violation of morality. God as a judge provides the full range of moral meaning, because he supports not just a universal standard, but also the power to enact punishment and reward which reach beyond the partial justice found in this life. Do you think it’s better to categorize this broader moral meaning as ontological rather than epistemological? I could see one saying it’s ontologically grounded in God, but that it’s “epistemological” because it’s a question of known meaning. I guess I’m wondering if moral “meaning” leans more toward ontology or epistemology?
@@macysondheim, I’m not sure that you have spent much time reading or thinking about this. Genesis is ancient Hebrew literature, not European. There are various views on the talking snake-it may have been a snake, but the Hebrew word can mean a creature of light, a type of angelic creature. It seems this creature became associated with chaos, as that’s what snakes came to represent in ancient mythology. If it was a just a snake, it is odd that it’s punishment was to go on its belly. Likely, it was called a snake because of this description, but that association doesn’t mean that it was an actual talking snake. The “dragon” is a water creature of some kind known to the ancients. It’s not a fire breathing cartoon. It appears in the hebrew poetry of the Bible. Like the snake it takes on the symbolism of struggle against the chaos of nature as well as malevolent evil. The Bible uses the real creatures that humans have encountered and sometimes turns them into symbols. It’s really not a childish thing to do. Some of our greatest literary and ethical achievements have fairy-tail like qualities (“All men are created equal with certain inalienable rights…” etc.). But we see through them like we should to their deeper meaning. Don’t pass over a good wine just because it’s a learned taste and requires intelligence. There is deep beauty and meaning in these histories and parables if you sit with them and let them speak what they say and not what you would have them say. All the best.
C.S. Lewis's moral argument has preserved and defended my faith against all intellectual challenges. Now that I have a better grasp of the ontological/cosmological arguments I see how firmly grounded the theistic worldview truly is, but the moral argument is still my utmost favorite.
Pretty much, yea. What's weird is that the discipline doing this is philosophy. A discipline that's all about examining and reflecting and analyzing, and secular moral realists frequently just fall back on "it's intuitive," "it's obvious," and "it's primitive" and "it's a brute fact." This is hardly the kind of compelling position that's going to win over skeptics.
I wouldn't say its because they are tried of thinking about it, I would say it is because they know where their thinking is leading them and they don't want to go there.
@@lanceindependenthow far do you expect people to think until there is nothing more to think about due to a lack of knowledge and experience that won’t be obtained in a lifetime
Maybe in the modern "regime of truth" we should critique the very idea of an "explanation" as the construct of a Fascist hegemon, borne out of anxiety at any potential change to the status quo that could unseat their system of power.
I'm not a very empathic person (and I do personally know a sociopath, who is also a Christian fun fact. It doesn't equal beyond saving like some people think), but even then I find the moral argument compelling in the sense of, God gives me reason to do good when my natural emotions don't really push me towards that. Objective morality gives me a logical reason to do good, which by the grace of the Holy Spirit then guides my emotions. I don't find any other argument to do good remotely compelling. Why should I do good purely for the sake of society/other people when I don't naturally feel an obligation towards either of those things? Why should I do good "cause it feels good" when it doesn't feel like much of anything to me if its lacking God? But doing good because its objectively right as decreed by God is extremely compelling for me. Because I can logically conclude that God exists via other arguments for His existence and evidence for The Bible, I can then conclude that objective morality exists. As I see it, I have zero obligation to do good if God doesn't exist, as I am not intrinsically bound to a randomly-occurring system, or to emotions, nor the happiness of other people. But I am intrinsically created to serve God, who made me in His image, even in my fallen nature, thus doing good is objectively right. I apologize if this is a bit sloppy or rant-y, but I am passionate about this topic as someone who is fully aware of how awful I am inherently, and how I can only do good by the grace of God and presence of the Holy Spirit. EDIT: A funny thing about the topic of "essences". They really are just a fancy way to say that they feel emotionally inclined towards those things being the way they are. I recently got into a debate with my sociopath friend about 5 being an odd number, when he insisted that it is even cause it "feels right" that it is even. I don't intend to mock him in any way by bringing this up (he knows how math works he just for some reason disagrees with the definition of an even number), but I was unable to convince him otherwise, as he felt no emotional pull towards defining an even number the same way as everyone else does, just because people do it. Of course, it is objective that 5 is an odd number, but it is shockingly hard to argue that it is when emotions are out of the picture (trust me I've tried). Yet, this same friend believes in the whole truth of The Bible and has grown in his faith massively over the time I've known him. His morals do not come from essences, but from God. And the fact that he is both largely unemotional and literally cannot wrap his head around the philosophical concept of essences, to me, shows that essences are just a fancy way of saying "cause it feels right". Making them arguments built on emotion rather than logic.
Morality is a Social phenomenon. The proof of which is right before your eyes and one “proof” is secular law. From the very beginning of the formation of human groups in which individuals had individual motives social groups had to form standards to sustain cohesion and civility. Because social groups are stronger and can provide more to individuals than individuals operating solely on their personal motives. Ancient groups may have chosen a deity as originator but that was sometimes necessary as a method to “favor” one leader over another that would be difficult to challenge. Further proof is available simply by examining the social orders of all the different nations and culture of the planet. Those societies choose certain standards, expectations and formulate law to limit what is acceptable behavior. There is no need and never has been any real need to connect morality directly to any deity.
Interesting observation: The more comfortable of an existence a society has, the easier it becomes to claim moral values and duties are “just brute facts”. Introduce some serious conflicts, and all of a sudden these “brute facts” become extremely difficult to parse out. It is also interesting to recognize that many, if not most, of the arguments for “brute moral facts” come from those who have benefited greatly from the Christian worldview, and now live an excessively comfortable existence. Last observation: This idea of “brute moral facts” is severely challenged when us religious folk question the standards of the day. For example, the abortion debate. Since this is very hard to justify moral stances on the “brute fact” view, we see most people simply wanting to ignore that which is morally and ethically questionable. “Out of sight, out of mind” becomes the dominant resolution; which is not really a resolution at all, but what else can we do when there is no agreement on what is a brute moral fact or not? Appealing to an abstract concept seems to hold very little judicial authority. Since abstract concepts are impersonal, there is no real reason to accept someone else’s claim to what is or is not a “brute moral fact”. I would argue a society could easily “brute fact” themselves into complete destruction, before they even realized it was happening.
So basically both sides have to ground objective morality in some sort of brute fact. It's just that the theist's brute fact also happens to be a brute fact for existence/reality itself, whilst the atheist's brute fact is entirely standalone.
I find that atheism always raises more questions philosophically than it attempts to answer. Every atheist becomes a skeptic (sometimes an absolute skeptic, which can be self-defeating) and reality just doesn’t hold itself together well.
@@blamtasticful You’re welcome to present your worldview, but you seem more like the type to say, “zero evidence,” and think that’s enough to shut down an argument.
@@blamtasticful All I said was I find that atheism tends to end up as more skeptical than theism in more issues and doesn’t really provide concrete or confident conclusions. You’re welcome to present an atheist worldview and we can discuss it. I wasn’t attempting to make a definitive statement without proof and have everyone take it as absolutely true, just raising my own conclusions on this issue.
Atheist here. First off, I enjoyed the video, thank you. The problem I have with all objective morality arguments is the presupposition that human well-being or some similar variant is objectively “good” or true. There is simply no evidence for this outside of a human-centric worldview making morality, at least initially, subjective. Second, I believe you have your brute explanation example backwards. Theism seems to rely far more on brute explanations - ie. "you just have to have faith", "God did it", etc. Atheists reject those explanation and seek answers beyond them.
Finally, allow me to address some common theist misunderstandings of atheism. Atheism is a faith position not a religion. Religion is the belief in and worship of a god or gods. This requires a theistic faith position. Atheists reject the claim that a god(s) exist - that is the atheist faith position. There is nothing religious about it. While it is true that evolution is often a typical atheist counterpoint in debate for how we as a species have arrived at where we are now, it has no direct relationship with atheism. Most atheists tend to believe science provides the best explanations for the natural world, but it isn’t some requirement. You don’t have to accept evolution to reject a god(s) claim and identify as an atheist. Historical atheist arguments, like any other, were only as good as the knowledge and information available to them at the time they made those arguments. Unlike theism, atheism does not have many years of apologetics to help defend, explain and refine their arguments. Have there been some bad atheist arguments in the past - you bet. Just like there have been all sorts of bad arguments in the past when we view them through a present day, greater knowledge available to us lens.
Before I was Saved by Jesus Christ, I was a full blown Ethical Nihilist Anti-Theist. Even then I knew that Morality couldn't be Subjective. But now I know the Objective Morality of God, and am thankful that I have been forgiven for persecuting Christians, as St. Paul was forgiven.
I enjoy Gavin’s videos and thoughtful approach His main critique of atheistic objective morality is that it hinges on base moral sentiments (like human flourishing or not causing unnecessary suffering) being called brute facts. He regards this as unsatisfying. I agree that making the concession that there are objective moral facts and then immediately stating “they are brute facts” seems to move the conversation no further. At the same time, the main argument for the existence of objective moral values is that “their existence is so intuitively obvious that we need no affirmative case.” So objective morality is justified by the brute fact of our intuitions. No further argument needed. If Gavin and others need no further grounding to establish that morality is objective, why should we expect further grounding as to why morality is objective? It begins and ends with intuitions. Once we’ve agreed to the basic intuitions, then moral arguments can take place.
I’ve recently been doing a lot more campus evangelism and the moral argument comes in handy a lot. Your video gives me a lot more confidence in asserting which answers are insufficient and why God is STILL the best explanation for objective moral values.
Okay, I'm going to listen to this video, but the idea that the way that a group of intelligent apes on a random planet choose to classify and rank human behavior according to desirability must stem from some objective "laws" of the universe like gravity and the speed of light, just seems understandable only if one is already convinced that there is a God who cares about what we do, or, on a more likely level, the human desire to have one's opinions confirmed by some kind of external authority.
Thanks for the video! I listened to the Joe Schmidt video and I was surprised by the particular claim that atheists can ground objective morality without issue. I thought maybe there had been some major shifts in the area since my time studying ethics in college.
Morals are determined by societies. If morals are prescribed by a deity from a text, then they are not objective rather subjective according to his/her edict. The god of the bible changes morals frequently in the old testament.
A welcome surprise to see you jumping into the ring here, Dr. Ortlund! While I disagree about grounding moral values strictly in God, I agree with an argument from moral knowledge and moral obligation as best explained by God. (Siding with Swinburne, take one of the horns of the euthyphro dilemma). Despite that minor disagreement, I throughly appreciated to seeing you set the example as a pastor and Christian thinker in diving into these topics. Hope to see other videos on philosophical topics from you in the future! 🙂
This is fascinating because atheists who conclude that objective love and justice are brute facts about our reality are, in essence, acknowledging the existence of a nonphysical reality. Since theists believe these nonphysical moral facts are attributes of God, it seems that atheists who hold this view are, in a way, recognizing aspects of what theists call God.
Atheism does not and has never implied hard materialism. And it's not at all clear whether 'non-physical realities' as you are using the term is even incompatible with hard materialism, at least as philosophers understand it.
@@fanghur You’re right, atheism doesn’t necessitate materialism. However, most atheists are materialists. Well, atheists in the traditional sense of the word.
Gavin, I assume you are familiar with the presuppositional arguments of Van Til and Greg Bahnsen, etc? They are interesting in what they say about this topic.
Thanks for the video, Gavin! You’ve contributed lots of valuable thoughts here, and I hope my comment can contribute value, too! These are not *all* my thoughts - that would involve a multi-page essay, haha! - but they’re some salient ones that will hopefully help people think critically about these matters :) Part One: Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau’s account At 14:30, you say: “it seems to boil down to saying that’s just the way it is” I admit, however, that I don’t share this sense; the account here provides a *unifying, illuminating explanation* of normative facts in terms of essence-facts concerning normative properties. As Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau argue in the article, this is not a vacuous, unilluminating account which merely adverts to the very fact in need of explanation (as happens in the case of you saying to your kids ‘that’s just the way the world is’). It cites a categorically different kind of fact altogether - non-normative facts about essences - to explain normative facts. And it’s a plausible one, by my lights - once one grasps what the normative property of badness is, there’s no mystery as to why, e.g., intense suffering is bad. This is characteristic of a good explanation: once one grasps the explanans, there’s no mystery as to why the explanandum obtains. So while I think you offer valuable insights and reflections here, I don’t think they successfully rebut the Bengson/Cuneo/Shafer-Landau non-theistic grounding of morality. You also appear to raise another worry for the account: it lands in brute, unexplained facts. But I don’t see how theism is in any better position. It, too, lands in brute, unexplained facts in its account of morality. God is good. Why? What explains God’s goodness? In virtue of what is God good? I currently see only three plausible answers: (1) You could say the explanation is that God is loving, kind, and just, and that these (sorts of) attributes make God good. But the non-theist can then make the same move: what makes certain acts and states of affairs good? Their lovingness, kindness, and justice. Both accounts end in the same sort of explanation, and so theism enjoys no explanatory advantage. (2) You could say that God is good by nature - what it is to be God is to be good. But then you’ve cited an essence-fact as the ultimate explanatory stopping point for morality, which is precisely the same thing Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau do. Once again, theism enjoys no explanatory advantage here. (3) You could say that there’s no explanation for God’s goodness. But then you’re saddled with primitive, unexplained normativity, and hence you have no ultimate ground for morality. Your explanatory stopping point in explaining other moral facts would *itself* be a moral fact (that God is good), and so you haven’t even given a grounding for morality as such. By contrast, Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau cite non-normative, non-moral facts to ground the fundamental normative/moral principles, and hence they *do* supply a grounding for morality. [Moreover, it’s hardly an objection to their account that essence-facts are themselves primitive if your account likewise ends in primitivity.] Finally, you say: this account raises a new question of how do we have essences in a “reductively physicalist, or naturalistic worldview”? There are several points to make here. First, Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau are not reductive physicalists (and neither am I), and their account of morality is non-naturalist. They don’t take essence-facts, or even normative facts, to be reducible to physical, scientifically investigable facts. So even if there’s a tension there, it doesn’t actually address the non-theistic account you’re supposed to be criticizing. Second, it’s not clear why there’s a tension between naturalism and essences. Water is essentially H2O; water couldn’t have been anything other than H2O. Heat is essentially mean molecular kinetic energy. Lightning is essentially electric discharge. These claims pose no challenge to naturalism. Natural things can have essences and essential properties; essences are simply *what it is to be* a certain thing. What it is to be water is to be H2O; that’s the essence of water, and that requires nothing supernatural. Third, it’s not clear how God could explain essences. Note that there’s at least one essence God can’t provide an explanation of - namely, the divine essence itself. God couldn’t explain his essence without pulling himself up by his own metaphysical bootstraps. Since God’s essence also doesn’t depend on anything apart from God, theism already grants that there’s nothing objectionable *in itself* about unexplained essences. As for other non-God essences, it’s hard to see how God could explain those. Of course, God can explain why there are some *concrete things* with a given essence; but it’s unclear how God could explain *essences* themselves, which aren’t concrete things like tables and chairs and platypuses. Essence-facts are necessary truths over which God has no control; for instance, God couldn’t have brought it about that water is H3O instead of H2O. Indeed, nothing about God himself seems to provide any resources for predicting what essences there would be. So again, it’s not clear how adding God to the picture secures an explanation for essences.
Part Two: Wielenberg’s account You say it’s much more parsimonious to give God the role as the unexplained explainer, rather than Wielenberg’s fundamental moral truths/principles, since God is singular whereas such truths are plural. But there are eat least two problems with this: (1) First, in terms of the number of things posited, *you* are also positing Wielenberg’s moral truths; you’re simply not taking them to be *fundamental* but instead grounded in God (in some way). Thus, you’re committed to everything Wielenberg is, *and then more* , since you add God to the picture. It’s therefore not at all clear that you have a simpler account; in fact, Wielenberg’s seems *far* simpler, since his commitments are a *proper subset* of yours. One way to get around this point is to say that, when comparing the simplicity of hypotheses, we should only take into account *fundamental* things and posits. This methodological principle is called Schaffer’s Laser. I don’t have the space to go into this here, but suffice it to note that (i) you would need to justify that principle, and (ii) lots of metaphysicians reject it, since it suffers from very serious problems. (E.g., we use simplicity to assess hypotheses about who committed a crime, even though these hypotheses only concern non-fundamental entities like humans, knives, blood, etc.) Another point to make here is that you also have a significant cost in *qualitative* complexity, since you posit a radically different *kind* of thing in your ontology (a non-spatiotemporal, necessary, unlimited God), which is a kind that non-theists don’t posit. This is yet another massive complexity cost of your explanation that you did not discuss. (2) Second, Wielenberg doesn’t actually need to commit to *multiple* fundamental moral truths; one can develop his account in a way that there’s only *one* fundamental moral principle, thus reducing his fundamental posits to a single case. (That principle might be, for instance, that the moral properties of acts, states of affairs, etc. are determined by their maximization of the welfare of sentient beings. This is a popular fundamental principle which many take to explain all other moral truths, but one could employ a different fundamental moral principle if one wants.) Finally, you demur that this response is explanatorily brute - as you say, “in his words, ‘basic ethical facts come from nowhere, and nothing external to them grounds their existence’”. But again, theism’s account of morality is also explanatorily brute; God’s goodness comes from nowhere, and nothing external to God grounds God’s goodness. If it’s a problem for an account of morality that it ends in explanatory bruteness, then your theistic account is also problematic on this front. If it’s *not* a problem, then your objection to Wielenberg’s account on the basis of bruteness doesn’t hold water.
Part Three: Chimpanzee war I didn’t find this section convincing; there are pretty compelling non-theistic explanations for why human morality is different from the social behavior of animals. You essentially ask what explains why we appropriately blame, praise, hold accountable, punish, etc. humans for their behavior but not chimpanzees. The explanation is that humans have various morally relevant intrinsic features that non-human animals lack. In particular, humans have the capacity to understand, deliberate about, and act on the basis of reasons. Animals aren’t sensitive to the range of reasons bearing on their actions, and this explains why they aren’t morally culpable for their actions; they can’t be held accountable since they can’t be privy to the range of specifically *moral* reasons counting for or against their actions. But humans are different. We have various intrinsic rational capacities, like capacities to apprehend and base our actions on reasons. This means that we’re liable to praise and blame if we act for bad reasons or overlook good reasons. None of this cites God; it’s a perfectly kosher explanation of the difference between human morality and animal behavior in terms of our inherent capacities as the kind of beings we are. You also say that the alleged inability to explain the difference between human morality and animal behavior makes non-theistic morality arbitrary. On the contrary, it is precisely the *theistic* view which, by my lights, suffers from arbitrariness. God either has some reason for endowing us with the relevant form of dignity/worth/value, or he doesn’t. If he doesn’t, then our having that dignity is arbitrary, since God has no reason at all for endowing it upon us. If he does have such a reason - say, because of the intrinsic features of humans, like the previously mentioned rational capacities - then it’s quite plausibly *that very reason* which accounts for our having dignity/worth/value, and God is simply serving as an intermediary here. At the very least, the non-theist will then have a perfectly adequate account of our dignity/worth/value simply by citing *that reason*, and the charge that atheism cannot account for dignity/worth/value vanishes. So, then, either theism suffers from arbitrariness, or else the non-theist has an account of the phenomenon, contrary to what you appear to claim in the video.
Thank you Joe! I have read through your comments once, but will want to read them again more slowly when its not the end of a busy day and take some time to digest them. In the meantime, you make a fair point that Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau are not reductive physicalists. I suppose I was making a sort of aside there, drawn from my reflection from reading of Lowe's book. On the chimpanzee war section, we need to probe the qualifiers I used for the distinction between human and animal morality, like "qualitatively" and "in the way we intuit" and so forth. I will also be curious to talk more about older atheists and evolutionary psychology sometime. Hopefully more to come. Thanks for your thoughtful comments here.
@@MajestyofReasonan you give an example which illustrates the Bengson & co approach in a moral argument? I’m sorry, lowly non-philosopher here 🤓 It makes so much sense in the mathematical realm (“3 is a number”) but that’s because it’s an easy fact to explain with very clear defining qualities. It’s always a number. There are no known circumstances in which it is not a number. I just would like to see an example in the morality realm which is as clear cut so I can understand how this approach works. Thanks!
@@MajestyofReason Speaking of qualitative complexity, how are non-naturalist essence facts and normative facts not a qualitatively different kind of thing in your ontology? On a non-naturalist account of morality, it seems the qualitative complexity is the same since both have to posit a different kind of thing.
Great video. New to apologetics but have done quite a bit of research on the cosmological argument. Can’t you combine additional arguments like the intelligent design, contingency and or causality principles to further emphasize the existence of an absolute moral giver?
Sproul's explaining Kant's take on the moral argument to me was one of the most powerful lessons I've ever heard. I don't know why I don't heard it elsewhere.
I wonder how people who accept these explanations deal with human groups having very different moral conventions at different times. Say in the Roman empire a child askes his Patrician father why it's ok to beat and kill slaves on a whim but no ok to beat and kill free people, and his father answers, "It's an inexplicable, brute moral fact. Everybody knows that, it doesn't require an explanation. That's just the way it is, son."
Even if God doesn't exist, from a human perspective, right would still be right, and wrong would still be wrong. We don't need God to come to that conclusion, irrespective of whether or not we can trust any of our neighbours to do what is right, when it is to their advantage personally to do otherwise.
Yeah, I think that something Christians often don't grasp when they argue that the world would be so different without God's objective standard of morality. Atheist are actually arguing that the world as it is, morality and all, is _better_ _explained_ as the result of natural and evolutionary forces. Whether or not God exists, the world as we know it remains the same. Differences would only happen if, in the wake of a definitive answer to the question of God's existence, people start acting differently. Even then, I doubt much would change, either way.
If indeed there are objective moral facts, then why, in the absence of God, would human beings have evolved to respect them? It seems incredibly unlikely that the set of brute moral facts would happen to perfectly coincide with the moral instincts imbued in us by an evolutionary process that favours traits according to their survival value alone. Either morality is not objectively true, and merely an adaptive trait, or God exits.
Another problem is that you can’t separate morality from human happiness. You couldn’t imagine a world in which all people were maximally happy and living forever and call it evil. And conversely, you couldn’t imagine a world in which all people were maximally miserable forever and call it good.
@@georgechristiansen6785 I would argue that happiness is not a subjective thing. Happiness is objective. Temporary pleasure can be subjective, but that is not happiness. And anything that is not happiness, that is not moral, will at some point inherently lead to destruction and misery. It is just a matter of time.
You are trying to make happiness mean something it doesn't. Evil people experience both happiness and pleasure in doing evil. Both happiness and pleasure are objective, even though our experience of them both is subjective. The can also both be temporary or permeant. Although the later is assumed, we cannot have evidence for it. The moral choice often leads to misery. We all see this regularly. And we also see people unhappy that they made the moral choice. We can argue that the ultimate end will be happiness, but the moral thing certainly isn't happiness.
@@georgechristiansen6785 Happiness is the long term holistic (involving the whole self) pleasure that comes from fulfilling one's purpose. It is not the same as short-term, partial pleasure.
@@georgechristiansen6785 Moral choices can temporarily lead to some misery. But ultimately, happiness comes from living out one's purpose, which is to be moral. People can experience all the temporary pleasures in the world, but still be unhappy if they don't have meaning (see Ecclesiastes). Similarly, a person can find purpose and meaning in the midst of great suffering. Heroism could be defined as "suffering plus noble purpose." And heroism is something we all aspire to. You can't NOT seek your own happiness. Every action you take is toward your own happiness. The question is whether or not your perception of happiness accords with objective human happiness. On a Christian system, God is the ultimate source of our happiness, so to rebel against him is by definition to rebel against our own happiness.
Thanks for the video! Is this your basic argument in syllogism? 1. Moral truths are objectively, ontologically independent of humans. 2. Athiests have no good explanation to why moral truths are objectively, ontologically independent of humans. 3. Whatever best explains the validity of premise 1 is the most likely true. 4. Theism best explains the validity of premise 1. Therefore, theism is more likely valid than atheism.
Dostoevsky is one of my favorite authors, and he covers so clearly the idea that without God, all things are moral (See Ivan (as you mentioned) in the Brothers, and Raskolnikov in Crime & Punishment). It seems so obvious at its face that we cannot create our own morals.
"It seems so obvious at its face that we cannot create our own morals." That seems obviously wrong to me. If someone else created morals, they wouldn't be OUR morals.
@@WhiteScorpio2 No, not necessarily, unless you're playing a pedantic game on the definition of "our". Our in my comment means the morals which are applied to us. The morals written on our hearts. It's entirely possible that another being (God) could create a moral value set, and write them onto our hearts. Those morals while not created by us would be our morals
@@bencook6585 I would have appreciated if you chose to formulate it more precisely than "written on our hearts". Now, while it is, indeed, possible that our morals were infused in us by some external being with a power to do so, but it would be far from "obvious" that such a thing happened, especially given that no such being have been demonstrated to exist or even to be possible to exist. Additional point: people have different moral values, goals and opinions. That would mean that either this being infused us all with differing morals, there are multiple such beings or that indeed we CAN and DO create our own morals in addition to the ones "written on our heart". I don't think any of these options allign with the idea that one being infused us all with the same moral law and we cannot create our own. If that idea was true, wouldn't everyone without exception have the same moral opinions? Yet we don't. Your idea is just completely contrary to the observable reality, thus I say that it is obviously wrong. How exactly do you justify saying that is is obviously correct?
@@WhiteScorpio2 You make a claim here that "no such being [has] been demonstrated to exist or even be possible to exist", which funnily enough is not supported by evidence, and requires a willful choice to ignore the evidence that exists. Historical evidence of Christ for example, including the gospel narratives, exists. Logical proofs proposed by multiple different thinkers throughout all time. The claim there which you proposed has very little foundation. To your second point, I would point to shared moral codes among multiple people groups. Throughout the world the majority of individuals intuitively know murder (not necessarily killing), theft, etc. to be intrinsically wrong. The reason for differences around the edges, in my observation, would be human proclivity to sin and corruption. Despite that, the most basic moral laws remain across civilizations. This is why we don't all hold the same moral code universally word-for-word. These things are not at all contrary to the observable reality. The alternative, that human morality was created over time by humanity, is not at all observed, and therefore is pure speculation. Some moral codes are revealed over time (i.e. the teachings of Christ were revealed during the incarnation and not explicitly before) but they remain revealed, not created.
@@bencook6585 "You make a claim here that "no such being [has] been demonstrated to exist or even be possible to exist" We are discussing the moral argument, that is to say, we are in a position in which the existence of God has not been established. "Historical evidence of Christ for example" Historical Jesus existing is not the same as transcendant supernatural God existing. "Logical proofs" Logic never proves anything about reality by itself, you still need to apply logic to availible evidence. So what evidence do you have aside from stories written in a book? Stories being written in a book are not automatically true. "the majority of individuals" But not ALL individuals, right? So are you saying that God has written morals on the majority of people's hearts, but not on all of them? "murder (not necessarily killing)" Well, yeah, murder is defined as a killing that is wrong. So, saying that murder is just semantically true, nothing else. Now, try and ask if abortion, capital punishment, some particular war or war in general are wrong, good or permissible, and you will find out how maleable human ideas about morality are. "The reason for differences around the edges, in my observation, would be human proclivity to sin and corruption." Did God also write the proclivity to sin and being corrupted on our hearts? "The alternative, that human morality was created over time by humanity, is not at all observed" You have never observed human moral opinions changing and developing? The opinion towards homosexuality, for example, has changed drastically just over my single lifetime, and you are saying that it isn't observed? "were revealed" So are morals revealed or written on our hearts? Was human opposition to slavery 1) written on our hearts; 2) revealed by Jesus; 3) developed in and by human thought?
It also kinda seems like, to me at least, that moral realism without God as a grounding suffers an epistemic nightmare. Like if one grants that, sure, morality can exist by brute fact then how in the world can we be confident that what we believe to be truely right and wrong are actually that? I remeber hearing a debate where one guy said that, basically, we ask ourselves what would a perfectly rational person do and we use that as a kind of guide. But that's the problem, absolutely no one is perfectly rational so how can we even begin to hazard a guess as to what a perfectly rational person would do? It seems that even if moral facts can exist without God, you need some type of revelation in order to even confidently begin to say that x is actually wrong
That guy was misunderstaning what rationality is, anyway. Rationality means you make decisions based on logic and reason, rather than emotion and bias. But logic and reason merely enable us to determine that A necessarily follows on from B, but is incompatible with C. It can't tell you things like whether it's better to pursue your personal well-being or the well-being of your society.
People already aren't perfectly rational even if God does exist so they can still make moral error. What's worse, if God's decrees make something moral not our inclinations about morality then God could order us to do something that seems truly immoral such as killing children and we wouldn't have any basis to say that this was wrong.
@@lanceindependent If we assume moral realism is true, then, as I see it, a good explanation of morality will be able to account for these features: it's objectivity, how we come to know it, and how it accounts for the intrinsic value we place on each other. So I'll say right off the bat that I can see how if one says that morality is just this brute fact about the universe, then sure, the first two criteria are plausibly fulfilled. It's objective because of brute force and we come to know it through reason (although imperfectly). Where the rub comes for me is the last one, why is it that people are intrinsically valuable on naturalism? It actually seems to me that we start with value in human beings and work our way from there, but the question remains for me why think we are intrinsically valuable? On a purely naturalist worldview it seems that we're basically a product of time, matter, and chance. We're a cosmic accident without a rhyme or reason for our existence outside of what we decide for ourselves or what others tell us. God explains the last thing that helps to make up morality for me. Because if we're made in God's image (from whom beauty, truth, justice, and reason flow) then it makes it way more easy for me to understand where this innate sense of value comes from. Hopefully that makes sense. Really like I said it's that last point that really sticks out for me, I've just never heard a convincing account of why we're valuable on naturalism. And for me it's that value we seem to have that makes morality even make sense in the first place
@@charlesbrown8117 Thanks. One worry I have about your remark is that not all atheist moral realists are naturalists. At least among professional philosophers there are about as many non-naturalist moral realists as there are naturalist moral realists. Atheism does not entail naturalism.
Excellent, Gavin! I would also add that, in some of my own work, people are totally missing an important aspect of morality: authority. I mean to say that Goodness has the expectation of being followed, and evil the expectation of being resisted. Even an atheist who claims some "brute facts" about morality has failed to account for "why goodness has authority, in that we expect others to uphold morals which we see as objectively good, and likewise must make things seem good in order to see them as worth pursuing and obeying." The theistic position accounts for not only goodness (as some fact of reality), but the authoritative nature of goodness.
It seems so weak to tell someone when they do something we all "know" is wrong that, "well, that is just the way it is." How does that work whatsoever as a means for proving to another they have done something wrong?
Fascinating video, Gavin. To avoid the claim that God existence is seen as a brute fact, do you think it’d be reasonable to say that God not only necessarily exists, but exists by logically necessity? So, perhaps God’s non-existence would be equivalent to a square circle existing?
Argument for the Ontological Independence of Morality 1. Objective moral values and duties can be conceived coherently without positing a deity. 2. If it is logically possible for objective moral values and duties to exist independently of a deity, then objective morality doesn't depend on a deity. 3. Objective moral values and duties can be inherent/intrinsic to a person's nature 4. Therefore, objective morality does not depend upon the existence of a deity. Argument from Logical =/= Metaphysical Possibility 1. if it is logically possible that there is atleast one instance of suffering, then it is metaphysically possible for God to create a world with the greatest good 2. Logical Possibility does not entail Metaphysical Possibility 3. Therefore, p1 is not true Defense of p2. 1. The proposition of "a man can fly unassisted" is logically coherent (i.e., it is not self-contradictory), but it is metaphysically impossible in the actual world. 2. Philosophical Zombies can be considered logically coherent but metaphysically impossible 3. Possible Worlds can be considered logically coherent but metaphysically impossible Furthermore, a moral anti-realist rejects the existence of objective moral truths, while the Pyrrhonian moral skeptic doubts the possibility of ever reaching a certain moral knowledge due to the problem of moral disagreement and subjectivity. Argument for Functionalism 1: Mental states are identical to physical events. 2: Any entity that is identical to another is indistinguishable from it 3. Therefore, mental states are physical events. For a mental state to be coherent, it must involve a sequence of events or changes over time. For instance, the mental state of thinking requires the successive generation and processing of thoughts, which unfolds over time. Similarly, emotions arise in response to specific stimuli or events, and they also require time for their development and expression. Thus, the coherence of mental states inherently involves temporal unfolding, supporting the idea that mental states are not static entities but dynamic processes. Even if these events were defined as mental events, that would not entail they were distinct substances but merely manifestations of physicalism i.e. ways in which physical objects can be/change metaphysically. Under functionalism, the mind is a set of functions. Argument for Nominalism 1. Abstract, mind-independent entities exist. 2: If Abstract entities exist, then we can prove they exist via non-empirical means. 3. If Functionalism is true, then abstract entities are physical events 4. For Platonism to be coherent, it must show that abstract objects are distinct from physical events 5. It cannot be shown that abstract objects are distinct from physical events Conclusion: Therefore, Platonism is incoherent. Argument From Physicalism 1. Functionalism posits that mental states are defined by their functional roles or causal relationships rather than by their underlying physical properties. 2: Nominalism denies the existence of abstract entities and universals, asserting that only particular individual objects exist. 3: Mental states are instantiated in and realized by physical systems, such as the brain. 4: Physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that everything that exists is either physical in nature or can be explained by physical phenomena. Conclusion: Therefore, mental states are physical states, and physicalism is true. Argument For Necessitarianism P1. Things can be other than they are. P2. If things can be other than they are metaphysically, then it is possible for them to have different properties or exist differently in some possible worlds. P3. We cannot prove that things can be other than they are metaphysically. P4. If something is necessarily true, then it cannot be other than it is in any possible world. C1. It is possible that things cannot be other than they are metaphysically. C2. Necessarily, things cannot be other than they are metaphysically
Argument Against Contingent Substances P1: Ontologically independent substances are those that exist and have their properties independently of other entities. P2: Contingent entities are those whose existence or properties depend on something external to themselves. P3: If a substance is contingent, it relies on external factors for its existence or properties. P4: The concept of necessitarianism asserts that all events and states of affairs are necessary and could not have been otherwise. C1: Therefore, if substances are contingent, they would not be ontologically independent, which contradicts the concept of necessitarianism. C2: Hence, all substances must be necessary and have their properties necessarily, supporting the position of necessitarianism. Defense of P1: Ontological independence is a well-established philosophical concept that pertains to entities' existence and properties. It asserts that substances have their existence and properties intrinsically, rather than depending on other entities for them. This concept is compatible with various philosophical perspectives and provides a basis for understanding the necessary nature of substances in the context of necessitarianism. Defense of P2 and P3: Contingent entities, by definition, rely on external factors for their existence or properties. If a substance is contingent, it means that its existence or properties could have been otherwise, which implies a dependence on external factors. This aligns with the notion of contingency and supports the understanding that contingent entities are not ontologically independent. Defense of P4: The concept of necessitarianism posits that all events and states of affairs are necessary, meaning they could not have been different from what they are. This notion assumes that there are no contingent entities whose existence or properties depend on external factors. If substances were contingent, it would contradict the idea of necessitarianism, as it would introduce elements of contingency and non-necessity into the ontology of substances. Argument for Substance Monism P1: If the mental is reducible to the physical, then the mental is not a distinct substance p2 The mental is defined by the functional roles or causal relationships of physical phenomena P3: Physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that everything that exists is either physical in nature or can be explained by physical phenomena. P4: Mental states are physical events. P5: Therefore, mental states are physical phenomena, and physicalism is true. P6: Substance Monism is true. Defense of p4. P1. Mental states require the passage of time to be coherent. P2. Physical events, as part of the physical world, occur within the framework of time. C1. Therefore, mental states are identical to physical events because they share the common property of requiring the passage of time. Argument for Moral Anti-Realism 1. Objective moral facts or properties are posited to be external and independent of subjective human perspectives. 2. If objective moral facts or properties are external and independent, they cannot be reducible to or identical with physical events intrinsic to the nature of physical substances. 3. If objective moral facts or properties are not reducible to physical events, they would require an ontological status beyond the physical realm. 4. Physicalism posits that everything that exists is ultimately physical in nature, and there are no non-physical entities or substances. 5. If objective moral facts or properties exist and are not reducible to the physical, physicalism would be false. 6. The coherence of objective moral facts or properties, therefore, raises questions about the compatibility with physicalism, which is a well-supported and widely accepted ontological position. 7. The existence of objective moral facts or properties would require a non-physical realm, akin to a form of moral Platonism. 8. Moral Platonism, as a non-physical and abstract realm, may not be coherent with our current understanding of the natural world and the physical basis of reality. 9. The assumption of objective moral facts or properties as external and independent entities raises challenges regarding their interaction with the physical world and how they can impact human actions and moral judgments. 10. Therefore, the coherence of objective moral facts or properties becomes questionable if we consider the implications it has on our ontological commitments, such as physicalism and our understanding of the natural world. Argument from Pyrrhonian Moral Skepticism 1.Objective moral truths are sui generis moral facts or properties that exist independently of humans, independent of beliefs, opinions, or cultural norms. 2.If objective moral truths exist, they can be established to exist independently of human's mental states. 3.There are no ways of establishing objective moral truths exist independently of human's mental states. 4.Human mental states are physical events.(viz. functionalism and nominalism) 5.The Problem of the Criterion, when applied to the Münchhausen Trilemma, makes it impossible to establish ontological objective moral facts or properties via epistemological means. 6.Therefore, claiming ontological objective moral facts or properties exist commits a special pleading fallacy.
Hey, I wanted to say that I appreciate the respectful way you addressed this point of disagreement. I think you handled the criticisms in a fair manner. Most of these points are why I consider myself a moral anti-realist, though I have heard one compelling argument for realism which grounds human morality in humanity itself. The argument that such a morality is contingent is simply a bullet that I have to bite if I were to take that option. But whether morality is objectively grounded in all humanity or subjectively grounded in humans is a border so fuzzy that I haven't been compelled to delve too deeply into it. I do find this as a sufficient answer to why human morality is not leveled at chimpanzees, though perhaps more to the point is simply that humans are not the victims of such violence, and so we don't care much about the morality of it. I also agree that essence vs accident seems weird sans theism. It seems such a thing is how Catholics justified transubstantiation of the elements by saying that the accidendals of the elements are still bread and wine, but the essence is now the body and blood of Christ. While an onlooker just sees... nothing appeared to change. This is to say that leveling accident as well as contingency at such a morality is not going to land with me. I have to say, I was reluctant to click on this video as so many Christian channels handle the moral argument more as a weapon than a tool, but you earned my upvote.
Why do atheists and agnostics seek objective morality? Is it of any higher value than subjective values - which seems to have a lot more face validity given that different people have such different view on what is the moral take on issues at hand? Is there a higher status to it or what?
15:35 Your recent articulation, detailing the point at which you can no longer simplify your explanation, resonates with our experiences concerning Christianity. Often, when we pose probing questions to Christians, their ultimate response boils down to either "because God ordained it so," "it is within God's nature," or "it aligns with God's will." However, these aren't actual resolutions, rather they represent the limit of their understanding, a threshold beyond which they are unable to progress. This situation parallels the concept of the 'essence of three.' Why is it the essence of three? Simply because it is. In the same vein, every inquiry regarding God terminates at an impasse, a question without an answer. These inscrutable queries typically culminate in assertions about God, His nature, His will, His desire, or some similar notion. Yet, such a conclusion lacks real explanatory power, providing an answer that fails to genuinely elucidate the matter.
Good stuff. More philosophical videos, please! I would argue that the moral argument is implicit in Aquinas’ argument from gradation (4th way) and that this is also a useful pushback against the brute (as you call it) line of argumentation used. 3 being a number because that’s its essence is completely different from something being good or bad. I’ll have to listen to the original argument because it seems so absurd. Is he arguing for a moral action or a quality like kindness, or for goodness itself? What is the thing he’s comparing to with the 3 is a number analogy?
I think the issue is that all moral theories will eventually bottom out in something like "that's just what it is to be good," including theistic ones. So if that's reason to reject/ be skeptical of atheistic moral grounding, it seems we should treat theistic conceptions in kind.
I think a useful question here as well is what it means for an act to be morally good or bad (as opposed to say practically advantageous, say). Without a God who will meet out some form of ultimate justice (whether posthumously or otherwise), what sense does it make to say that a murderer is morally bad as long as he can get away with it?
And with (the assumption of) god, "god" is the only thing that provides sense to saying murder is morally bad. What purpose does saying murder is bad have? The world hurdles through space whether you accept murder is bad or you don't. You are not owed "ultimate justice" and you have no evidence for it.
@@Sundayschoolnetwork If his nature is goodness itself than the nature of goodness itself without a God is sufficient to ground moral truth. Thanks for playing. Also if it's not his opinion than you are admitting that right and wrong exist regardless of God's opinions, feelings, and desires. That's just admitting that the existence of moral truth is what is informing God's proclamations and as such is true in and of itself rather than dependent upon God.
@@blamtasticful the question remains, "says who?" I believe good is good, because God is good. His nature defines right and wrong. "Thanks for playing"? You know it's possible to have a discussion without being snarky.
@@blamtasticful"Goodness" cant have a nature if it doesn't have Being. God is the Being of Goodness. He is the ontological perfection of Goodness because he is the Perfect being and thus lacks any privations. He is not moved to be good by anything external to himself, his nature just IS Goodness. Without God, goodness does not actually exist. Arguing for goodness without God is like arguing for Goodness without goodness. Its a non-starter. Also, God doesn't have opinions or emotions. He doesn't process information like you and I because He is not a contingent creature. What he knows and what he does are not dependent upon anything other than himself because God is simple, and thus nothing he knows or does can be arbitrary.
Great presentation. Morality is interesting to consider from an atheist point of view. I am a little rusty on persuasion on this topic Good to see this topic in video form
When I saw this video, I was planning on making a comment at the end, because I've thought about this a lot, but the video basically covered everything. I will still make some minor points. I think God acts a material, logical, and moral "first-mover". As discussed in the video, in order for any logical process to begin, it has to start somewhere without a cause. So I agree entirely that if morality is "real", then its beginning must be a brute fact, whether it's somebody positing that his personal preferences are a brute fact (like Sam Harris), or whether somebody posits that God is that brute fact. I think the Is-Ought fallacy described by Hume demonstrates that there can be no material basis for morality. Evolutionary explanations for morality (as discussed in the video) do not demonstrate objective eternal morals, but only "good strategies" and "bad strategies" for certain circumstances. In this case, morality is not different from game theory.
Morality is no mystery. Human beings in order to survive formed society and in order to continue to survive humans work to maintain and improve society. And because of living in a society we evolved few psychological traits like sensing fairness, experiencing empathy, and judging others’ harmful and helpful actions, mutual benefits. And these basic traits breeds other moral attributes. If you strip down all moral characteristics into parts than you will find these reoccurring patterns. These characteristics traits makes society more functional and there by ensures the survival of it's members so by natural selection we are moral . It's not that hard
Gavin, would you ever have Michael A.G. Haykin on your channel to discuss Baptist sacramentalogy? He has written a book on recovering a Calvinist sacramentology in Baptist churches against Zwinglism
Idk if I missed it, but what's the answer to moral anti-realists and people who think animal morality isn't fundamentally different from ours? Evolutionary variation doesn't pose an issue in that case. The idea of objective, universal morality seems driven by intuition and human ego rather than being derived from evidence. It's like saying the rules of chess are objective and universal because it's your favorite game that feels intuitively perfect.
In the prehistoric days a lone explore wandered far from his mountain tribe. And near death he makes it down the mountains to the sea. He is taken in and nursed to health by a strange tribe who dwell in caves by the sea. They have what are to him incredible sharp tools (shells) and medicine. After a few days he’s permitted to leave. Upon finding his way home to his warrior mountain tribe. The chief leads a group down and they brutally slaughter the sea tribe for their shells in the night taking the young women as slaves. .. were they in the wrong?
Human morality has changed over time. Not long ago, both slavery and torture were widely practiced. Now, both are proscribed by international convention (though imperfectly suppressed), Did the legal prohibitions of slavery and torture require a god, or may they be attributed to human reason alone?
Hey Gavin - this is unrelated but I wanted to see if you would address Aquinas’ view of scripture in his Summa - I forget which question but it is article 8 within that question where he says doctrine uses the canonical scriptures as the only incontrovertible proof, and the “doctors” as “probable” truths. My question is really twofold: foremost, how do Catholics qualify Thomas’ view here, and second, why is this quote not discussed in these debates (it is possible that I am misreading him!)? Thanks! I am sorry I can’t get more specific data on locating quote - I have lent my copy to a friend.
Another problem is that I don't see how this perspective deals with moral disputes. It seems very obvious to me that killing an infant in the womb is wrong, yet many seem to think it is not only sometimes permissible but is actually a very high good. These people are not even separated from me in time and space, we live in the same neighborhood. The Christian (as opposed to some generalized philosophical theism) view wonderfully answers this issue. God has written the moral law on the hearts of every human being, but humanity is fallen and "suppresses the truth in unrighteousness". This explains both the existence and knowledge of the moral law, and also resistance to it.
What do you think about aristotelian eudaimonia as a way to establish an objective moral? St. Thomas Aquinas will take this from Aristotle also. Men should be what it is. You must develop your potencies based on your human nature. Therefore you have an objective moral there
This is what I'm an actual "expert" on, and have written about extensively. I ultimately don't think the moral argument works unless you take it as an inference to the best explanation. I develop this in detail in my work. In short, God explains a lot of different things about normativity, not only in ethics but aesthetics, epistemology and logic. But to make the argument work you first have to establish that normativity is real. Modern thought is willing to deny that and there's no way to prove or really even argue for it besides appealing to our sentiments, in a sort of Humean account. But I really, truly don't think there can be any argument for that conclusion. It's ultimately a pragmatic choice. I explain this in detail in my masters thesis, you might like that. It's a very new area and I worked under one of Shafer Landau's students, who was a nihilist, to develop some of these new insights. Craig's argument is also total crap, in my opinion. It's kind of laughable honestly, and I respect Craig very much. Why? Because Craig gives NO account for how God can even explain normative grounding. He doesn't even touch the normative question Korsgaard raises, which is fundamental to the problem. The problem is that you have to justify the explanatory power of theism. It's not as easy as it seems. I have tried to do it, but it's not going to be straightforward. You also need to look into reading Quine, Putnam and Parfit on this. Theyve got a fairly tricky almost pragmatic approach to grounding normativity but it gets a bit complex.
Glad to see more and more theist rejecting Craig’s formulation of the moral argument. I side with Swinburne on this issue (God does not ground moral values but is the best explanation for moral knowledge and obligation). If we demand to ground moral values solely in God, we will ultimately run into some circularity problems or “brute” facts about God.
Ok, so I'll put it out there that I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I just read your statement and, no offense, it seems like you wrote quite a bit without saying anything. My question to you is simply, if there is no God, who or what defines what is good or bad, morally?
@@derrickcarson If there is a God, how does He ground moral values? The theist has to give an explanation for HOW God grounds values. Craig and no one but the voluntarists or divine command theorists do that, but both of those theories are awful, and are basically nihilism. I agree that God grounds values. But I don't know how. And I am happy saying I do not know how. But that means I can't make an argument from the fact that God explains morality. Because to do that I'd have to know (a) that morality is real (I can't prove it), and (b) how God could even explain it. To say that God can explain morality requires that I first know how God can explain morality. But I can't solve that. Now I think I can solve it pragmatically, mystically, but it doesn't help you get a straightforward argument across. It would be more nuanced.
@@rogerparada4995 Me too. I think you can make a good moral argument, but it would be very nuanced, and very different. It would be a pragmatic argument like Kant's, or as explaining moral knowledge and obligation. Theists run into the same "brute facts" problems that atheists do. But, I don't agree with Swinburne, because I don't buy platonism or constructivism.
What I love about this video is it displays how the proofs of God are often culturally applicable in ways that are more than apologetics. Not least, because the Moral Argument answers much more the culture takes for granted central to its assumptions, but it also I think answers very directly a philosophical movement very much at large. The Moral Argument for God answers meta-modernism and specifically its indulgence into the post-modern habit of making a play as insisting duality (of our sense perception) and dualism (of our rational faculties) the same while holding them in an absolute opposition. Rendering every meaning sentiment by insisting on a type of omniscience that creates a feeling life is absurd, doubling down on the relativistic constant/absolution of flux of post-modernity to treating reality like a game we are trying to win by way of proof a false basis for attaining to our own secular enlightenment. I think this argument shows specifically how that is immoral in obvious ways. What we need (more than ever) is an awareness of how truth is self-evident, and specifically that that self-evidence is obvious because God is obviously revealed. The Moral Argument for God's existence answers the deeper post-modern habit directly in what post-modern falsity plays to redefine reality often and almost always take for granted of truth. Because God exists we can learn to expect that there is self-evidence to truth expressed in reality itself, especially with respect to God that does not so easily contradict, that is not by necessity so extremely ideologically motivated. The implication of this Gavin does a great job of describing.
Humans live in groups, and like all social animals we've evolved a system of cooperation that makes group living possible. We call our system morality. And morality doesn't "change when you get to human beings." We may not apply our moral standards to chimpanzees, but all primate groups exhibit moral behaviours that are very similar to ours.
how do you know the intentions of animals? also morality is only a "system of cooperation" when you change the definition of morality to "a system of cooperation"
I'm a Christian, and also a voluntaryist. Most libertarians, voluntaryists, anarcho-capitalists, agorists, etc. who are secular argue deontological ethics in regard to morality not needing God. It's generally based on preconditional situations and past precedent that determines whether something is preferable or not. For example, a single woman considers adoption for her baby, but in the end chooses to raise the child herself, and after sixteen years is disappointed with the child, but the expectation that she should love the child can be based on her choice to keep the child when they were born. The same concept can be applied to most social interaction, and it's what separates the morality of how one treats their pet dog, a missing pet dog, a feral dog, and a wild coyote. I don't really support deontological ethics, and I think the argument for virtue ethics is better, but the debates make me think the moral argument is not that strong for God. The biggest flaw with the secular arguments is explaining why the people who tend to hold basic moral intutions and determinations are the majority, and the people who don't are the minority (around 1% or less of men, and less for women in regard to rejecting any sense of morality.) Darwinism and Social Darwinism would suggest the opposite would be true that people with completely animalistic minds like rapists, murderers, and thieves would obtain the positions of power through their brute force, since the evil people with positions of power obtain them through manipulation and indoctrination regarding the public thinking they have the justification to rule and coerce. Instead, those people are a fringe minority, which is better explained either by God creating us that way, Noah's Flood, or some other divine intervention.
Social Darwinism went the way of the dodo decades ago and is no longer in any serious secular person's collection of explanations of how morality works. Regardless, there are always plenty of ruthless brutal people in power in many parts of the world. Vladimir Putin immediately springs to mind, but there are plenty of others -- you could do worse than start with Trump's "best buds" list of world leaders. But when a majority bands together to resist such tyrants, they put measures in place -- e.g. democracy -- to make it far more difficult for those who would want to be autocratic to come to power. No God required, just a lot of hard work and sacrifice from a lot of well-meaning people.
4:13 "...there is this ancient intuition, that the realm of the conscience has to do with the divine" No, there is not. Intuitions are - just like moral - not objective.
Gavin how do you answer the question of evolving morality with Christianity? With moral objectivity from God, how does it make sense that God can allow things like slavery or even divorce when he sees them as immoral, and then later repeal these? Was God being immoral by allowing immorality to not be a sin?
Great video Gavin! As a theist, how would you respond to the objection that grounding morality in God’s character is just as brute/arbitrary as claiming that moral truths are brute facts? Isn’t this view implying that God’s character being good is a brute fact?
You can’t separate the ontological from the epistemological because you assume that you can know these facts within the moral argument. However, assumptions can be challenged.
Fifteen seconds in and I have my first question: How would merely assigning some moral grounding to a god change the way I behave in the world? I have never gotten a reasonable response to this question.
So, I think the line of thinking goes a bit like this (bear in mind, I'm an atheist and believe morals are subjective): A) Morals are, by definition, the way to determine what is good and what is bad. B) Morals could be based on outcome, personal preference, whatever. But morals ARE based on God. 1) Therefore, if you think that something is good, which is "objectively" not good (that is: is not good according to God), then your moral compass is flawed, and you should figure out why that is. Because, it is objectively good to do as God commands. 2) You can therefore be wrong about what is moral. (In some versions of christian belief, this line should read: You can be confused about morality, for all people have gods word written on their heart, and know instinctively what is good. But you can be mislead over time.) So it's not that you should change because morals come from God, it's the case that your behavior should already be reflecting Gods will, and if they don't, you should try to realize it and correct yourself. And you should already be comfortable with the morals of God, because those are the "base morals" of all people everywhere. It's kind of a parallel version of "everyone already believes in God, 'cause The Bible says so". The argument works if you already believe in it, and if you don't believe in it, you're just not accepting the truth because you've been mislead to misunderstand your own thoughts/feelings/morals.
Christians aren't saying that attributing objective morality to God will change your life. You would still have to become a born again believer for that to happen, so I guess it's only in the sense that a "correct" understanding of morality (from the Christian point of view) will (they hope) set you on the path to becoming a Christian that it will change your life's trajectory. If you don't become a Christian, and become a theist or, say, a Muslim instead, then nothing changes for you.
@@EnglishMike That seems to say to me that the moral argument isn't an argument for the existence of god, as it is so often presented. The issue for me is this: assigning moral grounding to god or claiming to be a christian tells me nothing about whether I can trust a person, which is really what's important. And as none of the rest of it is convincing, I simply can't get there.
@@kevinfancher3512 Well I can't get there either, but from the apologist's point of view the strength of the argument is philosophical, not practical. It's not important that flawed human beings can't be trusted, they argue that there can be no such thing as trust in the first place without an objective moral arbiter. My main objection is that even if there is some basic objective morality underpinning everything (which I highly doubt) it's impossible to determine what it is anyway. There's a reason why the go-to example for apologists seems to be: "It's objectively wrong to rape children for fun." If divining the object moral standard was easy, there would be no need to qualify their example with "children" and "fun." But then, some conservative Christians still believe wives don't have the right to withhold sex from their husband...
@@EnglishMike Mind you, while I didn't say people cannot be trusted, you did make a number of well stated points, so thanks for that. RE trust: For me, and I believe christians as well, the level of trust is going to be subject to what I know about the person. I just don't care where one thinks their morality comes from, what I need to know is what moral positions we share, and how committed a person is to them. Someone hammering his philosophical argument once responded to me with, "philosophy trumps science every time". In the actual world, the one where I want to be and do better at every turn, I can't see either being relevant without the other.
For anyone that doesn’t want to give up morality having some form of objective reality, I think this is the hardest problem for naturalist atheists to resolve, it may even be insurmountable for that particular worldview. Can’t ground it in nature as biology can’t tell us what’s right or wrong, can’t ground in society as it immediately becomes relativised, and can’t call it a brute fact, because that virtually assumes the existence of Platonic forms (basically conceding that there is some sort of higher reality).
So basically all you're saying is that we can't expect easy answers (unless you attribute everything to God, that is). I agree. Morality is hard. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
@@EnglishMike Nope, not at all. That’s just putting words into my mouth. There’s still issues with positing God as the source of objective morality, but they’re not nearly as difficult as trying to explain it from a naturalist point of view. Further, I would argue that atheism is the easy answer to a number of questions. Atheism is the easy answer for evolution, the scale of the universe and the problem of evil, for example. It takes a lot of theologising and philosophising to develop coherent and strong answers to reconcile the questions posed by those issues with God.
“Good” means that which is beneficial to the culmination of a purpose. A purpose is a type of desire, or association with a desire/goal. On a theistic system, God and his glory are the ultimate good, because that is what God ultimately wants - what he purposes to do. But if there is a universal human nature, and that human nature has universal desires, for survival, long term holistic pleasure, etc, then that would also constitute an objective basis for morality an atheist could affirm. Good is that which fulfills deep and universal desires of human nature, and evil is that which violates human nature. As a Christian myself, I think God is obviously the best explanation for why there is a universe and human nature at all. But if someone assumes a universe and universal human nature, they do not need to go beyond that to explain morality. The Bible itself grounds morality in the created order, “and God SAW that it was good.”
This entire discussion is modernist confusion. It should be noted that modern and pre-modern ethics are fundamentally different in orientation. For the pre-modern, the ethical question is: "How can I attain to happiness (beatitudo; eudaimonia)," or, expressed differently, "What is the best way to live my life?" That is not the modern ethical question. The modern ethical question is: "How can I objectively justify my actions such that any other rational actor could also consider them justified?" For the pre-modern, there is no such thing as a difference between the good as desirable, the good as perfective or perfected and the good as morally good. It's only when you have this distinction in the modern era (as Kant certainly makes it, if I recall correctly, for example, in the Critique of Practical Reason) that all of a sudden you have this "is/ought" problem. There is no such problem for the pre-modern. As St. Thomas Aquinas says, just as, in the speculative intellect's apprehension of being (being as true), it necessarily discovers as the first principle of its operation that the same thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect, so too, in the practical intellect's apprehension of being (being as good), it necessarily discovers as the first principle of its operation that the good is to be pursued and evil avoided. Just as being is knowable to the intellect, so too is being desirable to the will. All beings long for the good as perfective of their nature, and we, as human beings (i.e., as intellectual creatures), long for properly human happiness, which consists in perfect theoria. It is for this reason that the pre-moderns do not use the moral argument for the existence of God. The moral argument for the existence of God, as such, only arises under decidedly modern principles and conditions. For the pre-modern, there is no need to "ground" our apprehension of "moral" goods. The good, especially the good that perfects our nature and leads to happiness, is intrinsically desirable and lovely. See, for example, the first book of Plato's Republic or the very opening lines of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. To be sure, there is the question, which indeed points to God as lawgiver: "But how is it that our pursuit of the 'moral' good should become, in a sense, 'legally' OBLIGATORY," but again, that is a decidedly modern question. [Indeed, I can only think of a single place where anything like the moral argument is given, and that's in the Pseudo-Iamblichus' Theology of Arithmetic, where he asserts that it's when we are wronged that we long for the gods to exist, but when we do wrong that we long for them not to exist. Perfect justice requires something like a cosmic Judge Dredd in the sky.] The moral argument for God's existence is a decidedly modern, Kantian argument, and even Kant admits that it's not REALLY an airtight argument. Nietzsche and Sartre could easily evade the argument, as they do, simply by denying that the pursuit of the moral good is objectively and "legally" obligatory, that there are no objective moral "laws" as such.
Thank you. This is what I've been trying to tell people on both sides of the morality debate. I think the only "system" that incapsulates this is something like virtue ethics. I say "system" because virtue ethics is decidedly different from the other systematic moralities that have been formulated such as deontology, or consequentialism.
Hi @TruthUnites, the non-theistic responses you outline strike me as a kind of contemporary application of Platonic ideals which are alternative to a Theistic framework but not sustainable on materialism. Is that right?
Thanks for the response Gavin! I wish more people who engage in the scholarly Catholic-Protestant debate (on both sides of the issue) also had an interest in engaging robust, philosophical atheism.
Thanks! I am hoping to do more philosophy and general apologetics over the next year or so -- it will be fun to interact, Lord willing, on topics of agreement for change!
Clearly this is a sign that Trent and Dr. Ortlund should do a tag team discussion with joe schmid 🤷♂️. Y’all would be a strong force to be reckoned with just saying
@@TruthUnites Yes, updating Romans 1:20 would be strongly appropriate, for one... (maybe, also, showing the angelic version - too?)
@@TruthUnites YesI I'm especially heartened that you defend divine simplicity. I think that's key to making a good case for theism.
@@TheCounselofTrent I love watching your channel. Although I am Protestant (Episcopalian to be precise) I enjoy watching you defend the Catholic Faith at the Scholarly level, refuting the "Popular Apologetics" that caricatures Roman Catholicism, and even Christianity, while also justifying the Magesterium for what it actually says.
This was great!
Mere Christianity was the book that got me interested in apologetics - based on Lewis' moral argument!
So because of that, this argument has a special place in my heart, but i also believe it's very powerful! It alone turned a friend of mine from atheism to theism. We shouldn't shy away from this argument!
*The Abolition of Man* was the book that *really* made me respect C.S. Lewis as a thinker, once I learned that he wrote an incredible philosophical book explaining objective morality, something he summed up in a few sentences in *Mere Christianity.*
consideirng how lewis said that christians should lie to potential converts about the religion, it seems that Lewis isn't much of a moral standard.
"And secondly, I think we must admit that the discussion of these disputed points has no tendency at all to bring an outsider into the Christian fold. So long as we write and talk about them we are much more likely to deter him from entering any Christian communion than to draw him into our own. Our divisions should never be discussed except in the presence of those who have already come to believe that there is one God and that Jesus Christ is His only Son." - preface, Mere Christianity
intentionally lying to someone so they can't make an informed decision isn't moral. And unfortuantely, for lewis, we know that humans dont' automatically know any morals, from the cases of feral children.
@@velkyn1 The moral argument doesn't require for theists to be moral or perfect persons.
It simply requires the existence of objective moral values and duties to be dependent upon God.
@@repentantrevenant9776 Abolition of Man is my favorite book from Lewis, and one of my favorites of all time.
It's genuinely great.
@@natebozeman4510 Yep, I agree, the moral argument doesn't require anything from humans. Since you christians can't show that your god supports any set of moral values, you are all just liars when you claim this god wants "x" and that this god is the source of objective morality.
"The moral argument doesn't require for theists to be moral or perfect persons.
Lewis's claim in The Abolition of Man" is a baseless claim: "He says that there is a set of objective values that have been shared, with minor differences, by every culture, which he refers to as "the traditional moralities of East and West, the Christian, the Pagan, and the Jew..."."
Curiously, commonality doesn't show that christians own or started what we know of as common moral ideas. Those are far older than the ignorance of Christianity, and are common because they help civlization exist. As often is the case, the presupposition of christian are just their greed to try to claim everything "good" came from their cult.
It simply requires the existence of objective moral values and duties to be dependent upon God."
I’m an atheist and I often find apologist videos difficult to watch due to misrepresentations and straw men (something I also get frustrated by with some atheist channels), but I really enjoyed this video and think you presented the ideas very well. I’ll be checking out a few other videos from your channel.
thanks a lot, great to hear!
Look into Taoism or Buddhism if you want to consider traditional, non-western philosophical systems that refute the moral argument out of the gate: no god required.
You quote Erik Wielenberg as a leading proponent of the view that objective morality does not need God as its foundation. For a response to Wielenberg's "brute ethical facts" line of thought, Adam Lloyd Johnson, a philosopher, has written a response to Wielenberg defending the moral argument in his book "Divine Love Theory." He has also debated Wielenberg on the question.
helpful, thanks for mentioning that
And I'm over here thinkin too much is made of the notion of objective morality and objective standards.
Thanks!
Love this type of video. Thanks for putting in the time to dig into this!
Your video has been up for ten minutes and Joe is already half way through his three hour response
As he rightfully should. This isn't a great take by Gavin.,
@@blamtasticfulWhy?
@@MACHO_CHICO Because it doesn’t make sense to say something is moral because God said so.
@@blamtasticfulThats not what the moral argument says. And, about halfway through this video, nowhere has he said that, either.
@bendecidospr It claims that if God does not exist that moral values and duties do not exist. When asked why the reasoning comes down to commands (and something isn't right or wrong just because someone commanded something) or it comes down to the nature of goodness itself which is good or bad independently of a God saying so. Attempts to say God is the good are laughable as God is not at all identical with the good. If the good is a part of God then it is this part of God that justifies itself and would so regardless of whether it was contained in God or approved by God or not.
Fantastic video, thank you! After watching 5 or 6 of your videos I was impressed by your clear thinking, charitable approach, careful distinctions etc. Finding out in this video that you have a background in philosophy explains a lot of that! Keep up the great work.
As a Catholic I find this content very relevant...
When mad man are at the door, broken brother unite ;)
As an Atheist, he is mischaracterizing the modern position on this. If you want something relevant you should listen to the actual arguments of Atheists and not strawmen.
To cultivate your children's curiosity, you could try responding "I don't know, why don't we try to find out!?" May lead to a fun little research project together. Keep up the great work Gavin!
⁹9io9i
Gavin Ortlund: Pastor and theologian by day, philosopher by night. This guy is amazing lol.
And apologist at lunch time
@@HearGodsWordlol
I've really been chewing on this idea of trying to account for moral facts on Atheism. The idea that moral facts are just "brute" or "obvious" just really hasn't been sitting well with me. It's get's arbitrary really quick. But even if moral facts were brute, or we could account for them based on our acquaintance with them, that really only solves the problem of Moral epistemology, which the theist using the moral argument will gladly grant. It does nothing to answer the question of why those things are wrong in the first place. I find it very difficult to accept that morality can be ontologcally grounded in ones acquaintance with a moral fact. It only gets us as far as the Atheist who says "So you're saying I can't know right and wrong unless I believe in your sky fairy?"
Great video Gavin, looking forward to the inevitable responses :)
It also seems to follow that just because one affirms as an atheist that murder is wrong as a brute fact, that this is sufficient to give it meaning in the broad sense. Moral meaning seems to entail, not just the judgment “that is universally wrong for everyone in the same circumstance” but also a sanction for the violation of morality. God as a judge provides the full range of moral meaning, because he supports not just a universal standard, but also the power to enact punishment and reward which reach beyond the partial justice found in this life.
Do you think it’s better to categorize this broader moral meaning as ontological rather than epistemological? I could see one saying it’s ontologically grounded in God, but that it’s “epistemological” because it’s a question of known meaning.
I guess I’m wondering if moral “meaning” leans more toward ontology or epistemology?
Christianity is a fairy tale though. It’s literally 1st century European mythology, they has talking snakes, dragons, and zombies in it 😆🤣🤣
@@macysondheim, I’m not sure that you have spent much time reading or thinking about this. Genesis is ancient Hebrew literature, not European.
There are various views on the talking snake-it may have been a snake, but the Hebrew word can mean a creature of light, a type of angelic creature. It seems this creature became associated with chaos, as that’s what snakes came to represent in ancient mythology. If it was a just a snake, it is odd that it’s punishment was to go on its belly. Likely, it was called a snake because of this description, but that association doesn’t mean that it was an actual talking snake.
The “dragon” is a water creature of some kind known to the ancients. It’s not a fire breathing cartoon. It appears in the hebrew poetry of the Bible. Like the snake it takes on the symbolism of struggle against the chaos of nature as well as malevolent evil.
The Bible uses the real creatures that humans have encountered and sometimes turns them into symbols. It’s really not a childish thing to do. Some of our greatest literary and ethical achievements have fairy-tail like qualities (“All men are created equal with certain inalienable rights…” etc.). But we see through them like we should to their deeper meaning.
Don’t pass over a good wine just because it’s a learned taste and requires intelligence. There is deep beauty and meaning in these histories and parables if you sit with them and let them speak what they say and not what you would have them say.
All the best.
C.S. Lewis's moral argument has preserved and defended my faith against all intellectual challenges. Now that I have a better grasp of the ontological/cosmological arguments I see how firmly grounded the theistic worldview truly is, but the moral argument is still my utmost favorite.
People arrive at a brute explanation of things simply because they are tired of thinking about it...that’s a brute fact.
Pretty much, yea. What's weird is that the discipline doing this is philosophy. A discipline that's all about examining and reflecting and analyzing, and secular moral realists frequently just fall back on "it's intuitive," "it's obvious," and "it's primitive" and "it's a brute fact." This is hardly the kind of compelling position that's going to win over skeptics.
I wouldn't say its because they are tried of thinking about it, I would say it is because they know where their thinking is leading them and they don't want to go there.
@@lanceindependenthow far do you expect people to think until there is nothing more to think about due to a lack of knowledge and experience that won’t be obtained in a lifetime
Maybe in the modern "regime of truth" we should critique the very idea of an "explanation" as the construct of a Fascist hegemon, borne out of anxiety at any potential change to the status quo that could unseat their system of power.
@@jackplumbridge2704 No, it's because they recognize that the alternative is an infinite regress.
I'm not a very empathic person (and I do personally know a sociopath, who is also a Christian fun fact. It doesn't equal beyond saving like some people think), but even then I find the moral argument compelling in the sense of, God gives me reason to do good when my natural emotions don't really push me towards that. Objective morality gives me a logical reason to do good, which by the grace of the Holy Spirit then guides my emotions. I don't find any other argument to do good remotely compelling. Why should I do good purely for the sake of society/other people when I don't naturally feel an obligation towards either of those things? Why should I do good "cause it feels good" when it doesn't feel like much of anything to me if its lacking God? But doing good because its objectively right as decreed by God is extremely compelling for me. Because I can logically conclude that God exists via other arguments for His existence and evidence for The Bible, I can then conclude that objective morality exists.
As I see it, I have zero obligation to do good if God doesn't exist, as I am not intrinsically bound to a randomly-occurring system, or to emotions, nor the happiness of other people. But I am intrinsically created to serve God, who made me in His image, even in my fallen nature, thus doing good is objectively right. I apologize if this is a bit sloppy or rant-y, but I am passionate about this topic as someone who is fully aware of how awful I am inherently, and how I can only do good by the grace of God and presence of the Holy Spirit.
EDIT: A funny thing about the topic of "essences". They really are just a fancy way to say that they feel emotionally inclined towards those things being the way they are. I recently got into a debate with my sociopath friend about 5 being an odd number, when he insisted that it is even cause it "feels right" that it is even. I don't intend to mock him in any way by bringing this up (he knows how math works he just for some reason disagrees with the definition of an even number), but I was unable to convince him otherwise, as he felt no emotional pull towards defining an even number the same way as everyone else does, just because people do it.
Of course, it is objective that 5 is an odd number, but it is shockingly hard to argue that it is when emotions are out of the picture (trust me I've tried). Yet, this same friend believes in the whole truth of The Bible and has grown in his faith massively over the time I've known him. His morals do not come from essences, but from God. And the fact that he is both largely unemotional and literally cannot wrap his head around the philosophical concept of essences, to me, shows that essences are just a fancy way of saying "cause it feels right". Making them arguments built on emotion rather than logic.
This was a great perspective to read, thanks~.
@@makeda6530 Glory to God entire!
And just no more 2 Samuel 12 repeats...?
What do you mean by essence
Great comment
Morality is a Social phenomenon. The proof of which is right before your eyes and one “proof” is secular law. From the very beginning of the formation of human groups in which individuals had individual motives social groups had to form standards to sustain cohesion and civility. Because social groups are stronger and can provide more to individuals than individuals operating solely on their personal motives. Ancient groups may have chosen a deity as originator but that was sometimes necessary as a method to “favor” one leader over another that would be difficult to challenge. Further proof is available simply by examining the social orders of all the different nations and culture of the planet. Those societies choose certain standards, expectations and formulate law to limit what is acceptable behavior. There is no need and never has been any real need to connect morality directly to any deity.
Interesting observation: The more comfortable of an existence a society has, the easier it becomes to claim moral values and duties are “just brute facts”.
Introduce some serious conflicts, and all of a sudden these “brute facts” become extremely difficult to parse out.
It is also interesting to recognize that many, if not most, of the arguments for “brute moral facts” come from those who have benefited greatly from the Christian worldview, and now live an excessively comfortable existence.
Last observation: This idea of “brute moral facts” is severely challenged when us religious folk question the standards of the day. For example, the abortion debate.
Since this is very hard to justify moral stances on the “brute fact” view, we see most people simply wanting to ignore that which is morally and ethically questionable. “Out of sight, out of mind” becomes the dominant resolution; which is not really a resolution at all, but what else can we do when there is no agreement on what is a brute moral fact or not? Appealing to an abstract concept seems to hold very little judicial authority. Since abstract concepts are impersonal, there is no real reason to accept someone else’s claim to what is or is not a “brute moral fact”.
I would argue a society could easily “brute fact” themselves into complete destruction, before they even realized it was happening.
Yeah what you said is why the moral argument doesn’t work for many people
@@enzoarayamorales7220 That's true. I still think it works, personally.
So basically both sides have to ground objective morality in some sort of brute fact. It's just that the theist's brute fact also happens to be a brute fact for existence/reality itself, whilst the atheist's brute fact is entirely standalone.
"So basically both sides have to ground objective morality in some sort of brute fact." - No? How did you come to the idea that God is a brute fact?
@@jackplumbridge2704 I wondered the same!
Yes more apologetics!
I find that atheism always raises more questions philosophically than it attempts to answer. Every atheist becomes a skeptic (sometimes an absolute skeptic, which can be self-defeating) and reality just doesn’t hold itself together well.
See: How to Be an Atheist: Why Many Skeptics Aren't Skeptical Enough, by Mitch Stokes (Crossway).
Zero evidence for this claim.
@@blamtasticful You’re welcome to present your worldview, but you seem more like the type to say, “zero evidence,” and think that’s enough to shut down an argument.
@@exargyromeno3648 It is when you actually aren't providing evidence for the claims YOU made. Stop trying to shift your burden.
@@blamtasticful All I said was I find that atheism tends to end up as more skeptical than theism in more issues and doesn’t really provide concrete or confident conclusions. You’re welcome to present an atheist worldview and we can discuss it. I wasn’t attempting to make a definitive statement without proof and have everyone take it as absolutely true, just raising my own conclusions on this issue.
Atheist here. First off, I enjoyed the video, thank you. The problem I have with all objective morality arguments is the presupposition that human well-being or some similar variant is objectively “good” or true. There is simply no evidence for this outside of a human-centric worldview making morality, at least initially, subjective.
Second, I believe you have your brute explanation example backwards. Theism seems to rely far more on brute explanations - ie. "you just have to have faith", "God did it", etc. Atheists reject those explanation and seek answers beyond them.
Finally, allow me to address some common theist misunderstandings of atheism. Atheism is a faith position not a religion. Religion is the belief in and worship of a god or gods. This requires a theistic faith position. Atheists reject the claim that a god(s) exist - that is the atheist faith position. There is nothing religious about it.
While it is true that evolution is often a typical atheist counterpoint in debate for how we as a species have arrived at where we are now, it has no direct relationship with atheism. Most atheists tend to believe science provides the best explanations for the natural world, but it isn’t some requirement. You don’t have to accept evolution to reject a god(s) claim and identify as an atheist.
Historical atheist arguments, like any other, were only as good as the knowledge and information available to them at the time they made those arguments. Unlike theism, atheism does not have many years of apologetics to help defend, explain and refine their arguments. Have there been some bad atheist arguments in the past - you bet. Just like there have been all sorts of bad arguments in the past when we view them through a present day, greater knowledge available to us lens.
I think essentialism is their strongest bet.
What would a response to that be?
Great food for thought!
You’re an excellent orator!
As someone who was an agnostic, I dont understand a moralist view from athiests. Never will.
Before I was Saved by Jesus Christ, I was a full blown Ethical Nihilist Anti-Theist. Even then I knew that Morality couldn't be Subjective. But now I know the Objective Morality of God, and am thankful that I have been forgiven for persecuting Christians, as St. Paul was forgiven.
Well of course you can’t, it’s logically impossible
@@realDonaldMcElvy im happy for you man
I was a humanist bro, nothing more illogical than that 💀
@@realDonaldMcElvy
so now you just persecute non Christians and LGBT folk?
I love that you and Trent are becoming real frenemies it's like Tolkien and Lewis reincarnate
I enjoy Gavin’s videos and thoughtful approach
His main critique of atheistic objective morality is that it hinges on base moral sentiments (like human flourishing or not causing unnecessary suffering) being called brute facts. He regards this as unsatisfying.
I agree that making the concession that there are objective moral facts and then immediately stating “they are brute facts” seems to move the conversation no further.
At the same time, the main argument for the existence of objective moral values is that “their existence is so intuitively obvious that we need no affirmative case.” So objective morality is justified by the brute fact of our intuitions. No further argument needed.
If Gavin and others need no further grounding to establish that morality is objective, why should we expect further grounding as to why morality is objective?
It begins and ends with intuitions.
Once we’ve agreed to the basic intuitions, then moral arguments can take place.
I’ve recently been doing a lot more campus evangelism and the moral argument comes in handy a lot. Your video gives me a lot more confidence in asserting which answers are insufficient and why God is STILL the best explanation for objective moral values.
Loved this Gavin, I’m looking forward to more of these
Okay, I'm going to listen to this video, but the idea that the way that a group of intelligent apes on a random planet choose to classify and rank human behavior according to desirability must stem from some objective "laws" of the universe like gravity and the speed of light, just seems understandable only if one is already convinced that there is a God who cares about what we do, or, on a more likely level, the human desire to have one's opinions confirmed by some kind of external authority.
Thanks for the video! I listened to the Joe Schmidt video and I was surprised by the particular claim that atheists can ground objective morality without issue. I thought maybe there had been some major shifts in the area since my time studying ethics in college.
Great video!! Love this channel
Morals are determined by societies. If morals are prescribed by a deity from a text, then they are not objective rather subjective according to his/her edict. The god of the bible changes morals frequently in the old testament.
A welcome surprise to see you jumping into the ring here, Dr. Ortlund!
While I disagree about grounding moral values strictly in God, I agree with an argument from moral knowledge and moral obligation as best explained by God. (Siding with Swinburne, take one of the horns of the euthyphro dilemma).
Despite that minor disagreement, I throughly appreciated to seeing you set the example as a pastor and Christian thinker in diving into these topics.
Hope to see other videos on philosophical topics from you in the future! 🙂
Great video Gavin! Very clear, engaging and compelling. You do get to the heart of the problem. Thanks!
This is fascinating because atheists who conclude that objective love and justice are brute facts about our reality are, in essence, acknowledging the existence of a nonphysical reality. Since theists believe these nonphysical moral facts are attributes of God, it seems that atheists who hold this view are, in a way, recognizing aspects of what theists call God.
Atheism does not and has never implied hard materialism. And it's not at all clear whether 'non-physical realities' as you are using the term is even incompatible with hard materialism, at least as philosophers understand it.
@@fanghur You’re right, atheism doesn’t necessitate materialism. However, most atheists are materialists. Well, atheists in the traditional sense of the word.
Loved this video Gavin! You got my philosopher brain hyped!
Gavin, I assume you are familiar with the presuppositional arguments of Van Til and Greg Bahnsen, etc? They are interesting in what they say about this topic.
This video was needed. I like the apologetics content and glad you will be making more of it!
Thanks for the video, Gavin! You’ve contributed lots of valuable thoughts here, and I hope my comment can contribute value, too! These are not *all* my thoughts - that would involve a multi-page essay, haha! - but they’re some salient ones that will hopefully help people think critically about these matters :)
Part One: Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau’s account
At 14:30, you say: “it seems to boil down to saying that’s just the way it is”
I admit, however, that I don’t share this sense; the account here provides a *unifying, illuminating explanation* of normative facts in terms of essence-facts concerning normative properties. As Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau argue in the article, this is not a vacuous, unilluminating account which merely adverts to the very fact in need of explanation (as happens in the case of you saying to your kids ‘that’s just the way the world is’). It cites a categorically different kind of fact altogether - non-normative facts about essences - to explain normative facts. And it’s a plausible one, by my lights - once one grasps what the normative property of badness is, there’s no mystery as to why, e.g., intense suffering is bad. This is characteristic of a good explanation: once one grasps the explanans, there’s no mystery as to why the explanandum obtains. So while I think you offer valuable insights and reflections here, I don’t think they successfully rebut the Bengson/Cuneo/Shafer-Landau non-theistic grounding of morality.
You also appear to raise another worry for the account: it lands in brute, unexplained facts. But I don’t see how theism is in any better position. It, too, lands in brute, unexplained facts in its account of morality. God is good. Why? What explains God’s goodness? In virtue of what is God good? I currently see only three plausible answers:
(1) You could say the explanation is that God is loving, kind, and just, and that these (sorts of) attributes make God good. But the non-theist can then make the same move: what makes certain acts and states of affairs good? Their lovingness, kindness, and justice. Both accounts end in the same sort of explanation, and so theism enjoys no explanatory advantage.
(2) You could say that God is good by nature - what it is to be God is to be good. But then you’ve cited an essence-fact as the ultimate explanatory stopping point for morality, which is precisely the same thing Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau do. Once again, theism enjoys no explanatory advantage here.
(3) You could say that there’s no explanation for God’s goodness. But then you’re saddled with primitive, unexplained normativity, and hence you have no ultimate ground for morality. Your explanatory stopping point in explaining other moral facts would *itself* be a moral fact (that God is good), and so you haven’t even given a grounding for morality as such. By contrast, Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau cite non-normative, non-moral facts to ground the fundamental normative/moral principles, and hence they *do* supply a grounding for morality. [Moreover, it’s hardly an objection to their account that essence-facts are themselves primitive if your account likewise ends in primitivity.]
Finally, you say: this account raises a new question of how do we have essences in a “reductively physicalist, or naturalistic worldview”?
There are several points to make here. First, Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau are not reductive physicalists (and neither am I), and their account of morality is non-naturalist. They don’t take essence-facts, or even normative facts, to be reducible to physical, scientifically investigable facts. So even if there’s a tension there, it doesn’t actually address the non-theistic account you’re supposed to be criticizing.
Second, it’s not clear why there’s a tension between naturalism and essences. Water is essentially H2O; water couldn’t have been anything other than H2O. Heat is essentially mean molecular kinetic energy. Lightning is essentially electric discharge. These claims pose no challenge to naturalism. Natural things can have essences and essential properties; essences are simply *what it is to be* a certain thing. What it is to be water is to be H2O; that’s the essence of water, and that requires nothing supernatural.
Third, it’s not clear how God could explain essences. Note that there’s at least one essence God can’t provide an explanation of - namely, the divine essence itself. God couldn’t explain his essence without pulling himself up by his own metaphysical bootstraps. Since God’s essence also doesn’t depend on anything apart from God, theism already grants that there’s nothing objectionable *in itself* about unexplained essences. As for other non-God essences, it’s hard to see how God could explain those. Of course, God can explain why there are some *concrete things* with a given essence; but it’s unclear how God could explain *essences* themselves, which aren’t concrete things like tables and chairs and platypuses. Essence-facts are necessary truths over which God has no control; for instance, God couldn’t have brought it about that water is H3O instead of H2O. Indeed, nothing about God himself seems to provide any resources for predicting what essences there would be. So again, it’s not clear how adding God to the picture secures an explanation for essences.
Part Two: Wielenberg’s account
You say it’s much more parsimonious to give God the role as the unexplained explainer, rather than Wielenberg’s fundamental moral truths/principles, since God is singular whereas such truths are plural. But there are eat least two problems with this:
(1) First, in terms of the number of things posited, *you* are also positing Wielenberg’s moral truths; you’re simply not taking them to be *fundamental* but instead grounded in God (in some way). Thus, you’re committed to everything Wielenberg is, *and then more* , since you add God to the picture. It’s therefore not at all clear that you have a simpler account; in fact, Wielenberg’s seems *far* simpler, since his commitments are a *proper subset* of yours.
One way to get around this point is to say that, when comparing the simplicity of hypotheses, we should only take into account *fundamental* things and posits. This methodological principle is called Schaffer’s Laser. I don’t have the space to go into this here, but suffice it to note that (i) you would need to justify that principle, and (ii) lots of metaphysicians reject it, since it suffers from very serious problems. (E.g., we use simplicity to assess hypotheses about who committed a crime, even though these hypotheses only concern non-fundamental entities like humans, knives, blood, etc.)
Another point to make here is that you also have a significant cost in *qualitative* complexity, since you posit a radically different *kind* of thing in your ontology (a non-spatiotemporal, necessary, unlimited God), which is a kind that non-theists don’t posit. This is yet another massive complexity cost of your explanation that you did not discuss.
(2) Second, Wielenberg doesn’t actually need to commit to *multiple* fundamental moral truths; one can develop his account in a way that there’s only *one* fundamental moral principle, thus reducing his fundamental posits to a single case. (That principle might be, for instance, that the moral properties of acts, states of affairs, etc. are determined by their maximization of the welfare of sentient beings. This is a popular fundamental principle which many take to explain all other moral truths, but one could employ a different fundamental moral principle if one wants.)
Finally, you demur that this response is explanatorily brute - as you say, “in his words, ‘basic ethical facts come from nowhere, and nothing external to them grounds their existence’”. But again, theism’s account of morality is also explanatorily brute; God’s goodness comes from nowhere, and nothing external to God grounds God’s goodness. If it’s a problem for an account of morality that it ends in explanatory bruteness, then your theistic account is also problematic on this front. If it’s *not* a problem, then your objection to Wielenberg’s account on the basis of bruteness doesn’t hold water.
Part Three: Chimpanzee war
I didn’t find this section convincing; there are pretty compelling non-theistic explanations for why human morality is different from the social behavior of animals. You essentially ask what explains why we appropriately blame, praise, hold accountable, punish, etc. humans for their behavior but not chimpanzees.
The explanation is that humans have various morally relevant intrinsic features that non-human animals lack. In particular, humans have the capacity to understand, deliberate about, and act on the basis of reasons. Animals aren’t sensitive to the range of reasons bearing on their actions, and this explains why they aren’t morally culpable for their actions; they can’t be held accountable since they can’t be privy to the range of specifically *moral* reasons counting for or against their actions. But humans are different. We have various intrinsic rational capacities, like capacities to apprehend and base our actions on reasons. This means that we’re liable to praise and blame if we act for bad reasons or overlook good reasons. None of this cites God; it’s a perfectly kosher explanation of the difference between human morality and animal behavior in terms of our inherent capacities as the kind of beings we are.
You also say that the alleged inability to explain the difference between human morality and animal behavior makes non-theistic morality arbitrary. On the contrary, it is precisely the *theistic* view which, by my lights, suffers from arbitrariness. God either has some reason for endowing us with the relevant form of dignity/worth/value, or he doesn’t. If he doesn’t, then our having that dignity is arbitrary, since God has no reason at all for endowing it upon us. If he does have such a reason - say, because of the intrinsic features of humans, like the previously mentioned rational capacities - then it’s quite plausibly *that very reason* which accounts for our having dignity/worth/value, and God is simply serving as an intermediary here. At the very least, the non-theist will then have a perfectly adequate account of our dignity/worth/value simply by citing *that reason*, and the charge that atheism cannot account for dignity/worth/value vanishes. So, then, either theism suffers from arbitrariness, or else the non-theist has an account of the phenomenon, contrary to what you appear to claim in the video.
Thank you Joe! I have read through your comments once, but will want to read them again more slowly when its not the end of a busy day and take some time to digest them. In the meantime, you make a fair point that Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau are not reductive physicalists. I suppose I was making a sort of aside there, drawn from my reflection from reading of Lowe's book. On the chimpanzee war section, we need to probe the qualifiers I used for the distinction between human and animal morality, like "qualitatively" and "in the way we intuit" and so forth. I will also be curious to talk more about older atheists and evolutionary psychology sometime. Hopefully more to come. Thanks for your thoughtful comments here.
@@MajestyofReasonan you give an example which illustrates the Bengson & co approach in a moral argument? I’m sorry, lowly non-philosopher here 🤓 It makes so much sense in the mathematical realm (“3 is a number”) but that’s because it’s an easy fact to explain with very clear defining qualities. It’s always a number. There are no known circumstances in which it is not a number. I just would like to see an example in the morality realm which is as clear cut so I can understand how this approach works. Thanks!
@@MajestyofReason Speaking of qualitative complexity, how are non-naturalist essence facts and normative facts not a qualitatively different kind of thing in your ontology? On a non-naturalist account of morality, it seems the qualitative complexity is the same since both have to posit a different kind of thing.
Great video!
Great video. New to apologetics but have done quite a bit of research on the cosmological argument. Can’t you combine additional arguments like the intelligent design, contingency and or causality principles to further emphasize the existence of an absolute moral giver?
@@DaneilT solid feedback. Thanks!
Thank you for all you do!
Sproul's explaining Kant's take on the moral argument to me was one of the most powerful lessons I've ever heard. I don't know why I don't heard it elsewhere.
Got a link to that?
@@patrckhh20 th-cam.com/video/rCy_PGQL0CA/w-d-xo.html
I wonder how people who accept these explanations deal with human groups having very different moral conventions at different times. Say in the Roman empire a child askes his Patrician father why it's ok to beat and kill slaves on a whim but no ok to beat and kill free people, and his father answers, "It's an inexplicable, brute moral fact. Everybody knows that, it doesn't require an explanation. That's just the way it is, son."
The simple answer is culture and individualism. These, of course, sit below what God commands
Even if God doesn't exist, from a human perspective, right would still be right, and wrong would still be wrong. We don't need God to come to that conclusion, irrespective of whether or not we can trust any of our neighbours to do what is right, when it is to their advantage personally to do otherwise.
Yeah, I think that something Christians often don't grasp when they argue that the world would be so different without God's objective standard of morality. Atheist are actually arguing that the world as it is, morality and all, is _better_ _explained_ as the result of natural and evolutionary forces.
Whether or not God exists, the world as we know it remains the same. Differences would only happen if, in the wake of a definitive answer to the question of God's existence, people start acting differently. Even then, I doubt much would change, either way.
If indeed there are objective moral facts, then why, in the absence of God, would human beings have evolved to respect them? It seems incredibly unlikely that the set of brute moral facts would happen to perfectly coincide with the moral instincts imbued in us by an evolutionary process that favours traits according to their survival value alone.
Either morality is not objectively true, and merely an adaptive trait, or God exits.
How can we show that objective moral values and duties actually exist in the first place though?
Another problem is that you can’t separate morality from human happiness. You couldn’t imagine a world in which all people were maximally happy and living forever and call it evil. And conversely, you couldn’t imagine a world in which all people were maximally miserable forever and call it good.
There certainly seem to be people who thoroughly enjoy evil.
@@georgechristiansen6785 I would argue that happiness is not a subjective thing. Happiness is objective. Temporary pleasure can be subjective, but that is not happiness. And anything that is not happiness, that is not moral, will at some point inherently lead to destruction and misery. It is just a matter of time.
You are trying to make happiness mean something it doesn't.
Evil people experience both happiness and pleasure in doing evil.
Both happiness and pleasure are objective, even though our experience of them both is subjective. The can also both be temporary or permeant. Although the later is assumed, we cannot have evidence for it.
The moral choice often leads to misery. We all see this regularly. And we also see people unhappy that they made the moral choice.
We can argue that the ultimate end will be happiness, but the moral thing certainly isn't happiness.
@@georgechristiansen6785 Happiness is the long term holistic (involving the whole self) pleasure that comes from fulfilling one's purpose. It is not the same as short-term, partial pleasure.
@@georgechristiansen6785 Moral choices can temporarily lead to some misery. But ultimately, happiness comes from living out one's purpose, which is to be moral. People can experience all the temporary pleasures in the world, but still be unhappy if they don't have meaning (see Ecclesiastes). Similarly, a person can find purpose and meaning in the midst of great suffering. Heroism could be defined as "suffering plus noble purpose." And heroism is something we all aspire to.
You can't NOT seek your own happiness. Every action you take is toward your own happiness. The question is whether or not your perception of happiness accords with objective human happiness.
On a Christian system, God is the ultimate source of our happiness, so to rebel against him is by definition to rebel against our own happiness.
Fantastic work!
Thanks for the video! Is this your basic argument in syllogism?
1. Moral truths are objectively, ontologically independent of humans.
2. Athiests have no good explanation to why moral truths are objectively, ontologically independent of humans.
3. Whatever best explains the validity of premise 1 is the most likely true.
4. Theism best explains the validity of premise 1.
Therefore, theism is more likely valid than atheism.
Please define "moral truth" ? Indeed simply define the words "morality" and "good" ? 🤔
Dostoevsky is one of my favorite authors, and he covers so clearly the idea that without God, all things are moral (See Ivan (as you mentioned) in the Brothers, and Raskolnikov in Crime & Punishment). It seems so obvious at its face that we cannot create our own morals.
"It seems so obvious at its face that we cannot create our own morals."
That seems obviously wrong to me. If someone else created morals, they wouldn't be OUR morals.
@@WhiteScorpio2 No, not necessarily, unless you're playing a pedantic game on the definition of "our". Our in my comment means the morals which are applied to us. The morals written on our hearts.
It's entirely possible that another being (God) could create a moral value set, and write them onto our hearts. Those morals while not created by us would be our morals
@@bencook6585 I would have appreciated if you chose to formulate it more precisely than "written on our hearts".
Now, while it is, indeed, possible that our morals were infused in us by some external being with a power to do so, but it would be far from "obvious" that such a thing happened, especially given that no such being have been demonstrated to exist or even to be possible to exist.
Additional point: people have different moral values, goals and opinions. That would mean that either this being infused us all with differing morals, there are multiple such beings or that indeed we CAN and DO create our own morals in addition to the ones "written on our heart".
I don't think any of these options allign with the idea that one being infused us all with the same moral law and we cannot create our own. If that idea was true, wouldn't everyone without exception have the same moral opinions? Yet we don't.
Your idea is just completely contrary to the observable reality, thus I say that it is obviously wrong. How exactly do you justify saying that is is obviously correct?
@@WhiteScorpio2 You make a claim here that "no such being [has] been demonstrated to exist or even be possible to exist", which funnily enough is not supported by evidence, and requires a willful choice to ignore the evidence that exists. Historical evidence of Christ for example, including the gospel narratives, exists. Logical proofs proposed by multiple different thinkers throughout all time. The claim there which you proposed has very little foundation.
To your second point, I would point to shared moral codes among multiple people groups. Throughout the world the majority of individuals intuitively know murder (not necessarily killing), theft, etc. to be intrinsically wrong. The reason for differences around the edges, in my observation, would be human proclivity to sin and corruption. Despite that, the most basic moral laws remain across civilizations. This is why we don't all hold the same moral code universally word-for-word.
These things are not at all contrary to the observable reality. The alternative, that human morality was created over time by humanity, is not at all observed, and therefore is pure speculation. Some moral codes are revealed over time (i.e. the teachings of Christ were revealed during the incarnation and not explicitly before) but they remain revealed, not created.
@@bencook6585 "You make a claim here that "no such being [has] been demonstrated to exist or even be possible to exist"
We are discussing the moral argument, that is to say, we are in a position in which the existence of God has not been established.
"Historical evidence of Christ for example"
Historical Jesus existing is not the same as transcendant supernatural God existing.
"Logical proofs"
Logic never proves anything about reality by itself, you still need to apply logic to availible evidence.
So what evidence do you have aside from stories written in a book? Stories being written in a book are not automatically true.
"the majority of individuals"
But not ALL individuals, right? So are you saying that God has written morals on the majority of people's hearts, but not on all of them?
"murder (not necessarily killing)"
Well, yeah, murder is defined as a killing that is wrong. So, saying that murder is just semantically true, nothing else.
Now, try and ask if abortion, capital punishment, some particular war or war in general are wrong, good or permissible, and you will find out how maleable human ideas about morality are.
"The reason for differences around the edges, in my observation, would be human proclivity to sin and corruption."
Did God also write the proclivity to sin and being corrupted on our hearts?
"The alternative, that human morality was created over time by humanity, is not at all observed"
You have never observed human moral opinions changing and developing? The opinion towards homosexuality, for example, has changed drastically just over my single lifetime, and you are saying that it isn't observed?
"were revealed"
So are morals revealed or written on our hearts? Was human opposition to slavery 1) written on our hearts; 2) revealed by Jesus; 3) developed in and by human thought?
It also kinda seems like, to me at least, that moral realism without God as a grounding suffers an epistemic nightmare. Like if one grants that, sure, morality can exist by brute fact then how in the world can we be confident that what we believe to be truely right and wrong are actually that? I remeber hearing a debate where one guy said that, basically, we ask ourselves what would a perfectly rational person do and we use that as a kind of guide. But that's the problem, absolutely no one is perfectly rational so how can we even begin to hazard a guess as to what a perfectly rational person would do? It seems that even if moral facts can exist without God, you need some type of revelation in order to even confidently begin to say that x is actually wrong
That guy was misunderstaning what rationality is, anyway. Rationality means you make decisions based on logic and reason, rather than emotion and bias. But logic and reason merely enable us to determine that A necessarily follows on from B, but is incompatible with C. It can't tell you things like whether it's better to pursue your personal well-being or the well-being of your society.
People already aren't perfectly rational even if God does exist so they can still make moral error.
What's worse, if God's decrees make something moral not our inclinations about morality then God could order us to do something that seems truly immoral such as killing children and we wouldn't have any basis to say that this was wrong.
It's not clear to me how God helps with moral realism. What does God add to the picture that makes sense of moral realism and makes it more plausible?
@@lanceindependent If we assume moral realism is true, then, as I see it, a good explanation of morality will be able to account for these features: it's objectivity, how we come to know it, and how it accounts for the intrinsic value we place on each other.
So I'll say right off the bat that I can see how if one says that morality is just this brute fact about the universe, then sure, the first two criteria are plausibly fulfilled. It's objective because of brute force and we come to know it through reason (although imperfectly). Where the rub comes for me is the last one, why is it that people are intrinsically valuable on naturalism? It actually seems to me that we start with value in human beings and work our way from there, but the question remains for me why think we are intrinsically valuable? On a purely naturalist worldview it seems that we're basically a product of time, matter, and chance. We're a cosmic accident without a rhyme or reason for our existence outside of what we decide for ourselves or what others tell us. God explains the last thing that helps to make up morality for me. Because if we're made in God's image (from whom beauty, truth, justice, and reason flow) then it makes it way more easy for me to understand where this innate sense of value comes from.
Hopefully that makes sense. Really like I said it's that last point that really sticks out for me, I've just never heard a convincing account of why we're valuable on naturalism. And for me it's that value we seem to have that makes morality even make sense in the first place
@@charlesbrown8117 Thanks. One worry I have about your remark is that not all atheist moral realists are naturalists. At least among professional philosophers there are about as many non-naturalist moral realists as there are naturalist moral realists. Atheism does not entail naturalism.
Excellent, Gavin! I would also add that, in some of my own work, people are totally missing an important aspect of morality: authority. I mean to say that Goodness has the expectation of being followed, and evil the expectation of being resisted. Even an atheist who claims some "brute facts" about morality has failed to account for "why goodness has authority, in that we expect others to uphold morals which we see as objectively good, and likewise must make things seem good in order to see them as worth pursuing and obeying."
The theistic position accounts for not only goodness (as some fact of reality), but the authoritative nature of goodness.
“But religious people do a lot of evil…”
“So you admit there’s evil?”
Found this helpful. I like the "a creation must have a creator" argument, but apparently that isn't the best. I'm no philosopher
this is also my favortite argument, the best oart is it pounts to the christian god because the ultimate creator has to perfect
It seems so weak to tell someone when they do something we all "know" is wrong that, "well, that is just the way it is." How does that work whatsoever as a means for proving to another they have done something wrong?
Fascinating video, Gavin. To avoid the claim that God existence is seen as a brute fact, do you think it’d be reasonable to say that God not only necessarily exists, but exists by logically necessity? So, perhaps God’s non-existence would be equivalent to a square circle existing?
Gavin, please get your PhD in Analytic philosophy. Your material is so well done and thought out!
Wow! Fascinating.
Argument for the Ontological Independence of Morality
1. Objective moral values and duties can be conceived coherently without positing a deity.
2. If it is logically possible for objective moral values and duties to exist independently of a deity, then objective morality doesn't depend on a deity.
3. Objective moral values and duties can be inherent/intrinsic to a person's nature
4. Therefore, objective morality does not depend upon the existence of a deity.
Argument from Logical =/= Metaphysical Possibility
1. if it is logically possible that there is atleast one instance of suffering, then it is metaphysically possible for God to create a world with the greatest good
2. Logical Possibility does not entail Metaphysical Possibility
3. Therefore, p1 is not true
Defense of p2.
1. The proposition of "a man can fly unassisted" is logically coherent (i.e., it is not self-contradictory), but it is metaphysically impossible in the actual world.
2. Philosophical Zombies can be considered logically coherent but metaphysically impossible
3. Possible Worlds can be considered logically coherent but metaphysically impossible
Furthermore, a moral anti-realist rejects the existence of objective moral truths, while the Pyrrhonian moral skeptic doubts the possibility of ever reaching a certain moral knowledge due to the problem of moral disagreement and subjectivity.
Argument for Functionalism
1: Mental states are identical to physical events.
2: Any entity that is identical to another is indistinguishable from it
3. Therefore, mental states are physical events.
For a mental state to be coherent, it must involve a sequence of events or changes over time. For instance, the mental state of thinking requires the successive generation and processing of thoughts, which unfolds over time. Similarly, emotions arise in response to specific stimuli or events, and they also require time for their development and expression. Thus, the coherence of mental states inherently involves temporal unfolding, supporting the idea that mental states are not static entities but dynamic processes. Even if these events were defined as mental events, that would not entail they were distinct substances but merely manifestations of physicalism i.e. ways in which physical objects can be/change metaphysically. Under functionalism, the mind is a set of functions.
Argument for Nominalism
1. Abstract, mind-independent entities exist.
2: If Abstract entities exist, then we can prove they exist via non-empirical means.
3. If Functionalism is true, then abstract entities are physical events
4. For Platonism to be coherent, it must show that abstract objects are distinct from physical events
5. It cannot be shown that abstract objects are distinct from physical events
Conclusion: Therefore, Platonism is incoherent.
Argument From Physicalism
1. Functionalism posits that mental states are defined by their functional roles or causal relationships rather than by their underlying physical properties.
2: Nominalism denies the existence of abstract entities and universals, asserting that only particular individual objects exist.
3: Mental states are instantiated in and realized by physical systems, such as the brain.
4: Physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that everything that exists is either physical in nature or can be explained by physical phenomena.
Conclusion: Therefore, mental states are physical states, and physicalism is true.
Argument For Necessitarianism
P1. Things can be other than they are.
P2. If things can be other than they are metaphysically, then it is possible for them to have different properties or exist differently in some possible worlds.
P3. We cannot prove that things can be other than they are metaphysically.
P4. If something is necessarily true, then it cannot be other than it is in any possible world.
C1. It is possible that things cannot be other than they are metaphysically.
C2. Necessarily, things cannot be other than they are metaphysically
Argument Against Contingent Substances
P1: Ontologically independent substances are those that exist and have their properties independently of other entities.
P2: Contingent entities are those whose existence or properties depend on something external to themselves.
P3: If a substance is contingent, it relies on external factors for its existence or properties.
P4: The concept of necessitarianism asserts that all events and states of affairs are necessary and could not have been otherwise.
C1: Therefore, if substances are contingent, they would not be ontologically independent, which contradicts the concept of necessitarianism.
C2: Hence, all substances must be necessary and have their properties necessarily, supporting the position of necessitarianism.
Defense of P1:
Ontological independence is a well-established philosophical concept that pertains to entities' existence and properties. It asserts that substances have their existence and properties intrinsically, rather than depending on other entities for them. This concept is compatible with various philosophical perspectives and provides a basis for understanding the necessary nature of substances in the context of necessitarianism.
Defense of P2 and P3:
Contingent entities, by definition, rely on external factors for their existence or properties. If a substance is contingent, it means that its existence or properties could have been otherwise, which implies a dependence on external factors. This aligns with the notion of contingency and supports the understanding that contingent entities are not ontologically independent.
Defense of P4:
The concept of necessitarianism posits that all events and states of affairs are necessary, meaning they could not have been different from what they are. This notion assumes that there are no contingent entities whose existence or properties depend on external factors. If substances were contingent, it would contradict the idea of necessitarianism, as it would introduce elements of contingency and non-necessity into the ontology of substances.
Argument for Substance Monism
P1: If the mental is reducible to the physical, then the mental is not a distinct substance
p2 The mental is defined by the functional roles or causal relationships of physical phenomena
P3: Physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that everything that exists is either physical in nature or can be explained by physical phenomena.
P4: Mental states are physical events.
P5: Therefore, mental states are physical phenomena, and physicalism is true.
P6: Substance Monism is true.
Defense of p4.
P1. Mental states require the passage of time to be coherent.
P2. Physical events, as part of the physical world, occur within the framework of time.
C1. Therefore, mental states are identical to physical events because they share the common property of requiring the passage of time.
Argument for Moral Anti-Realism
1. Objective moral facts or properties are posited to be external and independent of subjective human perspectives.
2. If objective moral facts or properties are external and independent, they cannot be reducible to or identical with physical events intrinsic to the nature of physical substances.
3. If objective moral facts or properties are not reducible to physical events, they would require an ontological status beyond the physical realm.
4. Physicalism posits that everything that exists is ultimately physical in nature, and there are no non-physical entities or substances.
5. If objective moral facts or properties exist and are not reducible to the physical, physicalism would be false.
6. The coherence of objective moral facts or properties, therefore, raises questions about the compatibility with physicalism, which is a well-supported and widely accepted ontological position.
7. The existence of objective moral facts or properties would require a non-physical realm, akin to a form of moral Platonism.
8. Moral Platonism, as a non-physical and abstract realm, may not be coherent with our current understanding of the natural world and the physical basis of reality.
9. The assumption of objective moral facts or properties as external and independent entities raises challenges regarding their interaction with the physical world and how they can impact human actions and moral judgments.
10. Therefore, the coherence of objective moral facts or properties becomes questionable if we consider the implications it has on our ontological commitments, such as physicalism and our understanding of the natural world.
Argument from Pyrrhonian Moral Skepticism
1.Objective moral truths are sui generis moral facts or properties that exist independently of humans, independent of beliefs, opinions, or cultural norms.
2.If objective moral truths exist, they can be established to exist independently of human's mental states.
3.There are no ways of establishing objective moral truths exist independently of human's mental states.
4.Human mental states are physical events.(viz. functionalism and nominalism)
5.The Problem of the Criterion, when applied to the Münchhausen Trilemma, makes it impossible to establish ontological objective moral facts or properties via epistemological means.
6.Therefore, claiming ontological objective moral facts or properties exist commits a special pleading fallacy.
Hey, I wanted to say that I appreciate the respectful way you addressed this point of disagreement. I think you handled the criticisms in a fair manner.
Most of these points are why I consider myself a moral anti-realist, though I have heard one compelling argument for realism which grounds human morality in humanity itself. The argument that such a morality is contingent is simply a bullet that I have to bite if I were to take that option. But whether morality is objectively grounded in all humanity or subjectively grounded in humans is a border so fuzzy that I haven't been compelled to delve too deeply into it. I do find this as a sufficient answer to why human morality is not leveled at chimpanzees, though perhaps more to the point is simply that humans are not the victims of such violence, and so we don't care much about the morality of it.
I also agree that essence vs accident seems weird sans theism. It seems such a thing is how Catholics justified transubstantiation of the elements by saying that the accidendals of the elements are still bread and wine, but the essence is now the body and blood of Christ. While an onlooker just sees... nothing appeared to change. This is to say that leveling accident as well as contingency at such a morality is not going to land with me.
I have to say, I was reluctant to click on this video as so many Christian channels handle the moral argument more as a weapon than a tool, but you earned my upvote.
Why do atheists and agnostics seek objective morality? Is it of any higher value than subjective values - which seems to have a lot more face validity given that different people have such different view on what is the moral take on issues at hand? Is there a higher status to it or what?
No. There is nothing better about moral realism.
What do you mean they seek objective morality?
Yeah, I agree morality is Inter-subjective not objective.
15:35 Your recent articulation, detailing the point at which you can no longer simplify your explanation, resonates with our experiences concerning Christianity. Often, when we pose probing questions to Christians, their ultimate response boils down to either "because God ordained it so," "it is within God's nature," or "it aligns with God's will." However, these aren't actual resolutions, rather they represent the limit of their understanding, a threshold beyond which they are unable to progress. This situation parallels the concept of the 'essence of three.' Why is it the essence of three? Simply because it is. In the same vein, every inquiry regarding God terminates at an impasse, a question without an answer. These inscrutable queries typically culminate in assertions about God, His nature, His will, His desire, or some similar notion. Yet, such a conclusion lacks real explanatory power, providing an answer that fails to genuinely elucidate the matter.
Good stuff. More philosophical videos, please! I would argue that the moral argument is implicit in Aquinas’ argument from gradation (4th way) and that this is also a useful pushback against the brute (as you call it) line of argumentation used. 3 being a number because that’s its essence is completely different from something being good or bad. I’ll have to listen to the original argument because it seems so absurd. Is he arguing for a moral action or a quality like kindness, or for goodness itself? What is the thing he’s comparing to with the 3 is a number analogy?
Thanks for this! I have been mulling over the source of objective morality….
Emerson Green did an excellent piece on the moral argument called "The Collapse of the Moral Argument for God".
I think the issue is that all moral theories will eventually bottom out in something like "that's just what it is to be good," including theistic ones. So if that's reason to reject/ be skeptical of atheistic moral grounding, it seems we should treat theistic conceptions in kind.
You don't need God to explain Morality but you need God to have Morality.
I think a useful question here as well is what it means for an act to be morally good or bad (as opposed to say practically advantageous, say). Without a God who will meet out some form of ultimate justice (whether posthumously or otherwise), what sense does it make to say that a murderer is morally bad as long as he can get away with it?
And with (the assumption of) god, "god" is the only thing that provides sense to saying murder is morally bad.
What purpose does saying murder is bad have?
The world hurdles through space whether you accept murder is bad or you don't.
You are not owed "ultimate justice" and you have no evidence for it.
They are two entirely separate issues, even if I were to grant the general sentiment.
Why is good, good? and evil, bad? I like to ask, "Says who?" Apart from God, it becomes a matter of opinion, "my truth."
You are literally saying it's according to God's opinion.
@@blamtasticful not opinion, his nature. He is good, he is love. We are made in his image.
@@Sundayschoolnetwork If his nature is goodness itself than the nature of goodness itself without a God is sufficient to ground moral truth. Thanks for playing.
Also if it's not his opinion than you are admitting that right and wrong exist regardless of God's opinions, feelings, and desires. That's just admitting that the existence of moral truth is what is informing God's proclamations and as such is true in and of itself rather than dependent upon God.
@@blamtasticful the question remains, "says who?" I believe good is good, because God is good. His nature defines right and wrong.
"Thanks for playing"? You know it's possible to have a discussion without being snarky.
@@blamtasticful"Goodness" cant have a nature if it doesn't have Being. God is the Being of Goodness. He is the ontological perfection of Goodness because he is the Perfect being and thus lacks any privations. He is not moved to be good by anything external to himself, his nature just IS Goodness. Without God, goodness does not actually exist. Arguing for goodness without God is like arguing for Goodness without goodness. Its a non-starter.
Also, God doesn't have opinions or emotions. He doesn't process information like you and I because He is not a contingent creature. What he knows and what he does are not dependent upon anything other than himself because God is simple, and thus nothing he knows or does can be arbitrary.
Great presentation. Morality is interesting to consider from an atheist point of view. I am a little rusty on persuasion on this topic
Good to see this topic in video form
Great thoughts. Greg Koukl has also done some good work on this particular argument.
When I saw this video, I was planning on making a comment at the end, because I've thought about this a lot, but the video basically covered everything. I will still make some minor points.
I think God acts a material, logical, and moral "first-mover". As discussed in the video, in order for any logical process to begin, it has to start somewhere without a cause. So I agree entirely that if morality is "real", then its beginning must be a brute fact, whether it's somebody positing that his personal preferences are a brute fact (like Sam Harris), or whether somebody posits that God is that brute fact.
I think the Is-Ought fallacy described by Hume demonstrates that there can be no material basis for morality.
Evolutionary explanations for morality (as discussed in the video) do not demonstrate objective eternal morals, but only "good strategies" and "bad strategies" for certain circumstances. In this case, morality is not different from game theory.
Morality is no mystery. Human beings in order to survive formed society and in order to continue to survive humans work to maintain and improve society. And because of living in a society we evolved few psychological traits like sensing fairness, experiencing empathy, and judging others’ harmful and helpful actions, mutual benefits. And these basic traits breeds other moral attributes. If you strip down all moral characteristics into parts than you will find these reoccurring patterns. These characteristics traits makes society more functional and there by ensures the survival of it's members so by natural selection we are moral .
It's not that hard
Well put. This also provides a better explanation (as far as I can tell) for why morality varies considerably across time and cultures.
Absolutely ridiculous comment.
stunning rebuttal @@NoN0-eb8lj
Gavin, would you ever have Michael A.G. Haykin on your channel to discuss Baptist sacramentalogy? He has written a book on recovering a Calvinist sacramentology in Baptist churches against Zwinglism
Idk if I missed it, but what's the answer to moral anti-realists and people who think animal morality isn't fundamentally different from ours? Evolutionary variation doesn't pose an issue in that case. The idea of objective, universal morality seems driven by intuition and human ego rather than being derived from evidence.
It's like saying the rules of chess are objective and universal because it's your favorite game that feels intuitively perfect.
In the prehistoric days a lone explore wandered far from his mountain tribe. And near death he makes it down the mountains to the sea. He is taken in and nursed to health by a strange tribe who dwell in caves by the sea. They have what are to him incredible sharp tools (shells) and medicine. After a few days he’s permitted to leave. Upon finding his way home to his warrior mountain tribe. The chief leads a group down and they brutally slaughter the sea tribe for their shells in the night taking the young women as slaves. .. were they in the wrong?
Human morality has changed over time. Not long ago, both slavery and torture were widely practiced. Now, both are proscribed by international convention (though imperfectly suppressed), Did the legal prohibitions of slavery and torture require a god, or may they be attributed to human reason alone?
GOD
Hey Gavin - this is unrelated but I wanted to see if you would address Aquinas’ view of scripture in his Summa - I forget which question but it is article 8 within that question where he says doctrine uses the canonical scriptures as the only incontrovertible proof, and the “doctors” as “probable” truths. My question is really twofold: foremost, how do Catholics qualify Thomas’ view here, and second, why is this quote not discussed in these debates (it is possible that I am misreading him!)? Thanks! I am sorry I can’t get more specific data on locating quote - I have lent my copy to a friend.
Another problem is that I don't see how this perspective deals with moral disputes. It seems very obvious to me that killing an infant in the womb is wrong, yet many seem to think it is not only sometimes permissible but is actually a very high good. These people are not even separated from me in time and space, we live in the same neighborhood.
The Christian (as opposed to some generalized philosophical theism) view wonderfully answers this issue. God has written the moral law on the hearts of every human being, but humanity is fallen and "suppresses the truth in unrighteousness". This explains both the existence and knowledge of the moral law, and also resistance to it.
What do you think about aristotelian eudaimonia as a way to establish an objective moral? St. Thomas Aquinas will take this from Aristotle also. Men should be what it is. You must develop your potencies based on your human nature. Therefore you have an objective moral there
This is what I'm an actual "expert" on, and have written about extensively. I ultimately don't think the moral argument works unless you take it as an inference to the best explanation. I develop this in detail in my work. In short, God explains a lot of different things about normativity, not only in ethics but aesthetics, epistemology and logic. But to make the argument work you first have to establish that normativity is real. Modern thought is willing to deny that and there's no way to prove or really even argue for it besides appealing to our sentiments, in a sort of Humean account. But I really, truly don't think there can be any argument for that conclusion. It's ultimately a pragmatic choice. I explain this in detail in my masters thesis, you might like that. It's a very new area and I worked under one of Shafer Landau's students, who was a nihilist, to develop some of these new insights.
Craig's argument is also total crap, in my opinion. It's kind of laughable honestly, and I respect Craig very much. Why? Because Craig gives NO account for how God can even explain normative grounding. He doesn't even touch the normative question Korsgaard raises, which is fundamental to the problem. The problem is that you have to justify the explanatory power of theism. It's not as easy as it seems. I have tried to do it, but it's not going to be straightforward.
You also need to look into reading Quine, Putnam and Parfit on this. Theyve got a fairly tricky almost pragmatic approach to grounding normativity but it gets a bit complex.
Glad to see more and more theist rejecting Craig’s formulation of the moral argument.
I side with Swinburne on this issue (God does not ground moral values but is the best explanation for moral knowledge and obligation).
If we demand to ground moral values solely in God, we will ultimately run into some circularity problems or “brute” facts about God.
Ok, so I'll put it out there that I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I just read your statement and, no offense, it seems like you wrote quite a bit without saying anything. My question to you is simply, if there is no God, who or what defines what is good or bad, morally?
@@derrickcarson If there is a God, how does He ground moral values? The theist has to give an explanation for HOW God grounds values. Craig and no one but the voluntarists or divine command theorists do that, but both of those theories are awful, and are basically nihilism.
I agree that God grounds values. But I don't know how. And I am happy saying I do not know how. But that means I can't make an argument from the fact that God explains morality. Because to do that I'd have to know (a) that morality is real (I can't prove it), and (b) how God could even explain it. To say that God can explain morality requires that I first know how God can explain morality. But I can't solve that.
Now I think I can solve it pragmatically, mystically, but it doesn't help you get a straightforward argument across. It would be more nuanced.
@@rogerparada4995 Me too. I think you can make a good moral argument, but it would be very nuanced, and very different. It would be a pragmatic argument like Kant's, or as explaining moral knowledge and obligation.
Theists run into the same "brute facts" problems that atheists do. But, I don't agree with Swinburne, because I don't buy platonism or constructivism.
What I love about this video is it displays how the proofs of God are often culturally applicable in ways that are more than apologetics. Not least, because the Moral Argument answers much more the culture takes for granted central to its assumptions, but it also I think answers very directly a philosophical movement very much at large. The Moral Argument for God answers meta-modernism and specifically its indulgence into the post-modern habit of making a play as insisting duality (of our sense perception) and dualism (of our rational faculties) the same while holding them in an absolute opposition. Rendering every meaning sentiment by insisting on a type of omniscience that creates a feeling life is absurd, doubling down on the relativistic constant/absolution of flux of post-modernity to treating reality like a game we are trying to win by way of proof a false basis for attaining to our own secular enlightenment.
I think this argument shows specifically how that is immoral in obvious ways. What we need (more than ever) is an awareness of how truth is self-evident, and specifically that that self-evidence is obvious because God is obviously revealed. The Moral Argument for God's existence answers the deeper post-modern habit directly in what post-modern falsity plays to redefine reality often and almost always take for granted of truth. Because God exists we can learn to expect that there is self-evidence to truth expressed in reality itself, especially with respect to God that does not so easily contradict, that is not by necessity so extremely ideologically motivated. The implication of this Gavin does a great job of describing.
Humans live in groups, and like all social animals we've evolved a system of cooperation that makes group living possible. We call our system morality. And morality doesn't "change when you get to human beings." We may not apply our moral standards to chimpanzees, but all primate groups exhibit moral behaviours that are very similar to ours.
how do you know the intentions of animals? also morality is only a "system of cooperation" when you change the definition of morality to "a system of cooperation"
I'm a Christian, and also a voluntaryist. Most libertarians, voluntaryists, anarcho-capitalists, agorists, etc. who are secular argue deontological ethics in regard to morality not needing God. It's generally based on preconditional situations and past precedent that determines whether something is preferable or not. For example, a single woman considers adoption for her baby, but in the end chooses to raise the child herself, and after sixteen years is disappointed with the child, but the expectation that she should love the child can be based on her choice to keep the child when they were born. The same concept can be applied to most social interaction, and it's what separates the morality of how one treats their pet dog, a missing pet dog, a feral dog, and a wild coyote.
I don't really support deontological ethics, and I think the argument for virtue ethics is better, but the debates make me think the moral argument is not that strong for God. The biggest flaw with the secular arguments is explaining why the people who tend to hold basic moral intutions and determinations are the majority, and the people who don't are the minority (around 1% or less of men, and less for women in regard to rejecting any sense of morality.) Darwinism and Social Darwinism would suggest the opposite would be true that people with completely animalistic minds like rapists, murderers, and thieves would obtain the positions of power through their brute force, since the evil people with positions of power obtain them through manipulation and indoctrination regarding the public thinking they have the justification to rule and coerce. Instead, those people are a fringe minority, which is better explained either by God creating us that way, Noah's Flood, or some other divine intervention.
Social Darwinism went the way of the dodo decades ago and is no longer in any serious secular person's collection of explanations of how morality works.
Regardless, there are always plenty of ruthless brutal people in power in many parts of the world. Vladimir Putin immediately springs to mind, but there are plenty of others -- you could do worse than start with Trump's "best buds" list of world leaders. But when a majority bands together to resist such tyrants, they put measures in place -- e.g. democracy -- to make it far more difficult for those who would want to be autocratic to come to power. No God required, just a lot of hard work and sacrifice from a lot of well-meaning people.
4:13 "...there is this ancient intuition, that the realm of the conscience has to do with the divine"
No, there is not. Intuitions are - just like moral - not objective.
Gavin how do you answer the question of evolving morality with Christianity? With moral objectivity from God, how does it make sense that God can allow things like slavery or even divorce when he sees them as immoral, and then later repeal these? Was God being immoral by allowing immorality to not be a sin?
Great video Gavin! As a theist, how would you respond to the objection that grounding morality in God’s character is just as brute/arbitrary as claiming that moral truths are brute facts? Isn’t this view implying that God’s character being good is a brute fact?
More philosophy videos please
In Carl truemans new book he says it is a. Mistake to say nietzsche was a nihilist but most books and theologians classify him as that. Thoughts?
You can’t separate the ontological from the epistemological because you assume that you can know these facts within the moral argument. However, assumptions can be challenged.
Fifteen seconds in and I have my first question: How would merely assigning some moral grounding to a god change the way I behave in the world? I have never gotten a reasonable response to this question.
So, I think the line of thinking goes a bit like this (bear in mind, I'm an atheist and believe morals are subjective):
A) Morals are, by definition, the way to determine what is good and what is bad.
B) Morals could be based on outcome, personal preference, whatever. But morals ARE based on God.
1) Therefore, if you think that something is good, which is "objectively" not good (that is: is not good according to God), then your moral compass is flawed, and you should figure out why that is. Because, it is objectively good to do as God commands.
2) You can therefore be wrong about what is moral. (In some versions of christian belief, this line should read: You can be confused about morality, for all people have gods word written on their heart, and know instinctively what is good. But you can be mislead over time.)
So it's not that you should change because morals come from God, it's the case that your behavior should already be reflecting Gods will, and if they don't, you should try to realize it and correct yourself. And you should already be comfortable with the morals of God, because those are the "base morals" of all people everywhere.
It's kind of a parallel version of "everyone already believes in God, 'cause The Bible says so". The argument works if you already believe in it, and if you don't believe in it, you're just not accepting the truth because you've been mislead to misunderstand your own thoughts/feelings/morals.
Christians aren't saying that attributing objective morality to God will change your life. You would still have to become a born again believer for that to happen, so I guess it's only in the sense that a "correct" understanding of morality (from the Christian point of view) will (they hope) set you on the path to becoming a Christian that it will change your life's trajectory. If you don't become a Christian, and become a theist or, say, a Muslim instead, then nothing changes for you.
@@EnglishMike That seems to say to me that the moral argument isn't an argument for the existence of god, as it is so often presented. The issue for me is this: assigning moral grounding to god or claiming to be a christian tells me nothing about whether I can trust a person, which is really what's important. And as none of the rest of it is convincing, I simply can't get there.
@@kevinfancher3512 Well I can't get there either, but from the apologist's point of view the strength of the argument is philosophical, not practical. It's not important that flawed human beings can't be trusted, they argue that there can be no such thing as trust in the first place without an objective moral arbiter.
My main objection is that even if there is some basic objective morality underpinning everything (which I highly doubt) it's impossible to determine what it is anyway.
There's a reason why the go-to example for apologists seems to be: "It's objectively wrong to rape children for fun."
If divining the object moral standard was easy, there would be no need to qualify their example with "children" and "fun."
But then, some conservative Christians still believe wives don't have the right to withhold sex from their husband...
@@EnglishMike Mind you, while I didn't say people cannot be trusted, you did make a number of well stated points, so thanks for that.
RE trust: For me, and I believe christians as well, the level of trust is going to be subject to what I know about the person. I just don't care where one thinks their morality comes from, what I need to know is what moral positions we share, and how committed a person is to them.
Someone hammering his philosophical argument once responded to me with, "philosophy trumps science every time". In the actual world, the one where I want to be and do better at every turn, I can't see either being relevant without the other.
So there are feelings of guilt and obligation so god?
For anyone that doesn’t want to give up morality having some form of objective reality, I think this is the hardest problem for naturalist atheists to resolve, it may even be insurmountable for that particular worldview.
Can’t ground it in nature as biology can’t tell us what’s right or wrong, can’t ground in society as it immediately becomes relativised, and can’t call it a brute fact, because that virtually assumes the existence of Platonic forms (basically conceding that there is some sort of higher reality).
So basically all you're saying is that we can't expect easy answers (unless you attribute everything to God, that is). I agree. Morality is hard. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
@@EnglishMike Nope, not at all. That’s just putting words into my mouth. There’s still issues with positing God as the source of objective morality, but they’re not nearly as difficult as trying to explain it from a naturalist point of view.
Further, I would argue that atheism is the easy answer to a number of questions. Atheism is the easy answer for evolution, the scale of the universe and the problem of evil, for example. It takes a lot of theologising and philosophising to develop coherent and strong answers to reconcile the questions posed by those issues with God.
“Good” means that which is beneficial to the culmination of a purpose. A purpose is a type of desire, or association with a desire/goal. On a theistic system, God and his glory are the ultimate good, because that is what God ultimately wants - what he purposes to do.
But if there is a universal human nature, and that human nature has universal desires, for survival, long term holistic pleasure, etc, then that would also constitute an objective basis for morality an atheist could affirm. Good is that which fulfills deep and universal desires of human nature, and evil is that which violates human nature.
As a Christian myself, I think God is obviously the best explanation for why there is a universe and human nature at all. But if someone assumes a universe and universal human nature, they do not need to go beyond that to explain morality.
The Bible itself grounds morality in the created order, “and God SAW that it was good.”
The Knowledge of Good and Evil is the cause of the Original Sin... Subjective Morality!
Yep, deciding good and evil on our own terms, which is whatever is most convenient for us.
This entire discussion is modernist confusion. It should be noted that modern and pre-modern ethics are fundamentally different in orientation. For the pre-modern, the ethical question is: "How can I attain to happiness (beatitudo; eudaimonia)," or, expressed differently, "What is the best way to live my life?" That is not the modern ethical question. The modern ethical question is: "How can I objectively justify my actions such that any other rational actor could also consider them justified?"
For the pre-modern, there is no such thing as a difference between the good as desirable, the good as perfective or perfected and the good as morally good. It's only when you have this distinction in the modern era (as Kant certainly makes it, if I recall correctly, for example, in the Critique of Practical Reason) that all of a sudden you have this "is/ought" problem.
There is no such problem for the pre-modern. As St. Thomas Aquinas says, just as, in the speculative intellect's apprehension of being (being as true), it necessarily discovers as the first principle of its operation that the same thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect, so too, in the practical intellect's apprehension of being (being as good), it necessarily discovers as the first principle of its operation that the good is to be pursued and evil avoided. Just as being is knowable to the intellect, so too is being desirable to the will.
All beings long for the good as perfective of their nature, and we, as human beings (i.e., as intellectual creatures), long for properly human happiness, which consists in perfect theoria.
It is for this reason that the pre-moderns do not use the moral argument for the existence of God. The moral argument for the existence of God, as such, only arises under decidedly modern principles and conditions. For the pre-modern, there is no need to "ground" our apprehension of "moral" goods. The good, especially the good that perfects our nature and leads to happiness, is intrinsically desirable and lovely. See, for example, the first book of Plato's Republic or the very opening lines of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.
To be sure, there is the question, which indeed points to God as lawgiver: "But how is it that our pursuit of the 'moral' good should become, in a sense, 'legally' OBLIGATORY," but again, that is a decidedly modern question.
[Indeed, I can only think of a single place where anything like the moral argument is given, and that's in the Pseudo-Iamblichus' Theology of Arithmetic, where he asserts that it's when we are wronged that we long for the gods to exist, but when we do wrong that we long for them not to exist. Perfect justice requires something like a cosmic Judge Dredd in the sky.]
The moral argument for God's existence is a decidedly modern, Kantian argument, and even Kant admits that it's not REALLY an airtight argument. Nietzsche and Sartre could easily evade the argument, as they do, simply by denying that the pursuit of the moral good is objectively and "legally" obligatory, that there are no objective moral "laws" as such.
Thank you. This is what I've been trying to tell people on both sides of the morality debate. I think the only "system" that incapsulates this is something like virtue ethics. I say "system" because virtue ethics is decidedly different from the other systematic moralities that have been formulated such as deontology, or consequentialism.
God bless you soldier of Christ
Hi @TruthUnites, the non-theistic responses you outline strike me as a kind of contemporary application of Platonic ideals which are alternative to a Theistic framework but not sustainable on materialism. Is that right?