Sunday, May 29, 2022

Why I find the moral argument so convincing

I just watched this clip from the Unbelievable podcast with Justin Brierly where Richard Dawkins said he finds the moral argument utterly unconvincing, but he thinks the fine-tuning argument is the best argument for God and that if there were any argument that might convince him to be a deist, that would be it.

I found that interesting because for the longest time, fine-tuning arguments (and teleological arguments in general) have struck me as being the least persuasive arguments, and the moral argument has struck me as being the most convincing. The Kalam was a close second for a while there, but that has slipped a little. I've recently started to come around on the fine-tuning argument, but the moral argument remains the most convincing argument to me.

I should say, though, that in my own thinking, I don't take the various arguments for God as stand-alone arguments. I take them more as premises in a whole case for God, which I explained in another post.

But lemme explain why I find the moral argument to be so persuasive. This isn't meant to be a full blown defense of the moral argument, just a bit of autobiography really.

There are essentially two premises in the moral argument. One is that there couldn't be a real moral law unless there were a God. The second is that there is a real moral law. If those two premises are true, then it's inescapable that there's a God. The existence of God would follow necessarily from those two premises.

In spite of everything I've heard to the contrary, the first premise seems almost logically certain. What I mean by a real moral law are prescriptive obligations that transcend societies and cultures. They are objective in the sense that they don't exist merely because we feel a certain way, or becasue we value certain things, or that we've made a pact among ourselves, or even because we've passed certain laws. While they impose themselves on us, they are not a product of us.

I don't see how there could possibly be a particular way that people were obligated to live unless there were somebody who imposed that obligation on them. There can't be a way we're supposed to behave is nobody supposes us to behave that way. There can't be a way we are meant to be if nobody means for us to be that way. I mean there couldn't be traffic laws if there weren't a governing authority, right? You need some kind of an authority behind any prescriptive rule of behavior.

But at the same time, I don't see how any creature could fulfill that role for morality. We have all kinds of authority structures in our world that create rules--governments, parents, bosses, military commanders, etc. But none of these authorities are sufficient to explain morality. If these moral laws exist, then they transcend all human institutions. The government can't make something right or wrong by making it legal or illegal. The moral law is above the civil law. It's what we use to judge whether a civil law is a good law or not. In fact, the validity of all human rules and laws are judged by their agreement with some moral standard.

Since no conceivable creature that originated and evolved somewhere in the universe like we did could possibly have the kind of authority required to impose transcendent moral obligations on people, then the source of the moral law must reside in some kind of autonomous supernatural being, which would be a God.

To me, the fact that you can't have objective moral principles without a God is just as obvious as the fact that you can't have a thought without somebody who is thinking it. That first premise in the moral argument has the same intuitive appeal to me as Descartes cogito which is almost logically certain. Maybe it is logically certain.

So it just comes down to that second premise. Now, I fully admit that I can't prove that second premise. And that second premise is not as obvious to me as the first premise. For me, the first premise comes very close to a logical certainty, but the second premise comes nowhere near a logical certainty. If it's not a logical certainty, but it also can't be proved, then why do I believe it?

I've written a lot on my blog about that (here for example), but basically it just comes down to being perfectly honest with myself. No matter what possibilities a person may raise about the meaninglessness of everything, if I'm perfectly honest with myself, I cannot bring myself to seriously doubt that there are real moral obligations or that what we do does ultimately matter in the big scheme of things.

I have no problem sitting around with a bunch of people speculating about the possibility of there being no real right and wrong save the ones we've made up or evolved to believe. But to me that's no different than when you're a teenager or a young adult sitting around smoking a doobie with your friends and talking about how you might all be parasites in a giant goat's stomach, or characters in somebody's computer game, or maybe even just dreaming the whole thing. When I was a kid, I used to toy around with solipsism all the time, and I even believed I took it seriously. But I didn't, and some time in my mid 20's or so when I decided to start taking philosophy seriously and start being honest with myself, I gave up all that nonsense as just childish playing at philosophy. There's no real reason to doubt the external world, and there's no real reason to doubt morality. And if I'm perfeclty honest with myself, I'm just as convinced of one as I am the other. I don't need it to be proved. In fact, it can't be proved. But I think it more than reasonable to believe and downright nutty to deny it.

I also think most people, whether they'll admit it or not, really would find themselves believing in both morality and the extenal world if they'd just stop playing philosophical games and be honest with themselves. The fact that moral non-realists are rarely ever consistent betrays them. Just as an idealists takes the apparent external world just as seriously as a naturalist or a dualist, so also do moral nihilists, subjectivists, and relativists behave as if morality were objective. This is evident in a number of things, not least of which is the fact that they hold other people to moral standards as if those standards actually applied to those people. I even had a moral nihilist one time tell me he thought it was ironic that a lot of moral objectivists were less moral than their moral relativist counterparts. How could one be worse than the other if there's no standard? This person lacked self-awareness, and I think most moral non-realists probably do as well. They are literally in denial.

So, I don't think it's just me who is hardwired to believe in morality in spite of the fact that it can't be proved. I think every mentally healthy person is hardwired that way. People can deny what they are hardwired to believe, but they rarely live consistently with that denial. If you're one of those people who are in denial about there being a universal objective standard of right and wrong, just stop it. Be honest with yourself. Think about that shooting in Uvalde that happened recently and ask yourself, "In the great scheme of things, can I honestly say there's nothing wrong with walking into a school and shooting a bunch of kids for no other reaon than the fact that you're frustrated with life or that you hate the world"? Be serious.

So that's it. There's a transcendent moral law that imposes itself on us but did not originate with us. There can't be such a law unless there's a God. It follows inescapably that there's a God. If you affirm both of those premises, but you deny the existence of a God, then you're being irrational. The reason I find the moral argument so convincing is because I am forced by the power of logical necessity to conclude that God exists because of premises that I cannot honestly bring myself to deny.

3 comments:

Paul said...

Good thoughts, Sam. I actually was reeled into Christianity (and interest in apologetics) by way of the Cosmological and Teleological Arguments of Hugh Ross. I still love them. However, it is the moral argument that keeps me from being able to rationally depart from (at least) theism. To give up theism I'd have to surrender all my principles for operating in the world, and even for criticizing aspects of Christianity. I think this applies even to concepts like meaning, reason, and knowledge of the outside world.

I agree that the moral argument is deeply imbedded in our intuitions and we simply toy with ethical systems to try to make systematic sense of these intuition. In fact, we reject certain theories when we see them run afoul of what we instinctively know to be right and wrong. For instance, utilitarianism suggests that it would be okay to torture humans for the amusement of a large viewing audience, but we instinctively know that this is wrong to do and the wrong kind of amusement to engage in.

Our secular culture affirms the idea of objective morality at every turn, even when they may otherwise own relativism when you press them. They do this in some of the following ways.

They talk about making progress toward some utopian idea of justice.
They celebrate moral reformers.
They make moral judgments against past injustices.
They are very active in taking up moral and social causes.
I've even heard them complain about Christians for not acting like Christians are supposed to.

I've tried to debated with one agnostic fellow of Facebook, who is constantly moralizing, about grounding his morality. He begs off of the discussion every time by claiming he's not a philosopher and saying the issue is just too complex for him to sort out. It is indeed complex from a secular perspective, precisely because it is problematic (if not impossible) to ground objective morality inside of a closed materialist worldview. In fact, I theorize that the post-Christian philosophical history was an exercise in trying to sort this out. Nihilism was the admission that objective meaning and morality were lost to us, but this was unsatisfactory to the existentialists and postmodernists. I think we've come to a point where many people just don't care anymore about rationally justifying themselves, and so we arrived and the new atheists, who just made bald assertion about how things ought to be and even began deriding philosophy precisely because it harbored these kinds of tough questions.

Sam Harper said...

Hi Paul! Thanks for chiming in. I agree with a lot of what you said, especially that part about how we always judge the validity of moral theories by our moral intuitions. We consider a moral theory to be a good one as long as it accurately captures what we already know to be true, and it's a bad theory if we can think of counter-examples which also come from what we already know to be true.

It is interesting to me that a lot of atheists will cry foul whenever pressed to ground their moral assertions in a debate that has nothing to do with arguments for God, Christianity, or morality in general. If you're arguing over the morality of some social justice issue, they will argue as if there were some objectively true answer to the question. But then if you press them to justify morality in their worldview, they'll cry foul as if you've changed the subject on them.

I see in a lot of on line discussions how a lot of atheists will try to shame Christians when this happens. They don't bother to try to answer the challenge. They just say something like, "Oh, those Christians! There they go again." And I see a lot of Christians, in turn, backing down because of it. I don't think we should back down. I think we should keep holding their feet to the fire on this issue so they'll be forced to face their inconsistencies until they hopefully wake up and start being honest with themselves and admit that they are moral objectivists after all. Either that or give up arguing as if there were objectively correct answers to moral questions.

Paul said...

Most debates over specific political and social issues presume objective morality. Sometimes I humor a secular opponent by sticking to the issue and trafficking in their moral intuitions. However, if I do not have the time, patience, or expertise on the issue I'll bring up the moral grounding problem. You're right that they often see this as a dodge, and I think it's because their moral intuitions are so deeply entrenched in their subconscious that they just think all this is self-explanatory. Few comprehend how foundational this is to constructing a sensible ethic on any subject at all. How does one build a meaningful moral framework upon what amounts to personal preference? It is the beginning of constructing a house on stone to recognize that morality is imposed by an outside law-giver who created us to perceive and obey it. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.