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WillowOne's Positions

Moral Argument - Argument from Objective moral values

Form

As stated by William Lane Craig:

  1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
  2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
  3. Therefore God exists.

My Positions

  1. I reject premise 2. There are no objective moral values. Morality is the emergent, intersubjective product of human needs, interests, and agreements (see Morality and Moral claims are incomplete assertions). The argument is therefore unsound.
  2. Premise 2 is usually defended by appeal to intuition: "surely you believe torturing children for fun is objectively wrong." I believe it is wrong. I believe it with complete conviction. The strength of my conviction is evidence of how I am built, not of a fact in the fabric of the universe. The apologist equivocates between "I am certain that X is wrong" and "X is objectively wrong".
  3. I also reject premise 1, on independent grounds. Even if objective moral values existed, God would not be a satisfactory ground for them. The Euthyphro dilemma (Plato, c. 380 BC) applies: is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good? If the former, morality is arbitrary and "God is good" is an empty tautology. If the latter, goodness is independent of God and the argument collapses. Craig's reply that goodness is "God's nature" merely relocates the dilemma: is God's nature good because it is God's, or for some further reason?
  4. The argument proves too much, or too little. If moral intuitions were evidence of a moral lawgiver, then the moral intuitions of every culture and era would be evidence for it, including those that endorsed slavery, human sacrifice, and the burning of heretics. The apologist must then explain why God's moral law was so badly transmitted.
  5. The God of the Bible is a poor candidate for the source of objective morality in any case. He commands genocide (1 Samuel 15:3), regulates slavery (Leviticus 25:44–46), and orders the execution of children who curse their parents (Leviticus 20:9). The apologist who dismisses these as "context" is applying a moral standard external to God to decide which of his commands count, which concedes the point.
  6. The argument is, at root, an Appeal to Consequences: without God there would be no objective morality, and that would be terrible, therefore God. Whether a conclusion is comfortable has no bearing on whether it is true.

Also see