“Ah, those silly creationists are at it again. Every real scientist knows that evolution is fact, and then these people with no real experience in science come along and bumble through the issues without understanding them at all. And as for those geographers! I have no real time for geography myself, but pah! Everyone knows the earth is flat!”
Ironic, right? Anyone who would say this is playing by an obvious double standard, and they would look a bit silly, to put things mildly. They would be doing the very thing they complain about others doing. Just imagine my surprise then when I read through Lawrence’s Krauss’s reflections (I think after reading it you might be justified in calling it a bit of an outburst) on his debate with William Lane Craig. Read the rest of the entry »
In spite of what some say, appealing to God as the basis of morality (or the explanation for anything else) does not automatically violate Occam’s Razor.
Often something that catches my eye and on which I want to comment are themselves comments on other comments, which are in turn follow-up comments on previous discussions. I don’t want to re-tell the whole story, so here is the highly abbreviated version of what prompted these comments:
Jerry Coyne wrote a piece in USA Today where he dismissed the claim that God is the basis of morality, in which he made the cringeworthy move of assuming that the “Euthyphro Dilemma” dealt a crushing blow to theologically grounded ethics.
My friend and fellow blogger Matthew Flannagan responded to Coyne, noting that this was one of those instances where a scientist had gone crashing headlong through a philosophical issue and made a bit of a hash of it.
Coyne hit back at the criticisms levelled against him, in the process citing someone familiar with philosophy (Jason Thibodeau), without actually realising (or perhaps just not revealing) that actually the philosopher he quotes maintains that Coyne’s arguments fail to ultimately undermine Flannagan’s position on God and morality (the position held by many philosophers of religion today), and that the version of divine command ethics held by Christian philosophers does indeed “lead to a fully developed response to the arbitrariness objection.”
Flannagan documented this, noting the way that Coyne’s attempt to fend off criticism has failed, and noting that his selective quotation from Thibodeau is less than forthcoming. In the process, he noted that philosopher Brian Zamulinski had weighed in on the discussion. Brian had actually contacted Coyne before his first article appeared, attempting to inform him of some of the developments in discussion around the Euthyphro dilemma. Coyne, it seems, chose to ignore the help offered, which has clearly hurt the quality of his criticisms of divine command ethics to the point where those criticisms fail completely. But that’s not what I want to talk about here. Read the rest of the entry »
As readers will know, I think the moral argument for God’s existence is a good argument. As those same readers will also probably know, I’m very sympathetic to a divine command theory of ethics. One thing that I’ve said from time to time, at the blog, in the podcast and elsewhere, is that sometimes critics of the moral argument or of divine command ethics confuse the ontology (or perhaps metaphysics – the terms sometimes overlap) of morality with the epistemology of morality. If, as I say, some people miss this distinction, what does it boil down to and where is the confusion going on? That’s what this blog post is about. Read the rest of the entry »
As I mentioned at the blog a while back, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Brian Auten over at Apologetics 315 on the topic of God and Morality. Brian has been uploading his recorded interviews to Youtube, so for those who haven’t heard that interview yet, here it is:
Head on over to Apologetics 315 and check out the rest of Brian’s material.
After having this interview I decided I needed to say a bit more about Robert Adams and the social nature of moral obligation, which I then did in the podcast, episode 40: God and the Social Nature of Obligation.
In Episode 41, I address a common objection to divine command ethics: Does the fact that non-believers can still know moral truths and live moral lives somehow show that morality is not in any way grounded in God’s will or commands? Here I survey some crude versions of this argument and then offer some comments on a more recent presentation of the objection by Wes Morriston.
Recently I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Brain Auten of Apologetics 315. The main theme of the discussion was the relationship between God (or a lack thereof) and ethics.
Today’s interview is with Dr. Glenn Peoples. Glenn is a New Zealand based Christian philosopher, podcaster, and blogger. He runs the Beretta blog and hosts the Say Hello to My Little Friend podcast. In this interview, Glenn explores moral terminology, objective morality, the difference between ontology and epistemology, the moral argument, the Craig/Harris debate, advice for apologists, and more.
Episode 40 is an explanation of Robert Adams’ argument that the social nature of moral obligation supports the claim that morality is ultimately grounded in God.
NOTE: In this episode I call it episode 40. It’s not. It’s episode 39.
The podcast is back. Actually, episode 39 was going to be on another topic, but then someone suggested this one to me, so as I already had a document called “episode 039″ I called this “document 040.” And then when I started recording it I thought – “Hey, this is the 40th episode. Cool!” and I made a big deal of it in the recording. And then after I uploaded it I realised that since I skipped over the episode 39 that I’m writing, this isn’t really 40 at all, it’s episode 39! So that was an epic fail.
So no sooner do I release another podcast episode, I am making excuses for it! This episode is based on a lecture on divine command ethics that I gave a few years ago. Enjoy!
Today Erik Wielenberg’s book Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe arrived in the mail. Wielenberg is a proponent of the claim that moral facts exist without God. They are just brute facts. They are there, and that is that, with no deeper explanation to be offered. Because of my keen interest in the moral argument for theism, I was interested in seeing what he had to say.
At the moment I’m still at the stage of flicking through the pages, but already I am recognising some familiar friends (or enemies!) on the pages I read. The first one I thought I would mention is the perennial confusion of the the concept of moral rightness with more general goodness. In a way it’s actually encouraging to see so many examples of the error in the literature, because it confirms that there is a good reason to complete my article on “The Non-moral Goodness of God” and have it published (I’m fairly sure that some of what I say here will find its way into that article). But while the subject is fresh in my mind I thought I’d explain how Wielenberg makes this confusion. Bear in mind throughout, this isn’t a special problem with this book. A number of philosophers make the error, whether only through careless use of terminology, or, as in this case, through a confusion of the underlying concepts involved.
In the section of the book that I’m referring to, Erik Wielenberg is discussing the position that moral facts depend for their truth value on God, a position that he does not accept. He calls this the Dependency Thesis. He cites Edward Wierenga as an example of a philosopher who holds this view. That Wielenberg uses Wierenga as an example reassures me that I have understood what position he is referring to, since Edward Wierenga is a well known proponent of a divine command theory of ethics. According to this view (actually it’s more like a cluster of similar views), the truth of moral facts comes (in some important way, it varies from one view to the next) from God’s commands or will.
At this point (drawing on Ralph Cudworth), Wielenberg raises a very familiar objection to divine command ethics. The argument here is that if morality is based on God’s will then it would be completely arbitrary. God could command us to torture and pummel each other, and this would be OK. As Wielenberg puts it, this view implies “that it could be morally permissible for one person gratuitously to pummel another.”1 According to Wielenberg, this is “absurd.” Notice that he Wielenberg is referring, and correctly so, to the concept of being “morally permissible.” The subject is morality or ethics, the study of what we ought and ought not do. This will be relevant in a moment. Read the rest of the entry »
“Ah, those silly creationists are at it again. Every real scientist knows that evolution is fact, and then these people with no real experience in science come along and bumble through the issues without understanding them at all. And as for those geographers! I have no real time for geography myself, but pah! Everyone knows the earth is flat!”
In spite of what some say, appealing to God as the basis of morality (or the explanation for anything else) does not automatically violate Occam’s Razor.
As readers will know, I think the moral argument for God’s existence is a good argument. As those same readers will also probably know, I’m very sympathetic to a divine command theory of ethics. One thing that I’ve said from time to time, at the blog, in the podcast and elsewhere, is that sometimes critics of the moral argument or of divine command ethics confuse the ontology (or perhaps metaphysics – the terms sometimes overlap) of morality with the epistemology of morality. If, as I say, some people miss this distinction, what does it boil down to and where is the confusion going on? That’s what this blog post is about. 
In Episode 41, I address a common objection to divine command ethics: Does the fact that non-believers can still know moral truths and live moral lives somehow show that morality is not in any way grounded in God’s will or commands? Here I survey some crude versions of this argument and then offer some comments on a more recent presentation of the objection by Wes Morriston.
Recently I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Brain Auten of Apologetics 315. The main theme of the discussion was the relationship between God (or a lack thereof) and ethics.
We’ve reached a milestone – 40 Episodes!
Today Erik Wielenberg’s book Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe arrived in the mail. Wielenberg is a proponent of the claim that moral facts exist without God. They are just brute facts. They are there, and that is that, with no deeper explanation to be offered. Because of my keen interest in the moral argument for theism, I was interested in seeing what he had to say.