More on Peter Williams: The Moral Argument
Peter Williams makes an argument for the existence of god based on morality:
1. Morality is objective
2. The existence of a personal deity is entailed by objective morality
…thus, god exists.
Honestly, I’m just confused by this one; the article doesn’t have any explanation for why objective morality entails the existence of god.
But suppose (2) is correct; under this assumption, if some philosopher gives an entirely non-theistic demonstration that morals are objective, then this would imply that god exists. I, for one, find this pretty bizarre. I’m trying to imagine how you might argue that objective morals entail god’s existence, and my imagination is failing miserably.
I suspect, however, that these theologians just don’t understand what “entailment” means. In all likelihood, what they really meant by (2) is something like this:
- God provides a grounding for an objectively correct moral code, and
- We can’t think of any other way in which moral statements (of the form “one ought to do X“) could possibly be objectively true facts, rather than just opinions
This is not the same thing as god being entailed by objective morality.
I happen to be a moral subjectivist; I think David Hume got this one right. Plenty of atheists disagree with me, but I’ll let them defend their conceptions of objective morality.
Regardless of whether atheists can be moral objectivists, we should ask whether theists can. Many theists give god a special moral status, such that god’s opinions on what we ought to do are not just opinions but objectively true facts. I sorta understand why people are tempted to take this position. After all, god is the omnipotent creator of the world and all, and is thus a rather special being.
The problem, of course, is that there is no reason that the omnipotent creator of the world must necessarily be “good” (as we commonly understand the term). It’s easy to imagine an evil god, who endorses murder, rape, and genocide. Go read the Old Testament if you think this is just a hypothetical problem. If god is real, and he instructs me to start a genocide, I fully intend to tell god to piss off. On the other hand, people who use god to ground their morals would conclude that god’s instruction to commit genocide was good by definition, since “good” is whatever god says it is.
I’m really annoyed. Atheists have been debunking the notion of divine moral grounding for a long time. Dawkins makes the same points in his book. Even some theologians recognize that using god to ground our morals just doesn’t work.
At the very end, Williams says that if morals are subjective “Self-inflicted defeat looms for Dawkins, since his dissection of natural theology assumes that people ought to be rational.” This is just silly. If morals are subjective, then Dawkins’s opinion that we ought to be rational is, well, just an opinion. We atheists hope that theists share this opinion. However, if the god-fearing start shouting “I don’t want to be rational!” from their church steeples, I think that’s pretty much an admission of intellectual defeat.
Try Zagzebski’s formulation:
#1 Morality is a rational enterprise.
#2 Morality would not be a rational if moral skepticism were true.
#3 There is much too much unresolved moral disagreement for us to suppose that moral skepticism can be avoided if human sources of moral knowledge are all that we have.
#4 Therefore we must assume that there is an extra-human, divine source of moral wisdom.
Can you explain (1) to me? I don’t understand the meaning of that at all.
As for (3) and (4), I agree that it would be very convenient if a divine, all-knowing philosopher appeared to demonstrate an objectively true moral code to everyone. I’m waiting.
#1 is, really, a very, very terse summary of the Nicomachean Ethics. As for your comments on #2 and #3, Socrates would say, IMO, “Haven’t you been paying attention?”.
Is this supposed to be an argument that objective morality implies the existence of god? If so, I must point out that (4) does not follow from (1), (2), and (3). There’s no logical contradiction in supposing that morals are objective, but humans are too dumb to grasp moral truths or agree upon them.
How the heck would objective morals exist in the absence of a source? Morals are metaphysical; they only exist because rational beings with free will are capable if self-aware thought. Therefore, objective morality entails the existence of an objective non-human agent also capable of rational thought, etc. that is, simply, perfectly moral and rational.
I don’t know how morals could be objective without a divine source (or with one, for that matter). But the fact that neither you nor I can think of a non-divine way that morals could be objective is not a proof that it is impossible.
…and the last two sentences in that comment are just a non sequitur. Why can’t all of the moral agents be mortal?
As defined, mortal agents are incapable of being omniscient and/or omnipotent; objective morality as a metaphysical reality implies the existence of a source that is capable of rational thought, etc., etc. from above and is perfectly objectively moral (thus, the existence of objective morality). A rational being with free will capable of being perfectly objectively moral would by necessity have to be omniscient and omnipotent.
And you ar statement “…the fact that neither you nor I can think of a non-divine way that morals could be objective is not a proof that it is impossible” is a bit funny. We are speaking of an argument in logical forms and you make this appeal to emotions? Please, Jacob! Further, your statement is an unwitting admission of the power of the ontological argument!
Umm… this is not an appeal to emotion. You want to prove that objective morality entails the existence of god, or equivalently, that morality cannot be objective without god. I was merely pointing out that you can’t prove this by arguing from personal ignorance (either yours or mine) of how to construct a godless but objective morality. Recall that for centuries, no one had a clue how to resolve Zeno’s Paradoxes. But just because no one knew how to solve those problems at the time certainly isn’t proof that it’s impossible to do so — they were finally resolved with the advent of mathematical real analysis.
As for the first half of you comment… that just looks like illucid babble to me.
Honestly, even if you do somehow prove that objective morality entails god, you still need to independently establish that morality is, in fact, objective to conclude that god exists. How do you propose to do this? Do you have yet another a priori argument for this? Do you think empirical observations could establish that morality is objective?
Are you omniscient? Do you know anyone who is? Do you believe any mortal can be omniscient? Therefor, if the source of an objective moral code is, indeed, rational and capable of free will, that source cannot be mortal.
How is that illucid?
Are you claiming that morals are not subject to rational analysis? If morals are, indeed, rational (i.e., any reasonable person who examines morality honestly and rationally can over time determine right and wrong) then morals must, indeed, be objective. This is a very simple proposition embraced by people as diverse as Hindus and Objectivists.