Abstract
I offer a new deductive formulation of the Moral Argument for the existence of God which shows how one might argue for the conclusion that, if one affirms moral realism (traditionally understood as a metaethical view which acknowledges the existence of objective moral truths), one should affirm theism. The new formulation shows that these objective moral truths are either brute facts, or they are metaphysically grounded in an impersonal entity, a non-divine personal entity, or a divine personal entity i.e., God. I illustrate how the alternatives to God can in principle be excluded based on the essential characteristics of those alternative hypotheses and of certain objective moral truths. I demonstrate that my deductive formulation is better than other formulations, and that it is helpful for future work on the Moral Argument.
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Notes
A survey in 2020 by Bourget & Chalmers (ms) notes that 61.94% of philosophers accept or lean towards moral realism, while 18.83% of philosophers accept or lean towards theism.
For a defence of this premise based on our moral experience, see Kwan (2011). I shall evaluate the moral realism/anti-realism debate and various forms of moral anti-realist theories such as moral noncognitivism (e.g., expressivism), moral error theory, and certain forms of moral constructivism in future publications.
By objective, I mean independent of whether any contingent mind (human, angel etc) agrees with it—this is compatible with dependence on a necessarily existent Mind. While the standard definition of ‘objective’ in the metaethical literature is ‘mind-independence,’ there is a significant difference between the minds of human persons/societies/ideal observers compared with the mind of a divine person with a perfect nature. I shall argue below that this difference implies that a divine mind can be the metaphysical ground of objective morality. Against this, Huemer (2020, p. 150) points to physical facts and argues that the objectivity of morality ‘is the same as the sense in which physical facts are “objective”. If there is a cat on the table, then that is true regardless of whether anyone believes it, wants it to be true, and so on.’ But as Craig (p. 196) replies, physical facts can be mind-dependent too: ‘Special Relativity theory, which holds that simultaneity and relations of earlier and later are, indeed, observer-dependent. This most emphatically does not mean that such relations are subjective, but that they are relative to inertial frames’—which is an objective fact i.e., observer-dependence is true regardless of what anyone thinks about it. Huemer (2020, p. 150) also argues that ‘I think it is wrong to torture children for fun, and I think this is true regardless of what anyone thinks about it.’ However, on the one hand, this argument does not answer what is the ontological basis for ‘it is wrong to torture children for fun.’ On the other hand, one can argue that, just as special relativity is mind-dependent, the ontological basis for ‘it is wrong to torture children for fun’ is (divine)mind-dependent and that it is an objective fact i.e., it is true regardless of what Huemer or other contingent minds think about it.
There are other moral truths which are contingent— ‘for example, that it is wrong to cut off people’s legs (unless doing so will give them greater well-being than they would have otherwise—e.g., when amputating to prevent gangrene)’ (Swinburne 2007, p. 87).
Note that this argument does not show that other necessary truths like laws of logic or 2 + 2 = 4 needs to be grounded in God, because these other necessary truths do not have the feature of moral authority which requires a personal ground; contra Byrne (2007) who thinks that if moral arguments are to succeed, they may need to encompass best explanations for normativity in other areas such as logic. Swinburne (2007, p. 90) objects that the existence and actions of God can make no difference to what the necessary moral truths are, for since they are necessary truths (see Swinburne 2015), nothing can make any difference to them. This objection is based on the assumption that necessary truths cannot stand to one another in relations of explanatory priority, which is false, ‘for example, the axioms of Peano arithmetic are explanatorily prior to ‘2 + 2 = 4’, as are the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory to the theorems thereof’ (Craig 2012).
This avoids the prior obligation objection; see Choo (2019).
I would like to thank Frederick Choo and an anonymous reviewer for very helpful comments on the earlier drafts of this paper.
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Loke, A.T.E. A New Moral Argument for the existence of God. Int J Philos Relig 93, 25–38 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-022-09842-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-022-09842-1