Mark D. Linville has published a short booklet with Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM) entitled, "Is Everything Permitted? Moral Values in a World Without God?" The booklet begins with the following statement by Linville:
Few news stories have had the profound effect on me as did the shooting rampage at Columbine High School.
Can you guess where this is headed? Linville continues:
Today I remembered Plantinga wrote a very interesting article on naturalism and obligation back in 2010 in the journal Faith and Philosophy. I just checked my archives and made an interesting discovery. First, that article reinforces my belief that Plantinga believes atheism (and, indeed, naturalism) and moral obligation are incompatible. Second, in that article, Plantinga explicitly says he is not going to argue directly for that incompatibility claim; rather, he intends to "display" the failure of the most natural way of arguing that naturalism can accommodate moral obligation. In his own words:
I propose to support the claim that naturalism cannot accommodate morality—not by showing directly that it can’t, but by displaying the failure of the most natural way of arguing that it can.
In a prior post, I showed that Plantinga has failed to demonstrate a contradiction between atheism and moral obligation in any of this three types of contradiction: explicit, formal, or implicit. I want to continue to my exploration of the alleged contradiction between atheism and moral obligation, this time by asking if we can show that there is no inconsistency between atheism and moral obligation.
In the spirit of maximal transparency, what follows is mostly plagiarized material from Plantinga's book, God, Freedom, and Evil, Part I, Section a, sub-section 3, with the obvious exception that I have edited the material referring to God and evil with my own material referring to atheism and moral obligation.
In this post, I want to consider the assessment of historical hypotheses such as the alleged resurrection of Jesus (R), using the writings of William Lane Craig as a foil. In doing so, I will rely heavily upon a recent article by philosophers Robert Greg Cavin and Carolos Colombetti, but I want to be clear that I have not reviewed this post with them, so any mistakes in this post are entirely my responsibility.
While Craig's position regarding the use of Bayes' Theorem has evolved over the years, to my knowledge one thing which has not changed is his reliance upon the work of historian C. Behan McCullagh.[1] Following McCullagh, Craig argues for R using an argument pattern called "inference to the best explanation" (IBE).[2] In this post, I will argue the following three points contra Craig. First, Bayes' Theorem is the foundation for logically correct arguments for any historical hypotheses. Second, neither McCullagh's IBE criteria nor Craig's restatement of them are sufficiently clear to enable a rigorous assessment of historical hypotheses, whereas the Bayesian approach avoids these problems. Third, Craig's defense of R fails to establish that the alleged event is more probable than not.
According to what I call the "Divine Nature Theory" of axiology or value (hereafter, DNT-A), value is grounded in God's nature. In contrast, moral anti-reductionism (usually called "ethical non-naturalism") says that moral value is grounded in sui generis, non-natural properties.
What is the advantage of DNT-A over moral anti-reductionism? According to DNT-A, God’s nature, not God, is the source of moral value. But what is the distinction between God and His nature? God’s nature is simply the collection of God’s properties or attributes (e.g., omniscience, omnipotence, etc.). But if that is the case, then why do we need God in order for moral value to supervene on one or more of such properties? Or to put the point differently, why must those properties be instantiated in the person of God in order for the supervenience relationship to hold? Why can't they just exist as abstract properties? And if such properties do not need to be instantiated in the person of God, then what is the advantage of the divine nature theory over moral anti-reductionism?
Writing in 1955, the late Oxford don J.L. Mackie claimed that evil is logically inconsistent with God’s existence.
In its simplest form the problem is this: God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true the third would be false. But at the same time all three are essential parts of most theological positions: the theologian, it seems, at once must adhere and cannot consistently adhere to all three.[1]
Consider the following set of propositions: {God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; evil exists}. Mackie claimed that the set is somehow contradictory. But how?
For many former theists-turned-atheists, the loss of belief in God is a source of sadness. Consider these words from Christian-turned-atheist philosopher J.L. Schellenberg, taken from the conclusion of his landmark book, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Cornell University Press, 1993).
P.S. Now ask yourself: how often do you find atheist-turned-theist philosophers writing a book defending some argument for God's existence, such that the book's conclusion expresses the hope that other people will be able to refute his or her argument for God?
Daniel (@DarwinToJesus) recently tweeted the following:
#1. The laws of logic: There are three basic foundational laws of logic.
— Daniel (@darwintojesus) April 23, 2023
1. The law of identity (A* is A*)
2. The law of non contradiction (A* is not/cannot be B* in the same place and time)
3. The law of the excluded middle (every proposition is either true, or false)
These…
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Seth Dillon, the CEO of The Babylon Bee, recently tweeted the following:
Sure, atheists have moral values — they just can't ground them in anything. Read Alex Rosenberg's "The Atheist's Guide to Reality." He acknowledges that in God's absence, morality is nothing but a useful fiction. He argues that if atheism is true, the moral feelings we've… https://t.co/HSufKX5ay5
— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) August 7, 2023
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| Terence Irwin | Elizabeth Anscombe |
Irwin, T. The Philosophy and History of the Moral ‘Ought’: Some of Anscombe’s Objections. Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-023-10398-w
Abstract: According to G.E.M Anscombe’s paper ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, modern moral philosophy has introduced a spurious concept of moral obligation, and has therefore made a mistake that the Greeks, and Aristotle in particular, avoided. Anscombe argues that the modern concepts of obligation, duty, and the moral ‘ought’ are the remnants of an earlier, but post-Aristotelian conception of ethics, and that they ought to be abandoned. An examination of Anscombe’s historical and philosophical claims shows that we have no reason to take them seriously. In particular, they rest on a misinterpretation of Scholastic views on ‘ought’ and obligation.
(2) Responding with despair to the (supposed) truth of metaethical nihilism presupposes the falsity of metaethical nihilism.
Therefore:
(3) If one responds with despair to the (supposed) truth of metaethical nihilism, then it is true that nothing matters and it is false that nothing matters. [From 1-2]
Therefore:
(4) It is impossible to consistently respond with despair to metaethical nihilism. [From 3 and LNC]
They key insight of this argument is that if metaethical nihilism is true, then literally nothing, including metaethical nihilism itself, matters.
