More on Plantinga, Atheism, and Moral Obligation

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.

Imagine how Plantinga would have reacted if Mackie said, "I'm not going to directly argue for the claim that God and evil are incompatible. Rather, I'm going to indirectly argue for it by displaying the failure of the most natural way of arguing that God and evil are compatible." Surely Plantinga would have replied: "Even if Mackie succeeds at that task, that still falls short of what he needs to defend his logical argument from evil: a rigorous defense of the claim that God and evil are incompatible." And Plantinga would have been right.

By similar reasoning, then, it seems to me that the Autonomous Morality Defender ("Defender") would be just as correct to use a parallel reply to Plantinga. Even if Plantinga's article succeeds in showing that the "most natural way of arguing that" naturalism can "accommodate morality" fails, Plantinga would still fall short of what he needs to defend his 'logical' argument from morality for theism.

Can We Show There is No Inconsistency between Atheism and Moral Obligation?

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. 

Is the Combination of Atheism and Moral Obligation a Contradiction?

An Impossible (or Penrose) Triangle

Source: OpenClipArt; License: CC 

Three Types of Contradictions

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?

LINK: Stairs on Parsons on Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology

[This post was originally published on The Secular Outpost on October 18, 2011. It was republished here on November 8, 2021 with the date manually adjusted to reflect its original publication date. The link was also updated to its current location.]