William Lane Craig, “Richard Dawkins on Arguments for God,” Part II: The Moral Argument

Oh my god the moral argument. In its worst forms, this looks like the “Atheists cannot be moral! None of you are safe!” sort of fearmongering, or worse still, “But Hitler was an atheist!” which, as some people can attest, is absolutely the fastest way to get me to lose any intellectual respect I might have had for you. (It is fallacious, blatantly false, and excruciatingly common. That’s why.) To his credit, William Lane Craig is not here engaged in fearmongering. It is still the moral argument, however, which means it is among the more infuriatingly idiotic weapons in the unreflective apologist’s arsenal.

Here’s Craig’s formulation of the Moral Argument:

1) If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.

2) Objective moral values and duties do exist.

3) Therefore, God exists.

Craig goes on to say that most people – including Dawkins – would agree with the first two premises, cites Dawkins a few times to prove his point, and moves on to the teleological argument, all within two pages. We, however, will spend a little more time on it, as I have a lot to say on the subject.

Let us examine the word “objective”: what, precisely, does Craig mean by it? In 1), he evidently means something along the lines of “absolute, universal, set in stone”, and I’ll grant that God may well be necessary for that kind of objectivity in a moral code. In 2), he must mean something more along the lines of “not merely a matter of personal or cultural preference”, and in this case, I would readily concur – but notice what an enormous gap there is between the two usages. (Lest I be accused of twisting Craig’s words, I should reiterate that Craig’s entire defense of his two premises is that most people believe them (which is a perfectly legitimate defense), and all I have done is determined for what values of “objective” this is true. It’s just algebra.)

I’m about to delve into some pretty involved discussionn about the nature of objectivity and morality, and we’re about to leave Craig far, far behind, so let’s just deal with him quickly so we can get to the interesting stuff: Craig’s argument, as we have just seen, hinges on an equivocation not much more subtle than

1) Split-pea soup is better than nothing.

2) Nothing is better than a really terrific cheeseburger.

3) Therefore, split-pea soup is better than a really terrific cheeseburger.

He boasts that his argument is “logically airtight”, too, which I find just fantastically amusing.

So much for that.

My go-to example of things that fall between “absolute and universal” and “a matter of personal or cultural preference” is actually morality, which would here be a little bit circular, so we will talk instead about music. I think most people would agree upon reflection that the quality of a particular piece of music isn’t an absolute or universal thing – try having a 6^th-century Norseman listen to Madonna, or better yet, try getting an alien species to comprehend any human music, even assuming the relevant physiology exists! But I also think that most people would agree upon reflection that there is something more to it than mere personal taste. Personal taste enters into it, yes, but I think most of us are cognizant of some music which we do not personally like, but do not consider to be bad (The Grateful Dead, The Sex Pistols, or The Strokes are the examples which come most readily to my mind) – or that we keep listening to despite the fact that there’s probably not much of value there (for instance, I am right now listening to “Boom Boom Pow” by the Black-Eyed Peas). The fact is, we all want to be able to say that, yes, Led Zeppelin is in fact better than Aerosmith, or that The Joshua Tree is a far superior album to How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, or that the dreck churned out each year by the CCM industry is in fact dreck.

The difficulty is that we start with visceral reactions: I like this music, I don’t like that music, I don’t know why. We do not start with a coherent rational framework that we can coldly evaluate every piece of music with. That comes later, if at all, after a whole lot of listening and reacting, when we begin to piece together commonalities in the good stuff, or in the bad stuff, to figure out what makes something good or bad and why. Even after that, in my experience, music remains mostly a visceral thing, but once we have some model of what makes music good, we can support or modify our visceral reactions with that model – and vice versa. It’s a complex two-way process.

Morality works, in my experience, much the same way: we have certain a prioris, the conclusions of models that do not yet exist – murder is wrong, stealing is wrong, breaking promises is wrong, and so forth – and we have to reverse-engineer models from those conclusions, which leads to moral frameworks like utilitarianism or Kantianism or virtue ethics or what-have-you: again, a complex two-way process in which we confirm our models by how it deals with particular cases, and modify our response to particular cases as our models indicate.

(It is difficult for me, in the abstract, to state the criteria that separate those instances in which we alter our models based on our visceral reactions to particular cases, from those instances in which we modify our reactions to particular cases based on the input from our models – in either music or morality. This is a subject for further inquiry.)

So that’s more or less my model for how we arrive at morality. Note that it is a descriptive model, which applies in my experience both to religious and irreligious people (unless you’re of the incredibly rare variety of religious person who actually just follows every rule in their holy book of choice, which is stupid).

As for how we get the a prioris (murder is wrong, etc.), that is very easily explained in terms of the evolution of a social animal. Morality is an evolutionary advantage – it allows us to cooperate with each other without fear that the other will break their promise or our skulls.

On to a different but related subject: the moral argument is often presented in the form, “How can you, as an atheist, be moral?” This is a stupid question. Here are all of the possible reasons for behaving morally, no matter what your belief system: 1) because you fear the consequences if you don’t behave morally (hell, jail, ostracization) or desire the rewards if you do (heaven, social approval, warm fuzzy feelings), or 2) because you choose to, “because it’s the right thing to do”, which is ultimately tautological. Any set of reasons for moral behavior can be broken down into some combination of those two reasons. Therefore the claim that theists have more of a reason to behave morally than atheists causes me to look at you askance, because the only difference between theists and atheists on this score is that theists have a bigger carrot and stick. Guys, behaving morally because of the carrot-and-stick is not good enough. We can train animals to do that. The guy who will backstab you in a heartbeat if he thinks it will benefit him and he can get away with it is not moral, and the only difference I can see between that guy and the theist who asks this question is that the theist doesn’t ever think he would get away with it. Which makes the purely selfish theist better for society than the purely selfish atheist (at least in theory), but the person who chooses, whatever their stance on the existence of God, to be moral because, well, they choose to be moral, is a far better person than either of the above.

It is true that there are circumstances in which I would make the choice not to behave morally. They are highly improbable, and all involve people I happen to care about more than I care about society or morality. I would only point out that this is equally true for at least the christian, if you want to take the story of Abraham and Isaac at all seriously.