Truth Unites - Stop Abandoning the Moral Argument (Do This Instead)

Episode Date: February 1, 2025

The moral argument for God's existence has become less popular in some circles. Here Gavin Ortlund shares two reasons why Christians should hesitate before abandoning this argument, and three strategies for how to rehabilitate this argument. Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

The moral argument is often regarded as the most effective argument for God's existence. But interestingly, a lot of theists have become more lukewarm about the moral argument, and some are abandoning it altogether. It's become kind of unpopular. And it's certainly true that in the popular level usage of this argument, there's a lot of naivety about meta-ethics, which is the field of study about the nature of ethics, as opposed to normative or applied ethics.

We might get into that a bit. But this is a case where I'm worried about throwing out the baby with the bathwater, there are some really good moral arguments out there that I think we need to keep using and strengthening and rehabilitating as is necessary rather than just abandon them. So in this video, let me give two reasons why we should be cautious about rejecting altogether moral arguments, and then three strategies for how we can do better at deploying them in our conversations and evangelism, apologetics, and so forth. And I'll conclude with the final example of a really cool moral argument from fiction. And yes, it's from C.S. Lewis. If you're new to my channel, welcome.

I hope each video will serve you. I work really hard on them to try to make them. Some of them are long and in-depth, but I try to make them organized, and so it's not a waste of your time. And the goal is that each video would sort of shepherd people toward the joy and the enchantment and the peace and assurance that comes from knowing Jesus. You can check out my website if you're more interested in some of the other things I do as well. So first, let's take two reasons why people should kind of tap the brakes a little bit before just throwing moral arguments away.

Now, these are not reasons so much for an atheist to accept one of the moral arguments, more just reasons why theists should be careful before rejecting these. First, the intuition that morality points to God is very deep in the Judeo-Christian tradition, as well as in other religions as well. In other words, if you're a Christian theist, for example, this is just a part of our heritage. You can think in more recent times of C.S. Lewis's book, Mere Christianity. amazing to me that, you know, it's got, initially it had these three books or sections to the book. And the entirety of book one was a moral argument. This is the only argument for God that

he really gives, and it's one of the major three sections of the book. Now, some people say that moral arguments are only more recent arguments for God, beginning maybe with like a manual cons, for example. But arguments from morality in general go back throughout church history. You can look back at Athenagoras, a Christian apologist back in the second century, for example. He's arguing that if there is no divine judgment on our actions, then we're just like the animals and virtue is absurd. And he proceeds to argue that if there is a distinction between the fate of good and the fate of evil, it must be in the afterlife. And then he basically builds an argument from that to the resurrection. Or you can look all the way back in scripture. And you find the apostle Paul

writing about in Romans chapter 2 that the moral law of God is written on the hearts of Gentiles. Now this is not a syllogistic argument, but it supports the heart of all moral arguments, really, namely that the conscience points to God. And in this passage in Romans 2, Paul is assuming that our knowledge that we get from our conscience is relevant to what will be held accountable for on Judgment Day. In other words, Paul assumes that everybody, even if they don't have access to special revelation, like the written law of Moses or something like that. Everyone has enough knowledge about God from our conscience that will be accountable for that on Judgment Day. That's an amazing assertion about the sort of revelatory nature of our conscience. Now again, this doesn't mean

that every moral argument is successful out there, but it does mean that I think for Christians, we should at least be sympathetic to this broad idea involved in moral arguments. And that's kind of the burden behind this video as I've been coming back to study this topic more and more. If we were to abandon moral arguments altogether, this would constitute a major revision in kind of classical Christian thought. And it seems to me it would be kind of historically eccentric and strategically unwise. Think of an army that is abandoning a key hill on the battlefield from which they've made lots of successful attacks. And then they, without good reason, just abandon that hill. You'd kind of feel indignant like, no, no, we shouldn't leave that.

and that's kind of how I feel about moral arguments, even though they are often deployed poorly, in themselves, there's a lot there that can be harnessed and used to great effect, especially right now in our culture. Second reason why we should tap the breaks before rejecting moral arguments, especially if we're Christians or for many theists, this would apply as well, is that in contemporary academic philosophy, the moral argument is still defended by many high-level philosophers, and it's also taken seriously by many of those who reject it. And I'm pointing this out, even though it's a very modest point, because you'll sometimes hear the claim that no philosophers really take moral arguments seriously anymore.

In sophisticated philosophical discussions, we've moved beyond that, that kind of thing, that mentality. You'll hear that out there. But there are great philosophers who affirm various kinds of moral arguments. An important figure in this area seems to be Robert Adams, and in particular this book, full disclosure, I have not read that book. I've read other things from Adams, but I've read enough portions of it and sections from it that I have some sense of what he's about. It's very highly spoken of. And I want, it's on my two read list. Alistair McGrath, Graham Ward, William Alston, C. Stephen Evans. These are examples of contemporary philosophers who defend this argument.

Alvin Plantinga, is a very good philosopher. He takes moral arguments very seriously. In fact, if you read this fascinating book that I talk about a lot, two dozen or so arguments for God, which Plantanga inspired, David Baggett, who is another great defender of moral arguments, begins his whole chapter in here on an abductive moral argument, pointing out basically that Plantinga considered a particular moral argument for moral obligation to be the best argument in the whole lot, which is kind of amazing. Other good defenses of the moral argument can be found in this book. I don't have it with me right now.

It's called Good God by, again, David Baggett and Jerry Walls, fantastic book. The one I did happen to put next to me here is called Divine Love Theory. This is by Adam Johnson, and he's done various debates on the moral argument as well. He has really good defenses against some of the most current objections, so check out his work. Of course, William Lane Craig, one of the great Christian philosophers of our time, has very capably defended moral arguments in various debates. This would be a great debate to watch as one example. It's with Eric Wielenberg. So that brings me to this other point that a lot of the best philosophers who reject moral arguments still take them seriously. They don't have a kind of condescending, dismissive attitude toward them.

Eric Wielandberg is a fantastic philosopher. That's the person that Craig debated there in that debate I just mentioned. And he still recognizes that there are challenging arguments against secular morality that even if he thinks they're not successful, they need to be taken seriously. In this passage from one of his books, he speaks highly, particularly of Craig and also of the Adams text that I just mentioned. And then, of course, if we were to go back in history, we could find some major players. I've already mentioned Emmanuel Kant, but John Henry Newman, it's actually another fascinating theologian who's done a lot of, has a lot of insights into the nature of morality. Now there's a lot more examples. I'm really trying to make a very modest point right now. I'm not saying that moral

arguments are good or successful. I'm just saying, don't let people browbeat you into thinking that this is a silly argument that sophisticated philosophy has moved beyond, okay? Not at all. but in fairness, it can be handled very clumsily, okay? So if we're not going to abandon moral arguments, what's the best way to deploy them right now? I'll give three suggestions, hoping this is helpful. This is a video that's more designed to encourage Christians rather than necessarily defeat all the possible objections out there from onlookers. Here's my first suggestion. We need to be more creative and full-orbed in the descriptions we give of morality. The moral argument is such a fascinating sort of subject matter. The moral argument gets its power from

deep-seated intuitions in the human heart. Of all the arguments for God, I think the moral argument might be the most visceral and emotional. It's not pulling us way far away from everyday experience into some remote technicality. It's drawing from an intimate awareness deep down that we all feel but good and evil. And I think the best use of moral arguments will tap into the full range of moral experience that we have. Some moral arguments really put the focus on the objectivity of moral values and duties. And that's an understandable and often very effective strategy. But of course, there's more to morality than simply being objective. And you might say something like the objectivity of morality is like the skeleton, and then the full ontological quality of morality is like the organ and tissue.

So we want to consider the full range of what makes morality significant, including things like moral experience, moral knowledge, the moral status of persons, moral rights, moral freedom, moral transformation, and my personal favorite that I'll end this whole video with is moral hope. even many of those who are skeptical of the moral argument proper insofar as it focuses on moral objectivity, someone like Richard Swinburne, is more favorable to arguments from other aspects of morality like moral knowledge. And in the current literature right now, these evolutionary debunking arguments that come up that concern moral knowledge, in my opinion, are very strong. What they're pointing out is that if our knowledge of morality is reductively explained by our evolutionary history, with all its contingent development,

it's very difficult to be confident that we have arrived upon the correct moral intuitions. That's not an easy challenge to address. But the broader point I'm just trying to make right now is it's helpful to shine the spotlight on the full arena of moral experience and moral reality and the kind of unique quality and character that it has. Sometimes in the literature on this topic,

you'll find references to the Anscombe intuition. which is from Elizabeth Anscome, fascinating person and 20th century figure who debated C.S. Lewis, Roman Catholic philosopher. And David Baggett, drawing from C. Stephen Evans, describes this Anscope intuition as the idea that moral obligations, as experienced, have a unique character. And attempts to explain moral obligations must illuminate that special character. And it's this particular character of morality that I think we really need to emphasize. So, for example, Anne Scombe argued that moral feelings have an inherent kind of authority to them.

Moral obligation comes to us and impresses itself upon us like a kind of law. Think of what it feels like when you feel really guilty in your conscience about something you've done. You know, I remember I was a little kid, I stole some baseball cards for my brother, and I remember I couldn't sleep that night. I've confessed my sins all these years later. I've already actually told my brother about that. But, you know, you know that feeling. It's like you just, you feel so guilty.

That's a very particular and peculiar kind of emotion. And the lawlike binding character of morality calls for some kind of explanation. And this is really important to emphasize, because I think this undercuts a lot of the common objections that will get to moral arguments. Sometimes people will reference different meta-ethical theories about why some actions are morally better than others, as though that explained why any action should be moral in the first place. It's harder to do that once we've truly grasped the peculiar nature of morality that needs to be explained. Or another thing that we'll see a lot is a conflation

between moral bad and non-moral bad. So critics of the moral argument will often claim that suffering is bad because of its intrinsic character. This is something that Joe Schmidt emphasized in his response to me on Swan's Sonas channel on this topic. And Eric Wielandberg also brings this point up, using the example of a child who's suffering terrible pain. But I think the danger here is an equivocation on this word bad. David Baggett gives a good response to this. He says, most of us would surely affirm that the child's excruciating suffering is bad, but on reflection, it seems that it's best to characterize it as non-morily bad. There seems to be a need here to disambiguate between moral and non-moral badness. And he bases that distinction between moral

bad and non-moral bad on, among other things, William Sorley's observation that moral bad has a personal dimension to it. So changing an example I've given in the past slightly, imagine that you're walking out of your house on a Monday, and it snowed recently, and some ice slides off right as you're walking out the front door, randomly slides off, and hits you on the head and gives you a concussion. And then imagine on Tuesday, you are walking out of your house and your neighbor is waiting and maliciously throws a chunk of ice at you and hits you on the head and gives you a concussion. And the motive he has is malice. He wants to hurt you. Even if the concussion you have on Monday is exactly identical to the concussion you get on Tuesday, these two

events are bad in a different sense. The sliding ice on Monday is a non-moral bad. There's no personal guilt involved. The neighbor maliciously attacking you is doing something bad in a different sense. Here they've broken and violated the kind of law-like character of morality. Their different emotions are involved, like indignation and guilt and even shame and different actions and responses are called for. So the point I'm making is we can, the more we draw attention to the full texture of moral experience, the more we can undermine some of these responses, like the conflation between different meanings of the word bad or different meanings of the word good. Here's a second strategy I think we can consider, and that's using abductive moral arguments.

So abductive simply means an inference to the best explanation, as opposed to a deductive or inductive argument, which work from premises to a conclusion. So abductive moral arguments are basically saying, here's morality. How do we explain that? well, God seems to be the best explanation of that, whereas a deductive moral argument will often proceed more confidently saying basically morality proves God in some more definitive sense. And to be clear, I think both kinds of argument could work in different contexts. This is a matter of strategy. But to get at a little bit of how abductive arguments can be helpful in just strategically, and depending on the conversation you're navigating, I can share a little bit about this from my own angle.

in 2023, already crazily coming up on two years ago, I put out this video on the moral argument, and the basic goal was I was trying to survey one particular way that moral realism is often grounded in non-theistic views out in the literature. And what I was trying to point out is that many of these seem very explanatorily brute, which just means many of these accounts of morality don't go much further than saying, well, that's just the way it is. They either boil down to that or they're not much further than that. You know, some are saying basically moral facts come from nowhere and nothing grounds them. There is nothing further beyond love and justice to make them good. They just are. Sometimes we're told that it can be a fitting end to the explanatory enterprise to say it just is what it is,

that's of its essence. And in the video, I gave a fuller case there, but I was just observing that this feels a little underwhelming, especially in relation to how confidently some of these theories are appealed to, because while it's true that explanation has to stop somewhere, that's not a reason to cut off the search at a superficial point. We want to press through to a really satisfying explanation. And William Lane Craig addresses this by comparing moral theory to mathematical theory. He says, despite the broadly logical niscivilness, and self-evidence of arithmetic truths, and you give some example, mathematicians would never be content with a theory that simply postulates an infinite blizzard

of such truths. Rather, they seek a theory in which such truths may be derived from explanatory prior axioms. And similarly in morality, we want to have some kind of overarching theory that has coherence and so forth. And so the way the discussion usually goes here is these non-theistic explanations for objective morality, will use. just counter by saying, well, yeah, God is the exact same way. We saw that a little bit already in the Wielandberg quote. They'll basically say, yeah, everybody has bruteness. We posit bruntness here, you posit bruteness there. Nobody can sort of, you know, just go on explaining forever. The explanation has to stop at some point. And so then you're, at that point in the discussion, you're sort of in a

standoff about which is the better place for bruteness. And at this juncture, I think basically we, in conversations, it's often helpful to just reason abductively. This kind of takes a little bit of the pressure off of what you have to accomplish, and we can basically just ask, well, what's the least brute option? What's the best and most satisfying explanation for reality as a whole? And in particular, this peculiar arena we call morality. And we can point out that with God, as the ultimate sort of backstop of explanation, we have a singular, concrete, personal agent who is held to be uncaused and infinite. And this seems superior than positing an array of multiple abstract truths. Here's how Adam Johnson puts it. God seems to fit the bill better as the ultimate ontological

stopping point that needs no explanation because he, as commonly understood by theus, is an infinite, necessary concrete and most importantly causal being. Now, he flushes out. the argument for that. I'm not seeking to fully make a defense of this claim for the critic so much as to try to encourage Christians to consider this kind of approach. It's in general, it's less helpful. In fact, I would just encourage us to not say things like atheists have no explanation for morality and things like this. That's the kind of thing I think we need to push away from. Or if somebody says, you know, all atheists are moral nihilists or something like that, we want to recognize not all atheists are naturalists, for example, meaning some people are atheists. They don't believe in God or

gods, but that doesn't mean they only believe in physical reality. And so we want to sort of honor each different option and look at all the different views that are out there. And sometimes reasoning abductively can be a really effective way to do that. Really what we want to get into here is what are the specific reasons why theism has basically a more elegant way of accounting for meta-ethics. And we have the privilege of suggesting that it really is. I mean, I think Robert Adam's book is a great example of that. Third strategy is offer moral hope of all the qualities of morality that are helpful to focus on right now. I think moral hope is especially poignant. And the reason is very simple. This is an extension from the first point a little bit,

talking about the full nature of morality. But I just feel this is very relevant to the world right now because there is so much despair. Many people feel overwhelmed by the evil of the world, and they may be searching for moral hope. And let's not forget that what we have to offer to people in the gospel of Jesus Christ is good news. The gospel is good news for every area of life, but that includes the moral realm, because it offers moral hope. The gospel says, basically good is going to defeat evil in the end. That's one of the things the gospel teaches us. and we want to present this to people in such a way that a good person should at least want this to be true. So, you know, to give an example of what this might look like, there are lots of people around us right now who are

secular people who don't have any belief in the supernatural, and yet they're not quite willing to part ways with the intuition that love and justice really matter. Love and justice have some kind of, even many will want to say, they have some kind of transcendent quality to them. Okay? They may have not thought through where how they think about that, but many people still believe that, even if they've discarded belief in God and the supernatural. But within the confines of a secular worldview, it's very hard to see how you're going to keep a transcendent love and justice. Love and our perception and our experience of love and justice are going to be reductively explained if you're a naturalist by the basically by evolutionary psychology. These are the byproducts of what helped our animal ancestors

survive. They have no objective reference in the non-biological world, and they will have no final significance or resolution or something like that. Charles Taylor talks about this in his book, a secular age, amazing book, if you haven't read it. And he calls areas like these, the unquiet frontiers of modernity, where secularism is advancing, and yet it has some anxieties, and it's still trying to work a few things out. To put it simply, many secular people still live with moral hopes that don't quite make sense anymore in their worldview. Of that, I'm not saying that for every secular person, but this is commonly the case. And because on the one hand, there's this sense that love and justice have to have some kind of final, and even transcendent significance. On the other

hand, it's very hard to see how you can maintain that, and a lot of people haven't thought that through. And so this just gives us a chance to offer an invitation and say, hey, you know how movies always have almost every time good, triumping over evil? Why is that so deep in the human heart? Is that just a product of our evolutionary psychology? Or is this instinctive longing for good to achieve a kind of lasting, happy victory over evil? Is it more than just the byproduct of our survival mechanisms? Maybe there's something more. maybe that's actually a clue about the ultimate reality. And of course, in the gospel, we believe this is true. This is such good news. This is such a happy message to share with people. If Jesus rose from the dead, we get to tell them that there will be a final and complete victory of good over evil. I don't know why

I always think of this movie, but I love the movie X-Men Days of Future Past, came out in 2014, one of the best X-Men movies. I just love the scene where Wolverine wakes up, Spoiler alert, sorry about this. After time has been reset and all is well again, he's walking around Professor X's mansion, and there's this kind of bright aura about everything. That's one example of hundreds we could give. You could mention your favorite movie of the way a happy ending feels, right? When it's like, it's just, at the end of a movie, when it comes to resolution, there's a particular emotional experience involved with that. And as followers of Jesus, we get to tell people that because Jesus rose from the dead, that is actually a tiny little glimmer of what's going to happen one day forever,

that you really couldn't have something happier and more wonderful than the gospel. And we want to make arguments that it's true, but we also want to just hold it out before people and say, look at the hope that this gives. It hit at every different level of the human heart and mind and so forth. All right, wrapping up, let me give an example of what I see as a creative use of morality to point toward God and certainly to puncture a more like materialist worldview. And this comes from a novel, my favorite novel of all time, or maybe second favorite, and that's that hideous strength by C.S. Lewis.

The character, Mark, is imprisoned in this story. I'll just explain this to finish off. I think you'll find it interesting. He's imprisoned and he's tortured, but it's not physical torture, it's psychological torture. He's placed in a room where the architecture and the doorway are just a little bit out of proportion, but just barely. There's dots on the ceiling and on the floor that just quite don't. They almost align, but they don't quite.

And the shape and features of the room are designed to disturb the mind. And they offer the impression of a purpose or pattern, but then continually frustrate that impression. There's also paintings throughout the room. Some of them are grotesque and bizarre. Others seem normal at first, but then when you examine them more closely, there's little oddities, like there's a painting of The Last Supper, but there's a lot of beetles under to the floor. And there's a lot of scriptural themes in the paintings. And the effect that it has upon

him, the weirdness of the room gives him this disturbing feeling of evil. Something like if you're watching a horror movie and there's a particularly gross or bizarre scene and it kind of freaks you out a little bit. That's the effect this has on Mark. And he says it, he feels to have come into contact with a deeper kind of evil than he'd previously known. Long ago, Mark had read somewhere of things of that extreme evil, which seem innocent to the uninitiate, but had wondered what sort of things they might be. Now he felt he knew. And the purpose, by the way, of his captors who put him in this room, this prison, I call it the crooked room, is a kind of psychological conditioning by which they're trying to get him into what they call objectivity, which, to cut to the chase, basically involves

a denial of any kind of objective moral realm. But staying in that room has the opposite effect on Mark. quote, the built and painted perversity of this room had the effect of making them aware as he'd never been aware before of this room's opposite. As the desert first teaches men to love water or as absence first reveals affection, there rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked, some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else, something he vaguely called the normal apparently existed. He had never thought about it before, but there it was, solid, massive, with a shape of its own, almost like something you could teach, touch, or eat. or fall in love with. It was all mixed up with Jane and fried eggs and soap and sunlight and the rooks calling at Kure Hardy and the thought that somewhere outside daylight was going on at that moment. He was not thinking in moral terms at all, or else what is much the same thing, he was

having his first deeply moral experience. Three observations about this passage. First, it's interesting that Mark doesn't consciously think in moral terms when he has this moral experience. He doesn't call it morality. He doesn't call it goodness. He just calls it the normal. And related to that, it comes to him in aesthetic categories through art. Okay? So through the architecture, the ugliness of the paintings, and then he associates goodness with things like daylight and fried eggs and soap and things like this. And all of this kind of draws to mind this richer, more complicated vision of what goodness is. Second thing, it's interesting that Mark doesn't have this, C.S. Lewis says this is his first moral experience, and he doesn't have it until he's

confronted with real evil. You know, someone might relate to this if they've ever, like, been just going through their life, and all of a sudden they see something truly demonic. And you're kind of like, oh, good and evil are richer categories than I realized, right? The realm of the conscience almost seems to lie latent within Mark, and then it's sort of awakened in this particular experience. And this suggests that there may be a kind of, experiential quality to the revelatory nature of morality, which is something we need to keep in mind in our arguments. People might experience the argument differently based upon where they're coming from. Third, the robustness and objectivity of moral goodness is emphasized here. It's called solid and massive

and with a shape of its own. It's something external to Mark. And this aspect of the normal is further drawn out because as Mark is basically the way he survives the torture is from this. It says day by day, as the process went on, the idea of the straight or the normal grew stronger and more solid in his mind till it had become a kind of mountain. He had never known what an idea meant. He had always thought till now that they were things inside one's own head, but now when his head was continually attacked and often completely filled with the clinging corruption of the training, This idea towered above him, something which obviously existed quite independently of himself and had hard rock surfaces which would not give surfaces he could cling to.

The comparison here to a mountain and the references to hard surfaces that you can cling to emphasizes the practical effect of an objective morality. An objective morality is not simply out there to do nothing. It's not just an empty thought. it's something that can save you when you're under this kind of torture, right? And this is what ultimately saves Mark. I hope you can feel the effect that this depiction of morality can have upon the reader. And just the sense of, I'll use the word again, enchantment that it draws you into.

Because that's what I think the gospel does. And the moral argument is one entry point into the larger questions about God. And I think God is enchanting. And I think Jesus, who is the way to God and to know Jesus, is utterly enchanting beyond anything we can possibly fathom. And all I know to do to use moral arguments like this to try to advance the gospel is to try to emphasize the full enchanting nature of it. And when you get a passage like that from CS Lewis, boy, he does it better than probably any of us could. All right, thanks for watching everybody. Let me know what you think in the comments. I'll be interested

how this one lands. Do you think moral arguments can be, should be, need to be rehabilitated? Any other suggestions you would give? Let's keep working on this one together. Thanks, everybody.