CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 6
CAN WE BE GOOD WITHOUT GOD?
No one is good but God alone. (Mark 10:18 RSV)
Can we be good without God?
At first the answer to this question might seem so obvious that even to ask it is apt to make people angry. For while Christians find in God a source of moral strength that helps us to lead better lives than those we would have led without Him, still it would be arrogant and ignorant to claim that unbelievers don’t often lead good moral lives—in fact, sometimes lives that put ours to shame.
But wait! While it would be arrogant and ignorant to claim that people cannot be good without belief in God, that wasn’t the question. The question was: Can we be good without God? When we ask that question, we’re posing a question about the nature of moral values. Are the values we hold dear and guide our lives by just social conventions, like driving on the right-hand versus left-hand side of the road? Or are they merely expressions of personal preference, like having a taste for certain foods? Or are they somehow valid and binding, independent of our opinion, and if they are objective in this way, what is their foundation?
A Moral Argument for God’s Existence
Many philosophers have thought that morality provides a good argument for God’s existence. One of the finest was William Sorley, who was a professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge University. In his Moral Values and the Idea of God (1918) Sorley argues that the best hope for a rational, unified view of reality is to postulate God as the ground of both the natural and the moral orders.
Sorley maintains that there is an objective moral order, which is as real and independent of us as is the natural order of things. He recognizes that in one sense we can’t prove that objective moral values exist, but he points out that in this same sense we can’t prove that the natural world of physical objects exists either! (You could be a body lying in the Matrix experiencing a virtual reality.) The moral order and the natural order are thus on a similar footing. Just as we assume the reality of the world of objects on the basis of our sense experience, so we assume the reality of the moral order on the basis of our moral experience.
TALK ABOUT IT
How do you respond to the idea that the objective moral order is just as real as the objective physical world? Why?
In Sorley’s view both the natural order and the moral order are part of reality. The question, then, is: What worldview can combine these two orders into the most coherent explanatory form? Sorley argued that the best explanation is God. There must be an infinite, eternal Mind who is the architect of nature and whose moral purpose man and the universe are gradually fulfilling.
I myself stumbled into the moral argument while speaking on university campuses on the absurdity of life without God. I argued that if there is no God, then there is no foundation for objective moral values. Everything becomes relative. To my surprise the response of the students was to insist that objective moral values do exist. Certain things really are right or wrong.
Now what the students said didn’t in any way refute my claim that without God there would be no objective values. Instead, they had unwittingly supplied the missing premise in a moral argument for God’s existence! For now we can argue:
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.
This simple little argument is easy to memorize and is logically ironclad. I had argued for the truth of the first premise and the students had insisted on the second. Together the two premises imply the existence of God.
What makes this argument so powerful is that people generally believe both premises. In a pluralistic age, students are scared to death of imposing their values on someone else. So premise 1 seems correct to them because of its implicit relativism. At the same time, certain values have been deeply instilled into them, such as tolerance, open-mindedness, and love. They think it’s objectively wrong to impose your values on someone else! So they’re deeply committed to premise 2 as well.
Have you ever had a conversation with someone who said there are no objective moral values that apply to everyone? If so, how did that person deal with values like tolerance and love?
This can lead to some very strange conversations. I remember talking with one student who would jump back and forth between the premises. When we’d talk about the first premise, he’d agree with it and deny the second premise. But when we’d move on to the second premise, he’d agree with it and deny the first. And so back and forth we went, with him unable to make up his mind! It would have been funny, had it not been so heartwrenching to see someone floundering in this way in a vain attempt to avoid God.
Let’s examine more closely each of the argument’s two premises in order to see what defense you can offer on their behalf and what objections the nonbeliever might raise against them.
Premise 1
If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
Two Important Distinctions
The first premise, that if God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist, involves some important distinctions that must be grasped before we can look at reasons for thinking that premise to be true.
Values and Duties
First, notice that I distinguish values and duties. Values have to do with whether something is good or bad. Duties have to do with whether something is right or wrong. Now you might think at first that this is a distinction without a difference: “Good” and “right” mean the same thing, and the same goes for “bad” and “wrong.” But if you think about it, you can see that this isn’t the case.
Duty has to do with moral obligation, what you ought or ought not to do. But obviously you’re not morally obligated to do something just because it would be good for you to do it. For example, it would be good for you to become a doctor, but you’re not morally obligated to become a doctor. After all, it would also be good for you to become a homemaker or a farmer or a diplomat, but you can’t do them all. Furthermore, sometimes all you have is bad choices (think of Sophie’s Choice), but it’s not wrong for you to choose one, since you must choose.
TALK ABOUT IT
Make a list of some values—some things you believe are good or bad. Then make a list of some duties—some things you believe are right or wrong. Compare your lists with someone else’s to be sure you’re clear about the distinction.
So there’s a difference between good/bad and right/wrong. Good/bad has to do with something’s worth, while right/wrong has to do with something’s being obligatory.
Objective and Subjective
Second, there’s the distinction between being objective or subjective. By objective I mean “independent of people’s opinions.” By subjective I mean “dependent on people’s opinions.” So to say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is good or bad no matter what people think about it. Similarly, to say that we have objective moral duties is to say that certain actions are right or wrong for us regardless of what people think.
So, for example, to say that the Holocaust was objectively wrong is to say that it was wrong even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was right, and it would still have been wrong even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in exterminating or brainwashing everybody who disagreed with them, so that everyone believed the Holocaust was right.
Premise 1 asserts that if there is no God, then moral values and duties are not objective in that sense.
Defense of Premise 1
Objective Moral Values Require God
So consider, first, moral values. Traditionally moral values have been based in God, who is the highest Good. But if God does not exist, what is the basis of moral values? In particular, why think that human beings have moral worth? The most popular form of atheism is naturalism, which holds that the only things that exist are the things described by our best scientific theories. But science is morally neutral; you can’t find moral values in a test tube. It follows immediately that moral values don’t really exist; they’re just illusions of human beings.
Even if the atheist is willing to go beyond the bounds of science, why think, given an atheistic worldview, that human beings are morally valuable? On a naturalistic view moral values are just the by-product of biological evolution and social conditioning. Just as a troop of baboons exhibit cooperative and even self-sacrificial behavior because natural selection has determined it to be advantageous in the struggle for survival, so their primate cousins Homo sapiens exhibit similar behavior for the same reason. As a result of sociobiological pressures there has evolved among Homo sapiens a sort of “herd morality,” which functions well in the perpetuation of our species. But on the atheistic view there doesn’t seem to be anything about Homo sapiens that makes this morality objectively true. If we were to rewind the film of human evolution back to the beginning and start anew, people with a very different set of moral values might well have evolved.
Charles Darwin
As Darwin himself wrote in The Descent of Man,
If … men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering.[1]
For us to think that human beings are special and our morality objectively true is to succumb to the temptation to speciesism, an unjustified bias toward one’s own species.
So if there is no God, any basis for regarding the herd morality evolved by Homo sapiens as objectively true seems to have been removed. Take God out of the picture, and all you’re left with is an apelike creature on a speck of solar dust beset with delusions of moral grandeur.
Objective Moral Duties Require God
Second, now consider moral duties. Traditionally our moral duties were thought to spring from God’s commandments, such as the Ten Commandments. But if there is no God, what basis remains for objective moral duties? On the atheistic view, human beings are just animals, and animals have no moral obligations to one another. When a lion kills a zebra, it kills the zebra, but it does not murder the zebra. When a great white shark forcibly copulates with a female, it forcibly copulates with her but it does not rape her—for there is no moral dimension to these actions. They are neither prohibited nor obligatory.
TALK ABOUT IT
Try to come up with an atheist’s argument to defend the idea that forcible copulation is morally wrong for humans but not for sharks. How would you reply?
So if God does not exist, why think that we have any moral obligations to do anything? Who or what imposes these moral duties upon us? Where do they come from? It’s hard to see why they would be anything more than a subjective impression resulting from societal and parental conditioning.
Certain actions such as incest and rape may not be biologically and socially advantageous and so in the course of human development have become taboo. But that does absolutely nothing to show that rape or incest is really wrong. Such behavior goes on all the time in the animal kingdom. The rapist who goes against the herd morality is doing nothing more serious than acting unfashionably, like the man who belches loudly at the dinner table. If there is no moral lawgiver, then there is no objective moral law that we must obey.
Getting Clear about the Argument
Now it’s extremely important that we clearly understand the issue before us. I can almost guarantee that if you share this moral argument with unbelievers, someone will say indignantly, “Are you saying that all atheists are bad people?” They’ll think you are judgmental and intolerant. We need to help them see that this is a complete misunderstanding of the argument.
The question is not: Must we believe in God in order to live moral lives? There’s no reason to think that nonbelievers cannot live what we’d normally call good and decent lives.
Again, the question is not: Can we recognize objective moral values and duties without believing in God? There’s no reason to think that you have to believe in God in order to recognize that, for example, we ought to love our children.
Or again, the question is not: Can we formulate a system of ethics without referring to God? If the nonbeliever recognizes the intrinsic value of human beings, there’s no reason to think he can’t work out an ethical code of conduct that the believer will generally agree with. (Of course, he won’t take into account any moral obligations we have toward God.)
Rather the question is: If God does not exist, do objective moral values and duties exist? The question is not about the necessity of belief in God for objective morality but about the necessity of the existence of God for objective morality.
I’ve been shocked at how often even professional philosophers, who should know better, confuse these two questions. For example, I participated in a debate at Franklin and Marshall College with the humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz on the topic “Goodness without God Is Good Enough.” I argued that if God does not exist, there are no objective moral values, duties, or accountability for one’s actions.
Prof. Kurtz, to my astonishment, completely missed the point. He replied,
If God is essential, then how is it possible that millions of people who do not believe in God, nonetheless behave morally? On your view, they should not. And so, your God is not essential.… Many people have been optimistic about life; they have lived a full life … and have found life exhilirating and … richly significant. Nor do they wring their hands about whether or not there is an afterlife. It’s living life here and now that counts.[2]
Kurtz’s point shows only that belief in God isn’t essential to living a moral, optimistic life. It does nothing to refute my claim that if there is no God, then morality is just a human illusion.
TALK ABOUT IT
How would you explain the fact that atheists just know that harming an innocent human being is wrong, and can live good lives, without believing that God is the ultimate source of values and duties?
To repeat: Belief in God is not necessary for objective morality; God is.
The Euthyphro Dilemma
The other response you can count on getting from unbelievers is the so-called Euthyphro dilemma, named after a character in one of Plato’s dialogues. It basically goes like this: Is something good because God wills it? Or does God will something because it is good? If you say that something is good because God wills it, then what is good becomes arbitrary. God could have willed that hatred is good, and then we would have been morally obligated to hate one another. That seems crazy. Some moral values, at least, seem to be necessary. But if you say that God wills something because it is good, then what is good or bad is independent of God. In that case, moral values and duties exist independently of God, which contradicts premise 1.
Answer to the Euthyphro Dilemma
We don’t need to refute either of the two horns of the Euthyphro dilemma, because the dilemma it presents is a false one: There’s a third alternative, namely, God wills something because He is good. What do I mean by that? I mean that God’s own nature is the standard of goodness, and His commandments to us are expressions of His nature. In short, our moral duties are determined by the commands of a just and loving God.
So moral values are not independent of God because God’s own character defines what is good. God is essentially compassionate, fair, kind, impartial, and so on. His nature is the moral standard defining good and bad. His commands necessarily reflect His moral nature. Therefore, they’re not arbitrary. When the atheist demands, “If God were to command child abuse, would we be obligated to abuse our children?” he’s asking a question like “If there were a square circle, would its area be the square of one of its sides?” There is no answer because what it supposes is logically impossible.
So the Euthyphro dilemma presents us with a false choice, and we shouldn’t be tricked by it. The morally good/bad is determined by God’s nature, and the morally right/wrong is determined by His will. God wills something because He is good, and something is right because God wills it.
Atheistic Moral Platonism: Moral Values Simply Exist
The mention of Plato brings to mind another possible response to premise 1. Plato thought that the Good just exists on its own as a sort of self-existent Idea. (If you find this difficult to grasp, join the company!) Later Christian thinkers equated Plato’s Good with God’s moral nature; but Plato thought the Good just existed by itself. So some atheists might say that moral values like justice, mercy, love, and so on, just exist without any foundation. We can call this view atheistic moral platonism. It holds that objective moral values exist but are not grounded in God. What might we say about this view?
Answer to Atheistic Moral Platonism
First, atheistic moral platonism seems unintelligible. What does it mean to say, for example, that the moral value justice just exists? It’s hard to make sense of this. It’s easy to understand what it means to say that some person is just, but it’s bewildering when someone says that in the absence of any people justice itself exists. Moral values seem to be properties of persons, and it’s hard to understand how justice can exist as an abstraction.
Second, this view provides no basis for moral duties. Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that moral values like justice, loyalty, mercy, forbearance, and the like just exist. How does that result in any moral obligations for me? Why would I have a moral duty to be, say, merciful? Who or what lays such an obligation on me? Notice that on this view moral vices like greed, hatred, lethargy, and selfishness also presumably exist on their own as abstractions. So why are we obligated to align our lives with one set of these abstractly existing objects rather than any other? Atheistic moral platonism, lacking a moral lawgiver, has no grounds for moral obligation.
Third, it’s fantastically improbable that the blind evolutionary process should spit forth precisely that sort of creatures who correspond to the abstractly existing realm of moral values. This seems to be an utterly incredible coincidence when you think about it. It’s almost as if the moral realm knew that we were coming. It’s far more plausible, as Sorley contended, to think that both the natural realm and the moral realm are under the authority of a God who gave us both the laws of nature and the moral law than to think that these two independent realms just happened to mesh.
Stubborn Humanism: Whatever Contributes to Human Flourishing Is Good
So what’s the atheist to do at this point? Most of them want to affirm the objective reality of moral values and duties. So they simply embrace some sort of humanism and stop there. Whatever contributes to human flourishing is good, and whatever detracts from it is bad, and that’s the end of the story.
Answer to Stubborn Humanism
Just taking human flourishing as your ultimate stopping point seems, however, to be premature, because of the arbitrariness and implausibility of such a stopping point.
First, its arbitrariness. Given atheism, why think that what is conducive to human flourishing is any more valuable than what is conducive to the flourishing of ants or mice? Why think that inflicting harm on another member of our species is wrong? When I put this question to the Dartmouth ethicist Walter Sinnott-Armstrong in our debate on the existence of God, he replied, “It simply is. Objectively. Don’t you agree?”[3] Of course, I agree that it is wrong to harm another human being, but I pointed out that this is not the question. The question is: Why would it be wrong if atheism were true? When I put this question to University of Massachusetts philosopher Louise Antony in our debate on “Is God Necessary for Morality?” she shot back, “I wonder if you have any friends!” I just smiled—but the point remains that, like it or not, given an atheistic worldview, picking out human flourishing as morally special seems to be arbitrary.
Second, its implausibility. Atheists will sometimes say that moral properties like goodness and badness necessarily attach to certain natural states of affairs. For example, the property of badness necessarily attaches to a man’s beating his wife. The property of goodness necessarily attaches to a mother’s nursing her infant. Atheists will say that once all the purely natural properties are in place, then the moral properties necessarily come along with them. Now given atheism this seems extraordinarily implausible. Why think that these strange, nonnatural moral properties like “goodness” and “badness” even exist, much less somehow get necessarily attached to various natural states of affairs? I can’t see any reason to think that, given an atheistic view of the world, a full description of the natural properties involved in some situation would determine or fix any moral properties of that situation.
These humanistic philosophers have simply taken a “shopping list” approach to ethical questions. Because they hold to humanism, they just help themselves to the moral properties they need to do the job. What’s needed to make their view plausible is some sort of explanation for why moral properties attach to certain natural states of affairs. Again, it’s inadequate for the humanist to assert that we do, in fact, see that human beings have intrinsic moral value, for that’s not in dispute. Indeed, that’s the second premise of the moral argument! What we want from the humanist is some reason to think that human beings would be morally significant if atheism were true. As it is, their humanism is just a stubborn moral faith.
By contrast God is a natural stopping point as a foundation for objective moral values and duties. For unless we are moral nihilists, we have to recognize some stopping point, and God as the ultimate reality is the natural place to stop. Moreover, God is by definition worthy of worship, so that He must be the embodiment of perfect moral goodness. Again, God, by definition, is the greatest conceivable being, and a being that is the ground and source of goodness is greater than one that merely shares in goodness. So theism isn’t characterized by the sort of arbitrariness and implausibility that afflicts stubborn humanism.
Premise 2
Objective moral values and duties exist.
That brings us to our second premise, that objective moral values and duties exist. I initially thought that this would be the most controversial premise in the argument. In my debates with atheist philosophers, however, I find that almost nobody denies it. It might surprise you to learn that surveys taken at universities reveal, perhaps contrary to impression, that professors are more apt to believe in objective moral values than students, and that philosophy professors are more apt to believe in objective moral values than professors in general!
What do you make of the fact that professors are more apt to believe in objective moral values than students, and that philosophy professors are more apt to believe in objective moral values than professors in general? What might this say about these three groups of people? How might age be a factor? Education? Popular culture?
Moral Experience
Philosophers who reflect on our moral experience see no more reason to distrust that experience than the experience of our five senses. I believe what my five senses tell me, namely, that there is a world of physical objects out there. My senses are not infallible, but that doesn’t lead me to think that there is no external world around me. Similarly, in the absence of some reason to distrust my moral experience, I should accept what it tells me, namely, that some things are objectively good or evil, right or wrong.
Most of us would agree that in moral experience we do apprehend objective values and duties. When I was speaking several years ago on a Canadian university campus, I noticed a poster put up by the Sexual Assault and Information Center. It read: “Sexual Assault: No One Has the Right to Abuse a Child, Woman, or Man.” Most of us recognize that sexual abuse of another person is wrong. Actions like rape, torture, and child abuse aren’t just socially unacceptable behavior—they’re moral abominations. By the same token, love, generosity, and self-sacrifice are really good. People who fail to see this are just handicapped, the moral equivalent of someone who is physically blind, and there’s no reason to let their impairment call into question what we see clearly.
I’ve found that although people give lip service to relativism, 95 percent can be very quickly convinced that objective moral values do exist after all. All you have to do is produce a few illustrations and let them decide for themselves. Ask what they think of the Hindu practice of suttee (burning widows alive on the funeral pyres of their husbands) or the ancient Chinese custom of crippling women for life by tightly binding their feet from childhood to resemble lotus blossoms. You can make the point especially effectively by using moral atrocities perpetrated in the name of religion. Ask them what they think of the Crusades or the Inquisition. Ask them if they think it’s all right for Catholic priests to sexually abuse little boys and for the church to try to cover it up. If you’re dealing with someone who’s an honest inquirer, I can guarantee that almost every time that person will agree that there are objective moral values and duties.
Of course, sometimes you find hard-liners, but usually their position is seen to be so extreme that others are repulsed by it. For example, at a meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature a few years ago, I attended a panel discussion on “Biblical Authority and Homosexuality,” in which all the panelists endorsed the legitimacy of homosexual activity. One panelist dismissed biblical prohibitions of such activity on the grounds that they reflect the cultural context in which they were written. Since this is the case for all of Scripture’s commands (it wasn’t written in a vacuum), he concluded that “there are no timeless, normative, moral truths in Scripture.” In discussion from the floor, I pointed out that such a view leads to sociocultural relativism, which makes it impossible to criticize any society’s moral values, including those of a society that persecutes homosexuals!
He responded with a fog of theological double-talk and claimed that there’s no place outside Scripture where we can find timeless moral values either. “But that just is what we mean by moral relativism,” I said. “In fact, on your view there’s no content to the notion of the goodness of God. He might as well be dead. And Nietzsche recognized that the death of God leads to nihilism.” At this point another panelist came in with that knock-down refutation: “Well, if you’re going to get pejorative, we might as well not discuss it.”
What is it about humans that allows (and even encourages) them to live with logical inconsistency? Why, when faced with a logical argument like the one in this chapter, do they so easily say “Whatever” and go about their business unchanged?
I sat down, but the point wasn’t lost on the audience. The next man who stood up said, “Wait a minute. I’m rather confused. I’m a pastor and people are always coming to me, asking if something they’ve done is wrong and if they need forgiveness. For example, isn’t it always wrong to abuse a child?” I couldn’t believe the panelist’s response. She replied: “What counts as abuse differs from society to society, so we can’t really use the word abuse without tying it to a historical context.”
“Call it whatever you like,” the pastor insisted, “but child abuse is damaging to children. Isn’t it wrong to damage children?” And still she wouldn’t admit it! This sort of hardness of heart ultimately backfires on the moral relativist and exposes in the minds of most people the bankruptcy of such a worldview.
Sociobiological Objections to Moral Experience
The question, then, is: Do we have any overriding reason to distrust our moral experience? Some people have claimed that the sociobiological account of the origins of morality undermines our moral experience. According to that account, you’ll remember, our moral beliefs have been ingrained into us by evolution and social conditioning. Does that give us reason to distrust our moral experience?
Answer to Sociobiological Objections
The sociobiological account clearly does nothing to undermine the truth of our moral beliefs. For the truth of a belief is independent of how you came to hold that belief. You may have acquired your moral beliefs through a fortune cookie or by reading tea leaves, and they could still happen to be true. In particular, if God exists, then objective moral values and duties exist, regardless of how we come to learn about them. The sociobiological account at best proves that our perception of moral values and duties has evolved. But if moral values are gradually discovered, not invented, then our gradual and fallible perception of those values no more undermines their objective reality than our gradual, fallible perception of the physical world undermines its objective reality.
But perhaps the sociobiological account undermines, not the truth of our moral beliefs, but our justification for holding such beliefs. If your moral beliefs were based on reading tea leaves, they might accidentally turn out to be true, but you wouldn’t have any justification for thinking that they are true. So you wouldn’t know that they are true.
Similarly, the objection is that if our moral beliefs have been shaped by evolution, then we can’t have any confidence in them because evolution aims, not at truth, but at survival. Our moral beliefs will be selected for their survival value, not for their truth. So we can’t trust our moral experience and therefore don’t know if premise 2 is true.
There are two problems with this objection to our knowledge of premise 2. First, it assumes that atheism is true. If there is no God, then our moral beliefs are selected by evolution solely for their survival value, not for their truth. I myself pressed this point in defending premise 1. If God does not exist, then the sociobiological account is true, and our moral beliefs are illusory. But, you see, that’s no reason to think that the sociobiological account is true. Indeed, if God exists, then it’s likely that He would want us to have fundamentally correct moral beliefs and so would either guide the evolutionary process to produce such beliefs or else instill them in us (Rom. 2:15). Apart from the assumption of atheism, we have no reason to deny what our moral experience tells us.
Second, the objection is self-defeating. Given the truth of naturalism, all our beliefs, not just our moral beliefs, are the result of evolution and social conditioning. Thus, the evolutionary account leads to skepticism about knowledge in general. But this is self-defeating because then we should be skeptical of the evolutionary account itself, since it, too, is the product of evolution and social conditioning! The objection therefore undermines itself.
So given the warrant provided for premise 2 by our moral experience, we’re justified in thinking that objective moral values and duties exist.
Conclusion
From the two premises, it follows that God exists. The moral argument complements the cosmological and design arguments by telling us about the moral nature of the Creator of the universe. It gives us a personal, necessarily existent being, who is not only perfectly good, but whose nature is the standard of goodness and whose commands constitute our moral duties.
In my experience, the moral argument is the most effective of all the arguments for the existence of God. I say this grudgingly because my favorite is the cosmological argument. But cosmological and teleological arguments don’t touch people where they live. The moral argument cannot be so easily brushed aside. For every day you get up you answer the question of whether there are objective moral values and duties by how you live. It’s unavoidable.
So, in answer to the question that opened this chapter: No, we cannot truly be good without God; but if we can in some measure be good, then it follows that God exists.
[1] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd edition (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1909), 100.
[2] William Lane Craig and Paul Kurtz, “The Kurtz/Craig Debate,” in Goodness without God is Good Enough, ed. Robert Garcia and Nathan King (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 34.
[3] William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, God?: A Debate between a Christian and an Atheist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 34.