A Moral Argument
A MORAL ARGUMENT
Paul Copan
During the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC, including a six-year truce), the inhabitants of the island of Melos tried to remain neutral in the war between Athens and Sparta. Unfortunately Melos couldn't hold out. Athens demanded tribute payment, offering peace in exchange. The Melians tried to negotiate, appealing to their right to their own empire. The Athenians rejected the Melians' “fine phrases” of duty and morality. The Athenians asked the Melians
not to imagine that you will influence us by saying … that you have never done us any harm … since you know as well as we do that, when these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends upon the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.1
The Melians replied, claiming the Athenians' interests would best be served by preserving the principles of justice and fair play—after all, they too might be attacked one day. The Melians were appealing to the Golden Rule—to do to others as they would have others do to them; they took this moral norm to be transcultural. Alas, Athens replied to Melos:
It is a general and necessary law of nature to rule wherever one can. This is not a law we made for ourselves, nor were we the first to act upon it when it was made. We found it already in existence, and we shall leave it to exist forever among those who come after us. We are merely acting in accordance with it, and we know that you or anybody else with the same power as ours would be acting in precisely the same way.
In the end the Melians refused to submit to Athens, and Athens besieged the city, killed the military-aged men, and sold the women and children into slavery.
Did the Athenians violate some universal moral law, or does “might make right”? Is the belief in human value or rights nothing more than evolutionary hard-wiring that enhances human survival—comparable to teeth, feet, or opposable thumbs? Do human beings invent morality—a social contract perhaps—by which we agree not to harm or steal from one another? If such a transcultural morality exists, can it be explained in natural or supernatural terms?
These are the sorts of questions we'll examine in this brief essay. First, we'll look at the inescapability of objective moral values. Second, we'll address the context of objective moral values, arguing that God's existence and nature make better sense of objective moral values than do naturalistic—and other nontheistic (whether Buddhist, Hindu, Shinto, etc.)—explanations. Third, we'll look at the evolutionary and other subjectivist explanations for morality, which are ultimately inadequate and unsatisfying. Indeed, the existence of an intrinsically good God is needed to ground objective moral values as well as human rights, dignity, and moral responsibility—characteristics which reflect God's making us in His image. Finally, we'll look at the Euthyphro dilemma, which some claim shows that, if God isn't arbitrary in His commands, a moral standard must exist independently of God.
The Inescapability of Objective Moral Values
The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid wrote of the fundamental bedrock nature of moral values such as the obligation to treat another person as we would want to be treated. Such moral laws are as inescapable as our conviction that mind-independent objects exist: “The sceptic asks me, Why do you believe the existence of the external object which you perceive? This belief, sir, is none of my manufacture; it came from the mint of Nature; it bears her image and superscription; and, if it is not right, the fault is not mine. I ever took it upon trust, and without suspicion.”2
The Jewish-Christian Scriptures assume that human beings are morally responsible agents who can generally know what is good and that they ought to do what is good and avoid what is evil. In the Old Testament the prophet Amos (in chapters 1—2) delivers severe warnings from God to surrounding Gentile nations because of their atrocities and crimes against humanity, ripping open pregnant women, breaking treaties, acting treacherously, stifling compassion. The underlying assumption is that these nations, even without God's special revelation, should have known better. In the writings of the apostle Paul, the same assumption is expressed more explicitly: “For when Gentiles who do not have the Law [of Moses] do instinctively the things of the Law, these, not having the Law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them” (Rom 2:14-15).
Just as we trust our senses and powers of reasoning unless we have good reason to doubt them, we should also assume this “principle of credulity” when it comes to our basic moral sense as well. Even the most radical skeptic takes for granted the reliability of his reasoning powers and the stability of fundamental logical laws so that he can confidently draw skeptical conclusions! And simply because people may be mistaken in their sense perceptions (e.g., the faulty perception that a bird is on the branch, which is in fact being moved by the wind) is not reason to reject their general reliability.
Similarly, while we may make faulty moral judgments, there still are certain unmistakable moral truths—what we can't not know.3 Yes, we may suppress our conscience or engage in self-deception. However, when we are functioning properly and aren't stifling our conscience, we can get right the fundamentals of morality. As C. S. Lewis shows in his Abolition of Man,4 people, regardless of time and culture, have discovered (not invented) the same sorts of basic moral standards: don't murder, don't take another's property, don't defraud, treat people as you want to be treated. People can know right from wrong apart from special revelation from God. As Amos 1—2 and Romans 2:14—15 indicate, the rightness of basic moral laws and the wrongness of their violation can be known by anyone not suppressing his conscience or hardening his heart.
Properly functioning persons generally know when they're being treated cruelly or as a mere object (e.g., child abuse, raping, torturing innocent people for fun) rather than with dignity and respect. Indeed, we possess an in-built “yuck factor”—a basic internal revulsion toward torturing babies for fun and murdering. Humans—God's image-bearers—can, without the Bible, still readily recognize that kindness is a virtue and not a vice, that we ought to treat others as we would want to be treated, and that there is a moral difference between Mother Teresa and Pol Pot or Josef Stalin. Those not recognizing the proper basicality of these truths are simply wrong; they aren't functioning properly. Apart from and prior to any agreed-upon “social contract,” we can intuitively recognize that all human beings already have certain rights before the law or that racism is immoral. As Nicholas Rescher observes, if members of a particular tribe think that sacrificing firstborn children is acceptable, “then their grasp on the conception of morality is somewhere between inadequate and nonexistent.”5 Such a moral awareness is basic or “bedrock,” as Kai Nielsen put it:
It is more reasonable to believe such elemental things [as wife-beating and child abuse] to be evil than to believe any skeptical theory that tells us we cannot know or reasonably believe any of these things to be evil. … I firmly believe that this is bedrock and right and that anyone who does not believe it cannot have probed deeply enough into the grounds of his moral beliefs.6
We just know the rightness of virtues (kindness, trustworthiness, unselfishness), and the burden of proof falls on those who deny this. When the moral skeptic says, “Prove that moral values exist,” he doesn't need an argument. He really needs psychological and spiritual help. There are certain moral intuitions that are immediately apparent—unless there is some serious malfunction.
The philosopher Robert Audi offers a description of these moral intuitions. They are (1) noninferential or directly apprehended; (2) firm (they must be believed as propositions); (3) comprehensible (intuitions are formed in the light of an adequate understanding of their propositional objects); (4) pretheoretical (they are not dependent on theories, nor are they themselves theoretical hypotheses). Such moral knowledge emerges not from reflection on abstract principles but from reflecting on particular cases (particularism). Moreover, these intuitions are not indefeasible. That is, they may be adjusted or refined in light of other considerations or overriding circumstances. For instance, keeping a promise may be overridden by circumstances preventing me from keeping it, but I still have a duty to explain to my friend why I could not keep the promise.7
Thus, even if human beings make faulty moral judgments and can be misguided at points, we would be wrong to abandon the quest for goodness or become moral skeptics: “we cannot always or even usually be totally mistaken about goodness.”8 As with our senses or our rational faculties, we are wise to trust our basic moral intuitions even though modification or further reflection may be necessary. As with our sense perception and rational powers, we ought to take our moral intuitions seriously unless there is good reason to doubt them.
Naturalism Versus Theism—Which Is the Better Fit?
The late Carl Sagan confidently affirmed: “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”9 Of course, this is a metaphysical statement, a philosophical assumption, not a scientific observation. This statement, however, nicely summarizes naturalism: nature is all there is—which means no God, no supernatural, no miracles, no immortality. What are the implications of naturalism? They are stark indeed. Philosopher Jaegwon Kim admits that naturalism is “imperialistic; it demands ‘full coverage’ … and exacts a terribly high ontological price.”10 Biologist E. O. Wilson also holds to a naturalistic viewpoint, that all of reality “the Central Idea of the consilience worldview is that all tangible phenomena, from the birth of the stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and torturous the sequences, to the laws of physics.”11
What then are the implications for morality if a personal, good God doesn't exist? (Remember that this would apply to nontheistic Eastern religions, not simply to atheism.) Many atheists/nontheists recognize that a naturalistic world doesn't furnish a plausible context for objective moral values (e.g., kindness is virtuous, murder is wrong) as well as human rights and moral responsibility. Philosopher Thomas Nagel points out the implications: “There is no room for agency in a world of neural impulses, chemical reactions, and bone and muscle movements.” Given naturalism, it's hard not to conclude that we're “helpless” and “not responsible” for our actions.12 Likewise, Derk Pereboom affirms that “our best scientific theories indeed have the consequence that we are not morally responsible for our actions,” that we're “more like machines than we ordinarily suppose.”13 Naturalist Simon Blackburn confesses that he prefers dignity over humiliation, but he finds that nature offers no grounds for affirming human dignity or objective moral values: “Nature has no concern for good or bad, right or wrong. … We cannot get behind ethics.”14 This is what naturalism leads us to expect—no good God, no objective moral values. Even the noted Oxford atheist J. L. Mackie agreed: “Moral properties constitute so odd a cluster of properties and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events without an all-powerful god to create them.”15 But he went ahead and denied that objective moral values existed!
Yes, many naturalists deny that objective moral values exist—that our moral impulse is nothing more than the product of a blind evolutionary process that selects out traits that enhance survival and reproduction. In such a case, morality is merely subjective. However, non-theists can and do endorse objective moral values—that rape or child abuse is wrong. These nontheistic moral realists will tell us, “You don't need God to be good.” Yet the deeper question is, how did we come to be morally responsible, rights-bearing beings? Since all human beings are God's image-bearers, they not surprisingly recognize the same sorts of moral values theists do. The basic issue, though, is this: why think humans have rights and dignity if they're products of valueless, physical processes in a cause-and-effect series from the big bang until now? The more plausible context or scenario is that human value and moral responsibility come from a good God who created us as intrinsically valuable, morally responsible creatures. We function properly when living morally. We glimpse something of a personal God in the world's moral order: without a personal God, no persons would exist at all. If no persons would exist, then no moral properties would be realized in our world. We know that from nothing, nothing comes (ex nihilo nihil fit); similarly, from valuelessness, valuelessness comes. It's exceedingly difficult to see how we move from a valueless series of causes and effects from the big bang onward, finally arriving at valuable, morally responsible, rights-bearing human beings. If we're just material beings produced by a material universe, then objective value or goodness (not to mention consciousness or reasoning powers or beauty or personhood) can't be accounted for. One will search in vain for any physics textbook describing moral value as one of matter's properties! Perhaps one shouldn't really be surprised when atheists believe that moral values could emerge from valueless matter. After all, they tend to believe that the finite, finely tuned, life-producing, consciousness-producing, and value-producing universe could emerge literally from nothing!
We could press the point even further. In the name of simplicity, there seems to be no good reason for naturalists to invoke any independent moral realm. This would seem utterly superfluous and completely out of place given our valueless origins, according to naturalism. The nontheists who say that the moral value “murder is wrong” would hold true even if God didn't exist assume such moral values are just “brute facts.”16 But it's hard to see how love or justice itself could exist, say, during the Jurassic period. Without God, moral properties wouldn't be realized or actualized in this world in the form of human rights or dignity or moral duties: no God, no moral values. Since our personhood is rooted in a personal God's specially creating us, a deep connection exists between personhood and objective moral values.17
Again, atheists, like believers, can know what's good. And why is this? We're all beings made in God's image. Who we are enables us to know right from wrong. This point applies to nontheistic religionists as well—not simply atheistic naturalists. Nontheistic Jains, for example, believe that the soul (jiva) in each creature entails strict nonviolence (ahimsa). They take this value to be a simple brute given. However, what is the basis of any value in this finite world if God doesn't exist?
Furthermore, if nature is all there is, how do we move from the way things are (the descriptive) to the way things ought to be (the prescriptive)? Why bring in moral explanations when bare scientific descriptions are all that naturalism requires? Moral categories can be eliminated in the name of scientific simplicity. Rather than saying, “Hitler killed millions of Jews because he was morally depraved,” perhaps we can use a nonmoral “scientific” explanation: “Hitler was bitter and angry. He falsely believed that Jews were responsible for Germany's defeat in WWI. His hatred for the Jews helped release his pent-up hostility and anger, and his moral beliefs placed no restraints on his expression of hatred.”18 In a material universe of mindless, valueless origins, scientific explanations are all we need; moral ones are superfluous.
Another problem in assuming moral values as unexplained brute facts is this: a huge cosmic coincidence would exist between (a) these moral facts and (b) the eventual evolutionary and highly contingent development of self-reflective, morally responsible beings that can actually recognize that moral obligations exist. This connection begs for an explanation. It appears that this realm of moral facts was anticipating our emergence—a staggering cosmic coincidence! Even if a moral standard exists independently of God, the question still remains of how morally valuable and responsible beings could emerge from valueless matter. The existence of a good personal God, who created humans in his image, offers a simpler and less-contrived connection, a more plausible context to affirm human value and rights as well as moral obligations.
The Question of Evolutionary Ethics
It's not difficult to find naturalists who consider ethics to be nothing more than a human invention or a biological adaptation that is conducive to our survival and reproduction. Bertrand Russell claimed that “the whole subject of ethics arises from the pressure of the community on the individual.”19 According to Michael Ruse and E. O. Wilson, “Ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes in order to get us to cooperate.”20 Elsewhere Ruse asserts that morality is the “ephemeral product” of evolution—along with our hands, feet, and teeth. It's simply “an aid to survival and reproduction, and has no being beyond this.”21 Morality has biological worth—that's it. Naturalist philosopher Jonathan Glover believes that we are presently in a moral crisis. Given the ethical horrors of the twentieth century, he suggests that morality may survive “when seen to be a human creation.”22 So he advises humans to “re-create ethics” by programming future generations to be repulsed by genocide and concentration camps.23
According to many naturalists, to ask why we should be moral is like asking why we should itch or be hungry.24 We are simply evolutionarily hard-wired with adaptive features that enable survival and reproduction. Morality is one of those features—like our limbs or teeth. We meet the is-ought problem again: how do we move from the is of nature and science to the ought of moral obligation and value. If our morality is simply evolved, all we can do is describe how human beings actually function; we can't prescribe how humans ought to behave. There's no difference between whether I ought to be moral and whether I ought to be hungry since both are functions of evolutionary hardwiring. These states just are. Naturalism ultimately can give us a description of human behavior and psychology, but it can't ground genuine moral obligation. Moral obligations in a world of naturalistic scientific descriptions are odd indeed. They fit nicely into a theistic world, however.
We also face the question of why we should even trust our conclusions about truth (or morality) if a truthful Creator doesn't exist? If we're biologically hardwired to form moral beliefs that contribute to our survival and reproduction, then these beliefs simply are what they are. We can have no confidence that they are true: Can we trust our minds if we're merely products of naturalistic evolution trying to fight, feed, flee, and reproduce? Darwin himself was deeply troubled by this: “With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”25
Naturalistic evolution is interested in fitness and survival—not true belief. Morality then is just a biological adaptation—like the polar bear's thick fur: thick fur isn't more true than thin fur; it just better enhances survival.
So not only is objective morality undermined if naturalism is true; so is rational thought. Our beliefs may help us survive, but there's no reason to think they're true. So we may firmly believe that human beings are intrinsically valuable or that we have moral obligations or that we have free will and our choices really matter. This cluster of beliefs may help the species homo sapiens survive, but they may be completely false. So if we're blindly hardwired by nature to form certain beliefs because of their survival-enhancing value, then we can't have confidence about the truth-status of these beliefs.
Again, the existence of a good and truthful God offers a way out: we depend on our rational faculties in pursuit of truth. We trust our sense perceptions as basically reliable; and we tend to assume our general moral intuitions to be trustworthy. A biblical worldview inspires confidence that we can know moral and rational truths even if they do not contribute one whit to our survival. As God's image-bearers, we were designed to seek and find truth. But if we're naturalistically hardwired to reproduce and survive, then we can't trust these faculties. As we've noted, the scandal of such skepticism is this: we're relying on the very cognitive faculties whose unreliability is the conclusion of my skeptical argument; that is, I'm assuming a trustworthy reasoning process to arrive at the conclusion that I can't trust my reasoning! A nontheistic context doesn't inspire confidence in our belief-forming mechanisms.
The Euthyphro Dilemma
In Plato's Euthyphro dialogue (10a), Socrates asks: “Is what is holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is holy?”26 Skeptics like to raise this dilemma: Either (a) God's commands are arbitrary (something is good because God commands it—and He could have commanded, “You shall murder/commit adultery”), or (b) there must be some autonomous moral standard (which God consults in order to command)?27 Are we left with divine “caprice,” as Bertrand Russell suggested?28 Or do we have a moral standard completely independent of God? Critic Robin Le Poidevin declares that “we can, apparently, only make sense of these doctrines [that God is good and wills us to do what is good] if we think of goodness as being defined independently of God.”29
This dilemma ultimately derives from a confusion of knowing and being. Nontheists can know what is moral, but the question is how they came to be that way. The dilemma is ultimately resolved by rooting objective moral values in the nonarbitrary, essentially good character of God who has made us in His image. We would not know goodness without God's endowing us with a moral constitution. We have rights, dignity, freedom, and responsibility because God has designed us this way. In this, we reflect God's moral goodness as His image-bearers.
We should also ponder these further points as well. First, if naturalists are correct, then they themselves cannot escape a similar dilemma: Are these moral values good simply because they are good, or is there an independent standard of goodness to which they conform? Naturalistic moral realism's argument offers no actual advantage. Second, the naturalist's query is pointless since we must eventually arrive at some self-sufficient and self-explanatory stopping point beyond which the discussion can go no further. Third, God, who is essentially perfect, does not have obligations to some external moral standard; God simply acts, and it is good. He naturally does what is good. Fourth, the idea that God could be evil or command evil is utterly contrary to the very definition of God; otherwise, such a being would not be God and would not be worthy of worship. The acceptance of objective values assumes a kind of ultimate goal or cosmic design plan for human beings, which would make no sense given naturalism; such goal-orientedness makes much sense given theism (which presumes a design plan, which favors theism over naturalism).
For the sake of argument, even if some independent moral standard existed, this would hardly make God unnecessary or unimportant. After all, why think that humans—given their valueless, unguided, materialistic origins—evolved into morally valuable, rights-bearing, morally responsible persons who are duty bound to this standard? Even if the Euthyphro dilemma had some punch to it, it would still fail to show why intrinsically valuable, rights-bearing persons should emerge who are duty bound to some eternally preexistent moral standard. Again God makes much better sense of this.
Concluding Remarks
The moral argument for God's existence is vital in two important ways. First, the question of morality cuts to the heart of who we are as human beings. We fail morally; we aren't what we know we should be. Thankfully, recognizing we've fallen short of a moral standard can point us in the direction of God and His grace. How then do we handle our moral deficiency, guilt, and shame? Notice the “moral gap” that exists between (a) our recognition of basic moral values and ideals we know we should live by and (b) our moral failing to live up to these ideals. This gap serves to remind us of the need for (c) divine grace to enable us to live as we ought—grace that can be found in Christ's atoning work and the gift of the Holy Spirit who enables us to live lives that are pleasing to God. So rather than think that “ought implies can,” as Kant suggested, we failing humans can recognize our need and cast ourselves on God's readily available mercy and grace. So a more biblical understanding prompts us to conclude: “Ought implies can—with divine assistance.”30
Second, the moral argument has this important advantage: it offers a ready answer to what philosopher John Rist calls a widely admitted “crisis in contemporary Western debate about ethical foundations.”31 Taking seriously a personal God and Creator, the infinite good and source of all finite goods—including human dignity—helps provide the needed metaphysical foundation for human rights and objective moral values. Apart from such a move, it seems that the crisis will become only more pronounced. If objective moral values exist and if humans have rights and dignity, however, we have good reason for believing in God. Furthermore, a successful moral argument, while enhanced by the doctrine of the mutually loving Trinity, can point us to the need for divine grace and forgiveness through Christ; it can prompt us to ponder our moral and spiritual plight and prayerfully seek assistance through more specific revelation from God. That said, the moral argument does point us to a supreme personal moral Being (1) who is worthy of worship, (2) who has made us with dignity and worth, (3) to whom we are personally accountable, and (4) who may reasonably be called “God.”
1 Citations from this account are from Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999), 28—30.
2 In Thomas Reid's Inquiry and Essays, ed. Keith Lehrer and Ronald E. Beanblossom (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975), 84-85.
3 See J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know (Dallas: Spence, 2003).
4 C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (San Francisco: Harper, 2001), appendix.
5 Nicholas Rescher, Moral Absolutes: An Essay on the Nature and Rationale of Morality, Studies in Moral Philosophy, vol. 2 (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 43.
6 Kai Nielsen, Ethics without God, rev. ed. (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1990), 10-11.
7 Robert Audi, Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 32-65.
8 Robert M. Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 20.
9 Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980), 4.
10 Jaegwon Kim, “Mental Causation and Two Conceptions of Mental Properties.” Paper presented at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting (December 1993), 2-23.
11 Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998), 266.
12 Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 111, 113.
13 Derk Pereboom, Living without Free Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), xiii—xiv.
14 Simon Blackburn, Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 133-34.
15 J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 115.
16 E.g., Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
17 The necessity of moral truths doesn't make God irrelevant; such truths still require grounding in a personal God's good character: He necessarily exists in all possible worlds, is the source of all necessary moral truths, and is explanatorily prior—more basic—to these moral values. They would stand in asymmetrical relation to His necessity—like a pendulum, whose period (completed swing) can be deduced from the pendulum's length but not vice versa (i.e., the pendulum's length explains its period, not the reverse). William E. Mann, “Necessity,” in Companion to Philosophy of Religion, ed. William Quinn and Charles Taliaferro (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997). The necessity of moral principles doesn't mean they are analytic. For example, “water is H2O” is a necessary truth but is certainly not analytic. As Saul Kripke argued, there is a metaphysical necessity which, in this case, is discovered a posteriori. And, more to the point, “the fact that water is necessarily H2O by no means rules out the need for an explanation for the existence or structure of water” (367). See C. Stephen Evans, “Moral Arguments,” in Companion to Philosophy of Religion, 346—47.
18 T. L. Carson, Value and the Good Life (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), 194.
19 Bertrand Russell, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (London: Allen & Unwin, 1954), 124.
20 Michael Ruse and E. O. Wilson, “The Evolution of Ethics,” New Scientist 17 (1989): 51.
21 Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), 268.
22 Glover, Humanity, 41.
23 Ibid., 42.
24 Michael Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 57.
25 Letter to W. G. Down, 3 July 1881, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin Including an Autobiographical Chapter, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, 1887), 1:315—16.
26 Plato, “Euthyphro,” trans. Lane Cooper, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 178.
27 These terms are taken from Mark D. Linville, “On Goodness: Human and Divine,” American Philosophical Quarterly 27 (April 1990): 143-52.
28 Bertrand Russell, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962), 38.
29 Robin Le Poidevin, Arguing for Atheism (London: Routledge, 1996), 85.
30 John Hare, The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God's Assistance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).
31 John Rist, Real Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1.