Anthropological
Conclusion
Recall how the logical dialectic of the book proceeded. In part 1, we began with a cursory account of the rich, fertile history of the moral argument. Along the way we noted that a full-fledged book on contemporary variants of the moral argument is needed; we may try our hand at such a volume someday. A historical survey made clear a few interesting points. First, few of the luminaries acted as if their case could be made in such a compelling way that everyone must be convinced on pain of insincerity, irrationality, stupidity, or obstinacy. They believed in following evidence, and they were convinced that arguments play their role; but they paid their opponents the respect of allowing them their mental freedom to arrive at their own conclusions. Second, note the expansive epistemology, wide empiricism, and broad theories of rationality of so many of these historical figures. Few were narrow logic choppers or abstemious empiricists; they were open to the deliverances of relations, literature, poetry, emotions, and aesthetics.
Part 2 provided a short primer in metaethics, offering critiques of error theory, expressivism, and constructivism as well as offering several positive arguments in favor of moral realism. Our aspiration was to survey the lay of the land while recognizing the limitations that this imposes. We thought it eminently worth doing it this way so as not to miss the forest for the trees, in order to make clear some of the rich array of disparate and intersecting evidential considerations in favor of moral realism. The arguments encompass the logic, language, and phenomenology of morality, and plenty more besides. It is true to the way the human mind works to gesture at a panoply of operative reasons, the collective power of which is enough to culminate in a conviction worthy of allegiance and tenacity.
On that foundation, we offered an integrated, cumulative-case, five-part moral argument of our own in part 3. The argument canvassed objective moral values and inherent human dignity, objective moral duties, moral knowledge, an argument from grace, and an argument from providence. The divine loom weaves together the warp of moral facts with the weft of moral knowledge and, by turns, the taut threads of moral faith. To vary the metaphor, in the same way that a labyrinthine maze of jumbled metal filings suddenly stands in symmetrical formation in response to the pull of a magnet, likewise the right organizing story pulls all the moral pieces of evidence into alignment and allows a striking pattern to emerge.
Part 4 brought our discussion to a close by primarily contrasting atheistic Platonism with a theistic account of various moral phenomena. There we argued that theism indeed provides the right organizing story, more so than Platonism for several reasons, despite the wide swath of agreements Platonism and theism share.
Since most of what we have had to say in the book has pertained to theism generally, here in the conclusion we thought we would briefly canvass some ways in which the moral argument can be deployed as an argument not just for God per se but for Christianity particularly. The claim is not that one can, by moral apologetics alone, somehow deduce all the aspects of special revelation contained in Christianity but rather that, in light of Christianity having been revealed, moral arguments for God’s existence point quite naturally in its direction.
The following list offers seven reasons to think this may be so. This discussion is far from exhaustive and is simply meant to be suggestive for further investigation.
Christological
The final chapter of H. P. Owen’s Moral Argument for Christian Theism points to New Testament teachings on goodness, duty, and beatitude that can both positively and negatively lead the mind to belief in the God of Christianity.1 John Henry Newman thought that special revelation performs a sort of ampliative function in taking the deliverances of general revelation and focusing them into more fine-grained form—namely, of Christ.2 One of the great virtues of moral arguments for God’s existence is that they point not just to the existence of God but to a God of a particular nature: a God who is morally perfect—not just perfectly holy but also perfectly loving. A. C. Ewing once said that the source of the moral law is morally perfect.3 Such a notion is described in various ways: omnibenevolent, impeccable, essentially good, and the like. What does it look like when omnibenevolence takes on human form? The self-giving life of Jesus is a powerful answer and impeccable moral exemplar for us to emulate. Moral apologetics arguably works best when it is christological.
Trinitarian
To conceive of God as essentially and perfectly loving requires some sort of account. The right account, again, is not the sort of idea that we are able to generate on our own; we depend on special revelation to tell us what it is. But Christianity has provided us with an account of the divine nature that is trinitarian in nature—we cannot deduce it, but we can recognize its truth once we see it. C. S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that ‘God is love.’ But they seem not to notice that the words ‘God is love’ have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love.”4 The recent wonderful book Divine Love Theory by Adam Johnson makes this connection explicit.5 Moral apologetics works best when it is trinitarian.
Soteriological
Under the performative or transformational variant of the moral argument can fit our need for not just transformation but forgiveness. Most all of us have on occasion shuddered and been riddled with guilt for having fallen short of a moral standard of which we can hardly help but be aware. In a paper on moral arguments for God, Robert Adams once wrote that standard fare in such philosophical discussions are ontological or epistemic arguments, but then he added, “I am keenly aware that they form only part of the total moral case for theistic belief. Theistic conceptions of guilt and forgiveness, for example, . . . may well have theoretical and practical moral advantages at least as compelling as any that we have discussed.”6 The moral argument, functioning as a prelude to the gospel, leaves many with a deep felt need for forgiveness for moral failures. If that is a central phenomenological question the moral argument raises, the death and resurrection of Jesus is the historical and theological answer Christianity provides. As Lewis once said, Christians offer an explanation of how we got into our present state of both hating goodness and loving it—and how we hope that our worst moments do not define us. Moral apologetics reminds us of our need for forgiveness; a test of the strength of a worldview is its ability to provide it. The good news of Christianity is that forgiveness is available. Moral apologetics works best when it answers to our deepest moral existential needs for deliverance from guilt and shame.
Individually Transformational
Historically, Christianity has a demonstrated track record of reaching people of every race and ethnicity and socioeconomic background and of radically transforming their lives. In They Found the Secret, a book chronicling the spiritual lives of various Christian saints, can be found this description: “Out of discouragement and defeat they have come into victory. Out of weakness and weariness they have been made strong. Out of ineffectiveness and apparent uselessness they have become efficient and enthusiastic. The pattern seems to be self-centeredness, self-effort, increasing inner dissatisfaction and outer discouragement, a temptation to give it all up because there is no better way, and then finding the Spirit of God to be their strength, their guide, their confidence and companion—in a word, their life.”7 This isn’t Pollyannaish. We can be not only forgiven our sins but delivered from sin itself. We can be changed, and ultimately we will be entirely transformed; the very power that raised Jesus from the dead can be at work within us to change us from within, wholly and completely. Moral apologetics works best when it is individually transformational—indeed, A. E. Taylor preferred language of transfiguration.8
Culturally Transformational
Paul Copan speaks of a historical aspect of moral apologetics: the historical role played by Christ and his devoted followers to promote social justice. Morality demands deep cultural transformation, too, including hard work to battle systemic evils. Copan cites specific cultural developments that can be shown to have flowed from the Jewish-Christian worldview, leading to societies that are “progress-prone rather than progress-resistant,” including such signs of progress as the founding of modern science, poverty-diminishing free markets, equal rights for all before the law, religious liberty, women’s suffrage, human rights initiatives, and the abolition of slavery, widow-burning, and foot-binding.9
Jacques Derrida wrote that the cornerstone of international law is the sacredness of one’s neighbor.10 Today there is a growing opinion among Chinese social scientists that the Christian idea of transcendence was the historic basis for the concepts of human rights and equality. Atheist Richard Rorty admitted that societies throughout history have come up with various ways to exclude certain groups from the human family by calling them “pseudohuman” and that, by contrast, Christianity gave rise to the concept of universal rights, derived from the conviction that all human beings are created in the image of God.11 Moral apologetics works best when it is culturally transformational.
Eschatological
The moral argument and the problem of evil are locked in a zero-sum game. One will win, and one will lose. Christianity offers principled reason to think that the glory to come will not just outweigh but definitely defeat the worst evils of this world. Christian philosopher Marilyn McCord Adams writes, “If Divine Goodness is infinite, if intimate relation to It is thus incommensurably good for created persons, then we have identified a good big enough to defeat horrors in every case.”12 Moral apologetics works best when it is eschatological.
Anthropological
Christianity gives compelling reasons to think that every person possesses infinite dignity and value—a motif found in the likes of Linville, Farrer, and Evans. To be loved by God, the very archetype of all goodness—each of us differently, but all of us infinitely—and to have been made a person in his image is to possess greater worth than we can begin to imagine. And humanity is not just valuable in the aggregate, according to Christianity. Rather, each person is unique, each is loved by God, and each is someone for whom Jesus suffered, died, and was raised. And in the book of Revelation, for all who lay down their arms and allow themselves to be vanquished by the overtures of God’s perfect love, a white stone will reveal a unique name for each one of them—marking their distinctive relationship with God and vocation in him (Rev. 2:17). Moral apologetics works best when it is universal—without neglecting the personal.
1 H. P. Owen, The Moral Argument for Christian Theism (George Allen & Unwin, 1965).
2 Such a notion is a central and recurring motif of Newman’s theological masterpiece, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London, 1845), where he explained how the meaning of an idea, in this case Christian theology, can, while maintaining its essential integrity, expand over time without undergoing corruption. On Newman’s epistemology, see An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870; repr., University of Notre Dame Press, 1979).
3 A. C. Ewing, Value and Reality: The Philosophical Case for Theism (George Allen & Unwin, 1973), 204.
4 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 160–61.
5 Adam Johnson, Divine Love Theory (Kregel, 2023). Steve Parrish’s yet-to-be-published The Nature of Moral Necessity powerfully elucidates an application of several of Johnson’s trinitarian ideas to the arena of theistic ethics and moral apologetics.
6 Robert Adams, “Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief,” in Rationality and Religious Belief, ed. C. Delaney (University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 116–40.
7 V. Raymond Edman, They Found the Secret (Zondervan, 1984), 11.
8 Faith of a Moralist (Macmillan, 1930), 209.
9 See Paul Copan, “Reinforcing the Moral Argument: Appealing to the Historical Impact of the Christian Faith,” paper presented at the Evangelical Theological Society, November 19–21, 2014, San Diego.
10 See Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just (Penguin, 2010), 166–67.
11 Richard Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” in On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993, ed. Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley (Basic Books, 1993).
12 Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Cornell University Press, 1999), 82–83.