Overview of Chapter 5
5
Contemporaries
As contemporary figures in moral apologetics proliferate, constraints of space severely limit our sketches of them. There are about twenty to discuss, so we will say proportionately less about each. Their proliferation testifies to the resurgence of interest in moral arguments in recent years. Each one is worth looking into in more detail than we are able to do here. Bibliographical information is provided for further investigation. The point here is to underscore some of the fertility, ingenuity, and richness of the contemporary discussion of moral apologetics, and several of these figures will be discussed at greater length later in the book.
A. C. Ewing
Born just a year after C. S. Lewis, A. C. Ewing (1899–1973) was a Cambridge philosopher who worked extensively on the topics of moral goodness, idealism, and various issues in metaphysics and epistemology. In his chapter called “Moral Arguments for God” in his Value and Reality, he discussed several versions of the moral argument for God while expressing some surprise that there were not more of them. He offered a variant of his own that he thought could avoid some pitfalls others fell prey to, writing that “the unconditionally compelling character of the moral law as it presents itself to us insofar as we are good men suggests as an explanatory hypothesis the view that the law is in some way bound up with the fundamental nature of reality, and that the easiest way of conceiving the objectivity of the moral law is to think of it as realized in the mind of a deity.”1 He was also to note that the character of such a deity would have to be nontrivially good, precluding such notions as, say, mere pantheism.
David Elton Trueblood
David Elton Trueblood (1900–1994) was born a year after Ewing and was a noted twentieth-century American Quaker, prolific author, and well-known theologian. In his favored account of the moral argument, he distinguished between theistic sanction of the moral law and a theistic explanation of the moral law. “The problem is not that of what will the moral law power in men’s lives, but that of a conception of the universe which will make the very existence of a moral law understandable. It is often supposed that the theistic emphasis on objectivity refers to sanction when, in fact, it refers to understanding.” He also emphasized that the moral argument is most effective when it’s part of a larger cumulative case, and he noted the distinctive power of the moral argument to reveal more of God’s character than does, say, an argument from nature. Like Taylor, he thought that within our own moral life we see God with “the mask half fallen off.”2
Austin Farrer
Austin Farrer (1904–1968), a friend and colleague of Lewis’s, focused on the intrinsic, intuitively accessible value and dignity of persons in his variant of the moral argument. Consider the way we normatively ought to think about other people. It is of great importance, Farrer argued, that we think about others in such a way that we value them properly. The only limitations that such regard for others should encounter are those that cannot be avoided: those set by the conditions of our life, as he put it. Such regard should be at once so pure and so entire that it leads to a sort of frustration coming from incompleteness of our definition of those we so regard. Thinking of our neighbors in too garden-variety a way cannot sustain the esteem we intuitively think they deserve. The conclusion to which Farrer felt compelled is that what deserves our regard is not simply our neighbor but God in our neighbor and our neighbor in God.3
Basil Mitchell
Basil Mitchell (1917–2011) was an English professor and onetime Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford. He delivered the 1974–1976 Gifford Lectures at Glasgow, which culminated in his 1980 book Morality, Religious and Secular, one among many significant publications. The lectures analyzed the moral confusion of contemporary society, relating rival conceptions of morality with a wide variety of views about the nature and predicament of man. Mitchell argued that many secular thinkers possess a traditional “Christian” conscience that they find hard to defend in terms of an entirely secular worldview.4
George Mavrodes
George Mavrodes (1926–2019) was an American philosopher who underscored the ontologically odd nature of binding moral obligations in a naturalistic world. His point about the metaphysical oddness (or “queerness,” as it used to be called) of moral facts, traditionally construed, echoed an earlier point made by J. L. Mackie. In Mackie’s case, he used such oddness as an argument against moral realism, but Mavrodes turned the tables, emphasizing that if such facts don’t fit well into a naturalistic world, so much the worse for naturalism. A theistic world, in contrast, provides them a congenial environment.5
At this juncture we should also mention Stuart C. Hackett (1925–2012), who defended the moral argument not only in his The Resurrection of Theism but also in his The Rediscovery of the Highest Good and The Reconstruction of the Christian Revelation Claim.6 His influence is hard to overestimate. Several of the featured thinkers in this volume, like Steve Evans, Paul Copan, and Mark Linville, were among his pupils.
H. P. Owen
H. P. Owen (1926–1996) was a wonderfully systematic thinker, and his work is a joy to read. He was a student of history. As such, his moral argument is couched in what was one of the better cursory sketches of the history of the moral argument. On the shoulders of Newman, Sorley, Taylor, and others, he constructed an intelligent moral argument. Distinguishing between self-evidence and self-explanation, he argued that various moral phenomena, though they fall into the former category, don’t fall into the latter, so they cry out for an adequate account. In discussing the deliverances of morality and delineating their salient features, he patiently demonstrated their theistic implications without pretending to have offered anything in the vicinity of a logical proof or demonstration. Significantly, he extended his case not just to theism generally but to Christianity particularly.7
Clement Dore
Clement Dore (1930–2016) argued, in the fourth chapter of his book Theism, that morality gives us reasons to believe in a being with God-like power and knowledge.8 He started with the Platonic insight that a person’s wrongdoing inexorably harms himself. This is an aspect of morality that no Hobbesian view of ethics can adequately explain. According to Hobbes, ethics serves to adjudicate conflicts that arise from self-interest. What kind of harm does wrongdoing entail? Dore argued that this harm must involve more than merely being a bad person, because some people are perfectly content to be bad people. In fact, some hedonists relish the prospect while still seeming to avoid great harm in this life as a result. But if morality is overriding, such people will be harmed by their significant wrongdoing. Dore contended that a being with “God-like power” and “God-like knowledge” and who is thus a person provides the best explanation of this. Although Dore’s argument hardly proved the existence of the full-fledged God of orthodox theism, he asserted that it did imply that another doctrine, which is normally associated with theism, is true—namely, that human beings survive earthly death.9
Robert Adams
Robert Adams (1937–2024) did groundbreaking work on Leibniz, virtue, and theistic ethics, and he offered innovative variants of the moral argument on that foundation. His landmark work Finite and Infinite Goods breathed new life into both a Platonic theistic account of the good and a divine command theory of the right (moral obligation).10 In addition to explicating versions of Kant’s moral argument, he offered one of his own on the basis of his divine command account. Adams thought it entirely appropriate to deploy strong moral convictions about right and wrong as premises in a reasoned argument. After defending at length divine command theory as the best account of the nature of right and wrong, he observed that since such a theory entails God’s existence, this provides a measure of evidence for God’s reality. We will have occasion to discuss him at greater length in a later chapter.
Marilyn McCord Adams
Robert’s wife, Marilyn (1943–2017), was a powerful philosopher and theologian in her own right who, as mentioned before, wrote a magisterial two-volume work on William of Ockham. Among her accomplishments was a demonstration of how God’s incommensurable goodness can help defuse the most otherwise intractable versions of the problem of evil. Writing about the problem of evil, the diametric opposite of the moral argument, she emphasized the need to address “horrendous evils,” the most difficult cases to deal with, requiring nothing less than defeat by the goodness of God. In her words, “My strategy for showing how this can be done is to identify ways that created participation in horrors can be integrated into the participants’ relation to God, where God is understood to be the incommensurate Good, and the relation to God is one that is overall incommensurably good for the participant.”11
Linda Zagzebski
Linda Zagzebski (b. 1946) did important work in theistic ethics in her book Divine Motivation Theory.12 Also, rather than asking “Why be moral?” she asks another question in its vicinity not so easily answered: “Should I try to be moral?” In short, it doesn’t make sense to attempt something one can’t do. If we are relegated to depend on our own moral powers and capacities alone, our moral effectiveness seems to be in serious jeopardy, rendering the enterprise of morality futile. Since morality presumably isn’t futile, we have reason to think that we are not relegated to depend just on our own moral powers and capacities. More recently her work on moral exemplarism contains rich implications for theistic ethics as well.13
C. Stephen Evans
C. Stephen Evans (b. 1948), a retired Baylor University Kierkegaard expert, has defended a divine command theory of moral obligations and a natural signs approach to apologetics.14 Natural signs, on Evans’s account, satisfy the Pascalian constraints of being both widely accessible and easily resistible—consonant with a measure of divine hiddenness. His use of natural signs is another way in which to couch the moral argument—something more experiential than most inductive, abductive, or deductive formulations. The two moral natural signs he adduced are human dignity/worth and moral duties. He has also written the online Stanford encyclopedia article on moral arguments.15
J. P. Moreland
J. P. Moreland (b. 1948) constructed an argument on the basis of stubborn moral facts in The Recalcitrant Imago Dei.16 Moreland’s evidential considerations for God’s existence from the arena of morality focus on central philosophical insights and the strictures imposed by what constitutes a workable worldview. A worldview is to explain reality as it is in ways that follow naturally from its central explanatory commitments. A “recalcitrant fact” is one that is obstinately uncooperative in light of attempts to handle it by some theory. Particular recalcitrant moral facts on naturalism are threefold: (1) objective, intrinsic value and an objective moral law; (2) the reality of human moral action; and (3) intrinsic human value and rights. More recently, Moreland teamed up with David Horner to write the excellent primer Metaethics, helpful in defending the sort of moral realism on which the moral argument is usually predicated.17
John E. Hare
Yale’s John E. Hare (b. 1949), son of philosopher R. M. Hare, did landmark work on Kantian moral arguments, both (in his terms) the “argument from grace” and the “argument from providence.” He was a bona fide expert on the ethics of Aristotle, Kant, Scotus, and R. M. Hare, and his primary contribution to theistic ethics and the moral argument was his trilogy on God and ethics, loosely patterned after the model of the Trinity. The book corresponding to the Son was The Moral Gap.18 The book corresponding to the Father was God’s Command, and the book focusing on the Spirit was Unity and the Holy Spirit.19 Hare and Baggett are currently editing an Oxford University Press collection on the moral argument. Later chapters will elaborate on Hare’s analysis of the two aspects of moral faith, corresponding to the fourth and fifth prongs of our own moral argument provided in part 3. Hare also effected a rapprochement of sorts between aspects of realism and prescriptivism in his “prescriptive realism” approach.20
C. Stephen Layman
C. Stephen Layman (b. 1955) began his moral argument with what he calls the overriding reason thesis (ORT), which says “the overriding (or strongest) reasons always favor doing what is morally required,” and the conditional thesis (CT), which says that “if there is no God and no life after death, then the ORT is not true.” Since there are compelling reasons to reject neither, what follows is either God’s existence or the existence of an afterlife in which virtue is rewarded. But in light of the incalculable complexity of a system like karma and the transmigration of souls, the moral order postulated by nontheistic reincarnation paradoxically provides evidence for the existence of a personal God after all.21
Jerry L. Walls
The inimitable Jerry L. Walls (b. 1955) has written a trilogy on eschatology, the third volume of which is on the topic of heaven. In that book, and elsewhere, he argued that not just theism per se but Christian theology in particular accounts for morality better and more fully than does naturalistic evolutionary theory. He advanced three arguments for this claim in Heaven.22 Christian theology not only accounts for altruism in a way that reinforces our instinctive admiration of it but it also has a ready explanation for why moral obligation has an objective ground. He added that, in a Christian account, morality is not tarnished with the sort of deception and illusion that various naturalistic accounts rely on at certain points. Walls and Baggett have also written a tetralogy on the moral argument: Good God; God and Cosmos; The Moral Argument; and The Good, the Right, and the Real.23
R. Scott Smith
R. Scott Smith (b. 1957), in his In Search of Moral Knowledge, offered an epistemic version of the moral argument against naturalism and in favor of theism.24 There he articulated several specific ethical theories, while endeavoring to construct a master argument to critique all naturalistic ethical theories in one fell swoop. He took Daniel Dennett as a paradigmatic naturalist, one who takes both cognitive science and the implications of naturalism seriously. Although Dennett is not entirely consistent, he’s hoisted by his own proverbial petard. Dennett encounters deep difficulties that undermine many of his claims, Smith argued, including any principled reason to be committed to naturalism itself. More recently, Smith has written a book-length critique of constructivism, a rival to moral realism in metaethics that we will discuss in part 2.25
Mark Linville
In Mark Linville’s (b. 1957) entry in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, he offered two independent moral arguments for God’s existence.26 The first is an argument from evolutionary naturalism, which itself has two parts. First, on evolutionary naturalism our moral beliefs lack warrant. Ethical theories predicated on naturalism are found wanting on the grounds of evolutionary moral psychology. The second part of that first argument is that theism is able to avoid such moral skepticism. The second argument is an argument from personal dignity. He tests an array of normative ethical theories for their ability to account for the essential moral standing of human persons. Egoism, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics are all found wanting in their explanatory adequacy in accounting for the Kantian principle to treat people as ends in themselves. Naturalism per se is further implicated in its failure to account for the existence of persons themselves. Theism, in contrast, is well situated and equipped to explain human persons, moral agency, and personal dignity.
Paul Copan
Paul Copan (b. 1962) has done stellar work on the moral argument, including penning one of the most anthologized versions of it and reflecting deeply on connections between the moral argument and the problem of evil. Of his numerous contributions we will mention just two, both of which involve extending the argument beyond theism to Christianity in particular. First, he has done groundbreaking work on reconciling challenging Old Testament passages with nonnegotiable moral intuitions. In that connection, he’s written no fewer than three important books.27
Second, he has also added texture and an important twist to the moral argument by adducing such historical roles played by Christ and his followers in 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 practices such as slavery, foot binding, and widow burning.28
Angus Menuge
Angus Menuge (b. 1963) has done important work on human dignity and value, debunking objections to moral knowledge, critiquing naturalistic ethics, and underscoring challenges associated with the effort to derive ethics from an unguided evolutionary process alone. For example, he distinguished between strong and weak evolutionary ethics (EE). The latter assumes moral psychology would have been different had evolution played out differently, the former that moral facts themselves would be different. Whereas strong EE holds little realistic hope of sustaining objective moral facts, weak EE precludes objective moral knowledge.29 More recently he has addressed debunking objections to moral knowledge.
Angus Ritchie
Angus Ritchie (b. 1974) has offered an epistemic variant of the moral argument. Whereas Menuge focused on the way naturalism functions to preclude moral knowledge, Ritchie, in From Morality to Metaphysics, focused more on the way naturalism has a difficult time explaining moral knowledge. After identifying weaknesses in a broad range of secular metaethical theories, Ritchie advanced the claim that the teleological nature of theistic ethics is needed to overcome the central epistemic problem he identified. Ritchie doesn’t deny that secular ethics can justify moral beliefs; rather, its weakness, unlike theistic ethics, is in explaining or accounting for how our epistemic cognitive faculties can be reliable. He presses a kind of dilemma on nontheistic accounts of morality. Subjectivist theories such as expressivism can certainly make sense of the fact that we make the ethical judgments we do, but they empty morality of its objective authority. Objectivist theories that take morality seriously, however, have difficulty explaining our capacity to make true moral judgments unless the process by which humans came to hold these capacities is one that is controlled by a being such as God.
Overview of Chapter 5
With this chapter, part 1 of the book draws to a close. Previous chapters have pointed to the long history of relevant philosophical reflections about ethical truth that proponents of the moral argument can use to make their case. The couple dozen or so contemporary figures that this last chapter considered offer a range of variants of and contributions to moral arguments for God’s existence. Some direct their gaze at issues of human value and dignity, axiological matters in need of robust explanation. Others fix their focus on the qualities of various moral facts that, while a bad fit in a secular or naturalistic world, find a congenial environment in a theistic world. Some stand on the shoulders of Immanuel Kant and either talk about the need for divine grace to be forgiven or morally transformed, or point to the need for virtue and ultimate happiness to fit together in order for morality to make full rational sense. Some highlight the intrinsic limitations of a naturalistic evolutionary story to make good enough sense of moral facts, others point to the distinctive features of authoritative moral duties to accentuate their evidential significance, while yet others point to the power of theism generally or Christianity particularly to offer a good enough response to the problem of evil. Some talk about how theism can imbue us with the requisite principled moral faith, others speak of the historical dimensions of Christianity, and others point to the power of the teleological nature of theistic ethics.
The overall impression from reviewing such a wide range of evidential considerations is that the prospects are good for a powerful cumulative moral case for theism and against ethics predicated on a secular or naturalistic paradigm. We shall attempt to gesture toward such a case in this book, drawing from and expanding on the resources of fellow moral apologists, both contemporary and historical. First, though, in part 2, we need to offer a case for the sort of moral realism on which such an argument is based.
***
That concludes our whirlwind tour of the history of the moral argument. Obviously, it remains but cursory.30 Rather than a book-length history, we thought it worthwhile to put a more succinct version here in a primer of this nature. We could have discussed several more of the contemporary figures who have added to the discussion—from Robert Garcia to Frank Beckwith, John Crosby to Andrew Loke, Matthew Flannagan to Janine Idziak, Anne Jeffrey to Elizabeth Anscombe, and more besides. Our intent in summing up so much of the history in short compass has simply been to familiarize readers with some of the rich and fertile history of moral arguments for God’s existence.31
1 A. C. Ewing, Value and Reality: The Philosophical Case for Theism (George Allen & Unwin, 1973), 204.
2 David Elton Trueblood, Philosophy of Religion (Harper & Brothers, 1957), 116–17.
3 Austin Farrer, Reflective Faith: Essays in Philosophical Theology (Wipf & Stock, 2012).
4 Basil Mitchell, Morality, Religious and Secular (Oxford University Press, 1980).
5 George Mavrodes, “Religion and the Queerness of Morality,” in Ethical Theory: Classical and Contemporary Readings, 2nd ed., ed. Louis P. Pojman (Wadsworth, 1995).
6 All now republished by Wipf & Stock.
7 H. P. Owen, The Moral Argument for Christian Theism (George Allen & Unwin, 1965); and The Christian Knowledge of God (Athlone, 1969).
8 Clement Dore, Theism (D. Reidel, 1984).
9 John Warwick Montgomery, born a year after Dore, offered a variety of evidential arguments for God’s existence; among them he put forth a moral argument to the effect that classical theism provides the necessary explanation of human dignity and human rights. Montgomery wrote The Law Above the Law (New Reformation, 1975) and Human Rights and Human Dignity (New Reformation, 2019).
10 Robert Merrihew Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (Oxford University Press, 1999).
11 Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Cornell University Press, 1999), 156.
12 Linda Zagzebski, Divine Motivation Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2004). See also Linda Zagzebski, “Does Ethics Need God?,” Faith and Philosophy 4, no. 3 (1987): 294–303.
13 Linda Zagzebski, Exemplarist Moral Theory (Oxford University Press, 2017). Earlier she had used Jesus as an example of an exemplar, but in this book she casts the theory in a way that’s consistent with philosophical naturalism. So religious implications would be more implicit here.
14 C. Stephen Evans, Natural Signs and Knowledge of God: A New Look at Theistic Arguments (Oxford University Press, 2010); and God and Moral Obligations (Oxford University Press, 2013).
15 C. Stephen Evans and David Baggett, “Moral Arguments for the Existence of God,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, last revised October 4, 2022, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-arguments-god/. I (Dave) helped a bit with this recent revision, but the bulk of the entry remains Stephen’s.
16 J. P. Moreland, The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (SCM, 2009).
17 David Horner and J. P. Moreland, Metaethics: A Short Companion (B&H Academic, 2024). Earlier in Moreland’s prolific career he also published a debate on God with Kai Nielsen that touched on ethics. See Does God Exist? A Debate Between Theists and Atheists (Prometheus Books, 1993).
18 John E. Hare, The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance (Clarendon, 1997).
19 John E. Hare, God’s Command (Oxford University Press, 2015); and Unity and the Holy Spirit (Oxford University Press, 2022). One coauthor of this book, William Lane Craig, was also born in 1949, and readers will have occasion to see some of his distinctive contributions to this whole discussion in part 3.
20 Elaborated in his God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, and Human Autonomy (Eerdmans, 2001).
21 C. Stephen Layman, “A Moral Argument for the Existence of God,” in Is Goodness Without God Good Enough?, ed. Robert K. Garcia and Nathan L. King (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 52.
22 See the last chapter of Jerry L. Walls, Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy (Oxford University Press, 2002).
23 David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (Oxford University Press, 2011); God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2016); The Moral Argument (Oxford University Press, 2019); and The Good, the Right, and the Real: Is Value a Fact? (Oxford University Press, 2025). The website Moral Apologetics.com has served as a hub of resources on the moral argument for several years now.
24 R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge: Overcoming the Fact-Value Dichotomy (IVP Academic, 2014).
25 R. Scott Smith, Exposing the Roots of Constructivism: Nominalism and the Ontology of Knowledge (Lexington Books, 2022).
26 His chapter is available online. See Mark D. Linville, “The Moral Argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, ed. William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland (Blackwell, 2009), https://appearedtoblogly.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/linville-mark-22the-moral-argument22.pdf.
27 Paul Copan, “A Moral Argument,” in To Everyone an Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview, ed. Francis Beckwith, William Lane Craig, and James Porter Moreland (InterVarsity, 2004); Copan, Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God (Baker Books, 2011); Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan, Did God Really Command Genocide? Coming to Terms with the Justice of God (Baker Books, 2014); and Copan, Is God a Vindictive Bully? Reconciling Portrayals of God in the Old and New Testaments (Baker Academic, 2022).
28 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. See also Copan, “The Biblical Worldview Context for Religious Liberty,” in Religious Liberty: Its Nature, Scope, and Limits, ed. Angus Menuge (Routledge, 2017), 11–33; Paul Copan and Thom Wolf, “Another Dimension of the Moral Argument: The Voice of Jesus and the Historical Fruits of the Christian Faith,” in A New Theist Response to the New Atheists, ed. Joshua Rasmussen and Kevin Vallier, Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology, and Biblical Studies (Routledge, 2020), 131–52.
29 Angus Menuge, “The Failure of Naturalism as a Foundation for Human Rights,” Moral Apologetics, December 13, 2014, https://www.moralapologetics.com/wordpress/the-failure-of-naturalism-as-a-foundation-for-human-rights. See also Angus Menuge, ed., Legitimizing Human Rights: Secular and Religious Perspectives (Ashgate, 2013); and Menuge, ed., Religious Liberty and the Law (Routledge, 2018).
30 For a longer version of this history, see David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, The Moral Argument: A History (Oxford University Press, 2019).
31 The forthcoming Oxford University Press book edited by John Hare and David Baggett will feature over two dozen contemporaries writing about various aspects of the moral argument and will thereby fill an important gap in the current literature.