Genetically Modified Skeptic vs Arguments for God

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Introduction

Drew McCoy has a YouTube channel called Genetically Modified Skeptic and he posted a video titled The Arguments for God's Existence Tier List responding to various arguments for theism. I’ll go through them in chronological order of the video.

Pascal’s Wager

(1:38 to 3:03)

As Genetically Modified Skeptic (GMS) presents it, Pascal’s Wager is this: if you act as if God exists and God does exist, you have infinite gain in heaven and finite loss, whereas if you act as if God doesn’t exist and God doesn’t exist you have finite gain but infinite loss in hell. Summarized in a handy table:

Belief	Gain if correct	Loss if wrong
God	Infinite	Finite
No God	Finite	Infinite

Given the gain and loss data above, the rational individual would act as if God does exist. If God exists, acting as if he does exist gives you infinite gain and at worst finite loss. Whereas if you lived as if God didn’t exist, your gain was at best finite and your loss was at worst infinite. Therefore, the rational person would act as if God does exist.

GMS claims this commits the black and white fallacy, acting as if there are only two possibilites when there are actually a lot more. After all, there are many different religions with one or more gods. Which religion to pick?

I think GMS is sort of right in his objection, but the version of Pascal’s Wager he attacks isn’t really the strongest. The strongest version of Pascal’s Wager I’ve seen is that if you’re in a situation in which atheism and Christianity are the two viable options (e.g. perhaps you believe the case for the Resurrection of Jesus is strong enough to be likely if God exists) and the probabilities between the two options are roughly equal, then you should act as if God exists. Of course, this is a particularly narrow application of Pascal’s Wager, but it is arguably true that if the conditions were met then you should act as if God exist. A nontheist might not think the aforementioned conditions are met, but if so that would be a different matter than whether it would be rational to act as if God exists if the conditions were met.

The Ontological Argument

(3:06 to 4:55)

As GMS states, there are multiple forms of the Ontological Argument and GMS (tries to) address Anselm’s version of it. In Chapter 2 of Proslogion Anselm introduces the argument like this:

For it is one thing for something to exist in a person's thought and quite another for the person to think that thing exists. For when a painter thinks ahead to what he will paint, he has that picture in his thought, but he does not yet think it exists, because he has not done it yet. Once he has painted it he has it in his thought and thinks it exists because he has done it. Thus even the fool is compelled to grant that something greater than which cannot be thought exists in thought, because he understands what he hears, and whatever is understood exists in thought. And certainly that greater than which cannot be understood cannot exist only in thought, for if it exists only in thought it could also be thought of as existing in reality as well, which is greater. If, therefore, that than which greater cannot be thought exists in thought alone, then that than which greater cannot be thought turns out to be that than which something greater actually can be thought, but that is obviously impossible. Therefore something than which greater cannot be thought undoubtedly exists both in thought and in reality.

That’s a bit of a mouthful, so let’s do a bit of analysis and simplify it a bit. One popular analysis is such that Anselm considers God as that which nothing greater can be conceived, or what is often called the “greatest conceivable being” (GCB).

1. God is the greatest conceivable being (by definition); God exists in the mind and is thus conceivable.
2. Something that exists in reality is greater than that which exists only in the mind.

3. Suppose God, the greatest conceivable being (from 1), exists only in the mind and not in reality (i.e. God does not actually exist; which is the negation of what this argument attempts to prove).
4. Then there is a conceivable being that is greater (than the being in 4), namely God existing in reality (since as 2 says, something existing in reality is greater).
5. So it is conceivable for something to have been greater than God (from 4).
6. Since God is that which nothing greater is conceivable (from 1), then it is conceivable for something to be greater than that which nothing greater is conceivable (from 5).

7. Statement (6) is absurd and cannot be rationally accepted, thus the claim of (3) must be rejected and the greatest conceivable being must exist.

As it stands I think this version of the ontological argument is unsuccessful, but not for the reason GMS claims. GMS bizarrely claims that Anslem’s argument has God’s existence as a premise, but this is not a premise in Anselm’s argument. It is a premise of Anselm’s argument that God exists in the mind but that’s not the same thing as God existing simpliciter.

A more popular objection against Anselm’s argument is attacking premise (2), the notion that existence is a great-making property. One could even argue that “existence” isn’t really a property at all (the fancy philosophy way of putting it is “existence is not a predicate”). A statement like “God is omniscient” basically claims that if God exists this entity has the property of “omniscience” (I add “if God exists” because if there is no God, then there isn’t any God to have any properties). However, even trying to phrase it like “God has the property of existence” is basically saying that if God exists, he has the property of existence, in which case “has the property of existence” isn’t adding very much to saying what God is like if he exists, and so it isn’t a real property in the sense that omniscience, redness, and having a mass of eighteen kilograms are properties. Here’s a key portion of the Anselm text I quoted earlier:

And certainly that greater than which cannot be understood cannot exist only in thought, for if it exists only in thought it could also be thought of as existing in reality as well, which is greater.

Yes we can think of God existing in reality, but that wouldn’t make him exist in reality. Similarly, we can grant that God would exist if God existed, but that doesn’t mean he exists. (I think God does exist, but I don’t think this particular argument is successful; just because a view is correct doesn’t mean that every argument for that view is a good one.)

Lots more can be said about the “existence is not a predicate” objection to premise (2), and the objection isn’t universally agreed upon, but it at least attacks a real rather than an imaginary premise.

The Kalam Cosmological Argument

(4:56 to 6:55)

The kalam cosmological argument (KCA) basically goes like this:

1. Anything that begins to exist has cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

After that, philosophers have given further arguments to try to show that the cause has some characteristics conducive for theism, e.g. the cause of the universe being nonphysical and unimaginably powerful. You can read more about that and the argument in general at this William Lane Craig article (Craig is the philosopher famous for reigniting the KCA’s popularity in the late twentieth century).

GMS’s objection is quite bizarre; he points out that the conclusion of the KCA (the universe has a cause) doesn’t by itself get you to God. That’s true, but irrelevant. The KCA syllogism doesn’t aspire to do that. The nature of the universe’s cause is left to other arguments.

The Moral Argument

(6:59 to 9:01)

The moral argument for God’s existence that GMS critiques is this:

1. If God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist.
2. Objective moral values do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Christian philosopher William Lane Craig has popularized this variety (Craig gets around, philosophically speaking, in apologetics circles). At 7:18 to 7:27 GMS essentially attacks a straw man as follows:

This argument’s first premise is unsubstantiated. It doesn’t demonstrate that the only way objective moral values can exist is if God exists.

But that is not what the first premise claims. The first premise doesn’t claim that objective moral values cannot exist if God does not exist, it claims that objective moral values do not exist if God does not exist. This is important because all one has to do to justify the first premise as probably true is to argue that it is unlikely that objective moral values exist if God does not exist. I did just that in my debate on the moral argument with Jeffery Jay Lowder of internet infidels fame, and I didn’t need to argue at all that God is necessary for objective morality to exist (though the first premise is slightly different in the debate, the general reasoning would apply). At 7:47 to 7:58 GMS attacks another straw man:

Some other moral arguments such as C.S. Lewis’s argument in Mere Christianity state that moral law has not been shown to have a natural origin so it must have come from a supernatural moral lawgiver. First of all, this is an argument from ignorance; not knowing does not excuse asserting an unsubstantiated answer. Second, evolution by natural selection is actually a pretty good explanation for why social species would behave according to practices which promote fairness, peace, and well-being among groups.

As Lewis makes clear in chapter 3 of Mere Christianity by “moral law” Lewis is not talking about descriptive patterns of behavior as GMS seems to think here, so even if evolution by natural selection did explain why our species came up with the practices it did, this is irrelevant. Lewis is talking about the “oughtness” type of morality; e.g. men ought to be unselfish. As I’ve written before, moral oughts are non-natural.

Lewis never says that the moral law must have come from a supernatural moral lawgiver simply because it has not shown to have a natural origin. After observing that we do have this inner sense of the moral law (among other things), in chapter 4 Lewis says:

All I have got to is a Something which is directing the universe, and which appears in me as a law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong. I think we have to assume it is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know—because after all the only other thing we know is matter and you can hardly imagine a bit of matter giving instructions.

Among known stuff, Lewis believes a mind is the best explanation. Maybe you disagree with Lewis’s inference to the best explanation, but it is not the same thing as an argument from ignorance; Lewis doesn’t say “It hasn’t been shown to be a natural cause, therefore a supernatural moral lawgiver is behind it.” For one, it isn’t just that it hasn’t been shown to be a natural cause; Lewis believes we have good reason to think it’s just not the nature of inanimate matter to give instructions, whereas the same doesn’t apply so well to a mind. Whether you like or dislike this reasoning, it’s not of the form “It has not been shown that p is true, therefore p is false.”

In 8:28 to 8:55 GMS asserts that this argument has the special ability he calls “denigrate” in which the user asserts or implies that their opponent lacks morals. The problem with this alleged “special ability” is that it’s not an ability of the argument at all. Nowhere does the argument say or imply that nontheist can’t be moral. William Lane Craig, incidentally, has made it clear on repeated occasions that the moral argument doesn’t claim that atheists can’t live a good and decent life.

Argument from Personal Experience

(9:08 to 12:59)

GMS puts the argument like this:

1. My personal experiences are reliable sources of information.
2. I personally experienced [insert God claim here].
3. Therefore [the God claim] is true.

William Lane Craig has been known to often assert that God can be immediately known and experienced, but even he claims this really isn’t an argument, e.g. in the Craig-Curley debate he says this:

God can be immediately known and experienced. This isn't really an argument for God's existence; rather it's the claim that you can know God exists wholly apart from arguments simply by immediately experiencing Him…. If you're sincerely seeking God, then God will make His existence evident to you. The Bible promises, "Draw near to God and He will draw near to you" (James 4. 8). We mustn't so concentrate on the proofs that we fail to hear the inner voice of God speaking to our own heart. For those who listen, God becomes an immediate reality in their lives.

This is more of an invitation than an argument. As an argument, I agree that it sucks—at least if you’re trying to use it to convince other people. There are instances in which subjective personal experiences can trump even objective evidence for the person who has had the experiences.

Think that can’t happen? Imagine you’re on trial for a crime you know you didn’t commit because of your own personal experience of you not committing the crime, but all the objective evidence available to the court stands against you. You have no objective evidence you can give to the court to prove you are being framed, but you are still rational to believe in your own innocence. Subjective personal experience can be a powerful source of rational justification. If people really do have personal experiences of God, this can potentially be a source of rational justification for belief in God.

But as an argument to convince other people, I don’t see it being much more useful than reporting your own personal experience of being innocent before a jury who sees the objective evidence heavily stacked against you.

GMS notes that personal experiences can sometimes be delusory, which is true, but insufficient to reject our personal experiences (e.g. I’ll still trust my experience that I was alive in the twentieth century). He notes people can have conflicting personal experiences, which is again true, but still insufficient. People can look at the same set of data and disagree where the evidence points, thus having different intuitive experiences of where the evidence points, but I doubt that would make GMS reject anthropogenic climate change. That said, arguments from personal experiences like this are still not that useful to convince other people.

Teleological (Fine-Tuning) Argument

(13:03 to 16:13)

For those who don’t know, fine-tuning refers to the observation that certain parameters of our universe (certain physical constants and quantities) are “fine-tuned” in the sense that if any of these parameters were altered even slightly, the universe would be life-prohibiting rather than life-permitting, and physical life would not have evolved. So why is the universe life-permitting rather than life-prohibiting? The cosmic fine-tuning being the result of design seems to be a good and straightforward explanation. Cosmic fine-tuning is taken as evidence for the universe having been designed.

GMS makes the claim that this argument makes a false dichotomy fallacy at around 13:43 to 13:58:

First it makes use of a false dichotomy presenting pure chance and an intelligent creator as the only two possibilities when it hasn’t successfully ruled out other options. There could perhaps be some purely physical rule to the universe which demands that these constants be the way they are.

William Lane Craig however has often introduced the fine-tuning argument this way:

1. The fine-tuning is due either to physical necessity, chance, or design.
2. It is not due to physical necessity or chance.
3. Therefore, it is due to design.

Now perhaps GMS doesn’t believe that physical necessity has been successfully ruled out, but if the third possibility of physical necessity had been considered as a possibility and the argumentation against physical necessity for fine-tuning is just unsuccessful, this isn’t a case of a false dichotomy, since three possibilities were indeed considered.

Perhaps the physical constants are physically necessary in the sense that their values (represented numerically in physics) are the way they are in the universe and there’s nothing within the physical universe that can change it (it would require something supernatural to affect them). Note that physical necessity is distinct from metaphysical necessity which is the necessity of the way things could have been in a more absolute sense. If we define a possible world as a complete description of the way reality is or could have been like, some believe there are possible worlds with different physical laws, and that is at least partly why we need empirical study to see what the physical laws of our universe are actually like. In contrast, there are no possible worlds with a married bachelor.

But even if physical constants are physically necessary, we would end up with fine-tuned physical necessities and would not solve the problem or even really provide an alternative to chance.

To illustrate why, consider the following Meter Shower Scenario. Suppose a meteor shower clearly spelled out on the moon, “There is a cosmic designer; I supernaturally fine-tuned certain parameters of this universe so that this message would appear.” Now suppose we do find such fine-tuned parameters that can be expressed as numerical values, like a series of multiple dials that are set extremely precisely for the meteor shower text to appear. Suppose also that the parameters are physically necessary (the values are part of the rules of the universe, and no force purely within the universe can alter them) but the physical necessities are nonetheless fine-tuned so that if the values were altered even slightly, no meteor shower text would appear. Clearly there’s still sense in which it is incredibly unlikely that the fine-tuned physical necessities happen to be the way they are in the absence of a cosmic designer, because this fine-tuning just doesn’t seem to be metaphysically necessary. True, one could in this scenario claim that it is metaphysically necessary that we’d see such a meteor shower text, but that would seem highly implausible under the circumstances. A cosmic designer would seem to be the best explanation of the meteor shower text.

Similarly, even if the physical constants for a life-permitting universe are physically necessary, they don’t seem to be the sort of thing that is metaphysically necessary. The notion that there couldn’t have been a life-prohibiting universe to the point of a life-prohibiting universe being metaphysically impossible does not seem plausible.

GMS continues at around 13:59 to 14:12:

Second, this is an argument from ignorance because the arguer doesn’t know how such an unlikely thing could have possibly happened, they posit unsubstantiated explanation: a God, instead of saying, “I don’t know.”

First, the conclusion is “design” not “God” (though to be fair, the fact—if it is so—that the universe was designed would make atheism considerably less plausible). Second, we can see how such an unlikely thing could have happened, it’s just…unlikely (in the absence of a cosmic designer). Third, is this really an argument from ignorance? Arguments from ignorance take the form of something like “It has not been shown that p is false, therefore p is true.” Maybe somewhere somebody has argued this way in presenting the fine-tuning argument, but it’s just not an inherent part of the reasoning.

One could more charitably see the fine-tuning argument as an inference to the best explanation. To illustrate why, consider the Meteor Shower Scenario in which someone claims the fine-tuning for the meteor shower is clear evidence of design. Suppose a skeptic responded with this:

You’re saying you don’t know how such an unlikely thing could have happened, we must posit an unsubstantiated explanation: a designer, instead of saying “I don’t know.”

This rebuttal is less than convincing, in part because (1) simply saying that A is evidence for B here doesn’t by itself imply an argument from ignorance like the skeptic described above; (2) the fine-tuning being explained is the evidence for the posited “unsubstantiated” explanation of design; and (3) this response seems like a really desperate maneuver to avoid an intelligent designer of the cosmos.

Lots more could be said about the fine-tuning argument, but the objection GMS gave here is highly unsuccessful, as were many of the objections presented in the video with respect to other arguments for theism.

Can Objective Morality be Subjectively Perceived?

The Objection

One objection I’ve seen to objective morality on the internet, in one form or another, goes something like this: we use subjectively experienced intuition to believe in objective morality. This, somehow, is supposed to argue against objective morality or at least our justification for it. If belief in objective morality relies on subjective intuition, how can morality be objective if it’s subjectively perceived? Doesn’t the fact that supposedly objective morality is subjectively perceived mean we don’t really have any justification for accepting moral objectivism?

The answer to both questions is, “No.”

Responses

First, note that in practice, everything we know about is subjectively perceived; our own perceptions (intuitive and sensory) are all we have to go on. Yes, we can ask other people to see if they share our experiences, but the perception that there even are other people relies on, you guessed it, our own subjective experiences. At the end of the day, subjective experiences, i.e. the experiences of the self, are used to justify all of our beliefs. The fact that something is subjectively perceived thus doesn’t imply that it isn’t objectively real; e.g. my subjective experiences can report a tree existing with that tree being objectively real.

Second, some perceived truth being believed on the basis of subjectively experienced intuition doesn’t imply that the truth isn’t objective, even when people have disagreeing intuitions. If for example someone’s logic intuition told them there could be a married bachelor despite the self-contradiction, whereas your rational intuition says such a self-contradictory thing cannot exist, you’re still justified in believing that There can’t be any married bachelors is objectively true.

Or to use an example perhaps closer to real life, suppose a creationist and evolutionist look at the same data, but have differing intuitive perceptions about where that evidence points (the evolutionist thinks it’s evidence for evolution, the creationist disagrees). Does that mean there’s no objective fact of the matter about whether the data is evidence for evolution? Clearly not. Disagreeing, subjectively experienced intuitions do not imply that the intuitively perceived truths are not objective, nor do such disagreeing intuitions imply that we can’t be justified in believing them to be objectively true.

How?

So how do confused objections like, “Morality is subjectively perceived, so it’s not objective” arise? Perhaps one reason for the confusion is a conflation between moral epistemology (how moral truths are known) with moral ontology (the reality of morality; e.g. whether it’s objective or subjective). The moral epistemology may, in one sense, be subjective. But it doesn’t follow that the moral truths themselves are not objective.

A Quick Argument for Objective Morality

Here’s a quick deductive argument for moral objectivism, where by moral truths being “objective” I mean that they hold independently of human opinion.

The Argument

1. It is morally wrong for a man to torture an infant just for fun.
2. It would remain morally wrong to torture an infant just for fun even if a baby torturer thought otherwise and killed everyone who didn’t agree with him.
3. If (1) and (2) are true, then objective morality exists.
4. Therefore, objective morality exists.

The justification for premise (3) is that once we accept the truth of (1) and (2) it leads to moral objectivism via this step-by-step reasoning:

1. In the thought experiment of premise (2), something remains morally wrong even when all human opinion thinks otherwise (since the torturer killed off everyone who doesn’t agree with him);
2. in which case the moral truth “It’s morally wrong for a man to torture infants just for fun” would be holding despite human opinion;
3. in which case it seems we have an example of an objective moral truth (i.e., holding true independently of human opinion) thereby giving us objective morality.

If (a), (b), and (c) are all true as they seem to be, then we have an example of an objective moral truth. (For those who disagree, do you disagree with (a), (b), or (c)? If so, which one(s)?)

You could deny premise (1). Do you believe there’s nothing morally wrong with torturing infants just for fun?

You could bite the bullet and deny premise (2), say it’s not morally wrong for a man to torture infants just for fun as long as he believes otherwise and kills everyone who doesn’t with him. Do you think that’s a reasonable belief?

Why I Like It

I think this is a good deductive argument for moral objectivism because it quickly reveals how intellectually pricey it is to deny objective morality. It’s not reasonable to believe that there’s nothing morally wrong with torturing infants just for fun, so premise (1) is not plausibly false. Likewise, it’s not reasonable to believe that it’s not morally wrong for a man to torture infants just for fun as long as he believes otherwise and kills everyone who doesn’t agree with him; so premise (2) is not plausibly false.

This forces the disbeliever of moral objectivism in a very intellectually uncomfortable position, especially in a debate, because even if the disbeliever is willing to bite a bullet and reject a premise, most people won’t find the disbeliever’s premise rejection tenable.

Redefining Morality

In my first live oral debate (available on YouTube) my interlocutor and I debated the truth of the first premise of this moral argument:

1. If God doesn’t exist, then objective morality doesn’t exist.
2. Objective morality does exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

In my opening statement (1:31 to 11:57) I argue that objective morality probably doesn’t exist if atheism is true. My interlocutor got around the problem by redefining “morality,” but why would anyone do that?

The Problem

One reason a nontheist might redefine morality is that there’s a huge problem atheism has with objective morality, and in particular objective moral oughtness. Oughtness is a crucial part of morality; an action is morally wrong for someone only if they ought not to do it. So without moral oughtness nothing is morally wrong, not even torturing infants just for fun. Moral objectivism says moral truths hold independently of whether we think they do, e.g. it’s morally wrong for us to torture infants just for fun even if we believe otherwise. On a theistic worldview, it makes perfect sense that there’d be some component of reality transcending our opinion that says we shouldn’t do certain things, but let’s suppose atheism is true.

On atheism objective moral oughtness is pretty strange when you think about it; it’s invisible, nonphysical, and empirically undetectable. So why shouldn’t the consistent atheist reject the existence of this invisible nonphysical thing that cannot be empirically detected, if this atheist is to reject the existence of invisible nonphysical deities that have not been empirically detected? Given atheism, it seems more likely that people’s belief in moral oughtness is a delusion brought about by evolution to get us to behave in certain ways and help our species survive. Given atheism, moral oughtness probably doesn’t exist.

Suppose the atheist is willing to bite the bullet and say, “OK, I think moral oughtness is a delusion brought about by evolution to get us to behave in certain ways, and so nothing is actually morally wrong, not even torturing infants just for fun.” But one has to ask themselves, which is more plausible: that there’s something morally wrong with torturing an infant just for fun, or atheism? There are atheists who would sooner believe that there’s nothing wrong with torturing an infant just for fun than abandon atheism, but by my lights that level of irrationality is akin to religious fanaticism.

Some atheists don’t want to say, “I don’t see anything wrong with torturing infants just for fun,” since that makes them look like kind of crazy, and yet some of these very same atheists want to affirm atheism. One way to dodge the problem—or at least avoid thinking about the real problem—is to redefine morality so that a term like “moral wrongness” refers to something that is far more compatible with atheism than what most people mean by “moral wrongness.” It sounds crazy but there’s kind of a logic to it, starting with how one defines the word “ought.”

Redefining Morality

In the English language we use “oughts” in a couple different ways. One way is what philosophers call the hypothetical imperative, and 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant says the hypothetical imperative represents the “practical necessity of a possible action as means to something else.” For example, a statement like, “If you want to live, you ought to breathe” might mean something like, “As a matter of practical necessity, you need to breathe to live.” Here the “ought” is conditioned upon some particular goal or purpose (breathing) and thus has a purely descriptive meaning, viz. describing what you need to do as a matter of practical necessity to achieve some goal. Philosophers call these oughts “conditional oughts” or “hypothetical oughts” (since they are the oughts of hypothetical imperatives). We can define “descriptive ought” as any ought that is nothing more than some purely descriptive state of affairs (hypothetical oughts are an obvious example, but one could theoretically come up with some other purely descriptive meaning for the word “ought”).

On the other hand, there’s another type of ought as in “You ought not to torture infants just for fun” where the “ought” is not a shorthand for some purely descriptive meaning; torturing infants just for fun is something you just ought not to do, period. We can call this type of ought the prescriptive ought or the unconditional ought. This type of ought is (a) prescriptive; and (b) is not a descriptive ought (and is thus not identical to some purely descriptive state of affairs). Unless otherwise specified, when I use terms like “should” or “ought” in this article I’ll be using the prescriptive ought.

The type of “ought” morality has in mind is the “prescriptive ought.” For some atheists unwilling to bite the bullet of moral nihilism (the view that says there is no moral ought and nothing is morally wrong) this can produce cognitive dissonance. They want to believe atheism, yet on atheism, the prescriptive ought probably doesn’t exist, and you’d look pretty crazy if you said nothing is morally wrong, not even torturing infants just for fun. For these atheists who want to affirm atheism but also want to affirm that torturing infants just for fun is morally wrong, what’s an atheist to do?

Proposal: redefine the word “morality” to not have that troublesome “ought” component. That way one say “torturing infants just for fun is morally wrong” while affirming atheism.

Problem: part of what we mean when we say an action is morally wrong for someone is that they ought not to do it. Moral wrongness without the “ought” isn’t real moral wrongness.

Solution: redefine “ought”! Redefine the moral ought so that “ought” is a shorthand for some purely descriptive meaning. That way it’s empirically detectable and not quite so metaphysical.

Problem: most people have the prescriptive ought in mind when they think of moral wrongness. So what’s an atheist to do?

Solution: don’t accept that most people have the prescriptive ought in mind when they think of moral oughtness (as by remaining agnostic about it or by thinking that most people probably don’t have the prescriptive ought in mind when thinking of moral wrongness).

Through such mental gymnastics, an atheist can happily affirm morality’s existence without that troublesome prescriptive ought. Such rationalization might seem incredible, but it happened in my first live oral debate! My interlocutor redefined morality so that it doesn’t have the unconditional ought, and he actually denied that most people have the prescriptive ought in mind with respect to moral prohibitions.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen an atheist engage in this sort of rationalization, and I think a lot of other atheists do it also—not in the sense that they use terms like “conditional ought” and “unconditional ought,” but in the sense of recognizing (on some level) that the prescriptive sort of ought probably doesn’t exist if atheism is true and so they redefine morality to use the descriptive ought instead. These atheists are potentially oblivious to the fact that most use the prescriptive ought when thinking of moral wrongness.

For the most part, I don’t think that atheists who do this are doing this consciously; I think it’s more like a psychological defense mechanism. Atheists don’t want to appear horrendously irrational so they convince themselves, “Yes, I can say on atheism torturing infants just for fun is morally wrong,” and they tell other people they believe it’s morally wrong even though they really don’t. These atheists are what I call “stealth moral nihilists” in that they claim to believe in moral wrongness but they really don’t since they reject the prescriptive ought and redefine terms like “moral wrongness” so that they have a purely descriptive meaning, e.g. an atheist could redefine “moral wrongness” to mean something like, “an action that negatively affects the well-being of a conscious creature unnecessarily.”[1] Such redefinitions often have a grain of truth; “harming the well-being of conscious creatures unnecessarily” is often morally wrong, but without the “we ought not to do that” element, it isn’t real moral wrongness.

Conclusion

I want to reiterate that for the most part, I don’t think that atheists who do this are doing this consciously; I think it’s more like a psychological defense mechanism. It needn’t be the case that a stealth moral nihilist is consciously and deliberately lying when they say they believe in moral wrongness. They are quite potentially oblivious to the fact that most people use the prescriptive ought vis-à-vis moral wrongness. The nontheist I debated in my first live oral debate was neither the first nor the last stealth moral nihilist I encountered when talking about the moral argument. If you discuss the moral argument with a nontheist and the nontheist claims to accept objective morality, it might behoove you to define the sort of “ought” you have in mind and make sure dealing with a stealth moral nihilist.

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[1] There’s a problem of vagueness for defining “moral wrongness” as “an action that negatively affects the well-being of a conscious creature unnecessarily.” What makes an action necessary or unnecessary? Necessary for what purpose?

Denying Both Premises of the Moral Argument

Behold the deductive moral argument (or at least one variety of it):

1. If God does not exist, then objective morality does not exist.
2. Objective morality does exist.

I’ve seen a number of atheists claim both premises to be false. In this article I’ll give an informal proof to explain why that is impossible.

In a way this article is redundant, since I gave a formal proof for the falsity of both premises being logically impossible in part 2 of my introductory logic series, with part 2 also explaining the basic symbolic logic and various rules of logic needed to understand the proof (thus it isn’t necessary to read introductory logic part 1 to understand the proof, though it wouldn’t hurt either). So what inspired me to write this article to present a more informal proof?

Inspiration

In one Facebook dialogue somebody denied both premises. I said it was logically impossible for both premises to be false, and gave a link that had the proof of this in symbolic logic while noting, “If you’re not well-versed in formal logic, not to worry, because the article gives a crash course of some symbolic logic rules.” His first response to this was to ignore the proof entirely while saying there is “no reason” why one can’t reject both premises. I pressed further to get him to respond to the logical argument against both premises being false, but he seemed to have little motivation to learn the logic and understand the objection (judging from e.g. him saying “I will attempt to go back over this at some point, but I really have very little motivation to do so”). It’s this sort of behavior that tempts me to embrace the stereotype of atheists being irrational and giving lip service to logic while in reality having little real interest in learning it (at least when they discover it might be used against them).

But that’s a temptation I’m going to resist. I realize my articles introducing logic require a bigger time investment than reading a 100-word Facebook post, and that not everybody is interested in learning formal logic despite the benefits of doing so (e.g. helping one to think more logically). So in this post I’m going to distill some of the reasons of the logical proof in plain English.

Understanding the First Premise

For brevity’s sake I’ll abbreviate “objective morality” as OM. By morality being objective I mean that moral truths hold independently of human belief and perception of them (this matches closely with how “objective morality” is often defined in the context of the moral argument[1]). Behold the first premise:

1. If God does not exist, then OM does not exist.

Among the bad objections against the moral argument are straw men and red herring fallacies against the first premise. So to help prevent that, I’ll note what the first premise is not saying. It is not saying that God grounds morality—even some atheists agree with the first premise and they don’t believe God grounds anything. Nor is the first premise saying it is impossible for OM to exist in the absence of God; it merely says it isn’t the case that OM exists without God.

If it’s hard to see why that would be true here’s another way to look at the first premise. It is important to understand that whether we should believe an if-then statement often depends on the background information we possess, e.g. If it rained heavily in the last five minutes, then Sam’s car is wet depends on factors like whether Sam’s car is in a garage. Similarly, if you believe this equation is true…

God does not exist + background info = OM does not exist

…then you believe If God does not exist, then OM does not exist and to think otherwise is to misunderstand the meaning of the first premise. The first premise is not saying it is impossible for OM to exist without God, only that given the facts of the real world we are in OM does not exist if God does not exist.

The Proof

Let =entails⇒ signify “entails (by the rules of logic).” For example:

I have a hand and I have a leg =entails⇒ I have a leg

The above is true thanks to a rule of logic known as simplification (which I explain in introductory logic part 1).

A very important fact in the proof is this: if the following is true….

God does not exist + background info =entails⇒ OM does not exist

…then the first premise is true, and to think otherwise is to misunderstand the meaning of the first premise.

Now suppose we know the second premise to be false, i.e. OM does not exist is part of our background info. Then the first premise would be true because we’d get this:

God does not exist + background info

    =entails⇒ God does not exist and OM does not exist

    =entails⇒ OM does not exist

And thus the following entailment would be true:

God does not exist + background info =entails⇒ OM does not exist

Which would mean that the first premise is true. Once we accept OM does not exist as part of our background info, it inevitably leads to the above entailment and thus to the first premise. Thus it is logically impossible for both premises to be false, because the falsity of the second premise (OM does not exist) entails the truth of the first premise.

It is also worth noting that God, as traditionally conceived, entails the existence of objective moral values; God is morally good, and is good independently of whether humans believe him to be so, e.g. God was morally good prior to humans existing. Thus, God entails objective morality existing.

Conclusion

Whether we should believe an if-then statement often depends on the background information we possess, e.g. If it rained heavily in the last five minutes, then Sam’s car is wet depends on factors like whether Sam’s car is in a garage. Similarly, when interpreted correctly the first premise is saying that given the facts of the real world we are in, it is not the case that OM exists if God does not exist. Thus if you believe the following entailment to be true…

God does not exist + background info =entails⇒ OM does not exist

…then you believe If God does not exist, then OM does not exist is true, and to think otherwise is to misunderstand the meaning of the first premise. So if you’re an atheist who denies moral objectivism (and thus has OM does not exist as part of their background info) you accept the first premise, and to think otherwise is to misunderstand what the first premise means. In contrast, if God (a being who is morally good independently of human opinion) exists, objective morality exists.

Once we accept the falsity of the second premise (OM does not exist) as part of our background info, it inevitably leads to the above entailment and thus to the first premise. It is impossible for both premises to be false because the falsity of the second premise entails the truth of the first premise. All that is a bit rough, so if you want a rigorous formal proof for the logical impossibility of both premises I recommend reading part 2 of my introductory logic series.

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[1] A few examples:

1. Adams, Robert M. The Virtue of Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 105.
2. Craig, William Lane. Reasonable Faith, Third Edition (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 2008), p. 173.
3. Peter Byrne’s article on the moral argument that used to be part of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

It is also worth considering that the Oxford Dictionary of English lists this as one of the definitions of objectivism, “[PHILOSOPHY] the belief that certain things, especially moral truths, exist independently of human knowledge or perception of them.” Thus on this definition moral objectivism would be the belief that moral truths exist independently of human knowledge or perception of them.

Bad Objections to the Moral Argument

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Bad Objections to the Moral Argument

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The Moral Argument

There have been some bad objections against the moral argument, but before I get to that I’ll describe what sort of moral argument I’ll be talking about:

(1)	If God does not exist, then objective morality does not exist.
(2)	Objective morality does exist.
(3)	Therefore, God exists.

I’ll call the above argument the deductive moral argument, because the above argument is deductively valid, i.e. the premises entail the conclusion such that it’s impossible for the argument to have true premises and a false conclusion. The only way for the argument’s conclusion to be false is for a premise to be false.

Premise (1) has its variants, e.g. “If God does not exist, then objective moral values and duties do not exist.” By morality being “objective” I mean that it exists independently of human belief and perception of it, e.g. torturing infants just for fun is morally wrong independently of human opinion. I’ll also call this idea moral objectivism.

The Premises

The moral argument is deductively valid, but is it sound (deductively valid + true premises)? That’s where justifying the premises comes in. In Does Objective Morality Exist If God Does Not Exist? I justified the first premise, arguing that objective morality probably doesn’t exist if atheism is true. In Does Objective Morality Exist? I justified the second premise, appealing to examples of things that are objective morally wrong and considering alternatives to moral objectivism.

Once the theist has offered justification for both premises of the deductive moral argument, an objection against the argument should aim for showing that there’s a premise that is false or at least unjustified, since if both premises are justifiably true that will be troubling for those who wish to deny the argument’s soundness. Yet the bad objections I’ll talk about here not only fail to show that there’s a false or unjustified premise, they also commit outright fallacies.


Bad Objection #1: The moral argument’s definition of “objective” is wrong

Objection:

The correct definition of “objective” is “independent of the mind.” However, the moral argument as explained here uses the term “objective” to mean something like “independent of human opinion,” and that’s an incorrect definition of “objective.” Therefore, not only is the moral argument unsound, but objective morality is independent of God by definition.

Rebuttal:

Like many words in the English language, the word “objective” means different things in different contexts. In the context of the moral argument, “objective” often does mean something like “independent of human opinion.” Writing in the context of the moral argument, philosopher of religion William Lane Craig wrote that to “say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is good or evil independently of whether any human being believes it to be so.”[1] Also writing in the context of the moral argument is Robert Adams, a philosopher who taught at Yale, who speaks of a fact being “objective in the sense that whether it obtains or not does not depend on whether any human being thinks it does.”[2] Last but not least is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on the moral argument which speaks of moral properties being “objective in the sense that they hold or not regardless of human opinion.”

Let’s suppose though that these professionals don’t know what the word “objective” means within the context of their own profession. The principle of charity would then suggest we interpret their definitions of “objective” as stipulative definitions, in which case there’s still no problem.

Another reason this objection is a bad one is that all it does is complain about the words used to express the premises (using the word “objective” to express the concept of “existing independently of human belief and perception of it”). It really doesn’t do anything to attack the truth of the premises. If one uses the objection to try to show that the moral argument shouldn’t be accepted as sound, the objection commits the red herring fallacy (supposing a claim is refuted by arguing for an irrelevant conclusion), since even if the wrong word was used to express the meaning of the premises, that isn’t at all relevant to whether the premises are justifiably true.


Bad Objection #2: Evolution explains our moral behavior; God isn’t needed

Objection:

We don’t need theism to explain why we don’t eat babies and rape our neighbors. Evolutionary pressures force humans to behave in certain ways to help our species survive. If morality is defined as certain patterns of behavior that include e.g. refraining from raping and stealing, we see that God isn’t needed for such morals and we have no reason to believe premise (1).

Rebuttal:

The problem with this objection is that it misconstrues what type of morality the argument is talking about. Consider for example objective moral duties, which have to do with right and wrong behavior. An action is morally wrong for someone only if they ought not to do it, and an action is morally obligatory for someone only if they ought to do it. So if moral duties exist there is an oughtness property associated with them, and on moral objectivism that oughtness exists objectively. But the existence of this sort of thing (properties of objectively existing oughtness) is well outside the scope of evolution.

At best, evolution explains why we believe in objective moral duties (such beliefs helping to bring about survival conducive behavior); it doesn’t explain the existence of objective moral duties. The same sort of thing goes for objective moral values. Evolution might help explain why we believe in objective moral values (e.g. believing that helping others is objectively good helps encourage such actions), but it doesn’t explain the existence of objective moral values.

In sum, the “evolution explains our nicenesss” objection uses the term “morality” as referring to certain patterns of behavior, which is just not how the moral argument is using the term, and so by misconstruing the first premise this objection commits the straw man fallacy (distorting an opponent’s position before attacking it). If atheism is true, we might indeed act in the same way we do in fact behave thanks to evolution etc., but premise (1) claims that this behavior does not have any objective moral dimension (wrongness, etc.) if atheism is true.

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[1] Craig, William Lane. Reasonable Faith, Third Edition (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 2008), p. 173.

[2] Adams, Robert M. The Virtue of Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 105.

Bayes’ Theorem and the Moral Argument

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In my previous blog entry I gave a quick introduction to Bayes’ theorem. In this blog entry I’ll show how Bayes’ theorem can be used in the service of theism.

When I put forth for the moral argument, I that argued that “If God does not exist, then objective morality does not exist” was likely true, and that it seems unlikely on atheism that objective morality exists. Another way to put it: “The probability that objective morality exists given that atheism is true is low.” With the conception of God I’m using, the existence of God entails that objective morality exists (God is morally good independently of human opinion), such that “The probability that objective morality exists given that God exists” is 100%. So we can construct a form of the moral argument that uses Bayes’ theorem and the following symbols:

• H is the hypothesis that God exists.
• ~H is the proposition that God does not exist (and thus that atheism is true).
• E is the evidence of objective morality.
• Pr(E|H) is the probability that objective morality exists given that God exists.
• Pr(E|~H) is the probability that objective morality exists given that atheism is true.

That Pr(E|H) = 1 is pretty straightforward given the conception of God we’re using here, but the other probabilities aren’t so straightforward and will perhaps vary depending on the individual. Still, suppose we have someone who is truly agnostic (and thus Pr(H) and Pr(~H) are both 50%) but comes to believe in objective morality, and assigns the following probabilities:

• Pr(E|~H) = 0.25
• Pr(H) = 0.5
• Pr(~H) = 0.5
• Pr(E|H) = 1

One limitation of Bayes’ theorem is that the probabilities aren’t always clear, e.g. not everyone will agree on the correct value of Pr(E|~H). That said, if we had an agnostic that uses the above probabilities, the rules of probability suggest the agnostic should adjust his probability belief in theism using this version of Bayes’ theorem:

Pr(H|E) =	Pr(H) × Pr(E|H) Pr(H) × Pr(E|H) + Pr(~H) × Pr(E|~H)

Plugging in the values into Bayes’ theorem...

Pr(H|E) =

0.5 × 1 0.5 × 1 + 0.5 × 0.25

=

0.5 0.625

= 0.8

Thus leaving the probability of theism given objective morality at 80%. Your own beliefs about the probabilities of e.g. Pr(E|~H) may differ than those of our hypothetical agnostic. If so, experiment and see what you get!