Argument from Evil as an Internal Critique

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Introduction

Even if certain atheists reject moral objectivism, can such atheists still use the argument from evil as an internal critique of theism?

A Problem for Atheists Who Reject Moral Objectivism

As I wrote about in my article Rosenberg’s Argument from Evil Folly, there’s a big problem for the atheist in using the argument from evil if the atheist in question believes objective morality does not exist. People can have different ideas of what sorts of things are morally good. Suppose for example a theist has a standard of goodness such that it’s good that God permits the evil we see for certain reasons that are morally sufficient on this standard of goodness. Some atheists might say that if God adopted their standard of goodness, God would not permit the evil we see. But without an objective moral standard, there’s no objective fact of the matter about which standard of goodness God would adopt if he existed, and thus there’d be no objective fact of the matter whether God would permit evil if he existed, in which case the argument from evil would collapse under its own weight.

A Solution?

Another idea is to use the argument from evil as an internal critique. For example, couldn’t the atheist at least criticize the theist for having an inconsistency in the theist’s conception of goodness with respect to a perfectly good God allowing evil? That depends on the theist, but it’s relatively trivial to construct a view of goodness that is consistent with a perfectly good God allowing evil in the world. Suppose for example a hypothetical theist says that it is morally good for us humans to try to fight against evil (refraining from doing morally wrong actions, advancing medical technology, learning to share our food with the hungry, etc.) with the limited abilities that we have, with the obstacles we face etc. and that this is better than God making the evils any less bad, such that if God adopted this standard of goodness God would allow the evil we see (on this view, it’s good that God permits evil in the way that he does, but it’s not necessarily good that we humans permit evil; in a sense God and humans would have different responsibilities). Maybe this view of the hypothetical theist is wrong, but it’s not self-contradictory, and so there would be no inconsistency in this hypothetical theist’s conception of goodness with respect to a perfectly good God allowing evil.

There is another way an atheist who isn’t a moral objectivist could supply an internal critique. God is not only perfectly morally good, he is also all-loving. In the June 2020 debate on Capturing Christianity between Cosmic Skeptic and Inspiring Philosophy, Cosmic Skeptic said this at around 1:46:23:

Let’s not talk about good and evil because if they’re not objective maybe it’s unhelpful. But if you think that God is all-loving as a separate point then the question just reformulates itself. It’s not just a question about what’s loving and what’s not. It’s like we know facts about the universe. We know that children get cancer and we have to be committed to the view that that is loving; that it is loving to allow a child to get cancer. It’s the same problem as saying you have to accept that it is good or at least not evil for a child to get cancer. It would just be framed differently. Whatever the person believes, as you say Cameron that’s probably the best way to answer it, with any argument I ever make on any debate that I do, on any video I make, it’s always an argument of consistency—pretty much, most of the time. And that’s what I’m looking for here; is just consistency.[1]

Does it follow that if a loving God permits cancer, that it is loving to allow a child to get cancer? No. For starters, let’s ask this question: why assume that a loving God would not permit suffering? Presumably it’s because that if you love someone you value their well-being. It’s reasonable that loving someone implies valuing that person’s well-being, but the problem is that a morally good God might value other things as well, things that “interfere” with valuing one’s well-being.

To give an example of how valuing someone’s well-being can conflict with another value, suppose a loving and just judge is tasked with sentencing a man who has committed a heinous crime. The judge loves everyone including the man she is sentencing, so she values the man’s well-being, but on the other hand she also values punishing those who commit heinous crimes. So, the judge gives the man a long prison sentence to pay for his crime, even though she loves the man (by virtue of loving everyone) and values his well-being, and even though a lengthy prison sentence would decrease the man’s well-being.

Obviously the child Cosmic Skeptic has in mind hasn’t done anything wrong to deserve cancer, so the loving and just judge doesn’t work as analogy, but it does work to illustrate this point: values can conflict, including valuing someone’s well-being. If God is not just all-loving but also morally good, God could conceivably have other values that supersede the immediate well-being of humans. Imagine a hypothetical theist who believes God is all-loving but also believes that God is morally good, and that God adopts a standard of goodness such that it is good that God permits the observed suffering we see even though he loves us all, and that (at least in part) because God is all-loving our suffering in the mortal realm is finite and a pleasant everlasting life is available to every human who freely chooses God. This hypothetical theist grants it is not loving to permit suffering, but believes it is good that God permits the finite suffering we observe; God has values that supersede the immediate well-being of certain individuals. Again, maybe this view of the hypothetical theist is wrong, but it’s not self-contradictory, and so there would be no inconsistency in this hypothetical theist’s conception of goodness with respect to a perfectly good and all-loving God allowing evil.

Conclusion

The problem of evil fails as an internal critique not just against a morally good God but an all-loving and morally good God, at least tout court. It’s reasonable that an all-loving God would value our well-being. However, a theist could believe that while God values our well-being because he is perfectly loving, this is only one of the things that God values, and that other values could outweigh our immediate well-being such that an all-loving God who is also perfectly morally good would permit the evil we see.

I said that the problem of evil fails as an internal critique against an all-loving and morally good God tout court, but the problem of evil could succeed as an internal critique if the theist really did adopt a standard of moral goodness in which it is not good that God permits the evil we see. So in a way whether the argument from evil works as an internal critique depends on the theist. My objection is that the internal critique is not inherently successful; the theist could easily adopt a standard of moral goodness that evades the problem. Alternatively, the theist could say that while she knows some moral values (“moral values” in this case being “stuff that’s morally good”), she doesn’t necessarily know all the values, much less all values in conjunction with the appropriate weights for each value, such that for all she knows God has morally sufficient reasons for allowing the evil we see even if those reasons are beyond her ken (there are even more complications for whether to permit evil beyond knowing all the values and their appropriate weights, but for purposes of this blog article I’m mostly focusing on this).

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[1] I’ve lightly edited the quote to remove some filler words such as “um” and “right” for better flow.

Fine-Tuning: Barnes vs Malpass

Fine-Tuning: Barnes vs Malpass

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Introduction

Capturing Christianity hosted a fine-tuning debate between Luke Barnes and Alex Malpass in 2018-04-21.

For those who don’t already know, cosmic fine-tuning is the observation that given the physical laws of our universe, certain constants (such as the mass of the electron) and quantities (such as the entropy of the early universe) in our universe are “fine-tuned” in the sense that the life-permitting parameters of the universe are extremely narrow, such that if they were altered even slightly physical life would not have existed. The fine-tuning argument (FTA) argues that the fine-tuning of the universe, i.e. that the universe is life-permitting instead of life-prohibiting in these circumstances, is evidence for theism (sometimes using a relatively modest conclusion; e.g. claiming that design is the best explanation for the universe being life-permitting).

In my opinion the debate was excellent, and the debate was mostly over philosophy rather than the scientific claims. Perhaps that was to be expected, since the theist arguing on behalf of FTA (Luke Barnes) is a cosmologist and the person arguing against it is a philosopher. I’ll do an overview of the debate, but since the debate is nearly two hours long I’ll obviously have to skip over some details.

Debate Overview

Opening Statements

Luke Barnes gives his opening statement starting at around 2:58 explaining fine-tuning and describing some of the science involved, giving examples of fine-tuning such as the masses of electrons and quarks (3:15 to 4:55, where if the parameters fall outside the narrow boundary not only do you not get life you don’t even get chemistry) and the Higgs field (6:23 to 7:12). Barnes says there are good reasons for God to make a morally significant universe (and thus a universe with life), whereas on naturalism the sort of universe we’d expect is a dead one (23:09 to 23:24).

Alex Malpass’s opening statement starts at around 25:15 and he more or less concedes the physics Barnes presents, at least arguendo (24:48 to 26:13) while noting that some disagree with the fine-tuning claim. Best I can tell though, while the scientific opinion isn’t unanimous, the consensus does seem to be that cosmic fine-tuning is real. I find it unlikely that atheist physicists like Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow would have affirmed fine-tuning if it weren’t real.[1]

To his credit as a philosopher, Malpass presents the overall structure of the fine-tuning argument better than Barnes does at around 30:36 to 32:00.

1. P(L | N) << 1 (the probability that the universe is Life-permitting given Naturalism is much less than 1)
2. ~P(L | T) << 1 (it is not the case that the probability that the universe is Life-permitting given Theism is much less than 1)
3. If E is more probable on H1 than H2, then E supports H1 over H2.
4. Therefore, L is evidence for T over N.

Something called the odds form of Bayes theorem will be helpful here, the general structure of which is this where e.g. P(T|L) represents the probability of T (theism) given L (the universe is life permitting).

posterior odds		prior odds		likelihood ratio
P(T|L) P(N|L)	=	P(T) P(N)	×	P(L|T) P(L|N)

The theist wants the posterior odds to be greater than the prior odds. Of particular note in this debate will be the values of P(T) and P(N), i.e. the prior probabilities of T and N, respectively. The lower P(T) is, the worse the posterior odds will be. This brings us to what Malpass calls the “Goldilocks hypothesis problem.”

Goldilocks Hypothesis Problem

One thing that affects the prior probability of a hypothesis (i.e. its probability prior to examining some particular data) is its content, i.e. how much it “claims.” For example, the claim “An animal exists” has less content than “A flatworm with two heads exists,” and so “An animal exists” has greater prior probability; it’s broader and has less content than the claim of a specific type of animal existing. Malpass correctly notes that there’s a trade off between the content of T, it’s prior probability P(T), and P(L|T).

If T were “An omnipotent God desires L” then P(L|T) will be high but at the cost of P(T) being low. To see why, let R represent “It rained this morning” and let TR be “An omnipotent God made it rain this morning” in which case P(R|TR) is high, but P(TR) will have to be low since we can’t reasonably infer that an omnipotent deity caused it to rain every time it rains. The narrower and more specific T is (thus packing more content in it), the lower the prior probability of T. Conversely, making T broader (having less content), e.g. T meaning nothing more than “an omnipotent being exists” will make P(T) greater; but making T broader in this way will make P(L|T) lower.

The Goldilocks hypothesis problem is how precisely to define the hypothesis T in such a way to not make it ad hoc (e.g. “An omnipotent God desires L”) which would give it a lower prior probability, but also not make it so broad that P(L|T) isn’t terribly large. Put another way, T can’t have too much content, but it also can’t have too little content. If T is defined too broadly with too little content, Malpass seems to think that there’s a risk that P(L|T) is equal to P(L|N) (32:32 to 33:58). So how to define T in a good way so that P(T) and P(L|T) are both not so small?

Barnes gives a decent response to this (40:38 to 43:56). God is a free and morally good being who would choose the best actions, and a morally significant universe with free agents would be good. So if T is more or less “standard” theism where God is not only supremely powerful but also good, then T isn’t ad hoc and P(L|T) is not unreasonably low.

The Stalking-Horse Naturalism Hypothesis

Malpass explains what he calls the stalking horse naturalism hypothesis at around 49:33 to 57:14). If the theist can give God some sort of disposition to make P(L|T) relatively high, couldn’t the naturalist do the same thing? The naturaliast could give naturalism a “mysterious disposition” (56:24 to 1:00:48) to result in a life-permitting universe, call this form of naturalism ND, such that P(L|ND) is high.

The disposition for God to make P(L|T) not that low seems reasonable on theism (God being good), but physical reality having a disposition to result in a life-permitting universe seems rather ad hoc and potentially does little more than push the problem back a step. To illustrate, suppose naturalism’s disposition is some factor x that results in the universe falling into the extremely narrow parameters as specified in a certain mathematical equation. Then it seems that factor x would itself be fine-tuned so that it points to one set of narrow parameters rather than another set of parameters. In other words, naturalism’s disposition would itself have to be finely-tuned to be disposed to have one narrow set of parameters instead of some other set of parameters.

Barnes gives a somewhat similar objection (1:01:10 to 1:03:01). Barnes points out that we’d have to consider P(ND|N), i.e. the probability of naturalism having that particular disposition given N simpliciter. Naturalism could have had a disposition for a dead universe instead of a life-permitting universe, and when a set of parameters is chosen at random, there are far more dead universes than living universes. The impression I’m given is that Barnes is thinking that P(ND|N) is pretty comparable to P(L|N).

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[1] Hawking, Stephen; Mlodinow, Loendard. The Grand Design (New York: Random House, Inc., 2010), pp. 143-144, 157-162.

The Argument from Moral Knowledge

Home  >  Philosophy  >  Atheism/Theism

Moral epistemology asks questions like, “How do we know our moral beliefs are true?” and it’s a question that helps theism. What I’ll call “the argument from moral knowledge” tries to use moral knowledge as an argument for God’s existence. Thus a variety of the argument from moral knowledge goes like this:

1. If God does not exist, then moral knowledge does not exist.
2. Moral knowledge does exist (e.g. we know it’s morally wrong to torture infants just for fun).
3. Therefore, God exists.

Where warrant is that stuff we add to true belief to get knowledge (for example, the warrant for belief might be some type of evidence or justification for that belief), this argument claims that if God does not exist then our belief in morality’s existence is not warranted.

Defining Morality

Since I’ve seen some nontheists redefine morality to avoid some of the problems atheism has with morality as it’s ordinarily defined, I’ll briefly sketch what I mean by “morality” in this argument from moral knowledge. Morality has an “ought” component to it (e.g. moral obligations) but there are a couple different senses of the word “ought.” By “descriptive ought” I mean that type of ought that is nothing more than some purely descriptive state of affairs, e.g. “If you want to do well in school, you ought to study” meaning something like “As a matter of practical necessity, you need to study to do well in school.” A descriptive ought is any ought that has no properties besides purely descriptive ones. By “prescriptive ought” I mean that type of ought that is not a descriptive ought; it prescribes and is not purely descriptive, e.g. “You should not to torture infants just for fun.” The type of morality being referred to here involves the prescriptive ought, e.g. moral wrongness. An action is morally wrong for someone only if they ought not to do it in the “prescriptive ought” sense.

Moral oughts being prescriptive oughts is important because it means that moral facts and properties are, if not supernatural, at least non-natural. There is a scholarly article that fairly rigorously demonstrates that moral ought facts are non-natural when using prescriptive oughts, but here I will give an oversimplified version of the argument. Natural facts are facts that can be expressed entirely in the language of psychology and the natural sciences, e.g. “The atomic number of gold is 79” and “Bob needs an anesthetic to not feel pain.” (Caveat: don’t confuse the natural fact with the statement used to express what the natural fact is.) The language of psychology and the natural sciences is purely descriptive language, and thus what natural facts are can be stated entirely in descriptive language. But moral oughtness is not purely descriptive, i.e. what moral oughtness is cannot be stated entirely in descriptive language (it is false that moral oughts have no properties besides purely descriptive ones). Since natural facts are purely descriptive whereas moral ought facts are not, moral ought facts are not natural facts, and thus however morality exists, it does not exist as solely part of the natural realm; e.g. moral wrongness is nonphysical and non-natural. We can summarize the reasoning (which is an oversimplified version of this semantics argument for moral non-naturalism, and the math for that paper is explained here) as follows:

4. All natural facts are purely descriptive (they can be stated entirely in descriptive language).
5. Moral ought facts are not purely descriptive (it is false that moral oughts have no properties besides purely descriptive ones).
6. Therefore, moral ought facts are not natural facts.

The above argument is deductively valid, i.e. the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises by the rules of logic, and symbolic logic proves this.[1]

Morality is Empirically Undetectable and Causally Inert

Another indication that moral properties are non-natural is their empirical undetectability and causal inertness, at least barring the supernatural. Moral properties are non-natural, and anything outside the natural world causally affecting stuff would by definition be supernatural; thus moral properties are causally inert barring anything supernatural. To illustrate what I mean by moral oughtness being empirically undetectable, imagine a moral nihilist (who disbelieves in moral oughtness) and a moral realist (who believes in moral oughtness) observe some jerk kicking a dog just for fun; the dog whimpers in pain and runs away. Both agree on all physiological and psychological facts, e.g. that the dog felt pain and suffered minor injury. The moral nihilist says, “I don’t think moral oughtness (like moral wrongness) is attached to that action.” The moral realist says, “I think moral oughtness (moral wrongness) is attached to that action.”

There is no empirical way to determine who is right here. Both views agree on all the same empirically observable facts, and moral oughtness being associated with certain physical facts (such as the dog’s injury) doesn’t explain any physical fact. Moral realism and moral nihilism are empirically indistinguishable from each other, though since moral oughtness is non-natural and nonphysical, it isn’t surprising that both the moral realist and the moral nihilist would agree on all the same physical facts.

The dog kicker scenario also illustrates that moral oughtness is causally inert, at least barring the supernatural. Moral oughtness is non-natural and nonphysical, and something non-natural and nonphysical causally influencing the natural, physical realm would be supernatural. Notice also that whether moral oughtness is associated with natural facts (e.g. the dog’s pain and injury) or not associated with those same natural facts, the physical conditions are the same in both cases, and so barring the supernatural, the presence or absence of moral oughtness would make no causal difference as to what those physical conditions will result in.

Moral Awareness

But if moral properties like moral wrongness are empirically undetectable and causally inert (barring the supernatural) how in the world are we aware of morality? Since morality is empirically undetectable, in practice we have to rely on intuition, i.e. it just seems true to us that morality exists[2], similar to how it just seems true to us that the external world is real (as opposed to being something like a dream). But if we have to rely on moral intuition to justify our belief in morality, how does moral intuition deliver warrant for morality’s existence?

Theism has a straightforward explanation: God, wanting humans to have moral knowledge, designed our cognitive faculties (via evolution or otherwise) in such a way that when they are functioning properly we intuitively apprehend basic moral truths, just as we intuitively apprehend elementary truths of logic and arithmetic. Our moral awareness thus becomes a kind of God-given intuitive knowledge.

In contrast, atheism faces real trouble. Moral properties are causally inert in the absence of the supernatural, and because on atheism it is unlikely that supernatural intervention is responsible for our moral knowledge (e.g. supernatural clairvoyance seems far-fetched), it is likely that moral oughtness is causally inert if atheism is true, at least with respect to moral knowledge. On atheism, we have the intuition of morality’s existence because that’s what our brains give us, and moral oughtness being causally inert means its presence or absence would make no causal difference as to whether our brains would give us this moral intuition (nor would it make any causal difference to the evolutionary and environmental processes that gave us our brains). But if on atheism we’d have the intuition of morality existing even if morality did not exist, then it seems we wouldn’t know that morality exists.

To illustrate why, suppose a cyborg knows she has a metal-detecting implant installed in her brain that’s designed so that when a widget is in her hand, the implant delivers a strong intuition that the widget contains metal if and only if it contains metal. Suppose however the metal-detecting implant malfunctions such that it would deliver the intuition that the widget contains metal regardless of whether the widget contained metal. Then even if the widget in her hand did contain metal and she believed it contained metal on the basis of her intuition, her belief wouldn’t count as knowledge. Moreover, if she learned the metal-detecting implant would give her the intuition that the widget contains metal regardless of whether the widget contained metal, she would no longer have adequate grounds to believe the widget contains metal.

In the cyborg scenario (whereby the implant supplies the intuition that the widget contains metal regardless of whether such metal existed), the cyborg’s intuition clearly does not deliver warrant for the metallic widget belief. Similarly, on the “atheism scenario,” whereby atheism is true and our brains would supply moral intuition regardless of whether morality existed, our moral intuition would not deliver warrant for morality’s existence. But since we rely on moral intuition to justify our belief in morality’s existence, it seems that if atheism is true we are not warranted in believing that morality exists. We can summarize the reasoning in two steps. The first:

7. In the cyborg scenario, the cyborg’s intuition does not deliver warrant for the metallic widget belief.
8. If the cyborg’s intuition does not deliver warrant in the cyborg scenario, then if atheism is true moral intuition does not deliver warrant for morality’s existence. (No relevant difference seems to exist between the cyborg scenario and the atheism scenario whereby the cyborg’s intuition would not deliver warrant but moral intuition would in the atheism scenario.)
9. Therefore, if atheism is true, moral intuition does not deliver warrant for morality’s existence.

With If atheism is true, moral intuition does not deliver warrant for morality’s existence argued for, we are ready for the second argument:

9. If atheism is true, moral intuition does not deliver warrant for morality’s existence.
10. We rely on moral intuition to believe that morality exists, such that If moral intuition does not deliver warrant for morality’s existence, we are not warranted in believing that morality exists is true.
11. Therefore, if atheism is true, we are not warranted in believing that morality exists.

It seems then we have good grounds for affirming the first premise of the argument from moral knowledge:

1. If God does not exist, then moral knowledge does not exist.
2. Moral knowledge does exist (e.g. we know it’s morally wrong to torture infants just for fun).
3. Therefore, God exists.

Our awareness of morality’s existence thus seems to provide evidence for theism.

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[1] For philosophy nerds (and all philosophy nerds should be sufficiently versed in symbolic logic) here’s the symbolization key:

• Nx = x is a natural fact
• Dx = x is purely descriptive
• Mx = x is a moral ought fact

The goal is to prove ¬∃x[Mx ∧ Nx], i.e. that there does not exist a moral ought fact that is also a natural fact, from premises (1) and (2) in the argument below:

1. ∀x[Nx → Dx]
2. ∀x[Mx → ¬Dx]

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3. ∃x[Mx ∧ Nx] indirect proof assumption

4. Mf ∧ Nf 3, existential instantiation
5. Mf 4, conjunction elimination
6. Nf 4, conjunction elimination
7. Nf → Df 1, universal instantiation
8. Df 6, 7, modus ponens
9. Mf → ¬Df 2, universal instantiation
10. ¬Df 5, 9, modus ponens
11. Df ∧ ¬Df 8, 10, conjunction introduction

12. ¬∃x[Mx ∧ Nx] 3-11, indirect proof

[2] I don’t mean to imply that moral intuition necessarily gives us knowledge of morality’s existence by directly telling us that morality exists (though I don’t rule it out either). It could also be, for example, that we intuit a moral truth like, “It is morally wrong for a man to torture innocent sentient life just for fun” and from there we conclude that morality exists.

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.

Omnipotence, Creating an Immovable Stone, and YouTube

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I was thinking of having the title be “Omnipotence, Creating an Immovable Stone, YouTube, and Logic” (as we’ll see, logic plays an important but ironically overlooked role in the YouTube video being discussed) but the title was long enough already. This entry is inspired from a YouTube video I saw. Warning: the YouTube video contains strong language and violence (this article will itself contain some PG-13 level language, though I’ll limit myself) that is unsuitable for children, socially conservative non-maverick Christian old ladies, and bosses peering over your shoulder. If you decide not to see the YouTube video, I’ll just describe one part that I found annoying. The video:



If you didn’t see it, here’s the aforementioned part that annoyed me: At an atheist rally God shows up, violently killing atheists. One atheist and God (the Father) have the following conversation.

Atheist: If you’re all-powerful, could you make a rock so big that even you couldn’t lift it?

God: You idiot, of course I could!

Atheist: Aha! But then you wouldn’t be all-powerful!

God swears, begins to bleed, and turns translucent as if he is beginning to cease to exist.

Atheist: You see? Omnipotence is impossible!

Later in the video God eats a hundred dollar bill to fully materialize and before shooting the atheist dead he says, “You forgot one thing: logic is for pussies.”

The “logic is for pussies” remark was annoyingly ironic. To emphasize the irony I’ll use a bit of symbolic logic in this post:

• ◊ symbolizes the possibility operator, e.g. ◊P means proposition P is possibly true, i.e. P is true in some possible world.
• → symbolizes implication, i.e. “P → Q” represents “If P, then Q.”
• ¬ represents the not operator, e.g. ¬P means “not-P” or “P is false.”

A handy english-to-symbolic-logic table:

English	Symbolic Logic
P is possible	◊P
If P, then Q	P → Q
not-P	¬P

Symbolic logic is handy for showing that a conclusion follows from the premises by certain rules of logic. For example, the following rule of logic is called hypothetical syllogism:

1. P → Q
2. Q → R
3. Therefore, P → R

If you wanted to show that a proposition P is false, premises like these would be great:

1. P → Q
2. Q → ¬P
3. P → ¬P 1, 2, hypothetical syllogism

Someone who grants premises 1 and 2 would have to reject P as false (a little more symbolic logic would be needed to rigorously conclude that, but you get the idea).

Now let’s consider the following argument against omnipotence.

In this case, “omnipotence” is defined as the ability to do anything logically possible. If an omnipotent being exists, it is logically possible for him to create an immovable stone. Yet if there is an immovable stone, then an omnipotent being does not exist (for an omnipotent being could move anything). Therefore, an omnipotent being does not exist.

Now watch what happens when we use some symbolic logic. Using the following letters to represent statements:

O: An Omnipotent being exists.
S: An omnipotent being creates an immovable Stone.

Then we take the following argument...

1. If an omnipotent being exists, then it’s possible for an omnipotent being to create an immovable stone.
2. But if an omnipotent being creates an immovable stone, then an omnipotent being doesn’t exist.
3. Therefore, an omnipotent being doesn’t exist.

…and translate it into symbolic logic:

1. O → ◊S
2. S → ¬O
3. Therefore, ¬O

The argument is invalid, i.e. the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises. Why? Here’s one reason: just because an omnipotent being could give up his omnipotence (as by creating an immovable stone) it doesn’t follow that the omnipotent being has in fact done so. Inferring O → ¬O from premises 1 and 2 breaks the rules of logic. The “Could an omnipotent being create an immovable stone” argument is hopelessly invalid; so says logic.

But maybe some atheists think logic is for pussies.

Awakening the Sensus Divinitatis

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This entry is an epilogue to a series on the moral argument. The entries in that series:

1. The Moral Argument for God Part 1: Going from Morality’s Existence to God’s Existence
2. The Moral Argument for God Part 2: Does Objective Morality Exist If God Does Not Exist?
3. The Moral Argument for God Part 3: Does Objective Morality Exist?
4. The Euthyphro Dilemma
5. Epilogue: Awakening the Sensus Divinitatis

It is recommended, though not necessary (especially if you already believe God is the source of moral obligation), to read the other entries in the series first. In the course of the series I argue that God is the probable source of moral obligation.

The Sensus Divinitatis

A huge portion of people in humanity’s history have come to believe in God or at least something like God; it more or less comes naturally. Theologian John Calvin (1509-1564) used the term sensus divinitatis (SEN-suhss div-inn-uh-TAW-tuhss) to refer to an intuitive sense or awareness of God.

If you’re like me, for at least a large portion of your life you didn’t quite have this, at least not very strongly. When I was a child, even though I was much more theologically conservative than I am now, I believed in God and angels and all that but I was of the “I wish I could see a miracle or an angel, just to be sure” mindset. I didn’t quite feel an assurance of God’s existence that the sensus divinitatis seems to suggest. Now I don’t have that much doubt anymore. My own experience is somewhere between knowing that God exists and sensing God’s presence. Still, I wondered how that happened. As far as I know, I haven’t become any less sinful. I do know this happened after I accepted the moral argument for God’s existence and concluded that God is probably the source of moral obligation. I’m about as confident in the existence of God as I am about objective morality existing. From a previous blog entry:

When it comes to flagrantly morally wrong behavior like impaling babies with bayonets just for fun, most of us intuitively recognize that there is something in reality, transcending our opinion, that says people shouldn’t behave that way. It seems that raping children and committing genocide would remain morally atrocious regardless of what we believed. Even for many who don’t believe that God is the source of moral obligation (as I didn’t at one time), there just seems to be some component of reality beyond us, even if we can’t identify what it is, that says we should not do such things.

I now know that God is that component of reality beyond us that says we shouldn’t do certain things, so that when I ponder on the wrong I’ve done, I feel accountable to a sort of presence that exists beyond myself. It thus occurred to me that my acceptance of objective morality and God as the source of moral obligation was likely the cause of my sensus divinitatis experience.

From Christianity to Atheism to Christianity

When I read Why I Am a Christian: Leading Thinkers Explain Why They Believe, a book written by a variety of authors, J. Budziszewski wrote what was for me the most insightful of all the book’s essays. He is a Christian who became an atheist who then became a Christian again. How he converted back to theism mirrored how I think I would return to theism if I ever became an atheist. Budziszewski tells what happened one night when he prayed to God as an atheist.

I told him that I thought I was talking to the wall. I said that if he existed, he could have me, but he would have to show me because I couldn’t tell. As the minutes ticked past, the wall looked more and more like a wall, and I felt a fool.

Yet he did hear my prayer. I came, months later, to feel a greater and greater horror about myself, not exactly a feeling of guilt, nor of shame, nor of inadequacy—just horror: an overpowering true intuition that my condition was objectively evil. I could not have told why my condition was objectively horrible; I only perceived that it was. It was as though a man noticed one afternoon that the sky is blue when for years he had considered it red.

Nothing like this had ever happened to me before, and I could not explain it. The intuition of the objective evil of my condition appeared as though from nowhere and contradicted everything I had been telling myself. I experienced it not as an inference but as direct knowledge. It had authority, commanding assent—and I assented. Though I did not know it at the time, it was what John’s Gospel calls the conviction of sin. I believe that the Holy Spirit, in answer to my prayer, had been secretly cutting a door in the stone wall of my self-deception.

The conviction of sin is something I’ve felt as well. Though I am a Christian and believe I am saved through Christ’s sacrifice, I have no self-righteous delusions of being a sinless creature. Even if I were not a Christian I would believe that there is a moral standard beyond me and I have fallen short of it, and I would know the probable source of this moral standard. For me, the moral sense was the gateway to sensus divinitatis.

Why Atheists Might Wish God to be a Dictator

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Some atheists view God as an oppressive dictator, but I think if atheists realized who and what God is, they would if anything be upset that he wasn’t more of a dictator if it turned out that he existed. Let me explain. My conception of God is that he is the supreme authority in the universe, and so I believe that as the divine commander, what is morally wrong is one and the same property as that which God forbids; ergo doing evil is going against the will of God, and God gives creatures the power to defy his will and therefore to do evil. Every time we sin, God submits to our will over his. Even if one doesn’t believe that God is the transcendent authority behind moral duties (though I think it’s fairly clear that he would be if God existed), clearly one ought to recognize that humans doing evil would be against what God wills if he exists, and yet God gives humanity the power to defy his will. Indeed, as the sustainer of the universe God even continuously gives godless people the breath to blaspheme him. This is hardly the description of an oppressive dictator.

What about hell? Wouldn’t God be a tyrant for sending people to that horrible prison? I don’t pretend to know what hell is like, but I think it’s conceivable that this is again a case of God allowing human freedom to go where he’d rather not have it go, and that the doors of hell are (to borrow from C.S. Lewis) locked on the inside. C.S. Lewis doesn’t believe that the damned souls might not desire to come out of hell, “in the vague fashion wherein an envious man ‘wishes’ to be happy: but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good.” Lewis also says, “I would pay any price to be able to say truthfully ‘All will be saved.’ But my reason retorts ‘Without their will or with it?’” In effect, God says to those who reject them, “thy will be done.” When separated from the locus of goodness itself, the result is hell. God is not a dictator, and the consequences of this are precisely why an atheist might wish him to be one.