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- [00:04]
Dr. William Lane Craig
Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig. Today an excursus on Natural Theology, Part 22. For more resources from Dr. Craig, go
- [00:15]
to reasonablefaith.org Last week I was at Ohio State University for a Veritas forum which turned out to be unexpectedly significant. I had a debate scheduled with an atheist philosophy professor at OSU named Kevin Sharp, and the subject was, is there evidence for God? And I thought, like most of these Veritas form events, that this would be a sort of friendly dialogue where we would each speak for 15 minutes and then we would have a moderated conversation. Well, I have not experienced such ferocity in a critic since I had those dialogues with with Lawrence Krauss in Australia. And Kevin Sharp had prepared very, very well for this dialogue. He made a point of letting me know before the event began that he had listened to all eight years of our Reasonable Faith podcasts, all of them, and he was familiar with the debate with Sean Carroll, with Alex Rosenberg, as well as other material. And he had PowerPoints and charts to show, went a mile a minute and attacked not only the six arguments that I presented in my opening statement, but all the other arguments I've ever presented anywhere. So it was really a very good contest. Many people have asked me, what would it be like if you were to have a debate with someone who really took the time to prepare? Well, this is your chance to find out, because this is going to be on YouTube as soon as it's edited, and I think that it will be a great tool for dissecting and talking about hitting the pause button, replaying, thinking about it. It was a very substantive discussion and I'll say something more about the content of it later on in the class today because I want that to be part of the podcast because we can benefit from Sharp's critique of all of my arguments. Today we're going to wrap up our discussion of the moral argument for God's existence. The last time we looked at a defense of premise two, that objective moral values and duties exist, and responded to some objections to that premise. In particular the objection from evolutionary psychology, which says that because our moral beliefs are the product of evolution and evolution or natural selection is aimed at survival value, not at truth, we can have no confidence in the truth of our moral beliefs and therefore could not be justified in believing premise two. Now, I responded to this in a threefold way. First, I pointed out that in fact, there is no plausible, coherent sociobiological account of our moral beliefs. This defeater really does not exist, and we shouldn't let people bluff us by asserting that it does. Secondly, I pointed out that the objection assumes that atheism is true and therefore biggs the question yes, if God does not exist, then our beliefs are shaped by a mechanism that does not aim at truth, but mere survival. In fact, that is the first premise of the argument, that if God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist. But the atheist cannot be justified in simply assuming that therefore God does not exist. If God does exist, then he might well guide the evolutionary process so that we would arrive at moral beliefs that are for the most part true as well as have survivability. So the objection that because our moral beliefs have evolved, they are aimed at survival, not at truth presupposes the truth of atheism. And that begs the question. Finally, number three, I argued that the objection is ultimately self defense defeating. All of our beliefs on naturalism are the product of evolution and therefore are selected for by their survival value, not for their truth. And that would include the belief in naturalism itself. So that the objection is self defeating. It contains within itself its own defeater. You cannot be rational in in affirming naturalism, because if naturalism is correct, all of your beliefs are unreliable, including your belief in naturalism. And this is of course, as Cody pointed out, Alvin planting his famous evolutionary argument against naturalism. So I do not think that the objection to the second premise from sociobiology or evolutionary psychology is a good one. Now, we finished our class last time by talking about an objection or a concern that Michel raised based upon the subjectivity of our moral experience. Since our moral experience by definition is subjective, doesn't that mean that moral values and duties are subjective? And I suggested that that doesn't follow. My experience of the physical world around me is subjective. Feeling certain things, seeing certain things, hearing or smelling certain things, those are all subjective experiences. But that doesn't mean that the external world of objects which I experience is therefore subjective. The objective experience can be objective, real, and mind independent, even if the experience itself is something that is by definition subjective. Now, I want to share with you a letter that I received the day after our Defender's class. And I want to emphasize this letter does not come from a beginner, a novice. This comes from the man who is responsible for transcribing all of our Defenders podcasts. He's been doing this for years. He has transcribed all of Defenders two, and each week he does another lesson in Defenders three. So this is a person who has a good grasp of apologetics, material but listen to what he writes. Bill just wanted to give some feedback on Defenders and suggest you add something to your Moral argument Premise two presentation when you talk about this in the future to clear up a confusing matter. Now realize I've read and listened to your material on this countless times over the years, yet I've been misunderstanding this for a long time now. And in a similar way Michelle seemed to be I have to believe this is something a lot of people are confused about. It was the confusion equating the words experience and subjective, specifically equating moral experience to subjective morality. But the light bulb finally went on for me when I heard you explain this in the following way. I've not heard you put it quite like this before. Maybe I just missed it. You said obviously my experience is subjective. That is what experience is. But the object of the experience isn't therefore subjective. You only needed to say those three sentences. Now I finally get it. What I think I needed to be explicitly explained when going over Premise two is this distinction between the moral experience itself and the object of that experience. It is implied in your analogy with the five senses and the physical realm, but for dolts like me, you have to spell it out. Seeing a chair with my eyes is just as much a subjective experience as sensing that murder is wrong. But that does not mean the object of those experiences are subjective. Murder is objectively wrong, just as the chair is objectively real. Even though I had a subjective experience of both, it all makes sense now. Knowing this also helped with the flat earth analogy Michelle brought up. I finally realized that this wasn't a question about subjective versus objective at all, but rather was merely dealing with incorrect versus correct belief regarding an objective truth. Just as flat earthers had an incorrect belief regarding the objective truth of around Earth, so too the slave traders of the 18th century held an incorrect belief regarding the objective truth that slavery is wrong psychological. Tell Michelle thank you for me. I hope she doesn't feel she was asking a question no one else cared about because it was the one I was waiting for and the answer was definitely helpful to me. Anyway, it solves a nagging problem for me because I never fully got it until now. So thank you Michelle for raising this in class. It just goes to show that when you've got a question, it's probably something that somebody else is bothered by as well, and so don't be afraid to speak up. So is there any final discussion about Premise two? Its defense and response to objections to it? Okay, we've got Taiwan.
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Taiwan
Dr. Craig, it is interesting that Chinese character for soul is devil says. And two characters, devil. And that gives us a understanding that the fall of men when they ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, our soul has realigned from God says to devil says. And it's all about alignment issue. Our subjectivity and objective truth is a alignment issue.
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Dr. William Lane Craig
Yes, very nice. That's nicely said. Our subjective beliefs can be misaligned, can't they? Or they can be correctly aligned with the objective truth about these matters which is supplied by God himself, His nature, and his commands that express that nature. Okay, let's go down to David here.
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David
It was interesting that that was brought up because I was wanting to ask a question concerning humanity's history. Now we know that humanity separated in different cultures and things like that. And today when we find tribes, you know, in other countries, we find that certain acts that they do are horrific or very just horrific. So, for example, tribes that practice cannibalism and things like that. And I wanted. I was wanting to ask that question. If we separated so much and. But we believe that objective moral values exist, then I'm guessing. I believe you answered my question. We have a subject of those moral values. So therefore different cultures were unaligned correctly
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Dr. William Lane Craig
with those morals, right? That's right. And it's no part of the moral argument to say that our moral faculties are infallible any more than our sense faculties are infallible. You see water on the highway ahead on a hot day and it turns out to be a mirage. The stick in the jar of water looks bent, but you know it's not. There are optical illusions and auditory illusions. So it's no part of the moral argument to say that our moral perceptions are infallible. And this is especially true when you think of the sinfulness and the fallenness of man. It's no wonder that people would be involved in perverse practices given their alienation from God and their estrangement from him. Nevertheless, I'm told by anthropologists that the commonality of the moral codes among the peoples of the world is really quite striking. They may differ in ways in which these fundamental values come to expression culturally, but at root there is a large dimension of commonality. Take cannibalism, for example. From what I've been told, tribes in New guinea, for example, that practice cannibalism agree with the Christian ethic that you should love your neighbor as yourself, and therefore they would never cannibalize a member of their own tribe. But they just didn't regard people in other Tribes as neighbors, these were foreigners or strangers, and so they could be subject to cannibalism. They were enemies. But there was the underlying value of loving your neighbor as yourself. Similarly, a value like modesty is probably universal. But in some cultures, a woman's going bare breasted is not immodest. In others, just showing her bare arms is considered to be immodest, or showing her earlobes is immodest. So there can be different cultural expressions of underlying commonalities, I think.
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David
And another thing is that concerning the. Now we have that many cultures or many places share commonalities in their morals. Now, what about the punishment when they go against those morals? For example, in some countries, if someone murders, then it's to put them to death. But in countries like here, you might be put to death, or you could be in prison for 50 years or things like that. In other countries, in some Muslim countries, you know, for being immodest, you get harsh punishments. But yet here, which is more liberal, we don't get any punishment at all.
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Dr. William Lane Craig
Yeah, that's obviously a reflection of people's different conceptions of what constitutes justice and what would be an appropriate punishment for the crime. I would say, however, and here's a caution, is that especially in Western society, many people have given up the idea of retributive justice altogether. That when a criminal is punished, it's not to pay him back for his crime. It's either to reform his character so that he gets better, or it's to sequester him in jail so that he can't hurt anybody else. But the purpose of the punishment is not retributive.
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Bruce
And.
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Dr. William Lane Craig
And that would obviously affect what sort of punishment would be doled out for different sorts of criminals.
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Drew
Drew, something I've learned reading Thomas Aquinas in the Scholastics. Experience doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not like you just have experience implicit or experience is always experience of something. It is essentially intentional. It's outward directed. So when you're having a moral experience, what are you experiencing? You're pointing outside already. So it seems like the very claim of moral experience, and it seems to imply some sort of. If you don't believe in objective moral values, what is it you're experiencing?
- [16:37]
Dr. William Lane Craig
Yeah, what are you experiencing? Notice the word that Drew used, Intentionality. That's a technical term that's worth adding to your vocabulary if you don't know it already. And this is the of ness or aboutness of something. Thoughts have intentionality. I can think of my wife Or I can think about my summer vacation. And Drew's point is that experience, subjective experience, exhibits intentionality as well. It's an experience of something else. And so there is an object of that experience. Okay. Anybody else? Yes, James?
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James
Bill, I had a question. I know you, you kind of touched on this in your, your newsletter, but it has to do with the, I guess defending a premise and, and you were saying that, and you were going into how, how you know, there's, there's. As long as you can show that there's a greater probability that is correct rather than incorrect, then then you can use that as a way to, to, to prove that it's true. And I'm just wondering maybe if you could expound on that because I guess I know the person who debated must have brought that up or whatever, but I was kind of wondering about that myself. Can you expound on that?
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Dr. William Lane Craig
Yes, I will. When I finish this argument, then I'm going to reflect on the objections raised by Professor Sharp. But let's be sure that we've finished with any discussion of this premise.
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Cindy
Cindy, I just want to touch on the idea that evolution caused moral fiber within the human. And it seems to me if really we're saying survival of the fittest is the origin of our moral standard, it doesn't seem at all to add up. For example, in certain species of fish, they eat their young as a means of survival and in fact that helps the population of the fish. But I can't think of any example in humans in human culture where they would eat their young as a normal course of a day's events. And it just seems there's so many examples where if you're looking at only survival of the fittest, so many behaviors would be the norm that are not the norm. And it just speaks again to something beyond just that objective of survival.
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Dr. William Lane Craig
Yeah, I think you're right to challenge this. In the article that I quoted from by Jeffrey Schloss, he particularly looks at evolutionary explanations of altruism where someone does some self sacrificial act for a person or organism that is not its own progeny and therefore it has no evolutionary interest whatsoever in it. And yet altruism has evolved among human beings. So how do you explain that in purely evolutionary terms? Jeff says there is no explanation in the literature that effectively explains the value of altruism.
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Cindy
And I do think in most cultures if a mother dies, it is common for another woman to assume the responsibilities of the mother and not just let the infant.
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Dr. William Lane Craig
And that would be altruistic. Behavior because she has no genetic investment in that other woman's child.
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Cindy
In fact, it would be quite a burden, as we all know.
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Dr. William Lane Craig
Right? Exactly. It actually poses or places a burden on her. That's true. Okay, any other comments on this second premise? Okay, well, let's then draw our conclusion from the two premises of the argument. It follows that God exists. The moral argument complements the contingency and cosmological and design arguments by telling us about the moral nature of the creator and designer of the universe. It gives us a personal, necessarily existent being who is not only perfectly good, but whose nature is the standard of goodness and whose commands constitute our moral duties. So it really rounds out the case for theism in a way that the other arguments do not. I have to say that in my experience, the moral argument is probably the most effective argument for the existence of God. And I say this somewhat grudgingly because my favorite is the cosmological argument. But the fact is that cosmological and teleological arguments don't really grab people where they live. You can dismiss or ignore the cosmological evidence for the beginning of the universe or the fine tuning of the universe, but the moral argument, on the other hand, is not so easily brushed aside. Every day you get up, you answer by how you treat other people, whether you think there are objective moral values and duties. It's an unavoidable question. So in answer to the question that we began with several weeks ago, can we be good without God? I think the answer is no. We cannot truly be good without God. But if we can in some measure be good, then it follows logically that God exists. Any final comment on the moral argument? Steve?
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Steve
Like to try to point out that seems like the moral argument that
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James
our
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Steve
obligation is God's character and nature. Therefore for him to be just, he has to expect us to be, to make a way for us. Because you wouldn't hold somebody accountable to being something they're not. And that's what he is doing. A fallen nature. Therefore, for him to still maintain the moral obligation means he's provided a way to us to partake of his nature and be transformed.
- [23:02]
Dr. William Lane Craig
I think this does have intimate connections with the doctrine of salvation and the doctrine of the atonement, where you have the demands of God's justice need to be met, but then also his love, which would bring reconciliation. Now, in our closing minutes, let me say something about the critique that Professor Sharp offered at Ohio State University of my arguments for God's existence. It was a very odd critique because for the Most part, he didn't attack any of the premises in the arguments. Instead, what he argued is that all of the arguments, all 10 or so of them, suffer from what he called weakness. That is to say, they don't inspire sufficient confidence for belief in God. So it wasn't that they have false premises or are illogical, it's just that they're weak. They don't give you sufficient confidence for belief in God. Now, why did he think that? Well, it had to do with the criteria that I give for what constitutes a good deductive argument. Now, does anybody remember what I said? The criteria are for a deductive argument to be a good one. Okay, over here, you had described how
- [24:34]
Unidentified Male Participant
you weren't looking for it to be absolutely 100% guaranteed by all to say this is absolutely true, but just that it was more plausible than implausible.
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Dr. William Lane Craig
Okay.
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Unidentified Male Participant
And the premises had to follow.
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Dr. William Lane Craig
Okay, very good. Excellent. So a good deductive argument needs to be logically valid, that is to say, from the premises 1, 2. The conclusion 3 follows by the rules of logic. Secondly, the premises need to be more plausible than not. The premises need to be more plausible than the negation of those premises. And if those conditions are met, then I said, you have a good argument. Now, Sharp attacked this by saying, well, suppose that the premises are more plausible than not. So they give you a 51% confidence in the truth of the premises. And he says, that's not enough to engender confidence to believe in God. If you have only 51% confidence that God exists, that's not enough to believe in God. So the arguments are all too weak in his view, even if they are successful. Now, what's wrong with that response? Well, a couple of things. When I said that for an argument to be a good one, it had to be logically valid and its premises need to be more plausible than not. I was setting a minimum for what an argument needs to be to be a good one. I wasn't in any way suggesting that the arguments that I offer have premises that are merely 51% probable. What I'm saying is that they're at least that. I would say that these premises in many cases are extremely probable. So this just sets a lower threshold for goodness of an argument. But it is premises that are only 51% probable. Think of the premise that if the universe began to exist, the universe has a transcendent cause. I think that's 100% probable. That has a probability of one. I would say so. I just. I couldn't imagine why he thought that I was doing anything more than setting a minimum floor for what constitutes a good argument. Moreover, and here's the second point in a deductive argument, in a deductive argument, the probability of the premises taken together is not equal to the probability of the conclusion. Rather, the conclusion will be at least as probable as the premises. It will be equal than or greater, equal to or greater than the probability of the premises. So even if the premises are only 51% probable, that doesn't mean the conclusion is only 51% probable. It means the conclusion is at least 51% probable. And I would say in the arguments I gave, it's considerably more than that. Any comment or question about that response? Drew?
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Drew
I know with arguing over the Internet, I just find that people who are really dogmatically committed to a position can find some way to harmonize, some way of absolutely forcing the facts to fit their worldview. I mean, you can, of course, resort to some hardcore ad hoc harmonization, but that doesn't rescue your argument. It doesn't mean it's like, oh, therefore you're right, or that, you know, I haven't proven correctly. It's like people just don't get that.
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Dr. William Lane Craig
It's like, you think that's harmoniously right, Drew? But what was odd to me is that he didn't dispute really the cogency of the arguments on his view. It seems to me I had demonstrated that it's at least 51% probable that God exists. So here's an atheist who thinks that it's probable that God exists. And the title of the debate was, is there evidence for God? Well, the answer would be yes, and he would admit it. So it was really odd. Yeah. Bruce, over here,
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Bruce
just two things you could probably add to the good argument is explanatory value, which would enhance the probabilities.
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Dr. William Lane Craig
But I think that would be relevant, Bruce, to an inductive argument. But here I'm talking about a good deductive argument. And I think this is all you need for an argument deductive argument to be good. If you've got these two things, then you should accept the conclusion.
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Bruce
Okay. The second thing would be then he's at less than 50% for believing. You should be an atheist.
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Dr. William Lane Craig
Yeah, that's right. Atheism is improbable. On his view. Atheism is probably false. Yes.
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Unidentified Male Participant
I just think it's interesting that. Didn't you say he's a philosophy professor?
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Dr. William Lane Craig
Yes.
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Unidentified Male Participant
I mean, the simple things that you pointed out as far as a deductive argument are pretty much the Standard, that's with people being in philosophy at all, whether Christian or otherwise. And I think that's why so many non Christian philosophers have actually had given respect for your arguments and the way they have to attack your premises.
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Dr. William Lane Craig
Right.
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Unidentified Male Participant
Because if your premises are true, then it follows.
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Dr. William Lane Craig
Yeah, these are.
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Unidentified Male Participant
So he just. He just basically says philosophy isn't okay.
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Dr. William Lane Craig
Right. These are, as you say, the standard sorts of criteria.
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Unidentified Male Participant
So basically he's attacking his own field. I mean, by the way, it looks
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Dr. William Lane Craig
like to me, I think that he misunderstood me. Now, I can't prove that, but I think that he did not understand I was setting a minimum floor for the argument to be good. He thought I was claiming that my arguments have premises that are merely more plausible than not. But obviously a premise can be more plausible than not by being 70%, 80%, 95%. All of those meet the standard.
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Cash
Cash, I know there are some statisticians type people in here that could speak to this better, but for me, you're not basing your belief in God on just one of these arguments.
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Dr. William Lane Craig
Oh, good, I'm glad this up. Yeah.
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Cash
If one is 51, let's just say it was only 51%. And then you add to it another one that's 51%. Now you're at maybe 75%. A third one you're at 85. I mean, by the time we get to 10 arguments, we're at 9.9999999.
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Dr. William Lane Craig
Okay. Do you hear what Cash is saying? I didn't think of this in the dialogue, so I didn't say it. But afterwards, this is exactly right. And it occurred to me, Timothy McGrew, who's a professor of philosophy at University of Western Michigan, emphasizes that even deductive arguments that, say, make God's existence 20% probable, that's all just 20%. If you accumulate these arguments, 20%, 15, 30, 35%. Pretty soon, as Cash says, the cumulative probability of these independent arguments is way over 50%. And this is the way a cumulative case is built in a court of law, isn't it? No single piece of evidence might be enough to convict beyond reasonable doubt. But when you put all of the cumulative evidence together, then it can be beyond reasonable doubt that the accused is guilty. And so the very fact that I've got around 10 arguments, each of which increases the probability of God's existence, would, I think, make it very plausible to think that this does give you great confidence that God exists. All right, we're out of time, but next time we will wrap up our discussion of natural theology by looking at the famous ontological argument for God's existence.
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The copyright for the content of the of this recording is held by Dr. William Lane Craig. For more go to reasonablefaith.org.