Evidence · Case 09 · Atheism
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Moral Arguments for the Existence of God,” and the 2020 PhilPapers Survey
One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
Discussions of the moral argument begin from a shared starting point. Acts like torturing children for amusement strike almost everyone as wrong regardless of opinion or culture. Surveys of professional philosophers show that moral realism is taken seriously. In 2020 about 62 percent accepted or leaned toward it.
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Objections & responses
- The PhilPapers survey also shows only about 19 percent of philosophers are theists. So most moral realists reject the moral argument. Doesn’t the survey cut against the second half of this claim?
Correct, and both numbers belong together. Most realist philosophers are not theists, so the survey supports the first half of the claim (realism is respectable) and not the second (realism needs God). The moral argument’s defenders are making a claim that most of their fellow realists reject, and that should be said plainly. Their reply is that the secular realists have not solved the grounding problem, only declared moral facts brute. Whether brute moral facts are acceptable is the debate, and the survey does not settle it either way.
- The Euthyphro dilemma: either God commands things because they are good, so goodness is independent of him, or things are good because he commands them, so morality is arbitrary. Either way God doesn’t ground morality.
Every philosophy student will raise this, and it deserves a direct reply. The standard theistic answer is that goodness is grounded in God’s nature rather than his will: God commands what is good because he is good, so the commands are neither arbitrary nor derived from a standard above him. Critics ask what makes God’s nature good, and defenders reply that on every view the buck stops with some ultimate good, and a perfect person is a better stopping point than a Platonic abstraction. The second half of this claim is a live debate, and this exchange is the center of it.