What's wrong with the moral argument for God?

Doubting the idea that morality is objective only if God exists

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And morality. 

Imagine God standing prior to the moment of creation. He thinks to himself, “Oh yeah, I need to make that moral law.” Even though no one exists yet, he sees in his vast knowledge some of the things that will eventually come to pass within his creation. “Torture. Hmm…should I command or forbid that? Let’s see…impermissible, permissible, or obligatory…eh…does anyone have one of those Magic 8 Ball things I can shake up?”

It seems absurd that God would choose what’s commanded or forbidden arbitrarily, that there would be no reason that he chose to forbid murder and theft instead of commanding them. Surely he had a reason. And those are the only two options, right? He either had no reason, which is what I mean by arbitrary, or he had a reason. Those options are exhaustive – he either had a reason or he didn’t have a reason. In that hypothetical moment prior to creation as he thought about acts of murder, theft, rape, and torture – vividly and perfectly understanding their every feature – he could see that those things were wrong. He commanded us not to commit those acts because they’re wrong. The nature of merciless torture – the features of the act itself – are directly responsible for its moral status. God, for all his great power, could not have imposed any moral truth whatsoever upon the act of brutal torture, just as he was not free to impose any mathematical or logical structure whatsoever upon the world.

At least, that’s why my hypothetical creation account seems so absurd to me. God did not issue his commands arbitrarily, nor would the opposite commands have rendered murder, theft, rape, and torture morally good. It’s not God’s say-so that makes actions right or wrong. Rather, God says so because he can see what’s good and bad about these acts (and because he’s wise, all-knowing, loving, and so on). In other words, if God exists, he did have moral reasons for issuing his commands. 

An astounding number of people are inclined to think differently. They think that morality is objective only if God exists. Without a divine moral law giver, there would be no objective moral truths. But clearly, there are objective moral truths. So with those premises in hand, we have an argument for God – one of the most popular ones in existence.

1. Morality is objective only if God exists.

2. Morality is objective.

3. Therefore, God exists. 

If you’re like me, then you accept one of those premises – the one about the reality of objective moral truths – and you reject the other premise about God being required for moral objectivity. My radical claim is that in order for something to be wrong, like torturing a baby, we don’t need to find out whether God exists first. We can just see that it’s wrong to torture a baby without stopping and asking, “Wait a second, does God exist? Because I can’t really decide whether it’s good or bad or neither good nor bad to torture a baby until we answer that question about God first.” Even if God exists, he did not have to create moral truth. He’s not the author of the moral law any more than he’d be the author of laws of logic. As philosopher Michael Huemer once put it, “If the universe has a creator, this fact could have nothing to do with objective morality, and the absence of a creator poses no problem for objective morality.” 

Apologetics vs. Metaethics

Plenty of apologists make extremely confident assertions about this or that following logically from atheism. Nihilism is entailed by atheism. Subjectivism is entailed by atheism. Etc. Or somehow even more irritatingly: the more honest atheists will admit that [insert terrible metaethical view] follows from atheism. However, atheism would only entail a particular metaethical view if it were incompatible with all other metaethical positions, like moral non-naturalism and naturalism, subjectivism, non-cognitivism, and error theory. But it isn’t incompatible with any of those, so atheism doesn’t entail any metaethical view. So, atheism doesn’t entail nihilism (or whatever). And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you are really not in a position to be making the moral argument. 

A great deal of people who rely on apologetics are genuinely unaware that most philosophers are moral realists (in fact, the majority of atheist philosophers are moral realists) and that defenses of robust moral objectivity have been offered that make no reference to God. (In fact, most of them make no reference to God.) The influence of Christian apologists has been detrimental to the understanding of philosophy in this area, which is the main reason I wanted to talk about this subject. The moral argument, one of the most popular arguments for God in the modern age, depends entirely on metaethics, yet most Christian apologists who write books, give talks, make videos and podcasts, etc. are stunningly ignorant of the basics. As Christian philosopher Kenny Pearce once said on Twitter, “I am once again begging—nay, IMPLORING—people who want to use metaethics for apologetics to learn literally anything about metaethics.” I’m not just dunking on Christian apologetics here. (I’m not just doing that.) I want to raise the level of the discourse. Because, to be honest, I’m a little put-off that I was so misled by Christian apologists on this topic. I wasted a lot of time lost in the useless dialectic between apologists and counter-apologists spawned by the moral argument. I don’t want anyone else to get sucked into the black hole of confusion sustained in existence by apologists and the unfortunate souls who only know about metaethics through them. 

For better or worse, apologetics provided me with my introduction to philosophy as a teenager. I didn’t really know what philosophy was or what philosophers did, but I did want to figure out whether God existed and whether I should continue being a Christian. Based on what I learned in the first couple years engaging with the subject, I became an atheist. But as I continued my searching, I realized that the superficiality of the popular-level debate between apologists and counter-apologists had led me to form an unwarranted degree of confidence in my nonbelief. I had come to other hasty conclusions as well. 

While I was aware that some atheists were moral realists, like Sam Harris, I wasn’t familiar with contemporary figures in metaethics like Russ Shafer-Landau, Michael Huemer, or Erik Wielenberg. Reading and listening to philosophers (as well as the minority of apologists for either side that are more philosophically literate), my views on a range of subjects changed over time, including those concerning moral realism. It’s not just that the apologetics version of metaethics is superficial relative to the literature, which could be excused since the intended audiences differ. Rather, I found out that there was a chasm between the discourse in apologetics and the discourse in metaethics. They might as well be happening on different planets. 

In the internet trenches, Christians defend objective morals and atheists dispute that there is such a thing as objective morality. (At least in my experience, that’s how it typically went.) But God did not come up very often in the metaethical literature. For those who aren’t aware, the overwhelming majority of the talk about objective morals in apologetics concerns the moral argument, whose defenders maintain that objective morality is simply impossible without God. The only alternative is nihilism! The idea that atheism entails nihilism is not well-subscribed at all in metaethics, even by theists. According to the 2020 PhilPapers Survey, the majority of philosophers are moral realists. In fact, the majority of atheist philosophers are moral realists. To someone who had only been exposed to metaethics through apologetics, this was completely baffling. 

Within the realist camp, there’s a debate over what’s called moral naturalism and moral non-naturalism. Despite the name, the naturalism vs. non-naturalism dispute between moral realists has nothing to do with atheism or theism, sort of like how “libertarian free will” has nothing to do with politics. A communist can believe in libertarian free will, and an atheist can be a moral non-naturalist. Moral naturalism and non-naturalism are both realist positions in metaethics that accept the objectivity of morals. These are not concepts that I became familiar with as a result of listening to apologists. I heard a lot about moral relativism, but nothing about moral non-naturalism. 

Instead, I heard several versions of this: “Many theists and atheists alike will agree that if God does not exist then moral values are not objective”. Well, I don’t agree, and the majority of atheists in philosophy don’t agree. Even many theists don’t agree! Why do apologists almost never acknowledge the existence of moral realism apart from God? It’s the majority view among atheist philosophers. Since most of the people with some interest in apologetics and counter apologetics don’t go on to pursue philosophy, they’re never exposed to the alternatives. And by “alternatives”, I mean “the views accepted by the majority of atheist philosophers”. A multitude of people who have spent a decent amount of time reading apologetics, listening to apologists on podcasts and videos, and otherwise doing their homework are nevertheless woefully misinformed about the range of options and prevailing views in metaethics. That is no small failure on the part of apologists. 

One thing that I really dislike about pop apologists like Ray Comfort, Lee Strobel, Frank Turek, etc. is that their shortcomings are always at our expense. If they were just making honest mistakes, you’d think they’d occasionally, just by accident, make us look better than we actually are. They’d paper over some inconvenient truth from time to time. But on every issue, their mistakes make us look worse and our position less plausible. 

Why the Moral Argument Fails

I want summarize a few points that illuminate why the standard moral argument for God is an abysmally terrible argument. 

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist. 

2. Objective moral values do exist. 

3. Therefore, God exists.

I would dispute the first premise – that morality is objective only if God exists – for a number of reasons. First, there are robust systems of moral objectivity that make no reference to God. This is something that does not need to be stated for anyone who’s at all familiar with the metaethical literature, but it continually shocks those who have relied entirely on apologists for their information on this subject. As Joe Schmid noted in his video, Moral Arguments for God: An Analysis, “Popular apologetics is seriously out of sync with metaethics here. If you buy mainstream anthologies on metaethics, most won’t even mention God and will still contain boatloads of theories accounting for morality in non-theistic terms. So there’s a striking gap between popular apologetics on metaethics and the actual metaethical literature.” So am I saying “apologists are defending a fringe view, therefore it’s wrong”? No, I’m saying it’s a fringe view because they and their audience don’t seem to know that it’s a fringe view! They think my rejection of the first premise is fringe, but as a matter of empirical fact, they have it completely backwards, so it’s worth correcting. 

I also think it’s worth mentioning the coherence of non-theistic moral realism because it seems like the first premise of the moral argument – morality is objective only if God exists – is predicated on the impossibility of views like ethical non-naturalism. It’s a joke to suggest that defenders of the moral argument actually bother to rule out non-theistic (realist) alternatives, which is necessary to justify the first premise. If you’re going to defend the idea that morality is objective only if God exists, you need to spend some time arguing that nontheistic realism is not an option. But apologists rarely mention moral naturalism or moral non-naturalism, let alone attempt to rule them out in any detail. Apologists are not even on first base here. 

In case the significance of that point is unclear, let me reiterate that the defender of the moral argument needs to systematically rule out every realist option that works independently of God in order to meet the burden they’ve taken on for themselves when they say “Morality is objective only if God exists” or “If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist”. Take the specific metaethical views defended by Eric Wielenberg in his book, Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism or those of Michael Huemer in Ethical Intuitionism. If the views of Wielenberg, Huemer, and others like them are even possibly true, then the first premise of the moral argument is false. If there is even one coherent nontheistic option on the table, if it is merely possible that atheists can have objective morals, then it is not true that morality is objective only if God exists! Complaining that “moral platonism” is extravagant or vaguely gesturing at evolutionary debunking arguments does not satisfy the burden the defender of the moral argument has saddled himself with. You’re defending the moral argument – you need to justify the premises of your argument. And if you are going to justify the first claim of the moral argument, you need to justify the claim that all forms of nontheistic moral realism are impossible. If that sounds like an insane burden that no one could possibly meet, then you’re beginning to see the absurdity of the moral argument for theism. 

Another objection is on the basis of intrinsicality. I think some things are intrinsically good or intrinsically bad. That is, they’re good or bad in themselves, without the need for something outside of them to account for their goodness or badness. There’s something in the very nature of suffering which accounts for its badness, not some extrinsic relation it has to Yahweh. The explanation lies in the nature of suffering, not the nature of God. If you think some things are intrinsically good (e.g., some people say human life is “intrinsically valuable”), then you are saying that those things are good in themselves, not in virtue of something else, like an extrinsic relation they have to God. Similarly, I think facts about the act of torture account for its badness or wrongness. When you call up to mind the nature of torture and vividly contemplate the extraordinary pain that’s inflicted, the absolute dominance of one human being over another, the radical imbalance of power, the unreliability of the information that’s sought (if you gain any information at all), and – did I mention the extraordinary pain? – it becomes clear that those features are enough to make it right or wrong, good or bad. If God commanded us not to torture each other, he did so because of those facts about the victim, the perpetrator, and the nature of torture. And again, if you think that some things are intrinsically good or intrinsically valuable, like human life, then I believe what you’re saying is that it’s good independently of God. How is it intrinsically valuable – an end in itself – if its value depends entirely on some fact about something else? In that case, it’s not valuable in itself – it’s only valuable in virtue of a relation it stands in to something else. I don’t see how you can consistently maintain that human life is intrinsically valuable and that it only has value in virtue of God granting it value. 

In a related vein, we can ask whether God had reasons for issuing the moral law he handed down. Either God has reasons or he does not have reasons. If he has a reason for forbidding torture – say, because of the intrinsic features of the act, or because it violates the rights of the victim, or some other possibility – then at least some moral truths are explanatorily prior to God, which means the moral argument fails and you’ve paved the way for nontheistic moral realism. The only alternative to the option that there is a reason is there is no reason, in which case morality is arbitrary – there’s no reason God commands what he does. But if he did have a reason, then it’s clearly that reason that’s doing the explanatory heavy-lifting. And if that reason – whatever it was – was good enough for God to issue his injunctions, why wouldn’t it be good enough for us? 

That’s roughly the first-order Euthyphro dilemma. (At least, that’s my preferred way of posing the dilemma.) Pushing the dilemma back to God’s nature doesn’t help anything, since we can then present a second-order dilemma and ask if there’s a reason God’s moral nature is as it is. Is there any particular reason God’s nature is such that he necessarily forbids torture? Or is there no reason at all? The same dilemma presents itself: Either there is an underlying reason for God’s moral nature, in which case it’s that underlying reason that accounts for moral value; or there is no underlying reason and the theist has not successfully avoided the problem of moral arbitrariness. If there’s a reason God’s nature is essentially loving, or if there’s a reason his command to love one another necessarily flows from his nature, then God is explanatorily redundant. There’s a deeper explanation for his moral nature, and we should be looking to those reasons to account for the goodness of love. 

So it’s not just that the moral argument is implausible in its deductive form. Even if you made an abductive version of the argument with the premise, “If morality is objective, then God is the best explanation for its being objective”, I would dispute that, too. Since appealing to God to ground moral values either leaves you looking to deeper reasons or leaves you with moral arbitrariness, God could not be the best explanation of objective moral values. 

There’s a further reason God couldn’t be the best explanation – or an explanation at all – of objective moral values. How could God explain objective moral truths any more than he could explain objective logical or mathematical truths? If a mind or a person or three persons are posited to ground logical truths, it seems like we’re no longer talking about an objectivist theory. We’re talking about a subjectivist theory. In other words, I dispute the idea that God can be the author of objective moral values in the first place. Divine command theory cannot get you objective morality. 

Here are two more problems for divine command theory. Like other moral subjectivists, divine command theorists must hold that seemingly horrible actions, like genocide, terrorism, and torture, are morally right as long as the appropriate person or group of three persons endorses them. Second, a problem with grounding morality in God is that even if he does exist, God’s nature and commands are extremely uncertain. If we’re grounding morality in God’s commands, the natural question that follows is: What does God command, exactly? What is God’s nature, exactly? The various branches and denominations of the Abrahamic religions have core disagreements that have historically resulted in brutal executions and other forms of violent conflict. People who agree that moral truth is grounded in God emphatically do not agree about what God wants from us. (We might also add, as an afterthought, that another problem with grounding morality in God is that it’s doubtful that God exists.) 

Finally, there’s the Oppyan “both end in primitives” objection. Without rehashing all the details covered in my video on the moral argument: Both the moral realist and the divine command theorist are going to have to eventually rely on theoretical primitives. There comes a time when the chain of justification and explanation comes to an end, which means the divine command theorist doesn’t have a leg to stand on when they complain about the bruteness or ungroundedness of moral realism. We could also go on the offensive and say that while our theories both end in primitive axioms, the nontheistic alternative does it with less metaphysical baggage, and should therefore be preferred on grounds of simplicity. 

In light of the Oppyan objection, the fact that divine command theory is not an objectivist theory in the first place, the first and second-order Euthyphro dilemma, the intrinsicality objection, and the coherence of nontheistic moral realisms (like ethical naturalism and non-naturalism), the moral argument is a completely botched argument for God’s existence. There’s virtually nothing going for the central premise, and quite a lot going against it. 

Why does Craig defend the moral argument?

The moral argument’s astonishing popularity is mostly due to widespread unfamiliarity with the main subject matter, metaethics. As I’ve begun to talk more about this argument, some theists have reacted badly to the suggestion that it matters that they are unfamiliar with metaethics. But if you are making the moral argument, you have already started dealing with metaethics, making metaethical claims and so forth. It obviously wouldn’t make any sense to say, “I want to make the cosmological argument but I don’t want to talk about philosophy.” Metaethics is the engine of the moral argument. 

So why aren’t there more defenders of the moral argument who are well-versed in the subject matter it depends on? There are brilliant theists who defend cosmological arguments, design arguments — people who have advanced the understanding of the subjects those arguments run on! Why is it comparatively hard to think of similar cases when it comes to the moral argument? The reason is that once you learn about the subject matter, you realize the argument sucks. That’s why so many of the defenders of the moral argument are bottom of the barrel pop-apologists who don’t know anything about metaethics. The worst apologists are the ones who are ignorant of philosophy. 

So what’s Craig’s excuse? He’s a philosopher and arguably the most prominent defender of the moral argument. I think the answer can be found in an interview with John D. Martin, who asked Craig which arguments, in his opinion, are the most persuasive to students. Here’s how he responded: 

Interestingly enough, I think the moral argument is the most effective. I, personally, like the scientific and philosophical arguments, based on science and cosmology. But I find that those don’t really move students as much as the moral argument, which says that apart from God, there is no absolute foundation for moral values. Therefore, if you’re going to affirm the value of things like tolerance, love, fair play, the rights of women, and so forth, you need to have a transcendent anchor point. You need to have God. I think students [are so familiar with the idea God is dead, therefore everything is relative] that they resonate with that argument when you tell them that apart from God, there are no moral absolutes. … So this argument has tremendous appeal to students. It is one to which they respond.

Is it just me, or is he saying that he defends the moral argument so frequently because it’s effective and not because he thinks it’s a good argument? 

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Watch: The Collapse of the Moral Argument for God