Cory Markum
published an article last year in Atheist
Republic responding to William Lane Craig and his moral argument for the
existence of God called “God & Morality: Why God Cannot Serve as a
Foundation for Morality.” This ambitiously titled article attempts to show that
Craig’s argument does not accomplish the goal that he intends it to have. I
will argue that not only does Markum’s argument against Craig fail, not also he
does nothing even remotely close to showing that God
cannot serve as a
foundation for morality. In fact, it seems to me that not only can God serve as
a possible foundation for morality, but is the
only logically possible
entity to do so, thus arguing for the impossibility of the contrary – that God
not only is the foundation of morality but that it cannot logically be
otherwise.
I will in large part skip the first ¼ of the article as it
addresses a version of Divine Command Theory ethics (DCT) that I do not
personally ascribe to, nor feel any need to defend. In that section he attempts
to undermine Craig’s argument by appeal to the long debunked Euthyphro Dilemma
(ED). The ED seems to have become a staple among the New Atheist and internet
infidel communities, but it has largely fallen on deaf ears and fallen out of
favor even among atheistic philosophers.
However at this point in the article, Markum moves into a
version of DCT that I call Divine Attribute Theory (DAT)
in which moral values are rooted in the
nature or the
essence of
God rather than in God’s commands. There may be further discussion about
whether or not our moral duties/obligations may, at least in part, derive from
God’s commands (surely some do). Nonetheless, it seems that to even discuss
moral obligations we must first be able to ground moral values to which one is
obliged to keep. There is no need to discuss my civic duties to the state if
there is major doubt that there is anything like a state laws or state
authority to which I am beholden.
Markum writes of the DAS, “This is believed by some to
effectively render the first part or horn of the Euthyphro dilemma, what is
known as the arbitrariness objection, a moot point, as morality is not
arbitrarily set by a God but necessarily so, by a being who is perfectly and
completely good.” Markum concedes at this point that it at some level this does
avoid the 1
st horn of arbitraries and that it may even escape the
second horn, but only by pushing the goal posts of independence back a row.
Thus he thinks that it still ultimately gets hung up on the second horn of
independence via a Modified ED (MED) that will deliver the same results to DAT
as ED did to DCT.
He states, “To illustrate this, consider how theists tend to
describe God’s perfectly moral nature: he is impartial, just, honest,
compassionate, loving, etc. The fact that theists use such language to describe
their god betrays them as we can now ask whether God’s nature is good because
it is just, impartial, honest, loving, and so on, or are these qualities good
solely because they happen to be among the attributes of the creator of the
universe?”
The problems for Markum’s argument begin at this early stage
for he has made a severe conceptual error in confusing the causal arrow. When a
Christian says that God is good and then describes him as “just, impartial,
honest, loving, and so on” they are describing the outworking actions of God’s
goodness. That is, God is goodness and so therefore God acts in ways that are
what we come to know as “good.” God is not goodness because he acts
lovingly toward us for example. In fact, God was goodness before the creation
of the world and so had not yet expressed love toward us. Those character
traits are expressions of goodness and not the reasons for why God is
good. So the problem is largely resolved in the same way that the first
horn was avoided.
Markum continues, “If the former is true, then again, god
would more or less seem superfluous in regards to morality, as it is not God
per se, that makes something good, but ultimately the properties of honesty,
impartiality, compassion, et cetera.” Here the conceptual error that Markum
made initially is going to start costing him negative dividends at this point.
Because he thinks that the Christian is
grounding the goodness of God in their descriptions of God’s goodness,
he appears to think that this means those descriptions are then placed as
standards above God to which God must then align in order to be good. So again,
these are descriptions of what is entailed by the goodness of God, that
is, how it is expressed or displayed. This does not create the independence problem
that Markum hopes that it would.
He digs his hole deeper by trying to compare the problem by
analogy to himself, “As long as I myself am compassionate, impartial, loving,
and so on, I am good much the way this god would be if it in fact existed.” Not
only does this make the conceptual error just mentioned but it also makes a
massive category error of thinking that morality relates to all beings omnibus
idem – that we are moral in the same way that God is moral, and vice
versa. Here a sneak peak must be given to what is to come, but it is hugely
doubtful that Markum is the foundation for all objective moral values and so
when he acts in an ethical manner, he is reflecting the moral goodness of God,
much like how the moon may shine at night but only as it reflects the light of
the sun. So Markum may act in good ways but he is not goodness. That
distinction does indeed make all the difference. So with that first horn of MED
answered what about the second?
Markum writes, “But if the latter is true, then there is
nothing moral or good about things like compassion, love, and fairness, aside
from the fact they happen to be some of God’s personality traits. It’s not,
after all, as though God chose his nature. Conversely, there is nothing truly
wrong with being dishonest, cruel, or unfair, other than the fact that God
doesn’t act in this manner. Under this paradigm, morality amounts to little
more than a sort of copycatlike game of mimicry and imitation.”
This again is highly problematic. Not only does he still
confuse the difference between God’s nature and the expressions of that nature,
but here Markum seems to wildly conflate moral values with moral duties. That
compassion is a moral good does not automatically entail that beings in God’s
creation would have some moral duty to uphold them. That is, something can conceivably
be good without it being right and something could possibly be bad without
being wrong. Good and bad are words to describe the moral worth of some action.
Right and wrong are words use to describe whether or not we ought to engage in or
abstain from those actions. Duties are an issue of authority – why am I obligated
to do some action P? Well if I am under no authority, no command, no
decree, then I cannot possibly be obligated. So there may be a world in which
God is the foundation of all virtue and yet did not bind by either environment
or by edict any creature therein to those virtues. However that does not appear
to be the world that we are in. Not only is raping a small child for fun and
profit evil, we have real obligations to not only abstain from it ourselves but
to actively seek out those who would choose to engage in such actions. The fact
that these are derived from the nature of God and could not be different, is
hardly a substantive claim. It is like saying that the solidity of a bar of lead
is arbitrary because it did not choose to remain solid at room
temperature. Well in cases were we are talking about objectivity of a concept,
the fact that choice is not involved is kind of the point. In fact, this position
seems to be a blatant example of heads I win, tails you lose. Markum is
here arguing that it is a problem that God did not choose his nature and yet
one wonders what he would argue if the tables were turned and God could
choose his nature. Well in that case he would likely appeal to ED and argue
that morality would then be arbitrary.
He then continues on to argue that by trying to avoid the ED
horn of arbitrariness, the DAT creates several new problems for itself. He
writes, “First, if God is perfectly moral, by which we mean he is incapable of
doing wrong, then he is consequently cut off from half of the possible
actions/choices that he would otherwise be capable of doing. He is therefore
most assuredly not omnipotent.” This is a massive blunder on Markum’s part and
reveals that his understanding of classic Christian theology is not that
robust. While this argument is popular on online blogs, no theologian (atheist
or otherwise) would take this problem very seriously. Omnipotence does not mean
God can do any action but rather means that God could do any
logically
possible action or that no outside force could prevent God from doing what
he wills. In either case, God being unable/unwilling to do an evil action is
not problematic. For is God
is goodness, then for absolute goodness to
be absolute goodness it cannot logically do anything evil. Therefore because
God cannot do anything logically impossible, then as a the foundation of
absolute goodness God would not possibly be able to do any evil action and yet
still remain omnipotent. The other conception of omnipotence would also be
unaffected since as the foundation of absolute goodness, God would not desire
to do anything evil and no exterior force could cause him to do so. Thus no
power could be exerted against him and thus he would remain omnipotent.
Markum then argues, “Second, this sort of god is certainly
not a free creature either, by any reasonable definition of the word. When this
being approaches an ethical fork in the road, it inevitably finds one path
blocked off. God doesn’t choose to do, and therefore be, good—he just is. This
seems to me to make God a sort of wind up doll, or moral machine, with his
every action being not only mediated but wholly determined by his divine
nature.”
This again reveals considerable misunderstandings for Markum.
Here I will not be diverted down the massive rabbit trail of discussing or
defending any particular view of freedom of the will, but surely any view of
the will (libertarian, compatiblistic, deterministic, or otherwise) places
boundaries due to the nature to which the will is bound. Even if I have perfect
libertarian freedom, I am not free, for example to fly like a bird or to be a
dolphin. If God is goodness, then just because God will always by nature choose
the good path, it does not mean that he is not free. It does not make God a “robot”
any more than you or I are robots because we are not birds or dolphins.
Another major problem here is that it attempts to place God in time or at least
in relational to causal decisions in the same way that we face them. We are
asked to imagine that God is like an explorer, walking down the path of life
and comes to a fork in the road and must weigh the cost and blindly pick which
path to take. This may be one kind of deity I suppose, but it surely is
not the one of monotheism in which God knows the beginning from the end and
does not process thoughts and decisions in the same way that we do. God does
not need to choose A or B like we do. This kind of confusion and failure to
work within the Creator/creature distinction reveals a lack of clear and cogent
understanding of theism within Markum’s arguments.
In his section entitled “Rape is bad; therefore, God exists”
Markum then moves on to attempt to engage with Craig’s moral argument which is
as follows:
1. If God does not exist, then objective moral values and
duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exist.
This simple modus tollens argument is a valid syllogism and
so the real question is whether or not the premises themselves are true. Markum
begins his assault on the argument with revealing a major flaw in his own
argument. He states, “Now leaving aside the fact that many of us think values
are necessarily subjective...” Remember the subtitle of the article is, “Why
God Cannot Serve as a Foundation for Morality.” The irony of Markum’s statement
should be pointed out. He is attempting to show that God cannot be the
foundation for morality but in order to do so, he must reject that there is
such a thing as objective morality. I have argued extensively elsewhere that
subjective morality just is nihilism and thus no morality at all, but
observe how Markum needs to deny morality in order to defend his case that God
cannot be the foundation for morality. This is a very costly error for him to
make.
He then continues, “to what exactly does Dr. Craig point in
support of this? Amazingly, the only thing Craig gives in order to substantiate
this—the existence of objective moral values in the world—is the fact that we
perceive moral values in the world. That is, because things like rape seem
quite obviously wrong to (some) of us, we can simply conclude from this that
therefore these things are objectively wrong.”
The first major problem here is that Markum can only say
this if he is unfamiliar with the corpus of Craig’s work in which he has done
quite a bit of work defending P2. However, even if that were not the case I
would still be inclined to agree with Craig on this issue. We can think of a
simple analogy: How am I to convince you that a realm of material objects exist?
Well I point to the desk and say, “Here is a material object!” What do you say
then to the person who rejects perception and says, “Well you cannot appeal to
thing that is meant to be proven”? It seems to me that if someone wants to deny
that raping a small child for fun and profit is actually and objectively evil
and immoral, then I’m simply not sure that they have the moral or rational
capacities to discuss these issues cogently. In fact, the only I see this ever
coming up is in a defense of atheism or a denial of theism such that it seems
that nihilist is willing to accept absurdities in order to escape conceding
that God exists.
Markum then goes on to make several quite common, but
elementary, mistakes. He says, “The first and most obvious problem with this is
that clearly not everyone agrees about what is right or wrong in the first
place. Hence, our current culture wars over homosexuality, abortion, capital
punishment, etc.” He may think that this is a valid argument but what he has
actually done is confuse ontology with epistemology. The existence of
disagreements about certain facts does not mean that those facts do not exist
or are not objective. If that were the case then whether or not evolution were
true, if God exists, if the earth rotates around the sun or vice versa, and so
one would all just be subjective believe evolved from our cultural developments.
The simple fact that people
disagree about something is not a salient
point to an argument. This is not a problem for objective morality and in fact
is perfectly in line with it. Some people (maybe all people) can be wrong. I’m
certain that I have incorrect moral beliefs. Yet I’m also certain that those
who believe that trafficking humans for profit is morally acceptable are just
as wrong as the flat earthers living in the Appalachian backwoods.
He continues, “Secondly, it appears that some people (psychopaths)
are lacking a moral compass all together; are we to believe that God dropped
the ball here and failed to give them functional moral equipment?” This again
is not a problem for the existence of objective moral values than is the
existence of conspiracy theorists who doubt the moon landing are for the
objective historical reality of the moon landing. Just because people who are
cognitively deficient do not have the ability to formulate correct beliefs does
not entail that the rest of us cannot. We do not say that color is subjective
because some people are colorblind.
Markum reiterates this same fallacy by stating, “The next problem is that we
cannot simply use the fact that some of us perceive moral values to establish
the objective reality of those moral values... this is just lazy reasoning.”
Well hardly. Again, as we have seen, the disagreement over a fact has little to
no bearing on whether or not the fact is true or false. Just because nihilists
would disagree doesn’t mean that Craig or his argument is unsound anymore than
Markum would think that we should doubt evolution because Ken Ham and millions
of Young Earth Creationists disagree.
Markum then calls an audible and attempts to punt to a
concept of beauty and wonders if just because some people observe beauty that
therefore there is some kind of objective beauty. He wonders then who would
argue such a position and seems to be wholly unaware of the entire field of
philosophy which deals with aesthetics, many of whom do hold to objective
beauty. In fact many theists would say, along with their ethicists, that
creaturely beauty is only beautiful in so far as it displays the beauty of God
and that God intended to display with it. While it is beyond the scope of this
response to make such a case, I do think that something can be said for such
positions. In short, I think it is actually Markum and not Craig who is
employing “lazy reasoning” by throwing up beauty as if it is some prima facie a
priori defeater to the objectivist case.
Markum then takes a tact that I find quite puzzling. He
moves to the structure of the Moral Argument and attempts to argue not only
that the premises are false (which we have seen above he has failed at
demonstrating) but also that the argument is a non sequitur, that is, that the
structure of the argument is invalid. This is quite bizarre in that the
argument is actually quite a standard modus tollens structured argument. It is
of the form:
P1) ~P → ~Q
P2) Q
P3) P
This is a standard syllogistic form and within the moral
argument the propositions and their negations are properly carried through the
premises. However Markum starts this new assault by saying, “If this argument
were formulated correctly, premise two would read more like, ‘Objective values
seem to exist in the world,’ or ‘Objective values are perceived by most (I’m
being generous here) of the world’s inhabitants.’” What he has done is taken a
logically valid argument and in order to show why he thinks it is not valid, he
offers what he thinks are improvements that would actually make it
invalid. So not only is he incorrect that it is a non sequitur but his attempt
to change it would turn it into a non sequitur. For if we altered P2 to be “Objective
moral values seem to exist in the world” then we would also need to alter P1
and the P3 to be completely different. In fact not only would we have to change
P3 to “Therefore, it would seem that God exists” but P1 would have to be
radically altered because it is not clear on how many possible positions it
would be that moral values only apparently or seem to exist. What Markum is
doing is actually trying to change altogether what the argument is arguing for
in order to escape from its conclusion. Yet nowhere does he in fact demonstrate
that the argument, as formulated by Craig and others is in fact invalid.
He then rapidly shifts gears and goes back to his
previous complaint that Craig does not defend P2 that objective moral values
and duties do exist – again ignoring the entire corpus of Craig’s work doing
just that. Markum states, “Again, the only support for the assertion of
objective moral values is the subjective perception of them by some people.
We’re not talking about the existence of moral values, but the perception of
moral values. Clearly, this is just not enough to say that they do in fact
exist in some objective sense.” Here he is not actually making any new
arguments but merely recycling a previously failed one.
And thus ends the criticism of Craig’s argument. That really
is it. While Markum is a clear and considerate thinker, it can hardly be said
that his article has moved the needle for the cause of atheism against the
Moral Argument. And yet he is not done. Remember the article is meant to show
that God cannot be the foundation of morality. So Markum asks, “can we
think of any other possible explanations for the fact that many of us do
admittedly perceive moral values in the world?” This is where the real one-two
punch should come in to knock God out of the explanatory ring. But what comes
is not really what the title of the article offers.
“And the answer is of course an enthusiastic, yes. We are
social animals. Evolution, whether or not its existence is even acknowledged,
is a perfectly tenable explanation for why we happen to have these ethical
inhibitions seemingly woven into our very being. We, as social beings, are
preoccupied with the good and the bad quite simply because nature has
gracefully conditioned us to be this way.”
That’s all that he has to offer. Social animals and
evolution. Namely, nihilism. So we see again that in order for him to justify
that God is not the foundation of morality, he must deny morality itself. There
are no such things as objective moral values and duties. There is legal
fictions and wish fulfillment – Markum has painted himself into the corner
where he knows that rape is not actually evil and wrong but we
have just evolved to have a strong distaste for it... and yet we live like it
is wrong. We punish people for different tastes with imperialistic zeal. We
hold special disdain for those who rape small children and we justify it by calling
it evil. But for Markum’s worldview it is not and indeed it cannot be
evil or wrong. Just an evolved distaste. We really wish it was wrong and so we
pretend that it is in order to make society work. Wish fulfillment turtles all
the way down.
The final problem for Markum comes in his closing paragraph,
where he writes, “It may be that some god did in fact endow us with moral
sentiments, sure, but nevertheless it may also be that natural selection has
done so.” The thesis then that God cannot be the foundation for morality
is then shown to be a brutum fulmen that not even Markum himself thinks
he accomplished.
