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The Moral Argument
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The Moral Argument
 Every law has a law giver.
 There is a Moral Law.
 Therefore, there is a Moral Law Giver.
Romans 2:14-15:
 “When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do
instinctively what the law requires, these, though not
having the law, are a law to themselves. 15They show
that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to
which their own conscience also bears witness.”
Our Reactions Help Us Discover the
Moral Law
 An ethics professor in India assigned a term paper to his
students.
 He told them to write on any topic they desired to write
about.
 Each student had to support his or her thesis with
reasons and documentation.
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One Student Argued:
 “All morals are relative; there is no absolute standard of
justice or rightness; it’s all a matter of opinion; you like
chocolate, I like vanilla.”
 The student submitted the paper in the proper length
by the due date.
 He even placed it in a stylish blue folder.
The Professor Graded the Paper and
Wrote:
“F, I don’t like blue
folders!”
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The Student was Enraged:
 “F! I don’t like blue folders!’ That’s not fair! That’s not
right! That’s not just! You did not grade the paper on its
merits!”
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The Dialog:
 The Professor: “Wasn’t your paper the one that said
that there was no such thing as fairness, rightness, and
justice? It’s all a matter of taste?”
 The Student: “Yes.”
 The Professor: “Fine, then. I don’t like blue. You get an
F!”
We Couldn’t Identify Justice or
Injustice
 “[As an atheist] my argument against God was that the
universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got
this idea of just and unjust?…
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 …A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some
idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this
universe with when I called it unjust?”—C.S. Lewis,
Mere Christianity, 45.
Did Evolution Produce Morality?
 “Underlying the extensive cross-cultural variation we
observe in our expressed social norms is a universal
moral grammar that enables each child to grow a
narrow range of possible moral systems.”—Marc D.
Hauser, Moral Minds: The Nature of Right and Wrong,
419-420.
Did Evolution Produce Morality?
 “The central idea of this book is simple: we evolved a
moral instinct, a capacity that naturally grows within
each child, designed to generate rapid judgments about
what is morally right or wrong based on an unconscious
grammar of action.”—Marc D. Hauser, Moral Minds, xvii.
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Did Evolution Produce Morality?
 This view fails to consider the possibility that there
is an absolute objective moral standard that
humans have “discovered” through biological
means.
 Evolutionists hold that ears and eyes have evolved.
Does the fact that humans possess eyes and ears
disprove the reality of sights and sounds in the
external world?
Did Evolution Produce Morality?
 Sociobiologists note: “Some animals display a system of
morality that resembles human behavior. Therefore,
morality is only a biological trait that humans have
inherited from lower animals.”
 Our belief in a moral law is false, because this belief in
a moral law has been placed in us through sociobiological evolution.
Did Evolution Produce Morality?
 This is a prime example of the genetic fallacy, which is
the attempt to falsify a belief by explaining how that
belief originated.
 A belief could be true regardless of how it came to be
held.
 Evolution could have merely been the means by which
humans became aware of the moral law.
American Coots Can Count
“To most people, coots are noisy, quarrelsome water birds
that do a lot of splashing about. But it turns out they
are also closet cuckoos. Not only that, they can count….
American Coots Can Count
 “…The discovery was made by Bruce Lyon, a biologist at
the University of California, Santa Cruz. His study of an
American coot colony in British Columbia, Canada, is
the first to show that birds can keep a reckoning of the
eggs they lay. It also highlights an extremely rare
example of counting by a wild animal.”—James Owen
for National Geographic News, “Coot Birds Can Count,
Study Shows,” April 2, 2003, is available online
at:http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/04/
0402_030402_coots.html.
Did Evolution Produce Morality?
 Mathematical laws exist independently of these birds’
counting behavior.
 “The scientific theories that prove to be the most effective
descriptions of the physical world are invariably
mathematical. It is an interesting question, although not one
that concerns us here, as to why this should be the case.”—
John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic
Cosmological Principle, 408.
 Therefore, an objective moral law could still exist even
though some animals manifest moral behavior.
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Did Evolution Produce Morality?
 Is the difference between Hitler and Mother Teresa their
genetic makeup?
 Or: Is the difference between Hitler and a morally good
person their environment?
 Or: Is the difference between Hitler and a morally good
person their genetic makeup combined with
environmental factors?
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Did Evolution Produce Morality?
 If the answer is yes to any of these questions, then how
could one praise a morally good person or how could
Hitler truly be guilty and worthy of punishment?
 After all, their morality is only the product of their
genetic makeup and the environment they developed
in.
Did Evolution Produce Morality?
 “Nothing in our genome codes for whether infanticide,
incest, euthanasia, or cooperation are permissible, and
if permissible, with which individuals.”—Marc D. Hauser,
Moral Minds, 420.
The Atheist Michael Ruse Says:
 “The man who says that it is morally acceptable to rape
little children is just as mistaken as the man who says,
2+2 = 5.”—Michael Ruse, Darwinism Defended, 275.
 What makes raping little children morally unacceptable
in the atheist worldview?
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Wrapping Up the Moral Argument:
 The Moral Law exists.
 We know this from our reactions when we are treated
unfairly.
 It allows us to identify justice and injustice.
 The Moral Law is invisible.
 The Moral Law is immaterial.
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Summing Up
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What is the Cause Like?
Supernatural
Timeless (Eternal)
Immaterial
Since the Cause created nature, time, space, and
matter, the Cause must be outside of time, space,
and matter.
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The Cause is Intelligent:
 It “fine-tuned” so many aspects of the universe.
 It gave humans a good view of the universe.
The Cause is Moral
 It accounts for an objective moral standard.
 This standard is:
 Invisible
 Immaterial
 If one thing immaterial and invisible exists, then we should
be open to the possibility of an invisible and immaterial
God’s existence.
Q&A
The Euthyphro Dilemma
 “Either something is good because God wills it or else
God wills something because it is good. If it is good
because God wills it, then what is good becomes
arbitrary.
 If we say instead that God wills something because it is
good, then whether something is good or bad is
independent of God, which refutes the idea that
atheism cannot legitimately call something good or
bad.”
Dr. William Lane Craig Responds:
 Since our moral duties are grounded in the divine
commands, they are not independent of God.
 Neither are God’s commands arbitrary, for they are the
necessary expression of his just and loving nature.
 God, by definition, is the greatest conceivable being,
and a being which is the paradigm of goodness is greater
than one which merely exemplifies goodness.
 William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith. Third Edition.,
181-182.
Atheistic Moral Platonism?
 Suppose that values like Mercy, Justice, and Love just
simply exist.
 How does that result in any moral obligations for us?
 Why would we have a moral duty to be merciful?
 Why are we obligated to align our lives with these
values instead of Greed, Hatred, and Selfishness?
Atheistic Moral Platonism?
 It is fantastically improbable that just that sort of
creature would emerge from the blind evolutionary
process that corresponds to the existing realm of moral
values. This seems to be an utterly incredible
coincidence when one thinks about it.—William Lane
Craig, Reasonable Faith, 179
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What about Sociopaths?
 There is a difference between guilty knowledge
and guilty feelings.
 Precisely because they have guilty knowledge,
wrongdoers who lack guilty feelings show other
telltales, such as depression, a sense of defect, a
compulsion to rationalize, or a puzzling desire to
be caught.”[1]
[1] What We Can’t Not Know, 118.
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What about Sociopaths?
 “It is an interesting an important fact that most of the
diverse criminal types suggested here do tend to justify
their conduct one way or another, at least to
themselves.”—David T. Lykken, The Antisocial
Personality, 28