A couple of days ago I discussed an argument by Michael Martin which he calls TANG (Transcendental Argument for the Non-existence of God). It's an argument against the existence of God based on logic, science, and morality. In that last post we talked about whether his claim that logic and science precluded God actually works. In this post I want to take the last of the three elements of TANG and see how a theist might respond to it.
Martin writes:
Consider morality. The type of Christian morality assumed by TAG (Transcendental Argument for the existence of God)is some version of the Divine Command Theory, the view that moral obligation is dependent on the will of God. But such a view is incompatible with objective morality. On the one hand, on this view what is moral is a function of the arbitrary will of God; for instance, if God wills that cruelty for its own sake is good, then it is. On the other hand, determining the will of God is impossible since there are different alleged sources of this will (The Bible, the Koran, The Book of Mormon, etc) and different interpretations of what these sources say; moreover; there is no rational way to reconcile these differences. Thus, the existence of an objective morality presupposes the falsehood of the Christian world view assumed by TAG.
One reply to this is that morality is not merely a function of God's will nor is it independent of God, rather it's a consequence of God's essential nature. Just as logic is part of the essential nature of God, so too is goodness. Thus, just as all the energy on earth ultimately derives from the sun and would not exist were it not for the sun's existence, whatever goodness there is in the world derives from God and would not exist were there no God. Goodness, and derivatively, morality, are objectively real but only because they are grounded in the being of God. Without God it's very hard to see how there could be any moral good or bad, right or wrong.
Even if it were true that we can't know what God's will is it doesn't follow that morality is independent of God. We grope, perhaps, to find the good, but if there were no God there'd be no good to find. Nevertheless, as J. Budziszewski argues in his books Written on the Heart and What We Can't Not Know God has impressed upon us the basics of morality much as we have been given a facility for learning language. We may disagree about the details, but everyone knows deep inside that kindness is better than cruelty, and that fairness is better than unfairness. Yet why should we think this if we are just a mass of atoms?
The fact that there are disagreements about what God's will is means nothing. People disagree on how the world came to be. It doesn't follow from that that there is no true explanation for the provenience of the world.
Thus, contrary to Martin's assertion, the existence of an objective morality presupposes the existence of a transcendent ground for moral good and evil. It presupposes a God.
RLC
