A Challenge to the Moral Argument (Pt. III)

This is the final installment in a series of posts on objections raised by philosopher Erik Wielenberg to the moral argument for the existence of God (scroll down for the previous two posts). Recall that Wielenberg couches his challenge to the moral argument in the form of three questions:

1. Why think that only Divine Commands are sufficient by themselves to generate moral obligations?
2. How can God's commands impose obligations on those who are unaware of divine authority behind such commands?
3. Why would God command people to do things He knows they won't do anyway, since issuing such commands only introduces pointless evil into the world?

In the previous post we looked at question #1 to determine how persuasive it was as an objection to the claim that if objective moral duties exist, God must exist. Today we'll look at questions #2 and #3.

One response to #2 is to point out that in fact our fundamental moral obligations to do justice and show compassion and mercy are known by everyone, atheist and theist alike. The apostle Paul writes that "they [unbelievers] show the work of the [moral] law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness, and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them." (Romans 2:15).

In other words, everyone has a basic sense of what's right and what's wrong, but if there's no transcendent ground for this sense then there's nothing obligatory about following it. It can easily be explained away as a product of social conditioning or evolution and then we're back to the argument of our first post in this series.

In response to #3 it's hard to see how commanding people not to, say, commit murder actually introduces more evil into the world. Wielenberg seems to think that murder is evil because God prohibits it, but that's silly. Murder isn't evil because God forbids it. God forbids it because it's evil. People would still murder others had God never proscribed it. In fact there'd probably be more murder had God not forbidden it and therefore there'd be more evil.

Even if not everyone heeds the command forbidding murder surely most people do, and therefore God's command reduces the amount of killing and human suffering rather than introducing more of it.

We can conclude this series of posts with this observation: If the God of traditional theism exists He is perfectly good, He transcends human subjectivity, and He is able to hold us accountable for what we do. Only such a being could serve as an adequate ground for the existence of objective moral duties.

When people seek to live what would be considered a "good moral life" while denying the existence of the only adequate basis for their moral values, they're in fact piggy-backing on theism while at the same time claiming to reject the theism on which their moral life depends.

That doesn't seem to make much sense.