Philosophy Debates: Is God Necessary for Morality?
The following debate is between atheist, Dr. Shelly Kagan, and Christian theist, Dr. William Lane Craig on the subject is God necessary for morality? While the video doesn't have an exact date, I don't think that it is new, in fact, it seems to be quite old, and yet, I found it to be one of the more constructive debates on the topic, and its the first time that I have heard of Dr. Shelly Kagan, although the course he offered on Death did sound familiar.
As a centrist leaning more towards atheism on metaphysical and epistemological grounds, I was impressed by Dr. Kagan's arguments and overall style. Dr. Craig, a brilliant philosopher as well, has often bested his other atheist opponents in virtue of just doing better philosophy. Setting out the precise claims relevant to the topic, and arguing for them one at a time. His former atheist opponents, to my mind, often not providing arguments in the same fashion, rather just rattling off what amounted to personal gripes with God and organized religion, often straying off-topic and/or attacking the faith and not the arguments. I felt this was not the case with Dr. Kagan.
I have a few thoughts on the video that I want to share in this post pertaining mainly to my problems with Dr. Craig's arguments. while they won't be sketched out in their entirety, I hope to just give a brief outline and where I disagree. I hope to hear from anyone, theistic or not to provide their thoughts too.
With regards to Dr. Kagan, he believes that the answer to the question of the debate is no, God is not necessary for morality. As he said, people have been engaged with morality and have lived morally years before Christianity arose, and that one can continue to both live morally and objectively ground morality without the need to appeal to a deity. At the core of his argument is the objective wrongness of harm that obtains in all possible worlds, as they say. He unpacks this with three main key points that argue for both how we are moral and why we are moral,
1) Contractarianism
Dr. Kagan briefly argues for the effectiveness of establishing moral rules by the way of establishing a contract between perfectly rational agents, adding the twist of the construction of said contract behind a veil of ignorance.
2) An Appeal to the Laws of Logic
The objection to the first point is anticipated when Dr. Kagan acknowledges that one can agree to live morally, but whether or not we can ground these rules in a way that they gain and sustain objective truth. He points out the usual strain of thought amongst both theists and atheists that laws require lawgivers and/or requirements require requirerers, but argues briefly that the logic of a requirement does not necessarily entail the existence of a requirer. I fond this quite interesting.
3) Moral Accountability
Under theism, God holds us accountable for our actions, giving extra incentive to act morally. The theist would argue that the atheist does not have anything to hold individuals for their actions, giving us no objective reason to act morally. Dr. Kagan suggests that a possible solution to this would be to argue that it is precisely the members of our communities that hold us accountable for our actions.
While these can certainly be unpacked further and argued against, I will leave Dr. Kagan's main points here to progress to Dr. Craig's thought on the matter. These are a few of the problematic claims that arose, although I was quite impressed and pleased that Dr. Kagan managed to spot these out and call Dr. Craig out on them very well. The outline of Dr. Craig's arguments followed similarly as above, looking at societal institutions of morality, their grounding and the question of accountability.
1) A False Dilemma and Its Implications
I think that Dr. Craig continuously, whether inadvertently or not, creates a false dilemma when he assumes that if one does not accept a theistic worldview, then one must accept the atheistic worldview which automatically makes one a naturalist, and by extension, a determinist. This, along with his definition of atheism(provided in other debates, not here) is incorrect, demonstrated by Dr. Kegan in his brief explanation of his compatibilism. With this false dilemma, Dr. Craig goes on to make comparisons between animals and humans, both subject to the same law, and thus subject to view morality as nothing more than an adaptation conducive for survival. This is another mistake committed by theists when they make these ridiculous comparisons between, on the one hand, rational human agents that have highly sophisticated brains that allow for language, culture, co-operation, reflection, etc. and animals that have none or a diminished version of these capacities. Dr. Craig does spot this and points out the simple error in this way of thinking, something that Dr. Craig seems to acknowledge and accept.
Secondly, I find it strange that Dr. Craig feels that the "puppet master" known as natural determinism, which make moral acts incapable of praise, esteem or disgust, is worse than than "puppet master" known as God, who created us in a way that our individuals "stories" are already predetermined by the divine author who cannot possibly be surprised by deviations. This would greatly contradict God's perfection. As such, the theist has just as little freewill than the atheist, perhaps more so, given they are further constrained by the same laws of nature that the rest of us are.
2) God's Qualities
Dr. Craig rattles off God's qualities/attributes. describing him as perfectly good, kind, generous, etc. I first find it odd to give an infallible entity very fallible human qualities, which suggests qualities of the opposite kind, qualities that are laid out in the gospel. Dr. Craig omits that God is also cruel, petty, unjust, wrathful and needy. With this full picture, we could argue that the merits of our moral actions are something that we would not want to be judged by a flawed judge. One must also bear in mind that God, according to the texts, does not necessarily doll out punishments based on how much good or bad we brought to the world, but rather whether we submitted to Christ Jesus, who is the pathway to the father. On some accounts, a serious rapist will enter heaven before a good man based solely on giving up his life to Christ in his/her final moments. The just nature of this is dubious at best.
In addition to this, I am surprised that some atheist thinkers don't use arguments from atheistic faith traditions such as Buddhism. The Buddhist philosopher, Santideva, sets out three interesting arguments over the problems of the existence of a theistic deity, relevant to this small section, the arguments from God's psychological motivations for bringing humans into existence is quite interesting.
3) Accountability
Close to what was mentioned above, without the existence of God, it seems, according to Craig, that we have no good objective reason for acting morally. He gives an example of Stalinist soldiers happily torturing prisoners, claiming that since there is no God, they can be as evil as they want to be. First of all, I will repeat the above dubious nature of God's justice that was mentioned in the previous section. Second, the logic cuts both ways, as equal, if not, more horrendous acts have been committed by devout Christians and other theistic thinkers. Dr. Craig uses the platitude, "If God doesn't exist, then all things are permitted", I think that the thoughts of Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, are useful here when he reverses the sentiment by claiming that its the other way around. With God, all things are permitted, for what is human morality compared to the divine will? Under instruction from God, people can fly planes into buildings, killing thousands of innocent people, or a person can kill family, friends or other citizens of their communities if commanded(believed to be commanded) to do so.
These are only brief looks into the content of the video, and I stated from the beginning that I would be focusing primarily on some of the points raised by Dr. Craig. This is to say that there are many ways of also arguing against the views of Dr. Kagan and that despite my disagreement with Dr. Craig, I still think he is an incredible philosopher involved in some very interesting work. I hope to hear the thoughts of other Steemians regarding this topic. Happy viewing, and have a nice day :).