Morality as Evidence for God?

There are four separate ways for a moral argument for God’s existence to work.  

(a) The meta-ethical approach; moral values and/or obligations cannot be adequately grounded apart from a theistic worldview.  This claim has been asserted most forcefully in regards to obligations.  Robert Adams believes that our ought terms are irreducibly social and require a superior to ground them, and that God best fits this role.  There are also attempts, namely by William Lane Craig, to argue that moral value is best accounted for in a theistic universe.  I think that he’s right about this claim, but it’s difficult to show it.  There are a few routes of escape for atheistic moral realists:  Morality can reduce to pragmatic value.  Morality can be a Platonic universal.  Morality, concerned as it is with necessary truth, requires no explanation.  Morality is brute.  Morality can be generated from rational agents (conventionalism?).  Moral value reduces to a natural property (pleasure? happiness?).  Each of these suggestions I take to have problems, but it’s going to take an involved and lengthy argument to answer each one of them.

(b) The epistemological approach:  Theism best accounts for how we have true moral beliefs.  Platonism, if construed as belief in abstract objects, struggles to explain how we can make epistemic contact with an object that lacks causal powers.  Evolution, too, would seem to endanger at least some forms of secular ethics:  Evolution isn’t aimed at bringing about true moral beliefs, it’s guided towards survival.  So evolution without further explanation seems like it may undermine moral beliefs.  Theism has a ready explanation.  Our God is a good agent and would be interested in making sure agents that he creates would have access to moral truth.  

(c) The accountability approach:  This would be Kant’s argument.  Our moral system calls out for evil to be punished and virtue rewarded.  If atheism is true, many such cases will go unrewarded and unpunished.  But not on theism. God will make sure all wrongs are righted and all rights rewarded.

(d)  Indirect Argument Approach:  These are sort of hodge-podge.  They’d best fit in the meta-ethical category, but their nature is so occasional that I think that they deserve their own.  This category would include Robert Adam’s suggestion that our detection of excellence in the world seems to rely on an intuition that we’re comparing various excelleneces to a transcendent excellence, which would be God.  Maybe.  Adams also suggests that theism is able to maintain the Critical Stance in a way that naturalism in ethics cannot.  I don’t understand this suggestion, so it carries no weight for me. 

My favorite of the indirect approaches is newly emerging work from Alexander Pruss.  He argues that natural law is the best metaethical account and that natural law metaethics requires theism to be cogent.   See my earlier post “Rambling about Metaethics” to see this approach.