An Attack on William Craig’s Moral Argument With Regard to the Christian God

***An Attack on William Craig’s Moral Argument With Regard to the Christian God***

*Or: an attack on the motivations for premise 2 of Craig’s moral argument.*

In my last post, I incorrectly asserted the following theses:

**\[Given the truth of Bible-believing Christianity, Stomping on a Baby’s Skull is not an Intrinsically Evil Act.\]**

Through some fun dialogues with Christians, I conceded my argument wasn’t sound, and I was forced to retreat. someone correctly pointed out that the method was not Baby skull stomping. Citation:

\[*1 Samuel 15:7, NRSVUE Saul defeated the Amalekites, from Havilah as far as Shur, which is east of Egypt.* ^(8) ***He took King Agag of the Amalekites alive but utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword.*** ^(9) *Saul and the people spared Agag and the best of the sheep and of the cattle and of the fatted calves, and the lambs, and all that was valuable and would not utterly destroy them; all that was despised and worthless they utterly destroyed.* \]

**New position:** Thanks to Mr. someone, I have advanced a new thesis:

**Given the truth of Bible-believing Christianity, splitting an innocent baby open with a sword is not an Intrinsically Evil Act.**

That’s about to be Premise 3 in a new argument. If you want to reject premise 3 of the new argument, the thread is still active [Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAChristian/comments/1vp1pvf/title_given_the_truth_of_biblebelieving/).

Here’s Dr. Craigs moral argument, quoted from memory:

P1: If God does not exist, moral values and duties do not exist.

P2: Objective moral values and duties do exist.

C: God exists.

Where Craig motivates the second premise in this way:

“My claim is that we are justified in believing (2) on the ground of our moral experience unless and until we have a defeater of that experience, just as we are justified in believing that there is a world of physical objects around us on the ground of our sense experience unless and until we have a defeater of that experience. Such a defeater would have to show not merely that our moral experience is fallible or defeasible but that it is utterly unreliable, that we may apprehend no objective moral values or duties whatsoever. Our moral experience is so powerful, however, that such a defeater would have to be incredibly powerful in order to overcome our experience, just as our sense experience is so powerful that a defeater of my belief in the world of physical objects I perceive would have to be incredibly powerful in order for me to believe that I have no good reason to think that I am not a brain in a vat of chemicals or a body lying in the Matrix. As Louise Antony put it in our debate, any argument for moral scepticism will be based on premises which are less obvious than the existence of objective moral values and duties themselves, that is, than (2) itself.” — [William Craig — December 04, 2015](https://www.biola.edu/blogs/good-book-blog/2015/are-we-justified-in-believing-in-objective-moral-values-and-duties), “The Good Book Blog”

To summarize and paraphrase: Dr. Craig thinks that the moral intuition which validates (2) is so powerful and so intrinsic to our nature, **that the power of an argument to overwhelm it would need to be on the scale of an argument which commits us to the falsity of the external world.**

In this argument, I will be full-send granting both the validity and soundness of Craig’s moral argument. I’ll be using the motivation for P2 to demonstrate that I can personally know that the God of Craig’s argument **cannot be** the Christian God.

**P1: Objective moral values and duties do exist, and we can know them thanks to our inherent, first-hand, real experience of morality**

**P2: My god-given, inherent, first-hand, real experience of morality tells me that splitting a baby open with a sword is an intrinsically evil act.**

**P3: Given the truth of Bible-believing Christianity, splitting a baby open with a sword is not an Intrinsically Evil Act.**

**C: I can personally know that Bible-believing Christianity is false.**

**Motivations:**

**P1:** See Dr. William Lane Craig’s Moral Argument for God’s existence.

**P2:** My own internal moral intuition, granted to me by god and as real and powerful as my perception of an external world (According to Dr. Craig).

**P3:** See my previous post

**Possible Objections:**

**Attacking P1. Humanity’s sense of morality can be mistaken**

Generally, I think I can see what the theist would like to do here: The theist would like to say that thanks to our fallen nature, humanity’s internal sense of morality can be faulty or unreasonable. That’s fine, but runs into the issue of Craig’s motivation for premise 2 of his moral argument.

Namely, that my sense of moral experience is, as Craig put it, “...so powerful that a defeater of my belief in the world of physical objects I perceive would have to be incredibly powerful in order for me to believe that I have no good reason to think that I am not a brain in a vat of chemicals or a body lying in the Matrix.” (He needed to proofread this, but the point is clear).

If I am wrong about the vileness of an act so abhorrent and disgusting as splitting open a baby with a sword, then I am not just slightly wrong, and not just a little confused, I am at an exact 180 degree turn away from understanding morality. If this is the case, Craig’s premise 2 in his moral argument is completely unmotivated and totally devastated. We cannot know that objective moral values and duties exist by appeal to our own internal sense of right and wrong. We can’t rely on that internal sense of right and wrong for *anything.*

**Attacking P2: Splitting open a baby with a sword is actually just a morally neutral act on its own, only made immoral by other given conditions.**

To claim this is to directly contradict the exact moral experience Craig asks us to trust. Craig uses extreme language when motivating his P2, citing examples like torturing a baby for fun and the atrocities of genocides. He points out that we as humans have a pre-philosophical experience of morality. Craig argues that our moral intuition is so finely tuned and so powerful of a first-hand experience that to overwhelm it would require an argument of incredible power, akin to compelling the falsity of the external world.

But our moral intuition doesn’t check to see the source of an act before we make an estimation of it. When we see evil, we know it immediately, regardless of who it came from. If my immediate, deep-seated soul check of the intrinsic wrongness of splitting an infant open with a sword can be hand waved, then Craig’s appeal to intuitive moral realism is a complete failure.

**Attacking P3: The god of the Christian Bible does NOT order or condone the splitting of a baby with a sword.**

This is the part where I’m going to be soapboxing and behave a touch impetuously. When I posted the thesis “Given the truth of Bible-believing Christianity, Stomping on a Baby’s Skull is not an Intrinsically Evil Act,” I did so with the following disclaimer:

*“The argument is not intended to disprove the existence of God or the truth of the Bible. The argument is intended to arrive at the conclusion exactly as laid out in the thesis: Given the truth of Bible-believing Christianity, Stomping on a Baby’s Skull is not an Intrinsically Evil Act.*

*In actual fact, this argument needs to stand as part of a larger argument I’m working on as a critique of the second premise of Bill Craig’s famous ‘Moral Argument’ for the existence of God.”*

And while this disclaimer was plain as day on the post, Christian after Christian replied thusly (In fact this was my most common retort): “You could concede this thesis and it would mean nothing.”

To which I often replied, “That’s fine. Do you concede?”

And the Christian would say “I could concede. It would do nothing.”

To which I would then reply, “That’s fine. Do you concede?”

And the Christian would say “I could concede. It would do nothing.”

Etc… etc… etc.

Well, we’re here now. Concede, since it does nothing.

Anyway. If you don’t like premise 3, the argument motivating it is linked above.