Is the Foundation of Morality Natural or Supernatural? – The Craig-Harris Debate (2011)

1. Introduction

2. Dr. Craig – Opening Speech

3. Dr. Harris – Opening Speech

4. Rebuttals

5. Closing Statements

Is the Foundation of Morality Natural or Supernatural?

The Craig–Harris Debate

University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, USA – April 7, 2011

Topic: "Is Good from God?" – Are the foundations of moral value natural or supernatural?

Participants:

William Lane Craig – Christian philosopher and apologist

Sam Harris – Neuroscientist, author of The Moral Landscape

Format: 20-minute opening speeches, 12-minute first rebuttals, 8-minute second rebuttals, 5-minute closing statements, followed by audience Q&A.

Dr. Craig – Opening Speech

I want to begin by thanking the Center for Philosophy of Religion for the invitation to participate in tonight's debate. The question of the correct foundation of morality is one that is not only of tremendous academic interest, but also one that has enormous practical application for our lives.

Now to begin with an important point of agreement: Dr. Harris and I agree that there are objective moral values and duties. To say that moral values and duties are objective is to say that they are valid and binding independent of human opinion. For example, to say that the Holocaust was objectively evil is to say that it was evil, even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was good, and it would still have been evil even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in brainwashing or exterminating everyone who disagreed with them, so that everybody thought the Holocaust was good.

One of the great merits of Dr. Harris' recent book The Moral Landscape is his bold affirmation of the objectivity of moral values and duties. He inveighs against what he calls "the over-educated atheistic moral nihilists" and relativists who refuse to condemn as objectively wrong terrible atrocities like the genital mutilation of little girls.

The question before us this evening, then, is: what is the best foundation for the existence of objective moral values and duties? What grounds them? What makes certain actions objectively good or evil, right or wrong? In tonight's debate I'm going to defend two basic contentions:

1. If God exists, then we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties.

2. If God does not exist, then we do not have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties.

Now notice that these are conditional claims. I shall not be arguing tonight that God exists. Maybe Dr. Harris is right that atheism is true. That wouldn't affect the truth of my two contentions. All that would follow is that objective moral values and duties would, then, contrary to Dr. Harris, not exist.

First contention: If God exists, then we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties.

First, theism provides a sound foundation for objective moral values. On the theistic view, objective moral values are grounded in God. As St. Anselm saw, God is by definition the greatest conceivable being and therefore the highest Good. God's own holy and loving nature provides the absolute standard against which all actions are measured. He is by nature loving, generous, faithful, kind, and so forth.

Second, theism provides a sound foundation for objective moral duties. On a theistic view, objective moral duties are constituted by God's commands. God's moral nature is expressed in relation to us in the form of divine commandments which constitute our moral duties or obligations. Far from being arbitrary, God's commandments must be consistent with His holy and loving nature.

Second contention: If God does not exist, then we do not have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties.

On a naturalistic view, moral values are just the behavioral byproducts of biological evolution and social conditioning. Just as a troop of baboons exhibit cooperative and even self-sacrificial behavior because natural selection has determined it to be advantageous in the struggle for survival, so their primate cousins homo sapiens have evolved a sort of herd morality for precisely the same reasons. But on the atheistic view there doesn't seem to be anything that makes this morality objectively binding and true.

The philosopher of science Michael Ruse writes: "Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth... Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory... Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, and any deeper meaning is illusory."

As for moral duties: natural science tells us only what is, not what ought to be the case. If there is no God, what foundation remains for objective moral duties? Furthermore, Dr. Harris believes all our actions are causally determined and that there is no free will – yet "ought" implies "can." If there is no free will, then no one is morally responsible for anything.

What I'm offering Dr. Harris tonight is not a new set of moral values – I think by and large we share the same applied ethics – rather what I'm offering is a sound foundation for the objective moral values and duties that we both hold dear.

Dr. Harris – Opening Speech

I just want to say, it's an honor to be here at Notre Dame, and I'm very happy to be debating Dr. Craig, the one Christian apologist who seems to have put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists. I've actually gotten more than a few emails this week that more or less read, "Brother, please, don't blow this." So, you will be the judge.

Now, as many of you know, I've spent a fair amount of time criticizing religion. And one of the perks of this job is that you immediately hear from all the people who think that criticizing religion is a terrible thing to do. And strangely, the reason people rise to the defense of God is not that there's so much evidence that God exists, but that they believe that belief in God is the only intellectual framework for an objective morality. And clearly, Dr. Craig is among their number.

The sense is that without the conviction that moral truths exist, that words like "right" and "wrong", "good" and "evil" actually mean something, humanity will just lose its way. That's the fear. And I actually share that fear.

Now, it's widely believed that there are two quantities in this universe: there are facts, on the one hand, and then there are values, which many people think science can't touch. Now I want to challenge this view.

In claiming that values reduce to the well-being of conscious creatures, I'm introducing two concepts: consciousness and well-being. Imagine a universe devoid of the possibility of consciousness – imagine a universe entirely constituted of rocks. There is clearly no happiness or suffering in this universe; there's no good or evil; value judgments don't apply. For changes in the universe to matter, they have to matter to some conscious system.

Here's the only assumption you have to make: imagine a universe in which every conscious creature suffers as much as it possibly can, for as long as it can. I call this "the worst possible misery for everyone." The worst possible misery for everyone is bad. If the word "bad" applies anywhere, it applies here.

Now, Dr. Craig has argued that without God, we have no basis for morality. But consider what his view actually implies: it makes the goodness of God vacuous. If God's commands are what make things good, then to say God is good is simply to say that God does what God commands – which is a tautology. The alternative – that God commands things because they are good – means that goodness is independent of God.

Belief in God is not only unnecessary for a universal morality – it is itself a source of moral blindness. The God of the Bible sanctions genocide, slavery, and the murder of apostates. Dr. Craig has written that it was morally acceptable for God to command the slaughter of the Canaanites, including the children. I would suggest that this represents a profound failure of moral reasoning, not its foundation.

Science – specifically, the science of human well-being – can provide the foundation for objective moral values. Once we understand what it means for people to flourish or suffer, we can make objective claims about which actions, which policies, and which social arrangements are better or worse for conscious creatures.

First and Second Rebuttals

Dr. Craig – First Rebuttal

Dr. Harris has confused moral epistemology with moral ontology. I am not claiming that if religion is false, the word "good" has no meaning. People can know the good even if they do not know the ontological foundation of that good. To illustrate: people knew how to speak about light and what it does (semantics) long before they understood what light really was (ontology). In the same way, people can know the good even if they do not know that goodness is grounded in God.

Harris has not addressed my core argument: what makes human well-being objectively good in the first place? He simply asserts it as an axiom. But that is precisely what is in question.

Dr. Harris – First Rebuttal

Dr. Craig continues to misrepresent my position. I am not claiming that well-being is good by definition in a circular way – I am claiming that it is the only non-arbitrary place to anchor our moral concern. The alternative – grounding morality in the commands of the biblical God – leads to the conclusion that genocide and slavery can be morally required.

Consider the philosophical problem Dr. Craig faces: either God commands things because they are good (in which case goodness is independent of God), or things are good because God commands them (in which case morality is arbitrary). This is the Euthyphro dilemma, and Dr. Craig has not resolved it.

Dr. Craig – Second Rebuttal

The Euthyphro dilemma is a false dichotomy. I'm not saying God commands things because they are good (as if goodness were external to God), nor that things are good merely because God commands them (arbitrary). Rather, God is the Good – His nature just is the standard of goodness, and His commands flow necessarily from that nature. There is no dilemma here.

Dr. Harris has still not explained why human well-being is morally significant rather than, say, insect well-being. He has simply asserted it. This is not a foundation – it is the very thing that needs to be founded.

Dr. Harris – Second Rebuttal

If God's nature just is the standard of goodness, then that standard is still arbitrary – it happens to be whatever God's nature happens to be. Why should we think that nature is good? Dr. Craig has no answer that doesn't ultimately appeal to something outside of God.

My account of morality is analogous to mathematics or logic: we begin with axioms that are self-evidently true – that suffering is bad, that well-being is good – and build from there. Dr. Craig wants me to justify these axioms further, but every system of reasoning must begin somewhere.

Closing Statements

Dr. Craig – Closing Statement

Throughout this debate, Dr. Harris has failed to address my central arguments. He has not explained why, on atheism, human well-being is objectively valuable rather than merely one natural phenomenon among others. He has not resolved the problem of moral duty on a deterministic, atheistic worldview. And he has not provided any answer to the free will problem that undermines his entire framework of moral responsibility.

What he has offered is a redefinition of moral terms in non-moral vocabulary, and then declared the problem solved. But this is a semantic trick, not a philosophical argument.

On the theistic view, by contrast, we have a coherent and robust foundation: objective moral values grounded in the nature of God, and objective moral duties constituted by His commands. This is what grounds the moral intuitions we all share – that human beings have dignity, that suffering matters, that love and justice are real.

Taking objective morality on faith does not give us an atheistic grounding for morality – it gives us morality itself. We literally have no reason to believe naturalism can account for morality's being objective.

Dr. Harris – Closing Statement

How many of you consider yourselves to be devout Muslims?

You know the Quran exists. And you know that according to Islam, the rest of us – including Dr. Craig – are going to hell.

Here is the problem: everything Dr. Craig has said tonight could be said, with equal force, by a Muslim apologist. There is a book that tells us right from wrong; we all have to live by it; without it, morality collapses. What if the Muslims are right? We have been born into the wrong culture. Dr. Craig is doomed. I have been misled by science. Where is Allah's compassion? Allah could change this in an instant and give us a sign – but He's not going to. Hell awaits us and our children.

Now – appreciate how little sleep you have lost over this possibility. Think carefully about how worried you are that you will burn in hell for failing to recognize the Quran as God's word.

The fact that you are not worried – the fact that we all find this scenario almost comically implausible – reveals something important: we already know, intuitively, that the kind of argument Dr. Craig is making does not actually ground morality. We evaluate religious claims by their moral and rational content, not the other way around. We do not derive our moral intuitions from scripture; we use our moral intuitions to judge scripture.

That is the scientific approach to morality that I am defending. We have moral knowledge that is prior to, and independent of, any religious framework. And it is that knowledge – the knowledge that suffering matters, that human dignity is real, that fairness and compassion are genuine goods – that allows us to recognize good religion from bad, good God from bad God, and indeed the idea of God from the reality of human flourishing.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Dr. Craig – Opening Speech

Dr. Harris – Opening Speech

Rebuttals

Closing Statements