Part 2 of my review of the debate between William Lane Craig and Alex Rosenberg: On Rosenberg's objections to the moral argument based on confusions about divine command theories with theistic voluntarism

As far I could see, some of the people in the audience in the debate between Craig and Rosenberg were college students, professors of several disciplines, scholars and other intelligent, educated people. This created a high-level intellectual enviroment there that I enjoyed a lot.

In my right side, I had a young (beautiful and extremely smart) student of biology, who said to me that she was an agnostic with sympathies to Buddhism. In the left side, I had a scholar (a professor in anthropology or something like that) who claimed to be an "open-minded atheist". Other people whom I saw there were students of philosophy, sociology, physics and law, coming from other universities and from Purdue too.

I greatly enjoyed the enviroment and the conversations there.

Sadly, Rosenberg's performance didn't matched the intellectual level of the audience. He was extremely unprepared for the debate, and it is my impression that he disappointed even many atheists in the audience. (In fact, I suspect that Rosenberg himself agrees that he lost the debate). In twitter, during the debate, I read phrases coming from online atheists like "I'm hearing that an atheist is being trashed in a debate about God at Purdue" and so forth. 

As an example of Rosenebeg's bad performance, let's to see Rosenberg's objection to the moral argument for God's existence. 

Craig's moral argument was:

1)Objective moral values and duties exist.

2)If God doesn't exist, objective moral values and duties don't exist.

3)Therefore, God exists.

Besides the cosmological argument, this argument is one of the most often misunderstood by atheists. (In fact, they seem chronically and irrestibly incapable of understanding it).

 

The second premiss asserts an ontological connection between God and moral values and duties. Note that the specific way in which the connection works is not specified in the argument and could have many forms. It doesn't say that moral values and duties exist because God chooses or wills them.

Perhaps God creates human nature with intrinsic features (like consciousness, free will, rationality, potentiality for the afterlife, etc.) which, in turn, give rise to objective value or moral properties. (In this case, moral values are ultimately created and dependent on God's creation, as the ultimate creator of everything besides himself, but not created as a bunch of God's commands, but as supervenient properties emerging from the human nature created by God. This was Thomas Aquinas' position, for example).

But atheists, typically, understand the argument in its most crude and unsophisticated form (the form proper of the simplistic atheistic mindset), namely, as claiming that God, on purely arbitrary grounds, decided such a things like "Don't kill each other", "Don't rape children", "Don't abuse other people" and so forth. In the literature, this position is known as theistic moral voluntarism. As far I know, NO defender of the moral argument in the history of philosophy (with the exception of William of Ockham and his followers) has ever defended this version of the moral argument.

Most defenders of the moral argument are NOT theistic voluntarists: they don't think (and in fact, energically reject, that morality depend on God's arbitrary commands. Rather, they argue that God, as the most perfect personal being, IS  by nature the good. God's perfect and holy nature determines and define the paradigm of the good).

One powerful reason to think that moral values and duties cannot exist in a naturalistic worldview is that morality is a phenomenon related essentially to persons. Therefore, if the universe has an intrinsic moral dimension, it implies that it has intrinsic person-relative properties. But naturalism is a radically impersonalistic worldview: the physical world is purely mechanical, blind, non-personal. On naturalism, "persons" are mere accidents,  by-products of biological evolution. Hence, it is hard to see how such impersonalistic worldview could plausibly ground intrinsic personal properties (like rationality, consciousness, moral values, moral responsability, etc.) as part of the fabric of reality.

Philosophers who have reflected in depth about the implications of naturalism (including Rosenberg, as we will see) understand this. For example, naturalist philosopher Keith Augustine (who wrote his master thesis on the nature of naturalism) comments:

But ethics does not come into play in the history of the universe until very recently--when Homo sapiens appeared. It is possible that moral laws have existed since the Big Bang, but that they could not manifest themselves until sentient beings arose. However, such a view implies that there is some element of purposefulness in the universe--that the universe was created with the evolution of sentient beings "in mind" (in the mind of a Creator?). To accept the existence of objective moral laws that have existed since the beginning of time is to believe that the evolution of sentient beings capable of moral reasoning (such as human beings) has somehow been predetermined or is inevitable, a belief that is contrary to naturalistic explanations of origins (such as evolution by natural selection) which maintain that sentient beings came into existence due to contingent, accidental circumstances. If objective moral laws are part of the natural universe (not part of some supernatural realm), then the universe cannot be unconscious--it must be, in some unknown sense, sentient. Few naturalists would want to accept such a nonscientific pantheistic conclusion... But given that moral subjectivism is just as logically viable as moral objectivism and that moral objectivism is implausible if a scientific naturalism is true, I think that there is a good case for the nonexistence of objective moral values

As Augustine comments, "ethics" is not an intrinsic part of the universe, but something which appeared very recently in history. Moreover, even thought it is logically possible that moral laws existed even in the moment of the Big Bang, such view implies that the evolution of human being was directed in a way which matched such laws (which suggests some kind of cosmic mind which organized and was actively controlling the whole biological process... but such cosmic mind, powerful intelligent designer who guided human evolution to make it match the putative moral laws existing from the Big Bang,  is precisely what GOD is, among other things, supposed to be!).

Naturalism cannot countenance the existence of any "mind" as an intrinsic part of the universe. "Mind" is, given naturalism, an biological phenomenon connected with a PHYSICAL brain. This is why naturalists reject the afterlife or survival of consciousness, and are materialists regarding the mind-body problem.

Contemporary atheistic naturalists fully understand all of this.

But what was Rosenberg's reply to the above argument by Craig?

He argued that Craig's argument was refuted by Plato, who asked: Is the good good because God chooses it, or God chooses it because it is good?

As philosopher Glenn Peoples argues in this podcast,  the objection is one of the worst arguments in the history of thought. And contemporary atheists make it even worst.

For example, note that it is NO part of Craig's argument the claim "moral values and duties depend on God's CHOICES". Craig is NOT arguing for theistic voluntarism. The premise simply state that moral values and duties depend ontologically on God (and it could be the case that moral values depend on God's holy nature, as Craig claims; or God's creation of human nature which determine certain objective values for humans, as Thomas Aquinas claimed; or on God's choices, as William of Ockham and theistic voluntarists claimed).

Note that even we could argue for Craig's premise based on Augustine's argument above. Since Augustine is claiming that a necessary condition for the existence of moral values is the property of being conscious and sentient, and God is an infinite and most perfect sentient and conscious being (who is, in addition, the creator of the whole of reality), then God is the ultimate ground of moral values which are binding to finite conscious and sentient beings like human beings (created by God).

All of these possibilities of the way in which God could ground moral values are bypassed by Roseneberg. He only knows of the most simplistic forms of theistic voluntarism. But other forms of theistic meta-ethics, which are not volutntaristic, are wholly ignored by him.

This fact alone showed that Rosenberg was philosophically unprepared to the debate, and made easy for Craig to refute him.

So, Rosenberg's claim that Craig's argument was refuted by Plato is simply false, since Craig's version of the moral argument is a post-Platonic, non-voluntaristic formulation of the moral argument. Plato only refuted theistic voluntarism of Greek polytheism, not other forms of theistic meta-ethics.

INCONSISTENCY OF ROSENBERG'S POSITION ON MORALITY

In a attempt of scoring a rhetorical point (which was useless, as showed by the official vote results of the debate), Rosenberg asked us to think of any moral norm, for example (the examples are mine):

-Don't kill atheists for fun

-Don't rape nor abuse atheist women (a moral norm whose consistent acceptation or recognition by some atheists is in doubt, as suggested by "skepchick" Rebecca Watson).

Then, Rosenberg asks us to think if God's existence or non-existence is relevant to the correction of the above moral norms. (The purpose of Rosenberg's point seems to be that, even if you don't believe in God, you're likely to agree with the above moral norms. Therefore, God is irrelevant to the moral correction of such norms).

But note that Rosenberg's own position in his book "The atheist's guide to reality" and his other published work is MORAL NIHILISM, that is, he emphatically DENIES that the above moral norms are objectively correct.

In this article by Rosenberg (please, read it carefully several times), he wrote:

There is no room in a world where all the facts are fixed by physical facts for a set of free floating independently existing norms or values (or facts about them) that humans are uniquely equipped to discern and act upon. So, if scientism is to ground the core morality that every one (save some psychopaths and sociopaths) endorses, as the right morality, it’s going to face a serious explanatory problem. The only way all or most normal humans could have come to share a core morality is through selection on alternative moral codes or systems, a process that resulted in just one winning the evolutionary struggle and becoming “fixed” in the population. If our universally shared moral core were both the one selected for and also the right moral core, then the correlation of being right and being selected for couldn’t be a coincidence. Scientism doesn’t tolerate cosmic coincidences. Either our core morality is an adaptation because it is the right core morality or it’s the right core morality because it’s an adaptation, or it’s not right, but only feels right to us.  It’s easy to show that neither of the first two alternatives is right.  Just because there is strong selection for a moral norm is no reason to think it right. Think of the adaptational benefits of racist, xenophobic or patriarchal norms. You can’t justify morality by showing its Darwinian pedigree. That way lies the moral disaster of Social Spencerism (better but wrongly known as Social Darwinism). The other alternative—that our moral core was selected for because it was true, correct or right–is an equally far fetched idea.  And in part for the same reasons. The process of natural selection is not in general good at filtering for true beliefs, only for ones hitherto convenient for our lines of descent. Think of folk physics, folk biology, and most of all folk psychology. Since natural selection has no foresight, we have no idea whether the moral core we now endorse will hold up, be selected for, over the long-term future of our species, if any.

This nihilistic blow is cushioned by the realization that Darwinian processes operating on our forbearers in the main selected for niceness! The core morality of cooperation, reciprocity and even altruism that was selected for in the environment of hunter-gatherers and early agrarians, continues to dominate our lives and social institutions. We may hope the environment of modern humans has not become different enough eventually to select against niceness. But we can’t invest our moral core with more meaning than this: it was a convenience, not for us as individuals, but for our genes. There is no meaning to be found in that conclusion.

Bingo!!!!!

Consider the following phrases by Rosenberg above:

-In a world in which physics fixes all the facts there is NO ROOM for independently existing norms or values

-The strong selection for a moral norm is not reason to think it is right

-We can't invest our moral code with more meaning that this: it was a convenience, not for us as individuals, but for our genes...

Is this the same man who is arguing for moral norms being right independently of God? If such norms are not independent of physicalism (because physicalism implies that norms don't exist objectively nor are right), why are they independent of God (whose existence falsifies physicalism, and being an omnipotent personal being, is the most plausible ground of such normative properties? Why exactly is physicalism more important and powerful than God regarding the validity of person-relative phenomena like morality?

According to Rosenberg's explicit position, there is NOT reason to think that strong natural selection of a moral norm (like "Don't kill atheists for fun") are right. They can FEEL right to us, but this subjective fact about human emotions doesn't make them objectively right.

Can you see Rosenberg's straightforward inconsistency? On one side, he says that in a world in which physics fixes all the facts (i.e. in a purely physicalist, and hence atheistic,world) there is not place for a "right" morality. They're pure inventions of humans, which are useful to us and were shaped by evolution.

On the other hand (and denying his own position) he claims in the debate that moral norms are right, regardless of God.

I ask truth-seekers out there:  how could a physicalist (atheistic) worldview to have nihilistic implications for morality, but a worldview based on a wholly perfect, holy and rational God (which is incompatible with physicalism) to be irrelevant to morality? Roseberg is giving to physicalism a power which is lacking in an omnipotent God (which is absurd).

Rosenberg, who is a moral nihilist, was forced to argue AGAINST moral nihilism just in order to contradict Craig. But Rosenberg himself is not believing in his own position in the debate.

When I saw such misleading sophism, I told the girl in the right "Read this" (I gave her the above online citation by Rosenberg on which he denies the validity of morality), and she replied "I can't believe that he's arguing for a view that is incompatible with his scientism, he's damaging his own case". I told her: "I've read, studied and heard carefully all of Craig's published debates, and some of Rosenberg's published works, and believe me, Craig's going to destroy Rosenberg tonight".

As an experienced debater, Craig correctly exposed such inconsistency quoting Rosenberg's own published work in which he defends moral nihilism and denies the objective existence and validity of moral norms. 

As consequence, the public clearly realized that Rosenberg was affecting a position that himself regards as false (i.e. as fully incompatible with scientism and the view that physics fixes all the facts), and castigated him in the voting.

I attended the debate with a tablet in which I had full citations of his own book and online articles, and I took notes of Rosenberg's bad arguments. My intention was to wait until the Q/A part of the debate, and confront his arguments in the debate with his own arguments published in his book. 

But his performance was so bad and inept, that I decided not to put more pressure on him. There is not point in making people to look bad, specially in front of high-level scholars and college professors.

Rosenberg's own performance sufficed to destroy his own philosophical credibility (at least, regarding matters of philosophy of religion), as the vote results proved.