Your answer to the moral knowledge argument is unconvincing. Moral values progressing over time doesn’t explain *why* moral values progressed over time. Why did moral values progress over time instead of just being based on evolutionary adaptations? If God exists, you might expect him to providentially allow us to develop correct moral values, but under atheism you’d expect our moral beliefs would just be evolutionary adaptations.
This is one of the arguments that convinced Matthew Adelstein of God. Dustin Crummett’s stuff on this is good.
It’s also striking that the reason why western morality progressed is Christianity. It’s pretty uncontroversial among historians that Christianity caused western liberal morality. In fact Christianity is considered so entrenched in western moral thought and concepts that secular moral movements don’t realize that they are using concepts that come from Christianity. Tom Holland’s book “Dominion” explains this.
Are technological and theoretical advancements all due either to divine providence or to evolutionary adaptations? If so, that uses a very broad sense of evolution, one that makes the point trivial.
I’m not sure what you’re saying, other than I mean evolution in a biological sense, and I wasn’t talking about technological advances. I’m saying that under atheism you’d expect our moral intuitions to just be irrational evolutionary adaptations, but if that’s not the case, then we have evidence for theism.
Why would the same not apply to technological or scholarly advances? They are not the direct result of divine revelation or biological evolution. Perhaps the response would be that moral knowledge is different because it is obviously not objective, while technological and scholarly knowledge are at least potentially objective.
Because technological advances are the result of self-interest, both in the inventors and their benefactors. They are also more descriptively based (this is probably what you mean by “objective,” though philosophers use these terms differently). Morals aren’t. I’d say that morality is definitely objective.
Though a similar argument can be made about high abstract knowledge which leads to technological advances, yes. The moral argument is more straightforward, though. But that’s a pro to this style of argument, not a con.
So moral knowledge is different because it is prescriptive and technology and scholarship are descriptive, and therefore moral knowledge must be either the product of divine providence or of biological evolution? There is still something I am missing here.
No - this is not what I’m saying at all. Technology uses epistemic means that we would expect evolution to get right (with perhaps the exception of high abstract knowledge, but we can put that aside for the sake of argument). We’d expect evolution to give us correct descriptive knowledge because we need to know if a predator is around the corner or not to survive. Technology frequently uses descriptive information such as that and is created because humans are self-interested. Evolution makes humans self-interested.
Liberal intuitions require people to think of others in a way that you wouldn’t expect given evolution. You have to consider non-familial, non-tribal, and non-selfish interests. So knowledge in this area is quite hard, and you wouldn’t expect evolution to allow us to develop ideas contrary to our instincts. And since much of these things seem to come from Christianity, we have evidence for Christian theism.
But we would not expect a feral children, or one brought up in isolation to have typical moral intuitions. Evolution may delimit the possibilities, but culture demonstrably has explored the space.
Echoing other commenters, I would love to see your response to the moral knowledge argument (i.e., that atheism lacks a good account of how we know these platonic facts — including but not limited to moral facts).
I agree that Craig's arguments for the theistic account of morality are weak, but I don't see his criticisms of non-theistic accounts as easily dismissed (even if he perhaps doesn't do a great job of articulating them.)
Even if one accepts a moderate Platonism about abstract objects, moral facts are not on equal footing with mathematical or perceptual universals. The connection between lemons and the sun being "yellow" tracks empirical properties, reflected light within a certain range of wavelengths and our trichromatic visual system. There's a causal and biological explanation here. But with “pain is bad,” we’re asked to leap from an affective state to what sounds to me like a normative claim. That’s not just metaphysically heavier; it’s epistemically unmoored.
If "bad" simply means "aversive," the statement is trivial. Of course it is, that’s what it’s wired to tell our brains. If it means "ought not to be caused," then as Hume tells us, we need to explain where that “ought” comes from. And I see no reason to accept that such an “ought” is mind-independent—at least not without circularly assuming moral realism at the outset.
As for the sections on objectivity and origin, I’ll need to address Platonism directly, sadly.
I reject Platonism not just for moral truths, but also for mathematics and physics. These frameworks are spectacularly useful for modeling experience, but usefulness doesn’t entail ontological objectivity. Our minds evolved to track patterns in nature; mathematics is one such pattern. But whether numbers, sets, or even causality “exist” outside of human cognition is an open metaphysical question, not a settled foundation from which to bootstrap moral ontology.
Likewise, your question “How do objects know to be colored whenever they are yellow?” gets it backwards. Objects aren’t yellow. They're interpreted as such by us. And probably interpreted completely differently by any species that doesn't see in the exact same way as we do. If that's the case with color, why should we grant that “injustice” exists as an external object we access, rather than a pattern we impose?
As for Plantinga/Stephens:
Unfortunately, I can't access the whole article with Stephens’ reply to Plantinga, but from your description, it seems a little ironic to me, Your summary of Stephens' argument sounds less to me like a criticism of moral anti-realism or a rebuttal of Plantinga than it just seems like, a sober, non-romantic, but honest description of how moral intuition and cognition actually does work in practice. Humans moral intuitions are prone to parochialism, motivated reasoning, emotional salience effects, and outright category mistakes. Humans *routinely* make conceptual errors by attributing moral agency to non-moral actors like diseases and natural disasters, or by treating friendly individuals bearing unwelcome news as hostile. These are exactly the kinds of beliefs we’d expect from evolved primates managing coalitional behavior. Not at all from creatures attuned (even slightly and imperfectly) to abstract moral truths. In fact, the whole framework of human moral intuition seems like an adaptive framework that’s useful, but false, and “messes up” all the time.
And finally, I read through your article on empirical arguments for liberal realism, but I, honestly, couldn’t find anything that actually strikes me as “empirical” evidence at all. Your appeal to moral progress as evidence of objective moral truth begs several questions. First, it assumes that a shift in attitudes indicates epistemic advancement rather than memetic spread or institutional adaptation. But society’s liberalization also coincides with rapid technological and economic changes. There’s nothing mysterious about societies adapting norms that enhance cooperation, suppress violence, or expand participation in markets and governance. Especially when cooperation, peace, markets, and stable governance have done such a good job in driving the technological advancements that allow societies to militarily and culturally overpower others.
What’s more speculative: that liberal values gained ground because they worked in liberal institutions that outcompeted rivals materially—or that humans, via an undefined faculty of intuition, tapped into moral truths floating in Platonic space? In your essay, you dismissed the former as coincidental. Yet it seems almost trivially obvious to me that the two would coincide, much more plausible as an explanation than the latter, more speculative alternative.
But if you’re right, and values track truth, not power or utility, then what happens when illiberal regimes regain technological and cultural dominance? Would that reverse "moral progress"? If a future AI-powered Chinese Super-Empire ends up dominating the world and uses its military might and technological control over humanity to enforce its values the way that liberal regimes have for the past centuries, what does that mean for your narrative? Does it mean moral progress reverses? Or does it mean that liberalism was just a transitional state between barbarism and techno-totalitarianism?
And that’s the fatal question for any “empirical” argument for the existence of objective moral truths. Even if the evidence supports your narrative now, there’s no guarantee, or even reason to believe, that it always will. Trying to get to an “ought” from an “is” is already logically problematic enough, but you’re trying to get to “ought” from an “is” that could become an “isn’t” at any time.
From my analysis there are various issues in this article, but I want to first tackle this in the general sense, as I think we can discard all externalist accounts on principle:
In my analysis validity can be domain-specific and there are two kinds of domains that can be reasons-giving: the externalist, objectivist one, where there are external ends and "value", and the domain of the agent. The agent through his will constitutes agential ends, and it is these ends that create agential normativity.
Externalist normativity de-centers the agent, treating the agent merely as an actor of pre-given normativity. I think this is a logical error. While non-agential normativity may be valid in its own domain, it cannot function as agential normativity. Even if objective ends exist independently, they remain non-agential until the agent takes them as their ends—and once taken, what makes them normative for that agent is the agent's own end-making activity, not their external status.
We have now two kinds of normativity, ends and values (IF the externalist even gets off the ground as satisfying the conditions for this). But let's remember that the moral question is asked by a moral agent. "What should I do?", or more precisely: "which end should I hold as an end for me?" is the practical dimension. Both the question and the answer center around the agent. As agents, ONLY agential normativity is our concern, because we can only operate from within our agential-domain.
This is why both externalism and standard internalism miss the point. Externalism treats agential constitution as mere application of external considerations. Standard internalism reduces universality to contingent psychology (called "subjectivism" but should really be called contingent/local subjectivism). But agential normativity requires both poles as constitutive: the agent who constitutes the ends and the universal validity which renders any concept of validity intelligible.
I have made a short syllogism for clarity:
P1: External reasons are defined as considerations that have normative force for agents independently of their incorporation into the agent's practical framework.
P2: For any consideration to function as normative in practice, it must guide the will's determination.
P3: For a consideration to guide the will's determination, it must operate within the logic of the will's determination.
P4: The logic of the will's determination is irreducibly internal to the agent's practical framework—it constitutes the structure through which the will operates.
P5: The will's self-determination consists in its essential function of positing ends. If the will were determined wholly by external considerations, it would itself become merely a means to ends posited elsewhere, contradicting the very concept of will as that which posits ends.
P6: Once a consideration operates within the logic of the will's determination, it functions as internal to the agent's practical framework.
C: Therefore, external reasons cannot function as practical reasons while remaining external to the will's logic.
I think the intuitions of my principled resistance of externalist accounts of morality hold, but I'd be curious what you think. Open to feedback and critique
Now, we can go into some specific issues of the article. 1/2
This seems a trivial semantic point. It seems clearly the case that in using the term “objective” the theists are not referring non-subjective. The central point of why we refer to objectivity(the intuition it preserves) is not about personhood but about scope and validity. It is clear that the theist means by objective something that is universally valid. This is perfectly compatible with theism and has remained as such throughout history.
It also requires the distinction as if it were exhaustive, when it would collapse under, say, Kantianism. I am very curious as to what the response is to this, as it seems to to be a pre-critical(and naive) position: subjective-objective(as exclusive and separate). Idealism collapses this distinction compellingly preserving the intuitions and functions of both categories(and showing that the rejection of this is incoherent). Because we need not only relate to a pure object and a pure subject, but say how can the pure object appear to the pure subject AS the pure object, and in order for this condition of appearance to be valid it must then be a justified relation for the constitution of the objectivity of the object from the subject's own subjectivity.
1.2 Lack of Foundation:
While it’s true that Craig’s own thesis may be problematic this doesn’t extend to theism as such. I would say an answer not given in the options, which is the most accepted one entails an identification of the good with GOD so that it is neither a brute fact nor explained by something external.
Anotoher point about the brute fact is that you say that GOD as a brute fact and Platonic objects or relations are on equal grounds, but this would not be the case even if GOD were a brute fact, as GOD would be a unifier that because of its personal nature can be related to, and so it's much more parsimonious than multiple distinct objects and which are impersonal.
Also, the denial of the prudential reason seems to not account for the classical view as well that because participation in the good is the very purpose and goal of humans that therefore following the good is prudential AND moral(virtue ethics). An impersonal virtue ethics account seems to be a non-starter because it doe not hold personhood as its end or means, and so it cannot be an end for the subject towards the actualization of its personhood.
1.3 Moral Absurdity:
Why is it absurd? If his point is true and GOD is required, then a denial of GOD would then entail a rejection of morality(in the traditional sense). Our ethical intuitions(if we were to have them in such a way) would then be misleading(and therefore not real intuitions?). This is defended by the notion that apparently you and I have radically distinct intuitions. For me GOD is intuitive and ethics as a personal category that is vindicated by a universal subject is intuitive. I have no intuition of impersonal ethics. If I can be wrong about this(and you must presuppose this is the case) then it stands to reason we could all be mistaken about our intuitions.
2. 1 Platonism: I think Platonism and Kantianism have the stronger claim for secular ethics but it’s a live point of debate whether they are incompatible with theism. I think there are successful fatal objections to Platonism in regards to ethics(notably, the Kantian frame) but even if we take Platonism to be viable, would the commitment then be that in order to be a coherent atheist one needs to be a Platonist and that there IS something wrong with the non-Platonic secular accounts(the huge majority of them)?
2.2 Objectivity without GOD: The framing “…constitutively depending on the attitudes of observers” seems to be misleading. For the theist GOD is not constitutively a mere observer, he’s what constitutes the observed. This is especially profound in morality because morality entails a necessary function in the will and dependent on values , both of which are generally(with good reason) taken to be irreducibly subjective. So, if we are to hold the universal validity of these subjective categories we require a ground that is both universal and subjective.
Consider the objects as well. How can an impersonal object “command” me? Isn’t this on its face absurd? A book cannot generate normatively, do not impose unto the will, nor holds values. This is a matter not of the abstract vs the concrete but about the nature of objects. The idea that I broke up with my girlfriend because the totem imposes normatively that and has communicated that to me, regardless of what I want to do, would be obviously not a serious idea. Not because the totem is physical but because the totem is an object. Abstract objects are no different.
2.3. The source of morality. Here again the issue is authority(for Craig) of normativity. In order for a normativity to be valid it must come from a sufficiently authoritative source. How can objects be authoritative in front of subjects? What grounds this authority?
Your answer to the moral knowledge argument is unconvincing. Moral values progressing over time doesn’t explain *why* moral values progressed over time. Why did moral values progress over time instead of just being based on evolutionary adaptations? If God exists, you might expect him to providentially allow us to develop correct moral values, but under atheism you’d expect our moral beliefs would just be evolutionary adaptations.
This is one of the arguments that convinced Matthew Adelstein of God. Dustin Crummett’s stuff on this is good.
It’s also striking that the reason why western morality progressed is Christianity. It’s pretty uncontroversial among historians that Christianity caused western liberal morality. In fact Christianity is considered so entrenched in western moral thought and concepts that secular moral movements don’t realize that they are using concepts that come from Christianity. Tom Holland’s book “Dominion” explains this.
Are technological and theoretical advancements all due either to divine providence or to evolutionary adaptations? If so, that uses a very broad sense of evolution, one that makes the point trivial.
I’m not sure what you’re saying, other than I mean evolution in a biological sense, and I wasn’t talking about technological advances. I’m saying that under atheism you’d expect our moral intuitions to just be irrational evolutionary adaptations, but if that’s not the case, then we have evidence for theism.
Why would the same not apply to technological or scholarly advances? They are not the direct result of divine revelation or biological evolution. Perhaps the response would be that moral knowledge is different because it is obviously not objective, while technological and scholarly knowledge are at least potentially objective.
Because technological advances are the result of self-interest, both in the inventors and their benefactors. They are also more descriptively based (this is probably what you mean by “objective,” though philosophers use these terms differently). Morals aren’t. I’d say that morality is definitely objective.
Though a similar argument can be made about high abstract knowledge which leads to technological advances, yes. The moral argument is more straightforward, though. But that’s a pro to this style of argument, not a con.
So moral knowledge is different because it is prescriptive and technology and scholarship are descriptive, and therefore moral knowledge must be either the product of divine providence or of biological evolution? There is still something I am missing here.
No - this is not what I’m saying at all. Technology uses epistemic means that we would expect evolution to get right (with perhaps the exception of high abstract knowledge, but we can put that aside for the sake of argument). We’d expect evolution to give us correct descriptive knowledge because we need to know if a predator is around the corner or not to survive. Technology frequently uses descriptive information such as that and is created because humans are self-interested. Evolution makes humans self-interested.
Liberal intuitions require people to think of others in a way that you wouldn’t expect given evolution. You have to consider non-familial, non-tribal, and non-selfish interests. So knowledge in this area is quite hard, and you wouldn’t expect evolution to allow us to develop ideas contrary to our instincts. And since much of these things seem to come from Christianity, we have evidence for Christian theism.
Ah, intuition. Now i see.
But we would not expect a feral children, or one brought up in isolation to have typical moral intuitions. Evolution may delimit the possibilities, but culture demonstrably has explored the space.
I wouldn’t expect the child to have modern western-style intuitions, no.
Echoing other commenters, I would love to see your response to the moral knowledge argument (i.e., that atheism lacks a good account of how we know these platonic facts — including but not limited to moral facts).
I agree that Craig's arguments for the theistic account of morality are weak, but I don't see his criticisms of non-theistic accounts as easily dismissed (even if he perhaps doesn't do a great job of articulating them.)
Even if one accepts a moderate Platonism about abstract objects, moral facts are not on equal footing with mathematical or perceptual universals. The connection between lemons and the sun being "yellow" tracks empirical properties, reflected light within a certain range of wavelengths and our trichromatic visual system. There's a causal and biological explanation here. But with “pain is bad,” we’re asked to leap from an affective state to what sounds to me like a normative claim. That’s not just metaphysically heavier; it’s epistemically unmoored.
If "bad" simply means "aversive," the statement is trivial. Of course it is, that’s what it’s wired to tell our brains. If it means "ought not to be caused," then as Hume tells us, we need to explain where that “ought” comes from. And I see no reason to accept that such an “ought” is mind-independent—at least not without circularly assuming moral realism at the outset.
As for the sections on objectivity and origin, I’ll need to address Platonism directly, sadly.
I reject Platonism not just for moral truths, but also for mathematics and physics. These frameworks are spectacularly useful for modeling experience, but usefulness doesn’t entail ontological objectivity. Our minds evolved to track patterns in nature; mathematics is one such pattern. But whether numbers, sets, or even causality “exist” outside of human cognition is an open metaphysical question, not a settled foundation from which to bootstrap moral ontology.
Likewise, your question “How do objects know to be colored whenever they are yellow?” gets it backwards. Objects aren’t yellow. They're interpreted as such by us. And probably interpreted completely differently by any species that doesn't see in the exact same way as we do. If that's the case with color, why should we grant that “injustice” exists as an external object we access, rather than a pattern we impose?
As for Plantinga/Stephens:
Unfortunately, I can't access the whole article with Stephens’ reply to Plantinga, but from your description, it seems a little ironic to me, Your summary of Stephens' argument sounds less to me like a criticism of moral anti-realism or a rebuttal of Plantinga than it just seems like, a sober, non-romantic, but honest description of how moral intuition and cognition actually does work in practice. Humans moral intuitions are prone to parochialism, motivated reasoning, emotional salience effects, and outright category mistakes. Humans *routinely* make conceptual errors by attributing moral agency to non-moral actors like diseases and natural disasters, or by treating friendly individuals bearing unwelcome news as hostile. These are exactly the kinds of beliefs we’d expect from evolved primates managing coalitional behavior. Not at all from creatures attuned (even slightly and imperfectly) to abstract moral truths. In fact, the whole framework of human moral intuition seems like an adaptive framework that’s useful, but false, and “messes up” all the time.
And finally, I read through your article on empirical arguments for liberal realism, but I, honestly, couldn’t find anything that actually strikes me as “empirical” evidence at all. Your appeal to moral progress as evidence of objective moral truth begs several questions. First, it assumes that a shift in attitudes indicates epistemic advancement rather than memetic spread or institutional adaptation. But society’s liberalization also coincides with rapid technological and economic changes. There’s nothing mysterious about societies adapting norms that enhance cooperation, suppress violence, or expand participation in markets and governance. Especially when cooperation, peace, markets, and stable governance have done such a good job in driving the technological advancements that allow societies to militarily and culturally overpower others.
What’s more speculative: that liberal values gained ground because they worked in liberal institutions that outcompeted rivals materially—or that humans, via an undefined faculty of intuition, tapped into moral truths floating in Platonic space? In your essay, you dismissed the former as coincidental. Yet it seems almost trivially obvious to me that the two would coincide, much more plausible as an explanation than the latter, more speculative alternative.
But if you’re right, and values track truth, not power or utility, then what happens when illiberal regimes regain technological and cultural dominance? Would that reverse "moral progress"? If a future AI-powered Chinese Super-Empire ends up dominating the world and uses its military might and technological control over humanity to enforce its values the way that liberal regimes have for the past centuries, what does that mean for your narrative? Does it mean moral progress reverses? Or does it mean that liberalism was just a transitional state between barbarism and techno-totalitarianism?
And that’s the fatal question for any “empirical” argument for the existence of objective moral truths. Even if the evidence supports your narrative now, there’s no guarantee, or even reason to believe, that it always will. Trying to get to an “ought” from an “is” is already logically problematic enough, but you’re trying to get to “ought” from an “is” that could become an “isn’t” at any time.
From my analysis there are various issues in this article, but I want to first tackle this in the general sense, as I think we can discard all externalist accounts on principle:
In my analysis validity can be domain-specific and there are two kinds of domains that can be reasons-giving: the externalist, objectivist one, where there are external ends and "value", and the domain of the agent. The agent through his will constitutes agential ends, and it is these ends that create agential normativity.
Externalist normativity de-centers the agent, treating the agent merely as an actor of pre-given normativity. I think this is a logical error. While non-agential normativity may be valid in its own domain, it cannot function as agential normativity. Even if objective ends exist independently, they remain non-agential until the agent takes them as their ends—and once taken, what makes them normative for that agent is the agent's own end-making activity, not their external status.
We have now two kinds of normativity, ends and values (IF the externalist even gets off the ground as satisfying the conditions for this). But let's remember that the moral question is asked by a moral agent. "What should I do?", or more precisely: "which end should I hold as an end for me?" is the practical dimension. Both the question and the answer center around the agent. As agents, ONLY agential normativity is our concern, because we can only operate from within our agential-domain.
This is why both externalism and standard internalism miss the point. Externalism treats agential constitution as mere application of external considerations. Standard internalism reduces universality to contingent psychology (called "subjectivism" but should really be called contingent/local subjectivism). But agential normativity requires both poles as constitutive: the agent who constitutes the ends and the universal validity which renders any concept of validity intelligible.
I have made a short syllogism for clarity:
P1: External reasons are defined as considerations that have normative force for agents independently of their incorporation into the agent's practical framework.
P2: For any consideration to function as normative in practice, it must guide the will's determination.
P3: For a consideration to guide the will's determination, it must operate within the logic of the will's determination.
P4: The logic of the will's determination is irreducibly internal to the agent's practical framework—it constitutes the structure through which the will operates.
P5: The will's self-determination consists in its essential function of positing ends. If the will were determined wholly by external considerations, it would itself become merely a means to ends posited elsewhere, contradicting the very concept of will as that which posits ends.
P6: Once a consideration operates within the logic of the will's determination, it functions as internal to the agent's practical framework.
C: Therefore, external reasons cannot function as practical reasons while remaining external to the will's logic.
I think the intuitions of my principled resistance of externalist accounts of morality hold, but I'd be curious what you think. Open to feedback and critique
Now, we can go into some specific issues of the article. 1/2
Specific issues in the article:
1.1 Lack of Objectivity:
This seems a trivial semantic point. It seems clearly the case that in using the term “objective” the theists are not referring non-subjective. The central point of why we refer to objectivity(the intuition it preserves) is not about personhood but about scope and validity. It is clear that the theist means by objective something that is universally valid. This is perfectly compatible with theism and has remained as such throughout history.
It also requires the distinction as if it were exhaustive, when it would collapse under, say, Kantianism. I am very curious as to what the response is to this, as it seems to to be a pre-critical(and naive) position: subjective-objective(as exclusive and separate). Idealism collapses this distinction compellingly preserving the intuitions and functions of both categories(and showing that the rejection of this is incoherent). Because we need not only relate to a pure object and a pure subject, but say how can the pure object appear to the pure subject AS the pure object, and in order for this condition of appearance to be valid it must then be a justified relation for the constitution of the objectivity of the object from the subject's own subjectivity.
1.2 Lack of Foundation:
While it’s true that Craig’s own thesis may be problematic this doesn’t extend to theism as such. I would say an answer not given in the options, which is the most accepted one entails an identification of the good with GOD so that it is neither a brute fact nor explained by something external.
Anotoher point about the brute fact is that you say that GOD as a brute fact and Platonic objects or relations are on equal grounds, but this would not be the case even if GOD were a brute fact, as GOD would be a unifier that because of its personal nature can be related to, and so it's much more parsimonious than multiple distinct objects and which are impersonal.
Also, the denial of the prudential reason seems to not account for the classical view as well that because participation in the good is the very purpose and goal of humans that therefore following the good is prudential AND moral(virtue ethics). An impersonal virtue ethics account seems to be a non-starter because it doe not hold personhood as its end or means, and so it cannot be an end for the subject towards the actualization of its personhood.
1.3 Moral Absurdity:
Why is it absurd? If his point is true and GOD is required, then a denial of GOD would then entail a rejection of morality(in the traditional sense). Our ethical intuitions(if we were to have them in such a way) would then be misleading(and therefore not real intuitions?). This is defended by the notion that apparently you and I have radically distinct intuitions. For me GOD is intuitive and ethics as a personal category that is vindicated by a universal subject is intuitive. I have no intuition of impersonal ethics. If I can be wrong about this(and you must presuppose this is the case) then it stands to reason we could all be mistaken about our intuitions.
2. 1 Platonism: I think Platonism and Kantianism have the stronger claim for secular ethics but it’s a live point of debate whether they are incompatible with theism. I think there are successful fatal objections to Platonism in regards to ethics(notably, the Kantian frame) but even if we take Platonism to be viable, would the commitment then be that in order to be a coherent atheist one needs to be a Platonist and that there IS something wrong with the non-Platonic secular accounts(the huge majority of them)?
2.2 Objectivity without GOD: The framing “…constitutively depending on the attitudes of observers” seems to be misleading. For the theist GOD is not constitutively a mere observer, he’s what constitutes the observed. This is especially profound in morality because morality entails a necessary function in the will and dependent on values , both of which are generally(with good reason) taken to be irreducibly subjective. So, if we are to hold the universal validity of these subjective categories we require a ground that is both universal and subjective.
Consider the objects as well. How can an impersonal object “command” me? Isn’t this on its face absurd? A book cannot generate normatively, do not impose unto the will, nor holds values. This is a matter not of the abstract vs the concrete but about the nature of objects. The idea that I broke up with my girlfriend because the totem imposes normatively that and has communicated that to me, regardless of what I want to do, would be obviously not a serious idea. Not because the totem is physical but because the totem is an object. Abstract objects are no different.
2.3. The source of morality. Here again the issue is authority(for Craig) of normativity. In order for a normativity to be valid it must come from a sufficiently authoritative source. How can objects be authoritative in front of subjects? What grounds this authority?
2/2