This week, in part 3 of our series, Jamie turns now to the family of moral arguments.
Jamie Dew: Hey everybody. This is Jamie Dew.
Joe Fontenot: And I'm Joe Fontenot.
Jamie Dew: And welcome back again to our podcast, Towel in the Basin.
Joe Fontenot: That's right. And so this episode is the third part of a series we're doing, Can we Know God Exists? And so we're looking at different... That's right, different arguments and different approaches and different ways we can come about that question. And so the first two episodes, we looked at cosmological arguments. Second episode, we looked at teleological arguments. So both of those, if you're listening now and you missed them, you can go back and check them out, they're really good, if I don't say so myself. And so this one, what's another argument we can know God exists?
Jamie Dew: Well, and to clarify, based off of the way I framed the last two, what's another family of arguments, maybe a slightly different question there. So what I've argued in the other podcasts was that look, for each of these kinds of arguments really, there each is just a sort of a family of arguments, right? So there's not really a cosmological argument, rather there are cosmological arguments and the same for teleological arguments. And now we can talk about moral arguments and essentially in the same way that these other two brands of arguments, cosmological and teleological arguments, pick out some feature of the world. Cosmological, they pick out the universe itself, teleological will pick out what appears to be designed.
In the same way that those arguments pick that out and then argue from it to the existence of God, what moral arguments do is they pick out some feature of the universe or some feature of our existence, and it argues from that feature to the existence of God. And moral arguments, not surprisingly, they pick out this phenomenon of morality, the fact that indeed we are moral creatures with moral inclinations and moral principles that guide us and that we, no matter how we may protest otherwise, we are at the end of the day moral beings.
So, just take our current political climate today. I mean, you may have between say in just the United States between Republicans and Democrats, you may have wildly different senses of what is right and wrong, but notice that each side will firmly and without question, plant a flag in the ground and argue that indeed what they are doing is right and good, and what the other is doing is bad and unhelpful. So it's based off of that sense of morality that a lot of philosophers throughout history have argued for the existence of God.
And these arguments tend to be pretty persuasive. We talked to in the last episode, I believe it was about cogency. And we talked about what are we after here, demonstrating rationality? Yes, of course we are, but we're demonstrating rationality specifically with an eye towards persuading people. That's at the end of the day, what apologetics is trying to do, and are the arguments for God's existence. And so in short, what these moral arguments will do, what that family of arguments will do, is they'll pick up on our moral inclinations or even commands, and they will argue from those commands to the existence of God.
And like all of the other families of arguments, there's lots and lots of examples that we can start with. So let me start with maybe one popular way that this has been argued throughout history. And then we can maybe see what's good or what's bad about that particular kind of argument. One way that this has been argued throughout history is what I would classify as morally specific arguments. So morally specific argument basically is an argument that says, "Hey, there's this moral command or this moral principle, that's universally agreed on by everyone. And in light of that, God must exist." And so they may say, for example, that everybody everywhere, no matter where you live in history, no matter where you live in the world, no matter what culture are you in, everybody agrees that murder is wrong, or everybody agrees that incest is wrong or torture is wrong.
And so we get some morally specific commands, specifically don't murder, don't torture, don't do incest, those specific commands. And they would argue essentially that, if everybody everywhere agrees to them, then those commands are indeed objective. And if they're objective, then they're universal. But if they're objective and universal, there has to be something behind them that puts them there. So the argument could run something like this, premise one, it would say, "Well, if there are actions that are morally wrong for all people, then there has to be an objective universal moral standard for it. Premise two, there are indeed certain actions like murder, rape, torture, and such that are morally wrong for all people, and everybody agrees on them. Premise three, therefore moral objective standards, and those moral objective standards could only come from God. And so then the conclusion of that would be, therefore God has to exist." So this is an example of an argument that I would call a morally specific argument.
And look, these arguments have been persuasive. They've convinced a lot of people. These arguments do indeed, however, have some problems, philosophically speaking, and therefore I would argue that there are better versions of moral arguments we could look at. These types of arguments, the morally specific arguments seem to have fallen on some tough times, and here's why. So perhaps one of the influential, if not the most influential philosophers since Plato, you could argue maybe it's Descartes, but I would argue maybe Immanuel Kant. Immanuel Kant basically was agnostic about God and yet in keeping with many of the thinkers of his time, wanted to hang on, didn't want to hang on to God per se, but he certainly wanted to hang onto the Judeo-Christian ethic of the world. So the question is, how do you keep our moral system without having the God that underpins it, as was kind of his project in many ways. And Kant argued that you could still have objective, moral principles that are true for everybody everywhere, and you don't have to have a God to do it.
And the way he did it was through something he called the categorical imperative. Now a hypothetical imperative is if you want this to happen, then do this thing. A categorical imperative would be something that's applied categorically across the board. You'd apply it to everybody everywhere. And Kant said, "Look, if we could find a principle that everybody everywhere would want to be true and want to be treated by, then we would have an objective moral principle that's obligatory to everybody." And he thought essentially that we could get that by common consent, that we all agree to this, type of thing. So the upshot of that was in the modern world, in the enlightenment, there was a pretty rigorous philosophical challenge to this premise that you could only get these moral objectives via God. He thought you could get them through some kind of common consensus through all people everywhere, we all just agree to it, and that's what makes it objective.
Now, I'm not particularly persuaded by that, but at the end of the day, there were a lot of people that were. I think though there was a bigger problem for both the morally specific arguments and for Kant's approach, and it's in the whole assumption of universality and objectivity. We may have at one point thought that everybody everywhere throughout history would indeed agree to certain moral principles like don't murder, don't rape, don't torture. But actually in the 20th century, the more we learned in sociology and anthropology and such like that, is that when we started studying cultures, actually we found, well, there have been some civilizations throughout history that didn't agree with us, even on those sort of basic principles.
And so now look, I would argue from that, that, "Well, those people were just jacked up, right? They just were clearly not seeing it right." But, I would just say for now it at least sort of takes the teeth out of that argument, that everybody everywhere always agrees on these things because in fact, that's not true. Now it may be true that there are the outliers and the overwhelming vast majority still agree with these things, but it's just hard to make that case at that point that everybody everywhere always agrees with those things. So for those reasons, I would say, morally specific arguments have been a little bit harder to sustain. Does that make sense?
Joe Fontenot: Yes, that makes sense because we just kind of see that we are not as moral as we thought we were.
Jamie Dew: Yeah. Or just different cultures see it in a certain way. So there have indeed been certain civilizations that offer up the innocent in sacrifices to their gods. There are certain cultures that have felt incest is perfectly acceptable or maybe torture is right on certain occasions. I mean, even in the United States, after the Patriot Act after 9/11, I mean, there's a lot of Americans that will argue, the torture is right in some cases. So, it makes it hard to sustain that because indeed we can find outliers to the idea, because that makes it difficult.
Now having said all that, I don't think that moral arguments in and of themselves are just therefore unworkable. I mean, that's not the case at all. There are other ways to make moral arguments for God's existence that I think are pretty doggone persuasive, but it takes us into a different family of inference. And here it might be helpful if we just spend a minute talking about the different kinds of inferences, deduction, induction, and abduction. You're familiar with this, you've studied this a little bit, right?
Joe Fontenot: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I have.
Jamie Dew: Okay. So let me see, I would quiz you and say, "Well, which ones?" I won't do that though.
Joe Fontenot: I can spell them.
Jamie Dew: Yeah. So I've made the case here that you've got families of arguments, cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, and moral arguments and so on and so forth, and that those are families, there's lots of different types. Well, one of the things that gives you lots of types within each of those categories is that there's different ways you can draw inferences. You can draw an inference deductively. You can draw an inference inductively, or you can draw an inference abductively. So you could make cosmological types of arguments, deductively, inductively, or abductively. You could make teleological arguments, deductively, inductively, or abductively, and you can make moral arguments, deductively, inductively, or abductively.
So let me explain the difference between those three real quick, okay? Deduction is very rigid, right? It's if this is true, then that has to be true. Deduction entails a kind of certainty if you will. A good example of this is something we call modus Ponens arguments. And that may sound fancy, but it's actually real simple. Arguments that follow this structure are deductive. If P is true, then Q is true. P is true, therefore Q is true, right? That's an example of a deductive argument, right? If this premise is right, and this premise is right, then these two have to go together. Another example would be the classic, all men are mortal, therefore, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is a mortal. So that's another example of deduction.
In deduction, you're arguing, it's a very rigid, step-by-step logical form and it produces certainty, okay? In fact, I think in many ways, the argument on the morally specific argument that I gave a minute ago, it's an example of a deductive type of argument, okay? An inductive argument is very different. Induction does not give you absolute certainty. Induction gives you probability, okay? But it may give you a high degree of probability, but there's always the possibility that you find the data that goes the other direction. So for example, we know that the sun will rise tomorrow, not deductively, we know that inductively. What does that mean? It means that's where all the evidence points us. So for example, an induction, what you would do is you'd say, "Hey, look," imagine we knew nothing about swans, nothing at all. We just knew there were these creatures, we've seen one, right?
And we wanted to know more about swans. And we were asking basic questions like, "Well, what color are swans?" Well, what induction would do is it would go out and it would find as many swans as it could, and it would survey them. And you'd look at the first one, it's white. The second one, it's white. The third one, it's white. Fourth, fifth, six, 10000th, it's white, it's white, it's white, it's white. And on the basis of a wide swath of evidence, you would draw the inference, Swan are white, right? That's an example of induction, okay? Induction is very long and thorough. Now, roughly modern science runs on induction. In fact, what happens in the 17th century, and you didn't ask for this, but there's a little bit of background [inaudible 00:13:33] details. In the 17th century, you have the birth of modern philosophy and the birth of modern science, modern science is born.
I would argue with Francis Bacon because he gives us the Novum Organum, the new method. Largely the sciences were trying to do science via deduction up to this point. And now all of a sudden they use a new method, the method of induction. And look, we go from thousands of years of horse and buggy to within a couple of hundred years, we've got automobiles, airplanes and we're putting people on the moon. It's astounding how fast change science changes in the world, technology changes when we got a new method. It allowed us to genuinely discover the world in a new way, but it's still very slow going. Scientists like to move a little quicker when they can, hence they introduce things called hypotheses, okay?
So this brings us in many ways to abduction. Abduction is not kidnapping, okay? Abduction is when, basically what you do, it's technically a form of induction, okay? But a specific form of induction. Abduction is an inductive process that basically argues for the best explanation, and it's often associated with something called inference to best explanation, okay? So an example of this would be something like, here's the one I use with my students all the time. Imagine that you walk out in the morning and your lawn is wet and you go, "Hmm, wonder what happened to my lawn?" You know almost intuitively that there's a couple possibilities it could be. It could've rained last night. You could have a busted sewer line, maybe that's what's doing it, or maybe your crazy neighbor, Bill, got up in the middle of the night and watered your lawn. And he's weird, and that's why you think that might be possible, right?
So the fact you got to explain is your wet lawn, you've come up immediately with some possible explanations, and then you collect data to figure out which of those explanations that you just came up with and hypothesized, fit the data the best. So, once you do that, you draw the inference to the best explanation. So in this case, you'd look at the weather report from last night, you would look at other people's yards. If they're wet too, then clearly that's probably not Bill or the sewer line. If it predicted that it was going to rain last night, that would be the case. You'd also look for pieces of evidence that aren't there. If your sewer line busted, you'd have smells and stinks and you'd probably have some substances flooding up in your yard. So you can look at all the data. And basically you would judge the possible explanations that you hypothesized against the data. And then you draw what we call, "the inference to best explanation," that's abduction, okay?
By the way, when you go to the doctor, this is what they're doing. You walk in, "Well, I've got a sore throat, stuffy nose, blah, blah, blah." "Have you been exposed to somebody with COVID?" Now they're collecting data, right? They swab your nose, now they're collecting data. And what do they do? It could be a cold. It could be the flu. It could be strep, it could be COVID-19. And then all of a sudden they collect the data and boom, boom, boom. They come up with the best explanation, it's this, and they prescribed medication for it. When this gets in the court of law, man, Jill is dead. She was shot with a 38 revolver. Bill has a 38 revolver. Dan has a 38 revolver and this criminal we just busted, had a 38 revolver. Then you start looking at alibis and all these other things. And in a court of law, we draw the inference the best explanation, okay?
So that's what abduction is, all right? Now I think you could make moral arguments this way, and we wouldn't have to find a command that everybody everywhere always agrees to. All we would have to argue is that, "Look, whether we think the right thing is A, or we think the right thing is B, so you're allowing for some difference of interpretation on what's, right, the fact that we all have these moral inclinations, that's what we're looking at. Let's start with something like that, the fact that there's this oughtness, the sense of responsibility, the sense of right and wrong. Where does that come from? And that's what we're trying to explain. That's the fact that we explain. What do we do then? We look at the possible explanations. Maybe there's a God who made us in his image and we're supposed to live a certain way, that's one possibility.
Another possibility is this is just a construct of our psychology, like Freud thought. Another possibility is maybe Darwin's right, it's an evolutionary by-product of some kind where we just feel this way or something like that. And then what do we do? We start collecting data and we start paying attention to the way these moral inclinations work. And I would argue that when we do that, maybe theoretically, some of those other ones could happen, but I would argue that the best explanation for our sense of morality, the fact that you and I feel so strongly a right and wrong, is because indeed there is somebody out there who cares very much about the way we live our lives. Seems to me, that's the best explanation. So I think if you argued it abductively, that could be quite an enticing type of argument for God's existence.
Joe Fontenot: Yeah. And so what you started out with saying was in the past, one of the reasons why moral arguments have fallen on hard times, so to speak, is because as we've learned more about different cultures, we see that, "Oh, they don't share that. So it's sort of a defeater for these things." But by using abductive, which as you said is sort of a category of inductive, which is about probability.
Jamie Dew: Yeah. Yeah. That's right. It's about probabilities and it's about what explains the facts the best. By the way in apologetics, we already do this when it comes to the resurrection of Jesus, right? Look, here's the facts. The tomb is empty and he shows up again later, right? Okay, wow. What do you do with that? Well, you got possible theories. He was raised from the dead, just as the Bible says, people had a hallucination of some kind or what are some others, maybe the disciples went to the wrong tomb, or maybe the disciples stole the body. Those are your possible explanations for those facts. And then when you run those facts or those explanations against all the data and the facts of what we do know about those situations, overwhelmingly, the data fits best with the claim that Jesus was raised from the dead. And so we draw that conclusion.
In fact, the only thing that really counts against that conclusion is philosophical pre-commitments. So you don't have those philosophical pre-commitments commandments that God exists, or could act in the world. Then the data fits quite nicely with that explanation. And so that's how we defend it apologetically. So these actually, even though we got into the technical details in between deduction, induction, and abduction, such that people might've been like, "Whoa, what are we doing?" I would argue, everybody's already familiar with what I'm saying right here, because you're doing it on every other thing.
Joe Fontenot: Yeah, I think that's really true. And for me personally, so I sat in class and listened at some point in the past, in logic class, and listened to detective, inductive and abductive. And still, they're kind of difficult concepts. So I appreciate the recap and just kind of breaking that out, because for me, when I understand the difference, I understand what you're saying a lot better.
Jamie Dew: Okay, good, good, good, good. Well, that's one way you could make the argument today. And I think that these kinds of arguments will have a greater and greater appeal for folks that are trying to argue for God's existence.
Joe Fontenot: Sounds good. All right. Well, thanks for walking through that.
Jamie Dew: Yeah man.
Joe Fontenot: Hey everybody, this is Jamie and Joe again. If you liked this podcast, would you leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts? That helps other people find it.
Jamie Dew: And if you have any questions, we'd love to hear about them. Just go to Jamiedew.com/questions and send them in that way, and we'll take a look at the most frequently asked questions and give them a shot.