MORAL ARGUMENTS FOR THEISM
154MORAL ARGUMENTS FOR THEISM.
A family of arguments that variously urge
that certain features of human moral
experience are best accommodated on a
theistic worldview. In particular, the com-
mon claim is that moral realism, the view
that there are objective or mind- inde-
pendent moral facts, calls for theistic
metaphysical or epistemological under-
pinnings. Immanuel Kant reasoned, for
instance, that if there is no God then there
are objective moral requirements that are
not possibly met, namely, that the moral
good of virtue and the natural good of
happiness embrace and become perfect
in a “highest good.” The early twentieth-
century idealist philosophers Hastings
Rashdall and W. R. Sorley argued that an
objective moral law requires an infinite
mind in which to reside if it is to have full
ontological status. C. S. Lewis offered a
popularized version of such an argument
in a series of talks for the BBC during
World War II, later published in his
Mere Christianity. Lewis argued that con-
science reveals to us a moral law whose
source cannot be found in the natural
world, thus pointing to a supernatural
Lawgiver. Philosopher Robert Adams
has argued that moral obligation is best
explained by appeal to the commands of
a loving God, and moral values in general
may be thought to reflect God’s nature.
Atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie observed
that objective moral facts and our
epistemic access to them would be meta-
physically and epistemically “queer” on
metaphysical naturalism. He thus rejected
moral realism for a variety of nihilism.
The argument invites reversal: Insofar as
the belief in moral facts seems warranted,
we have reason to reject naturalism for
something akin to theism. Other argu-
ments focus on the inadequacy of meta-
physical naturalism for accommodating
any robust form of moral realism. The
naturalist’s commitment to a Darwinian
genealogy of morals might be thought to
present the naturalist with an undercut-
ting defeater for any and all moral beliefs,
thus yielding moral skepticism. The theist
may be thought to be in a position to
maintain that human moral faculties are
designed for the purpose of discerning
moral facts and are thus “truth-aimed” in
a way that they would not be on natural-
ism. Or one might argue that no adequate
theory of normative ethics sits comfort-
ably within the confines of a naturalistic
worldview. For instance, one might argue
that the belief in natural and inviolable
rights is implicated by our considered
moral judgments, but would prove to be
“nonsense on stilts” given the metaphys-
ics of naturalism. The inherent worth of
persons, on the other hand, might best be
understood within a theistic framework
in which the axiological and metaphysi-
cal Ultimate is a Person.MORAL REALISM. The thesis that there
are objective truths about moral rightness
and wrongness; these truths are not a