Moral Arguments for God's Existence

This volume brings together an impressive range of leading scholars to deftly navigate the field of moral arguments for God's existence. To this end, it canvasses the fertile history of the moral argument, highlighting thinkers from before Immanuel Kant, Kant himself, and various post-Kantian thinkers up until the present day-including C. S. Lewis, perhaps the most important popularizer of the moral argument of the twentieth century. It then makes a case for moral realism and against realism's salient metaethical alternatives such as error theory, expressivism, and constructivism. In that context, both the problem of evil and debunking arguments against moral knowledge are also discussed at length. Then the volume discusses a range of important moral phenomena, realistically construed, that call for adequate explanation-issues of moral value, human dignity, objective moral duties, issues of moral accountability and forgiveness, matters of moral knowledge, and aspects of Kantian moral faith. Then a range of theistic ethical accounts are outlined and defended against objections, from divine command theory, theistic natural law, divine will and desire theories, and divine motivation theory. The penultimate section elucidates challenges facing naturalistic theories like Cornell realism and atheistic Platonism, including the task of providing an account for basic human rights and escaping from problematic implications of debunking. Finally, an assortment of finer-grained religious ethical accounts are laid out, including a Trinitarian analysis, a Jewish perspective, and an original argument that certain moral considerations point beyond theism to Christianity in particular.

David Baggett served as Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Christian University until he and his wife, Marybeth, recently enrolled to study at the University of Missouri School of Law. With Jerry Walls, he's the author of a tetralogy on the moral argument for God's existence (Oxford University Press), and most recently wrote Reasonable Moral Faith (Baker Academic) with William Lane Craig. John E. Hare is Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale University, Emeritus. He has published numerous books and articles about the relation between morality and religion. Three of the books form a trilogy about the Trinity published by Oxford University Press, namely The Moral Gap (1996), God's Command (2015), and Unity and the Holy Spirit (2023).