An Outdated Dispute

UPDATE:  If you have come here from Matt Flannagan’s blog, you should know that I have been cut off from it as a potential hacker and my second response to Flannagan is here.

Jerry Coyne has responded to a criticism by Matt Flannagan by citing a philosophical response by Jason Thibodeau.

The issue is the Euthyphro dilemma:  does God create the good through His commands or does He command what is independently good?  If we choose the former option, anything could be good.  But it is not true that anything could be good, so a good God would command what is independently good.

Robert Merrihew Adams contended that morality is constituted by the commands of an essentially loving God.  The Euthyphro dilemma collapses because an essentially loving God could not command just anything.

In his USAToday article, Coyne rehearses the Euthyphro dilemma but does not mention the Adams reformulation.  This is odd.  I had an e-mail correspondence with Coyne some months earlier in which I pointed out the Adams reformulation.  Coyne should have taken time to rebut the reformulation.  He did not.

Coyne’s failure to rebut Adams provides Flannagan with the opportunity to point out the Adams reformulation.  Flannagan clearly wins the exchange.

Coyne believes that he has been rescued by Thibodeau.  I think not.

To repeat, Adam’s reformulated divine command theory is that morality is constituted by the commands of an essentially loving God.  Now, if E (for “entity”) essentially possesses P (for “property”), then E possesses P in all possible worlds in which E exists.  So, by hypothesis, God is loving in every world in which He exists.  God is not just contingently loving, that is, loving in at least one possible world in which He exists.

On the basis of an analogy, Thibodeau claims that “we may know with certainty that an all-loving being will not issue a command to torture children, but, given that he is omnipotent, it remains the case that he can issue such a command.”  The analogy is to someone who will not but who could jump from the Empire State Building.  The analogy is irrelevant because the possible jumper is only a contingent jumper.  For the parallel to hold, it must be possible for an essentially non-jumping person to jump.  Thus, Thibodeau equivocates between an essentially loving being and a contingently loving being.  Thibodeau has a second objection that also fails:  it begs the question in that it presupposes that a non-loving being can create morality.

So, Thibodeau does not save Coyne and Flannagan still comes out on top.  The Euthyphro objection can no longer be regarded as decisively refuting the divine command theory.  Of course, the fact that the divine command theory has not been decisively refuted does not entail that it is true.

At this point, Flannagan makes an appeal to the best explanation:  the best explanation for morality is that it has been constituted by the commands of an essentially loving God.  Hence, in Flannagan’s eyes, morality constitutes evidence for the existence of an essentially loving God.

Now, purported adaptationist evolutionary accounts of morality do not explain the existence of morality itself but the existence of our belief in morality.  They do not explain it so much as explain it away.  They do not satisfy people who want morality to be real and not merely an ineliminable delusion.  Furthermore, they cannot explain why anyone would care about the fate of outsiders.  Some variants declare such caring to be simply a mistake.  The same variants are unscientific in that they thereby dismiss disconfirming evidence in order to avoid falsification.

The upshot is that, in this exchange, Flannagan beats Coyne and Thibodeau.

But it does not follow that the God hypothesis is the best explanation for morality.  Absolutely not.  The following paragraph was posted earlier as “The ‘Evidence’ for God.”

If someone purported to explain an observable phenomenon by postulating an unobservable entity that created and sustained the phenomenon but did nothing else, the “explanation” would be question-begging and therefore vacuous.  It would tell us no more than that the phenomenon existed and persisted, effectively repeating the original claim in different words.  Using the same unobservable entity to “explain” a larger number, a greater range, or different aspects of, observable phenomena would do nothing to improve it as an explanation.  If it fails with respect to small matters, it fails with respect to great ones as well.  Hypothesizing that the unobservable entity existed necessarily would not improve it as an explanation either.  The ultimate destiny of such an entity is to become the traditional God of theism, the ad hoc hypothesis than which no greater can be conceived.  Therefore, no observable phenomenon constitutes evidence for God.

Not only is God, in principle, an inadequate explanation for anything, but also there is a better explanation for morality, an explanation that I have set out in my book, Evolutionary Intuitionism:  A Theory of the Origin and Nature of Moral Facts.  (If you do not want to read the book, you can look at the summary on my website – but note that the summary is not a substitute for the book and that I am in the process of revising it.)  My work has not received a great deal of attention.  Maybe I am wrong.  However, you cannot have a rational discussion of the issues if you ignore some of the possibilities, so my work does deserve to be part of the mix of views to be considered.

Be that as it may, evolutionary intuitionism is a better explanation for morality than God is.  For one thing, it does not violate Occam’s Razor by postulating a new kind of entity.  For another, it is testable.  And, it passes the tests.  (It is scientific in that it has empirical implications that are confirmed by observation.)  Since evolutionary intuitionism is a better explanation for morality than God is, God is obviously not the best explanation for morality.  Therefore, morality is not evidence for God.