Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
This book aims to reinvigorate discussions of moral arguments for God's existence. To open this debate, Baggett and Walls argue that God's love and moral goodness are perfect, without defect, necessary, and recognizable. After integrating insights from the literature of both moral apologetics and theistic ethics, they defend theistic ethics against a variety of objections and, in so doing, bolster the case for the moral argument for God's existence. It is the intention of the authors to see this aspect of natural theology resume its rightful place of prominence, by showing how a worldview predicated on the God of both classical theism and historical Christian orthodoxy has more than adequate resources to answer the Euthyphro Dilemma, speak to the problem of evil, illumine natural law, and highlight the moral significance of the incarnation and resurrection of Christ. Ultimately, the authors argue, there is principled reason to believe that morality itself provides excellent reasons to look for a transcendent source of its authority and reality, and a source that is more than an abstract principle.
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Top Highlights
“So this is the first part of Lewis’s argument: there is an objective moral law that is binding on our actions.” (Page 10)
“So religious ethicists are thought to face a serious problem. Either they have to endorse voluntarism or nonvoluntarism. To embrace nonvoluntarism is to locate the authority of morality outside of God, which strikes classical theists as a huge mistake. However, to affirm divine command theory, or voluntarism, the ‘because God says so’ approach, Antony claims, is to believe that an act’s ‘being good just consists in its being chosen by God,’ and this entails that there’s ‘nothing about an action in advance of its being chosen or rejected that would enable us to determine what attitude God would take toward it in some other possible world.’” (Page 33)
“Consider the analysis of sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, who contends that centuries of debate have left us with just two fundamental options with respect to morality: the ‘transcendentalist’ option and the ‘empiricist’ option.[7] The former holds that moral principles exist outside human minds and are true independently of our experience, while the latter holds that they are the inventions of human minds, and can be explained in terms of biological and cultural evolution.” (Page 3)
“Lewis’s essential argument can be summarized like this: There are objective moral facts, among them guilt for wrongdoing and duties we are obliged to obey and are responsible for neglecting, and such objective facts are better explained by a religious understanding of reality than by a Russellian world. So morality gives us some significant preliminary reason to believe in God.” (Page 11)
- Title: Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality
- Authors: David Baggett, Jerry L. Walls
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Print Publication Date: 2011
- Logos Release Date: 2020
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
- Subjects: Religion and ethics; Religious ethics
- ISBNs: 9780199751808, 9780199751815, 9780199830237, 0199751803, 0199751811, 0199830231
- Resource ID: LLS:WS_FE0BFA98889C4A8AAE63BD7D123DF000
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-30T04:29:30Z
