God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning

by David Baggett; Jerry L. Walls

Publisher:

Oxford University Press

, 2016

Overview

Naturalistic ethics is the reigning paradigm among contemporary ethicists; in God and Cosmos, David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls argue that this approach is seriously flawed. This book canvasses a broad array of secular and naturalistic ethical theories in an effort to test their adequacy in accounting for moral duties, intrinsic human value, moral knowledge, prospects for radical moral transformation, and the rationality of morality. In each case, the authors argue, although various secular accounts provide real insights and indeed share common ground with theistic ethics, the resources of classical theism and orthodox Christianity provide the better explanation of the moral realities under consideration. Among such realities is the fundamental insight behind the problem of evil, namely, that the world is not as it should be. Baggett and Walls argue that God and the world, taken together, exhibit superior explanatory scope and power for morality classically construed, without the need to water down the categories of morality, the import of human value, the prescriptive strength of moral obligations, or the deliverances of the logic, language, and phenomenology of moral experience. This book thus provides a cogent moral argument for God's existence, one that is abductive, teleological, and cumulative.

Contents

Top Highlights

“The heart of Lewis’s argument hinges on the claim that objective moral truth, which he calls the Tao, is axiomatic and that we cannot prove it any more than we can prove the axioms of geometry.” (Page 244)

“The heart of this argument is obviously a straightforward conditional: If we are to have values at all, we must accept the platitudes of Practical Reason as having absolute validity.” (Page 245)

“Lewis here was not trying to argue for moral realism so much as show how reasonable it is to believe in it, and how unreasonable it is to disbelieve in it.” (Page 254)

“Epistemic access to fundamental moral truth is not enough, even to sustain the moral authority of those very truths. Full moral rationality requires an ontological ground of morality that, among other things, ‘guarantees’ an unbreakable connection between morality and the ultimate self-interest of all rational beings.” (Page 269)

“Let us now return to Lewis and his case for the Tao in light of Sidgwick and Kant. It is striking first of all that all three of these thinkers, diverse as they are in some ways, agree that there are self-evident moral truths that are axiomatic in their clarity and moral authority.” (Page 267)

Product Details

• Title: God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning
• Authors: David Baggett, Jerry L. Walls
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Print Publication Date: 2016
• Logos Release Date: 2020
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
• Subjects: Religion and ethics; Religious ethics
• ISBNs: 9780199931194, 9780199931217, 0199931194, 0199931216
• Resource ID: LLS:WS_188BC1F6DC1F4F34B40E8535E0D7B746
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-30T04:02:36Z