In my experience, ontological arguments are not very effective apologetic tools. Cosmological and design arguments are much better and tend to make people more open to the possibility that a personal creator God exists. Moral arguments seem to do the best in actually convincing people of a personal God that cares about the moral behavior of people. It was the moral argument that resulted in C.S. Lewis converting from atheism to deism (and later to Christianity). Lewis writes:
“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? … Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too—for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense.”[i]
The moral argument for the existence of God is presented in detail in the chapter on Christian ethics. The argument forces a choice between moral absolutism and moral relativism. If you believe that some actions are more moral than other actions, that some actions are always wrong, that some governments are more moral than other governments, and that moral improvement is possible, you must believe in an absolute moral lawgiver that exists apart from the physical universe. Otherwise, cultures, societies, and even individuals can simply choose their own preferred system of ethics. When presented with a proposed secular opinion related to morality, the skeptical response can always be, “Says who?”
Arthur Leff, an agnostic professor at Yale Law School famously incorporated this “cosmic sez who” response to show how absolute moral statements are impossible without an absolute moral lawgiver. Leff writes:
“Napalming babies is bad.
Starving the poor is wicked.
Buying and selling each other is depraved.
Those who stood up and died resisting Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin, and Pol Pot—and General Custer too—have earned salvation.
Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned.
There is in the world such a thing as evil.
[All together now:] Sez who?
God help us.”[ii]
And so, logic dictates that a person must either view seeming atrocities a matter of opinion or concede that there is an answer to the cosmic sez who: a personal God who sets all moral standards and cares about our moral behavior. This is not proof for the existence of God, but simply forces a choice. From an apologetic perspective this is a good thing because people are generally more open to possibilities when presented with a choice when compared to “you must believe this because of this proof.”
The remainder of this section will focus on apologetic responses to the most common objections to the moral argument for the existence of God. It will not focus on moral relativism, because this is a logical choice (although one in which most people will find unsettling). Rather, it will discuss divine arbitrariness, atheistic moral realism, and pantheism.
The objection of divine arbitrariness is that God could make any moral code he wants, such as murder and torture of the innocent being moral goods. This objection was famously presented in Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro. In this dialogue, Socrates is conversing with Euthyphro on the definition of piety (Socrates had been charged with the crime of impiety). Euthyphro offers several definitions of piety including the following: “What all the gods love is pious, and what they all hate is impious.” Socrates argues that the gods all love something because it is pious, not the other way around. Otherwise the gods (or God) could arbitrarily make anything pious or impious. This objection is generally correct, but not specifically applicable to the Christian God. The Christian God is not arbitrary but consists of the perfect embodiment of divine attributes such as love, justice, and mercy. God cannot act contrary to His nature. Therefore, the moral code is necessarily in accordance with the divine conception of love, justice, mercy, and any other relevant divine attributes.
Another objection is that absolute moral standards can exist in a materialistic universe without the need for a divine lawgiver. This is called atheistic moral realism (AMR). AMR holds that real morals exist as part of the physical universe and therefore those who do not believe in God do not have to resort to moral relativism. Advocates of AMR typically feel that there is little evidence for a moral God but a significant amount of evidence for objective moral values. Moral values are similar to mathematics, simply true due to the nature of reality. Just as the sum of the interior angles of a triangle are necessarily equal to two right angles, torturing innocent people is necessarily immoral.
AMR is most effectively countered by arguing for the existence of a moral God. After all, the job of apologetics is to advocate for Christianity, and nobody will consider Christianity a viable option if they are convinced that there is not God. But there are also some philosophical arguments against AMR. First, there is no objective criteria for AMR morality and so AMR adherents can still choose any moral system that they want, making it functionally equivalent to moral relativism. Second, there is no reason why an objective moral system would apply to humans if humans are merely an accidental result of impersonal physical processes. Last, even if it is assumed that certain objective morals exist apart from God, there is no reason why a person should adhere to them rather than ignore them.
The last major objection to the moral argument for God’s existence is pantheism, where all of the universe is part of God and God is beyond good and evil. For the pantheist, something that seems immoral or evil from a human perspective would not if understood from God’s perspective. This is the flip side of materialism. There is no room for God in materialism and therefore no room for moral realism. With pantheism, everything is God and therefore everything is moral, even if we cannot recognize it. But the practical result is the same: an inability to make moral judgements, which is a bridge too far for most. Some forms of pantheism address this through the doctrine of karma, where one is resurrected based on how moral one has been in past lives. But since everything is moral, karma requires two levels of reality, a higher level that is beyond good and evil, and a lower level where a distinction is made between good and evil. But this distinction is not representative of the highest truth. Needless to say, the apologetic weak point in pantheism is the reliance of karma on living a moral life when the highest truth does not make moral distinctions.
[i] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, New York, NY: HarperOne, 1952/2002: 38-39.
[ii] Arthur Leff, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law,” Duke Law Journal, vol. 1979, no. 6, Dec. 1979: 1249.
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