Monday, October 14, 2019

Denying The Second Premiss of The Moral Argument Does Not Save You From Theism: The Moral Argument And Idealism

I wonder if the following argument could be used to counteract atheistic rejections of the second premiss of The Moral Argument.

Usually, the moral argument is formulated as follows:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
2. Objective moral values do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Premiss 2 relies heavily upon intuition. We all have a strong sense that some things are just wrong: it is wrong to abuse children; it is wrong to enslave other people, and so on. Nevertheless, there are some who bite the bullet and reject that objective moral values exist, holding that we cannot trust our intuition. 

But, if we cannot trust our intuition in regards to moral values, why should we trust our moral intuition regarding other things we normally intuitively believe? Would it not be more coherent to say that we cannot intuitively believe anything, rather than be selective about it? And if this is so, we cannot intuitively believe that there is an external world behind our own sense-data. Intuition tells us there is, but all we have acquaintance with is the ideas represented to us. 

However, this would lead us to accept idealism. And as demonstrated by Berkley, ideas are passive and can thus exercise no casual power; thus, on an idealist model, in order to explain change, one needs to adopt occasionalism, whereby God is a primary cause of all change (there being no secondary causes). 

Since this requires God, denying intuitionism in order to reject the second premiss of The Moral Argument cannot save one from theism. 

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