Moral Arguments for God's Existence

Navigating the Terrain
Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-0-19-763571-1
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 576 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 235 mm

This volume brings together an impressive range of leading scholars to deftly navigate the field of moral arguments for God's existence. To this end, it canvasses the fertile history of the moral argument, highlighting thinkers from before Immanuel Kant, Kant himself, and various post-Kantian thinkers up until the present day-including C. S. Lewis, perhaps the most important popularizer of the moral argument of the twentieth century. It then makes a case for moral realism and against realism's salient metaethical alternatives such as error theory, expressivism, and constructivism. In that context, both the problem of evil and debunking arguments against moral knowledge are also discussed at length. Then the volume discusses a range of important moral phenomena, realistically construed, that call for adequate explanation-issues of moral value, human dignity, objective moral duties, issues of moral accountability and forgiveness, matters of moral knowledge, and aspects of Kantian moral faith. Then a range of theistic ethical accounts are outlined and defended against objections, from divine command theory, theistic natural law, divine will and desire theories, and divine motivation theory. The penultimate section elucidates challenges facing naturalistic theories like Cornell realism and atheistic Platonism, including the task of providing an account for basic human rights and escaping from problematic implications of debunking. Finally, an assortment of finer-grained religious ethical accounts are laid out, including a Trinitarian analysis, a Jewish perspective, and an original argument that certain moral considerations point beyond theism to Christianity in particular.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Baggett, David

Hare, John E.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Introduction

- Part I: History of the Moral Argument(s)

- Chapter 1: Aristotle and Augustine on God and Happiness: An Implicit Moral Argument Prior to Kant

- Chapter 2: The Right, the Good, and the Threat of Despair: (Kantian) Ethics and the Need for Hope in God

- Chapter 3: Moral Arguments from John Henry Newman to Austin Farrer

- Chapter 4: Putting Us Back in the Dock: C. S. Lewis's Moral Argument as Praeparatio Evangelica

- Chapter 5: Moral Arguments: Recent Developments

- Part II: Moral Realism and Its Challengers

- Chapter 6: Moral Error Theory (and God)

- Chapter 7: Expressivism

- Chapter 8: Constructivism

- Chapter 9: Debunking Arguments: The Dialectical Situation

- Chapter 10: The Problem of Evil and the Moral Argument

- Chapter 11: Moral Realism

- Part III: Moral Phenomena

- Chapter 12: Supernatural and Natural Goodness

- Chapter 13: God is Good (for Us)

- Chapter 14: The Preciousness of Human Persons: In Dialogue with Raimond Gaita

- Chapter 15: The Benefits of Divine Command Theory: Its Links to Accountability and Forgiveness

- Chapter 16: The Fact-Value Split, Nominalism, and Moral Knowledge

- Chapter 17: Moral Faith

- Part IV: Theistic Ethics

- Chapter 18: Divine Command Theory

- Chapter 19: Divine Will and Desire Theories

- Chapter 20: God as Supreme Exemplar

- Chapter 21: God and the Natural Law

- Part V: Secular Ethics

- Chapter 22: Platonized Naturalism: A Bromide for Disenchanted Naturalists

- Chapter 23: Naturalism and Its Counterfeits

- Chapter 24: People, Things, and God

- Part VI: Finer-Grained Religious Accounts

- Chapter 25: Kant's Moral Case for God

- Chapter 26: Divine Love Theory: How the Trinity Best Explains Objective Moral Truth

- Chapter 27: The Greatest Story Ever Told: How Theism Predicts the Light of Christ

Über Autor(innen)

David Baggett served as Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Christian University until he and his wife, Marybeth, recently enrolled to study at the University of Missouri School of Law. With Jerry Walls, he's the author of a tetralogy on the moral argument for God's existence (Oxford University Press), and most recently wrote Reasonable Moral Faith (Baker Academic) with William Lane Craig.

John E. Hare is Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale University, Emeritus. He has published numerous books and articles about the relation between morality and religion. Three of the books form a trilogy about the Trinity published by Oxford University Press, namely The Moral Gap (1996), God's Command (2015), and Unity and the Holy Spirit (2023).