EDITOR'S NOTE: Today continues our eight-part debate on the resolution, "Does objective morality depend on the existence of God?" We'll hear from two sharp young thinkers. Joe Heschmeyer, a Catholic seminarian in Kansas City, Kansas, will argue the affirmative view. Steven Dillon, a gifted philosopher and a former Catholic seminarian, will argue the negative. The eight parts will run as follows:

Monday (11/4) - Joe's opening statement (affirmative)
Tuesday (11/5) - Steven's opening statement (negative)
Wednesday (11/6) - Joe's rebuttal (affirmative)
Thursday (11/7) - Steven's rebuttal (negative)
Friday (11/8) - Questions exchanged (three questions each)
Saturday (11/9) - Answers (Joe and Steven answer each other's questions)
Sunday (11/10) - Joe's closing statement (affirmative)
Monday (11/11) - Steven's closing statement (negative)

Today we conclude the series with a closing statement from Steven. Both Joe and Steven have agreed to be present in the comment boxes, so if you have a specific question for them, ask away!
 

Introduction

 
I’m very grateful to Brandon Vogt and Strange Notions for hosting this debate, and to Joe for participating in it. Debating a Thomist has been refreshing.

Now as I’ve indicated throughout this debate, the resolution is vulnerable to numerous interpretations. But, it has a particularly interesting meaning when uttered by someone of a Thomist persuasion, such as Joe.

As Ed Feser explains:

“[I]t isn’t atheism per se that threatens the very possibility of morality, at least not directly. Rather, what threatens it is the mechanistic or anti-teleological (and thus anti-Aristotelian) conception of the natural world that modern atheists are generally committed to…”

Objective morality depends on God, for the Thomist, in so far as its underwriting teleology does. But, Aristotle took teleology to be fundamental, thus permitting objective morality to exist independent of God. In a lot of ways, I’ve defended the Aristotelian view in this debate. I’ve argued that morality is ultimately foundational, negating the need for it to depend upon something further. And I resisted Joe’s argument that the teleology of moral duties requires God by showing the argument to be internally inconsistent. Of course, my arguments don’t commit anyone to endorsing Aristotelian metaphysics (though, I’d encourage people to do so), but they’ll play an important role in this closing statement as you’ll soon see.

Let’s review and evaluate the debate so far.

Joe’s Case

 
Joe’s general strategy for defending the resolution was to argue that objective morality could only be grounded in God, and he presented three arguments to that end. First he argued that normative theories which do not appeal to God are unable to ground objective morality. Second he argued that if God existed and was goodness, then objective morality would be grounded in God. Finally, he argued that objective moral duties required something that only God could deliver: universally binding ends.

In response, I noted that Joe’s general strategy was incapable of evincing the resolution. We could grant everything he said and it would only show that objective morality would be ungrounded in God’s absence. But, an ungrounded objective morality is still objective morality. Furthermore, each of his arguments seemed burdened with problems. For example, his first argument involved a series of questions which do not—contrary to their purpose—indicate whether a normative theory is objective, and as stated above his last involved a set of self-defeating claims.

We did not really interact over these points in the Question and Answer period, so I don’t have much to add here. Perhaps the resolution is true, but it does not seem to me that Joe’s arguments are able to show that it is. However, this could ultimately mean nothing for the purposes of this debate unless my case fared better.

My Case

 
My general strategy was to argue that objective morality does not depend upon God because some moral propositions belong to the class of propositions that would be true regardless of whether or not God exists. Other members of this class include the laws of logic and mathematical truths. I employed one argument to this end. I argued that the proposition ‘Agony is intrinsically bad’ featured the properties that characterize members of the class of ‘God-independent’ propositions. Namely, I argued that it was necessarily true, fundamental, and did not involve God.

I expected Joe to respond by arguing that there is no evil without goodness and no goodness without God. But, he instead took issue with the truth of the proposition. In his rebuttal, Joe argued that however we understand the ‘badness’ of agony, it won’t allow my proposition to qualify in the class I need it to. Either ‘badness’ just emphasizes the pain of agony—in which case, this isn’t even a moral proposition—or, ‘badness’ refers to moral evil, in which case counter-examples abound wherein agony is either not morally evil, or at least sensibly described as such.

But, ‘badness’ doesn’t just emphasize the pain of agony nor is it just a moral evil. In fact, moral evil is a proper subset of badness. Badness is an enormous category that we all recognize on a daily basis, which is why I’ve been stubborn in explicating this: it seems far too close to experience to need analysis. To illustrate its breadth, badness also includes natural evils. Thus, we tend to think that it’s ‘bad’ when hundreds of children drown after a natural event occurs such as a tsunami striking a village. Badness even transcends actions. We say “I had a bad day”, and “This is just a bad situation.” It is the most fundamental disvalue known to us. So, as we can see, Joe’s counter-examples are not successful. Agony is intrinsically bad, even though it’s not intrinsically morally evil. Note, in using such a broad notion of badness, my proposition is still moral as it concerns evaluative facts that relate to what we should and should not do.

How else did Joe respond to my case? Well, consider the following quotation:

“[Positing ultimately foundational moral truths] is not an answer. It’s a shrug of the shoulders and a “Just because.”

That's not the case in the Christian answer that God is uncaused. We argue that God must exist, since you cannot just have an infinite series of conditional and created beings. For example, St. Thomas Aquinas’ Third Way proves the existence of a Being (who we call God) who must exist necessarily, and who relies only upon Himself for His Being. Without Him, there couldn’t be a universe. We don’t assume that God must exist: we show that He must.”

Those of us who do not believe in God will simply disagree: Christians have not shown that God exists. I’d add that they especially have not done this through Aquinas’ Third Way. If it is sound, it only shows that there is an imperishable substance. We’d definitely need additional argumentation to reasonably infer that this substance is anything like God. Joe may believe it’s a short step from the Third Way to God, but it doesn’t seem like we’ve been given reason to share that sentiment.

Now, because Joe has given an argument for God’s existence, I feel it is permissible for me to respond. In fairness to Joe, I won’t argue in any greater length against the Third Way than his linked video argued for it. You can find my response in footnote.¹ I’ve included it there so as not to interrupt the flow here.

In the above quotation Joe indicates that it’s a cop out to say some moral facts are so foundational they’re in no need of being grounded in or by anything. But, I pointed out that this is self-defeating because on his view, the moral fact that there is goodness cannot be grounded in or by anything, since God is goodness and nothing grounds God.

He replied in his Answers section that goodness is—contrary to my suggestion—grounded in God. But, surely this can’t be right. If God is goodness, then to say that goodness is grounded in God is to say that God is grounded in God. If his view commits one to the position that God grounds himself in himself, my view can hardly be regarded as inferior!

So, Joe is suggesting that theists have good reasons to believe in ultimately foundational morality because they’ve got good arguments that God exists (e.g. Aquinas’ Third Way) and is goodness, whereas non-theists lack comparable reasons for endorsing this moral position.

But, what are these arguments for the conclusion that God is goodness? Joe linked us to a video on the Third Way, but up to this point he’d only said that God would be goodness. So, I asked him to provide such an argument. At least this way the readers could decide for themselves whether or not Joe is justified in suggesting that theists are more reasonable than non-theists in endorsing ultimately foundational morality. But, Joe responded by protesting that providing such an argument wasn’t necessary to establish the resolution. However, in so far as he needs to show that God would be goodness in order to show that morality would be grounded in God, he does.

In response, Joe gave us two Fourth Wayish kind of arguments. I’ll leave it to the reader to determine whether these are logically valid and factually correct. I’ve responded to them in [1]: in so far as Aquinas’ Fourth Way implies that Pure Act efficiently causes², it’s unsound.

The only other issues Joe raised that I’m aware of are about Moral Intuitionism. But, they seem more to do with its practicality than truth, so I’ll set them aside for the time being.

Conclusion

 
I hope that at the very least I’ve managed to show that non-theists can reasonably resist the resolution. But, my case strikes me as stronger than that. What do you think?

Thanks for reading!
 
 
(Image credit: Fine Art America)

However, this belief came under attack when scientists—still called “natural philosophers” at the time—began searching for physical and material explanations, for eternal physical laws that regulate falling bodies and the motion of planets.  It is at this point in the discussion that Charles Darwin comes into the picture. He replaced teleological explanations with physical explanations in terms of what he called natural selection. According to some, Darwin rephrased teleology from an “a priori drive” to an “a posteriori result.” Was this the end of teleology? Darwin may have thought it was, but let’s find out.

Biology Has a Teleological Dimension

 
What makes biology so inherently teleological? Biological features can be understood in terms of effects—that is, in terms of survival problems that need to be effectively solved. In other words, they serve a function; the green color of a caterpillar has a function, namely, to deceive potential predators; such is their end or goal—or in more neutral, biological terms, such is their function. One could also say that camouflage is “for” deceiving, just like a knife is “for” cutting. So in biology, it remains very common to ask what a feature is “for.” Just like pumps are for pumping (that’s their desired effect), so eye patterns on butterfly wings are “for” protection (that’s the advantageous effect it has on fending enemies off). This is a function of eye patterns, but certainly not a purpose or intention of butterflies.

Prior to any talk of evolutionary theory, William Paley (1743-1805) had argued that something as beautifully designed as the universe must have had a Designer, just like a watch does. In the footsteps of Paley, Darwin also saw a beautiful design in nature, but unlike Paley, he viewed nature as something designed by the trial-and-error test of natural selection during a process of evolutionary change. No matter what, in either case, the results must be design-like (in the sense of well-adapted), because if they were not, they simply would not work in solving problems. If the eye lens, for example, did not function like a physical lens, one would not see very well. There is teleology again.

Apparently, biological features can have and do have effects that are advantageous (or detrimental) to various degrees. But how that is possible in itself is an altogether different story—actually a meta-physical story.

The Metaphysics of Teleology

 
Somehow our universe has been designed in such a way that specific designs do work, whether it is for better or for worse. It is only due to this metaphysical notion of design and teleology that we can talk about biological designs; all biological designs are “design-based” designs. It is one of the most perplexing things about our universe that it allows for any kind of design to work the way it works.

Did Darwin ignore this part of the story? Or did he really discard teleology? Some keep stressing that he replaced teleology with the causality of natural selection. One of them was George Bernard Shaw who once said that Charles Darwin threw Paley’s “watch” into the ocean. Well, Shaw was wrong. If Darwin did throw something away, it was Paley’s “watchmaker,” but certainly not his famous “watch.” Darwin never threw away the design concept—it was actually essential to his theory.

The artifact analogy of design is as basic to Darwinism as it is to Paley’s natural theology. Since the heart is designed like a pump, it is a successful design “for” circulating blood. After Darwin, the heart still existed “for” circulation; the cause of its existence may have been different, but its teleology was not. However, Darwin ignored, or at least bypassed, the following question: How come that certain biological designs “work,” and are “successful” and “effective” in reaching their “goal”? What is it that makes them “goal-directed”? What carries them through the filter of natural selection?

It’s here that teleology keeps coming back. There is teleology in the biological world because the animate world is design-like—as much so as there is teleology in the technical world of designers because that world is design-like as well. Natural selection may explain that a fine working design has a better chance of being reproduced, but ultimately it cannot explain why such a design is working so well.

And that’s where teleology is needed—even in Darwinism. In that sense, Darwin did not change teleology from an “a priori drive” into an “a posteriori result.” Teleology is not a biological outcome a posteriori but a metaphysical given a priori. Natural selection does not create teleology, but its working is based on teleology.

Where Does Teleology Come From?

 
The answer may seem mystifying at first sight: Teleology must have been built into nature—as some kind of all-pervasive architecture. It may be so all-pervasive, though, that it easily escapes attention. Natural selection on its own cannot do the “job” unless it works within a framework of purpose and design. Without this “cosmic design,” there couldn’t even be any natural selection. Natural selection can only select those specific designs that are in accordance with the cosmic design (by the way, designers, engineers, and architects must do the same thing).

As it turns out, science does not operate in a vacuum, but it works within a philosophical framework of pre-existing assumptions—and one of them is teleology (some call it cosmic teleology, in distinction from the older idea that biological designs are the product of predetermined goals).  Darwin may have thought he could reduce teleology to causality, but his causality mechanism of natural selection can only work on condition that there is teleology in nature. There is “something” in successful biological designs that carries them through the filter of natural selection. To put it briefly, organisms are not teleological because they have survived; on the contrary, their survival is mainly due to the fact that they are teleological. Creation is “loaded” with cosmic design, just like a dice that constantly throws a six must be loaded.

Let me come to a conclusion. The inescapable idea behind all of this is that our universe is ultimately an “intelligent project,” created by an Intelligent Designer. The assumption of a Creator would explain that the universe exists and is what it is; and the assumption of a cosmic design would explain why the universe is this way. In that sense, even Darwinism needs some Divine Help—whether its fans like it or not. There is no way Darwinism could survive without teleology.
 
 
(Image credit: AJ MacDonald)

When something stops working, our first reaction is often to find someone who knows how to fix it. Whether it’s a car, a computer, or a toaster, most of us aren’t inclined to try and tinker around with some machine that we are just as likely to make worse as better. We are all pretty good at telling when something isn’t working right, but it’s far more difficult to discern why. Clearly this piece of technology is designed to do some useful task, and when it stops doing that task, we need someone to reorder its parts to get it working again.

In certain ways this is exactly how many people look at the natural world as well. Many natural things obey observable patterns or standards. Squirrels tend to gather nuts for the winter; apple seeds tend to grow into apple trees; and water tends to flow downhill. If one of these normal trends fails, we notice, even if we don’t call a mechanic to look under the hood of the withered apple tree. While we may have some inkling as to what might have gone wrong to interrupt the process, true knowledge of the process is left to the experts. And for a long time, those experts have been telling us that nature, just like the machine, is simply a matter of understanding the parts.

We are basically told by these experts that our intuition that natural things move towards some end or purpose is just a convenient way of looking at things—a pretty picture to dress up our ignorance. The alternate model proposed is that one simply break the natural process down into its parts to see how each works, both individually and with the other parts, to produce the apparent purpose. By this process we can banish any talk of natural ends from our discussion of science.

There are a whole host of philosophical and scientific problems that this trend in modern thought raises and ample grounds to question the reasonableness of the project of denying natural ends. For instance, if you are going to explain away something that looks like a natural end by claiming that it is simply the purposeless motion of its parts, then you had better hope that the parts themselves don’t demonstrate motion to an end. Inevitably, parts are broken down into other smaller parts and the question only temporarily forestalled. The apparent purpose of the apple seed growing into an apple tree is slowly stripped away as we descend down to more and more fundamental layers of explanation. The descent passes through organs, cells, molecules, and atoms until we get to the fundamental particles of nature at which point the claim is that any semblance of a natural end has been seemingly ground into nothingness.

The problem is that the ends never actually go away. Electrons and quarks and any other particles we care to consider may not act like any normal macroscopic objects, but that does not mean they do not have natural ends. Quantum Field Theory is far from intuitive, but the motions and interactions it describes follow a coherent order and structure, despite the fact that it comes with a good dose of quantum “weirdness.”

One great example of the weird teleology of particle physics is the quark. As best we can tell, the protons and neutrons that make up the nuclei of all atoms are themselves made up of smaller particles that we call quarks. One particularly odd thing about the quarks is that, while we are confident they exist in abundance, we have never directly observed them in the way we have observed the particles they make up. The problem is that the “strong” force that binds several quarks into a “bound state” like a proton or neutron gets stronger as you try to separate one quark from the rest, unlike the electromagnetic or gravitational forces, which weaken with distance. At some point, as more and more energy is expended trying to keep hold of that one quark in the proton, there is enough energy in the system for new quarks to be created. Some of these new quarks will form a new bound state with the escaping quark and one will replace it in the original proton. We simply never find a lone quark, only bundles of quarks

Whether quarks are truly fundamental particles or are themselves made up of something smaller, one thing should be clear: they have a natural tendency towards something beyond themselves—a bound state with other quarks. That is to say, they have a natural end. So, for all the efforts of some people to explain away natural ends, modern science simply won’t oblige.
 
 
This article first appeared on DominicanaBlog.com, an online publication of the Dominican Students of the Province of St. Joseph who live and study at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC. It was written by Br. Thomas Davenport, a Dominican student brother of the Province of St. Joseph. He graduated from Stanford University with a PhD in Physics. Used with permission.
 
(Image credit: Vwamlausanne.com)