Adam Johnson

By Adam Lloyd Johnson, Ph.D.

In God and Moral Law: On the Theistic Explanation of Morality, Mark Murphy critiques the two most well-known theistic theories of morality, natural law theory and divine command theory, and then presents a third view which he argues is superior. In this book he doesn’t argue for theism; rather, he assumes theism is true and then explores what sort of relationship, given theism, we should expect between God and morality. He also explains that he’s arguing with the assumption of perfect being theology, though that doesn’t seem to play a large role in his argument, with the following exception: based on his understanding of perfect being theology, sovereignty is a perfection and thus any explanation of morality must put God in the center.

On April 24, 2024, Dr. James P. Sterba, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame, debated Dr. Adam Lloyd Johnson, president of Convincing Proof Ministries. They debated the question “Without God, Can There Be an Objective Ethics?” Dr. Sterba took the affirmative position that there can be an objective ethics without God, and Dr. Johnson took the negative position, that there cannot be an objective ethics without God. The debate took place at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and was sponsored by the Ratio Christi chapter at UNL.

Without the existence of the all-good, all-powerful God of traditional theism can there be an objective ethics?

By Adam Lloyd Johnson, Ph.D.

Political rhetoric is nothing new; it’s been around forever. But over the last few years, its intensity has skyrocketed. This causes many to struggle with anxiety, fear, frustration, anger, and hatred. It can get people so worked up that they feel compelled to take extreme, even violent, actions. As of July 18, 2024, we don’t know the motives of the man who tried to assassinate Trump. But it’s reasonable to assume that extreme rhetoric played a role in creating this horrendous event where people were injured and one man lost his life. I’m going to explain how and why political rhetoric comes about.

By Adam Lloyd Johnson, Ph.D.

The moral argument for God’s existence is often summarized as follows:

Those who use the moral argument argue, as part of their defense of premise two, that God is the source of morality. However, some who push back against this argument (which includes atheists as well as theists who think the moral argument is a poor argument) argue that if God is the source of morality then morality would be subjective, not objective.

By Adam Lloyd Johnson, Ph.D.

Some people dislike stories that involve appalling evil such as sexual immorality and murder. However, such stories can be powerful tools to encourage us to do what’s right and fight against our prideful, selfish desires. Often this is done by having an appealing character make an evil decision and then showing the audience how that decision destroys his life. A famous example of this is the story of David whose decisions to commit adultery with Bathsheba and murder her husband ruin his life, his family, and his kingdom.

By Adam Lloyd Johnson, Ph.D.

There are several reasons that apologetics largely died out in the 1900s. Many of these reasons have to do with how postmodern thinking influenced how Christians thought about the role of human reason. In general, postmodern movements in the 1800s and 1900s, which viewed human reason too negatively, were overreactions to the modernism of the 1700s which viewed human reason too positively.

An example of how postmodern thinking influenced how Christians thought about human reason can be seen in the work of the most influential theologian of the twentieth century—Karl Barth.

By Adam Lloyd Johnson, Ph.D.

In April 2023, Adam published a paper in the journal Religions which offers a response to an objection to Divine Command Theory put forth by Erik Wielenberg. In this paper, Wielenberg argued that Divine Command Theory is implausible as an explanation of objective morality because it fails to explain how psychopaths have moral obligations. Adam’s response to this in Religions is open-access (free to read) and can be found by clicking the button below:

By Adam Lloyd Johnson, Ph.D.

Enoch begins his book Taking Morality Seriously by stating that he believes there must be some normative moral truths that are irreducibly normative, truths that are perfectly objective, universal, absolute, and that are independent of us, our desires, and our wills. These truths are not an expression of our practical attitudes but are truths we discover rather than create or construct. This realist view was in the minority when he first argued for it in 2003, but by 2011 some were saying it was now the majority view. He admits his robust realism has heavy ontological commitments, but he is willing to defend such commitments.

By Adam Lloyd Johnson, Ph.D.

In his book Moral Realism: An Introduction, Russ Shafer-Landau argues for, unsurprisingly, moral realism. On the first page he explains that the project of this book is to explain how the moral law could be something not of our own making, something whose truth did not depend on the commitments of those who are bound by its dictates. He argues that moral judgements enjoy a special sort of objectivity, that when they are true, they are so independently of what any human being, anywhere, in any circumstance, may think of them.

In part one of this book, Shafer-Landau provides a helpful catalogue of metaethical positions.

What is apologetics? In short, it is giving good reasons and evidence to believe that Christianity is true. Apologetics focuses on some big questions about the truth of Christianity, like “Does God exist?” “Who was Jesus?” “How do we know Jesus is God?” “Is the Bible even historically reliable?” Often, these questions can be hard to answer to a skeptical world, especially when being confronted with them for the first time. In this course, we seek to equip teens with the resources they need to navigate these issues. This course contains most of the same basic material from the “Intro to Apologetics” course, but it is presented at a high-school level.