Metaethics

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.

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.

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.

By Adam Lloyd Johnson, Ph.D.

Edward T. Welch earned an M.Div. degree at Biblical Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. in counseling psychology (neuropsychology) from the University of Utah. He serves as the director of counseling and as an academic dean at the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation (CCEF) and professor of practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary. His work has led to several of his own books, contributions to many others, and numerous articles for both theological and secular journals.

By Adam Lloyd Johnson, Ph.D.

In his seminal work After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that our Western society has lost the conceptual context for and foundation within which moral language makes sense. In the premodern world moral judgments were understood as governed by impersonal standards justified by a shared conception of human good. That context was lost in the Enlightenment when Aristotelian Scholasticism and Christian theology were discarded and, with them, the idea of teleology. After teleology was discarded, several conceptual systems attempted to provide a new account of morality which would maintain the status, authority, and justification of moral rules.

By Adam Lloyd Johnson, Ph.D.

On October 17, 2022, William Lane Craig discussed an article of mine in which I explained my Divine Love Theory. My article was published in the Worldview Bulletin Newsletter here: Divine Love Theory: How the Trinity Is the Source and Foundation of Morality.

You can listen to Craig’s podcast about my Divine Love Theory here: Divine Love Theory and the Trinity | Podcast | Reasonable Faith.

First, I’ll provide key quotes from Craig’s podcast. Craig said he has reservations about my Divine Love Theory because “it proposes that the love between the members of the Trinity is the source and foundation of morality, and I think that is a distorted and lopsided view because, as important as divine love is, it also equally belongs to God’s moral perfection to be just and to be holy.”