Alex O'Connor on The moral argument
O'Connor argues that the moral argument's first premise — that without God, objective morality cannot exist — is unsubstantiated.
O'Connor engages Craig's moral argument with philosophical precision, targeting the claim that God is the only possible foundation for objective moral values. He argues that this premise is asserted rather than demonstrated — Craig treats it as obvious, but there are well-developed secular metaethical theories (moral realism, contractualism, constructivism) that ground objective morality without reference to God.
O'Connor is particularly sharp on the Euthyphro dilemma. If God commands the good because it is good, then goodness is independent of God. If the good is good because God commands it, then morality is arbitrary — God could have made cruelty virtuous. Craig's standard response — that God's nature is the good — strikes O'Connor as a terminological move rather than a genuine solution, since it merely relocates the arbitrariness to God's nature rather than his will.
He has also challenged the second premise, arguing that our strong moral intuitions may be the product of evolution and socialisation rather than evidence of objective moral facts. The feeling that something is objectively wrong, however intense, does not establish that objective moral facts exist — it may simply reflect the depth of our evolutionary programming.
“The moral argument assumes that without God, morality is subjective. But that is precisely what needs to be demonstrated, not assumed.”