Harris vs. Craig

On April 7, 2011, Sam Harris and William Lane Craigdebated the question “Is Good from God?” at the University of Notre Dame. The debate is notable not only because both participants are accomplished thinkers, but because the topic was narrower and more philosophically specific than most God debates: it focused squarely on the foundations of morality.

Harris had recently published The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (2010), in which he argued that science can, in principle, determine moral truths. Craig had spent decades defending the moral argumentfor God’s existence: that objective moral values require a transcendent foundation, and that foundation is God. The Notre Dame debate was, in effect, a direct confrontation between these two positions.

Craig’s case: morality needs God

Craig’s argument was characteristically structured. He presented two main contentions:

1. If God exists, we have a sound foundation for objective morality.God is, by nature, the Good — the locus of moral value. God’s commands constitute our moral duties. God’s nature is the standard against which actions are measured. This is a form of divine command theory, modified to avoid the Euthyphro dilemma: God does not arbitrarily decide what is good; rather, God’s nature is goodness, and his commands flow necessarily from that nature.

2. If God does not exist, we do not have a sound foundation for objective morality. On a naturalistic worldview, human beings are the accidental products of evolution on an insignificant planet. Moral beliefs are the result of evolutionary and social conditioning, not insights into objective truths. Without a transcendent anchor, moral claims reduce to expressions of personal or cultural preference. Craig was careful to say that atheists can behave morally; the question is whether, on atheism, there is any objective basis for calling anything truly right or wrong.

Harris’s case: the moral landscape

Harris rejected both of Craig’s contentions. His central claim was that moral questions are, at bottom, questions about the well-being of conscious creatures — and that science is, in principle, capable of answering such questions.

The “moral landscape” is Harris’s metaphor for the space of possible human experiences, with peaks of well-being and valleys of suffering. Some ways of organizing human societies genuinely produce more well-being than others. Throwing acid in a girl’s face for learning to read is objectively worse than not doing so — not because God says it is, but because it causes needless suffering to a conscious being. If we accept that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad, then there are objective truths about how to move away from it. Science can help us discover those truths.

Harris also attacked the idea that God could serve as a foundation for morality. If God commanded something abhorrent — as he appears to in certain Old Testament passages (the genocide of the Amalekites, the stoning of adulterers) — would it be moral simply because God commanded it? The fact that believers themselves recoil from these commands, Harris argued, shows that they are applying an independent moral standard to evaluate God’s behaviour — which means morality is prior to God, not derived from him.

Where the debate stalled

The Harris-Craig debate is widely regarded as one of the most frustrating of the major atheist-theist exchanges, and for a specific reason: the two participants were largely talking past each other.

Craig’s challenge to Harris was philosophical: what grounds the claim that well-being is objectively good?Why should the well-being of conscious creatures be the standard of morality rather than, say, the will of the strong, or aesthetic excellence, or anything else? Harris seemed to treat this as self-evident — if you don’t accept that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad, there is nothing more to say to you. Craig argued that this was precisely the question that needed answering, not dismissing.

Harris’s challenge to Craig was moral: how can you call God good when the Bible attributes atrocities to him?How is divine command theory distinguishable from might makes right? Craig’s response — that God’s nature is the good, and his commands are necessarily consistent with that nature — struck Harris and many audience members as circular.

Neither thinker successfully engaged with the other’s strongest point. Craig never explained, to a skeptic’s satisfaction, how God’s commands in the Old Testament are consistent with perfect goodness. Harris never explained, to a philosopher’s satisfaction, why well-being is the objectively correct foundation for morality rather than simply the one he prefers.

The deeper question

The Harris-Craig debate touches on one of the most important questions in moral philosophy: can morality be objective without being grounded in something beyond the natural world? There are serious philosophical positions on both sides of this question that neither debater fully represented.

Moral realists like Derek Parfit and Russ Shafer-Landau argue that objective moral truths exist as brute facts about what we have reason to do — irreducible to natural properties but also not dependent on God. Constructivists like John Rawls and Christine Korsgaard argue that moral principles are constructed by rational agents under idealized conditions. Error theorists like J.L. Mackie argue that there are no objective moral truths at all — that all moral claims are false, because they presuppose a kind of objectivity the universe does not contain.

Harris’s position is a form of moral naturalism — the claim that moral facts are natural facts about well-being. Craig’s position is a form of theological non-naturalism — the claim that moral facts are grounded in the nature and will of God. Both positions have sophisticated defenders and sophisticated critics. The Notre Dame debate, for all its drama, only scratched the surface of a question that has occupied moral philosophers for centuries and shows no sign of being settled.

What each side gets right

Harris is right that morality, whatever its metaphysical foundation, has to do with the experiences of conscious beings — that suffering matters, that well-being matters, and that these are not arbitrary preferences. He is right that you do not need to believe in God to recognize the difference between a world of flourishing and a world of agony.

Craig is right that the question of whysuffering matters — why the well-being of conscious creatures is objectively important rather than merely something we happen to care about — is a genuine philosophical question that cannot be waved away. He is right that Harris’s framework, at bottom, takes a fundamental moral claim as axiomatic and then calls it science.

The honest conclusion may be that neither position is complete. Theistic morality has the advantage of a clear grounding (God) but the disadvantage of needing to explain how a good God can command or permit atrocities. Secular morality has the advantage of not needing to defend divine commands but the disadvantage of struggling to explain why its foundational values are more than sophisticated preferences. The question remains open — and that itself is worth knowing.