Do you think there's value in a Swinburnian "c-inductive" (probability-raising, but not putting the hypothesis over 0.5) argument from morality, like the following?
1. Moral realism is true.
2. Moral realism is probable on theism.
3. Moral realism is not as probable on naturalism.
C. Therefore, moral realism raises the probability of theism over naturalism.
Great question, Caleb! (By the way, I love your publication title. 😂)
I prefer the Swinburnean argument to the Craigian one, because it begins with step one: Moral realism is true. I also like the conclusion, C.
I'm skeptical of 2 and 3, because I think they should be almost opposite. The questions they answer should be: Does the truth of moral realism raise the probability of theism? And, does the truth of moral realism decrease the probability of naturalism?
If I had a methodological motto, it would be, "hypotheses non fingo," like Isaac Newton. Instead, we look at the evidence, and then we see what we must postulate for its explanation.
My other reason for skepticism about 2 is, how could we know? If theism and naturalism are just hypotheses, we either don't know what follows from theism, or we are making up what follows from theism by making up a concept of God. For example, that is Craig's response to the Euthyphro dilemma: "Let's hypothesize that God is identical with his goodness. Boom--problem solved!" Woefully inadequate in my view.
I don't know if moral realism is probable on theism, because if God is the explanation of moral realism, the simplest conclusion is that this is because of his will: voluntarism. If God is the supreme decider of what is good, then this is a kind of conventionalism.
In terms of 3, I think philosophers like Helen De Cruz and the like have done a lot of work to determine whether scientific study and evolutionary moral psychology can justify moral realism as opposed to debunk it. Others, like Richard Joyce, start from the hypothesis of naturalism and see what follows from it (roughly). But in principle, what should be done is philosophize whether moral realism or anti-realism is correct, and *subsequently* determine what explanatory resources are required. The study of biological or evolutionary psychology is usually shown to fall short of explaining moral truth.
Hope some of that made sense! Yes, there's a broader critique of common rationalist, Bayesian reasoning here...
Interesting! Perhaps it'd be better to combine 2 and 3 into something like "moral realism is more probable on theism than naturalism"—I remember Tim McGrew pointing out that a Bayesian odds ratio is often more "epistemically accessible" than its component probabilities. So perhaps that (somewhat) alleviates the "how do we know" concern. We don't need to know how likely moral realism is on theism; we merely need to argue that it's more likely than it would be on naturalism.
For what it's worth, I think the process of determining a posteriori what explanatory resources are required is going to rely on a fundamentally Bayesian inference—what theories actually give us reason to expect the data that we observe? But maybe not! I'm not sure.
Regarding the publication title: thanks, I'm quite proud of it 😂
I find it interesting that I have heard a very similar argument on a very different topic from a philosopher I know that you don't think highly of. You are accusing Craig (rightly, I think) of a sort of affirming the consequent, in which he concludes that because A makes B more likely, and B holds, this makes A more likely. Because we are dealing with probabilities, this is not quite the formal fallacy, but it is close. This same accusation, in a slightly different form, was levelled against the entire scientific project by one Gordon Clark (in Philosophy of Science and Belief in God). Since scientists test hypotheses by seeing if the things following from them hold, they are applying a type of reasoning similar to that of William Lane Craig, and Clark argues that science, while useful, can tell us nothing true about the world, and thus cannot be used in arguments against religion. Given your own empiricism, I actually find it surprising that you consider this kind of abductive reasoning fallacious. What would you suggest is the difference between scientific inference and what Lane Craig is doing?
Do you think there's value in a Swinburnian "c-inductive" (probability-raising, but not putting the hypothesis over 0.5) argument from morality, like the following?
1. Moral realism is true.
2. Moral realism is probable on theism.
3. Moral realism is not as probable on naturalism.
C. Therefore, moral realism raises the probability of theism over naturalism.
Great question, Caleb! (By the way, I love your publication title. 😂)
I prefer the Swinburnean argument to the Craigian one, because it begins with step one: Moral realism is true. I also like the conclusion, C.
I'm skeptical of 2 and 3, because I think they should be almost opposite. The questions they answer should be: Does the truth of moral realism raise the probability of theism? And, does the truth of moral realism decrease the probability of naturalism?
If I had a methodological motto, it would be, "hypotheses non fingo," like Isaac Newton. Instead, we look at the evidence, and then we see what we must postulate for its explanation.
My other reason for skepticism about 2 is, how could we know? If theism and naturalism are just hypotheses, we either don't know what follows from theism, or we are making up what follows from theism by making up a concept of God. For example, that is Craig's response to the Euthyphro dilemma: "Let's hypothesize that God is identical with his goodness. Boom--problem solved!" Woefully inadequate in my view.
I don't know if moral realism is probable on theism, because if God is the explanation of moral realism, the simplest conclusion is that this is because of his will: voluntarism. If God is the supreme decider of what is good, then this is a kind of conventionalism.
In terms of 3, I think philosophers like Helen De Cruz and the like have done a lot of work to determine whether scientific study and evolutionary moral psychology can justify moral realism as opposed to debunk it. Others, like Richard Joyce, start from the hypothesis of naturalism and see what follows from it (roughly). But in principle, what should be done is philosophize whether moral realism or anti-realism is correct, and *subsequently* determine what explanatory resources are required. The study of biological or evolutionary psychology is usually shown to fall short of explaining moral truth.
Hope some of that made sense! Yes, there's a broader critique of common rationalist, Bayesian reasoning here...
Interesting! Perhaps it'd be better to combine 2 and 3 into something like "moral realism is more probable on theism than naturalism"—I remember Tim McGrew pointing out that a Bayesian odds ratio is often more "epistemically accessible" than its component probabilities. So perhaps that (somewhat) alleviates the "how do we know" concern. We don't need to know how likely moral realism is on theism; we merely need to argue that it's more likely than it would be on naturalism.
For what it's worth, I think the process of determining a posteriori what explanatory resources are required is going to rely on a fundamentally Bayesian inference—what theories actually give us reason to expect the data that we observe? But maybe not! I'm not sure.
Regarding the publication title: thanks, I'm quite proud of it 😂
I find it interesting that I have heard a very similar argument on a very different topic from a philosopher I know that you don't think highly of. You are accusing Craig (rightly, I think) of a sort of affirming the consequent, in which he concludes that because A makes B more likely, and B holds, this makes A more likely. Because we are dealing with probabilities, this is not quite the formal fallacy, but it is close. This same accusation, in a slightly different form, was levelled against the entire scientific project by one Gordon Clark (in Philosophy of Science and Belief in God). Since scientists test hypotheses by seeing if the things following from them hold, they are applying a type of reasoning similar to that of William Lane Craig, and Clark argues that science, while useful, can tell us nothing true about the world, and thus cannot be used in arguments against religion. Given your own empiricism, I actually find it surprising that you consider this kind of abductive reasoning fallacious. What would you suggest is the difference between scientific inference and what Lane Craig is doing?