Is Good From God? [Debate Review]

It is hard to give an unbiased review of the debate between Sam Harris and William Craig. It is even harder to find one-- do a quick search and you will be bombarded with sites and blogs promoting either christian apologetics or atheism, making personal attacks against both contestants. Taking a stroll into a idealist's war-zone, I chose to start with this debate because I neither agree wholly with Harris' nor Craig's philosophies. They are both moral objectivists, arguing if an ethical good can exist naturally or only supernaturally. Harris takes on the stance that maximizing human well-being is the greatest good, and it can be determined by science and logic. Craig's stance defends his views that good is authoritative and comes from god. It is important to remember that this was not a debate concerning the existence of a god, or any evidence for it. I recommend that you watch or listen to the debate yourself, but if you don't have time (it's long), you can view my notes of the debate here.

In Craig's introduction, he merits Harris on his stance that objective moral values exist and offers up two contentions. He says if god exists, then there is a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties. Secondly, if god does not exist, then we do not have this foundation. Craig claims that this is Harris' "value problem," and that Harris simply redefines good and evil by non-moral terms. He puts this idea together with his second contention, and underlines this as one of his biggest points of the debate, accusing Harris of circular logic-- maximizing well-being is good because he defines good as maximizing well-being.

William Craig (left), Sam Harris (right)

Harris' introduction more or less doesn't directly address the question at hand, and he later strays away from the argument more and more throughout the debate. I observe that what Harris is trying to do is build more of a credibility for his standpoint. Largely he speaks in comparisons; one example shows well-being is similar to health; "The distinction between a healthy person and a dead one is about as clear and consequential as any we make in science." He highlights his idealism with a very imperious statement: "If you think the worst possible misery isn't bad, or that there is a silver lining, or that maybe there is something worse, I don't know what you are talking about. And what is more, I'm not sure you know what you are talking about either."


As the debate goes on, Craig clarifies the difference between moral ontology (the foundations of moral values) and moral semantics (the meaning of moral terms.) This becomes one of the biggest questions of the debate-- if Craig defines god as intrinsically good, is he playing the same semantic games as Harris? Craig rejects this, but with what I believe is a weak argument; he says god is the greatest conceivable being, and in its own nature is a form of a priori knowledge. In a way it becomes a stalemate, making objective morality as a whole seem as enervated as ever.

My Opinion

Both debaters were rhetorically impressive, as neither of them seemed pressed for time or unconfident. On the same token, no debater 'creamed' the other or 'got it handed to them.' Harris was as calm as ever and made the audience laugh quite a bit, while Craig offered his consistent display of first rate debating skills. As far as the argument goes, I still don't see sufficient evidence for an objective morality. And as far as an objective morality is concerned, I'd have to side with Craig. A quote he offered in his closing remarks illustrates this idea well: "Any attempt to ground objective values in the world is open to the playground bully's retort, 'who says?' . . . Only if ethics were something unspeakable by us could law be unnatural and unchallengeable. Starving the poor is wicked, napalming babies is bad . . . says who?" The only way for me to imagine an objective morality in the universe is with a belief that it is transcended beyond any element of the natural world. [Don't confuse this with my view of morality, which I knowingly leave absent.]

Certainly good can be conceived in relative terms, and even though it didn't explicitly state it in the debate, I don't think that this is what the debate is about. Harris acknowledges that science does not require us to ignore that certain facts are subjective, which is appealing, but doesn't bridge the gap connecting human well-being with objective morality. His ideas are practical, and built on the natural world with logic and evidence . . . but I am yet to put the pieces together on his most important and audacious claim.  I might have to read his book to get a better understanding.  It will take more to win over the "over educated moral relativists and nihilists" on these arguments alone.