Is Richard Shumack Delusional?

Peter Boghossian engaged in a rather strange debate* with a guy called Richard Shumack a few years ago in which he laid out the characteristics of delusion.  To be deluded, Boghossian maintained, using the words of Karl Jaspers, you have to sincerely hold a belief that is implausible, and that belief has to be incorrigible.  In other words, you really need to believe what you say you believe (you can’t just be mouthing a commonly held belief and you can’t be just joking with someone).  You can’t be argued out of that belief.  And the belief must not only be false, it must be unbelievable by a reasonable person or the evidence must be heavily stacked against it.

The last two criteria are very closely linked, incorrigibility and implausibility, because the more you refuse to accept evidence against your claims and more questionable the “evidence” brought forward in support of your claims, the more implausible your claims are.

To show that your belief is not a delusion you need to demonstrate two things, 1) the claims associated with that belief are plausible and 2) you are willing to change the nature of your belief in the presence of contradicting evidence.

Boghossian showed, with some technical issues, a short clip with William Lane Craig talking about the nature of “faith”.  WLC quite clearly states that if “in some historically contingent circumstances” the weight of evidence turned against christianity, then it would not affect his faith because he has “the witness of the holy spirit in (his) heart”.  Under WLC’s interpretation of the “proper relationship between faith and reason”, faith trumps reason – or perhaps we could less kindly say that, when in a “proper relationship”, faith ignores reason, at least when reason indicates that the contents of faith are wrong.  Additionally, he makes an unsubstantiated claim (at least not in this context, it can be implied that the substantiation is biblical) that if a believer has intellectual doubts, then that can be attributed to Satan who is forever trying to destroy faith thus implying that any effort of reason that speaks against faith could always due to be satanic influences and providing a theological motivation for ignoring reason.

This is very much an indication that WLC is almost all the way to delusion – his beliefs appear to be sincerely held (he’s not a televangelist, so he doesn’t appear to be in it for the money like Kenneth Copeland [net worh $760M] or even Billy Graham [net worth $25M]), his beliefs are incorrigible by his own admission and the beliefs are inherently implausible because they include (amongst other things) belief in miracles which are, by definition, implausible.

The only thing that could save WLC from delusion would be truth of his claims under theism – if his god were to exist.

The debate, however, was not Boghossian vs. WLC, it was Boghossian vs. Shumack.  Shumack appeared to do well enough against the one prong of the Boghossian attack, his attempt to explain that if we are going to “know” something then we need to bring empirical evidence – so a tape measure to obtain the dimensions of a door, not divination, or a dog’s opinion, or the ceremonial sacrifice of a goat.

It should be noted however that this example was raised in the context of explaining that there can be better and worse ways of “knowing” things.  For measuring a door, a better way is to bring a tape measure.  If it’s a standard, unmodified door, then you can look up the standard – but to know whether it’s standard door, you need to measure it otherwise you’re just guessing.  Worse ways include guessing, using woo and asking someone who has no reason to know the dimensions of the door.

Shumack totally ignored the actual message and the motivation behind the example.  Instead, he talked about how there are other ways to “know” things that do not call upon empirical evidence – including the testimony of other people and one’s own personal anecdotal evidence – without acknowledging that some of these ways, if not all of them, are worse than empirical evidence.

He also ignored Boghossian’s follow-on from the door example, the argument that we all want to increase the number of true beliefs that we hold and reduce the number of false beliefs that we hold and that there are two processes that work against that: holding beliefs that are not based on evidence and holding beliefs based on what we believe to be evidence which is actually not evidence.  Note that I did not remove the term “empirical” from Boghossian’s argument because Boghossian didn’t use the term at this point.  Sure, he considers the tape measure to be a good device for obtaining evidence and that evidence would be empirical evidence, but he implicitly accepts that there are other kinds of evidence (not as good as empirical evidence, but evidence nonetheless).

Directly after, Boghossian approaches the meat of his presentation, in which he argues that religious belief is clearly delusional (so much so that religious belief requires an explicit exemption in the DSM-V’s definition of delusion).

Shumack did not address this at all.  Even when given time to reflect and put his words into an opinion piece, he hardly addressed the issue (and then only in passing while criticising “scientism”).

So, the key question was: Is Richard Shumack delusional?

Well, he’s a christian, so on those grounds he qualifies since christian beliefs are (when done properly) sincerely held, incorrigible and implausible.  Unless his god actually exists, of course, but Shumack didn’t make an effort to prove that his god exists.  His aim was to show that “theism can be held by reasonable or reliable epistemology“.

I’m going to look, therefore, at delusion in terms of these aims.  I’m going to assume that Shumack left that interaction with the belief that he succeeded in his aims (his article written later made no admission that he failed to do so and I am presuming that he is a sincere chap who would have acknowledged such a failure if he believed that he had suffered one).  The video is up on line, and he has probably reviewed it and even if he hasn’t the unwillingness to review evidence is problematic.  If there is evidence in the video of that debate that indicates that he failed to achieve his aim, then we can call his belief incorrigible.  All we need to do now is work out whether a belief that he achieved his aim is plausible or not.

To do so, we need to assess what he presented in light of what Boghossian had just said, specifically about better and worse types of knowledge.  Were any of the ways of coming to knowledge described by Shumack sufficiently good as to be called reasonable and/or reliable?  Note that I am going to discuss plausibility, given that believing in something plausible is reasonable and clearly (although after the fact) a belief that turns out to be reliable is thus shown to have been plausible.

Rather than relying on the video, I’m going to use his washup at Eternity News for two reasons.  First, it’s much easier to refer to than a video, and second, a piece of published writing can be polished and perfected while there is plenty of scope to misspeak while behind a speaker’s podium (Boghossian referred to Shumack as “Robert” for example, while his name is Richard).  If there is something that he said that was significantly better than in the written version, feel free to let me know.

Shumack claims that “(c)hristian belief is based on all the ordinary ways of knowing” and he lists them: intuition, second- or third-hand eyewitness testimony, personal experience and, oddly, miracles. (His words, in context: “But here there’s a great irony. Scientism is revealed to be an extraordinary and unsustainable way of thinking about knowledge, whereas Christian belief is based on all the ordinary ways of knowing. Christians sensibly ground so many of their ethical and existential beliefs in intuition. Christians put their faith in Jesus in large part based on the eyewitness testimony to the historical events of his life, death and resurrection. Christians know God personally through the presence of the Holy Spirit and they experience his power through miracles like healing and visions.”)

What he leaves out are empirical evidence (my preferred type) and logical argument (WLC’s second favourite after personal experience).

Are these, in the absence of a presupposition as to the existence of a god, sufficient to make the belief in a god plausible?

The last shall be first, and in this case that is the humble miracle. It’s a bit of a stretch to claim that this was actually in Shumack’s list of “ordinary ways” but I want to address it anyway.  A miracle, as earlier stated, is implausible by definition.  If your belief in something is based on something else that itself is implausible, you’ve got a problem right from the get go.  If I witness a miracle, I have to first consider it an aberration, a freak confluence of events or a misunderstanding or misremembering on my part.  If I am told about a miracle, I have to apply the same doubts, and add to it any doubt relating to unreliability of the witness.  Note that when we consider a miracle as the path to knowing, we must remember that that path passes through either eye-witness testimony or personal experience.

So, we really only have three truly “ordinary ways”, unless we drastically redefine the term “ordinary”: intuition, testimony and personal experience.  I have to point out here that Shumack raised these three in the context of an attack on “scientism”, not an attack on science.  If the below seems a bit too close to science, that should not be a problem per se, unless the reader wants to accuse me of scientism on the grounds of sounding too reasonable.

Let’s look at intuition.  What exactly is intuition?  According to the dictionary (well, a dictionary) it’s “the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning”.  Wikipedia says “Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without proof, evidence, or conscious reasoning, or without understanding how the knowledge was acquired”. Well, that doesn’t augur well for Shumack’s initial aim (to show that theism can be held by reasonable or reliable epistemology), since reason itself has been jettisoned.  Is intuition reliable?  It’s certainly not 100% reliable, but perhaps it’s reliable enough for some things.  Is it reliable enough to know about what could be argued to be the most important thing you could ever know (were a god to exist)?

I would argue not.  Human advances have steamrolled over incorrect intuitions for millennia.  Logic exists to skewer intuitions and those holding them and make our thinking better and more ordered.  Consider Boghossian’s end-game regarding better and worse ways to know things.  Which is better, a) knowledge acquired without proof, evidence, or conscious reasoning, and/or without understanding how the knowledge was acquired, or b) with proof, evidence and conscious reasoning, and with an understanding as to how the knowledge was acquired?

Intuition might not be the worst way to start a trip towards knowledge, but it’s far from being the whole journey.  You certainly don’t want to rely solely on intuition, you want something more substantial to get you to knowledge.

So, what about testimony?  I’m going to be outrageously fair here and consider only eye-witness testimony, rather than second and third hand eye-witness testimony and firsthand testimony to gossip and hearsay.

While eye-witness testimony has been considered the gold standard in court cases (somewhat eclipsed now by forensic evidence), it has always been dodgy.  There is an increasing body of work which shows that humans are unreliable eye-witnesses but we don’t need to trawl through the scientific literature to make the point.  The point is adequately made for us by christians who have a bible in which there are four gospels, all of which differ to some extent or another.  The very need to include four perspectives relates to the unreliability of testimony.

Perhaps considering the gospels as eye-witness testimony might be thought of as a trap, but even if we consider the works as collations of reports of people who may or may not have been eye-witnesses, we are still relying on the ability (and will) of the authors to correctly relate what they have been told and the reliability of the original eye-witnesses whose tales have passed from person to person in an oral history tradition.

Add to this the fact that when a christian is accepting the testimony of another they are treating their source as an authority for some reason.  If these authorities have arrived at their knowledge via a questionable epistemology, then you are just putting off the problem of how to arrive at knowledge rather than solving it.

And then we have personal experience.  Personal experience is really no more than zero hand (rather than firsthand) eye-witness testimony, since it only works as a form of knowing when you relate your experiences back to yourself and try to understand them and to place them in a comprehensible context.  Above I pointed to the fact that there are problems with the reliability of eye-witness testimony and this is not entirely limited to people who are eye-witnesses and who are testifying to someone else.

All people are unreliable with regard to their own personal experiences, to a greater or lesser extent.  They can be misled, confused and ignorant.  They can leap to incorrect assumptions, especially if sufficiently motivated to do so – as well they might be if life eternal is on offer.  They can misinterpret their memories, muddle them up and even construct them out of whole cloth where required (my younger brother used to clearly remember our house burning down, despite it happening three months before he was born and a work colleague often confidently reports events that no-one else in the office has any recollection of, he’s so extremely non-synoptic that we could refer to him as “John”).

As with intuition, and similarly to the eye-witness testimony of others, personal experience is an adequate starting point on the way to knowledge, but to bridge the gap between opinion and knowledge, we must accept that our memories are questionable (when they aren’t better described as feeble) and that we are plagued by confirmation and other biases.  And, especially when what we think has happened is rather odd, we must seek confirmation if we are going to transform our personal experiences into knowledge of more than a memory (we will know that we remember, but we won’t know that what we remember happened as we remember it).  To be of any use, that confirmation is going to have to be via the collation and assessment of appropriate evidence.  In other words, via a sort of scientific process – perhaps not the hardest of hard science, but at least some sort of impartial evidence gathering and assessment process.

Is Richard Shumack delusional to think that he can know anything via intuition, testimony and personal experience without taking scientific-like steps to bridge the gap between his opinions (and presuppositions) and actual knowledge?  Yes, I think he might be a tad delusional.

The only thing that might save him, allowing him to be either accidentally in possession of knowledge or even correctly in possession of knowledge (via a divine boost to the reliability a personal experience vis a vis interactions with the holy spirit), would be the existence of his god.  Unfortunately however, he made no real attempt to show that his god exists.

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* Note that I call the debate strange because of its structure – 30 minutes for Peter Boghossian, 15 minutes for Richard Shumack, 30 minutes for structured questions for clarification and then a Q&A free-for-all.  Usually a debate gives each debater equal time to present their case.  Perhaps Shumack felt that he could smash his case in less time than Boghossian needed (along with less technology).  He did, after all, have god on his side …

Deformed Epistemology

For some reason, there are some christians who find calling Plantinga’s “Reformed Epistemology” by another name, namely “Deformed Epistemology”, insulting.  They called it name-calling.  I think that’s a little unfair, so I’m going to put a little effort into defending the use of the term “deformed epistemology”.

First, we need to look at what is being either reformed or deformed – epistemology.  This is what Wikipedia has to say (I’ve tidied up the list though):

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the theory of knowledge. Epistemology studies the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief. Much of the debate in epistemology centers on four areas: the philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and how it relates to such concepts as truth, belief, and justification; various problems of scepticism; the sources and scope of knowledge and justified belief; and the criteria for knowledge and justification.

Alternatively, there is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry:

Defined narrowly, epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. As the study of knowledge, epistemology is concerned with the following questions: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? What are its sources? What is its structure, and what are its limits? As the study of justified belief, epistemology aims to answer questions such as: How we are to understand the concept of justification? What makes justified beliefs justified? Is justification internal or external to one's own mind? Understood more broadly, epistemology is about issues having to do with the creation and dissemination of knowledge in particular areas of inquiry.

There is also a Merriam-Webster dictionary entry:

the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity

Now I could go on adding text from the IEP (“Epistemology is the study of knowledge”), other dictionaries (like dictionary.com: “(epistemology is) a branch of philosophy that studies the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge”), other encyclopedias (like Britannica: “Epistemology (is) the study of the nature, origin and limits of human knowledge”) and papers on epistemology (JT Tennis in Epistemology, Theory, and Methodology in Knowledge Organization: “Epistemology is how we know”), but I think the point has been adequately made already – epistemology is about knowledge.

If we are going to reform (or deform) epistemology, then we are going to reform (or deform) something about how we interact with or think about knowledge. 

So, let’s look at Plantinga's deformed epistemology and specifically his "proper functionalist version of epistemic externalism" which he summarises in Warranted Christian Belief (p133):

Put in a nutshell, then, a belief has warrant for a person S only if that belief is produced in S by cognitive faculties functioning properly (subject to no dysfunction) in a cognitive environment that is appropriate for S’s kind of cognitive faculties, according to a design plan that is successfully aimed at truth. We must add, furthermore, that when a belief meets these conditions and does enjoy warrant, the degree of warrant it enjoys depends on the strength of the belief, the firmness with which S holds it

Note that, according to Plantinga, knowledge is warranted true belief rather than justified true belief:

That may not come as much of a surprise, given that this book is a sequel to Warrant: The Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function. In the first of those books I introduced the term ‘warrant’ as a name for that property—or better, quantity—enough of which is what makes the difference between knowledge and mere true belief.

So ... is there a problem with Plantinga's deformed epistemology?

This might not come as a surprise, but I think there is.  Right off the bat, there is the assumption of a "design plan".  I understand that theists believe that there is, in some sense, a design plan to humans.  I do think it's possible to work backwards from a belief in a god, including a belief that one's belief in a god is a true belief and reach a belief that one has knowledge about the existence of a god.  Breaking it down a bit:

Is there a god?

  

 Do you believe there is a god?

Do you consider your belief to be a true belief?

Is there a truth (or god) detecting design plan in the human brain?

Is your brain working in accordance with the design plan (or is properly functioning)?

Does your belief with respect to god constitute knowledge?

Hopefully it can be seen that the only situation in which Plantinga's deformed epistemology both matters and works is one in which:

1) there is actually a god of the right sort,

2) there is actually a design plan for brains such that, when functioning properly, they seek and find truth (or detect the being that created the design plan),

3) the brain of the theist is actually functioning properly in accordance with that design plan, and

4) the believer does actually have the correct sort of belief about the god that exists.

If there is no god (or no god that fiddles with brains the way that it would have to in order to ensure that humans accurately and truthfully detect it), then Plantinga's argument falls in a big heap.  Remember that Plantinga’s
“reformed epistemology” involves warrant, that warrant is that which “makes the difference between knowledge and mere true belief” and that a key element of warrant is that it involves “cognitive faculties functioning properly … according to a design plan”.

Now, it cannot be that a belief in a god (or a particular sort of god) is a “true belief” if there is no such god.  However, it is conceptually possible that that which “makes the difference between knowledge and mere true belief” could exist even in the absence of a true belief so that a (false) belief that nevertheless has this quality (“warrant”) could be described as a “rational belief”.

Note that when you look for descriptions of “Reformed Epistemology”, you invariably get referred to Plantinga and his attempts to argue that religious belief may be rational.  IEP:

Reformed epistemology is a thesis about the rationality of religious belief.

A section on reformed epistemology appears in the SEP, but within the article on the Epistemology of Religion, an article which makes it clear that it is concentrating on questions of the justification of religious belief and ignoring questions as to whether “these beliefs count as knowledge or whether these beliefs are scientific”.

So, it seems, “reformed epistemology”, despite Plantinga’s protestations, isn’t about knowledge after all, but about the justification or rationality of belief.  It doesn’t really qualify as epistemology at all, or rather it would qualify as epistemology if and only if Plantinga’s god existed, which means he’s seriously begging the question with his terminology.

Note that a not uncommon defence by theists is that reformed epistemology is no more than the position that “belief in God, like belief in other persons, does not require the support of evidence or argument for it to be rational” (Kelly Clark, Without Evidence or Argument: A Defense of Reformed Epistemology).  So, when challenged, they are more than willing to step back from the appearance of any knowledge claim.  But what they are not stepping back from, and this is tricky bit, is the implication of a truth claim.

Reformed epistemology might claim that a belief in a god may be rational despite not having any evidence or argument in its support, but this is entirely contingent on there being a god and the belief in that god being true.  This is why I call this point of view deformed epistemology, it’s not really about knowledge at all, just about justifying (or warranting) belief in a god in the absence of evidence or convincing argument.  And, to the extent that it is an argument about knowledge (because Plantinga doesn’t step away from implying that warranted true belief is knowledge), it’s both begging the question and special pleading (because you can’t use the same approach on other things you might want to believe and claim as knowledge).

Is there anything about Plantinga's “deformed epistemology” that a person who is not already a committed believer should take seriously?  Does it do anything more than provide a fig leaf of rationality to someone who believes something that otherwise should not be believed without very good evidence and/or argument?

Moral Ontology and Moral Epistemology

Earlier in the year, I was entertaining myself at the Reasonable Faith forums.  A thread which attracted some minor interest for a short while was one on William Lane Craig’s moral argument.

In summary, I linked When Morality Arguments Are Bad and asked if anyone was convinced by Craig on this point.  What followed was a lot of jiggery-pokery concerning various definitions of “objective morality”.  Most of my interaction was with a chap called LNC.  (I assume masculinity due to aggressive stupidity and total lack of conciliation on his part.)

We had some minor skirmishes over various axes of morality, but an issue that LNC returned to a few times was the distinction between “moral ontology” and “moral epistemology”, in both a strand with myself and with another visitor to the forums, Jabberwock.

(sub-strand 1) I think the problem with your article in relation to this argument is: First, it confuses the grounding of morality (ontology) with applied morality (epistemology) ...

(sub-strand 1) Well, I’m glad that Christians seem to be thinking about these issues, but it is not a theistic concept. Moral ontology simply deals with the metaphysics of morality. You can find plenty of discussion on the topic at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. However, it is a philosophical term, not necessarily a theistic term. And no, I didn’t mean “some special Christian interpretation of moral epistemology.” I just meant, moral epistemology.
(sub-strand 2) Here, I believe, you are confusing two arguments. The first is the metaphysical basis of morality or what is known as moral ontology; the second is how we know what is or isn't moral, that is moral epistemology.

<snip>
Also, Christians don't believe that memory is a basis for morality. Sure, memory is used in our reasoning about morality, but that is not a basis for morality. Again, this confuses ontology and epistemology.

<snip>

I believe you are confusing the issues of ontology and epistemology again.

(sub-strand 2) You are confusing moral ontology and moral epistemology again. Please keep the arguments straight. Applied ethics is different from the grounding of ethics. Just because some people get morality wrong does not mean that moral facts don’t exist. The same is true for science. Just because scientists in the past had wrong ideas about how the world works, doesn’t mean that there are not facts about how the world works.

Investigation time!

I did point out to LNC that he was not using standard definitions of ontology and epistemology in his first mention of them:

ontology - the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence, or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations
epistemology - the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge - if you look up "moral epistemology" you get directed to "meta-ethics" this is not about "applied morality".
… when I look up "moral ontology", I see a lot of Christian sites - it seems to be a particularly theistic usage, one which seems to assume moral realism, since the "existence" of morality is intertwined with its "reality". I think, therefore, that you meant "moral ontology" and some special Christian interpretation of "moral epistemology".

As indicated above, LNC responded by saying that “(m)oral ontology simply deals with the metaphysics of morality”.

According to Wikipedia, metaphysics is:

Metaphysics is a traditional branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. <snip> The metaphysician attempts to clarify the fundamental notions by which people understand the world, e.g., existence, objects and their properties, space and time, cause and effect, and possibility. A central branch of metaphysics is ontology, the investigation into the basic categories of being and how they relate to each other. Another central branch of metaphysics is cosmology, the study of the totality of all phenomena within the universe.

Given that I am not totally convinced by this, I looked further, given that LNC suggested taking a look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  While both have entries on “moral epistemology”, neither has an entry on “moral ontology”, although the IEP’s entry on “moral epistemology” includes one of two uses of term “moral ontology” (the other being in the title of a referred document).  The SEP only mentions “moral ontology” three times, once in a quotation, once in the title of a referred document and once in an article on deontology.  There is, however, an inferred reference to moral ontology in SEP’s “moral epistemology” article (noted below).

SEP: Deontological theories are normative theories. They do not presuppose any particular position on moral ontology or on moral epistemology.

IEP: moral ontology, the study of what sort(s) of reality underwrites the truth or reasonableness of moral claims or attitudes.

SEP: Moral epistemology – How is moral knowledge possible? This question is central in moral epistemology and marks a cluster of problems … :

·         Sociological …

·         Psychological …

·         Ontological: Moral knowledge is about moral reality. How is that reality constituted? Three general possibilities present themselves. (a) Moral reality might be theological in nature, pertaining to (say) the will of God. (b) It might be a non-natural realm that is neither theological nor natural, but sui generis. (c) It might be comprehensible as a part of the natural world studied by science. Each of these possibilities, however, is beset with difficulties, and no viable fourth alternative has been conceived.

·         Evolutionary …

·         Methodological …

·         Moral …

IEP: Moral epistemology – Can we ever know that it’s wrong to torture innocent children? More generally, can we ever know, or at least have some justification for believing, whether anything is morally right or wrong, just or unjust, virtuous or vicious, noble or base, good or bad? Most of us make moral judgments every day; so most of us would like to think so. But how is such knowledge, or justification, possible? We do not seem to simply perceive moral truth, as we perceive the truth that there is a computer screen before us. We do not seem to simply understand it, as we understand that all roosters are male. And we do not seem to simply feel it, as we feel a bit hungry right now. Moral epistemology explores this problem about knowledge and justification.

So, in summary, having synthesised the definitions above:

moral ontology does relate to moral realism, as I suspected, and

moral epistemology is about how we might have and justify moral knowledge.

This doesn’t seem to link particularly well to LNC’s claims, at least with relation to the latter:

grounding of morality (LNC’s definition of moral ontology)

applied morality (LNC’s definition of moral epistemology)

So we move on, or rather backwards.

The whole discussion centred on an argument raised by Craig.  Craig did not, in his debates with Sam Harris or Stephen Law, get into discussions on moral ontology and moral epistemology.  He did say, however, in his debate with Harris:

Here Dr. Harris didn’t have anything by way of disagreement to say, but I do want to clear up a possible confusion. He represented this by saying that if religion were not true, then words like “right” and “wrong” and “good” and “evil” would have no meaning. I’m not maintaining that. That is to confuse moral ontology with moral semantics. Moral ontology asks, “What is the foundation of objective moral values and duties?” Moral semantics asks, “What is the meaning of moral terms?” And I am not making any kind of semantical claim tonight that “good” means something like “commanded by God”. Rather, my concern is moral ontology: What is the ground, or foundation, of moral values and duties?

This seems to match quite well with LNC’s words, and with IEP’s definition of moral ontology: “what sort of reality underwrites the truth or reasonableness of moral claims or attitudes?”  That is, so long as a question is involved, rather than an answer.

Craig does get into the distinction between moral ontology and moral epistemology at reasonablefaith.org.  This is an interesting little article in a couple of ways.  Firstly, the person posing the question talks of “wiggling out of this one” – this is odd terminology for someone who is presenting an apologetic argument (although I can imagine it being used by someone describing an apologetic argument).

Secondly, Craig himself writes:

I’m convinced that keeping the distinction between moral epistemology and moral ontology clear is the most important task in formulating and defending a moral argument for God’s existence of the type I defend.

This indicates a weakness in the argument, one that Craig appears to recognise, and leads one to suspect that the argument is little more than fancy word play.

Thirdly, Craig uses an image from Moral Skepticism and Justification, supposedly for the purposes of showing that Moral Ontology and Moral Epistemology are distinct.

So far so good, but when we look at the surrounding text, what do Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Mark Timmons have to say?

In order to better understand the field of moral epistemology, it is useful to locate it within the larger territory of moral theory. Any division of moral theory is bound to be controversial, but some framework can help in comparing various views. For this purpose, moral theory is often divided, first, into substantive ethics and meta-ethics.

<snip>

Metaethics also includes moral ontology, which asks about the metaphysical status of moral properties and facts, if any.

<snip>

Moral epistemology is yet another area of meta-ethics. Moral epistemologists study justification and knowledge of substantive moral claims and beliefs.  Of course, one cannot determine whether a claim is justified or known to be true if one has no idea what that claim means, so moral epistemology depends in some ways on moral semantics.  It also depends on moral ontology and on the definition of morality. Nonetheless, moral epistemology differs from other areas of meta-ethics in that it focuses directly on justification and knowledge of morality and brings in other theories only insofar as they are relevant to these central concerns.

<snip>

Moral epistemology is simply epistemology applied to substantive moral claims and beliefs. Epistemology is the study of knowledge and justification in general.  It asks whether, when, and how claims or beliefs can be justified or known or shown to be true. Moral epistemology then asks whether, when, and how substantive moral beliefs and claims can be justified or known or shown to be true.

So, in Craig’s source, moral ontology involves questions on the metaphysical status of moral claims without any presumption of moral realism (since the caveat “if any” is used) and moral epistemology asks about how moral beliefs and claims may be known and justified, which aligns with what SEP and IEP tell us.

But what did Craig himself have to say?

The claim that moral values and duties are rooted in God is a Meta-Ethical claim about Moral Ontology, not about Moral Linguistics or Epistemology. It is fundamentally a claim about the objective status of moral properties, not a claim about the meaning of moral sentences or about the justification or knowledge of moral principles.

<snip>

The salient point is that God’s commands constitute our moral duties. That is a claim of moral ontology. How we come to know our moral duties is a matter of moral epistemology and is irrelevant to the argument. There’s nothing to wriggle out of.

Well, ok.  I’ll quibble about the words, since I think that Craig is the person making an ontological claim about morality.  Alternatively, Craig is the person making a claim which may be considered under the broader topic of moral ontology.  However, either way, Craig is simply wrong if he thinks he can make an ontological claim and then ignore epistemology.  He has to justify his claim.

Craig would, of course, argue that I’ve missed the point.

He would do so by saying that in the second sentence in the quote above, he is talking about specific moral duties, for example “Thou shalt not rape” (an example that Craig raises in his debate with Harris).  How we come to know that rape is “really wrong” is a question of moral epistemology.

That’s correct.  But it’s not what I am saying, so in this Craig would have missed the point – or perhaps more accurately, he would have been doing some Olympics-grade wriggling.

The epistemology that Craig is trying desperately to avoid is associated with his ontological claim that “God’s commands constitute our moral duties”.  How does Craig know that?  How does Craig justify that particular claim?

The point is that so long as that claim is not justified, Craig cannot use the associated claim that “moral values and duties are rooted in God” (or, per his debates, “if God did not exist, (then) objective moral values and duties would not exist”) to prove the existence of his god.

So, for once, I have to agree with Craig.  It is very important for his argument that moral epistemology is avoided – because when moral epistemology is not avoided his argument fails.

When he does avoid moral epistemology, on the other hand, his argument is merely trivial.