Is God Just a Human Invention? And Seventeen Other Questions Raised by the New Atheists

by Sean McDowell

“The fact that our ethical intuitions must in some way supervene upon our biology does not make ethical truths reducible to biological ones.” The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 226. While this is a more technical point, the reader will notice he doesn’t explain how this “supervenience” works. Craig is instructive here, “If there is no God, then it is hard to see any ground for thinking that the property of moral goodness supervenes on certain natural states of such creatures. If our approach to metaethical theory is to be serious metaphysics rather than just a ‘shopping list’ approach, whereby one simply helps oneself to supervenient moral properties or principles to do the job, then some sort of explanation is required for why moral properties supervene on certain natural states or why such principles are true. It is insufficient for the naturalist to point out that we do, in fact, apprehend the goodness of some feature of human existence, for that only goes to establish the objectivity of moral values and duties, which the theist is ready to affirm.”