Category Archives: Atheism

Atheism, Morality, Philosophy

What Are Sam Harris’s Metaphysical Presuppositions?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

It is impossible to ground a theory about the source of objective moral values and duties without recourse to metaphysics. Philosopher David Oderberg reminds us that it is “impossible to know how the world ought to go, more specifically how one ought to act (or what makes a state of affairs or action good, or worthwhile, praiseworthy, etc.) without prior knowledge of how the world is.” Metaphysics tells us how the world is.

So what are Sam Harris’s metaphysics? How is the world, according to Sam Harris?

Rather than argue for his metaphysical view, Harris, for the most part in his book The Moral Landscape, merely presupposes that his ontology is correct.  Harris’s worldview can be best described as metaphysical naturalism, which is roughly the view that what exists is that which can be described by physics, chemistry, and biology.  Harris reveals that he is a metaphysical naturalist in several ways.

First, recall his thesis summary statement: “Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end).” Second, Harris claims that the well-being of conscious creatures “must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain.”

In one particularly telling passage, Harris asks the reader to imagine a world where only two people existed, a fictional Adam and Eve.  How might the moral landscape look in that situation?

In fact, there are, by definition, paths that lead to the worst misery and paths that lead to the greatest fulfillment possible for these two people— given the structure of their respective brains, the immediate facts of their environment, and the laws of Nature. The underlying facts here are the facts of physics, chemistry, and biology as they bear on the experience of the only two people in existence.

For Harris, the ontological foundation of ethics consists in brain states, the physical world surrounding human beings, and the natural laws which constrain the physical world.  Again, all of these aspects of reality fit comfortably under the label of metaphysical naturalism.

Might Harris allow other aspects of being into his metaphysics?  How about the notion of a Creator-God?  Harris rules out the existence of God almost immediately in his book as he explains that one of his primary goals is to provide a moral theory which has no need of God.

What about immaterial human souls?  For Harris, the existence of a soul, which is “metaphysically independent of the brain, seems untenable given that damage to the relevant neural circuits obliterates these capacities in a living person.” In other words, neuroscience has shown that the “soul,” and thus consciousness, really just is neural circuits.

How about the existence of metaphysical principles such as nature, form, or essence?  Harris seems to disavow the existence of essences when he says, “I am certainly not claiming that moral truths exist independent of the experience of conscious beings— like the Platonic Form of the Good— or that certain actions are intrinsically wrong.”

It seems that Harris’s ontology allows nothing beyond what physics, chemistry, and biology reveal.  It remains to be seen whether Harris’ metaphysical views can provide an adequate ground for the good.

Atheism, Morality

What Is Sam Harris’s Moral Theory?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

New atheist Sam Harris made a splash with his book The Moral Landscape. In it, Harris claims to have solved the millenia-old debate about the source of objective moral values. Harris is no relativist about moral values. In fact, he reserves some of his harshest criticism for atheists who deny the objectivity of morality.

So what exactly is his thesis? How has he solved the perennial problem of how to ground objective moral values and duties? Here is Harris in his own words:

Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds— and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.

Harris bases his moral theory on the well-being of conscious minds.  These are the two key foundational ideas for him.  For Harris, morality only makes sense given the existence of conscious creatures, since nothing can be valued if there is no conscious creature to do the valuing.  Rocks do not value anything.

Given the importance of conscious creatures, Harris elaborates that “the concept of ‘well-being’ captures all that we can intelligibly value. And ‘morality’— whatever people’s associations with this term happen to be— really relates to the intentions and behaviors that affect the well-being of conscious creatures.” Again, Harris is clear that “meaning, values, morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures— and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain.”

Harris’ next move is to make the explicit connection between the well-being of conscious creatures and science.  How exactly does science determine human values?

Questions about values— about meaning, morality, and life’s larger purpose— are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. Values, therefore, translate into facts that can be scientifically understood: regarding positive and negative social emotions, retributive impulses, the effects of specific laws and social institutions on human relationships, the neurophysiology of happiness and suffering, etc.

Science, broadly defined as empirical observation and experimentation, can be employed, according to Harris, to determine which thoughts, actions, and behaviors, contribute to the well-being, or flourishing, of human beings.  As human beings flourish, they climb to peaks on a “moral landscape.” The valleys on the landscape represent the misery and suffering of human beings. Harris encourages his readers to allow science to take humanity to the peaks of the moral landscape, and out of the valleys.

Now that we have a basic understanding of Harris’s “moral landscape,” we next need to understand his metaphysical presuppositions. That will come in a future post.

Atheism, Intelligent Design, Science and God

Why Is the Argument from Poor Design Simply Atheism of the Gaps?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

The other day I heard an atheist say that the fact that he sees poor design in the natural world leads him to the conclusion that the Christian God does not exist. Here is the argument:

  1. An omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent creator God would create organisms that have optimal design.
  2. Organisms have features that are sub-optimal.
  3. Therefore, God either did not create these organisms or is not omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.

There are several things wrong with this argument, but I want to focus on premise 2 – organisms have features that are sub-optimal.

I am an electrical engineer who has been designing integrated circuits (IC) for 20 years, either personally or through managing other engineers. I am extremely familiar with IC design. Over the years, I have often heard young engineers, who did not design a particular IC, criticize the design of that IC by saying it is sub-optimal, that they could do a better job. I have then seen these same engineers eat crow when they finally talk to the original designer and discover the constraints that original engineer was under when he designed the IC and the purposes for which he designed the IC.

It is impossible to judge a design as optimal or sub-optimal without knowing the purposes of the designer and without knowing the constraints the designer faced during the design. Young engineers just assume that they know both when they look at somebody else’s design. After being embarrassed a few times, they usually drop this approach and gain some humility.

I see the atheist who uses the argument from poor design in the same light. Biological organisms are incredibly complex and they operate in an environment that is massively complex. Our current knowledge of biological organisms and of all the earth’s diverse ecosystems is in its infancy. Every year, scientists realize how much more there is to learn. However, science marches onward and we do indeed learn more each year.

Here is the problem for the atheist. Like the young IC designer, they are in a very poor position to judge whether biological organisms are optimally designed or not. Each year, scientists discover new purposes, or functions, for biological organisms, and each year scientists discover more constraints within which biological organisms must function.

This means that every year the atheist making the argument from poor design will have to retract examples of poor design, and it will always be that way. The overall trajectory of scientific discovery is that the world we live in is more complex than we ever imagined, not less. Science is going in the wrong direction for the atheists making the argument from poor design.

Because of that, this argument is simply atheism of the gaps. Atheists fill in their biological knowledge gaps by claiming that certain organisms are designed poorly, only to have to abandon each example of alleged poor design as science advances. This argument, then, is a loser for atheists, and should be dropped. They are literally swimming against the tide of scientific progress when they make this argument. Their “poor design” gaps will continue to be filled in year after year.

Atheism, Existence of God

What Explains the Laws of Logic and Mathematics?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

The laws of thought and mathematics are absolutely true.  The law of non-contradiction, the law of identity, and the law of the excluded middle – the three fundamental principles of thought, otherwise known as the laws of logic – are all undeniable.  To deny them is to assume they are true.

They are true regardless of time, place, or who is thinking about them.  There is no possible world where they could not be true.  Likewise with mathematics.  2+3=5, and this is true regardless of time, place, or who is thinking about it.  There is no possible world where 2+3 does not equal 5.

So, any worldview which claims to explain all of reality had better have a good explanation of how this could be true.

How does atheistic naturalism explain the laws of thought and mathematics?  Since everything, on naturalism, must be reduced to physical matter, an explanation for the laws of thought and mathematics will be hard to come by, for these laws are clearly not made out of matter.

Naturalists take a couple different routes.  First, some of them say that there is no explanation for these laws; they just exist and that’s it; they are brute facts of the universe.  But surely these laws that transcend time, space, and matter, that existed before humans ever came on the scene, and will still exist after humans are extinct, are uncomfortable bedfellows with electrons, skin cells, and hydrogen atoms – the things of physical science.

How will the scientific methods of physics, chemistry, and biology explain the laws of thought and mathematics when they are built on them and rely on them? It’s like trying to explain the cinder block foundation of a house by appealing to a second-story window.

A second explanation is the following: some naturalists deny that these laws actually transcend time, space, and matter.  They claim that these are merely human conventions, laws that human beings have simply invented.  But this claim seems incredible.  Are we to really accept that 2+3 does not equal 5 unless human beings say it does?

I feel quite confident that even Klingons would agree that 2+3=5.  Can you imagine there being any dispute between a human and a Klingon over math? Of course not. The idea is absurd. This explanation just won’t fly because these laws are absolute; it doesn’t matter one bit whether any one of us ever discovered these laws, as they would still be true.  You can’t imagine a time or place where these laws aren’t true.

How does Christian theism explain the laws of thought and mathematics?  Instead of denying that these laws are transcendent, Christian theism affirms our basic intuitions that they are.  Christians identify the source of the laws of thought and mathematics with God, who is timeless, spaceless, and has always existed.

These laws are a part of God’s eternally existent nature.  They are built into God, in a matter of speaking.  So Christian theism not only provides an explanation for these laws, it also provides an explanation that makes sense of the absolute and transcendent nature of these laws.  They have always existed because God has always existed.

Atheism, Mind-Body Theory, Philosophy

What Explains My Enduring Self?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

I exist. I cannot deny that I exist without first existing. In addition, I seem to be a single, enduring self who has existed throughout my entire life.  My past memories belong to my same identical self.  I fully expect my same identical self to exist tomorrow and next week, assuming I don’t die. Not only do I think these things about myself, but I wager that everyone on the planet, excepting maybe those with severe mental illness, feels the same way.

Any worldview worth believing in should have an explanation for the existence of an enduring self. Let’s look at how atheistic naturalism and Christian theism explain the enduring self.

So how does atheistic naturalism explain the existence of my single, enduring self?  Honestly, it can’t.  Recall that naturalism explains everything in terms of matter – what physics, chemistry, and biology can describe.  According to these disciplines, each moment I lose hundreds of thousands of cells and other microscopic parts.

Every 7 to 10 years, most of my cells are entirely replaced.  Put another way, the average age of all the cells in the adult human body is 7 to 10 years. So, according to naturalism, I am virtually a new individual every 7-10 years.  Any sense I have of an enduring self that is the same through my entire life is an illusion, a trick of the human brain.

I may resemble the self I was last week, but I am not the very same self, for my body and my brain have lost parts and gained new parts.  Likewise, I will not be the same person next week or next month or next year.  In fact, in roughly 10 years, I will have very few physical parts in common with my current self.  On atheistic naturalism, there is no enduring self.

What about Christian theism?  This worldview posits each individual self as an enduring, immaterial, soul.  This soul persists from the moment of conception through death.  The reason we believe our memories of the past belong to us, and not some other self, is because our memories are unified by our single, enduring soul.

My exact same soul will endure next week and next month and next year.  I will exist in the future, not somebody else.  My physical body can be constantly changing, but my soul can persist unchanged.  The immaterial, unchanging soul of each human being explains why we believe we all think that our past, present and future selves, are one and the same, and not a series of distinct individuals.

What explains the existence of an enduring self? Certainly not atheistic naturalism. Only something like the immaterial soul offered by Christian theism can explain it.

Atheism, Morality

Is It Always Rational to Act Morally?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

If you are a dictator, and you have complete control over your nation, and you have good reason to believe you will remain in control, why should you not take whatever you want from whomever you want in order to bring yourself pleasure? Why would it be rational for you to be moral?

In certain cases of truth telling or repaying a debt or keeping a promise, and in those rarer cases where the performance of a duty risks death or injury, why do the moral thing? In an atheistic world, there may be instances where doing the moral thing does not advance my goals and desires for my life. In other words, doing the moral thing may not be the rational thing for me to do.

David Baggett and Jerry Walls, in their book Good God: The The Theistic Foundations of Morality, offer this choice to the atheist:

Either affirm that morality and rationality sometimes dictate different things and then either infer that we should do the moral, irrational thing anyway, or do the rational thing and ignore the dictates of morality.

How does this differ from the theist?

Notice how sharp is the contrast here between the theist who believes in ultima facie prescriptively binding moral obligations and the skeptic who rejects the existence of such duties or their rational authority. The theist affirms that there are such duties, which are in our ultimate self-interest because loving God and doing right are always in our ultimate self-interest. So it’s always rational to do such duties and acknowledge their authoritative force. The skeptic denies this, saying instead that morality seems to lack rational authority or perhaps authority altogether, for sometimes it’s just too costly.

Baggett and Walls continue:

Now, both thinkers could be said to be thinking in a way that’s rational in at least one sense. Each is thinking through the implications of their worldview in a way that is not obviously unreasonable or irrational.

What this shows, then, is that the meta-ethical question about morality and rationality is inextricably tied to ultimate questions of ontology and metaphysics. The right ultimate view of reality is plausibly the one that will be most likely to produce the right analysis of the relationship between morality and rationality. Both the atheist and the theist are predicating their approach on a fundamental axiom: that the world makes sense.

Why does it matter if the world makes sense and what does that have to do with morality?

It wouldn’t make sense if the world required us to do what isn’t in our ultimate self-interest. We think this was Kant’s insight when he suggested that the moral enterprise needs, in a deep and radical way, the postulate of a God who can, and will, make happiness correspond to virtue. Morality fails to make sense when that correspondence fails.

Does atheism guarantee that morality will correspond with ultimate happiness?

It’s the atheistic world in particular, however, that introduces the failure of this correspondence. Reality itself must be committed to morality in some deep way for morality to make sense. Morality really must be a very deep feature and fixture of reality in order for its demands to retain their authoritative force. In an atheistic world there just doesn’t seem likely to be the sort of ontological foundation to morality that renders it always rational to both believe in and do what’s morally binding. The picture is very different for a theistic world of a certain sort.

On Christian theism, is always rational to act morally. On atheism, it is sometimes rational to act morally, but in certain cases atheism can give a person no guarantee that their moral actions will ultimately lead to their happiness. Surely atheism, then, weakens the dictates of the moral law.

Atheism

Why Is “Scientism” False? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 1, we saw Edward Feser’s analogy of the metal detector, which helped us see why scientism is false. In part 2, we examine atheist Alex Rosenberg’s complaint against theists who deny scientism. Rosenberg believes that unless you believe that science (physics, in particular) is the only source of knowledge, then you cannot believe science gives us any kind of knowledge. Here is Rosenberg:
“Scientism” is the pejorative label given to our positive view by those who really want to have their theistic cake and dine at the table of science’s bounties, too.  Opponents of scientism would never charge their cardiologists or auto mechanics or software engineers with “scientism” when their health, travel plans, or Web surfing are in danger.  But just try subjecting their nonscientific mores and norms, their music or metaphysics, their literary theories or politics to scientific scrutiny.  The immediate response of outraged humane letters is “scientism.”
As Feser explains,

According to Rosenberg, then, unless you agree that science is the only genuine source of knowledge, you cannot consistently believe that it gives us any genuine knowledge.  This is about as plausible as saying that unless you think metal detectors alone can detect physical objects, then you cannot consistently believe that they detect any physical objects at all.

Feser, in keeping with his metal detector analogy, offers the Metallicist’s Guide to Reality:

“Metallicism” is the pejorative label given to our positive view by those who really want to have their stone, water, wood, and plastic cakes and dine at the table of metallic bounties, too.  Opponents of metallicism would never charge their metal detector-owning friends with “metallicism” when they need help finding lost car keys or loose change in the sofa.  But just try subjecting their nonmetallic mores and norms, their music or metaphysics, their literary theories or politics to metallurgical scrutiny.  The immediate response of outraged humane letters is “metallicism.”

Of course, “metallicism” is ridiculous, but so is Rosenberg’s scientism.

Those beholden to scientism are bound to protest that the analogy is no good, on the grounds that metal detectors detect only part of reality while physics detects the whole of it.  But such a reply would simply beg the question once again, for whether physics really does describe the whole of reality is precisely what is at issue.

Feser also notes that Rosenberg is not alone in making these kinds of arguments for scientism.

One hears this stupid non sequitur over and over and over again when arguing with New Atheist types.  It is implicit every time some Internet Infidel asks triumphantly: “Where are the predictive successes and technological applications of philosophy or theology?”  This is about as impressive as our fictional “metallicist” smugly demanding: “Where are the metal-detecting successes of gardening, cooking, and painting?” — and then high-fiving his fellow metallicists when we are unable to offer any examples, thinking that he has established that plants, food, works of art, and indeed anything non-metallic are all non-existent.

For why on earth should we believe that only methods capable of detecting metals give us genuine access to reality?  And why on earth should we believe that if something is real, then it must be susceptible of the mathematically precise prediction and technological application characteristic of physics?  I submit that there is no answer to this question that doesn’t beg the question.

Atheism

Why Is “Scientism” False? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Many atheists believe that reality consists of only what physics can describe. This viewpoint is also known as scientism. They point to the fact that the progress of physics over the past few hundred years has been astounding and that the mathematical descriptions of the natural world, given us by physics, have brought us technological advances that our ancestors could not have imagined.

While I completely agree with the success of physics, it simply does not follow that because physics has been successful, that only what physics describes exists. Edward Feser also sees that this argument is fallacious. He criticizes one of the foremost proponents of it, atheist Alex Rosenberg. According to Feser, here is Rosenberg’s basic argument:

1. The predictive power and technological applications of physics are unparalleled by those of any other purported source of knowledge.
2. Therefore what physics reveals to us is all that is real.
What does Feser think of this argument? He thinks it is bad, spectacularly bad. In order to demonstrate just how bad the argument is, he compares it to the following metal detector argument:
1. Metal detectors have had far greater success in finding coins and other metallic objects in more places than any other method has.
2. Therefore what metal detectors reveal to us (coins and other metallic objects) is all that is real.

Feser explains the problem with the metal detector argument:

Metal detectors are keyed to those aspects of the natural world susceptible of detection via electromagnetic means (or whatever).  But however well they perform this task — indeed, even if they succeeded on every single occasion they were deployed — it simply wouldn’t follow for a moment that there are no aspects of the natural world other than the ones they are sensitive to.
And so by analogy, why does Rosenberg’s argument fail?
Similarly, what physics does — and there is no doubt that it does it brilliantly — is to capture those aspects of the natural world susceptible of the mathematical modeling that makes precise prediction and technological application possible.  But here too, it simply doesn’t follow for a moment that there are no other aspects of the natural world.
Rosenberg, however, is frustrated with theists who want the benefits of physics, but who deny that physics explains all of reality. He believes that it is a package deal. In part 2, we will look at Rosenberg’s complaint and Feser’s response.
Atheism, Morality

Why Is God So Often Tied to Morality?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Theists are constantly claiming that without a personal, perfect, unchanging God, objective moral values and duties make no sense. I have written on this topic, myself, on numerous occasions. But is it only theists who recognize that God and morality go together? No. There are several prominent atheists thinkers who agree.

In their book Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality, David Baggett and Jerry Walls cite some of these atheist thinkers. First, they quote the philosopher J. L. Mackie, who said, “Moral properties constitute so odd a cluster of properties and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the course of events without an all-powerful god to create them.”

Baggett and Walls comment about Mackie:

His idea was that moral facts, as traditionally conceived, particularly those pertaining to obligation, exhibit features so strange that their appearance in a naturalistic world seems nothing less than miraculous. And unfortunately, miracles do not sit well in a naturalistic world! For this reason, as an atheist, Mackie himself found the notion of their existence altogether dubious.

Baggett and Walls then mention the late German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s

confident proclamation that the “death of God” should have for one of its practical outcomes a Copernican revolution in ethics. According to this view, selfishness and pride, perhaps even ruthlessness rightly understood, should now eclipse traditionally exalted moral virtues like humility, altruism, and compassion. Upholding traditional morality after the death of God wasn’t Nietzsche’s concern. It was rather his agenda to effect his transvaluation of values, in an effort to infuse goodness again with strength and heroism.

Finally, Baggett and Walls quote one of the most famous atheists of the 20th century, Jean Paul Sartre. Here is Sartre in an extended passage:

Towards 1880, when the French professors endeavored to formulate a secular morality, they said something like this: God is a useless hypothesis, so we will do without it. However, if we are to have morality, a society and a law-abiding world, it is essential that certain values should be taken seriously; they must have an a priori existence ascribed to them. It must be considered obligatory a priori to be honest, not to lie, not to beat one’s wife, to bring up children and so forth; so we are going to do a little work on the subject, which will enable us to show that these values exist all the same, inscribed in an intelligent heaven although, of course, there is no God. In other words . . . nothing will be changed if God does not exist; we shall discover the same norms of honesty, progress and humanity, and we shall have disposed of God as an out-of-date hypothesis which will die away quietly of itself.

The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men.

To summarize how these three atheist thinkers connect God to morality, Baggett and Walls write:

For these thinkers, atheism didn’t mean business as usual when it came to ethics. It meant fundamental rethinking of what ethics is all about, because they recognized the long history of a perceived connection between God and morality. They thus stand in contrast to those who think that eliminating God from the moral equation changes little or that including God adds nothing of consequence.

Atheism, Morality

Which Worldview Best Accounts for Morality?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

There are two major worldview contenders today, at least in western civilization: naturalism and theism.  As morality is central to the human experience, both worldviews owe us an account of where moral values and duties come from.

Bertrand Russell, one of the most famous naturalistic philosophers of the 20th century, described the world through naturalism’s eyes in his book Mysticism and Logic:

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

Cheerful words, I know.

If Russell is right, then from whence come moral values and obligations? Philosophers David Baggett and Jerry Walls, in their book Good God:The Theistic Foundations of Morality, argue that it is hard to see how moral values and moral obligation can come from mere matter:

The source of this moral obligation isn’t likely to be mere matter. An evolutionary account of feelings of or beliefs in, say, moral obligation is certainly possible, but how would naturalism explain obligation itself? How collections of atoms could generate and issue genuinely binding moral commands is altogether mysterious, if not absurd.

How might a Russellian naturalist make it less absurd?

Contemporary naturalistic ethicist Richard Boyd identifies goodness with a cluster of empirical properties, among them the satisfaction of mutually supportive social human needs. Choices are deemed moral to the extent that they satisfy such needs. Such an account might seem to make morality objective, yet it’s difficult to see how purely empirical properties could really account for binding obligation or intrinsic value.

The attempt to define morality in terms of the satisfaction of our desires tries to replace theism’s objective account of value and meaning with subjective satisfaction, but the exchange leaves us worse off. It remains a leap of blind faith to affirm that anything like objective obligation would emerge from such empirical properties. For that matter, persons themselves, especially persons with intrinsic value and dignity, seem much less likely to emerge from valueless impersonal stuff than from the intentional hand of a personal Creator.

Baggett and Walls then present C. S. Lewis’ reasoning about why a theistic universe better explains moral values and obligations:

A religious conception of reality, in contrast, holds that behind the physical world is something else, likely a mind of some sort. “That is to say,” as Lewis put it, “it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing to another. And on this view it made the universe, partly for purposes we do not know, but partly, at any rate, in order to produce creatures like itself . . . to the extent of having minds.”

. . . The Catholic thinker John Henry Newman, a century before Lewis, had similarly argued that our conscience, particularly our feelings of guilt, lead us to conclude God exists. Feelings of conscience are often directed toward fellow human beings, but sometimes our feelings of guilt or shame, which we take as evidence to suggest that we have offended someone, lack an appropriate human target. If such feelings are appropriate, they must then have a nonhuman one. Our feelings of responsibility, shame, and fear emanating from our conscience imply that “there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear.”

In a similar vein, Lewis’s essential argument can be summarized like this: There are objective moral facts, among them guilt for wrongdoing and duties we are obliged to obey and are responsible for neglecting, and such objective facts are better explained by a religious understanding of reality than by a Russellian world.

The argumentation is not complex, but it is nonetheless compelling. Compare Russell’s world to a world where a perfect God exists. Instead of Russell’s world explaining the existence of moral values and obligations, it explains them away. Until naturalists can come up with a source of morality that has greater explanatory power than the theistic God, they will forever fail to win the battle of worldviews.