God and Cosmos Moral Truth and Human Meaning

by Baggett, David; Walls, Jerry L.

• ISBN13: 9780199931217
• ISBN10: 0199931216
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2016-03-01
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Naturalistic ethics is the reigning paradigm among contemporary ethicists; in God and Cosmos, David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls argue that this approach is seriously flawed. This book canvasses a broad array of secular and naturalistic ethical theories in an effort to test their adequacy in accounting for moral duties, intrinsic human value, moral knowledge, prospects for radical moral transformation, and the rationality of morality. In each case, the authors argue, although various secular accounts provide real insights and indeed share common ground with theistic ethics, the resources of classical theism and orthodox Christianity provide the better explanation of the moral realities under consideration. Among such realities is the fundamental insight behind the problem of evil, namely, that the world is not as it should be. Baggett and Walls argue that God and the world, taken together, exhibit superior explanatory scope and power for morality classically construed, without the need to water down the categories of morality, the import of human value, the prescriptive strength of moral obligations, or the deliverances of the logic, language, and phenomenology of moral experience. This book thus provides a cogent moral argument for God's existence, one that is abductive, teleological, and cumulative.

Author Biography

David Baggett is a professor of philosophy and apologetics in the graduate school of the School of Divinity at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. He has written or edited about ten books, in such areas as philosophy and popular culture, apologetics, and ethics; and published several dozen articles in the philosophy of religion, epistemology, and theology. He is the executive editor of MoralApologetics.com, and his book Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality, co-written with Jerry Walls, won Christianity Today's 2012 Best Book in Apologetics.

Jerry L. Walls is Professor of Philosophy and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University. He is the author or co-author of over a dozen books, including a trilogy on the afterlife.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction

Introduction to Part I
Chapter 1: Alone in the Cosmos
Chapter 2: The Case for Abduction
Chapter 3: The Problem of Evil, Freedom, and Moral Responsibility

Introduction to Part II
Chapter 4: Moral Value
Chapter 5: Moral Obligations
Chapter 6: Moral Knowledge
Chapter 7: Moral Transformation
Chapter 8: Moral Rationality

Part III
Chapter 9: A Moral Argument
Conclusion

Index