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Abductive Moral Arguments And Godless Normative Realism: An Evaluation Of Explanations For Moral Facts And Motivations For Moral Behavior, Jonathan Smith

Quaerens Deum: The Liberty Undergraduate Journal for Philosophy of Religion

Within this paper, I examine Godless normative realism, a naturalistic explanation of morality given by Erik Wielenberg and determine whether the theory poses a threat to abductive moral arguments for the existence of God. In particular, I argue that Wielenberg’s theory is a possible explanation for the existence of moral facts and that it offers a motivation for one to act morally, but that theism, as a whole, remains a better explanation for the moral aspects of the world. To do so, I defend the legitimacy of weak forms of DCT, identify a few areas in which Godless normative …