THE CITY

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Winter 2015 gets to using arguments, they are usually painfully weak. Second, I believe in God because I have had experiences that I naturally find myself interpreting in terms of the presence of God in my life. I have experienced what I take to be God’s protection, God’s guidance, God’s mercy, and God’s challenges. These experiences are important aspects of my life. But both these reasons are, as we might say, subjective. Nobody else feels any need to accept what my parents taught me and nobody else has experienced my encounters with God. Accordingly, you might wonder whether I am able to give any “objective” evidence for God— an argument, perhaps. Yes, I can, although I can only briefly suggest it. I’ll call it the genocide argument. Let me define genocide as the crime of intentionally destroying or trying to destroy an entire group of people, usually a racial, ethnic, national, or religious group. My argument presupposes moral objectivism, i.e., the theory that certain things are morally right (things like compassion, truth-telling, and promise-keeping) and that certain other things (things like lying, cruelty, and murder) are morally wrong. It also assumes that genocide is one of the things that is morally wrong. Here is how the argument goes: 1. Genocide is a departure from the way that things ought to be. 2. If genocide is a departure from the way that things ought to be, then there is a way that things ought to be. 3. If there is a way that things ought to be, then there is a design plan for things. 4. If there is a design plan for things, then there is an author of the plan, a designer. 5. This designer we can call God. 4 A full design plan would simply be a list of all those things that are morally right, that constitute the way that things ought to be, and the way that things ought not to be. Obviously, the genocide argument does not prove that God has all the properties that the 4 I have adapted here, with his permission, an argument from Douglas Geivett. 47
The City God of theism is supposed to have. It does not prove that God is omnipotent or omniscient, for example. Still, since there can be no such thing as an authorless design plan, a plan for how things ought to be that follows merely from how things are, the designer must be a sentient being. That sentient being is not any one of us human beings, so it is surely God. IV My conclusion then is quite simple: if you want to avoid the contradictions and counter-intuitive implications of ethical relativism, your best bet is to embrace theism. STEPHEN T. DAVIS, PhD, is the Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author and/or editor of some seventeen books and many academic essays. He publishes mainly in the philosophy of religion and Christian theology. 48
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The City ROBERT B. STEWART, PhD, is
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attributes, such as wisdom and inte
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The City: Winter 2015 SPECIAL FEATU
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THE CITY

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