It’s perfectly correct that the debate didn’t focus on the problem of evil because I want to say there isn’t a problem of evil if there’s no reason to believe in God, and we can make sense of our lives without believing in God. I also said that, as far as I can see, if someone really has other reasons for believing in God, he probably can make sense, from his perspective, of the problem of evil.
I didn’t particularly find Craig’s arguments very convincing. I’ll talk a little bit about them, but I don’t want to waste a lot of time (at least from my perspective) about this. I’ll move from the very last things he said.
Take animal suffering. There are certain laws of nature that God somehow created or is responsible for, and because of those, there is animal suffering. If God is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-wise, all-good (and here with animals there is, presumably, no question about free will), he could have made laws of nature that didn’t entail that suffering. And there’s an enormous amount of suffering. That we don’t see God’s complete purpose doesn’t mean, as MacIntyre once said, we’ve seen enough to know there’s a lot of evil in the world which is not explained except by postulating God. It’s not the sort of thing that would lead us to believe in the God of Christianity just by looking at the world.
In one of his last points, he said in response to me that I didn’t meet his point that if there is no immortality, we all end up the same way. What difference does it make how we end up? What makes a difference is about how we live here and now. And those things are important to us just now. Think about love. In light of the fact that you’re going to die, does this mean that the love between persons means nothing? Not at all.
Let me turn to a really central misunderstanding, and I’m surprised, if he’s ever read my book Why Should I Be Moral?, that he would make this mistake. There’s a complete difference between giving a moral justification (a justification inside of morality) and a pragmatic justification for accepting the whole institution of morality. I wasn’t at all defending hedonism, self-interest inside of morality; I’ve criticized that extensively. I’ve said, "Suppose somebody says, ‘Why accept the moral point of view at all?’ he’s not asking for a moral reason. He’s asking for a non-moral reason." And I’m saying we can give him a non-moral reason. (We can tell him to go get lost, too.) But if somebody says, "Why should I pay any attention to science?" he’s not asking for a scientific reason. He’s asking for a pragmatic reason to pay attention to science, and we can give him a reason for that. I say we can give a self-interested reason for "why be moral" outside of morality, but when we’re justifying moral beliefs, we don’t appeal to self-interest--or not in any essential way. That’s a complete confusion. The slightest readings of my books would never have allowed him to make that point.
My next point has to do with Craig’s saying, "Take extraterrestrials again. Suppose they regard suffering as bad--not human suffering." Again, using my same method, I could say, "What’s the difference between you and humans?" If they said, "We’re more rational," so what? What does that have to do with suffering? I’d say, "If suffering is bad for you, why isn’t it bad for human beings as well?" We can argue with them and if both parties are sufficiently rational, there is no reason to think that one couldn’t achieve agreement, but one might not. Again I say that morality is principally for humans, but if we ever came across this situation, we could still argue with them.
Similarly, suppose the extraterrestrial says, "I don’t see anything particularly bad about degradation." Then we can concretely speak to him about what degradation really comes to, of what happens to a woman when she’s raped, and so forth. If these beings are willing to think about this, it would be very hard for them to continue, I think, to argue that degradation is not evil.
If, finally, they didn’t, if we couldn’t "find feet" with them, this doesn’t mean values are subjective. It means that values, maybe, are inter-subjective to human beings and beings who have rationality, who know what it is to suffer and experience pain and the like.
He says that I don’t meet his objection that moral purposes in life all are perfectly arbitrary without God. I don’t see the slightest reason for that. Some of them are arbitrary if they are silly and thoughtless purposes. Some purposes, if they are integrated, carefully thought-out, related to everything else we know, reflective (where human beings work through long traditions, including working with Christian traditions, in which you put together everything you know and think carefully about these purposes), are perfectly objective. And they are the only kind you can give much sense to. Craig seems to think that to have objective values is for values to have some strange objective quality--some abstract object like numbers, maybe. Many have tried to make sense of this. (And here Mackie is very powerful.) No one has been able to make much sense of this--God or no God. G. E. Moore believed in objective values and was an atheist. Perhaps you can do that, but the point is this. Objective values in that sense are a completely incoherent notion. We don’t know what we’re talking about. And moreover, if there were such values, we don’t need them. We could make perfectly good sense of our lives and justify our moral beliefs without them.
He says, "But that still does not address the difference between the order of knowing and the order of being." Well, it addresses it in this sense. That question of the ontology of values is an incredibly opaque one. Anybody who has studied the problem rather carefully knows how difficult it is. It’s very, very unclear whether we even know what it would mean for values to be objective in that sense. And in doing that, we are bringing in a lot of baggage that achieves nothing. If we would stick with the kind of justification I talk about, we could have something that was humanly objective without any appeal to God or, for that matter, to the pseudo-abstract entity "the Good."