God and Cosmos ― Moral Truth and Human Meaning

Naturalistic ethics is the reigning paradigm among contemporary ethicists; inGod and Cosmos Baggett and Walls argue that this approach is seriously flawed. Although naturalistic ethics currently enjoys great popularity, over the long term, since the inception of western philosophy, the majority of ethicists have not been naturalists. In fact, they have been deeply suspicious that such an approach is capable of providing an account of what seems most important in ethics. 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, 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. The authors show that truth, goodness, and beauty strongly cohere and that there is principled hope for an ultimate resolution to the problem of evil.

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 bookGood God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality, co-written with Jerry Walls, wonChristianity 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.