# Godless Normative Realism ## Intro Godless normative realism is the view that some things really are right or wrong, good or bad, no matter what anyone thinks, and that this is true even if there is no God. On this view, a truth like "cruelty for fun is wrong" is like a truth of logic. It holds everywhere and always. It does not need a lawgiver behind it, because it is one of the basic facts about how things are. The name comes from the atheist philosopher [Erik Wielenberg](/codex/erik-wielenberg/), who has given the view its fullest defense. It is the strongest answer to the moral argument for God, because it agrees with the believer that morality is real. The question it raises is not whether moral truths exist, but what best explains them, how we come to know them, and why they bind us. ## In full Godless normative realism (GNR) is a form of robust, non-naturalist moral realism conjoined with atheism. Its core theses, as Wielenberg develops them in *Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe* (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and *Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism* (Oxford University Press, 2014), are: 1. **Objectivity.** There are moral and normative facts whose truth does not depend on the attitudes of any human being or community. 2. **Non-naturalism.** Normative properties are not identical to, or reducible to, the natural properties studied by the sciences. Reviewers summarize Wielenberg's normative properties as objective, non-natural, irreducible and causally inert. 3. **Brute foundations.** Some basic ethical facts are necessary and have no external foundation. They are not grounded in God, in human nature or in anything else. They are where explanation stops. 4. **A making relation.** Particular moral facts obtain because natural facts stand in a non-reductive "making" relation to moral properties. Wielenberg treats this relation as itself brute, and models it on the way theists describe divine conservation. 5. **Reliable moral knowledge.** Evolved human cognition can track moral truth reliably enough for justified moral belief, without any causal contact with causally inert moral facts. The view is a deliberate rival to theistic metaethics. Its claim is that every explanatory job theists assign to God in ethics can be done, or does not need doing. ## The position, steel-manned ### Wielenberg's case - **The analogy with necessary truth.** Logical and mathematical truths are necessary, and most philosophers do not think they need a divine commander to hold. Wielenberg argues that basic ethical truths belong in the same category. Asking what grounds them is like asking what grounds the law of non-contradiction. - **The tu quoque on bruteness.** Every worldview stops somewhere. Terence Cuneo's review of *Robust Ethics* (*Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews*, 2015) reports that Wielenberg argues his theistic critics are committed to brute relations between distinct properties too, so they cannot fault him for positing one. - **The reply to divine command theory.** Wielenberg engages Robert Adams's divine command theory and argues, as Cuneo summarizes it, that it cannot explain why reasonable non-believers have moral obligations, since they do not recognize God as a legitimate authority. - **The epistemology.** Wielenberg combines a dual-process picture of cognition (fast intuitive judgment and slow reflective judgment) with a broadly reliabilist account of justification: intuitive moral judgments are justified to the extent they reliably track moral principles, even when the thinker cannot state those principles. - **The third-factor reply to evolutionary debunking.** Debunkers say evolution shaped our moral beliefs for fitness, not truth, so a match between our beliefs and mind-independent moral facts would be a lucky coincidence. Wielenberg answers with a third factor that explains both sides. Evolution gave us certain cognitive faculties, reason among them. On a widely held view, having those faculties is sufficient for having rights. The same faculties are what produce beliefs about rights. So a creature with the faculties both has rights and, when it uses them, tends to believe truly that it has rights. No tracking mechanism is needed, because the faculties ground the fact and generate the belief. ### Related non-theistic realists GNR is Wielenberg's label, but several leading secular metaethicists hold neighbouring views. - **Russ Shafer-Landau**, *Moral Realism: A Defence* (Oxford University Press, 2003), defends mind-independent moral facts, non-naturalism and a reliabilist moral epistemology. He does not tie the view to theism. - **David Enoch**, *Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism* (Oxford University Press, 2011), defends what he calls robust realism, arguing that irreducibly normative truths are indispensable to deliberation. - **Derek Parfit**, *On What Matters* (Oxford University Press, 2011), holds that there are irreducibly normative truths but that they carry no weighty ontological commitments, a position he called non-metaphysical, and later non-realist, cognitivism. - **[Michael Huemer](/codex/michael-huemer/)** defends ethical intuitionism, a non-naturalist realism with an intuition-based epistemology, and is one of the commentators on the Craig-Wielenberg exchange. These views differ in detail. What they share, and what makes them rivals to the [Moral Argument](/codex/moral-argument/), is the claim that real moral truth needs no God. ## The Craig-Wielenberg debate - **The event.** [William Lane Craig](/codex/william-lane-craig/) and Erik Wielenberg debated the question "What is the best account of objective moral values and duties?" at North Carolina State University in 2018. The speeches were written in advance over several months and then delivered orally. - **The book.** The exchange was published as *A Debate on God and Morality: What is the Best Account of Objective Moral Values and Duties?*, edited by Adam Lloyd Johnson (Routledge, 2020). It includes extended endnotes and five response chapters by [J.P. Moreland](/codex/j-p-moreland/), David Baggett, Mark Linville, Wes Morriston and Michael Huemer. - **The positions.** Craig argued that theism provides a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties and that atheism does not. Wielenberg argued that morality can be objective without God. - **The epistemic objection.** Craig pressed a lucky-coincidence worry built on [Alvin Plantinga](/codex/alvin-plantinga/)'s evolutionary argument against naturalism: if our faculties were shaped by unguided selection for survival, it would be fortunate for any of our beliefs, moral beliefs included, to be reliable. Wielenberg's reply, in Craig's own summary of the exchange, is that we are no luckier in having true moral beliefs than in having true beliefs generally. ## The main critiques ### 1. The epistemic access problem - **The challenge.** [Sharon Street](/codex/sharon-street/), "A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value" (*Philosophical Studies* 127, 2006), argues that if evolution shaped our evaluative attitudes, the realist must either deny any relation between those pressures and moral truth (leaving moral knowledge a coincidence) or posit a tracking relation that adds nothing to the evolutionary explanation. - **Against the third factor.** Mark Linville, writing at the Moral Apologetics site, grants that Wielenberg's model is internally consistent but argues that it assumes what a debunker denies, namely that rights exist and are grounded in our faculties. He also asks whether faculties selected for their usefulness can ground the intrinsic worth of persons, and why an unguided process should produce moral agents at all. - **Where the luck goes.** Even if the third factor removes coincidence between belief and fact, it relocates the luck to the prior question of why the universe produced beings with exactly those faculties. On theism that outcome is intended; on GNR it is fortunate. ### 2. The grounding and explanation objection - **The worry.** GNR posits a plurality of necessary moral truths and a brute making relation that links them, case by case, to natural facts. Critics argue that this is a large set of unexplained necessary connections, and that theism replaces them with one ground: the nature of a necessarily existing, perfectly good God. - **Cuneo's point.** Cuneo notes that modelling the making relation on divine conservation risks explaining the obscure by the more obscure, a worry the book does not address. - **Mackie's warning.** [J.L. Mackie](/codex/j-l-mackie/), *Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong* (1977), argued that objective prescriptive facts would be metaphysically queer, utterly unlike anything else in a naturalistic universe. He concluded that there are none. GNR accepts the queer facts and rejects the conclusion, which leaves it holding a commitment that a leading atheist thought was the strongest reason to deny moral realism. ### 3. Value versus obligation - **The distinction.** Robert Merrihew Adams, *Finite and Infinite Goods* (Oxford University Press, 1999), separates the good from the obligatory. He identifies the good with God, and treats obligation as social: it arises from the commands of a loving God within a relationship. C. Stephen Evans, *God and Moral Obligation* (Oxford University Press, 2013), defends a divine command account of obligation only, leaving goods and the reasons they generate to stand on their own while God's commands turn some of those reasons into obligations. - **The pressure on GNR.** Even if brute values exist, an obligation seems to be owed to someone, and to carry authority over a person's own interests. Cuneo argues that the important question is whether a metaethic should vindicate the authority and overridingness of moral reasons, and that *Robust Ethics* neither shows that it can nor argues that failing to do so is no shortcoming. - **Wielenberg's counter.** The non-believer objection above is his reply: a command theory seems to make obligation depend on recognizing the commander. Divine command theorists answer that an obligation can be real and binding before it is recognized, as a child's duty to a parent does not wait for the child's theory of parenthood. Evans develops the related idea that God can communicate commands through conscience and natural moral knowledge to people who do not know their source. ## Christian assessment - **Common ground first.** The Christian and the godless normative realist agree on the datum: some things really are wrong, and every human being is answerable to them. Scripture expects exactly this agreement: > (for when Gentiles that have not the law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are the law unto themselves; in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith, and their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing them); ([Romans 2:14-15](/codex/romans-2-14-15/), ASV) Paul's point is that moral knowledge does not require knowing its source. A non-believer who knows that cruelty is wrong is not a counterexample to theism; he is what theism predicts. See [Argument from Conscience](/codex/argument-from-conscience/). - **The debate is about explanation, not existence.** The theist's claim is not that atheists cannot know or do right. It is that three facts GNR must take as given, the existence of necessary moral truths, our reliable access to them, and their binding authority over us, are each expected if a good, personal God made us to know him, and each is left brute on GNR. - **One stopping point versus many.** Both views end in something necessary and unexplained. The difference is in the number and kind. Theism stops at a single necessary personal being whose character is goodness itself (see [Divine Simplicity](/codex/divine-simplicity/)). GNR stops at many independent moral truths, plus brute connections between them and the natural world, plus the fortunate emergence of creatures who can know them. Simplicity favours the single stopping point, though how much weight simplicity carries here is itself disputed. - **Obligation needs a person.** Values can perhaps be impersonal. Duties are owed. The grammar of obligation, debt and guilt points toward someone to whom we answer. See [The Ought-Owe Argument](/codex/the-ought-owe-argument/) and [The Cold Case Argument](/codex/the-cold-case-argument/). - **Honest limits.** GNR is coherent and defended by serious philosophers. The theist does not refute it by calling it queer, and Euthyphro-style objections apply to theistic views as well (see [Euthyphro Dilemma](/codex/euthyphro-dilemma/)). The case against it is comparative and cumulative, not a knock-down proof. ## Where the codex uses this rival - [The Felt Ought Argument](/codex/the-felt-ought-argument/) treats non-natural realism without God (Parfit, Wielenberg) as the main secular rival to its claim that agony's badness is best explained by theism. - [The Cold Case Argument](/codex/the-cold-case-argument/) meets moral realism without a Judge, which keeps the debt of justice real but leaves it permanently unpaid. - [The Ought-Owe Argument](/codex/the-ought-owe-argument/) presses the obligation-versus-value distinction through the language of debt. - [Atheist Moral Realism Objection](/codex/atheist-moral-realism-objection/) and [Atheist Moral Realism Defeater](/codex/atheist-moral-realism-defeater/) handle the view as an objection to the moral argument in debate. ## Scholarship Published academic works this page draws on, each matched to a publisher, index or library catalog record. - Robert Merrihew Adams, *Finite and infinite goods* (1999). [Open Library](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1922504W) - William Lane Craig and Erik J. Wielenberg, *A Debate on God and Morality: What is the Best Account of Objective Moral Values and Duties?* (Routledge, 2020). [doi:10.4324/9781003055259](https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003055259) - David Enoch, *Taking Morality Seriously* (Oxford University Press, 2011). [doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579969.001.0001](https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579969.001.0001) - C. Stephen Evans, *God and Moral Obligation* (Oxford University Press, 2013). [doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199696680.001.0001](https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199696680.001.0001) - Russ Shafer-Landau, *Moral Realism: A Defence* (Oxford University Press, 2003). [doi:10.1093/0199259755.001.0001](https://doi.org/10.1093/0199259755.001.0001) - Sharon Street, "A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value," *Philosophical Studies* 127 (2006). [doi:10.1007/s11098-005-1726-6](https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-005-1726-6) - Erik J. Wielenberg, *Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe* (Cambridge University Press, 2005). [Open Library](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL8325182W) - Erik J. Wielenberg, *Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism* (Oxford University Press, 2014). [doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198714323.001.0001](https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198714323.001.0001) ## See also - [Erik Wielenberg](/codex/erik-wielenberg/), the philosopher who named and defends the view - [Atheist Moral Realism Objection](/codex/atheist-moral-realism-objection/), the view deployed as an objection to the moral argument - [Atheist Moral Realism Defeater](/codex/atheist-moral-realism-defeater/), the debate-prep reply - [Moral Argument](/codex/moral-argument/), the argument GNR is built to resist - [Moral Arguments](/codex/moral-arguments/), the wider family - [Morality](/codex/morality/), the metaethical positions compared - [Divine Command Theory](/codex/divine-command-theory/), the theistic account of obligation GNR rejects - [Moral Anti-Realism Defeater](/codex/moral-anti-realism-defeater/), the reply to the error theory GNR also rejects - [Sharon Street](/codex/sharon-street/), the Darwinian Dilemma - [J.L. Mackie](/codex/j-l-mackie/), the queerness argument - [Michael Huemer](/codex/michael-huemer/), a fellow non-naturalist realist - [William Lane Craig](/codex/william-lane-craig/), Wielenberg's debate partner - [Grounding Argument from Cognitivism](/codex/grounding-argument-from-cognitivism/), a theistic grounding argument from moral truth - [The Felt Ought Argument](/codex/the-felt-ought-argument/), [The Cold Case Argument](/codex/the-cold-case-argument/), [The Ought-Owe Argument](/codex/the-ought-owe-argument/), arguments that steel-man GNR as their rival ## Common questions this page answers **Q: What is godless normative realism?** It is Erik Wielenberg's name for the view that objective moral facts exist and need no foundation in God. Some basic ethical truths are necessary and brute, like truths of logic, and particular moral facts hold because natural facts make them hold. **Q: Can atheists believe in objective morality?** Yes. Philosophers such as Erik Wielenberg, Russ Shafer-Landau, David Enoch and Derek Parfit defend objective moral truth without God. The theist's argument is not that atheists cannot hold this view, but that theism explains moral truth, moral knowledge and moral obligation better than the view does. **Q: What did William Lane Craig and Erik Wielenberg debate?** In 2018 at North Carolina State University they debated what best accounts for objective moral values and duties. Craig defended a theistic foundation; Wielenberg defended godless normative realism. The exchange was published by Routledge in 2020 as *A Debate on God and Morality*, edited by Adam Lloyd Johnson, with responses from five other philosophers. **Q: How does Wielenberg answer the evolutionary debunking argument?** He offers a third-factor explanation. Evolution gave us cognitive faculties such as reason; having those faculties is sufficient for having rights; and the same faculties produce beliefs about rights. So the faculties explain both the moral fact and our belief in it. Critics reply that this assumes the moral facts the debunker questions and leaves the emergence of such faculties unexplained. **Q: What is the difference between moral value and moral obligation in this debate?** Value is about what is good; obligation is about what we must do and owe. Robert Adams and C. Stephen Evans argue that even if goods could exist without God, obligations are best explained by the commands of a personal God, because a duty is owed to someone and carries authority over our own interests. **Q: If God's nature is a brute stopping point, why is that better than brute moral facts?** Both views stop somewhere. The theist argues that one necessary, personal and perfectly good being is a simpler and more unified stopping point than many independent moral truths, plus brute links to the natural world, plus the fortunate arrival of creatures who can know them. That is a comparative judgment, and defenders of godless realism contest it.