My Debate on Capturing Christianity

Contra Bobby Conway on the moral argument for God

[my bit’s around 29:30]

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Capturing Christianity—a YouTube apologetics ministry with 234,000 subscribers—just started doing a series of live call-in shows, where atheists/sceptics/sceptics-of-this-or-that-apologetic-argument get to call in and challenge an expert (or, perhaps, ‘expert’) who defends some feature of Christianity.

This time around, the channel hosted Dr. Bobby Conway—an apologist, pastor, and philosopher—who wrote his dissertation on the moral argument for God. Before the livestream kicked off, I read around 70% of Conway’s dissertation so I’d know where he was coming from.

Conway’s goal was to defend a new version of the moral argument based on the experience of moral guilt. The argument is basically this: theism explains our experience of moral guilt better than naturalism, because only theism can ground objective morality, and you need objective morality for there to be things one is appropriately guilty about. Also, Christianity (surprise, surprise) is best equipped to deal with the existential problem of guilt, since the atonement allows our forensic guilt before God to be wiped away, and our psychological guilt to be healthily overcome (by coming to terms, emotionally, with Christ’s sacrifice).

In my view, there are about a zillion problem with Conway’s dissertation. I may write up a paper addressing them. When I called in, though, I only had time to levy two. In brief, they were:

1. In the dissertation, Conway promises to do a theory comparison between naturalistic theories of guilt and the Christian theory of guilt, with the angle that Christianity comes out on top. Normally when you do a theory comparison, you’re meant to take the best versions of each theory and run those against each other, to ensure it’s a fair fight. But in Conway’s manuscript, only three naturalistic theorists of guilt get discussed: they are, I kid you not, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud, all of whom died before the 21st century. No modern-day, empirically juiced-up moral psychologists were considered. This is like an atheist dissertating on why naturalism explains the facts of embryology better than Christianity, and then only comparing the views of Aquinas to those of contemporary, secular embryologists.

2. I am a moral non-naturalist. That is to say, according to me, there are mind-independent moral facts, and they’re not reducible to descriptive, natural facts like ‘X is pleasurable’ or ‘Y is agreed to by most people’. Specifically, morality consists of abstract normative reasons—necessary, non-physical, abstract entities, which supervene on situations in the world, making some actions right and others wrong. I don’t expect you’re convinced, but anyway, that’s my take on morality. This view is an alternative to the view than morality in some way depends on God. Even though I believe in God, I believe the moral facts are necessary and exist independent of Him. (Indeed, I don’t think God even could ground morality—to my mind, that’s roughly as confused as saying morality is grounded by the left half of an orange peel. But I digress.) In his dissertation, Conway gives a slew of half-baked objections to this view, which is increasingly fashionable in thoughtful atheist circles. One objection I took him up on was his objection that abstract normative reasons can’t constitute morality, since they’re “not offended if one opts out of living according to these values.”¹ Contra Conway, the non-naturalist’s view isn’t that, say, slapping someone is wrong because it ‘offends’ some abstract object. The view is that abstract normative reasons are that in virtue of which slapping someone is wrong. The offended party is the person slapped, which is what my mother will do to you if you don’t subscribe.

As the stream was going on, long-time internet person Nathan Ormond reacted to it live on his channel. (Philosopher/Psychologist Lance Bush even called in at one point and gave a very kind shout out to my blog! It goes without saying that you should all read his stuff over at Lance Independent, his groove-tastic Substack about metaethics.)

Sometime after, I hopped on the stream to discuss the debate. It ended up devolving into a long discussion about whether Cameron Bertuzzi—the genial fellow who hosts Capturing Christianity—is a bad egg. (Nathan thinks so; Matthew Adelstein and I argued he was being wildly uncharitable.)

Nathan’s view, I think, is that Cameron is an intellectually dishonest grifter, and that reason Cameron won’t debate him or some of his friends is that stems from an indifference to truth-seeking and an unchristian failure to turn the other cheek, in light of the many 10 hours YouTube streams in which Nathan often insults Cameron, psychoanalyses him, and picks apart his character. My impression is that Cameron is probably not those things, and that the reason he won’t debate Nathan or some of his friends is that he doesn’t want to interact with someone who constantly insults him, doesn’t want to interact with the close associates of someone who constantly insults him, and doesn’t anticipate an outweighing benefit of doing so vis-à-vis improving his philosophical outlook.

You can see the whole thing—with timestamps—here.

1. Conway, R. (2021). Christian theism and the problem of guilt (Doctoral dissertation, University of Birmingham): p. 165.