Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig, today an excurses

on Natural Theology, Part 21.

For more resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

We've been talking about the moral argument for God's existence, and I've completed my defense

of the first premise of that argument that if God does not exist, that is to say if atheism is true,

then objective moral values and duties do not exist. And we looked at some objections to that premise,

and I answered those as best I could. And so today we want to move to the second premise of that

argument that objective moral values and duties do exist.

Now I initially thought that this would be the weak and more controversial premise in the

argument.

In my debates with atheistic philosophers, however, I find that virtually nobody denies this premise.

Virtually everyone affirms that some objective moral values and duties do in fact exist.

In fact, it might surprise you to learn that actual surveys taken on university campuses indicate

that faculty professors are more likely to believe in the objectivity and moral values than students,

and that of the faculty philosophy professors are more

likely to believe in objective moral values and duties than professors in other disciplines.

So it is not the case that students get their relativism from university professors, as is often thought. The professors are more

objectivist than the students, and of the professors, the philosophers are the ones who affirm

moral values and duties are objective in the clearest way. Now why is that? Well, philosophers who reflect upon our moral experience

would say that just as I believe my five senses, that there is a world of physical objects

around me that I'm sensing unless and until I have some overriding

reason to distrust my senses. Similarly, in the absence of some overriding reason to

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