A Moral Argument for God's Existence, The Peircean Perspective, and an Interpretive Scheme for the Success of the Twelve Steps

Abstract

Philosopher and theologian Dr. William Lane Craig is a well-known proponent of moral arguments for God’s existence. In the course of arguing for his own formulation of a moral argument in his seminal work Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, Dr. Craig makes critical mistakes that unveil deeper problematic assumptions in his thinking about morality. The Euthyphro Dilemma looms large over Craig’s arguments, and he fails to overcome it. These shortcomings are expounded in Chapter I and offered a remedy in Chapter II in the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce. His pragmatism gives us much more adequate, workable conceptions of morality and ethics than Craig offers. Chapter III illustrates the advantages of Peirce over Craig in application by showing that the conceptual framework of the Alcoholics Anonymous recovery program can be understood as a way of talking about the Peircean conceptual framework, but not the Craigean framework.