Robert M. Adams, Moral arguments for Theistic Belief - Essay Example

Adams begins with what he thinks is one of the most apparent, though perhaps not the most fashionable, arguments about the farm: the Argument on the Nature of Wrong and Right. He deems that people believe quite firmly that particular things are morally right while others remain morally wrong (for instance, that it not right to torture a person to death only for fun). He goes ahead to raise questions on the nature of what is in these moral beliefs: what does the wrongness or rightness of an act comprise in?

He believe that the most satisfactory answer is given by a theory that involves the existence of God – particularly, by a theory that moral wrongness and rightness consist in disagreement and agreement, respectively, with the commands or will of the loving God. The most generally conventional reasons for believing in existence of anything are what its existence is inferred by the theory that appears to account most satisfactorily for some subject matter. He contemplates that his metaethical views provide him with a reason of a substantial weight for believing in God existence.

Adams thinks that there is no need of discussing to what extent the advantages of divine command theory may be controlled by theological metaethical theories, for instance, by views according to what moral principles do not rely on the will of God for their cogency, but on his consideration for their ontological positions. Such theories, if someone is inclined to take them, can of course get the basis of theism argument. He thinks it is very important to discuss, and at greater depth than the advantages, the alleged disadvantages of celestial command metaethics.

Advantages may be easily acknowledged, but the disadvantages are normally thought to be decisive. He argues that, they these disadvantages are not decisive. There he takes the reader through three major objections that are particularly significant for the present argument as