Interview with Dr. David Baggett on God, Morality, and Meaning

Think Theism

Zach interviews Dr. David Baggett, professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Christian University. Video: https://youtu.be/YWrif8pvWXc

“The Morals of the Story” https://www.ivpress.com/the-morals-of-the-story

With his co-author, Jerry Walls, Dr. Baggett authored Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality. The book won Christianity Today’s 2012 apologetics book of the year of the award. In 2016 he published a sequel with Walls that critiques naturalistic ethics, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning. A third book in the series, The Moral Argument: A History (2019), chronicles the history of moral arguments for God’s existence. They are under contract with OUP for the fourth book of their tetralogy—on the topic of moral realism, Dr. Baggett has also co-edited a collection of essays exploring the philosophy of C. S. Lewis, edited the third debate between Gary Habermas and Antony Flew on the resurrection of Jesus, and in 2018 co-wrote (with his wife Marybeth) The Morals of the Story: Good News about a Good God. Dr. Baggett currently is a professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Christian University. For more information, go to MoralApologetics.com

Timestamps
0:00 Why moral apologetics?
4:20 Importance of personal character
7:10 Moral knowledge
12:50 Evolutionary ethics and moral knowledge
17:21 Moral Platonism and moral knowledge
19:22 Moral transformation
24:22 Secular alternatives
27:33 Does the Bible cause moral regression?
31:45 Why follow God’s commands?
33:25 Does God contradict our deepest moral intuitions?
37:05 Does Calvinism make God evil?
43:56 Is the world run by an evil God?
48:29 How God grounds the Good, the True, and the Beautiful