A common charge by non-believers is that Christian Ethics suffers from the naturalistic fallacy, but that has some issues. Hume’s argument, you may recall, was that “you cannot deduce ‘ought’ from ‘is.’” That is, you cannot derive normative conclusions from merely descriptive premises. G. E. Moore used the phrase “naturalistic fallacy” to describe that kind of error. Now in a Christian epistemology, matters are not quite so simple. The reason is that God is both the chief fact and the chief norm. To put it differently: God’s existence is a fact, and he is a person who rightly makes the highest demands on our obedience. Thus he … Continue reading Does Christian ethics commit the naturalistic fallacy?