Do scientists and Philosophers convert based upon the arguments and evidence?

A recent blog post concerning Evidence that God Exists, the author quotes scientist Alan Sandage in support of the contention that the evidence of science supports the conclusion that God exists. The same author has on other occasions referred to Anthony Flew, whose (near) death bed conversion to Deism is also referenced in support of the same contention.

Are these examples of conversion to beliefs in a God (of a sort) examples of scientists and philosophers converting due to the evidence?

Trivially, the answer is yes. In both of these cases, the person in question cites some scientific evidence (in both cases it's the complexity of biochemistry/DNA).

If we look a little closer, and think about the way in which these examples are being used, which is that these people are experts and they ere convinced by the evidence, then we can see that these examples should be taken with a grain of salt.

Both of these people are experts in their respective fields, which are Cosmology in the case of Sandage, and various areas of Philosophy for Flew. Neither of these two men appear to have relevant expertise in the area of science they cite to support their conversion claims. This means that these are NOT examples of experts that were converted by the evidence. Their conversion stories should be given no greater weight than that of Joe Bloggs down the road who read a book on biology and came to the same conclusion.

The examples which should be produced are those where someone was convinced by the evidence in their field of expertise that a God or Gods exists. I can think of a single example of this - Edwards Feser - who states that he was convinced to convert to Catholicism by the Cosmological Argument (the Thomistic rather than Kalam variant).

In contrast to this, I suspect there are a vast number of people who were convinced to become Deists or Agnostics or Atheists while studying to become experts in their field, especially considering the inverse correlation between increased education and religious belief.

I would love to hear about more examples of experts who were convinced by the evidence in their field to become theistic.

Is God the only basis for objective morality?

Just a couple of quick references to critiques of Divine Command metaethics (DCM), which show that there can be other objective foundations for morality, and that basing morality upon God isn't successful.

In "In defense of non-natural, non-theistic moral realism", Erik Wielenberg argues that there are ethical brute facts which supervene on "states of affairs". Wielenberg notes that DCM proponents find these sorts of "freely floating" ethical facts to be weird, and then points out that these people are also committed to these "strange" ethical brute facts:

• P1) Part of the definition of God is the statement "God is Good"
• P3) "God exists" is a brute fact
• P4) From P2, "God is Good" is a brute fact
• P5) "God is Good" is an ethical statement
• C) from P4 & P5, "God is Good" is an ethical brute fact

In "A sematic attack on Divine Command Theory", Stephen Maitzen argues that Divine Command Metaethics is either vacuous, or false, starting from the uncontroversial DCM statement "For any agent x, x is morally good because, and only to the extent to which, x wills what God wills": true

P1) The statement "God is Good" is not religiously trivial P2) Every tautology (eg. "Good is Good", "God is God") is religiously trivial P3) If 2 statements have the same meaning, then one is a tautology only if both are P4) According to DCM, "X is Good" has the same meaning as "X wills what God wills" P5) From P4, the statement "God is Good" has the same meaning as "God wills what God wills" P6) "God wills what God wills" is a tautology P7) From P3, P4, P%, according to DCM "God is Good" is a tautology P8) From P2, P7, according to DCM, "God is Good" is religiously trivial P9) From P1, P8, DCM is incompatible with traditional theism P10) From P9, if traditional theism is true, DCM is false P11) If moral nihilism is false and DCM is true, then traditional theism is true P12) From P11, if traditional theism is false, then moral nihilism is true or DCM is false P13) From P12, if traditional theism is false, then DCM is true only if moral nihilism is true P14) Traditional theism is true, or traditional theism is false C) From P10, P13, P14, DCM is true only if moral nihilism is true

Read the papers themselves for more detailed arguments and justifications of the claims.