A Comparative Study of the Moral Argument for the Existence of God in the View of Richard Swinburne and Ayatollah Javadi Amoli

Abstract

The moral argument provides a crucial framework for understanding the relationship between human moral experience and the existence of God, yet its formulation varies significantly across Western analytic philosophy and Islamic metaphysical thought. This study offers a comparative analysis of Richard Swinburne, a leading analytic philosopher, and Ayatollah Javadi Amoli, a prominent representative of the Islamic tradition of transcendent theosophy. Swinburne employs an inductive–probabilistic methodology, treating morality as empirical data that contributes to a cumulative case for the existence of a perfectly good God. He emphasizes the objectivity of moral values, the normative force of moral obligation, and the central role of free will and responsibility, arguing that theism provides the simplest and most coherent explanation for these phenomena. In contrast, Javadi Amoli views morality not as empirical evidence but as an existential reality rooted in human fitrah and grounded in divine ontology. For him, moral values manifest the divine attributes within the structure of the human soul, and ethics acquires meaning only within the framework of divine unity and metaphysical knowledge of God. Consequently, morality is not an inferential proof for God but an expression of humanity’s intrinsic connection to the Divine. The findings show that although both thinkers affirm the reality of morality and its dependence on God, their methodologies diverge sharply: Swinburne seeks an explanatory argument based on moral experience, whereas Javadi Amoli understands morality as a dimension of human existence in relation to God. This comparison reveals two distinct paradigms in interpreting the link between morality and theism and highlights new possibilities for cross-cultural studies in philosophy of religion.