David Baggett

David Baggett is an American analytic philosopher of religion best known for reviving and systematizing the moral argument for God's existence. Trained at Wayne State University (PhD, 1996), he has taught at Liberty University and is currently Professor of Philosophy at Houston Christian University, where he directs the Center for the Foundations of Ethics. Working within the Christian analytic tradition, Baggett defends a form of theistic ethical Platonism he and co-author Jerry Walls call 'moral apologetics,' arguing that the objective features of morality—moral obligations, value, knowledge, transformation, and providence—are better explained by classical theism than by naturalism. His Good God (2011, with Walls) engages the Euthyphro dilemma by grounding moral goodness in God's character rather than arbitrary command, situating itself against both Robert Adams's earlier divine command theory and naturalist metaethics defended by figures such as Erik Wielenberg, with whom Baggett has publicly debated. God and Cosmos (2016) extends the case by surveying naturalist alternatives. Subsequent volumes (The Moral Argument, 2019; The Morals of the Story, 2018) consolidate the project. Critics question whether moral phenomena require theistic grounding and whether the argument's cumulative structure begs the question. Baggett also edits the journal Moral Apologetics and has written on C. S. Lewis's philosophical theology.