In the previous post, I argued that many classical apologetic arguments—while logically valid—often fail to persuade modern audiences. This is not because their conclusions are weak or because belief in God is irrational. Rather, the challenge lies in the cultural posture of the modern hearer, who often inhabits what Charles Taylor has called a disenchanted moral landscape. Traditional arguments assume a framework of meaning and moral depth that many in the modern West no longer share. If we are to speak compellingly to this condition, we need an apologetic method that doesn’t merely deduce God’s existence from distant premises, but that begins where humans inescapably live: in their moral experience of the world. For this, we need to understand what Taylor calls strong goods—moral realities that reveal something crucial about human life, the world we live in, and is best accounted for by God.
Strong Goods
In Sources of the Self and numerous other places, Taylor describes how our lives are structured by goods that are not all of equal weight. By “goods” I mean activities, ideals, projects, and the like that are desirable. Not all desirable things are created equal nor are they desirable for the same reasons. Some goods—say, convenience or even pleasure—are not as important as other sorts of goods. The most important goods in life, things like the dignity of human life, meaning of and in life, contemplation of beauty, and the like carry far more weight in our experience. We instinctively recognize that these sorts of goods are important.
Two Kinds of Goods
There are two sorts of ways that a more important good might be more important. First, it might be more important such that it is on the same plane of evaluation but simply garners more moral, rational, or personal consideration. For example, the relative merit of a filet mignon vs. a McDonald’s hamburger. Both are “goods” in the sense that they are desirable since they are tasty food. Yet, many would prefer the filet over the fast food. Why? Because it is more pleasant cuisine experience.
In contrast, the choice between writing out another blog post and attending my daughter’s piano recital, if such a thing was mutually exclusive, is different. Being the father that attends, pays attention to, and enjoys my daughter’s performance is the sort of father I want to be and this ideal compels me to attend, even if I happen to want to write more and skip it. One might parse this in terms of more pleasure and enjoyment but there are also other factors at work. The ideal of a present and loving father is not simply something that weighs more than my work but compels me over my work. It presents itself as not a product of my desires but as directing my desires.
Features of Strong Goods
Taylor calls these deeper values “strong goods” or “hypergoods.” These are goods that not only matter deeply to us, but also stand in a higher category than others. Some of them have the special place of ranking and organizing lesser goods. These goods in life have two important features that are recognizable to us in our experience of them. First, is that they have an overriding quality such that they aren’t just more of the same sort of less good but a different sort altogether that in a way “silences” other, lesser goods.
Second, strong goods are incommensurate with lesser goods, we can’t exchange higher goods for lesser goods in the way we can exchange lesser goods for other lesser goods. Strong goods are not constituted by our desires or preferences. Instead, they shape our desires. They stand over us, not under us. Even when we fail to pursue them, we still acknowledge that we should.
Three Strong Goods in Human Experience
Taylor gives several examples of strong goods that still carry force in modern life, despite our broader culture’s disenchantment. Let me outline three of these—and add one of my own.
1. The Dignity of Human Life
One of the most basic moral intuitions is the inviolability of human dignity. Taylor writes that “perhaps the most urgent and powerful cluster of demands that we recognize as moral concern the respect for the life, integrity, and well-being… of others” (Sources, 4). We recoil at murder, cruelty, and degradation—not because of personal preference, but because we sense that something real and important has been violated in such an act.
This is a strong good: the value of human life is not measured against social consensus or utility. Even if a cultural group desires the harm of an innocent person, we do not believe that desire justifies it. Human dignity overrides desire. It commands us.
2. A Life Worth Living
Another domain of strong goods is our sense of what makes life meaningful or worthwhile. Even when not framed in religious terms, people still seek lives of purpose, calling, and depth. Taylor notes that modern people often wrestle with the question of if they have “lived up to their potential” (Sources, 14).
This concern isn’t merely psychological—it’s moral in this strong good sense. We evaluate ourselves against a standard of fullness that transcends our immediate desires. Even when people choose comfort or expediency, they often sense they have betrayed a deeper calling. That sense of betrayal testifies to a strong good—an ideal of flourishing—that structures how we interpret our lives.
3. The Experience of Wonder
Let me add a third example: the experience of wonder. There are moments when we encounter something in the world—natural beauty, great art, sacrificial love—and are arrested. Wonder breaks in unexpectedly. It cannot be manufactured. And when it comes, it demands our attention, reverence, even contemplation.
This experience of wonder, has clear strong good features: it transcends our desires and it often reorients our vision of life. People may ignore it, but they cannot deny its pull. Like the sense of dignity or fullness, wonder invites us to see the world as meaningful beyond our mere preference.
From Strong Goods to Reenchantment
These strong goods—dignity, fullness, wonder—point to something profound. They are not things we make up or project onto the world. These goods are things we discover. They carry normative authority—they tell us what we ought to desire, how we ought to live. In doing so, they challenge the flat ontology of a purely materialistic worldview.
And here is where Taylor’s framework becomes a powerful cultural apologetic.
If these strong goods are real—if they truly command us—then we must ask: what kind of world makes this possible?
The disenchanted worldview is hard pressed to deny our experience of the world in terms of strong goods. What it often does is explain away strong goods as independent from our own minds. We either project them from our preferences, our emotions, or commands, or something else. Each of these views deserves their own treatment that I cannot get into now. However, they each faulter in that they do not explain why these strong goods have authority over us.
This opens the door to what Taylor calls reenchantment: not a regression to superstition or medievalism, but a reorientation that begins with our experience of strong goods to a world that is ordered by strong goods. It is “re”-enchantment because it is built from this experience of strong goods to a wider worldview. This is how it differs from the irretrievable world of medievalism. For the middle ages assumed or presumed this order, they did not reason to it from one aspect of their experience.
The Beginning of an Apologetic
Taylor himself does not offer a formal argument for God explicitly, although it is surely in the background of his account. But his work lays the groundwork for a phenomenologically rooted, culturally resonant apologetic.
The structure is this:
- Strong goods exist and shape our moral experience.
- These goods are not reducible to preferences or social utility.
- The best account of these goods is that they are grounded in a moral reality—a biblical worldview makes sense of them.
Strong Goods Exist
Defending each of these points is beyond this blog post. But here’s some reasons that motivate their plausibility. Many moral frameworks, like utilitarianism or Kantianism, reject premise 1. On these theories, there are not planes of goods with some incomparably higher and more desirous. Rather, these theories reduce morality to a single plane of a basic reason, attempting to capture moral experience, reasons, and evaluation under one fundamental principle. Taylor’s (and those like him) push back against this single plane account by pointing to our moral experience. Even if our theories say there is only one plane of morality, we do not live that way and thus, our theory needs to adjust to the observed phenomenon of our lived experience.
Strong Goods are not Reducible to Preference
The second point is more technical because it requires us considering alternative accounts. The basic point is that strong goods are not subjective. The multitude of subjective accounts is abundant and come in varieties of “isms” like projectivism, emotivism, prescriptivism, expressivism, error theory, constructivism, and so on. Each of these views have been developed with a high degree of sophistication and I cannot go into them here. What each of them lacks is the demandingness of and incommensurability that characterize strong goods. And it is these characteristics that Taylor convincingly describes as part of strong goods that factor into our moral experience.
This is not a deductive proof. It is a re-description of our experience, one that makes belief in God plausible again by showing how belief helps us make sense of what we already know and feel.
Caveat
I would be remiss if I didn’t also acknowledge the areas that I have assumed in this post. I have not defended, but rather assumed, that the only way to explain our moral experience is to recourse to theism. There are other ways that a materialist attempts to explain our moral experience and these accounts have dominated the 20th century philosophical literature. Perhaps I will write posts about this and their flaws in future posts. Most of this contemporary literature absolutely disregards these higher goods or doesn’t even engage with them. Part of Taylor’s genius is articulating our moral experience to such a degree as to lead us to conclude that these goods are indispensable. Other, more popular level books like Life Worth Living zero in our this indispensability of the modern person and shows that we cannot do with it and that there is immense interest in detailing what it is.
In the next post, I’ll explore how these strong goods function within what Taylor calls moral frameworks—and how all of us, whether we acknowledge it or not, live by a vision of the good.
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