What do you think about a god who would send children to hell? Let’s finish our critique of an article by William Lane Craig (WLC) in which he defends God’s honor (part 1).

On to the philosophical question

Remember that WLC said that the first question, the psychological one, was a red herring. Having stumbled through that response, he moves on to the question he says is significant, the philosophical one. Since philosophy is his discipline, you’d expect an intellectual tsunami. You’d be disappointed.

As for the philosophical question, “How can you think that is a fair and reasonable thing for anyone or anything to do?”, I’ve already alluded to the answer, and I’d refer you to my debate with Prof. Ray Bradley on this topic.

He’s spent 90 percent of his article discussing what he says is a red herring, but for the question that he admits deserves an answer, you must sit through a 75-minute debate. Maybe it’d just be easier to take his word for it.

Fortunately, I’ve already responded to his argument from that 1994 debate. If WLC won’t summarize it, I will.

WLC admitted in the debate that “God is all-loving and yet some people go to hell” sounds bad. He tried to turn the tables and argued that the atheist must show two things.

1. If God is all powerful, then God could create a world in which everyone freely lives their life in such a way that they merit getting into heaven.
2. If God is all loving, then he would want such a world.

He insisted that, “Both of these assumptions have to be necessarily true, in order to prove that God and hell are logically inconsistent with each other. So as long as there’s even a possibility that one of these assumptions is false, it’s possible that God is all-loving and yet some people go to hell.”

Step back and admire that message: it’s possible that God is all-loving and yet some people go to hell. Said another way, God does look like an immoral tyrant, but you can’t prove it. Yeah, that sounds like a compelling message.

Let’s return to his two points and play the game as he defined it. Christian doctrine seems to accept point 2—an all-loving God would want a world in which everyone merited heaven. In fact, WLC himself said in this article, “God’s heart breaks for the lost far more than mine does!”

So we’ll focus on point 1: could an all-powerful God create a world in which everyone freely lives such that they merit heaven? Surprisingly, God has apparently already created such a world: that world is heaven itself.

Consider two properties that heaven must have. First, people in heaven must have free will, given how vital Christians say it is. For example, Christian apologists say that God won’t step on people’s free will, and that’s why there’s so much evil in the world. They also inform us that God is a gentleman who won’t force people to love him—that would make them zombies. (For more on the bizarre uses apologists make of God’s love, go here.)

Given that Christians insist that our love of God be freely given, we can assume that free will is also mandatory in heaven. But heaven must be a lot better than just a continuation of life on earth. The secret ingredient that makes heaven work must be wisdom. Free will is a clumsy tool in the hands of imperfect humans on earth, but add perfect wisdom, and all the sinful uses of free will (robbery, rape, murder, and so on) vanish. The perfectly wise inhabitants of heaven would have the free will to commit a sin, but they’d have the wisdom to know that that would be foolish.

Conclusion: God could’ve made heaven on earth by giving us the wisdom to use free will properly. That meets the two criteria WLC set out. Therefore, “God is all loving” is indeed in conflict with “Some people go to hell.” Therefore (returning to the subject of this post series), God is indeed not benevolent when he sends your children to hell.

WLC attempts a final defense of hell

This is his conclusion.

There are no good defeaters of this doctrine [of hell], given such facts as (i) the universal reality of human evil and our profound need of forgiveness and moral cleansing, (ii) God’s holiness and justice, (iii) God’s will for universal human salvation and efforts to draw everyone freely to a saving knowledge of Himself, and (iii) human freedom.

No good defeaters? I think we’ve just seen one. But let’s look at his points.

1. The universal reality of human evil and our profound need of forgiveness and moral cleansing. Our “need for forgiveness” and a fallen world is a Christian invention. That’s not an objective fact of our world.
2. God’s holiness and justice. God is just pretend, and God is a Bronze Age dictator. Show us that he exists and that biblical morality rises above being merely an anthropological curiosity.
3. God’s will for universal human salvation and efforts to draw everyone freely to a saving knowledge of Himself. Salvation is a solution to a problem (hell) that Christianity invented. I don’t need either, thanks. As for universal human salvation, remember that Yahweh was initially just the god of the Chosen People, not a source of universal salvation.
4. Human freedom. Yes, humans like freedom. No, God is no champion of free will.

God’s one-size-fits-all hell, completely at odds with modern Western ideas of proportionate justice, is ridiculously immoral. Justifying it is a desperate attempt to justify one’s belief in the unbelievable.

More posts on hell:

• 9 Responses to Christian Hell
• William Lane Craig Wrong About Morality Again as He Justifies Hell
• What Christians Won’t Do to Defend God’s Marvelous Plan®

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Image from Marco Verch, CC license
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Are Christians okay with a god who could send their children to hell? Let’s continue our critique of an article by William Lane Craig (WLC) in which he defends the Christian position (part 1).

The doctrine of hell

WLC had divided the question into a psychological question (“How can you love and worship a God who you believe would do that to your children?”) and a philosophical question (“How can you think that is a fair and reasonable thing for anyone or anything to do?”).

His point about the psychological question is that if this is just someone’s personal opinion, “it would have no implications at all for the truth of the doctrine of hell.”

Hell? So much for Good News. But what is the doctrine of hell? Is it C.S. Lewis’s “gates barred from the inside” or fire ’n brimstone® or something else? He must make sure his answer is in harmony both with every afterlife passage in the Bible and with the doctrine of hell in every other Christian denomination. Don’t give us your interpretation; rather, show that the Bible defines a single unambiguous doctrine about hell.

Objective vs. subjective morality

WLC moves on to emphasize the critic’s relative (rather than objective) position on moral issues.

Suppose I were one of those persons who would not or could not bring himself to do X. That implies nothing about the rightness/wrongness of doing X or the truth/falsity that someone does X. It’s just about me and my personal psychology.

Uh . . . did you just deny the existence of reliably accessible objective morality? Well done, Dr. Craig. You’ve convinced me. I guess even if objective morality exists, that doesn’t matter because we humans can’t reliably access it. One wonders, though, why you keep pretending like such a thing does exist.

Children and the age of accountability

WLC next wants to make a special case for young children.

Neither God nor I would send small children to hell, for they are not morally accountable.

Show me, and again don’t just cherry pick verses to support your position. Make sure that no Bible verse contradicts your claim.

The age of accountability (the idea that children below a certain age are too young to be held accountable for their sin) comes from tradition, not the Bible. But the Bible makes clear that everyone has a sin nature and falls short.

Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me (Psalm 51:5).

The wicked are estranged from the womb; they go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies (Ps. 58:3).

So then, each of us will give an account of ourselves to God (Romans 14:12).

There is no one righteous, not even one (Rom. 3:10).

These verses argue that children don’t deserve an exemption.

(An insightful video by Underlings argues that God’s plan is either that (1) dead babies go to hell or (2) they don’t. But knowing that most adults do go to hell, option (2) means that murdering babies is morally proper because it saves them from hell. With either option, God loses.)

The Bible and thoughtcrime

Back to WLC:

Neither God nor I would send anyone to hell “simply because of thoughts in their heads.” Where in the world did you get that idea?

Uh, from the Bible? The tenth Commandment demands “no coveting.” Jesus added a few of his own thoughtcrimes in the Sermon on the Mount: “I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment.” And, “I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Coveting, anger, and lust are thoughts in your head, they’re evidently all sins, and you know the penalty for sin.

God’s provision to get us out of the mess we’re in

And now it’s time for WLC to hurry to God’s defense because, Lord knows, he can’t defend himself.

People go to hell because they willingly reject God’s forgiveness and resist His every effort to save them.

How can I willingly reject what I’ve never been given good evidence for? Christianity’s sin/salvation story is nonsense. “God made you sinful, but that’s okay because if you believe in the unbelievable, he’ll not burn you forever” isn’t coherent, loving, or fair.

It’s misleading to talk about God’s “sending” people to hell. He desires and strives for the salvation of every person, but some freely resist His grace and so separate themselves from Him irrevocably. It’s not His doing.

Did he make the rules? Then it’s his doing. If I’m imperfect, blame my Maker. And even if humans are sinful, God could just forgive, since that’s how we do it and he’s done it before.

As for “freely [resisting] His grace,” I’ve never seen evidence of God’s grace, but apparently you think I deserve hell nonetheless.

God’s offer of salvation: take it or regret it

WLC moves on to discuss salvation.

What do you mean by “don’t believe that Jesus Christ died for their sins”? If they don’t believe because they are ignorant of the Gospel message, then they will not be judged on that basis. But if you mean that they knowingly and willfully reject Jesus Christ as their Savior, then, yes, God will judge them on that basis.

Or, option three, they understand the gospel message but have no good reason to believe that it’s anything but legend and myth. They might understand the message of countless other religions, but they probably don’t believe that they’re anything more than legend and myth, either.

I can reject a serving of potatoes at the dinner table, but that assumes I believe those potatoes exist. I don’t reject unicorns or leprechauns, I just don’t have enough evidence to believe in them, or a thousand other mythical creatures, or gods.

The problem is not that they simply lack a certain belief but rather that they repudiate God’s provision for their sin.

You mean the sin that God made unavoidable? Yeah, my bad. Sorry about that.

Anyway, Paul made clear that we’re all good. In Romans 5:18–19, he said that humanity didn’t need to opt in to inherit Adam’s sin, but it also didn’t need to opt in to get Jesus’s salvation. So I guess I’ll see you in heaven, Dr. Craig.

Conclusion for the psychological question

So to sum up the psychological question, “How can you love and worship a God who you believe would do that to your children?” I guess I would answer that I know He would condemn them only if they deserved it. I trust in His justice.

Why trust God’s justice? It doesn’t match what we think of justice in the West. God ordered genocide on the Canaanites (here, here). He set up the rules for slavery. He flooded the world. Much of humanity today live in substandard conditions, which he could easily correct but won’t. These would be crimes against humanity if done by a person. WLC apparently wants to redefine justice so that whatever God does is just. No, God doesn’t get a pass, and Christians don’t get to redefine “justice” to make it easier for God to meet.

He goes on to liken non-Christians who ignore God’s offer of salvation to a drowning man who refuses a life preserver. The obvious flaw in this feeble analogy is that we all know that life preservers exist. A ticket to heavenly paradise, on the other hand, sounds like make-believe.

In part 3, WLC responds to the philosophical question, the one he said deserved attention.

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Image from Steve Shreve, CC license
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This is a continuation of my response to the popular Christian apologetics book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norm Geisler and Frank Turek. Begin with part 1 here. For part 1 of the critique of the moral argument, go here.

In the (mercifully) final section of their chapter on morality, Geisler and Turek (GT) list five areas of confusion within the topic of absolute vs. relative morality. Since the boys have indeed been quite confused about this, perhaps we’ll get some clarity on the issue. The labels in this enumerated list come from their book.

Confusion #1—absolute morals vs. changing behavior

GT tell us that relativists confuse is and ought. You can change what you do, but you can’t change what you ought to do. GT tell us that relativists sometimes preface their outrage at backwards Christian attitudes about issues like sex with, “This is the twenty-first century!” as if morality adapts to the times.

But of course morality has changed over time—consider changing attitudes toward slavery, genocide, and rape, for example. During every time period, society thinks that they have finally gotten on the right side of these issues. GT can fume about it, but morality changes. Given that the Bible’s morality is abysmal, society’s moral evolution away from that is a good thing.

GT respond to charges that our many approaches to morality undercut the idea of a Moral Law, an objective morality.

But that doesn’t mean there is no unchanging Moral Law; it simply means that we all violate it. (page 182)

No, our contradictory moral actions mean that there is no objective, reliably accessible Morality, which they have already admitted. How they imagine this strengthens their claim of objective morality (when the natural explanation works just fine), I can’t imagine.

There’s also a vague reference to the is-ought problem, which I respond to here.

Confusion #2—absolute morals vs. changing perceptions of the facts

GT try to salvage the idea of objective, unchanging morals with the example of witch burning. We used to burn witches but not anymore. A change in morality? The boys tell us no:

What has changed is not the moral principle that murder is wrong but the perception or factual understanding of whether “witches” can really murder people by their curses. (183)

Not really. The KJV of Exodus 22:18 memorably demands of us, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Western society today includes witches (that is, people who so identify and who have corresponding supernatural beliefs), but only the most fringe Christian would demand the death penalty. This is a change in morality, and our modern morality (which is so familiar as to seem like common sense) wins out over a foreign idea in an ancient book.

Confusion #3—absolute morals vs. applying them to particular situations

Even if two victims wind up disagreeing over the morality of a particular act, this does not mean morality is relative. An absolute Moral Law can exist even if people fail to know the right thing to do in a particular situation. (183)

Translation: “Yeah, but I never said that objective morality was reliably accessible.” (But then what good is it?)

The larger point GT make is, “You haven’t proven me wrong.” That’s correct, but that’s not the skeptic’s job. I’ve given a plausible natural explanation for morality. You want to make the remarkable claim that objective morality exists? I’m listening, but not only have you done nothing but assert it, the moral issues you raise are better explained with natural explanations.

Going forward, I’ll leave pointing out the Assumed Objectivity fallacy as an exercise for the reader.

GT move on to imagine people puzzling over a life-or-death dilemma. They come to different conclusions and conclude that morality is relative.

But the dilemma actually proves the opposite—that morality is absolute. How? Because there would be no dilemma if morality were relative! If morality were relative and there were no absolute right to life, you’d say, “It doesn’t matter what happens!” . . . The very reason we struggle with the dilemma is because we know how valuable life is. (184)

Let’s consider the moral options that GT imagine. They reject option 1, some strange form of laissez-faire, “I have my opinion and you have yours, and whatever you do is fine with me” kind of morality. This strawman morality exists only in GT’s imaginations.

GT hope you’ll pick option 2 and say that an objectively correct answer exists, and our only problem, when faced with a moral dilemma, is calling forth this answer from the phlogiston or ectoplasm or wherever it lives. And GT admit that they have no reliable voodoo to do so.

It’s up to the skeptic to point to option 3, the obvious natural explanation: we all share a common sense of morality, and ambiguous or subtle moral puzzles can separate us into opposing camps. There is no objectively correct answer.

The fact that there are difficult problems in morality doesn’t disprove the existence of objective moral laws any more than difficult problems in science disprove the existence of objective natural laws. (184)

Translation: “Ha! You can’t prove me wrong.” That’s not much of an argument.

Yes, there are difficult problems in science, and there are objective natural laws. Science continually pushes through difficult problems and finds those laws. But you say that parallels our search for objective moral laws?

Show me. Science has uncovered many new laws about nature in the last two centuries, so produce one example of a new objective moral law from that time. Eternal aphorisms like the Golden Rule don’t count because they’re old. And if it’s a new development (say, “slavery is bad” or “no genocide”), it can’t be unchanging and is therefore not objective.

The attempted parallel with natural laws fails.

If just one moral obligation exists (such as don’t murder, or don’t rape, or don’t torture babies), then the Moral Law exists. If the Moral Law exists, then so does the Moral Law Giver. (184)

GT are getting desperate now and have ignored the collateral damage. They’ve thrown out of the life raft any claim that their Moral Law is reliably accessible—or even accessible at all. Their objective morality has become a useless bit of trivia—something that exists but might as well not for all the good it does us. They have no explanation for God’s Old Testament rampages and moral errors. As a result, they have discarded any claim to be honestly searching for the truth. This is all to make the claim, “Well, you haven’t proven that objective moral truth is impossible, so God could still exist!”

Would God want to rule the moral wasteland that you’ve left him?

Confusion #4—absolute morals (what) vs. a relative culture (how)

Morality varies by culture—yes, I agree.

Confusion #5—absolute morals vs. moral disagreements

GT note that there are contentious moral issues within society.

Some think abortion is acceptable while others think it’s murder. But just because there are different opinions about abortion doesn’t mean morality is relative. (185)

Not for sure, but it’s a good clue. This is the “You haven’t proven me wrong!” argument again. The burden of proof is yours.

Next up, GT handwave that “each side defends what they think is an absolute moral value.” Redefinition! No one believes in relative morality, and morality is now only absolute morality.

On the heels of that is another redefinition. If you disagree with GT’s anti-abortion stance,

This moral disagreement [about abortion] exists because some people are suppressing the Moral Law in order [to] justify what they want to do. (186)

So if you’re pro-choice, you’re just wrong. As if the arrogance couldn’t get any greater, morality has devolved to become that which GT believe.

I can’t take any more of the same childish errors over and over, so I’m done with this chapter. I’m amazed that the Christian flock is content to be fed such pablum.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/28/15.)

Image from Wikipedia, CC license
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This is a continuation of my response to the popular Christian apologetics book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norm Geisler and Frank Turek. Begin with part 1 here. For part 1 of the critique of the moral argument, go here.

We move on to dabble in history.

Founding U.S. documents

About the U. S. Declaration of Independence, Geisler and Turek (GT) say:

Notice the phrase, “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” In other words, the Founding Fathers believed that human rights are God-given. (page 175)

Nope. “Creator” to the Founding Fathers wasn’t the Yahweh of the Old Testament, it was a hands-off, deist god. The Declaration is of no help to the Christian cause because it makes clear who’s in charge: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Unlike Harry Truman, God doesn’t have a sign on his desk that reads, “The buck stops here.” God is irrelevant to the American experiment.

And an appeal to the Declaration is always a sign that the apologists couldn’t find what they wanted in the Constitution. The Constitution remains the supreme law of the land, while the Declaration is just an important historical document with no role in government today.

Objective morality in the Nuremburg trials

If there were no such international morality that transcended the laws of the secular German government, then the Allies would have had no grounds to condemn the Nazis. (175)

The Allies won, and they imposed their laws—is that surprising? Isn’t that how wars work? Whose laws do you think they should’ve used?

In other words, we couldn’t have said that the Nazis were absolutely wrong unless we knew what was absolutely right. But we do know they were absolutely wrong, so the Moral Law must exist. (175)

Who said the Nazis were absolutely wrong? The Allies said they were regular wrong, we had a trial of 24 German leaders, and we imposed justice from our perspective. This wasn’t a sham trial with summary death sentences for all—half were sentenced to death, three were acquitted, and most of the rest were given prison terms. Centuries from now, future historians might criticize those sentences from their perspective.

The Problem of Evil

GT move on to address what Christians often admit is their toughest intellectual challenge: why does a good god allow so much bad in the world? They answer with an analogy from C. S. Lewis: “A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.” God’s actions may appear wrong, but that can only be because we’re comparing them against an absolute good.

The only straight lines we can make are imperfectly straight lines; similarly, the only moral standards come from our own not-objective rules. GT have again only allowed themselves the option of imagining one kind of morality, an absolute or objective morality.

Notice also that to make this argument, GT must admit that there is a Problem of Evil, which puts God in a very bad light.

Lewis, like you and me, can only detect injustice because there’s an unchanging standard of justice written on our hearts. (176)

That’s another redefinition—now the Moral Law has become unchanging. But I don’t know what’s unchanging about it. Is slavery wrong? It sure wasn’t back in the Old Testament. Same for genocide. Same for polygamy. I certainly think that slavery is wrong for all time, but the Bible won’t support that.

The Holocaust

GT want to know, how do Jewish atheists argue against the Holocaust? Are a critique about a meal and a critique about the Holocaust both mere opinions?

That works for me. Perhaps there’s a word difference that will capture the universally held or deeply felt nature of judgments about the Holocaust. Regardless, this still doesn’t get GT their desired objective morality. The natural explanation of morality works fine: we have a shared idea of morality, and killing millions of people is almost universally accepted as wrong.

GT can’t let go of the idea of a moral law that’s not objective. They imagine that a claim like “racism is wrong” has no objective meaning without the god-given Moral Law. This chapter is 25 pages long, but they could distill it to a page if they cut out the repeated groundless assertions. For example:

Unless there’s an unchanging standard of good, there is no such thing as objective evil. But since we all know that evil exists, then so does the Moral Law. (177)

If the Moral Law doesn’t exist, then there’s no moral difference between the behavior of Mother Teresa and that of Hitler. (178)

[C. S. Lewis said,] “If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something—some Real Morality—for them to be true about.” (178)

Suppose I think it’s okay to kill mice in my house, and you say that one must capture them humanely and set them free outside. There’s a moral difference; is that impossible without a Real Morality?

Ordinary, natural morality is quite capable of distinguishing between Mother Teresa and Hitler (let’s assume that Mother Teresa is the shining example of goodness, as they falsely imagine). GT refuse to consider that the natural explanation even exists, let alone explains morality better than any claim to objective morality. This is the Assumed Objectivity fallacy—either assuming without evidence that objective morals exist or assuming that everyone knows and accepts objective morality.

The word “moral” is just another adjective. Can a puppy be cute or a sunset beautiful or a resolution fair without objective definitions of “cute,” “beautiful,” and “fair”? Of course—look them up in the dictionary. The same is true for “moral.” These concepts come from within, not outside, human culture, and they’re not unchanging. Morality is important, like other aspects of culture, but here GT confuse important with supernatural, probably deliberately.

Moral relativists? Hoist by their own petard!

GT imagine a chaotic world where abortion, birth control, and sex were outlawed. What could atheists say about this?

So by rebelling against the Moral Law, atheists have, ironically, undermined their grounds for rebelling against anything. In fact, without the Moral Law, no one has any objective grounds for being for or against anything! (181)

Again, this is the Assumed Objectivity fallacy. We don’t need objective grounds for morality because the regular kind works (and is the only one we have evidence for).

They continue by arguing that excuses for breaking moral rules are evidence for the Moral Law. Excuses like “It was just a white lie” or “I had to steal the bread because I was starving” or even “I had to shoot him because he had a gun himself” point to the Moral Law.

Nope—these excuses point to a shared natural morality. There is no need to imagine an objective morality.

I don’t remember ever seeing so much blather that could be shut down so quickly, in Gordian Knot fashion. Just drop the demand for objective morality, and this empty argumentation blows away like irrational smoke.

Concluded in part 4.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/23/15.)

Image from Wikimedia, CC license

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This is a continuation of my response to the popular Christian apologetics book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norm Geisler and Frank Turek. Begin the critique of the book here. For part 1 of this critique of the moral argument, go here.

Fundamental problems with the Moral Law argument

Geisler and Turek (GT) formulate their moral argument as follows:

1. Every law has a law giver

2. There is a Moral Law

3. Therefore, there is a Moral Law Giver

What they don’t mention is that every law giver referred to in point 1 is a material being, but then they switch to an immaterial law giver in point 3. They do nothing to address or even acknowledge the fact that their argument can’t explain the change (thanks to commenter MNb for this insight). The problem with the argument becomes obvious when this is made explicit:

1. Every law has a material law giver

2. There is a Moral Law

3. Therefore, there is an immaterial Moral Law giver

Here’s another variant (from commenter primenumbers) that also skewers GT’s flabby argument:

1. Moral values come from a mind.

2. Objectivity means independence from any mind.

3. Therefore, objective moral values don’t exist.

And are we even using the same definition of “law”? Yes, morality is related to human laws, which are to some extent codified morality, but while laws are arbitrary (that is, not objective), some aspects of morality are innate and (from the standpoint of humans) unchangeable. Examples might be the Golden Rule or a prohibition against unjustified killing. Human laws have law givers, but morality is, in part, programmed into humans by evolution and unchangeable.

The analogy and therefore the foundation of the argument fails, but let’s set that aside and see what else GT have up their sleeves.

More redefinitions

One of the problems so far has been to nail down what this Moral Law actually is. They imagine objective moral laws, but what does that mean? Starting with objective morality as a morality grounded outside humanity—rules valid regardless of whether anyone believes in them—the definition changed to the morality that we feel. Then, they back away from the idea that we can reliably access this morality, so it becomes morality that we only dimly feel. Expect more reversals as their moral theory continues to chafe against reality.

Let’s return to GT’s moral argument.

We can’t not know, for example, that it is wrong to kill innocent human beings for no reason. Some people may deny it and commit murder anyway, but deep in their hearts they know murder is wrong. (page 172)

Uh, yeah—murder is wrong by definition. And the natural hypothesis (see part 1 for the natural morality hypothesis that I defend) is sufficient to explain our revulsion at killing innocent people. The supernatural hypothesis is unnecessary.

Relativists make two primary truth claims: 1) there is no absolute truth; and 2) there are no absolute moral values. (172)

I make neither claim.

“1 + 1 = 2” may be an absolute truth. As for absolute moral values, I’ve simply seen no evidence to overturn the natural explanation of morality. I insist on evidence for objective morality, and I suspect I have a long wait.

GT uses “relative morality” in opposition to objective morality, but because the term has been so clumsily defined by apologists, I prefer to state my position as “not objective morality.” To minimize confusion in this post, though, I’ll stick with GT’s terms, “relativists” and “relative morality.”

Relativists are absolutely sure that there are no absolutes. (173)

Nope. I’m just pretty sure there are no moral absolutes. I keep doggedly asking for evidence, though I get nothing in response.

Relative morality fails?

GT relate the anecdote of a paper written by an atheist student. The student argued, “All morals are relative; there is no absolute standard of justice or rightness,” and the professor gave it an F because of the color of the folder it was delivered in. When the student protested that the reason wasn’t fair, the professor asked, “But didn’t you argue in your paper that there is no such thing?” At that point, the student “realized he really did believe in moral absolutes.”

I don’t, and I doubt any student in that situation would. There are absolute morals, and then there are the ordinary kind as defined in the dictionary. The student appealed to the natural non-objective morality he shared with the professor.

This is the Assumed Objectivity Fallacy. GT assumes that everyone knows and accepts objective morality. We’ll be seeing more of this.

The moral of the story [about the paper graded F] is that there are absolute morals. And if you really want to get relativists to admit it, all you need to do is treat them unfairly. (173)

Treat relativists unfairly, and they’ll appeal to shared, natural morality just like the student.

People may claim they are relativists, but they don’t want their spouses, for example, to live like sexual relativists. (173)

So you think relative morality is no morality? Your “moral relativists” have morals; they just don’t pretend that the morals are grounded outside humanity since there is no evidence for that.

Actually, I’m happy for my spouse to use relative morality for all aspects of her life, both because I know of nothing else and because the natural morality that we all use works pretty well.

This reminds me of an observation from Penn Jillette: “The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero.” Natural morality—it’s not perfect, but it serves us pretty well.

GT moves on to the visceral horror we felt from 9/11.

Our reaction reinforced the truth that the act was absolutely wrong. (175)

Another redefinition! We’ve switched to emotional gut feelings, and objective morality is now strongly felt morality.

GT go on to admit that we often betray our moral sense with our actions (the bad things we do), but they claim that the Moral Law is “revealed in our reactions.” Our sense of the Moral Law isn’t good enough to keep us firmly on the right track, but the truth comes out when we react. So now—redefinition!—objective morality is instinctive morality.

GT’s sloppy thinking may work with the flock, but it has consequences. One Amazon reviewer of this book titled his comment, “I don’t have enough intellectual dishonesty to be a Christian.”

Continued in part 3.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/21/15.)

Image from Megan Studdenfadden, CC license
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