Let’s revisit the question of objective morality. We have another contestant who thinks he can convince us that objective morality exists.
But before we consider that, here’s Christian apologist Tim Keller to set the stage:

The Nazis who exterminated Jews may have claimed that they didn’t feel it was immoral at all. We don’t care. We don’t care if they sincerely felt they were doing a service to humanity. They ought not to have done it. We do not only have moral feelings, but we also have an ineradicable belief that moral standards exist, outside of us, by which our internal moral feelings are evaluated.

“They ought not have done it”? How do you know?
This is the problem with how this topic is typically handled within Christian apologetics: a moral situation with one obvious answer is tossed out, and we’re supposed to infer ourselves into the apologist’s moral viewpoint. This is insufficient. There’s a difference between a widely believed or strongly felt moral opinion and objective morality. Don’t make the remarkable claim of objective morality (Keller’s “moral standards exist, outside of us”) without evidence.
Enter our contestant …
Let’s give a warm welcome to J. Warner Wallace of the Cold Case Christianity blog. He interviewed me on his podcast once, and we’ve had occasional email exchanges. He’s unfailingly polite and a good reminder to all of us that dialing back the anger makes one’s arguments more palatable.
In one post, Wallace first notes that the simple moral dictates that we find in the Ten Commandments (don’t kill, don’t lie, etc.) are insufficient because sometimes these actions are justified. How do we escape from this moral morass? He offers this rule:

When we simply insert the expression “for the fun of it” into our descriptions of these moral actions, we discover the objective moral foundation to these claims. [With this applied to killing and lying], we’ve just discovered two objective moral absolutes.

So we shouldn’t kill or lie just for fun. I confess that I’m unimpressed. Do we now have a useful moral roadmap where we didn’t before? Does this rule illuminate issues that frustrate society like abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and capital punishment so that the correct path is now clear to all?
Nope. We’re no wiser than we were before. And note that the Nazis didn’t kill Jews just for fun, so this rule does nothing to help Keller’s example.
The point of this exercise is only to spit out yet another example that we can all agree to. Keller pointed out that exterminating Jews was bad, and Wallace points out that killing or lying without justification is bad. I’m sure we all agree with these claims, but this isn’t news. Nothing has been illuminated.
And the correct answer is …
The problem, of course, is the remarkable claim of moral truth grounded outside humanity—“moral values that are valid and binding whether anybody believes in them or not” as William Lane Craig defines it. Why would you pick this explanation? A far more plausible explanation is morality as a combination of

• a fixed part (moral programming that we all pretty much share since we’re the same species) and
• a variable part (social mores).

This explains morality completely without an appeal to the supernatural.
Wallace next anticipates some reactions to his position.
What do we do when two groups disagree on a moral issue?
Wallace first imagines Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.

When a society defines an objective moral truth and the vast majority of its members agree, on what basis can a lone reformer make a call for change?

Obviously not through an appeal to an objective moral truth. If such a truth were accessible to all of us, how could we be in disagreement? Or does Wallace imagine that objective moral truth is not reliably accessible? But if it’s inaccessible, what good is it?
Wallace puzzles over how MLK could’ve caused change, but where’s the difficulty? History tells how it happened. America is not a simple democracy where the majority rules. We have a Bill of Rights that protects the minority against the tyranny of the majority. We have a free press. And we have a long history of (slowly) changing our minds on moral issues.
The majority opinion is that and nothing more. The moral claim “Jim Crow laws are wrong” is grounded only by everyone who agrees with the statement. It’s not objective moral truth.
Next, what about two societies that disagree? He gives as an example the Nuremburg trials of Nazi war criminals, during which a prosecutor said, “There is a law above the law.” Yes, that sounds like an appeal to objective morality, but that appeal is no more supported by this guy than by Wallace himself. The laws used during the trials came from the Allies, not from God.
Since morality changes, doesn’t this overturn the idea of objective morality?
Wallace gives an anecdote about four witnesses with conflicting descriptions of a purse snatcher. Does this disagreement mean that there was no purse snatcher? No, Wallace says, and similarly, disagreement about what objective moral truth is doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.
But if we can’t agree on the description of the purse snatcher, then why bring up objective truth? All you’ve shown is that the description is inaccessible, so why bring up “objective” anything?
And back to our subject, if different people give different answers to today’s moral issues, where does “objective” fit in? There may be an objectively correct resolution to each, but we can’t access it. The Big Book of Moral Truth is locked up in God’s library.
Wallace might’ve given us slightly more than other apologists, but this is woefully insufficient to overturn the obvious natural explanation of morality.

Can God make a rock so heavy that hitting His head with it 
would explain the change in personality He underwent 
between the Old Testament and the New Testament?
— commenter GubbaBumpkin

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/21/13.)
 

Avalon has supported this blog since its earliest days (and before, when I had a small corner of apologetics.com), generous both with comments and the occasional correction. He is today’s guest blogger.
If you want to write a guest post, contact me.
Dr. Craig’s famous moral argument goes like this:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

He defines objective moral values like this:

To say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is right or wrong independently of whether anybody believes it to be so.

We may safely replace the definition of a word for the word itself without altering the meaning of a sentence. Let’s do so now to clarify the argument:

1. If God does not exist, values and duties independent from what anyone believes do not exist.
2. Values and duties independent from what anyone believes do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

I take issue with #2. It is not self-evident that values and duties independent from what anyone believes do exist. Since every example of objective moral values Dr. Craig uses (Nazis, murder, rape, torturing babies for fun, etc. …) is in agreement with what everyone believes, I submit that they are not independent from human belief.
Therefore, I submit the following argument:

1. If God does not exist, values and duties independent from what anyone believes do not exist.
2. Values and duties are not independent from what anyone believes. They exist by consensus of belief.
3. Therefore, the existence of values and duties has no bearing on the existence of God.

Dr. Craig goes on to explain,

It is to say, for example, that Nazi anti-Semitism was morally wrong, even though the Nazis who carried out the Holocaust thought that it was good; and it would still be wrong even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in exterminating or brainwashing everybody who disagreed with them.

Note that Dr. Craig has chosen an example of near universal agreement. How is it that Dr. Craig knows that the Nazis were objectively wrong? Isn’t it because everyone (except Nazis) agrees with him? This merely endorses his opinion that the consensus view is objectively true. But he’s just said that what we believe (individually, collectively, or universally) is irrelevant to the actual truth of the matter. Why rely on the consensus view to support your claim of objectivity? Is it just his intuition?
Suppose Dr. Craig’s scenario actually happened and everyone was brainwashed. Assuming a good brainwashing leaves no trace of your former beliefs and no memory of being changed, what position would Dr. Craig hold in this post-brainwashed world? Would he not point to what everyone (now) knows as evidence for the Nazis being objectively right? What makes the consensus view objectively right before we’re all brainwashed, but objectively wrong after we’re all brainwashed? According to Dr. Craig’s definition, where our beliefs are irrelevant, isn’t it entirely possible that our near universal beliefs were entirely wrong beforehand and the act of brainwashing simply put us onto the objective truth? Does Dr. Craig think his intuition remains unchanged after being brainwashed?
If Dr. Craig believes his own argument (values and duties independent from what anyone believes do exist) then why doesn’t he provide an example? He’s had opportunities to do so, yet he never appeals to his own argument.
For example, when asked about the Canaanite genocide that God ordered, Dr. Craig could simply reply that that was the objectively right thing to do even though we all believe it was wrong. But he doesn’t. Instead, he abandons all objective morality and cites many other, subjective moral theories (ones he supposedly rejects). These include cultural differences (“our moral sensibilities in the West”), upbringing (“shaped by our Judeo-Christian heritage, which has taught us…”), and consequentialism (“the death of these children was actually their salvation”). All of these reasons indicate someone who believes in the subjective nature of moral values rooted in what we all collectively believe about them.
The same is true when confronted with the problem of evil. Dr. Craig could say that we may perceive evil in this world, but we’re all wrong and it’s all objectively good. But he doesn’t. Instead he jumps right back on the subjectivist bandwagon and becomes a consequentialist when he says:

What I am simply saying is that God’s aims in this life, in this world, are for a maximum number of people to come to know God and His salvation as fully as possible. And it is possible that that would not be achieved in a world that did not involve as much suffering and evil as this world does. Far from being counter-intuitive, I find that very plausible. In fact, I have recently done a study, using a missions handbook, of nations of the world in which there has been intense suffering, and what I found over and over again is that it is in precisely those nations that evangelical Christianity is experiencing its most rapid and sustained growth.

So, in his mind, it’s not that what we perceive as evil is actually an objective good. We’re right again and it’s really evil, but it’s just a means to a greater good.
It is not self-evident that values and duties independent from what anyone believes do exist. Dr. Craig never provides an example of such independent values and duties. No one has ever provided evidence of independent values and duties that differ from human belief. And Dr. Craig refuses to use his own argument when the opportunity arises. Therefore, I submit that Dr. Craig doesn’t believe in objective moral values, that is, values and duties independent from what anyone believes.
So here’s the challenge to any objective moralist who agrees with Craig’s definition: give me one example of an objective good that everyone believes is wrong, some basic act that we all believe is evil, but is independently (that is objectively) good despite what anybody believes.
But perhaps I’m being unfair. Suppose it’s the case that objective moral values happen to be exactly the same as the consensus view of mankind at this point in time. If that’s the case, then it’d be impossible to provide a counter-example because none would exist. It could be that every moral consensus now is objectively true. If so, then we have a new definition of objective moral values: Objective moral values are the consensus values of mankind at this point in time.
If objective moral values are always identical to our consensus beliefs then their independence is irrelevant. We are then perfectly capable of determining moral values by a consensus of belief and no outside source (God) is necessary.

When people complain about the lack of values, 
They are usually complaining about the fact 
that other people fail to value the things they value, 
and they are presupposing that the things they value 
are the things that are truly valuable.
— Richard Garner

(This is a repeat of a post that originally appeared 6/3/13.)
 

Why do liberals and conservatives argue so much about morality? Don’t we all have a common sense of right and wrong?
Yes and no. For the common examples given by Christian apologists (torturing babies, for example), we’re all on the same page, but it’s more complicated than that. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has brought the amorphous domain of morality into focus to reveal five separate categories. It’s a simple idea that explains much and can help us get past our differences—or at least understand them better.
From his TED video, here are Haidt’s five components of morality.

1. Care/harm. We’ve evolved to feel (and dislike) pain. This isn’t just true for ourselves; we also sense and dislike pain in others. From this comes kindness, nurturing, empathy, and so on.
2. Fairness/reciprocity. This is related to reciprocal altruism. From this foundation comes justice, rights, autonomy, and the Golden Rule.
3. Ingroup/loyalty. We have a long history as tribal creatures able to adapt to shifting coalitions. This foundation underlies patriotism, selflessness, and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it’s one for all, and all for one.
4. Authority/respect. As primates, we understand hierarchical social interactions. This foundation underlies the virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.
5. Purity/sanctity. This is shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. Being repulsed by things that look or smell bad can keep us from eating unsafe food. It also underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, and more noble way.

Haidt theorizes that the rise of civilization may have needed all five of the morality categories.
Make love, not war
Here’s the interesting bit: when people from different viewpoints are tested against these five categories, everyone strongly endorses #1 (care/harm) and #2 (fairness/reciprocity).
As Haidt’s drawing shows, Americans across the political spectrum strongly endorse the foundations of Care/Harm and Fairness. Not so for the next three. The conservative says “go team,” while the liberal says “celebrate diversity” (#3). The conservative says, “respect authority,” while the liberal says, “question authority” (#4). The conservative says, “life is sacred” (while the liberal says, “women have the right to choose”) and “Men kissing? Eww!” (while the liberal says, “Don’t like gay marriage? Don’t have one.”), category #5.
That’s a caricature, of course. Liberals like the team, authority, and purity as well; it’s just that they are likelier than conservatives to fear these good ideas taken to an extreme.
Liberals speak for the weak and oppressed, and they’ll risk chaos for the benefits of change. Conservatives speak for institutions and traditions, and they’ll risk injustice to those at the bottom for the benefits of order.
Haidt observes that in Eastern thought, it’s not the zero-sum game that it is in the West. While there are opposites (yin and yang, for example), they aren’t enemies. Each is recognized as having value. Brahma is the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer. Each has a role.
This insight that morality is composed of different components has been helpful to me in making clear how those who disagree with me aren’t evil or insane but simply see morality differently. We value the same moral foundations but rank them differently.

See also: Understanding Morality—It’s Really Not that Hard

Are we at an impasse?
Let me think aloud for a bit.
Social liberals and conservatives will see issues like abortion and same-sex marriage differently. The liberal acknowledges the differences and wants each person to be minimally constrained. You need an abortion? Up to a point, it’s your choice. You’re going to get gay married? Congratulations!
Alternatively, if you don’t like abortion or gay marriage, then don’t get one. If you want to argue against them, the First Amendment allows that.
The conservative typically wants minimal government intrusion but makes an exception here because the stakes are so high. Life is too important to permit abortion. Marriage is too important in the traditional sense to expand the definition. Government is tasked to impose the correct approach on everyone.
Where does this put us as a society? Are we destined to struggle? Or are there larger social trends pushing us in one direction or the other where, like slavery and civil rights, one side will prevail and the debate will seem inconceivable decades from now?

Never let your sense of morals 
prevent you from doing what is right. 
— Isaac Asimov, Foundation

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/29/13.)
Image credit: Wikimedia

Morality changes, and we shake our heads in disbelief at the conditions that Western society tolerated just a century or two ago—slavery, child labor, mental hospitals as warehouses, voting for white men only, and so on. But let’s not pretend that we’ve now got it all figured out. A century in our future, society might look back on our world in disbelief at the moral errors (from their standpoint) that we found acceptable. Raising animals and then killing and eating them may be one of these moral errors.
There is a solution: synthetic meat.
The moral issue
How many of us have heard someone say that they took a tour of a slaughterhouse and became a vegetarian on the spot? Some cows, chickens, or pigs live fairly natural lives before they are killed for meat, but there are millions that won’t.
I eat meat. What’s my moral excuse? If pressed, I’d argue with a combination of “I like to eat meat” and “Yeah, but everyone else is doing it.” There is a small health issue—getting the right amino acid mix is easy from meat, but from plants it requires some thought—but that is easily resolved. By eating meat, I’m taking the easy route, but I don’t have much of a moral defense.
What got me thinking about this was a recent Sam Harris interview with Uma Valeti of Memphis Meats, a new company working on synthetic meat (Valeti prefers the term cultured meat).
The environmental issue
The magnitude of the environmental problem is as shocking as the moral one.

• Land use. Pastureland (land used for open grazing as well as that used to raise crops for livestock) is one quarter of the earth’s land area (Annenberg). “Only about 20 percent of the planet’s agricultural land is used to produce food that is eaten directly by people, while about four times as much is used to feed livestock.” (Union of Concerned Scientists)
• Greenhouse gases. Cows produce a lot of methane. The agriculture contribution to worldwide greenhouse gases is 15% (UN FAO).
• Deforestation. The need for pastureland is a major driver of deforestation (Union of Concerned Scientists).
• Water use. “The consumption of animal products contributes to more than one-quarter of the water footprint of humanity.” Source
• The environmental impact of beef is especially large: “Nearly 60% of the world’s agricultural land is used for beef production, yet beef accounts for less than 2% of the calories that are consumed throughout the world. Beef makes up 24% of the world’s meat consumption, yet requires 30 million square kilometres of land to produce. In contrast, poultry accounts for 34% of global meat consumption and pork accounts for 40%. Poultry and pork production each use less than two million square kilometres of land.” Source

These problems also touch on political tensions caused by scarce fresh water and climate change. There’s also the energy used and the pollution caused by raising livestock.
Can cultured meat be the answer?
A 2013 article titled, “A quarter-million pounder and fries” documented the taste test of a €250,000 hamburger, the first made from synthetic beef. We have a long way to go, but, as Sam Harris noted, the cost to sequence a human genome is now around $1000, while the first one, sequenced in 2003, cost $3 billion. Technology predictions often disappoint, but there is room for optimism.
Valeti of Memphis Meats cites the problems with the status quo, both moral and environmental, as the motivation for cultured meat. There are other benefits.

• No antibiotics would be needed (70% of antibiotics used in the U.S. are for livestock).
• The amount and kind of fat in the meat can be tuned.
• There are 4 million illnesses every year from eating meat in the U.S., and most of these are due to unsterile meat from the store.
• Eliminating animal breeders might also eliminate influenza pandemics.
• There would be no risk of prion disease such as BSE.
• The cultured process is more efficient. It now takes 23 calories to make 1 calorie of beef, while Valeti’s process should require just 3 calories.

The public responds
Harris said that his own informal Twitter poll reported that, while most people would switch if the cost and taste were identical to conventional meat, the creepiness factor was a problem to some. I suppose they imagine peaceful grazing cows monitored by hay-chewing cowboys replaced by bubbling vats of chemicals monitored by white-coated technicians. So they’re grossed out by vats but okay with a slaughterhouse?
“Natural” as a trait of food is in vogue today, and there will be pushback against cultured meat. But how natural are the animals we’re growing for meat? Valeti said, “The chickens that we eat now grow 6 to 7 times faster than they would in the natural environment. The cows give about 10 times more milk than what they would naturally give. Turkeys are so top-heavy that they can’t even stand up to breed.”
We’re not there yet
We should hold off celebrations. Hamburgers and sausage may happen quickly (Memphis Meats hopes to release their first product in five years), but complex structures like steak will take longer. A technology maxim that we often forget is that you can’t schedule a breakthrough. The politically powerful ranching industry will fight for the status quo.
Nevertheless, I find it encouraging that a startup like Memphis Meats quickly found funding.
The switch to a diet with meat has been credited with changing our genus and permitting our large human brain. Maybe we’ll soon be able to eat that diet with a clear conscience.

In 50 years, I personally believe that
the thought of slaughtering animals for meat
will be laughable.
— Uma Valeti of Memphis Meats

Image credit: IQRemix, flickr, CC

Everyone safe and sound after yesterday’s scary lunar eclipse? The weather in Seattle cooperated, and I watched it with many other sky watchers.

In an article in John Hagee’s local paper titled, “John Hagee Didn’t Mean The Apocalypse Was Coming Yesterday, Silly,” we’re told that all the mocking of Hagee is out of line. “Nowhere in Revelation does it say that the end of days was due to arrive on September 27, 2015.” Right—and nowhere in the entire Bible does it say anything to support John Hagee’s breathless four blood moons hypothesis.

The article continues, “According to Hagee, the end times will arrive at some unspecified point in the future.” In other words, the period of the four blood moons was meaningless for telling us when the End will come. Thoughtfully, the article ends with links for buying the DVD, book, and soundtrack. There’s still time before the End to buy a book that tells you nothing about the End!

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 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. 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 slavery, genocide, and rape, for example—and we think that now we’re on the right side of these issues. GT can fume about it, but morality changes. Given that the Bible’s morality is abysmal, moral evolution of society away from that is a good thing.

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

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 King James Version of Exodus 22:18 memorably commands us, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Western society includes people who claim to be witches with corresponding supernatural beliefs, but only the most fringe Christian would demand the death penalty. This is a change in morality—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.”

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 so far you’ve done nothing but assert it (with examples that are better explained by the natural explanation!).

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 imagines. They reject option 1, some strange form of laissez-faire, “Whatever you do is fine with me” kind of morality. This straw man 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 is calling forth this answer from the phlogiston or ectoplasm or wherever it lives. The problem is that they 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”—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’s parallel to our search for objective moral laws?

Show me. Produce one example of a new objective moral law from the last two centuries. 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 this 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 answer 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.

I don’t have enough intellectual dishonesty
to be a Christian.
— title of one Amazon review of
I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist

Image credit: Wikipedia

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 given sentenced to hang, 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?

GT respond 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, absolute or objective morality.

Notice also that to make this argument, GT must grant our claim that there is a problem of evil, which puts God in a bad light.

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

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 strongly 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 Moral Law. This chapter is 25 pages long, but they could distill it to a page if they cut out the repeated errors. 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 trap 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.

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)

Assumed Objectivity fallacy. We don’t need objective grounds for morality because the regular kind works.

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.

To be concluded in Part 4.

I assert that if you are depressed
after being exposed to the cosmic perspective,
you started your day with an unjustifiably large ego.
— Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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