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

Image credit: Wikimedia