This is a continuation of a critique of Frank Turek’s arguments in favor of Christianity made in his latest book. See the beginning of the discussion here.
The M in CRIMES is Morality
On the topic of morality, Turek couldn’t resist a Holocaust reference. He showed a photo of the Buchenwald concentration camp with stacks of dead bodies. He said,

If there is no god, this is just a matter of opinion.

The statement “I like chocolate” is just an opinion. By contrast, I wouldn’t call “I recommend we declare war” in a cabinet meeting just an opinion, but that’s a quibble. If Turek wants to say that both are conclusions grounded in the person making the statement and nothing else, I agree. The same is true for “the Holocaust was wrong.”
What alternative does Turek propose?
Turek imagines a morality grounded outside of humanity. He would probably agree with William Lane Craig’s definition of objective morality, “moral values that are valid and binding whether anybody believes in them or not.”
The other explanation for morality
But there’s no need to imagine Turek’s universal moral truth when we have a better alternate explanation: universally held moral programming. We’re all the same species, so we have similar responses to moral questions. That explains things nicely without the unsupported assumption of a supernatural being.
Turek confuses the degree of outrage (which, for the Holocaust, is quite high) with the degree of absoluteness. He seems to imagine that the more emphatically we think that the Holocaust was wrong, the more objective that moral opinion must be, but why imagine this? He provides no evidence to support universal moral truth or to reject the obvious alternative, universally held moral programming.
Let’s take a step back and consider his example. God allows 11 million innocent people to die in the Holocaust, and Turek thinks that this is an example supporting his side of the ledger?
Morality also changes with time. In the West, we’re pleased with our abolition of slavery and the civil rights we’ve established, but these aren’t universals. The modern views on these issues contradict the Old Testament’s, but none of us cling to the Old Testament view. Turek’s objective morality doesn’t allow change with time.
Morality vs. absolute morality
Turek listed things that must be true if God doesn’t exist. First, “The Nazis were not wrong.” If morality is an opinion, the Nazis had an opinion and the Allies had an opinion. We said they were wrong; they said we were wrong. Stalemate.
Nope—dude needs a dictionary. He’s confusing morality with absolute morality. I agree that the Nazis were not wrong in an absolute sense. But they were still wrong (from my standpoint) using the definition of morality in the dictionary, which makes no reference to an absolute grounding.
He continues his list with more examples of the same error: love is no better than rape, killing people is no different than feeding the poor, and so on. In an absolute sense, he’s right; he just hasn’t given any reason to imagine that morality is based in absolutes. Drop the assumption of absoluteness, and nothing is left unexplained.
Why the insistence on objective or universal or absolute morality? We don’t have any problem with shared (rather than absolute) ideas of other concepts like courage, justice, charity, hope, patience, humility, greed, or pride. Again, the dictionary agrees. None of these have an objective grounding, and the earth keeps turning just fine.
Turek bragged about the time he kicked Christopher Hitchens’ butt when Hitchens raised the issue of wrongs done in the name of God during the Crusades. Turek agreed but said that there’s nothing wrong with that if there is no god; without a standard of righteousness there is no righteousness.
Add the qualifier that we’re talking about absolute morality, and I agree. As he stated it, it’s nonsense.
Turek wrestles with science and science loses
Turek continues to praise science when he approves of it and lampoon it when he doesn’t.

If we’re just overgrown germs that got here by some evolutionary process then we’re no different than any other animal.

Yep, science makes clear that we’re just one more species of animal. Is this a problem?
This must’ve been a bone thrown to those in the audience who imagine that the universe was built for them. As Neil DeGrasse Tyson observed, “If you are depressed after being exposed to the cosmic perspective, you started your day with an unjustifiably large ego.”
Turek again:

Atheists can’t justify morality.

Again, I’m missing the problem. What, specifically, are atheists unable to do? A natural evolution of morality seems pretty defensible.
But the bigger question is, And you think you can justify morality?? Sure, you can point to this doctrine or that verse, but that explains nothing. You say your theology has it all figured out? Great—show that your theology is accurate and you’ve got an argument. Until then, nothing.
Here’s a thought experiment, Frank. Imagine that two Christians are arguing about a moral issue. They finally agree that Christian #1 was correct. Question: did they reach the right conclusion?
You’ll say that you need to know what the options were. But how is that relevant? You inject yourself into the conversation, and now it’s three Christians. How does that help? Or maybe you’ll say that you need to know what procedure they used. Again: how does that help? Prayer is no source of moral truth, and interpreting the Bible is ambiguous. Morality comes from people. That explains how Western societies could think that slavery was okay but now think it’s not. Explain that with unchanging objective morality.
In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s ruby slippers could always have taken her home. Like Dorothy, we have always been the source of our morality and some of us simply need to realize that. Society’s morality ain’t perfect, but it’s the best we have, and improving it as we mature is a heckuva lot better than being held back by a barbarous book that preserves the morality from a primitive society thousands of years ago.
Continue to E = Evil and S = Science.

One of the great tragedies of mankind
is that morality has been hijacked by religion.
— Arthur C. Clarke

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/12/13.)
Image credit: James Cridland, flickr, CC
 

This is a continuation of a critique of Frank Turek’s arguments in favor of Christianity made in his latest book. See the beginning of the discussion here.
The R in CRIMES is Reason
Turek said, “If you’re an atheist, you can’t justify reason.” He said that Darwin knew this, referring to this statement from Darwin: “Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” If our minds are just the end result of a long series of evolutionary steps, why trust them?
First, who cares what Darwin said? If the subject is History of Science, that’s interesting. If it’s simply what evolution or physiology say today, we’re not bound by what Darwin says. No one consults Darwin’s writings to ensure that the latest findings don’t contradict the great man.
The fallible human brain
Second, I agree that our brains are quite fallible. Who would disagree? This passage from my book Future Hype (2006) summarizes some of our blind spots.

Ongoing risks with a track record (such as the number of deaths per year) are easy to compare with each other. Nevertheless, most people weigh risks poorly. The average American is much likelier to die in a car accident than a plane crash, much likelier to die from lightning than fireworks, and much likelier to die from influenza than anthrax. You’re less likely to win the jackpot in a major lottery than to die in an accident while driving to buy the ticket. The likeliest calamity that could happen to a traveler to another country is not terrorism or kidnapping, but a car accident. Tornadoes and hurricanes combined aren’t as deadly as heat waves; heroin and cocaine combined aren’t as deadly as alcohol. Risk experts say that nuclear power is quite safe and swimming is not, while most people feel the opposite. Money spent on disease research is only vaguely proportional to each disease’s impact. We worry about cell phones and brain cancer when we should be worried about cell phones and driving. The public’s ranking of fears doesn’t match up with the real risks, and a technology with the same death rate as a natural risk is perceived as more dangerous.

Here are more examples of the fallibility of our brains.

• Our brains play tricks on us: consider placebos, psychosomatic illnesses, and phantom limb pain.
• We can be fooled by optical and auditory illusions. Pareidolia is seeing patterns where none exist—a message in a song played backwards or the face of Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich, for example. Coincidences can seem meaningful even when random.
• We confuse confidence with accuracy when we overestimate how reliable our memories are. Richard Wiseman’s awesome color-changing card trick shows that your skills at observation may not be as good as you might think.
• We’re poor at weighing harm. The Discovery television channel had a Shark Week, but based on how many people are actually killed, Cow Week would make more sense. That’s right—cows kill more people than sharks. Psychic numbing is a related problem. This is the observation, “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”
• A popular misconception in South Korea is that electric fans in closed rooms can be deadly, but we Americans shouldn’t get too cocky, because we have our own blind spots. In a 2013 poll of Americans, 21% say a UFO crashed in Roswell, 28% believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack, 20% believe there is a link between childhood vaccines and autism, 7% think the moon landing was faked, 13% think Barack Obama is the anti-Christ, 14% say the CIA created the crack epidemic, 9% think the government adds fluoride to our water supply for sinister reasons, 4% believe lizard people control our societies, and 11% believe the US government allowed 9/11 to happen.
• We know how crop circles are made, and yet some people are determined to see them as the work of extraterrestrials. Most of us have probably used Snopes to investigate a suspicious story passed along by email, and yet urban legends continue to deceive.
• We’re surrounded by simple instances of probability, and yet we’re terrible at it. If you want to see how good your instincts are, give the Monty Hall problem a try.
• We have cognitive biases such as confirmation bias, where we focus on evidence that confirms our thinking and ignore evidence that refutes it. The backfire effect is what happens when you correct an error in someone’s mind, but they retrench and believe the misinformation more strongly.
• The weighty Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) lists hundreds of kinds of mental illness.

Now that we’re on the same page that the human brain is imperfect, how do the atheist and theist proceed from here? Let’s return to Turek’s claim, “If you’re an atheist, you can’t justify reason.” So therefore the Christian can?
This is just another argument of the form “Ooh! Ooh! I know! It was God!” No—your unsupported dogma isn’t even in the running. Show us the evidence, or remain at the children’s table.
And yes, actually atheists can justify reason. Evolution selected for animals that had a good understanding of reality. Those that didn’t—those whose senses gave unreliable information or whose brains evaluated the information poorly—became lunch. (I respond to Alvin Plantinga’s similar Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism here.)
The human mind is indeed unreliable for finding absolute truth. The best we can hope for are good approximations. If Turek can access absolute and immutable truth, he needs to share that marvelous fact with the rest of us.
If we agree that the human brain is imperfect, why does the Christian trust it when it makes the incredibly outrageous claim that God exists? Apparently Turek thinks that atheists can’t rely on God’s imperfect gift but Christians can.
Continue to I = Information.

Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully 
as when they do it for religious convictions. 
— Blaise Pascal

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 08/05/13.)
Image credit: Ryan Cadby, flickr, CC
 

Fellow atheist blogger Jeffery Jay Lowder of Secular Outpost blog here at Patheos has a new video that responds to Frank Turek’s recent book, Stealing From God: Why Atheists Need God to Make Their Case.
Lowder recently debated Turek, and he repurposed his presentation for that debate into this video rebuttal of Turek’s book. I haven’t seen that debate, though I did listen to a recent podcast with Turek, and he praised Lowder highly as someone who was polite and provided a substantive argument.
Turek arranged his apologetic book using the acronym CRIMES:

• Causality
• Reason
• Information
• Morality
• Evil
• Science

Lowder, in his video, created his own acronym in response, VICTIM:

• Value
• Induction
• Causality
• Time
• Information
• Morality

Lowder’s video is a couple of hours long, though he has an index so you can jump to the parts that you find most interesting. Check it out here.

Man outgrows religion
by self-respect and self-awareness of capacity,
which overcomes misery.
And thus changes religion of misery into misery of religion.
— “The Misery of Religion” by Anton Constandse
(translated by commenter Mark Nieuweboer)

People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning
… but moral rationalization:
they begin with the conclusion,
coughed up by an unconscious emotion,
and then work backward to a plausible justification.
— Steven Pinker