Cold Case Christianity: Wallace's shockingly unpersuasive case for objective morals

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Cold Case Christianity: 

God Didn’t Create Moral Law, It’s Simply a Reflection of His Character

Posted: 18 Jul 2018 01:52 AM PDT

Moral truths are malleable and subjective if they aren’t grounded in a transcendent source (such as God).

That's highly misleading.  Read Isaiah 13:16-17 and you'll find out that God sometimes causes men to rape women, forcing you to conclude either that God's own morals are malleable, or that rape can be good in certain circumstances.  In the below-quoted section from Isaiah 13, God is the alleged speaker:

 16 Their little ones also will be dashed to pieces Before their eyes; Their houses will be plundered And their wives ravished.
 17 Behold, I am going to stir up the Medes against them, Who will not value silver or take pleasure in gold.
 18 And their bows will mow down the young men, They will not even have compassion on the fruit of the womb, Nor will their eye pity children. (Isa. 13:16-18 NAU)

Go ahead:  read the whole chapter, then come back here and tell me who the speaker was in v. 16-17.  Wallace continues:

I’m not the only person to realize this; even honest atheists recognize the inconsistency of embracing objective moral truths while simultaneously rejecting the one reasonable source for such truths. In a recent exchange with an atheist who is frustrated with his peers, I received the following email:

“It’s the rare atheist who will honestly admit what their world view would wreak, taken to its logical conclusion. To know that you are simply an accidental conglomeration of chemicals at the same time that such a thing as morals even exist is oxymoronic statement and yet I hear it all the time from fellow atheists.  …Be consistent. Acknowledge that the Universe is an uncaused accident, ethics is an illusion, and act accordingly. Or acknowledge the possibility of another possibility.  Stop trying to have it both ways.  Can you be an ethical atheist?  Yes.  But you won’t be a logical one.”

 Fuck you, Wallace.  That "atheist" was either Frank Turek, or one of his dishonest followers pretending to be an atheist.  Or it was just you, dishonestly crediting your faulty viewpint to a non-existent atheist.

Only a stupid Christian apologist would say that morals cannot exist in a godless universe.  For life forms to survive, they need to act upon value judgments, whether to fight or flee, whether to attack or back off, etc, etc. You don't think insects are created in God's image, yet you are quite aware that they are capable of distinguishing, imperfectly, situations of danger from situations of benefit, and to make decisions as to whether to act or not act in given situations.

The truth is that "morals" are simply the value judgments that most creatures make in their environment. 

And since "morals" include value judgments most people would think are immoral, such as rape, it is clear that morals, being a normative part of mammalian life, obviously exist, since living human beings who survive from day to day, obviously exist. 

Whether atheists can reasonably view their own subjective morals as "better" than other atheist morals, is a different question.  But yes, it's possible, and it happens every day.  The wrongness of rape is felt by most people (most of the world is civilized) and has nothing to do with "god", but has everything to do with our subjective value judgments about respecting boundaries, allowing women to have free choice, and our collective decision to govern ourselves by the laws set down by our representatives and legislators.  Wallace, you cannot really say you'd think adult men marrying pre-adolescent girls is "immoral" if you had been born and raised in a 16th century Yemeni family.

Your bible is full of morals set down by your 'god' that most Christians today would cringe at, such as the need to burn to death the girl who, while still living in her fathers house, acts as a prostitute, Leviticus 21:9.  Gee, why didn't god put that law into our hearts?  Did he just decide by flipping a coin? Casting lots?

That’s an amazingly honest statement from an atheistic perspective.

 No, it is unsurprisingly dishonest...or else it comes from a rather stupid atheist. There is no requirement that ethics be absolute or objective in order to be "ethics".  It is a moral decision whether a Christian man wishes to give in to his Christian wife's request to have sex.  But what fool would pretend that this is governed by an objective or absolute standard?  It doesn't matter if they have a biblical duty toward each other regarding sex, sometimes, one of them just isn't in the mood, and nothing but the passing of time can change this. 

Will you say their sexual obligation toward one another under 1st Corinthians 7:3-4 requires that the man attempt sexual intercourse at the request of his wife, even if he cannot get an erection?  Well then, unless you stupidly answer that question "yes", then you admit that this sexual situation is a) implicating ethical and moral concerns, yet b) is not governed by any absolute or objective standard.  So even in that pretend fantasy world of bible inerrancy and Christian marriage, the fact that some ultimately subjective morals exist, is clear.

The writer seems to be struggling with the same realizations I recognized as I journeyed from atheism to theism:

Objective moral truths are self-evident

 You mean like how shockingly stupid it is to burn a girl to death for prostitution (Leviticus 21:9)?  Why do modern people cringe at this, Wallace?  Because God put his laws into their hearts?  or because they were born and raised in cultures far more liberal than the one Moses lived in?

Moral truths are not encoded in our DNA

But the need to survive IS encoded in the DNA, that's why a person cannot avoid feeling hungry, thirsty, and wanted by the other members of their social group, with variations for those afflicted with more herd-metality, and for those more afflicted with a sociopathic disorder.  So the instinctive need to survive, and being born into this modern civilized world, results in the obvious: that person growing up to exhibit certain moral patterns and preferences.  This fully explains why people have "morals", no need to invoke a moral law-giver.  When I say Hitler was immoral, I only mean according to my subjective judgment.  Neither Turek nor you can say for sure whether or not you'd have become a Nazi had you been born in 1910 in Germany.  The culture really does have a very powerful impact on the morals one has.

Moral truths are not simply a matter of cultural agreement

Then our horror at the thought of burning a girl to death for prostitution (i.e., our horror at Leviticus 21:9) doesn't stem from the culture we were born and raised in.  Where then, did our disdain for this biblical moral ultimately come from?  The same god who ordered this grisly form of death?

Moral truths are not simply driven by “human flourishing”

Then blame your stupid god for making the human sex drive so strong, something he obviously didn't need to do to keep their freewill intact.  God could just magically afflict all post-adolescent boys with low sex drive and erectile dysfunction, to the same degree that many men over the age of 60 are afflicted with, whom you think have just as much freewill as teen boys, and the world be one hell of a lot less sinful that it currently is.  

Moral truths are not dictated by a common concern for our species

On the contrary "moral truths" are ultimately relative.  Whether the single guy living alone should or shouldn't invite his girlfriend over for a fling is up to nobody but himself and his girlfriend and whoever they choose to involve in the matter.

There is a difference between moral utility and moral creation

So what?

Theism provides, at the very least, sufficient “grounding” for the objective moral laws we willingly affirm with our words (or unwillingly reveal with our lives). I’ve encountered a number of skeptics who object to such a claim, however. One objection is named after one of Plato’s dialogues (the Euthyphro). Skeptics who hold this objection make the following claim: If God is the source of morality and decides what is “right” or “wrong,” the relationship between God and moral truth can be described in one of only two ways, and both of these possibilities are problematic:

An act is wrong because God condemns the act

If this is the case, morality is largely an arbitrary decision in the mind of God. In such a world, torturing babies for fun is not objectively wrong, but merely a decision God makes (when He could easily have decided otherwise). Would we be willing to accept baby torturing as morally virtuous if God had proclaimed it differently? Is morality “elastic” and merely an arbitrary decision? If your theology allows for a view of God in which He changes His mind (and revelation) given current conditions (like the God of Mormonism who altered His view of polygamy), how do we know if something is truly wrong or simply currently wrong?

God condemns an act because the act is wrong

One way to avoid such a capricious view of moral law is to argue moral truth is simply recognized and affirmed by God. This also problematic, however, because it suggests moral truth precedes (and even supersedes) God. In this view, God is not the necessary, objective source of moral truth, but is instead incidental to this truth (much like you and I). Why should we consider what God says at all if this is the case? If moral truth is the one true eternal reality, doesn’t it trump God?

If these are the only two ways to explain the relationship between God and morality, theists seem no better able to account for the objective nature of moral truth than atheists. There is however, a third alternative:

Moral truth is a reflection of God’s nature

 The only problem being that Christians themselves disagree about morals, everything from whether pregnancy by rape is a justification for abortion, to death with dignity, to whether Christians should involve themselves in worldly politics, to the death penalty, etc, etc.  Your belief that moral truths reflect God's nature does no practical real-world good for anybody, due to the pool of moral contradiction Christianity sinks itself deeper into with each passing decade. 

For example, it hardly matters whether God thinks abortion is absolutely prohibited for all situations.  That "truth" is not going to prevent the Christians who disagree with it, from exercising their common sense and deciding that a greater good can be done by allowing abortion for cases of rape, threat to the mother's life, and incest.

Philosophizing about how objective moral truths spring from God's nature, doesn't do jack shit toward getting those authentically born again Christians to become any less divided on morals than they are.  You may as well try to mend church splits by flying kites, you'd have better chances of success.

From a Christian worldview, God doesn’t simply tell us what is righteous, He is righteous.

 All you are doing now is bellowing.  Your God caused men to rape women in Isaiah 13:16-17.  To continue insisting God is righteous, while reading what God says about himself in Isaiah 13, is to blindly adhere to a pie-in-the-sky doctrine more than to anchor oneself to reality. 

And you cannot screw this up by pretending it is legitimate at this point to ask me, an atheist, why I am morally objecting to the rapes caused by the bible god.  YOU believe that God always condemns rape and YOU believe God is the reason that rape is objectively or absolutely immoral, so God's causing rape in Isaiah 13:16-17, constitutes a logical contradiction in God's morality (i.e., rape is absolutely wrong at all times for all people....but but but...wait...when God causes rape, then suddenly, its morally good), a problem of logical inconsistency that exists independent of my own moral opinions.  If your god is as against rape as you think he is, his nature would never allow him to cause it.

Goodness and righteousness are attributes of his innate character.

 Then because God cannot do anything evil, and all his actions are infinitely good by necessity, his action of causing men to rape women in Isaiah 13, supra, was good.

This is the part where you display to the world your overpowering mental abilities by trifling that God is morally good to "cause" rape, but the men whom he causes to commit rape, are still immoral for fulfilling his will.  Read Ezekiel 38:4 ff before you pop off about how God respects human freewill.  God would hardly illustrate his soverignty over man's freewill with the metaphor of "hooks in your jaws", as he does in Ezekiel 38:4 ff, if god respected freewill to the extreme degree that you and Turek think he does.  Under your theology, Ezekiel's choice of metaphor constitutes heresy, because it makes it appear that God "forces" people to sin, then blames them after they do what he wants them to do.

While it’s tempting to think there isn’t anything God couldn’t do, this is not the case. God cannot act or command outside of his character.

Which is a totally useless philosophical nothing, since God allows every kind of evil to happen to his alleged "loved" ones, so that god's alleged inability to act contrary to his character provides no actual real-world sense of security for anybody ever.  Your god might distract the arsonist from setting fire to your home.  But then again, he also might not tell you the babysitter is raping your daughter, and will allow it to continue until you discover it when you get home an hour later.  God's alleged inability to contradict his nature constitutes nothing but sophistry and illusion.

He is innately logical and moral; it is impossible for Him to create square circles or married bachelors, just as it is impossible for Him to sin.

But since furniture movers are constantly making boxes too big for them to lift, and since nothing in the bible says overfilling a box is sinful, then doing this is neither sinful nor logically impossible.  Therefore there is nothing illogical or immoral in challenging God to make a box so heavy that he cannot lift it.   Maybe someday you'll discover that the purpose of the question is to show the illogical nature of omnipotence.    as

And the idea that God cannot sin, is equally useless babble:  God's inability to contradict his own nature is nothing more special than a man's inability to contradict his own nature.  So stop pretending that God's inability to sin is some overawing thing, it's about as wonderful as a man being unable to give birth.

Objective moral truths are simply a reflection of God’s eternal being.

 But you haven't demonstrated that any moral act is objectively bad.  How about you do something no other Christian philosopher has ever done, and quit beating around the bush and identify the moral yardstick you are using when you say it is objectively immoral to torture babies to death solely for entertainment?

Or is your argument for this so weak that it cannot convince anybody except those who already accept it as true?

They are not rules or laws God has created (and could therefore alter recklessly), but are instead immutable, dependable qualities of his nature reflected in our universe.

So name one already.  Do you say adultery is objectively immoral?  If so, why?  Because the bible tells you so?  Some other reason?  If you are going to do what Frank Turek does, and wiggle away from the yucky parts of the Mosaic law by pretending it was intended only for ancient Israel, how do you know that some parts of it continue to apply outside that cultural context?  You seriously think you'll sound convincing to an atheist by quoting the apostle Paul? 

Or maybe I have an objective moral duty to get my Ph.d in Christian reconstructionism and dispensationalism before I could be morally justified to render a decision about these matters?

They exist because God exists (not because God created them or recognized them later).

 But part of God's nature also tells the filthy people in the last days to continue being filthy, which amounts to telling child molesters to keep on molesting:

 11 "Let the one who does wrong, still do wrong; and the one who is filthy, still be filthy; and let the one who is righteous, still practice righteousness; and the one who is holy, still keep himself holy." (Rev. 22:11 NAU)

Gee, Wallace....are we living in the "last days", or did you suddenly discover that you were "left behind"? Infinite moral goodness doesn't sound like it leaves any logically possible room to encourage sinners in any context to continue in their moral filth.

The Bible describes God as omnipotent and capable of doing anything he sets out to do.

Only by trial and error, after he makes a few decisions that he later regrets. Genesis 6:6-7.  Since you must justify your interpretation by the grammar, context and genre, there's plenty here to indicate this passage is literal, and there is nothing here to suggest the passage is merely "anthropomorphic".  And since the bible isn't the inerrant word of God anyway, your knee-jerk insistence that passages like these are mere anthropomorphisms, is not justified.  You never insist that we cannot know what any other author meant with his words until we compare them to everything else he ever said, so when you pretend that we cannot be sure we understand Genesis 6:6 correctly until we harmonize it with everything else in the bible, that's a case of special pleading, which proceeds from a belief in biblical inerrancy, a doctrine most Christian scholars reject, a doctrine that those Christian scholars who accept it cannot even agree on.  So when I toss your "anthropomorphism" interpretation of that passage out the window, I have objective grounds for doing so.  The passage continues to loom against your childish belief that God is "perfect".  Just ask any open-theist.  Those Christians have been challenging classical theism for decades.

God’s choices, however, are always consistent with His moral and logical nature; He never sets out to do something contrary to who He is as God.

 Which is useless sophistry again, since again, in Isaiah 13, God causes men to rape women and beat children to death.  You would hardly take comfort in any 'friend' whom you knew might one day help you change a flat tire, and the next day set your house on fire.  No blind presumption that this friend is always good, could possibly give you any real-world sense of security in fellowshipping with him.  Nothing could be a greater waste of time than Theistic Philosophy.  You may as well go around pushing the idea that the Bermuda Triangle is a gateway to another dimension, it would have about as much real-world relevance to a person's sense of fulfillment and security in life, as any discussion about God's mysterious ways.

Theism is still the most reasonable explanation for the objective moral truths all of us either affirm or reflect with our lives.

 Not in light of all those conservative Christians who disagree on matters of abortion, death pentalty, minimum age for sex/marriage, whether Christians should become involved in non-Christian politics, etc, etc. 

But under your logic, at least one side in those contradictory moral disputes must be wrong, yet we'd both cordially assume both parties in each disagreement are sincerely believing that God is working through them. How can your pushing the moral argument against atheism have any real-world significance?

When skeptics argue against a transcendent God, yet acknowledge transcendent moral truths, they are acting inconsistently, given their worldview.

 That's true.  Consistent atheism doesn't say morals don't exist, they obviously do exist.  Consistent atheism says all morals are ultimately relative to culture and situation.

They are borrowing from theism as they make a case against it.

 And this sounds so much like Frank Turek's book title "Stealing From God: Why Atheists Need God to Make Their Case" that it virtually confirms that the "atheist" you "quoted" at the beginning of this article was just Turek himself or one of his cronies pretending to be an atheist. 

I think this is the part where you trifle that God will say dishonesty is good in the limited context of the internet and the need to sell Jesus for tax-free profit.  And you'd have ample biblical support for the proposition that God authorizies dishonesty the way a mob boss authorizes murder:

 19 Micaiah said, "Therefore, hear the word of the LORD. I saw the LORD sitting on His throne, and all the host of heaven standing by Him on His right and on His left.
 20 "The LORD said, 'Who will entice Ahab to go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?' And one said this while another said that.
 21 "Then a spirit came forward and stood before the LORD and said, 'I will entice him.'
 22 "The LORD said to him, 'How?' And he said, 'I will go out and be a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.' Then He said, 'You are to entice him and also prevail. Go and do so.'
 23 "Now therefore, behold, the LORD has put a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; and the LORD has proclaimed disaster against you." (1 Ki. 22:19-23 NAU)