Cold Case Christianity: Is God Real? God is the Best Explanation for Objective Moral Laws

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

Cold Case Christianity:

Is God Real? God is the Best Explanation for Objective Moral Laws         

Posted: 20 Feb 2019 01:56 AM PST

We live in a world populated with self-evident, objective, transcendent moral laws.

 Thus indicating you aren't trying to convince atheists or skeptics, only bible-believing Christians.  Should you ever feel up to the challenge, grow a pair of balls and actually have a debate with an informed atheist the way Turek does.  Something tells me you are too afraid to do this.  Why threaten your fan base you've worked so hard to get?

“It’s never OK to torture babies for fun”

But the burden is on YOU to show that this is an objective moral.  You are assuming, without argument, that because most people agree this is morally wrong behavior, then presto, it must be objectively wrong. Not so.  You are assuming without proof that whatever morals are agreed to by "most people" are therefore representative of transcendent objective moral standards.  But it could just as easily be that most people think torturing babies for fun is wrong, for much the same reason that gorillas and other higher mammals don't go around torturing their own babies for fun.  It's mere natural instinct to survive.  The question of why we have that instinct goes beyond the moral question and gets into the muck of "intelligent design".

And regardless, your own bible shows God requiring his followers to torture kids (when the bible says you must hit your child with a "rod" its authors probably wouldn't think that leaving bruises and lacerations on the child's body was too much, see Pro. 20:30, and remember that many proverbs are strung together without concern for theme or context, so you cannot automatically assume v. 30 must be interpreted in a way harmonious with the "immediate context".

How torturous do you suppose it is for the child who watches as strangers over run their village killing everything in sight?  How long can a child fend off the man trying to murder it?  How much torture does that child endure in those horrific moments?  Where else could the Canaanites go after be chased out of the promised land, except to barren places already occupied by slave traders, where survival required criminal acts, or selling kids into slavery, or prostitution?

or (my new favorite from a blog reader) “It’s never OK to torture non-believers just because you don’t like them?” are two examples of such transcendent laws. How do we account for laws such as these?

 The better question would be to avoid begging the question of transcendence and ask instead "why do most people think it immoral to torture babies?" or "why has human history exhibited a pattern of disapproving of baby-torture?" 

Of course, I'd disagree that humans have agreed throughout history that baby torture is immoral.  That Israel found some babies expendable is clear (Numbers 31:17, 1st Sam. 15:2-3), and as already pointed out, if all Israel was doing was "dispossessing" the Canaanites, they were chasing them off the promised land and thus into dangerous barren territory where crime or worse would be the only way a family could stay alive.

We are mammals, and we instinctively avoid doing things that inhibit the survival of our young.  Furthermore, in our mammalian minds, any "benefits" we could get from torturing babies would be outweighed by the cost of inhibiting survival.  The fact is most mammals simply lack a desire to torture babies just like they lack a desire to torture forgotten invisible dust particles. What fool would pretend this cannot be accounted for except by positing space aliens controlling our minds with their beam-weapons?  How's that any different than your invisible god who can read minds?

Their existence points to a reasonable inference: the existence of a Transcendent Moral Law Giver.

Not if you define that TMLG as spaceless, timeless, immaterial, invisible, other-dimensional, and the other mantra that Turek repeats ad nauseum to his mostly Christian audiences.  That's nothing more than an incoherent definition which we are reasonable to dismiss.   The only theory you have, to justify such nonsense talk, (i.e., the big bang) is a theory that is manifestly not what the originally intended addressees of Genesis 1-2 would have thought when reading the creation account.   Try again.

But there are other alternatives typically offered by those who reject the existence of such a Being. Is God real? The insufficiency of the alternative explanations strengthens the argument for the existence of God:    

    Are Objective, Transcendent Moral Laws A Product of Genetic Evolution?

When you ask a loaded question like that, no.  If a moral was objective and transcendent, then no, mere genetic evolution would not create it.  Evolution cannot create something whose nature extends beyond the physical.

    As one friendly skeptic said recently, “We share 99.999% of our physical traits with our fellow humans . . . so why would our mental traits not be similarly shared?” Are moral truths simply part of our genetic coding?

 Yes, that's why newborn babies don't need to be taught to breastfeed.  Your theory that "god puts his laws into our hearts" is bullshit anyway, as testified to by billions of children, who obviously don't already have such morality, who only acquire it by learning from their mammalian caregivers.

There are good reasons to reject such an explanation. When someone claims self-evident moral truths are simply a matter of our genetic evolution, they are assuming the same evolutionary pathway for every people group. What are we to make of cultures that behave in a manner different than our own?

 It's called cultural conditioning.  We all seek after food, water, shelter and companionship, we just tend to go about it in different ways in different periods of history.

How can we justly adjudicate between the myriad of people groups, all of whom have their own genetic evolutionary pathway? This form of emboldened relativism is powerless to judge any form of behavior, good or bad.

 No, you are assuming that if all morals are relative, that we have no "right" to judge others.  That's total bullshit.  One "relative" moral instinct we have is to criticize others who do things differently than we do.  Our "right" comes from our innate desire to criticize outsiders.  Just like there is no "right" for one junkyard dog to bite another, nevertheless, they still do.  It's purely instinctive, as nuanced by a person's environmental conditioning.

There is no objective moral truth governing the carnivores chasing the herbivores on earth, but that hardly means we accuse them of being "inconsistent" for foisting their morals on each other.  It's just what creatures of instinct do when they have different ideas about survival, yet have to live together.

In fact, how can we judge any behavior if it is so connected to our genetic nature?

 The same way one junkyard dog decides to attack another junkyard dog.  If we feel uncomfortable with another person being in what we consider our personal space, we react.  We aren't reacting merely because we first figured out how to prove that our moral view was more "objective" than theirs, we simply "react".

We don’t blame people for being brunettes or having blue eyes; if our genes are the cause of our moral understanding, what right do we have to blame people when they simply express genetic moral wiring different from our own?

Because we all innately resist the attempts of others to harm the ability of ourselves and our favored groups from surviving and thriving.  Instinct. And since I deny freewill, yes, I think society is wrong to pretend that a criminal had a "choice" or ability to resist the temptation to do a crime.  Why some boys in a group shy away from stealing while the others go through with the plan, has to do with the boys having very different genetic predispositions and environmental conditioning.  $50 says in the group of 5 boys playing to steal from a store, the one who will actually not puss out, but go through with it, will be the kid whose genetics make him more aggressive, and/or the kid who is lacking any serious discipline at home.

Perhaps most importantly, even if my skeptical friend is right and commonly accepted moral truths are merely a product of our genetic encoding, we still must account for the source of this encoding. 

No, that gets into the question of intelligent design, which doesn't get you off the hook.  Your attept to prove that some morals can only be accounted for by a transcendent moral lawgiver, has failed.  You cannot correct that problem by simply insisting on intelligent design.  That's called moving the goal-posts.  The "moral argument" for God fails.  The "intelligent design" argument for God is another matter.

DNA is information rich. As Stephen C. Myers observes in Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, there isn’t a single example in the history of the universe in which information has come from anything other than an intelligent source. If our genetic code contains information about moral truth, we still must ask the foundational question, what intelligent source provided this code? All codes require encoders.

 Meyers is debunked here.

But I don't really care if a "god" exists, the NT provides evidence that makes it more likely Jesus stayed dead, so given that Christianity is a failure, whatever 'god' exists, is nothing to worry about. 

And it wouldn't matter if Jesus did rise from the dead, the idea that God will send to hell all those who fail to live up to whatever Christian light they had, is total bullshit and is denied by enough liberal Christian scholars  to justify the non-religious person in turning away from such an exercise in futility as "What does the New Testament teach?"  You people have been asking that for 2,000 years, you couldn't agree with each other in the lifetime of Jesus, the lifetime of Paul, by the second century many sects of Christianity were competing as "the" truth and calling each other "heretic", and the only thing Christianity did for the next 2,000 years was get more splintered and more complex.

    Are Objective, Transcendent Moral Truths a Matter of Cultural Agreement?

When you ask the question in loaded form like that, the answer is obviously "no".  Cultural Agreement cannot produce some invisible moral law that "transcends" humanity itself.

    If societies are the source of objective moral truths, what are we to do when two cultures disagree about these truths?

You are assuming there is a higher moral law to answer that in an objective way, and there isn't.  When we find other cultures with morals opposed to ours, then whether we attack or leave them alone is largely conditioned on the current generation's genetic predispositions and their environmental conditioning. Once again, there's no higher moral "truth" to govern when two dogs choose to fight, so its pretty stupid to ask what moral law governs when you confront another person whose morals are opposite to our own.  But that fact that human history has exhibited a tendency to war or to just stay away from those of differing persuasion makes a good case that there really are no higher moral truths to it, and what we "should" do goes no deeper than what we feel like we should do at the moment.

How do we adjudicate between two competing views of a particular moral claim?

By using our relative morals. When we all gasp about the criminal who was caught torturing children, this shows nothing more than that a bunch of people have formed a city, state or nation and they all pretty much have the same moral disgust for hurting kids.  While we may often act like putting such people in jail aspires to some higher moral law, this is not true, such act only aspires to the moral law that a bunch of mammals agree on.

If objective moral truths are simply a matter of “shared morality”, the societal majority rules; “might makes right”.

 Which is precisely what we have in our democratic "Christian" nation.  You either obey the majority's morals, or they will send their strongest representatives after you to put you in jail even if you don't wanna go.

In a world like this, anyone (or any group) holding the minority position in a particular moral argument is, by definition, immoral.

Yes.   A minority of men in America approve of homosexuality and/or pedophilia. Not really strange that they are automatically accounted "immoral" by the majority.

In fact, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson made this clear in his early career as a prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials following World War II. When the German soldiers who committed atrocities in the Jewish prison camps were brought to trial to face criminal charges, the issue of moral relativity was tested directly. The lawyers for the German officers argued that these men should not be judged for actions that were actually morally acceptable in the nation of Germany at the time of the war.

Those lawyers were just asking for consistency. 

They argued their supervisors and culture encouraged this behavior; in fact, to do otherwise would defy the culture and ideology in which they lived. In their moral environment, this behavior was part of the “shared morality”. Jackson argued against such a view of moral relativism and said, “There is a law above the law.”

 Jackson was wrong if he meant there was a moral law transcending humanity.  The fact is that before WW2, not everybody in the world agreed that they should go involve themselves in the affairs of other countries.   But then that's why they call it "war".  Us mammals tried but could not achieve peace, so we just fought it out.

    Are Objective, Transcendent Moral Truths a Consequence of “Human Flourishing”?

Not when you ask the question in that loaded way.  Once again, if the moral truth "transcends" humanity, than humanity's flourishing obviously did not create said law. 

    Sam Harris (author of The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values), argues we can establish the moral value of any particular action by simply evaluating its impact on human well-being (something Harris typically refers to as “human flourishing”).

 And Harris was wrong on the point, as are most moral objectivist atheists, since he fails to provide an objective definition of human well-being.  And indeed he cannot.

Harris likens the establishment of such truths to a game of chess. In any particular game, each player must decide how to move based on the resulting effect. If you are trying to win the game, some moves are “good” and some moves are “bad”; some will lead you to victory and some will lead you to defeat. “Good” and “bad” then, are evaluated based on whether or not they accomplish the goal of winning the game. Harris redefines “good” (in the context of human beings) as whatever supports or encourages the well-being of conscious creatures; if an action increases human well-being (human “flourishing”) it is “good”, if it decreases well-being, it is “bad”. What, however, do we mean when we talk about “flourishing”?

Good question, which is why I say atheist moral objectivists are just being silly.  If humanity is the highest form of life, then it us US, and nobody and nothing else, that decides whether a given act constitute moral goodness or moral badness. 

It’s one thing to evaluate a behavior in terms of its impact on survival, and if we are honest with one another, this is really what drives Natural Selection. But Harris recognizes survival, as a singular goal, can lead to all kinds of morally condemnable misbehavior.

 Condemnable only because of Harris's subjective and relative morals that he brings to the moral investigation table.  Harris might think the way the Nazis chose to 'survive' in WW2 is condemnable, but his basis for such criticism cannot be anything greater than his naturalistic relative morals.

Harris suggests the goal is something more; the goal is “flourishing”. Human flourishing comprises a particular quality of life; one in which we honor the rights of others and seek a certain kind of character in order to become a particular kind of human group that has maximized its potential.

That sounds nice, but doesn't solve the problem:  "Should" we allow the Taliban to "flourish"?  If not, then apparently "flourishing" is not a sufficient criteria for morality.

See the problem here? Harris has already imported moral values into his model, even as he seeks to explain where these values come from in the first place. One can hardly define the “maximization” of human wellbeing without asserting a number of moral values. What, beyond mere survival, achieves our “maximization” as humans?

Good question, I don't think Harris can answer it.  Dan Barker tried to answer it with "pain" by saying we naturally recoil from pain, which is true enough, but he draws back somewhat by acknowledging that some pain is required to achieve good, such as the doctor who sets the broken bone, or cutting off one's hand that is stuck between two huge rocks so that one can survive.

The minute we move from mere survival to a particular kind of “worthy” survival, we have to employ moral principles and ideas.

Correct.

Concepts of sacrifice, nobility and honor must be assumed foundationally, but these are not morally neutral notions. Human “flourishing” assumes a number of virtues and priorities (depending on who is defining it), and these values and characteristics precede the enterprise Harris seeks to describe. Harris cannot articulate the formation of moral truths without first assuming some of these truths to establish his definition of “flourishing”. He’s borrowing pre-existent, objective moral notions about worth, value and purpose, while holding a worldview that argues against any pre-existing moral notions.

Good for you.  You refuted Harris.  But you didn't refute me.  I've based humanity's morality in each human's mammalian instinct for individual and group survival, as flavored by genetic predispositions and environmental conditioning.  These naturalistic explanations account for all known moral issues.

    Try as we might, the alternative explanations for objective, transcendent moral truths are desperately insufficient.

Dream on.

    Try as we might, the alternative explanations for objective, transcendent moral truths are desperately insufficient. The moral law transcends all of us, regardless of location on the planet or time in history.

And there you go again, proving you aren't talking to skeptics but only to Christians just looking for anybody that can professionally articulate what they already believe.  Try having a live debate with an informed atheist, then take a poll of your fan base and see how many think you survived.

Or....continue running away from challenges and just tell yourself that periodically preaching to the choir must be something inspired by God because it happens to boost book sales.