Getting ChessMaster 9000 to work on Windows 10

Since Windows 10 came out, many have bemoaned the fact that Chessmaster 9000 will not install on it.  I was one such person, and I personally think 9000 is far better than the "10".  9000 had lots of nice colors and graphics and options.   the "10 Grandmaster" was little more than washed out black and white pastels. Reminded me of how Microsoft 'upgraded' from XP to Vista.  Yeah right.

I figured out very easy way to make it install and work properly...including with that 'no cd patch' that UBI put on the internet years ago, so you don't have to have the cd spinning in the drive during play.

Install Advanced System Repair.    File ASR_Blue_Installer_7GA-G-F2.
https://advancedsystemrepair.com/

You don't need to make any actual repairs...just install.

Now insert Chessmaster cd 1 and do 'complete' install.

After install, it will ask you to insert Disc 2.  Do so.

After it looks like its done, you have to go through a few more quick additional installs with the second disc still in the drive.  Including installing Acrobat 5, which can be safely declined.  Now remove the disc.

Take your chessmaster "no cd patch", making sure it is named exactly Chessmaster, and copy into
C:\Program Files (x86)\Ubi Soft\Chessmaster 9000.
If you don't have the patch, I'll give you a copy, as i think UBI no longer support 9000 in any way.

You are replacing the original .exe with this patch.  Confirm.  Now right-click and drag a shortcut from the patch.exe to your desktop, or wherever you'd like the icon to be.

Double clicking the shortcut icon should then cause Chessmaster to work exactly the way it did on XP, starting as it normally does with that video.  One small hangup:  if you let the video play all the way through, the game might freeze. Simply left-click your mouse when the video starts, and the video will stop and you'll be given the functioning game window.

Restart.  confirm that Chessmaster still works.  You can then uninstall "Advanced System Repair", and Chessmaster will still work.

Don't ask me what ASR actually does, I don't know...it just works.  It would appear, therefore, that patching Chessmaster to make it compatible with Windows 10 would have been a relatively easy and inexpensive affair for UBI, but for whatever reason, they chose to just abandon the idea.  Hope this helps.

Answering Apologetics Press and Dave Miller, Ph.D., on god killing children

This is my reply to an Apologetics Press article by Dr. Dave Miller, entitled

Did God Order the Killing of Babies?

by  Dave Miller,Ph.D.

 Skeptics and atheists have been critical of the Bible’s portrayal of God ordering the death of entire populations—including women and children.

Because the more infinite god is, the more options he has to solve sin problems without needing to inflict misery.  If limited sinners, can solve sin problems without mass slaughter, so can "god". 

Appeals to ripple-effect and chaos theory might help you save face, but foists not the least bit of intellectual obligation upon the person criticizing the bible's divine atrocities.  Hence appeal to such wishful speculations do not perform the function of making your fundamentalist position more reasonable than the position of a person who appeals to other dimensions to explain Bigfoot's uncanny ability to evade most attempts at detection.

For example, God instructed Saul through the prophet Samuel to “go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (1 Samuel 15:3-4, emp. added). Other examples include the period of the Israelite conquest of Canaan in which God instructed the people to exterminate the Canaanite populations that occupied Palestine at the time. However, if one cares to examine the circumstances and assess the rationale, the Bible consistently exonerates itself by offering legitimate clarification and explanation to satisfy the honest searcher of truth.

Ok, where does the bible teach that a person of infinite power "didn't have any other way" to resolve a sin problem except to inflict horrific misery on children and infants?   When we bomb cities in war and cannot avoid killing a few innocent people, it's precisely because we are limited in our power and knowledge.  If we have infallible ability to pinpoint where the innocent civilians were and where the guilty enemy combatants were, we would be able to solve the war problem without killing innocent people.

You know, the excuse of imperfection that your infinite god cannot use.

The Hebrew term herem found, for instance, in Joshua 6:17, refers to the total dedication or giving over of the enemy to God as a sacrifice involving the extermination of the populace. It is alleged that the God of the Bible is as barbaric and cruel as any of the pagan gods. But this assessment is simply not true.
 If the critic would take the time to study the Bible and make an honest evaluation of the principles of God’s justice, wrath, and love,

Which the bible says he cannot do unless he first converts to your religion (1st Cor. 2:14), so you are asking of the critic that which your own theology says is impossible.  Sort of like me asking you to lift 5 tons above your head with no other means beyond your personal unaided biological muscular strength.

he would see the perfect and harmonious interplay between them.

That's funny...most Christian scholars don't believe in biblical inerrancy, which means not even most Christian scholars find your fundamentalist "reconciliation scenarios" too convincing.  That is, even if I became a Christian, god still might be telling me that the divine atrocities of the OT truly contradict the divine love preached by Jesus.

God’s vengeance is not like the impulsive, irrational, emotional outbursts of pagan deities or human beings.

Of course not.  For example, when he determined to murder Moses for no specific reason, the wife felt so constrained by the urgent death threat that she used something more dull than a knife, which happened to be nearby, to circumcise her son, the only apparent way God would back the fuck off:

 24 Now it came about at the lodging place on the way that the LORD met him and sought to put him to death.
 25 Then Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son's foreskin and threw it at Moses' feet, and she said, "You are indeed a bridegroom of blood to me."
 26 So He let him alone. At that time she said, "You are a bridegroom of blood "-- because of the circumcision. (Exod. 4:24-26 NAU)

You will insist surely there was a reason God wanted to kill, even if the text doesn't express it, but on the contrary, God specifies that he can be incited to harm people "without cause":

 3 The LORD said to Satan, "Have you considered My servant Job? For there is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man fearing God and turning away from evil. And he still holds fast his integrity, although you incited Me against him to ruin him without cause. (Job 2:3 NAU)

Miller continues:

He is infinite in all His attributes and thus perfect in justice, love, and anger.

Ok, you are a classical theist.  But Greg Boyd and other conservative Christian scholars reject classical theism and use the bible to substantiate the opposite doctrine of open-theism (i.e., God is limited and makes mistakes).  In other words, the only way I could allow your classical theist presuppositions is if I convert to Christianity and decide that the Christians who advocate for open-theism are wrong. 

Not likely.  In the text of Genesis 6:6-7, God's regret is not toward the sinfulness of man, even if that was historically true.  His regret is toward his own prior choice to have created man.  That is, god is sorry he created man and this means pretty much the same thing the parent means when saying they are sorry they ever chose to have kids.  In both cases, one's confession of personal imperfection is clear.  Hence I deny any bible verses that extol God's power and wisdom, and refuse to read such classical theist concepts into the biblical wording to make the bible agree with classical theism.  The bible's teaching about God's limitations and imperfections cannot be changed merely beaccuse other parts of the bible give a contrary picture.

Therefore I am reasonable to take god at his word, and accept his personal confession of imperfection as the truth about him...and therefore recognize the bible to be full of theological error.  As if 2,000 years of Christian theologians attacking each other didn't already do the job.

Just as God’s ultimate and final condemnation of sinners to eternal punishment will be just and appropriate,

Ok, you aren't challenging skeptics here, you are preaching to the choir.  Rock on.

so the temporal judgment of wicked people in the Old Testament was ethical and fair.

Gee, how easy is it to blindly accept God's perfection in one part of the bible, to justify the conclusion that "surely the judge of the earth will do right" to quell any problems with any other part of the bible?  Like I said, preaching to the choir.  What you say puts no intellectual compulsion on skeptics, nor highlights any logical fallacies in their criticism of the bible-god.

We human beings do not have an accurate handle on the gravity of sin and the deplorable nature of evil and wickedness.

Yes we do.  Those who trivialize the moral wrongness of sin aren't expressing any greater cavalier liberalism than God did when he got rid of David's two death-deserving sins of adultery and murder...by simply waiving his magic wand:

 13 Then David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the LORD." And Nathan said to David, "The LORD also has taken away your sin; you shall not die. (2 Sam. 12:13 NAU)

How high is God's standard of justice?  Put your diapers on!....He requires a whole entire RAM to be sacrificed when a master rapes a slave girl, and by that sacrifice, he forgives the rapist completely:

 20 'Now if a man lies carnally with a woman who is a slave acquired for another man, but who has in no way been redeemed nor given her freedom, there shall be punishment; they shall not, however, be put to death, because she was not free.
 21 'He shall bring his guilt offering to the LORD to the doorway of the tent of meeting, a ram for a guilt offering.
 22 'The priest shall also make atonement for him with the ram of the guilt offering before the LORD for his sin which he has committed, and the sin which he has committed will be forgiven him. (Lev. 19:20-22 NAU)

I therefore soil myself at the thought of the bible-god's infinitely high standard of justice.  Clearly, he thinks the person who steals a pack of bubble gum from the corner store has made themselves worthy of eternally irreversible conscious torture by fire.

Human sentimentality is hardly a qualified measuring stick for divine truth and spiritual reality.

Said the Muslim terrorist to the American mother of three kids.  When idiots get it in their head that their god wants them to commit some horrible act, they necessarily become immune to common sense.

How incredibly ironic that the atheist, the agnostic, the skeptic, and the liberal all attempt to stand in judgment upon the ethical behavior of God when, if one embraces their position, there is no such thing as an absolute, objective, authoritative standard by which to pronounce anything right or wrong.

We don't need any moral to be "absolute" or "objective" in order to remain "reasonable" to foist our subjective morals on others.  I am reasonable to conform to my culture's apathy toward racism, even if no absolute morals exist.  By conforming to my culture, I make my own life far more pleasant...while contradicting my culture's morals could easily lead to me landing in jail or otherwise making my life miserable.
Acting lawfully in effort to make life enjoyable, by definition, is reasonable. 

That logic will not disappear merely because you can carp "who was right, Mother Theresa or Hitler?"  The question blindly presumes there is a way to objectively determine who was right, which means the question is begging the question of the existence of objective morals, when whether they exist is precisely the debate.

As the French existentialist philosopher, Sartre, admitted: “Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist.... Nor...are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimize our behavior” (1961, p. 485).

He was correct.  And due to the power of cultural and environmental conditioning, intelligent mammals are going to make changes in their lives that cause those who mostly agree on morals to band together in villages, cities, states, and nations. A whole bunch of people think raping a child is immoral, so it doesn't take a genius to figure out why such people choose to group together.  Yes, very often people are uneducated on moral philosophy and do indeed mistake their ultimately subjective morality for absolute morality, but thankfully, I'm not among them.

The atheist and agnostic have absolutely no platform on which to stand to make moral or ethical distinctions—except as the result of purely personal taste.

We don't need to ground our personal moral tastes in objective morality before our employment of those tastes to reach our desired goals can be reasonable and rational.

The mere fact that they concede the existence of objective evil is an unwitting concession there is a God Who has established an absolute framework of moral judgments.

Then you just encountered a rather extreme roadblock: I'm an atheist, I do not concede the existence of objective evil.  I am horrified at news that somebody slaughtered a schoolyard full of kids...but only because I was raised to adopt and reflect my culture's general morality...by parents who did the same.

Had I been born in 1915 in Germany, I might just as easily have taken the view that jewish kids "deserve" to be killed.  Now what are you going to do?  Find fault with a person for growing up to adopt their own culture's morals?  Ok, how about if I find "fault" with a man who grew up as a fundamentalist Christian and now thinks adultery is immoral?  Informed discussion about morality makes it clear that it is wrong to fault those who reflect the culture they were born and raised into.  We can disagree with them all day long, but we err in pretending the "American way" is "better".  We can't prove its' better except to shake our fist on Sunday and hear the claps of other people who already agree with us.  That doesn't prove the American way is objectively good.

The facts of the matter are that the Canaanites, whom God’s people were to destroy, were destroyed for their wickedness (Deuteronomy 9:4; 18:9-12; Leviticus 18:24-25,27-28).

John H. Walton (PhD, Hebrew Union College) is professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College and Graduate School.  He is author of The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest: Covenant, Retribution, and the Fate of the Canaanites" (IVP Academic, 2017).  Therein he insists

Proposition # 12: The depiction of the Canaanites In Leviticus and Deuteronomy is a sophisticated appropriation of a common ANE literary device.  Not an Indictment.

In other words, on the basis of the case made by Walton and Sandy, my becoming a genuinely born again Christian AND graduating from a Christian college AND conducting extensive review of fundamentalist Christian treatments of the Canaanite problem could easily still leave me thinking the fundamentalist view is incorrect. 

Now if becoming spiritually alive doesn't do anything to help me correctly understand God's justice, I'm not going to think becoming spiritually alive is anything deeper or more significant than a description of a purely  naturalistic process.

Miller continues:

Canaanite culture and religion in the second millennium B.C. were polluted, corrupt, and perverted.

Sorry, you don't have any archaeological evidence that any of them ever practiced bestiality with anywhere near the consistency that fundamentalist apologist typically accuse them of.  Instead, you read the ancient and politically biased accounts by the Israelites, and automatically assume these are just as easily understood and reliable as yesterday's headline in the San Francisco Chronicle.

No doubt the people were physically diseased from their illicit behavior.

The fact that the Israelites were so easily swayed into such idolatry on nearly ever page of the Pentateuch tells me your argument about who 'deserved' to be slaughtered is superficial.  If God was correct to slaughter the Canaanites, then since the Israelites were no better, they "deserved" to be slaughtered likewise.

If God could live with the Israelites who were just as bad (James 2:10-11), he could have lived with the Canaanites.

There simply was no viable solution to their condition except destruction.

Then I apparently know your bible better than you.  God could have just waved his magic wand and convinced all Canaanites to do whatever he wanted them to do.  See Ezra 1:1.

Their moral depravity was “full” (Genesis 15:16).

Yup, you aren't addressing skeptics, you are only concerned with the readers who automatically conclude "historically reliable!" every time they read something in the bible.  Perhaps that explains why your arguments here give skeptics little reason to worry about anything except their next beer.

They had slumped to such an immoral, depraved state, with no hope of recovery, that their existence on this Earth had to be terminated—just like in Noah’s day when God waited while Noah preached for years, but was unable to turn the world’s population from its wickedness (Genesis 6:3,5-7; 1 Peter 3:20; 2 Peter 3:5-9).

Nope, Ezra 1:1, God has a non-barbaric way of turning people from the error of their way...therefore his choice to solve the problem in an unnecessarily barbaric way means nothing less than what's implied when a parent puts a bullet in their child's brain to make them stop disobeying.  The fact that the parent had other options, is all we need to be reasonable to conclude that parent is evil and guilty.  Telling us that God is always a special exception and his ways are mysterious, etc, cannot be viewed as plausible unless and until some hardcore undisputed evidence of his actual existence is brought forward, lest we  find ourselves doing nothing more than making excuses for story characters.  I'm an atheist.  You aren't going to be bringing in any evidence of god's actual existence.

Including the children in the destruction of such populations actually spared them from a worse condition—that of being reared to be as wicked as their parents and thus face eternal punishment.

Which is the precise argument I use to prove that abortion is morally good.  How could it be morally bad to send a child to heaven in a way that protects them from the possibility of ending up in hell?  Isn't the spiritual perspective (going to heaven) more important than the earthly perspective (unlawful to kill)?  When we remember the bible god takes credit for all murders anyway (Deuteronomy 32:29), then we can know it is God who is causing a woman to get an abortion.

So if God cannot do anything morally bad, then is it morally good when God employs his Deut. 32:39 power, yes or no?

When you say God can orchestrate our sinful acts for his own good purposes without himself thereby becoming guilty of sin, you are clearly desperate to grasp at any stupid trifle nobody in their right mind would ever grasp at, to avoid admitting the god of the OT is nothing but an accurate reflection of the barbaric culture that created him. There is no possible reasoning that can justify the argument that you encouraged a person to commit a criminal act, but you yourself bear no moral responsibility for the criminal act.  If older brother James encourages younger brother Dennis to steal a candy bar from a store, does James bear any moral responsibility for this crime, yes or no?

All persons who die in childhood, according to the Bible, are ushered to Paradise and will ultimately reside in Heaven.

Well in any moral analysis, where the result of the act is morally good, the act itself was morally good (i.e, healthy kids because you made them eat healthy food).

If the result of the moral act is morally good, you are a fool to say the act itself could nevertheless be immoral, since the good result is precisely the reason to say the act producing the good, was itself good.  How do you know feeding kids healthy food is morally good?  The result.  That's sufficiently objective to make it reasonable for moral relativists to feel their actions morally justified, even if absolute morals don't exist. You will say "this is merely 'the ends justify the means' !", but that doesn't bother me, as ends-justify-the-means is a rather popular moral justification.  If I'm starving, I won't just look at somebody else's food and perish away, I'll probably try to get some of it even if I know this is stealing.

Children who have parents who are evil must naturally suffer innocently while on Earth (e.g., Numbers 14:33).

But only because your god chose to refrain from waving his magic Ezra 1:1 wand and causing those evil parents to do whatever he wants.

Those who disagree with God’s annihilation of the wicked in the Old Testament have the same liberal attitude that has come to prevail in America just in the last half century. That attitude has typically opposed capital punishment, as well as the corporal punishment of children.

Then count me out.  I'm not  fundamentalist Christian, but I'm not a card carrying ACLU radical.

Such people simply cannot see the rightness of evildoers being punished by execution or physical pain.

Said the Muslim terrorist leader to his followers when talking about the moral goodness of killing Americans.

Nevertheless, their view is skewed—and the rest of us are being forced to live with the results of their warped thinking: undisciplined, out-of-control children are wreaking havoc on our society by perpetrating crime to historically, all-time high levels.

And like the parent who has the ability to control the kids without killing or brutalizing them, God just sits around refusing to exercise his Ezra 1:1 magic.  So God is like the wealthy parent watching their own kids starve, because dad refuses, solely by choice, to withdraw money from the bank to buy food.  When you have ability and opportunity to prevent your own created situation from spinning out of moral control, and you don't, the evil that occurs is YOUR fault whether others can be implicated too. 

God is no different than the mother with three toddlers who constantly chooses to never guide them, and just lets them run all over hell and back, then bitches about the fact that they exhibit the natural characteristics of unguided children.  Or like the mother who never guides her kids by anything more than words.  Sorry god, "words" are not enough, thus "the bible says..." is not enough to solve actual real world problems, even if it's enough to dazzle the delights of believers every Sunday.

Those who reject the ethics of God’s destructive activity in the Old Testament, to be consistent, must reject Jesus and the New Testament.

Nah, plenty of genuinely born again Christians have had severe probelms with the moral contradiction between the OT and NT.  I therefore reasonably deduce it is a real problem and not merely a case of somebody lacking spiritual insight.

Over and over again, Jesus and the New Testament writers endorsed and defended such activity (e.g., Luke 13:1-9; 12:5; 17:29-32; 10:12; Hebrews 10:26-31).

Yup, you aren't arguing to convince skeptics, but only to convince "bible-believers".  Dismissed.

The Bible provides the only logical, sensible, meaningful, consistent explanation regarding the principles of retribution, punishment, and the conditions under which physical life may be extinguished.

Yup.  We'd all cry if America's ghettos were nuked clean, but I'm sure you'd probably find a bible verses that says nuking the ghettos is the "only way" an infinite god of infinite powers could  possibly solve the problem.

Answering the Catholic case for objective morals

This is my reply to an article by catholic apologist Christopher Akers entitled

God and Objective Morality

Christopher Akers

SATURDAY, JULY 8, 2017

There is a rather simple, yet nowadays rarely discussed, philosophical argument that can help lead to assent to the existence of God. It has the potential to change the hearts and minds of those who seriously consider it.

Which means you probably aren't a 5-Point Calvinist...one of those Christians who says unbelievers are so steeped in sin, they are "totally unable" to seek after God (First point of Calvinism; total inability), so that if a sinner does seek after god, this was not a combination of their freewill and god's grace, but solely of god's grace (leading to the question "why doesn't take away the total inability of all sinners?", and the Calvinist answers "because god does not wish to save everybody").  If you think the Calvinists don't know about John 3:16, 1st John 2:2, 1st Peter 3:9 or 1st Timothy 2:4, think again.

The argument, succinctly, is that for an objective moral system to exist, God must exist.

If you mean "objective" according to the dictionary system, then yes.  The reason any act of man is objectively immoral, by definition MUST be for reasons completely independent human belief or feelings.

For a moral system to be truly objective, moral law must stem from a source external to humanity. Otherwise, all we have is subjective human moral opinion, no matter how it is dressed up.

Agreed.

The implications of this are particularly fascinating, especially since the vast majority of nonbelievers live and act as if they believe in an objective moral system, while their own belief system makes this logically impossible.

I would agree with you that many non-Christians live out their morality in ways inconsistent with their beliefs about the origins of morality.

Musing on such questions played a key role in my own conversion to the Church.

That's too bad, as blaming morality on "god" is quite the absurdity, for myriad reasons.

Thinking deeply about objective morality forces you to question why you act as you do on a day-to-day basis, and what sort of rationale lies behind your moral choices.

We are physical mammals living amongst other physical mammals who compete for resources and in doing so, often find other mammals that help us survive, and still other mammals that threaten our survival.  Asking whether Hitler or Mother Theresa were "right" is like asking which bug is "right" as a spider attacks a fly.  The only morality governing the situation is the morality of the players, and the morality of any other life form that cares enough to cast its opinion on the matter.

If unbiased logic is employed, the conclusion is clear: without a divine lawgiver moral choices and actions must be subjective and ultimately meaningless.

This is true.  "ultimately meaningless" would mean our moral choices, regardless of what they might be, do not have any significance that transcends humanity.  Whether you burp at the table or mow down a schoolyard full of children with an AK-47, your actions mean precisely nothing beyond the human beings who care to comment about them.  However, if you get a lot of human mammals together who happen to agree on basic morals, "group-think" can set in and you can start errantly thinking that the majority view on morality is something that "transcends" the group of mammals who enjoy such agreement.

And maybe they cannot be blamed, since to engage in such mental error achieves an even greater degree of solidarity that is otherwise key to mammalian groups surviving and thriving.  Christianity is wrong, but that would be irrelevant if it could be shown that it leads to human beings enhancing their ability to survive and thrive.  Not all false beliefs are harmful.  "New Atheists" that shit all over religion like it's nothing but alien toxic waste are high on crack.

It is terrifying to understand the full implication of the words of Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, that “without God everything is permissible.”

"Ultimately, they are correct". How could child rape on this earth possibly be of concern to alien life forms that might be living 5 billion light years away?  Child rape is a terrible thing, but only in the context of earth-based humanity.  Looking at earth from a long distance, our hurting each other would likely be viewed by some advanced alien intelligence with about the same degree of concern as we have in watching insects kill each other.  We ourselves are a higher life form, and look how utterly apathetic we are to lower life forms when we feel such lack of concern will help us feel better about ourselves. 

Once again, child rape is certainly a terrible thing, but only in the context of human life.  If there is no life higher than human, then the wrongness of child rape is necessarily limited to earthly human life, since there is no evidence to suggest its wrongness extends beyond earthbound humans.

And yes, most people are not experts in moral philosophy, and they are also mammals with a nasty habit of mistaking their fist-pounding rah rah rah for divinely revealed ethics.  If people were just a bit more philosophically adept, they would be turtle-slow in automatically equating their basic moral opinions with divine decree.  They would correctly realize that cultural conditioning plays a gargantuan role in shaping our moral attitudes.

The longer you've been crediting god with your basic morals, the harder it is for you to honestly acknowledge the ultimately subjective nature of your ethics.  If a child is always taken to McDonald's for dinner every day, yes, they are going to feel taht something is "wrong" if an authority steps in and puts a stop to it.  So discovering there's no god and we are just mammals lost in space probably doesn't sound as appealing as perpetual Christmas in heaven, but mature adults eventually wake up and, even if reluctantly learn how to distinguish their dreams from actual reality.

Once you reach this point, the only choice left is between God and nihilism.

No, there are schools of thought out there which say life goes on after physical death, but not because of a "god" but because reincarnation and karma are simply how the universe works.

The more intelligent atheists realize this only too well, which is why this point is not often discussed.

Then I must be one of the more intelligent atheists, since I don't shy away at all from the taunting question "If god doesn't exist, then why do most mature adults in human history believe that child rape is absolutely immoral?"  To me the question is about as informed as "If god doesn't exist, then how could I ever know it is immoral for a girl to date before she is 18 years old?  Clever sophists can make certain conglomerations of words appear to be asking a legit question, when in fact the question is absurd.

Instead, the most heinous acts are simply “clearly wrong,” without any need to investigate further why this is so.

I agree that most atheists are inconsistent for aspiring to objective morality.  I agree with Frank Turek that atheists like Michael Shermer are inconsistent.  If there really is no life form higher than human, then what constitutes moral goodness is limited to what human beings think, and since they constantly disagree, the closest to "objective" you'll ever get is majority-viewpoint.  But majority viewpoints do not show objective truth, since majority viewpoints can be wrong.

Such an unsupported morality is literally nonsense, of course.

Agreed.

It makes you think of the maxim attributed to Chesterton, that “when a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything.”

An obviously false maxim, as few atheists believe "anything".   And a misleading maxim, since apparently, according to what we know of human history, believing in god never slowed down anybody from harboring false beliefs.  Christians would be forced to agree that the vast majority of non-Christian theists believe falsely about god.

To reiterate, the majority of individuals live as if an objective moral system exists, yet without God no such system can exist.

Once again, yes, even the people who don't believe in god are often guilty of living life as if their moral views originated in some "higher power".  It is an exceptionally rare atheist who will directly admit that we are little more than overgrown mosquitoes living on a damp dust-ball lost in space. Such brutal honesty simply doesn't score points with the other mammals in the group you are seeking to score points with.  But we all know that just chiming in and agreeing with everybody else dramatically increases the odds that one will score points with such groups.

C. S. Lewis lucidly outlined in the opening sections of Mere Christianity that people “appeal to some kind of standard of behavior that they expect the other to know about,” when moral disagreement rears its ugly head.

Yes, inconsistency reigns in the moral beliefs of many atheists.

The Tower of Babel by Marten van Vlackenborch, 1595 [Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden]
This is still the case in our own times, yet according to the mores of modern society, there is no one (more specifically, no God) to provide the standard. Logically, if this is the case, then the standard itself must fall.
I have debated this point often with atheist friends, some of whom have attempted to offer alternative “objective” ways in which one can understand morality. A certain interlocutor suggested that utilitarianism could be given as an example of a non-theistic objective moral system.

Only by violating the dictionary definition of the word "objective".  Any moral system, including utilitarianism, originates in humanity, therefore, it can never be truly "independent of the mind" (dictionary definition of objective).

Then again, morals can never be truly independent of the mind anyway, since they boil down to opinions which boil down to thoughts, which are themselves physical aspects of the brain, as proven from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

Utilitarianism, however, is merely a philosophical theory posited by man. For even if every person on earth accepted utilitarianism, no one would be obligated to follow it in the same way that we are obligated to follow the moral law of the Creator of heaven and earth. Utility is as nought compared to Love, as readers of The Catholic Thing will know. There is no subtle difference here; the distance between these ideas is quite great – and obvious.

Agreed.

Another friend suggested that we only act as we do because of biology, and argued that we can extract objective moral truths from pondering our biological makeup and surroundings.

Once again, only by violating the dictionary definition of "objective" since that word means existing outside and independent of the mind.

This would be a world where we only act out of self-interest, where self-sacrifice is a lie, and where love is merely a “chemical reaction in the brain.”
Any way you try to turn it, this argument is simply incomprehensible. For if God does not exist, then who is to say whether it is right or wrong to follow specific biological urgings?

Excellent point.

Take the horrific act of rape, for example. If you follow a moral system based on mere Darwinian biology, where the goal of life is ultimately the propagation of genes, then could not rape be taken as a good as it may ensure a more widespread transmission of said genes?

Yes, and whether rape is morally good or bad depends on who you ask, given that the world and human history is full of not only rapists, but rapists whose sole motive for refraining from rape is fear of jail.

Those who hate rape and those who love it will give you different answers, and when you pretend the rapist's views deserve to be automatically discounted, and you call them "insane", you stop being an objective investigator, and you start preaching to the choir by appeal to what they already believe.  I would argue that those who cannot distinguish god from their strong moral beliefs, are naive about the origins of morality.

I am not claiming that my dear friend would ever argue for this, but this is an obvious example of the absurdity of reducing morality to biology.

Only absurd to people who think rape is wrong.  You will discount the significance of those who think rape is morally acceptable, but that's where you stop being objective in your evaluation. What are you gonna say next?  The only people that matter are American capitalists?  True objectivity doesn't automatically discount opinions held by those adopting some minority view.  Then again, most people lack the ability of cool objectivity necessary to deal with people whose morals are contrary to society.  We just want the local recently paroled child pornographer to get the fuck out of our town, not caring whether or how he will manage when the next town tells him to move on.  That's herd-mentality for you.  It is characterized by lack of concern for the long-term consequences, and therefore also childish in nature.  But such short-sighted thinking has the benefit of preserving one's social group from breakup.  I guess you cannot blame herds for engaging in herd-mentality.

Not to put too fine a point on it, there is a world of difference between the beauty of human sexual love and the famously violent copulation of many species in the animal kingdom.

We would not expect a person with your religious commitment to realize how many men and woman enjoy being hurt during sex.  When you say such people don't count because they are clearly insane, that's the point where you stop being objective and change over to appealing to what your own group believes in an effort to convince them.  One place to start your education is the bible, which does a pretty good job of showing how easily even people who are being activily guided by god, can fall into lifestyles that you think are deviant and gross.  Apparently, the squeaky clean catholics that always show up for Mass in their Sunday best, aren't the only life forms that are representative of human morality.

And when you decide that a catholic lady's expressed disdain for sado-masochistic sex is genuine, you run the possibility of being wrong, and that she likes such acts, but is only pretending to be more moral than she is because she wishes to stay in the good graces of her chosen circle of equally Catholic friends.  Gee, Christians have been never been duplicitous, have they?  If a Christian found sexual deviance attractive, surely they'd make that clear to their church?  WRONG.

We can see all around us the disintegration of civilized ethics that has resulted from the confusion over objective morality.

A phenomena that has no more ultimate significance than the fact that lions reduce the zebra population in Africa.  Since you are not a zebra, you couldn't care less.  So we have to wonder, if there was a life form outside earth higher than human, why shouldn't we think it would be as apathetic to our plight as we are to the plight of the baby zebra being torn apart?  The answer is:  blindly assuming the higher life form gives even two shits about us just happens to define "hope", and by its nature, hope achieves its ends equally well whether its object is real or fake.  Doesn't it just feel good to know we have a heavenly father?

And the confusion is only compounded by the well-intentioned people around us who speak as if objective morality exists while rejecting all the things, including the One, that must underpin it.
The veneer of civilized ethics that we still enjoy is due only to the afterglow of a Christian civilization,

No, there are strictly empirical mammalian reasons why higher mammals find the "civilized" type of life more conducive to their instinct to thrive, survive, and carry on their genes.  Civilization dramatically reduces the chances one's genes will disappear from the pool. most higher mammals don't go around purposefully looking to put their own existence at risk. 

and without care our inheritance may be completely cast aside. The connection between God and objective morality must be restated firmly, clearly, and often by priests, apologists, philosophers, catechists, et al. In fact, it must be shouted from the rooftops!

Except that under the Christian-invented "Occam's Razor" rule of thumb, the very fact that "god" is the most complex possible being (i.e., infinitely complex because he himself is infinite, allegedly) means "god" is always going to be "infinitely" less likely the true hypothesis, than any coherent naturalistic hypothesis for morality.  We don't need methodological naturalism to knock the Christian view all the way out of the ball park of probability or possibility...we only need to show that the empirical evidence favors naturalism, in order to successfully arrive at being "reasonable" to adopt it.

You've done nothing in this article that even remotely attacks the empirical basis for naturalistic morality.