Wasting Time with Triablogue's morals-expert Steve Hays

Christian fundamentalist Matthew Flannagan wrote an article defending William Lane Craig's Divine-Command Theory (DCT).  Atheist scholar Richard Carrier wrote a rebuttal.  Steve Hays comments on Carrier's rebuttal.  This is my reply to Hays' criticisms.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Richard Carrier on the rampage

 I'm going to comment on a screed by Richard Carrier:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/8708

That account was suspended but wayback still has it, here.

You have to wonder if Carrier had to much to drink when he wrote it.

Not even people who have that "higher" morality that Steve boasts for himself can resist calling names.  Surely we are idiots to deny how you have been transformed by Christ into a new creature who now avoids wrangling words (2nd Timothy 2:14).  Steve Hays has never committed that sin after he got saved, has he?

It's an attack on Matt Flanagan's Divine Command Theory. In commenting on Carrier's post, I'm not going to get into the weeds of DCT. That's Flanagan's specialty, so I will leave that to him. He can more than hold his own against the likes of Carrier.

That's quite a concession, you often don't hear hyper-Calvinists admitting the intellectual brilliance of other Christians whom the Calvinist thinks are missing the biblical forest for the trees.

But much of what Carrier says isn't tied to DCT, per se.
Before delving into the details, I'd like to make a general observation. Carrier evidently regards atheism as synonymous with secular humanism. His attack on DCT goes way beyond the negative, minimalistic definition of atheism as "nonbelief in God or gods." Rather, he proceeds as though atheism entails social obligations. 

    Theology has no salvageable theory of morality. Theists complain atheists have no reason to be moral. But in fact theists have no reason to actually be moral, as in: to elevate compassion, honesty, and reasonableness above all authority, even the authority of their own gods.

 There's nothing inherently wrong with the argument from authority if the appeal is to someone who is, in fact, a legitimate authority figure.

I would agree that some atheists try to transform the denial of god into social policy.  For my own reasons, I decline.  You also shouldn't teach children that collateral damage can be morally justified.  Some people simply aren't ready to learn certain hard truths, and will never be ready, to learn certain hard truths.

    Unless they covertly adopt a naturalistic moral theory (and most do), they are not actually moral people. They are minions. Theists are essentially the unquestioning gestapo of whatever monster manufactured the universe. Or rather, whatever monster some men made up and duped them into thinking it made the universe. Which means, they are essentially the gestapo of whatever random ignorant madmen wrote their scriptures and now thumps their pulpits with sufficiently fiery claims of special divine communications at bedtime. 

Atheists are not actually moral people. They are minions. Atheists are essentially the unquestioning gestapo of amoral physical determinism, which duped them into thinking their beliefs are rational. Which means, they are essentially the gestapo of whatever mindless, random natural process wired their brains and pushes their buttons. 

    I’m sorry to say, but that’s the truth. Theism actually has no moral theory. 

I’m sorry to say, but that’s the truth. Atheism actually has no moral theory.
 

    This is why.    Hannibal Lecter created the universe? He escaped from a future holodeck simulation and then used a stolen TARDIS to Make the Universe after evaporating God by discovering the Babel Fish? Oh crap. Well, I guess we better get down with murder and elegant cannibalism or else he’ll be angry with us and send us to hell. Because he is now eternal and the supreme being and made the universe. So we can’t deny, his will and character is now the ground of all morality. And, oh yeah. This all totally makes sense.Is that any more sensible than…? 

That's an argument from analogy minus the supporting argument.

Not every critique requires "argument". There IS such a thing as choosing, for good reason, to air one's opinion without giving the supporting argument.  Decisions on what to slice and what to keep are largely subjective and thus mostly insulated from criticism.  Before you provide examples, perhaps you should consider that, given your Calvinist statement of faith, whether the bible could have been written in a more clear way had God commissioned John Calvin to do the work?  Oh gee, no way, Romans 9 just makes Calvinism more obvious than Calvinism makes itself, amen?

Carrier needs to demonstrate that this is, in fact, parallel to Christianity. All he's done is to stipulate an invidious comparison.

Steve Hays needs to demonstrate criteria by which reasonable people would agree on what arguments to include or exclude from an argumentative article.  If you write a book defending the resurrection of Jesus, can we call you stupid because you "didn't mention" certain skeptical arguments?  Writing about a certain subject does not mean you are intellectually obligated to back up every last breath you take therein with argument.  Waxing polemical without argument is something we learned from the biblical authors, so don't be too skippy on the "need" to "provide argument".  And read Mark's parenthetical remark (13:14) before you foolishly insist that by providing no explanation, the claimaint puts no intellectual obligation on the reader.  Gee, "let the reader understand" is supposed to take the place of "argument" or "support"?

    A cosmic Jewish zombie named Jesus who telekinetically fathered himself by a virgin and now resides in outer space, is possessed by the spirit of a supernal ghost that is in some sort of parallel-dimensioning identical with but distinct from himself and an ancient Canaanite storm god, and promises to make you live forever in an alternate dimension if you symbolically eat his flesh and drink his blood, and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that has eternally tainted our mammalian flesh ever since a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree. So you better do what he says. 

Carrier has strung together a series of caricatures. What does that accomplish?

Probably this:  by boiling down biblical 'truths' to the irreducible cores, such "truths" tend to strike the average reader as absurdities, and thus unworthy of being taken seriously.

Since it's not an accurate description of Christian theology, how does ridiculing a caricature disprove Christian theology? Let's run through some of these descriptors:     "Cosmic" No. The Son is not a part of the cosmos. Rather, he essentially exists outside the physical universe.

Wrong, the bible says the Son "fills all things" Ephesians 4:10, and the fact that he does so after going to the "heavens" suggests he went to a place within the cosmos.  And since "outside the universe" is about as coherent as "north of the number 4", we continue to be rational in viewing Christian theology as incoherent.

    "Zombie" No, Jesus is not an ambulatory, cannibalistic corpse with minimal brain function.

A weak criticism if scholar Carrier knew the dictionary definition of zombie and intentionally took literary license, which is likely.  If I said Jesus was a clown, Hays would probably retort that there is no biblical or patristic support for the notion that Jesus wore makeup.

Rather, he died, then was not only restored to life, but glorified, so that he now has an ageless, youthful, immortal, disease-free body. His mental faculties are fully intact.

Telling us you likely intended your criticism more for Christians than for non-Christians, as only Christians would find it the least bit compelling.  Yes, I am assuming the stupidity of the arguments for Christianity.  I'm under no intellectual obligation to provide argument for every opinion I set forth.

    "telekinetically, telepathically" Carrier uses this terminology because he thinks telepathy and telekinesis are ridiculous. Yet these are well-attested phenomena.

Telling us you are likely high on crack.  The secular evidence of such is total bullshit, we are rational to insist the studies be done while we watch in real time before we become intellectually obligated to believe any such thing is real.  Furthermore, if you were talking about "miracles" (as if you think miracles happen) I've issued a challenge to Craig Keener by email and open letter for him to show us the one miracle claim recounted in his two volume "Miracles" work that he thinks is the most impervious to falsification.  So far, zip.  I've already interacted with you before about the stupidity of claiming miracles happen in the modern world, and, characteristic of somebody who fears their bluster won't last long under cross examination, you dropped the debate after you gave your two-cents.  Perhaps you were too busy at your second job in your effort to help Engwer help fund the digitization of the Maurice Grosse's Enfield tapes so that you could then prove that poltergeists are real.  Let's just say I don't think disregarding Triablogue leaves me ignorant of any part of reality.  I choose when I'll bother with your ridiculousness the way I choose which vintage cartoons to watch during a boring moment.

    "fathered himself" I take it that Carrier is suggesting that's an oxymoron. But that ignores the preexistence of the Son.

That's right.  And because Mark wanted to prove Jesus was the Son of God, his silence on the virgin birth is less likely due to authorial intent, and more likely due to his either not knowing such stories, or disapproving of them.  Jesus also ignored issues of his own preexistence when talking to Gentiles...apparently, the canonization of the NT made Christian belief more complex for Gentiles than Jesus ever intended it to be.  We thus WORRY about "ignoring" the preexistence of the Son like we WORRY should we misquote Goldilocks.

    "by a virgin" A miracle, which functions a sign.

And assuming Matthew wrote the gospel now bearing his name, he apparently 'expected' that what he said about the virgin birth was sufficient to intellectually compel Gentiles to believe the story...despite his taking Isaiah 7:14 out of context (i.e, the more honest way of saying "typological fulfillment"). 

    "now resides in outer space" Where did Carrier come up with that?

What pre-scientific notion of the heavens did Jesus intend to encourage within his disciples when he intentionally "ascended" in their sight "into heaven"?

 51 While He was blessing them, He parted from them and was carried up into heaven. (Lk. 24:51 NAU)

 9 And after He had said these things, He was lifted up while they were looking on, and a cloud received Him out of their sight. (Acts 1:9 NAU)

Apparently, "heaven" really does exist "up there", a premise supported by scores of other bible verses. 

 24 Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven, (Gen. 19:24 NAU)

 20 For it came about when the flame went up from the altar toward heaven, that the angel of the LORD ascended in the flame of the altar.  (Jdg. 13:20 NAU)

Once you ask "how would these passages have been interpreted by their original pre-scientific audiences?", you know perfectly well the "heaven is up there" belief is what was held by all of the biblical peoples.  Whether you can reconcile such statements with modern cosmology is quite beside the hermeneutical point.  And only a Christian worried about biblical "inerrancy" would feel motivated to care about such a word game anyway.

The Bible doesn't say that. Does Carrier equate the Biblical concept of "heaven" with "outer space"?

Well given the bible says heaven is "up there", and means it literally, and science tells us "up there" consists of nothing more than "outer space", the answer is yes.

    "is possessed by the spirit of a supernal ghost" A ghost is the soul of a dead human being. The Holy Spirit isn't human, and never died. Indeed, the Holy Spirit isn't "alive" in the biological sense.

Like it matters.  "not alive in the biological sense" merely means "alive in an incoherent sense".  Now what, Steve?  Gonna point to the Enfield Poltergeist that Engwer spent all that money on trying to research, to "prove" that non-physical "life" can be real?  LOL.  If the voice is heard within the cosmos, why do you automatically suspect origination from another dimension?

    "That is in some sort of parallel-dimensioning identical with but distinct from himself" Carrier's attempt to parody the Trinity. A more accurate analogy would be a mirror symmetry.

Ok, Jesus sees the father when he looks in the mirror.  What are you going to do now, start the world's first Calvinist Oneness Pentecostal denomination?

    "and promises to make you live forever in an alternate dimension" If that's an allusion to the intermediate state, then it's not a physical dimension. Discarnate souls don't exist in space.

But since you cannot show that "outside of space" is even coherent, what you suggest can be safely and reasonably dismissed as nonsense-talk.

If that's an allusion to the final state, then that's not an alternate dimension, but the renewed earth.

Like it matters.

    "if you symbolically eat his flesh and drink his blood" Most evangelicals don't think you acquire eternal life by celebrating the Lord's Supper.

Then apparently they never read Jesus' statement to that effect, which was taken so literally by many of his followers that they fell away, when in fact if it had been obvious when Jesus said it that he was speaking only figuratively (as evangelicals maintain), the statement would not likely have caused such controversy and apostasy.  Let's now consult the bible's "devil-verse":

 57 "As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats Me, he also will live because of Me.
 58 "This is the bread which came down out of heaven; not as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live forever."
 59 These things He said in the synagogue as He taught in Capernaum.
 60 Therefore many of His disciples, when they heard this said, "This is a difficult statement; who can listen to it?"
 61 But Jesus, conscious that His disciples grumbled at this, said to them, "Does this cause you to stumble?
 62 "What then if you see the Son of Man ascending to where He was before?
 63 "It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.
 64 "But there are some of you who do not believe." For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were who did not believe, and who it was that would betray Him.
 65 And He was saying, "For this reason I have said to you, that no one can come to Me unless it has been granted him from the Father."
 666 As a result of this many of His disciples withdrew and were not walking with Him anymore. (Jn. 6:57-66 NAU)

If Jesus really did do genuinely supernatural miracles in sight of his disciples, it is absurd to think that a Christ-saying that Steve Hays, 2000 years after the fact, can still tell is merely figurative, would have caused such apostasy.  "Yeah, I know he did real miracles, but his figurative statement about eating his flesh was just too much".  LOL.

    "a rib-woman" Is there something antecedently false about the idea that God made the first woman from a tissue sample of the first man?

Fallacy of loaded question.  The concern here is what "god" did "in history", and therefore is subject to probability analysis, you don't just win merely because the allegation falls within the bounds of the logically possible.  And that's to say nothing of the growing list of Christian scholars who think the story of Adam and Eve is pure metaphor, despite the concerns of fundies that metaphorical interpretation of Adam and Eve would destroy the NT.  If Christianity's theology requires interpreting the story as historically literal, then I guess Christian theology is false.   Why would I worry about the interpretation of Adam and Eve as given by idiots who constantly took the OT out of context (Paul) as even admitted by other Christian scholars?

    "by a talking snake" The Hebrew designation is probably a pun that trades on the multiple senses and connotations of the word (snake, diviner, shining one).

And there you go again, setting up an opportunity to wrangle words and to thus disobey apostle Paul's prohibition in 2nd Timothy 2:14.

    "to eat from a magical tree" The text doesn't indicate that the tree of knowledge is a magical tree. That's like saying the ark of the covenant is a magical box, or that Moses' staff is a magical stick. Rather, what we have is a divinely assigned correlation.

I'm not seeing much of a difference.  You can make a bunny come out of the empty hat by "magic" or because God created the bunny ex nihilo after you showed everybody the hat was empty.  But since you seem hell-bent on disobeying 2nd Timothy 2:14, feel free to cherry pick your NT moral obligations.  We only expect such from those who disobey such bible passages.

These are ordinary objects. They have no special power. The result comes from God, not the object.

See above.

Is Carrier deliberately misrepresenting Christian theology, or is he actually that ignorant?

Is Steve just ignorant?  Or does he realize that "magic" in the biblical world view meant to make use of invisible people to accomplish what normal people could not?

    And lest we forget, that’s the Jesus who has nothing to say against slavery or the subjugation and disenfranchisement of women Argument from silence.

Not all arguments from silence are fallacious.  See Wigmore.  Yet you act as if "argument from silence" is all that need be uttered to reasonably view the criticized position as being fallaciously unsupported.

For that matter, Jesus said nothing against the disenfranchisement of men. It's not as if Roman rule was democratic. Most men had not vote.

Well then, Steve, what DO you think about Christians who believe God is working in them to create change in American politics, when in fact Jesus's silence about his disciples becoming involved in the world suggests he didn't want them wasting their time on "worldly" concerns?  Does there come a point when a person's misunderstanding of the Jesus in the gospels starts eroding the viability of their claim to be genuinely born-again?

    or the execution of homosexuals, other than, at best, It's striking to see contemporary atheists jump on the bandwagon of "gay rights." I don't recall atheists in the past spearheading the campaign for "gay rights." Were Antony Flew, A. J. Ayer, J. L. Mackie, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow, Charles Bradlaugh, Robert Ingersoll, Thomas Huxley, Thomas Paine, and Alexander White in the vanguard of the "gay rights" movement? Did I miss that? How did this suddenly become a self-evident moral maxim when so many prominent atheists of yore failed to discern it? Rather, atheists waited until it was safe to champion "gay rights." Waited until they felt the wind behind their backs.

I agree with you against Carrier on this.  I'm an atheist, yet I see nothing about my atheism that means the rational next step is to support gay rights.  I have arguments against male homosexuality that are not employed by fundamentalist Christians, which show the reasonableness of viewing legalization of the act as an absurd departure from America's values and likely contributing to further complexity and thus bobsledding this nation on the way to societal collapse.  In the ancient world and before, the male who had no sexual attraction to females was likely that way due to genetic malfunction; nature selecting him for extinction.

     that you shouldn’t invite sluts and homos to legally murder the sluts and homos because that would be hypocritical (John 7:52-8:11, a forgery). The fact that the Pericope Adulterae is a scribal interpolation is hardly news. Any standard edition of the Bible will footnote that familar fact.
     Oh no, you are supposed to wait for Jesus to murder them (Matthew 3:12). i) To begin with, that text does't single out "sluts and homos."
ii) How does Carrier infer "murder" from that text? It's about eschatological judgment.

You are a CALVINIST, and you don't think killing people is part of god's "eschatological judgment"?

It doesn't even say God kills them.

Doesn't have to, it was addressed to Jews, who would have attempted to reconcile it with Deut. 32:39.

Rather, that might well be postmortem punishment. Not to mention the figurative imagery.
And even if God did kill then, killing isn't synonymous with murder. 

If advanced space aliens came to earth and started zapping people dead, it would be rational to accuse them of "murder" despite the technical fact that they have their own set of laws that say it is legally allowable to kill earthlings.  So the fact that murder is different than "killing" merely because it techically means "unlawful killing" is a trifle of semantics that doesn't do you much more good than proving, once again, you have no intention of obeying 2nd Timothy 2:14.  Why not just end the suspense and admit that you finally discovered a command from Paul, applicable to you, that you refuse to obey?

    if the conditions he imagines existed, rape would be ethical—namely, if it was the loving and just thing to do (and we can imagine scenarios, though Flannagan wisely avoids attempting it: like, maybe, being forced to rape someone lest, the coercer informs you, the victim will be killed instead. Carrier fails to explain why, from the standpoint of secular ethics, it would be unethical to rape someone if the alternative is the victim's death.

Shouldn't have to.  Secular ethics are necessarily relative.  Smart  secularists don't fall into the trap of pretending there's some "objective morality" out there which they aspire to.  But I have to admit lots of people are truly ignorant about moral philosophy, and yes, they will pretend as if their moral beliefs are "absolute" without realizing what that implies, or caring.

If that's a forced option, isn't allowing the victim to be murdered worse than saving the victim's life, even if that entails rape? What is the secular basis for Carrier's disapproval? In fact, Carrier later says:
     To successfully argue that “loving and just” decisions are moral requires (i) appealing to the consequences of “loving and just” decisions and the consequences of “unloving or unjust” decisions, and then (ii) appealing to which of those consequences the moral agent prefers. But DCT can accomplish neither, except in exactly the same way ethical naturalism does. Therefore, DCT reduces to ethical naturalism in practical fact. It therefore cannot be an improvement on it. So he himself stipulates that taking the consequences into account are a necessary element in ethical decision-making.

I also observe the stupidity of the anti-consequentialist camp.  What fool would ever tell a kid, in the name of moral truth, that they can be good without considering the consequences of their actions?

According to his own hypothetical, the end-result of one choice is the death of the victim, while the end-result of the other choice is saving the victim's life–albeit by rape. If ethical decision-making comes down to weighing the respective consequences, then on what secular basis does Carrier conclude that rape would be wrong in that situation?

That's a good question for atheists who think morals can be "facts".  Count me out.  I observe that moral wrongness is utterly subjective.  While I would fight off an attempted murder of myself, that too is subjective, as I really wouldn't care if the whole world agreed I should die, I'd still subjectively try to save my life and thus act against those trying to kill me.  Frank Turek is correct:  if atheism is true, morals are relative.  But Frank Turek is also wrong:  if atheism is true, then asking "who is right, Hitler or Mother Theresa" is the fallacy of loaded question, falsely assuming that because a moral disagreement exists, surely somebody has to be in the "right", or both must be in the "wrong".  Nope.  You wouldn't ask that about two wild dogs fighting over a piece of meat, why ask it about human beings, who are just more intelligent dogs?

    DCT produces “infantile” moral reasoning, not only by reducing it to obeying what someone else says God wants, rather than applying one’s own critical reasoning to ascertain what is right, but also by eliminating any stable adult motivation to be moral. As atheists well know, from all the theists who terrifyingly admit they would murder and rape everyone but for their fear of hell, this is profoundly immature moral reasoning. Where are all the theists who allegedly admit that "they would murder and rape everyone but for their fear of hell"?

This is an inference drawn after asking the question "why did NT authors want people to fear hell?  Were they trying to scare them into resisting their baser instincts?"

I haven't encountered them. To begin with, there's no reason to suppose theists in general even want to rape or murder everyone.

If you think that what people say in public is an accurate reflection of what they privately believe, then sure.

The actual argument is this: if a person would like to commit rape or murder, would he refrain even though he could do so with impunity?

My experience of other people tells me that a substantial number of them would commit various types of crimes if they were as sure as possible that they wouldn't get caught.  But for obvious reasons, few such people would publicly admit this baser instinct, because that admission has enough power to destroy marriages and friendships or partnerships.  If you need people to be honest about their dark secrets so you can record reliable data, you'll need all the luck in the world.

It doesn't imply that he in fact desires to rape or murder anyone, much less everyone. Rather, it's a conditional or hypothetical scenario. If someone happens to feel that way about someone else, would he act on his impulse if he could get away with it? It doesn't mean he normally has that impulse. He may never have that impulse.

Correct. 

    Adults reason differently: they won’t murder and rape anyone because they care about them.  There's no empirical evidence that atheists care about everyone. Indeed, there's abundant empirical evidence that atheists don't care about everyone.

I think Carrier meant to say that adults would never reason that raping a person they care about might possibly signify the rapist's "care" for them, which would then be completely opposite to the divine atrocities of the bible, wherein the fact that you obeyed god and forced a woman into marriage (Deut. 21:10-14) is all you need allege to show that such shot-gun wedding was "loving" toward her.   That is, Carrier likely meant that smart people gauge whether something is morally good or bad based upon the extent to which it causes others misery.  But in bible land, beating children to death is morally good solely because God willed it, and the god who willed it can never be evil, end of story.

In Christian ethics, by contrast, you should treat people justly even if you don't care about them personally.

Except that in a Calvinist's mind, God might have predestined you to commit the sin of acting unjustly toward another person, which, because it was infallibly divinely decreed, turns the unjust act into a just act, since the god who ordered it is necessarily good in all that he does, meaning god's act in forcing people to sin is a morally good act. 

You treat them justly because that's the right thing to do, and not because you care about their wellbeing. You may treat them justly in spite of what you think of them.
     on DCT, you can’t decide God is “evil” and thus to be defied, not obeyed…no matter how evil God is If an atheist came to believe in the existence of an evil God, would he defy him? That would be pretty foolhardy.

Not any more foolhardy than Jews of WW2 who preferred death over respecting Hitler.  He may indeed have had the power over their lives, but they were not irrational to decide that wearing the badge of martyrdom was better than conforming to an evil dictator's will. I'm not seeing a whole lot of practical difference between fighting Hitler to the death and fighting the biblical god to the death. Especially given that the doctrine of eternal conscious torment in the bible has a high degree of falsity to it, so that fighting the bible god becomes about as fearful as punching snowflakes.

    He never responds to Sinnott-Armstrong’s actual point: which is that either moral facts are wholly unknowable on DCT (and therefore DCT entails we can know nothing about morality, and therefore by definition cannot ground any morality), or they are knowable by virtue of observable properties apart from DCT. But if they are knowable by virtue of observable properties apart from DCT, then they are already sufficiently moral by virtue of those properties. So we don’t need DCT. In what sense are "moral facts" "observable properties"? In ethics, we apply moral norms to concrete situations. Moral norms or ethical standards are not observable properties. Rather, they are ethical criteria by which we evaluate events or contemplated courses of action.
     Even if God exists, indeed even if a loving God exists, this is of no use to us in ascertaining what is and is not moral. Because He simply isn’t consistently or reliably telling anyone. Which begs the question.

No, Carrier's contention about God's inconsistent revelation is not the fallacy of begging the question, as there is plenty of good reason to suppose there is no god, or that the god is very inconsistent in how he communicates his will to human beings.  Carrier is speaking from what he observed in past research. Gee, Steve, if you make a statement in support of Calvinism, but you don't follow it with an 800 page book of arguments thereto, does that mean you have "begged the question"?   Do you seriously think its "wrong" to give your opinion without providing argument to back it up? 

Actually, you didn't support your contention that Carrier "begged the question"...so does that make you guilty of the same fallacy?  Must people ALWAYS follow their statement of belief with an argument before they can correctly avoid "begging the question"?  Obviously not.

    So all we have left is the ethical naturalist’s best alternative: an increasingly well-informed moral agent who cares about herself, and a body of advisors who care about her (crowdsourced knowledge, tested and accumulated from past to present). That’s the best you get. You don’t have access to an omniscient advisor. So you have to make do. And that means caring about whether you have enough information (about yourself and the world), and caring how to make the information you get more reliable, and caring whether you are reasoning from that information without logical fallacy or cognitive error. That’s the only way to get closer to the truth in matters of morality. Phoning God simply isn’t an option.  How does that rise to the level of moral realism?

That's a good question for an atheist who aspires to moral realism.  Count me out.

    Notice that this is Flannagan’s moral theory, minus the primitive hocum about sky spirits.
 In classical theism, God is not a "sky spirit." In classical theism, God subsists outside the physical universe.

And "outside the physical universe" is no less incoherent than "sky spirit".  If your god is so wonderful that human language fails to do proper justice, you might concede that words are not always good enough for you to convey to skeptics your other-worldly ideas.  Have you ever tried telepathy?

    DCT is therefore unlivable, even if it were correct. It puts moral truth inside an inaccessible black box, the mind of one particular God, whom we cannot identify or communicate with in any globally or historically reliable or consistent way. We therefore cannot know what is moral, even if DCT were true. Which assumes, without benefit of argument, that we don't have access to divine revelation.

Not necessarily.  The disagreements of Christians over morals would make it reasonable to assume that there is no more god concerned to resolve those disputes than there is a god who cares about resolving disputes between the ACLU and Trump.  Especially given that many Christians in such debates are not morons, but are skilled in apologetics and are serious about their faith.  That is, it doesn't even matter if you are a genuinely born-again Christian sincerely seeking god's will, not even THAT is enough to break into that black box and discover what moral god wants you to follow.

This is even worse for Calvinists like Steve Hays, who say God wants the world to believe He doesn't want them to commit adultery (revealed will, the Law), but that God secretly wills all adulterous acts before they take place, and wills them "infallibly".  You know, the parent who says "don't eat the cookies before dinner", but then sets up everything to increase the odds as much as possible that the child will disobey this and conform to the parent's "hidden" will...then when and if the child disobeys, the parent punishes the child for engaging in the disobedience that the parent secretly intended the whole time.  THIS is "god" according to Steve Hays.  And he seriously thinks atheists should view such a large bucket of morally duplicitous horseshit as some type of "threat".

    The supernaturalist is stuck in the exact same position as the ethical naturalist: attempting to ascertain from observable facts what the best way is to live. It's not the same position if the theist relies on moral intuitions which have their source in natural revelation whereas the atheist relies on moral sentiments that have their source in social conditioning and amoral evolutionary psychology.

I think you missed the point:  You cannot have a "Christian morality" unless you cite observable "facts" to support such morality.  DCT doesn't merely get up, shout "I'm correct", then walk away, as if the report came hot off the plates from Mt. Siani. DCT'rs do indeed cite to what they regard as "observable facts" to justify it.  Otherwise, Flannagan's articles on DCT would not require more than once sentence.

    But we cannot demonstrate that the “God” (or “ideal agent”) we have thus modeled in our mind or intuition is the “one true” God or not, except by appeal to natural facts that require no actual God to exist. Which disregards theistic proofs that appeal to "natural facts."

So? There IS such a thing as regarding your presuppositions as so settled that you can be reasonable to rely on them when debating people who disagree with them.  Such as you just did by pretending that the theistic proofs were some sort of formidable obstacle that Carrier was fearfully avoiding.  You "disregarded" showing that such theistic proofs were powerful.  Shame on you.

    Otherwise, we cannot know the God informing the intuition of Islamic suicide bombers is the incorrect God.
 If Muhammad appeals to the Bible to vouch his own prophetic credentials, when, in fact, his message contracts the Bible, then he's falsified his own claims.

Stick with the subject, Hays.  Carrier wasn't talking about Islamic suicide bombers who cite the bible to justify their crimes.  He was talking about how, if we have no reliable to way to discern the "true" god's morality, then whether god is or isn't inspiring the Isalmic suicide bombers is not the kind of question that can be resolved, therefore, the DCT'rs who think it can be resolved, are incorrect.  His larger point was that DCT lands us at a dead end, proving itself to be useless.  If god refuses to specify which religion is true, in a way that people can agree on, why would it matter than the moral goodness of an act is rooted in his nature?  Jesus stayed dead, so if there really is some "god" out there, you have no reason to think he would be more angry with atheists than with you.  Worse, if Christianity is false, the first god-option you'd likely exercise is the god of Judaism.  But if Christianity is false, that means its use of OT scripture was false, which means Jesus wasn't the real messiah, whcih means the god of the OT probably views Christians as promoting idolatry. Go ahead, Steve, how often in the OT does god display wrath against "atheism", and how often does he display wrath against idolatry?  or did you suddenly discover how late you are for church?

Of course you will pretend the bible is more reliable than the Koran and extremist Muslim theology, but I would argue that because your god committed so many 'divine atrocities' in the bible, you cannot realistically deny that Isalmic suicide bombers are reflecting the morality of your Christian god. 

Worse, as a Calvinist, Steve Hays also believes that God infallibly predestined any and all bombings caused by suicidal converts to Islam.  That is, when we look at the worst evil in the world, we are seeing things that God thinks are morally good.  After all, if God is morally good by nature, whatever he approves of must also be morally good, since by nature such morally good God would not approve of morally bad acts.  This gets Calvinist Hays in more trouble, though, because Hays will say God's expressed hatred of certain 'bad' things is merely god's "revealed" will, and you cannot really know whether such expressions are telling you the actual truth about God's hidden will.  I've been saying for 20 years that Calvinists are idiots if they wish to take part in DCT discussions.  The Calvinist God's distinction between good and evil is an absolute farce, and a misleading one at that.

    And the most important turning point here, is where theists simply can’t defeat Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma from 2400 years ago.
 i) Even a secular ethicist like Richard Joyce has argued that the Euthyphro dilemma is a failure:
http://personal.victoria.ac.nz/richard_joyce/acrobat/joyce_2002_euthyphro.dilemma.pdf
ii) Likewise, in a book which Flannagan recently coauthored with Paul Copan (Did God Really Command Genocide?), they devote two full chapters (chaps 13-14) to the Euthyphro dilemma.
So Carrier has his work cut out for him. He can't win the argument by taking intellectual shortcuts.

Sure, there's always the 'mysterious ways' third option, but even if the ED isn't a logically necessary deduction, the fact that it reasonably justifies atheism is enough.  Because we are people, we aren't going to maintain objective neutrality toward the truth of a highly improbable conclusion merely because it doesn't go all the way and become logically impossible.  We are going to live as if those things that are highly improbable are logically impossible, despite the fact that these are different things.  What is the practical difference between "i don't care about your idea because it is too improbable to deserve consideration", and "I don't care about your idea because it is logically impossible"?  In the real world, NONE.

    Because for DCT to be true, what Flannagan needs to say is, “we should obey whatever character God happens to have,” which would mean, we should all be the mass murderers that the God of the Old Testament actually wants us to be. Which begs the question of whether Yahweh is a mass murderer.

Probably because Carrier expected his readers would already know that truth.  Hays' word wrangling attempts to trifle that God's demand that children be massacred (the Flood, 1st Samuel 15:2-3, etc) is something other than mass murder (all because it cannot be "murder" if the lawgiver has authorized it) merely fails to intuit that Carrier was using "murder" in the colloquial sense of killing.  You'd be a fucking idiot to reply "which begs the question whether god's killings in the bible were unjustified" since even you yourself often make points without providing supporting argument.

    Or admit the Old Testament God is a demon the worthy of any horror film villain himself, and somehow convince everyone that we are lucky enough that that God just happens not to exist. (Oh wait. Atheists are already doing that.)
 How do you disprove the existence of a Being who, if there is such a God, exists outside the physical universe?

By pointing out that "outside the universe" constitutes an incoherent concept, and therefore, is sufficiently false as to intellectually justify those who choose to infer that it is positively false.

What would count as evidence for his nonexistence?

Well given that the place he exists doesn't even qualify as coherent thought, none.

    The commands of a loving and just person is a conceptual category that does not require that person to exist for their commands to be loving and just. If it is good to obey such commands, it is good regardless of whether they are fictional or real. To the contrary, good commands involve social obligations. We have no social obligations to fictional characters. Nonentities cannot oblige us.

If it is good to obey a man's advice "don't steal", that would generally remain a good idea even after the man dies. So he doesn't exist anymore, but that doesn't mean his advice suddenly becomes a bad idea.

    or not punishing rapists by legally ordering them to continue raping their victims (Deuteronomy 22:28-29). That's an inept misinterpretation of the passage. It is dealing with a hypothetical situation in which sex could either be coercive or consensual. There are no witnesses. A Jewish judge has no independent evidence to determine if the sex was coercive or consensual.
In that culture, loss of virginity made a single woman far less eligible for marriage. So the law represents a practical compromise: either a shotgun wedding or financial compensation in lieu of marriage.

Gee, Steve, where does that passage allow for the other option of "financial compensation in lieu of marriage."?

 25 "But if in the field the man finds the girl who is engaged, and the man forces her and lies with her, then only the man who lies with her shall die.
 26 "But you shall do nothing to the girl; there is no sin in the girl worthy of death, for just as a man rises against his neighbor and murders him, so is this case.
 27 "When he found her in the field, the engaged girl cried out, but there was no one to save her.
 28 "If a man finds a girl who is a virgin, who is not engaged, and seizes her and lies with her and they are discovered,
 29 then the man who lay with her shall give to the girl's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall become his wife because he has violated her; he cannot divorce her all his days.
 30 "A man shall not take his father's wife so that he will not uncover his father's skirt. (Deut. 22:25-30 NAU)

Looks to me like this is no "either/or", but a "both/and", i.e., the man must BOTH pay financially AND marry her.

You also overlook that because not much more is stated, the "marriage" would then authorize the sexual union, and the burden would be on you to show that further sexual activity was prohibited.  That is, the rape victim would be expected not to resist the rapist-husband's attempts at sex after marriage.  Some apologists scream to high heaven that this marriage would not authorize sex, but then that means God thought that depriving the rape victim of the joy of sex for the rest of her life was the best thing to do, which is obviously stupid under the popular Christian belief that the sexual joy evinced in Song of Songs was something to be aspired to by all married believers.  And God depriving the victim of this joy certainly opens the fundies' mind to the prospect that the bible god probably is a bit more sadistic and callous than Sunday's well-wishers give him credit for.

    As I commented for Loftus in The Christian Delusion (p. 101), “any rational would-be rapist who acquired full and correct information about how raped women feel, and what sort of person he becomes if he ignores a person’s feelings and welfare, and all of the actual consequences of such behavior to himself and his society, then he would agree that raping such a woman is wrong.” That's willfully naive. Serial rapists know how raped women feel, which is precisely why they rape them. They hate women. The psychological damage is intentional. How women feel is a presupposition of the serial rapist. He aims to inflict maximal harm.

I agree, Carrier got this one wrong.  He has far more faith in humanity's basic goodness than I ever would.