Correcting CerebralFaith's theological and moral errors

This is my reply to an article by Evan Minton entitled

Q&A: The Moral Argument, Moral Relativism, and Perfect Being Theology 

posted by Evan Minton on June 04, 2019

Evan Minton posts an alleged reply to him from some guy named "Sam", then Minton replied.  I've kept "Sam's" post because I wished to comment on it also, even though he is critiquing the Christian view. 

He made some good points. 

But I can make them better (cue Bionic Man intro music).  (Minton's reply was too long so I snipped some of it, and didn't do a final check, but the point is, Minton, like Turek, Craig and Flannagan, fail to demonstrate that the atheist cannot for morality.)  Sam says:

A very common argument that I have heard for the existence of God is the moral argument. You argue as follows:
 "1: If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2: Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3: Therefore, God exists."
 For number 1 it depends on what you mean by objective. If you mean a moral standard that is beyond humanity and independent of us then you are correct. If however, you mean that there aren't emotion-based principles that possess a certain quality or type of feeling referred to as moral present in all sane humans then no.
 So when someone says Abortion for the sake of convenience is wrong they are indeed saying "I don't like Abortion for the sake of convenience!!" to some extent. So emotivism has some truth in it. However, they are saying it violates certain forms of feeling that are turned into principles in the minds of all sane humans. Which is a distinction that must be made. It is not exactly the same to say "I don't like Abortion" and "Abortion is a moral abomination." (Which I would agree with in most cases) In the first case you are saying you find it disagreeable to your feelings generally, in the second you are saying it violates the feelings/principles that have the quality/type of feeling known as moral you and others have. (The moral feeling/principle that humans have the right to live.) So calling an action immoral means it violates one of more of these principles. Calling an action moral means it conforms to these principles.

There is nothing about "morality" that requires "objectivity", just like there's nothing about "opinion" that requires objectivity.  And pretending our strongly held morals "come from god" violates Occam's Razor, since a) god is the most complex thing anybody can possibly imagine, and b) even if some god existed, the Christian is still depending on divine telepathy to "account" for why most people agree that, say, rape is wrong, and "telepathy" is also either nonsense or else far more complicated than the naturalistic and obvious explanation...we get our morals from genetic predisposition and environmental conditioning.

This is going towards the second point. Since there are objectively speaking certain emotion based principles that are universally accepted (hence referred to as core morality) (among sane people) that possess the quality known as moral we can in a sense say that there is "objective" morality. (Or at least an adequate replacement). It is objectively true that humans have certain emotion based principles that possess a certain quality (a sort of sense/feeling of obligation and duty) referred to as moral. It is objectively true that a society's behavior can either conform or not conform to these principles. And if they over time start to conform more to these emotion based principles than they had in the past, we have what is referred to as Moral Progress. There are moral duties explained. Now for moral obligations, an obligation is an ought. Oughts are conditional. To comply with moral principles you ought to do action X, Y and Z and you ought not to do actions A, B and C. Duties seem to me to be able to come from a conscience as much as a command.

we might call it "a sense of duty" or "ought", but in reality, mammals are driven by instinct to do anything which they perceive will either enhance their own ability to survive/thrive, or enhance the ability of their own group to survive/thrive.  The question is why mammals feel an obligation to do something. The answer is that it is nothing but instinct which they got from genetic predisposition and environmental conditioning.  That is, the "ought" that Lewis and others keep talking about is nothing more than instinct operating through the value judgments a specific mammal has acquired.  The notion that the "ought" draws from a "transcendent" source has no evidence, and constitutes nothing but an empty talking point for Turek and his presumably predominantly Christian audiences who are already primed to assume anything that points toward the Christian god, constitutes valid argument.

C.S. Lewis extensively argued in Mere Christianity that when people argue over morals they presuppose that there is a moral standard above them that is known to both of them.

And he was wrong.  When I argue with another atheist who thinks it permissible to commit crime on a regular basis, I remind him that his duties are imposed on him by society, and he can expect to suffer in this present world if he continues committing crimes.  The question of how do we convince a person that they "ought" to do something, is answered by noting that morality is relative and subjective, and that if we don't impose our morality on them as children, it is highly unlikely that they will care as adults, with the only thing stopping such adults from committing those crimes is the fear of jail.  Turek's reply that Christians at least have a more logical basis for imposing their "oughts" on criminals, is nothing but an empty talking point.  Appealing to "god" does nothing but increase the complexity of the near-intolerably complexity already present. The fact is that appeals to "God" are only found coherent by theists.  They are so ingrained with the idea that God gave human law, they simply cannot imagine how it could be otherwise.  But Appeals to god place no demonstrable intellectual obligation upon the skeptic.  Neither would appeals to the tooth-fairy.

snip....

-- Sam

-------------------------------------------Minton now responds, and I reply respectively. 

It's always a pleasure to interact with you on these issues, Sam. You are a thoughtful individual and you clearly think through faith issues deeply. I also would love for you to believe in a Perfectly Good God, not simply so that your life will be a lot better, but so that your afterlife will be infinitely better!

And if you think unbelievers go immediately to hell upon death, no second chances, then your lengthy response is implying you think Sam can safely delay the day of his repentance until after he has checked out whatever volumes of apologetics you recommend, a task that might take him months or years...when in fact your denial of second chances after death would seem to demand that the dangerousness of his present unbelief is very urgent, and would require that you insist Sam repent, now, right now.

Therefore, I will do my best to answer your concerns about the soundness of The Moral Argument.
 Emotions and Moral Intuitions
 If I understood you correctly, Sam, (and I always read your e-mails slowly to ensure I do to the best of my ability) your first point is that our moral intuition is really just our emotional dislike of certain behaviors. These emotional repulsions are universal, sure, but they are, nevertheless simply emotional repulsions.
 I don't think our moral intuitions can be reduced to simply our emotive reactions to actions we dislike. There are things that make me mad that I do not think morally wrong. One example that immediately comes to mind is people who chew their food loudly. You know the kind; their chewing sounds like an agitating washing machine or someone slogging through thick mud. I cannot stand people who chew loudly. Yet if someone chewed loudly behind me in a cafeteria, while he'd make me mad, I would never ever say that he was doing something morally wrong. I wouldn't rebuke him and tell him to repent or anything like that.

But why does loud chewing make you mad?  thoughts beamed into your heart by divine telepathy?  And what do you think about Christian parents who tell their own kids to stop chewing loudly...does this "ought" represent a duty originating with god...or are the parents merely imposing their subjective morality on the kids in the name of the Lord?

On the other hand, there are things I do think are morally wrong, but they don't make me angry. I think prostitution is morally wrong. Nevertheless, if I'm driving down the street and see an obvious streetwalker on the corner, I'm not going to feel angry in the slightest. I don't think the streetwalker ought to be a streetwalker, but I'm unemotional about the subject (except for maybe pity since I know women only do this kind of thing when they hit rock bottom).

Then you lack righteous indignation.  Read Romans 1.  God himself got angry at Sodom and Gomorrah, which seems to imply that for you to be "godly" you must exude the same moral sentiment.  You aren't preaching Christ when you go past a streetwalker without telling her she needs to repent. On the other hand, the fact that you conveniently avoid a potential fight or embarassment for yourself, might actually be the real reason you don't preach at hookers, so we have to keep in mind whether your understandable unwillingness to catch her germs, or fend off her attacks, are the real reason you "don't get mad" at prostitution.

But, admittedly, many things I consider to be evil do make me angry.
 So, there are three categories of behavior that undermine the proposal that moral intuition is reducible to dislike of certain behaviors.
 1: There are things that make me mad that I don't consider a moral wrong (e.g loud chewing).
2: There are things I consider to be morally wrong that don't make me mad (e.g prostitution).
3: There are things that both make me mad and I consider to be moral wrongs.
 So, the law of identity is not applicable to anger and moral intuition. I can come up with several more examples of things that fall into the first category as well as things that fall into the third.

FAIL. There is nothing about your list of 3 descriptions that remotely begins to suggest moral intuition cannot be reduced to dislike of certain behaviors.

Example 1: If someone throws a blue shell at me while we're playing Mario Kart while I'm in first place, about to cross the finish line, and the blue shell causes my character to spin out of control and allow my buddy to pass by me, I might rage quit. Actually, in my own case, I probably wouldn't. I'm a good sport, but I do know that there is such a thing as a "sore loser".

You are still addicted to video games, yet you consider yourself a "teacher"? You remind me of Mormon missionaries, these 18 year old know-nothings that refer to themselves as "Elder so and so". Yeah right.  Read James 3:1. 

snipExample 3: I used to have a dog named Max. I had a bell on my front door and trained Max to ring it with his paw whenever he needed to go outside to urinate or defecate.

You need to rise above the young apologist's immature need to give precise details about everything little thing you talk about.  "whenever he wanted to go outside" would have sufficed.

There were days when he would ring the bell very frequently, thus being very disruptive when I was trying to read a book, play a video game, or watch a TV show.

You wouldn't have experienced that, had you been either working a job, or preaching on the street.  You'll forgive me if I take your liberal relaxed attitude about God as a sign that you don't seriously believe what the bible says about his anger toward sin and unbelief.  Apologetics is not your heartfelt concern.  It is a very cool way to make money, that's all.  When you aren't playing video games, that is.

And on these days, in most of these instances, he didn't do anything. We just walked around the yard for 15 minutes. I would be very irritated with Max making me go outside for no reason.

Max probably just wanted to be outside the house.  Like you.

I had something better to do than walk around my front yard.

yeah, like playing video games or watching tv.

I understand that "when you gotta go, you gotta go", but if he doesn't have to go, he shouldn't ring the bell! Yet, I would never say that Max did anything morally wrong. He just did something I didn't like.

You are asking for trouble pretending that you can argue morality by using analogies to animals.  You don't believe Max has the image of god.

Example 4: When my cat Jellybean sits on the keyboard when I'm trying to write a blog post, I get irritated.

If you preached the wurdagawd the way the apostles did, you'd be too busy interacting with people in real time to worry about what your cat is laying on.

I repeatedly move her out of the way, yet she keeps coming back! It's very annoying when she does this. Nevertheless, I wouldn't charge my cat with violating the moral law.

Probably because of your own biblical view that the animals are purely instinctive, and do not bear the image of god, which means they are not suitable analogies for topics involving human morality.

if you explained why it is that you detest, say, child-rape, you could get down to business a lot faster.  I'd be asking for proof that this moral comes into your heart from the sky, you'd lose the debate, and you could go back to asking Jesus to heal your broken heart, as you play video games.  But I guess if yer gonna make money with your blog, there's sense in drawing something out longer than it needs to be drawn out.

Now, by contrast, when I learned about what happened during The Holocaust in Nazi Germany when I learned the details of what The Nazis did to innocent Jews, I was incensed and disgusted, and I thought to myself that the fires of Hell could never be too hot for these lowly pieces of scum.

In light of god's requirement to burn children to death in Leviticus 21:9 and Joshua 7:15, and in light of Isaiah 10's admission that God uses immoral pagans as his "rod of iron" to punish his own people, I'm not seeing a basis for your disgust.

If someone stole my Nintendo Switch (God forbid!), I'd be really ticked off at whoever robbed me.

Trust me buddy, you are NOT "leadership" or "teacher" material.  Making money off this Christian crap through the internet might be fun and interesting, but you will lose any debate you have with me about what the bible says regarding Christian leaders.

If someone poured a bottle of water all over my keyboard to ruin it, I'd likewise be outraged.

Probably because you don't know of any other way to reach people, except by posting something to a money-making blog.

And yet, unlike in the four aforementioned examples, while I would be angry in all of these cases, I recognize consciously and subconsciously that there is a real moral difference between these categories of actions. There's a real moral difference between beating me at a video game and stealing a video game from me.

But not a difference that shows the latter to be "objectively" immoral.

There's a real moral difference between blocking me from my keyboard and destroying my keyboard.

But not a difference that shows the latter to be "objectively" immoral.

There's a real moral difference between constantly interrupting my theological studies and slaughtering innocent people.

But not a difference that shows the latter to be "objectively" immoral.

And you seem to have forgotten your classical theist roots:   nobody is innocent in god's eyes, we all deserve punishment and death, therefore, nobody can complain if god allows guilty sinners to suffer.

If you took the time, I'm sure you could come up with examples of things like the above in your own case. You could probably think of things that anger you that you don't necessarily consider morally wrong, things you do consider morally wrong but don't get you outraged, and things that you consider morally wrong and that do outrage you.
 So, in conclusion, our moral intuitions are not reducible to our emotions.

You have done precisely nothing to rebut the premise that moral intuitions are reducible to our emotions.

I don't consider things wrong merely because they make me angry, but because I just know that they're wrong, regardless of how they make me feel.

You "just" know they are wrong?  So you infer god's existence from you unexplained sense of morality?

So, when you say \\\"For the second premise if as William Lane Craig Argues we have a sense of a realm of objective moral values that is on par with our sense experience of the world, why does morality reflect emotions so much? Is that really true?"\\\ I would say, yes it is true. Our sense of moral right and wrong is indeed on par with our sense of the physical world. And while emotions often accompany our reactions to good deeds and crimes, our evaluation of the moral status of them are independent of our emotions. Just as you can feel pain from someone slicing your arm open, but your physical response is not what you base your knowledge on whether there's a swordsman in front of you. Even if it didn't cause pain, even if it felt good, you'd still know that something exists in the external world that cut you.

Sorry, not seeing your point.  You have done nothing so far to refute the premise that our sense of moral duty arises from genetic predisposition and environmental conditioning.  perhaps refuting "Sam" merely made your position more complex than it needed to be?

We have a sense of right and wrong that is cognitively rooted within us, and these don't depend on our emotions as I've just demonstrated.

You are mistaking emotion for extreme emotion.  You might not get "angry" at hookers, but that doesn't mean there's no emotion involved when you tell yourself they are doing moral wrong.

You wrote \\"Moral Experience" seems to be rooted in emotions (Or emotion based principles as I like to put it to distinguish my view from simple emotivism) and can (to some degree) change based on emotions and mood, this is quite unlike sense experience."\\\- I disagree with you entirely. Not only do my distinctions above refute this concept, but I also think forgiveness refutes this concept. If I can "get over" something that someone did to me that I considered wrong, eventually I won't feel bitter over it anymore. If they come to me in sincere apology with a true desire to reconcile, I'll forgive them.

Then you are a pussy, as sometimes, refusal to forgive creates a greater long-term good, like removing some idiot asshole from your life forever.  People seldom change, and the more you forgive, the more they will desire to pretend that they agree with you, when actually they don't, they are merely being nice, to avoid ruining the friendship.  I say being honest about what one really believes is far better for society, than whatever short-term good can be achieve by "fronting".  I "front" too, I guess it cannot be avoided, but I'm far qucker than the average person to say how I really feel.  I think confronting people with the truth about reality is a better long term good than simply shining them on.

It'll take a while for the bitter feeling to go away, but as soon as I make the decision to forgive, the healing process has begun.

Or your sense of forgiveness, which you learned from religion, contradicts your actual beliefs, and so forgiving somebody means the emotional distress process has begun.

And there have indeed been things that people have done to me that I don't harbor resentment over anymore. Yet, when I remember them, I still consider them wrong! The fact that my emotions over the action have subsided haven't changed my opinion on the moral status of the action.
 Exactly What "Data" Are Our "Moral Senses" Registering?
 You wrote \\\\"And further exactly what "data" are our "moral senses" registering? Are they registering God's nature/commands? An abstract realm? The way God meant for morality to work? How can the moral sense even remotely register God's nature or the purpose he had for morality? We would need other methods to work with this. (Finding out his commands, nature, purposes, etc via sense data, reasoning or God revealing it in a vision.) I suppose he could plant intuitions on our heart, however, that is essentially emotion based principles, which we would also expect on evolution and emotion based principles aren't data that indicates truth."\\\\ --
 What our moral sense is registering is simply that certain actions and behaviors are right and others are wrong. You're correct in saying that the moral sense doesn't "even remotely register God's nature of the purpose he had for morality" and that "we would need other methods to work with this". That method is philosophy! That's what The Moral Argument is all about.

Because Paul contrasted philosophy with Christ in Colossians 2:8, it would appear that Paul is not trying to say there is philosopher out there that is bad, as if he were leaving room for some of it to be good.  He was saying the word of Christ is all the Christian minister needs to discharge all of their duties.  Paul wasn't condemning "vain philosophy".  He was condemning "philosophy" (i.e., any system of thought that doesn't specifically arise from Christ).  "Skeptics cannot account for morality!" does not arise from "Christ".  The modern notion that all truth is god's truth, is not biblical.  What's biblical is that the OT "completely" equips the Christian ministry for every good work (2nd Timothy 3:16-17).  You are not honoring that by pretending that this doesn't exclude other possible sources of divine truth.  Sticking with what the bible actually says, is more likely to protect you from sin, than is your temptation to read between the lines and trifle as you do.  Doing things the way the bible says would keep you so busy you wouldn't have time to try anything else.  Just a thought.  What would the spiritually mature teacher do?  Dance around the edges?  Or heed the rules?

When your dad imposed bedtime on you as a child, did you go bed because he named the bedtime?  Or did you trifle and say "Dad, you only specified the bedtime, not the DATE!" ?

Just as science only shows us that the universe had a beginning at The Big Bang and nothing more,

No, it doesn't matter if bb belief is reasonable, bb skepticism is equally as reasonable.  But what's notable is that the more apologists seek for proof of God outside the bible, the more they necessarily imply they are dissatisfied with the biblical evidence.  They can say they are just trying to find truth wherever it may be found, but that is not the biblical way.  2nd Timothy 3:16-17, you have enough problems viewing the OT as "completely" equipping you for Christian ministry, without pretending you also have an obligation to go looking in places god has no seen fit to specify. 

so our moral intuition tells us that morality is objective and nothing more.

No, our moral intuition has no deeper grounding than genetic predispositions and environmental conditioning.  And since lower mammals can learn duties the same way we do, and those animals aren't made in the image of god, there is nothing unique about human morality that would argue it draws from our being made in the image of god.

To get from Big Bang to Big Banger (A transcendent Creator), you need to use the tool of philosophy/logic to formulate a sound argument for a transcendent cause.

But only AFTER you express intentionally or unintentionally, your dissatisfaction with Paul's belief that the OT "completely" equips you for Christian ministry.  2nd Timothy 3:16-17. 

And as I have to remind apologists almost daily, you need to stop worrying about whether god can be logically inferred from the Big Bang, and worry more about why the originally intended and likely mostly illiterate hearers of the traditions that eventually became Genesis 1 and 2 would never have inferred a gigantic explosion whose effects lasted for billions of years.  You run the dangerous risk of emphasizing a modern scientific doctrine that is positively contradictory to the bible.  You also need to stop asking yourself whether you can "reconcile" the BB with Genesis.  The more objective question would be "If I stop having a BB axe to grind, and read Genesis on its own terms, what is the likelihood that it teaches the BB doctrine?"

Likewise, having reflected on the moral law and realizing that objective moral values and duties must be ontologically grounded in something, we can then ask "What type of grounding is needed?" and we can philosophically reason to what we think is the most plausible ontological grounds for objective moral values and duties. I think God's character and commands are the best grounds for these, and I am willing to contend that no other proposal given in an atheistic framework is tenable (and indeed I do this in my book The Case For The One True God as well as other blog posts on this website).

Ok, then for what reason do you cringe at the thought of burning children to death (Leviticus 21:9, Joshua 7:15)?  Is it because you are a sinner who doesn't truly appreciate how sinful sin is?  Or because these biblical principles are contradictory to the alleged divine person who is allegedly beaming his morals from the sky down into your brain?

So, our moral intuitions only get us to the conclusion "Some things are really right and others are really wrong" just as cosmology only get us to "the universe began to exist 14 billion years ago.". Philosophical reasoning must be employed to take these facts of nature and make them into a case for a Creator and Moral Law Giver.

At the expense of 2nd Timothy 3:16-17, yes.  You obviously aren't satisfied with doing exactly what the NT requires of all Christian ministers.  You think you "need" to come up with ways of proving god that go outside the scripture.  If the pastorals were not in the bible, you'd be quick to call them good but imperfect advice.

Moral Relativism and The Problem Of Evil I largely agree with most of what you said regarding relativism's dilemma. They indeed cannot say we should be tolerant of others and should not impose our values on others. After all, morality is subjective. It's like the taste of ice cream on their view. Who are you to impose your moral values on me?

But that's a sword that cuts both ways, for indeed if morality is ultimately merely relative and subjective, then the victim has just as much right to defend her life, as the attacker has in trying to take it.  Subjective morality doesn't merely result in "why would you impose your morals on your attacker?", it also results in "why would you impose your morals on your victim"?

Furthermore, there's a major difference between trying to motivate an attacker to stop stabbing the victim, and trying to motivate him to find desirable a taste of ice-cream that he doesn't actually like the taste of.  A review of mammalian behavior makes it clear that we instinctively find repulsive any act that hurts the chances of survival for ourselves or our preferred group.  Trying to convince another mammal that they should learn to like the taste of something they actually don't like the taste of, has nothing to do with mammalian survival, and therefore it was error on your part to pretend that interfering with the atacker's knife thrusts is, on relativism, equal to forcing him to find desirable the taste of something he doesn't like the taste of.

But, like you said, what if my subjective moral values are that I should impose them on other people? By saying I shouldn't impose my values on others, you're pushing your values on me!

So?  Your complaint might sound plausible to a bleeding heart idiot liberal whose vision of the future is an unrealistic extreme form of democracy, but most other people find it conducive to survival and thriving that sometimes we impose society's collective moral judgments on those who act contrary.  Like I said, subjectivity cuts both ways.  In the morally relative world, the clash of persons of contrary moral belief is inevitable, and does not imply there would be a solution beyond whatever the result of the clash is.  Two junkyard dogs fight over a piece of meat they both spotted at the same time...should we presuppose there's a moral "answer" to "which one is right?"  No.

Thus, on cannot affirm relativism and also make moral fiats such as "You ought not to judge others", "You ought to tolerate others cultures and beliefs", "You ought not to impose your morals on others?" Where do oughts come from if morality is subjective? You're totally right in pointing this out.

You avoided his point.  If the subjective moral tells me to impose my morality on others, then I would, because my own personal feeling that I have such right, even if contrary to reality, is sufficient to rationally justify such imposition.  Often police don't have the right to make an arrest, but they still do.  If we tweaked the system to make false arrests impossible, far more guilty people would be going free.  We are not irrational to prefer an imperfect system that tries to balance constitutional rights with the need to successfully convict the genuinely guilty.

You go on to say \\"Another implication that is said to follow from moral relativism is that if morality is relative or if moral nihilism is true, Atheists and other skeptics can't use the problem of evil since there is no objective source of good and evil. This argument came from C.S. Lewis (again) and Christian Apologists love to use it however the problem is that it doesn't work. Both Atheist and Christian worldviews agree that there are certain core values that are referred to by the word moral. The atheist typically believes they came from evolution by natural selection and the Christian believes they came from God. From the perspective of the Atheist, the Christian is projecting their morals onto a God, and claiming that this being created existence."\\ --
 I would argue (and I have argued in my blog posts and books) that the atheist is wrong in saying morality comes from evolution. Subjective morality could come from evolution, sure, but not objective morality.

I'm not seeing the problem; as "objective" in the sense YOU intend, means "transcending the human realm" which in your theistic vocabulary means "from the immaterial realm", and of course, once we dispose of your Big Bang and other fallacious arguments for god, the empirical evidence for morality having roots no deeper than genetic predisposition and environmental conditioning, becomes the most reasonable.

Consider that if if evolution had gone differently, we might have different morals.

Yeah.  So?  Are you appealing the the reader's current system of morality and pretending like it shall be the definitive guide to whether alternative moralities are viable? 

In fact, Charles Darwin himself said this in his writings. He wrote “If men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering." 1

Yeah, so?  What, do you appeal to our current mothers who don't desire to kill their own children, as if this is supposed to be an automatic infallible yardstick of morality that other alternatives must measure up to?

What reason is there to think that our morality is objectively true other than this other evolutionary lineage? As William Lane Craig writes "To think of human beings as special [on atheism] is to be guilty of specie-ism, an unjustified bias toward one’s own species. Thus, if there is no God, then any basis for regarding the herd morality evolved by homosapiens as objectively true seems to have been removed. So if theism is false, it’s hard to see what basis remains for the affirmation of objective moral values and in particular the special value of human beings."2

I agree.  You Christians do a fine job of refuting the stupid atheists who believe in objective morality.  There's a very good reason Turek kicked ass on Shermer in their debates about morality.  Shermer pretends that there is some type of objective moral standard to which human beings are constantly evolving, but this is a mirage.  His "moral arc" book would have held different conclusions had he written it in the dark ages.

On the atheistic view, human beings are just animals and animals aren't morally obligated towards one another.

That's correct.  the moral obligation is a feeling, not a transcendent truth.

Now, one objection I frequently receive is that if evolution is true, and if an evolutionary account could explain why we morally intuit the way we do, doesn't that undermine the reliability of our moral intuitions? I don't think so. First, such a response commits the genetic fallacy. How we learned morality is irrelevant to whether morality is objective.

Incorrect.  The fact that we learned morality constitutes evidence that it is relative to our environmental conditioning, which, if true, would constitute evidence against it's being "objective".

Even if we evolved the intuition that killing innocent people is wrong, it wouldn't entail that "killing innocent people is wrong" is not objectively true.

Correct, but if there is evidence that we evolved this moral intuition, then the moral would appear to be relative to time and circumstance, effectively transferring the burden back to you to show that it is objective and transcendent, and therefore, is something that wouldn't have evolved with time, but something we've always had as humans. Good luck.  That won't be happening.

Of course, one might say "Well, maybe it wouldn't undermine the truth of our moral beliefs, but it would undermine the epistemological justification for them. After all, as you said, rewind the clock and creatures with different moral values would have evolved." The problem with this response is that it only works if God is taken out of the picture. If God guided evolution to produce our faculties in such a way (e.g through a middle knowledge view of divine providence), then God could guide the evolutionary history of the world in such a way that His creatures evolved moral intuitions that intuitively recognize the moral values and duties that correspond with His character.

Ok, that's a logical possibility.  But in all debates, the winner is the one who shows their possibility to have more probability than the theory they disagree with.  You aren't doing anything merely by showing that the way you believe is possibly true.

So, even if what we consider right and wrong are the products of biological evolution, they would still be reliable and tell us objective moral truths.

Only if theistic evolution were true.  Good luck, given that the big bang is unbiblical, as viewed by the likes of inerrantist creationists such as AiG and ICR.

Only if atheistic evolution were true would I argue evolution would undermine the reliability of our moral intuitions. Those who use the sociobiological account to undermine premise 1 thus beg the question in favor of atheism.

When we talk in English, we beg the question of the correctness of the dictionary definition of our terms, but this is hardly "fallacious".

As for saying that skeptics cannot use the problem of evil because their worldview doesn't permit objective morality to exist, I think there is some truth to this. Though, if you read my chapter on the problem of evil in The Case For The One True God, you'll see that I use this tactic a bit differently than, say, presuppositionalist apologists do (and even some evidentialists). Rather than saying that atheists should just be quiet about the problem of evil because their framework entails either moral relativism or moral nihilism, or saying "You wouldn't even know there was evil unless you knew God exists!" I will argue the following:
 1: If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2: Evil exists.
3: Therefore, objective moral values and duties exist.
4: Therefore, God exists.

 You are assuming that only an "objective" interpretation of "evil" can be beneficial.  You are wrong.  I don't have to show the Holocaust to violate objective standards, before I can be reasonable to call it "evil".  All I have to show is that the Holocaust violates what most people in the world consider fair, and that will be more than plenty to rationally warrant my calling it "evil".  I'm afraid you've been reading your bible so much that you just automatically think "evil" can only make sense in a universe of objective morals.  Nope.  You don't have a corner on evil.

Ironically, rather than disproving the existence of God, the existence of real evil demonstrates exactly the opposite. The only way for the atheist to get out of this argument is to do one of two things. One thing he could do is deny that objective morality exists. But if he takes this route, then he's denying that real evil exists, and if real evil does not exist, then there is no real problem of evil. What the atheist calls evil are just things he doesn't like. So we can ask "Why demand that God kowtow to your personal tastes?"

Because the nature of subjective morality is that the person naturally feels compelled to live out their own ethical system and to thus oppose contrary ethical systems which seek to impose on their lives.  The smart atheist doesn't show the bible-god to be evil by comparing his child-slaughter commands to modern notions of democratic ethics.  The smart atheist rather argues that the kind of "love" the bible god pretends to have for his people is reasonably viewed as the kind that would never intentionally set then up to be raped or cannibalized.  That is, the evil nature of the bible god comes from the fact that he often fails his own alleged standards of love.  And since the bible-god is a mere character in a fictional fable anyway, the failure to demonstrate real-world evil means nothing.  The big bad wolf remains reasonably viewed as evil despite our acknowledgement that the story of him and the 3 little pigs is fable.

On the other hand, if he insists that evil does exist and it is not grounded in his or anybody else's opinion, then he's got to provide some alternative ontological grounding for morality than the existence of God, and I have never seen an atheist successfully do this.

Correct.  Atheists who think some objective morality exists, are simply ignorant.  Humans are the highest possible standard.  Unless they define objective in the limited sense of "what most human beings think", they are going to be refuted by you and Turek.

Sam, you and I have done plenty of debating on The Problem Of Evil, so you probably know that I don't consider this the only thing necessary to refute The Problem Of Evil. We apologists still must explain why God, being all powerful and all loving, would allow His moral law to be so widely violated. And here is where I'd appeal to The Free Will Defense, The Greater Good Theodicy, etc. as we've discussed in previous conversations.

But if you were a true Christian teacher, you'd find any answer from the OT to be better than one coming from philosophy (2nd Timothy 3:16-17).  That is, perhaps you'd reconcile rape with God's existence by telling us that God often causes men to rape women (Isaiah 13:15-17, Deuteronomy 28:30), that God can "delight" to cause such evil to people no less then he delights to do good (v. 63).  If Paul's insistence that the OT "completely" equips the Christian for ministry work, leads to special problems for people like you, you cannot make them go away by simply choosing to say Paul got it wrong. 

The Moral Argument's Relation To "Evil Bible" Verses The issue that I and other Christian Apologists have with atheists criticizing The Bible on moral grounds is that their worldview doesn't have an adequate grounding for morality.

You mean "objective" morality?  Yes, I agree.  There is no problem.  We also don't provide an adequate grounding for belief in fairies.  Is that a "defect" in our system?  I think not.

The existence of a necessarily existent, morally perfect, sovereign Being (God) is the best explanation for how objective morality is ontologically grounded.

Not by the standards of Occam's Razor, which slices away first the most intolerably complex of the competing hypotheses.  All Christians admit they are more ignorant than knowledgeable of God's ways, qualifying him as far more complex than any naturalistic theory.  That's a sharp razor.

So, if God grounds morality, then to accuse God of immorality is incoherent.

Sure, but the notion that god grounds morality is stupid, and doesn't affect atheists at all, except in the sense that we might toy with you and confront you with difficult questions from your own bible.

You are essentially saying that the being whose character is the standard of morality somehow violates the standard of morality. Yet the standard of morality is Himself! How can the standard violate the standard? This makes no sense?
 Additionally, I usually make the point that since I don't appeal to The Bible to defend The Moral Argument, the atheist ought not to be allowed to point to "evil bible verses" to refute it.

But we are doing better than you if we insist that your desire to stay in the fog of pure philosophy runs contrary to the positive command in 2nd Timothy 3:16-17 that you use the OT to make all of your arguments.  Pretending that this verse doesn't "forbid" going outside the OT is sort of like the young child who says "daddy said we couldn't get into the cookies, but he didn't say WHEN this prohibition was to take effect!".

And even if we give you a break, we refute you solely on your own philosophical grounds anyway.  Your attempts to undermine the logical validity of subjective morality are abortive.

Natural Theology argues for the existence of God without making any appeals to scripture.

And as a Christian you should recognize that the closer your methodology sticks to 2nd Timothy 3:16-17, and the less you try to dance on the edges of what's biblically permissible, the better servant of Christ you'll be.  It is precisely your spirit of being dissatisfied with the sufficiency of scripture, that makes you an apostate fundamentalist.  If you were truly satisfied with the sufficiency of scripture, you'd find scripture "sufficient" to ground any arguments you needed to make for Christianity.

It relies solely on philosophy, logic, and occasionally science (in the cases of the Kalam and teleological arguments). Therefore, it isn't fair that I must make my case without touching scripture, the skeptic can use scripture all he wants against me. If I'm not allowed to use scripture, then neither is the detractor. I'm not allowed to use it, and rightly so.
 Now, this isn't to say that God doesn't sometimes do things that appear harsh or unfair in The Bible's historical records, and any good apologist would do his best to show how what seems to be immoral is not really once you understand things like the immediate context, the cultural context, or inferences we can draw from other scriptures, what The Bible says about the justice of God etc.

No, when you say "or inferences we can draw from other scriptures", you are merely using bible inerrancy as a hermeneutic, i.e., you will trash a grammatically and contextually justified interpretation of a bible verse for no other reason than that it would contradict something the bible says elsewhere.  Sorry, you have no intellectual basis for employing such hermeneutic, and since even Jehovah's Witnesses and others abide by the principle (i.e., scripture interprets scripture) you are forced to admit that this hermeneutic has a a bad track record of demonstrating its ability to reveal biblical truth.  If God is taking delight to cause rape Deut. 28:30, 63), I'm not going to pretend this was only meant in a good way merely because Genesis 18:25 exclaims that the judge of the whole earth will sure do right.  I would argue that Deut. 28 indicates God thinks it is righteous to watch with glee as women are raped, children are kidnapped, and parents eat their kids in the craze brought about by prolonged starvation.  If God didn't think such attitude was righteous, we wouldn't be reading about him taking that attitude in the first place.

For interested readers, Paul Copan has an excellent book on this called "Is God A Moral Monster?: Making Sense Of The Old Testament God". I highly recommend it.

Then you aren't being biblical.  The NT forbids people from word-wrangling, 2nd Timothy 2:14, and Copan and Flannagan do little more in their books than treat words in such hair-splitting way that the only way to expose their errors is to "wrangle words" with them.

In the case of Deuteronomy 22:23-27, the text isn't calling for a rape victim to be stoned at all. Let's look at what the text says:
 "If there is a betrothed virgin, and a man meets her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones, the young woman because she did not cry for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbor's wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst." - Deuteronomy 22:23-24
 I read a very helpful commentary on this somewhere. I can’t remember whether I read about this passage in Is God A Moral Monster? by Paul Copan or The Big Book Of Bible Difficulties by Norman Geisler and Thomas Howe. I may have read about it in both. But wherever I read it, I remember the commentator saying that the difference between a woman crying out and not crying out indicated whether she was actually raped or committed adultery and was trying to claim it was rape to get out of trouble. In other words, if she didn't cry out, she must have consented (after all, a woman who freely chooses for a man to have intercourse with her doesn’t cry out for help). If she consented, then it was adultery, not rape. If it was adultery, then she was to be stoned since that was the penalty for adultery (see Leviticus 20:10).
 Now, this would only apply to someone that was raped in an area with a high probability she would be heard if she yelled. This is where the "outside of town" part comes into play. You see, if a woman was in a secluded place, a place with not many people around, it would be impossible to prove whether she cried out for help or not. She could have cried out with the result of no one hearing her, or she could have stayed silent. The Jewish court would not be able to know which occurred. This is why “if in the open country a man meets a young woman who is betrothed, and the man seizes her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die.” (Deuteronomy 22:25).
 But you object "This ignores obvious problems like the fact that some people freeze up in terror in those situations, that he could have threatened to kill her if she didn't comply, etc."
 But we can think of special circumstances in any kind of situation and criticize a law based on that. Do we criticize the law that if you're in possession of illegal drugs, you go to prison on the basis that some people might sneak them into your suitcase to get the cops off their trail? This does happen. Rarely, but it does occur. That's why, when I went to the ETS conference back in Colorado, I kept a close eye on my luggage the whole time I was in Atlanta's and Colorado's airports. Would you accuse the lawmakers of not being fair or rational?

No, because most such laws have a mens rea requirement (i.e., intent to possess or sell must be shown, not mere possession, since as you admit, drug mules are highly motivated to involve innocent people unwittingly in the attempt to move drugs.

So yes, if there was a law that created strict criminal liability where possession of illegal drugs was proven, yes, I'd protest against that law.  There's a lot of legal backlash against laws that prevent possible defenses.

Yes, there would be some circumstances in which the woman was unable to cry out, but these would be the exceptions to the rule. Now, if you think God could have come up with some criteria for judging these special circumstances, what would they be?

God could just put the truth into the heads of the earthly judge through his divine telepathy that is proved from your own "he put his laws into our hearts" and from Ezra 1:1.  What, does god not have enough energy to do this?  If God wants innocent people to fall through the cracks because he has a higher mysterious good purpose for imposing an imperfect legal system on people, then why doesn't he beam an attitude of relaxed contentment into the hearts of those who feel sorry for those who suffer unjustly?  It's all part of his morality, aint' it?

How would the Jewish court be able to determine whether a woman stayed silent because of consent or stayed silent because she was threatened or "froze up in fear"? The woman could say the latter was her reason for being silent, but how could one know she was telling the truth?

Easy, we call it "magic. Read Deuteronony 1:17 for God's solution to the "hard" cases. See the same in 17:8-12.

Or maybe God could force the girl in question to drink deliberately poisoned water and take an oath.  If her allegations of innocence are true, nothing would happen.  If her allegations of innocence are false, her vagina will rot out of her body.  That's disgusting, but at least it is identical to God's test for suspected adultery in Numbers 5.

I don't see this as a reason to affirm that "whoever thought up this law was not a perfectly rational God." We can nitpick and find difficult exceptions and special circumstances for all laws, divinely given or not, both ancient and modern. No laws are perfect because, unfortunately, the human condition is fallen. People lie, people cheat, people find loopholes.

But if God is all you think he is, he could have created a legal system that prevents liars and loopholes from succeeding.  Especially if some of the truth-discovery methods he commands are "magical"...that is, the priest deciding the case "just knows" what the truth is.

I recently came across a post in which Ravi Zacharias was quoted as saying "The reason our lawbooks have thousands and thousands of regulations is that we can't obey ten simple laws carved in stone" (paraphrase). Indeed, this is true not just for the American lawbooks but the Torah as well. A great deal of what you find in Leviticus and Deuteronomy has to do with how the authorities should handle specific cases in which The Ten Commandments (ten simple commands on two tablets) were broken. It would be impossible for anyone to record every conceivable circumstance and how to deal with it, even if God revealed it. Moses would be like "God, stop! I've run out of papyrus!"

Nope, I already cited Deut. 1 and 17:8 ff as examples of God's having figured out how to determine truth in the "hard" cases.  It's called magic.

Moreover, when you ended your paragraph with "This is a moral critique of the Bible that is perfectly compatible with Nihilism or relativism." I thought, "wait a minute, NO moral critique of ANYTHING can be compatible with nihilism or relativism" The reason being that if morality doesn't exist or is dependent on human opinion than you have no objective grounds to criticize anything morally.

You are assuming relative human opinion is not sufficient to criticize.  That's false.  The mere fact that the proof you are wrong is that the way you act violates my own standard of morality, does not mean the criticism is illegitimate.  It might just be my morality reflects that agreed to by the majority of Americans, in which case there's a reasonable rational basis for saying criticizing you, even if such criticism doesn't arise from objective morality. 

What you haven't thought of yet is that it is precisely this stupid bullshit "I rebuke you in the name of the Lord" dogma of objective morality that keeps Christians constantly disagreeing with each other.  Because two parties in disagreement each believe their respective moralities come from god, they are unwilling to compromise, and that's why so many Christians have warred against each other, and engaged in otherwise moral disagreement.  It seems society would be better served if people stopped saying their moral came from a god immune from criticism, and asked which moral would be best for society.  Not an infallible method, but it certainly seemed to work in the case of American Democracy.

Again, why should God kowtow to your opinion? You might as well chastise Jesus if he eats a type of ice cream you don't like.

Already explained why taste-preferences are not analogous to moral judgments.  See above.

The Divine Identity Argument You write \\"The Being could have moral principles inherent to it's nature but also have evil (desires contrary to the moral principles) in its nature. The moral aspects of its nature could be the standard of morality."\\ -- Then in that case, whenever I did something evil, I would be in line with the standard of morality. If God were mean spirited, then I would be in line with his will when I am mean spirited. Thus, to attain a sort of good-evil hybrid nature would be the hight of living according to the moral law. This is absurd.  To borrow an analogy of C.S Lewis' this would be like saying you know a crooked line by comparing it with a somewhat straight, somewhat crooked line.
 \\"Clearly, God's omniscience wouldn't be a part of the standard of morality, yet this is a part of his nature which illustrates that it isn't his entire nature that is the moral standard."\\ -- This is a misunderstanding by what I mean when I say "God's nature". By God's nature, I obviously don't mean aspects of His being like omniscience, omnipotence, etc. I mean His moral nature. His character.
 \\\"Can parents love the children before giving birth to them or even before their conception? Can they act loving by preparing to be able to provide a good home for their future child? Can't God be acting loving before creation by simply choosing to create the world so that people would exist in it? (And creating the creation?) On Molinism, this is even worse for your argument because God knows exactly what individuals will exist and everything about them. So I see no reason why God can't just love the future beings he will create (or on Open Theism beings he might create) and still be a perfectly loving being."\\\ --

But Steve Hays, a Christian apologist and 5-Point Calvinist, says everybody's sins always obey the secret will of God, that is, God sometimes secretly wills for us to disobey his revealed will.  See here.
Gee, how many years should I spend learning the disagreements Christians have with each other about Calvinism, before I've learned enough to say which is more likely biblical?

And while I'm checking out books recommended by Steve Hays and you, could I possibly die, while still and unbeliever, and end up in hell forever?  If so, it would appear that the level of danger I'm in does not allow for friendly discussions about philosophy, but for you to yell "repent now, right now!" which of course would require that I prioritize conformity to your religion over the need to become properly educated about it.  And so the more urgent the danger the bible says unbelievers are in, the more they need to forget the "study" and prioritize the "do like i tell you".

Since even Christians will admit atheists are always in conformity to god's secret will, yeah even God hath predestined them to be atheists, then all I can say is that if your god is such a fuckhead that he bitches at me for fulfilling his will in the exact time and manner he intended from all eternity, then I have no more hope than the Jews living under Hitler had in WW2.  The big guy is a sadistic lunatic and there's nothing we can do about it.  Might as well share, might as well smile, life goes on for a little biddy while.

This is related to what I've written in my blog post "God's Freedom To Love Revisited". At the end of that blog post, my conclusion was "So perhaps it can be said that God can love those who do not presently exist, but He cannot love those who will never exist. God loved me in the first century when He died on the cross because He had decided to actualize a possible world in which I would exist and fall into sin." (emphasis in original). Now, this, of course, would at first glance seem to make me inconsistent. It would seem on the one hand that I am saying God cannot be loving before the creation of any humans, yet God loved us before we ever came into being. Yet, a subtle nuance needs to be made clear.
 While God can certainly make the choice to love someone before they exist, He can only do so by deciding that their existence will be actual. If God chooses to actualize one of the feasible worlds in which they never come to be, God has made the decision not to love them.

Or, like a lunatic, he decided to actualize a possible word of suffering because he likes to watch people suffer.

Jesus didn't die on the cross for their sins, because this sinner's very existence is a counterfactual.
 Even still, God can choose to love someone before they exist, yet, until they exist, God cannot express that love for them. There's no one to express the love to. I have said that I have already chosen to love my wife in another blog post even though I don't know her yet. However, although I have decided to love her, until I actually meet her, I cannot express my love for her. I can only resolve that I will eventually express it when we meet. In a state in which God and God alone exists, He would have no one to express love to unless He consisted of multiple persons. Therefore, on a unitarian view of God, while he could have the disposition to be loving, and could even volitionally choose to love creatures that He planned on creating, the expression of this love would have to wait for their creation.
 Now, it seems to me that you are a greater being if you are expressing love than if you merely have the disposition to love. A being greater than which no being can be conceived would be a being constantly expressing love.

Thomas Aquinas was a stupid son of a bitch, and his "greater than which nothing can be conceived" crap was one of the finer exercises in sinful word-wrangling and illusory sophistry to disgrace us from the halls of history. 

Sorry, had to snip the rest, it was nothing but presumption.