At the Christian apologetics site https://www.moralapologetics.com/wordpress/msm13
R. Scott Smith's article is linked. So I went to his contact page and sent him the following questions:
Hello,
I am an atheist, and I was wondering what you think of the following argument: When most people really think about it, they do not seriously believe that unreasonableness is an essential component of faulty argument. For example, jurors are "wrong" to convict an innocent person, but if trial consisted of the right combination of clever prosecutor and incompetent defense attorney, you could hardly blame the jury for thinking it reasonable to view the suspect as guilty.
If then it be true that unreasonableness doesn't necessarily inhere in all faulty arguments/beliefs, aren't you admitting there is at least a possibility, even if not a probability, that one's denial of God might remain "reasonable" despite being "false"?
I ask because it is my experience that Christians are constantly equating a skeptical belief or skeptical denial with "unreasonableness", as if they thought "inaccurate" and "unreasonable" were necessarily synonymous, which not even a thesaurus will confirm.
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Now, we will see when we explore ethical relativism that while there is a fact of moral diversity amongst people and cultures, nonetheless those differences may not be as wide or deep as we have been taught.
So I guess apologists are wrong when they get from the bible the notion that hundreds of thousands of Canaanites lived a morality that was diametrically opposed to the morality of the Hebrews.
Instead, we can identify common morals that may be applied differently (e.g., how people in one culture show respect for their elders, versus how people in another culture do so).
I'm not seeing the point, the fact that we are all mammals and desire to live together means were are going to discover that the best way to facilitate this is to agree on some common morality. Frank Turek's statement that atheists cannot sufficiently or reasonably account for why most humans in history have eschewed rape, is absurd. If you desire to live in groups, outlawing rape is one definite way to enhance group survival. On the other hand, God's requirement to burn pre-adolescent girls to death (if she is having illicit sex in her father's house, she is likely not married and still living there, thus she is likely 12 years old or younger since marriage took place at early age back then) is so despised by Christians that we could use Turek's logic "we all know that rape is wrong" and say "we all know that burning teen and preteen prostitutes to death is wrong", and we'd have set a basis for beliving that God wanted us to believe that Leviticus 21:9 wasn't from Him.
Further, just because there is a descriptive fact of diversity, that alone does not give us ethical relativism, which is a normative thesis.
Correction, doesn't "necessarily" give us ethical relativism. But I myself do not argue that my conclusions abuot such matters follow "necessarily", especially in the area of which morals are "right".
Which means I don't need to argue necessity to win the debate, all I have to show is that my position on the matter is reasonable. Reasonableness can exist even if the opinion in question doesn't follow "necessarily". Just like we can be reasonable to call the police only to find out later that we misinterpreted the scene.
Granted, too, irreducibly moral properties would be rather “queer” given naturalism. But, perhaps there are independent reasons why we should question that assumption. In later essays, I will suggest a few such reasons.
I've been analyzing Christian moral apologetics for several years now. Matthew Flannagan did little more than run away when I debated him at his blog and asked what moral yardstick he uses to decide whether some human act is morally good or bad. I documented many such failures on his part. Here's two:
https://turchisrong.blogspot.com/2017/11/matthew-flannagan-fails-to-show-child.html
https://turchisrong.blogspot.com/2019/07/my-latest-challenge-to-matthew-flannagan.html
Moreover, it is true that we may speak in ways that do not necessarily commit us to the reality of things we are talking about.
That's right. The atheist who views his own morality as "absolute" is a fucking fool.
Generally, mere word uses do not have power to cause things to come into existence (except, for instance, stories). A scientific example was talk of phlogiston to explain combustion. Later, however, scientists discovered it was not real; instead, oxygen was what was involved.
Further, error theory does not explain why we find morality to be such a ubiquitous aspect of life.
Maybe so, but other atheist theories DO explain it. Morality is found everywhere in human life because we are mammals and hard wired to be societal, and thus to prioritize that which contributes to group survival above that which inhibits it. Little wonder then why most people eschew rape, child molestation, murder and theft, and have only good things to say about getting a job, raising kids, going to college, disinfecting the bathroom, etc, etc.
After all, why talk morally if there are no morals?
Straw man, morals obviously exist, the problem is that they appear to be nothing more than opinions. Atheists have just as much justification to talk about adultery as they have to talk about politics. Nothing about those conversations express or imply that we are speaking about things that originate in something transcendent to humanity.
While error theory explains why we can talk morally, given naturalism, it still does not give us an adequate explanation of what morals are.
Easy: when you say "you shouldn't steal" and "you shouldn't use the tv remote", these ultimately reduce to thoughts.
If they are just the way we use words, then we can change morals by changing how we talk. In that case, murder could become right, and justice could become bad. But surely that is false.
What do you mean "surely"? So at the end of the day, your argument for objective transcendent morals is nothing more than the fallacy or argument from outrage?
Murder is not intrinsically wrong merely because it is the "unlawful" killing of another human being, because this begs the question of whether such prohibitive law is itself always a good thing. If the state law criminalized use of deadly force in self-defense, then killing in self-defense would be "murder", but that would hardly justify pretending that the law making it so was completely beyond criticism.
Probably wouldn't take me long to find many normal typical every day mature adult fathers who would make effort to murder the babysitter for molesting their child, even if the molestation did not put the child's life in danger (i.e., inappropriate touching, a crime that wouldn't justify use of lethal force). Again, most of us are shocked by the news that a dead body with a bullet hole in its head was found in some ditch outside of town...but most of us stop crying if the news continues and says it is the body of a convicted pedophile who was recently paroled. Our inability to cry equally giant tears when we hear of the death of a pedophile as when he hear about the death of a pedophile commits us to the premise that while the state law against murder is generally good for society, we are not foolish enough to think that it is an absolutely exceptionless standard.
Once again, most of us don't like gang warefare. But if we heard on the news that two rival gangs met in a parking lot outside town and killed each other in a gun battle, most of us would be happy that additional human scum are not longer a threat. It was murder, but the moral goodness of the result is no less apparent than the moral goodness of eating nutritious food. And like it or not, yes, most people do believe the ends justify the means, even if they are willing to take the personal risks that would materialize if they lived in total consistency to that viewpoint.
As far as relative morality committing itself to the premise that in some situations, it would be morally good for justice to become bad, this seems to be a bit convoluted. But even so, it isn't hard to imagine scenarios where a person believes that the way the law operates results in "bad justice", but where that person decides to just conform to it anyway. The innocent suspect might be looking at only 2 years on a plea deal, but risks 20 years if he goes to trial. He views his guilty plea as resulting in "bad justice", and yet it was morally good to him because he was forced to choose this evil over the greater evil of losing trial and getting 20 years. Can it possibly be good for justice to be bad? Yes. In the civilized world we live in, any justice system is eventually going to put an individual in the situation of being required to either choose a lesser evil or a greater evil, so that their choosing the lesser evil ends up proving to be the "good" choice.
