This is my reply to an article by Cerebral Faith entitled
After writing my blog post titled "The Kalam
Cosmological Argument NOT Debunked - A Response to YouTuber Rationality
Rules", one of my Facebook friends commented in one of the various places
I had posted that blog post on Facebook and in the comment, he asked if I would
respond to his video dealing with The Moral Argument. I agreed to it because
(1) he asked me to, and (2) Rationality Rules (RR) is a very popular atheist
YouTuber whose videos get thousands of views and who makes thousands of dollars
per creation on Patreon. Lots of people are being exposed to his bad arguments
against Christian theism, and therefore, we Christian Apologists who create
online content need to interact with his work. If you'd like to watch the video
for yourself before reading the article, click "The Argument From Morality
- Debunked (William Lane Craig's Moral Argument Refuted)"
For the uninitiated, The Moral Argument for God's Existence
is 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.
I have defended this argument in several blog posts on this
site as well as in my recent book The Case For The One True God: A Scientific,
Philosophical, and Historical Case For The God Of Christianity.
*snip*
Let me defend this claim.
*Defense Of Premise 1
Moral Values
First off, if theism is not true, then what reason remains
for thinking that human beings are intrinsically valuable?
I'm not seeing how the question is relevant, it is assuming humans are indeed instrinsically valuable, but they are not, as the notion of "intrinsic" worth is false. "Worth" always refers to a person making a value judgment about another person or object, there is no such thing as something having "worth" apart from another person making such judgment call. Minton will say God values us, but since the moral argument he's trying to defend is seeking to prove god exists, he can hardly insist that god's valuation of us supports this first premise, otherwise, he's just begging the question of god's existence. What you are "worth" must be answered with reference to an outside person or agency, not yourself alone. So "intrinsic worth" is a nonsense concept. Minton can trifle that a person can place a value on her own self, but that wouldn't establish actual worth, anymore than the homeless alcoholic who thinks he is "worth" $6 trillion has therefore proven he's really worth that much.
On atheism, man is
just a biological organism. There are other biological organisms on the planet.
What makes humans more valuable than the life of say, a cockroach, or a tree?
The opinion of other human mammals, who do like most mammals, and naturally find the members of our own species more worthy of our time and resources, than other species.
Most people don’t believe you’re committing murder when you stomp on a
cockroach or cut down a tree, but they do think you’re committing murder if you
end the life of another human being.
Because "murder" is the "unlawful" type of killing. There's no law against stepping on bugs.
Why is it that the life of a man is of
more value than that of a roach or a tree?
You haven't established that yet. But generally, as I said, we are mammals, and being intelligent, we naturally find preserving of our own kind of greater importance than preservation of other species.
Why is it murder to cut down a man,
but not murder to cut down a tree?
It is not "murder" to cut down a man...you have to show that the way he was cut down or killed was by unlawful means. Human beings have set up laws that say killing another human, absent exceptional circumstances, is a crime, and we call that crime "murder". Cutting down a tree thus wouldn't be "murder" unless somebody enacted a law saying cutting down a tree is a crime and we then started referring to tree-cutting as "murder". Yeah right.
Both are living organisms. They’re both
considered life.
But the mammals who are more intelligent than trees have decided for themselves that certain acts of killing another human being are criminal.
Maybe humans are more valuable than these things because
they’re more advanced.
Why a trait should make something more "valuable" depends on the person who is evaluating the trait. Many women have called their boyfriends "good-for-nothing".
A man, unlike a roach or a tree, can walk, talk, and do
complex mathematical equations.
And most people react to the wanton death of the higher mammals with emotion slightly less intense than they do in reaction to the murder of a man. All of us feel sorry for the fawn or gazelle who gets caught and ripped apart by the lion. Some of us have no care at all about death of such animals. People value things differently.
A person can build a rocket and fly it to the
moon, build houses, and can do many things lower animals cannot do, and this is
certainly something trees cannot do.
Once again, the "worth" of a person is not determined by himself, but by others at least in the way that society functions as a whole.
But if you were to say that this is what
makes a man intrinsically valuable, another question immediately arises; why is
complexity a criterion for objective worth?
You are assuming the existence of objective worth. I deny that based on the above. There is no such thing as objective worth. What something costs is the price set by the actual or legal owner.
Why is a human more valuable than
any other organism just because he’s higher up on the evolutionary tree?
That's loaded question, I don't think humans have greater value merely because they are higher up on the evolutionary tree. I decide the worth of a human being on a case-by-case basis. I've decided to conform to society's rules and criminal codes, so when I think somebody worthy of death, I don't murder them.
Why
isn’t it the case that simpler organisms have the most worth like an amoeba?
Probably beacuse as intelligent mammals we find very little use for the simpler life forms. Then again, the simpler organisms are valued highly by the bio-tech industry, and every doctor knows that killing off all the bad simpler organisms, might be sufficient to send them on unemployment benefits. Because the lower-life forms eat the lesser life forms, life for us would become unbearable if the simpler forms simply all died off. We'd have ceaseless indigestion, and birds would become bold as they attack us in hunger. So in a way the simpler organisms are very valuable to human life, but not in the direct way most people think about.
Why is the advanced-ness of man a criterion for his objective worth?
There is no such thing as objective worth. What something is "worth" arises from another person's personal opinion, which is subject to change.
It doesn’t seem that there is any intrinsic worth of human
life on the atheistic worldview.
Correct. On atheism, what something is "worth" is completely subjective.
On atheism, man is just a bag of chemicals on
bones who, because of the electrochemical processes in his brain, neurons
firing, and molecules going about in motion, goes about his day thinking that
his life is valuable.
Exactly. Except that because the delusion is shared by so many, life for us is much more rewarding and satisfying if we simply live and let live, as opposed to trying to convince everybody else that we are nothing but moist robots on a damp dustball lost in space.
This, despite the fact that he was thrust into existence
from a blind process which did not have him in mind, despite the fact that he’s
a tiny speck on a somewhat less tiny speck of dust called Planet Earth in a
massive universe that cares not whether he lives or dies.
Exactly. Through millions of years of evolution, it is second nature to be altruistic toward others of our same species.
On atheism, there is nothing but matter, energy, space and
time. Why is one bag of chemicals on bones so sacred, but other bags of
chemicals on bones not so much?
Because the other bags (the simpler life forms?) do not serve us as directly as other human beings do.
It is true though, that humans can have subjective value.
After all, many people have other people who care about them. A man loves his
wife, his kids, and his parents. Given that many people have other people who
care about them, it may be said that they really do have value after all. But
this isn’t objective value, it’s subjective. What that means is that your worth
is dependent on how many people love you. This type of value that a detractor
of my argument may refer to seems akin to sentimental value. A man may cherish
a toy because it reminds him of the happy times he had back in his childhood.
There may be thousands of toys exactly like it, but this one is special to him
because it is this one that he grew up with. Replacing it is out of the
question. However, the toy doesn’t have objective value (that is to say, the
value in and of itself). Its value is wholly dependent upon the man cherishing
it. Human beings, on atheism, seem to have that kind of value. We have
sentimental value to those around us, but there doesn’t seem to be any value to
the man in and of himself.
Correct.
I can’t see how human life can have any objective worth on
the atheistic view.
You are already a Christian. You already view any system showing less than Christian worth of human beings, as offering you far less. Most humans don't like the option that provides less. SInce Christianity offers "more" as in "more love", people naturally flock to it and similar religions.
It seems that the first premise of the Moral Argument is
correct. If God does not exist, there are no objective moral values.
Agreed.
Man is
just a bag of chemicals on bones. He is nothing but a speck of dust in a
hostile and mindless universe and is doomed to perish in a relatively short
time. Without God, wherein lies the
objective worth of a man’s life?
Nowhere. But a lot of people, lacking in critical thinking skills, have been so accustomed to drawing worth for their lives from religion, than they just cannot imagine how relative or subjective worth can be equally as intensive and satisfying.
What makes human life sacred?
The other person who is evaluating whether you deserve to live, that's what.
I don’t see any
reason to think that there is objective worth on the atheistic worldview.
Good.
Moral Duties
If atheism is true, it would seem that moral values go out
the window.
No, only
objective moral values go out the window. You are doing what Turek does, and falsely assuming that if a moral is not "objective", then it is worthless. Not so. Your moral opinion about how to raise kids is not objective, but it likely contributes to the good of your child anyway.
The life of human beings is no more worth protecting than the life
of insects.
No, other human beings are profoundly useful to other human beings, far more than insects, which is precisely why we sense a greater loss at the death of a human being than we do at the death of a bug. You may retort that you also feel bad hearing about the murder of strangers on the national news, but I reply that your grief over the death of people you never met will not be quite as emotionally intense as your grief over the death of a human being who had repeatedly satisfied your sense of worth for most of your life (family, friends, etc). Don't forget, families can come to hate each other and honestly not care whether one member ends up dead in a ditch. Values change.
If moral values go out the window, then moral duties go with it.
True, but only for
objective morals and duties, not subjective morals and duties.
Why? Because if man has the same value as a flea,
Most people think a man is worth more than a flea, and that subjective opinion is enough to justify laws protecting his life, and it is natural and normal for adults to obey the same laws they observed as a child.
then you have as much of an
obligation towards your fellow man as you do a flea. Since atheism robs human
life of objective, intrinsic worth, why is it morally wrong to murder someone
on that worldview?
Whether it is morally wrong is something various people would answer differently. Most would say murder is morally wrong, but their reasoning is usually superficial and stops at the point of "the law" and "how could you be so callous!?" But if a person causes sufficient unnecesary harm or trouble to others, you'll find lots of people thinking it morally good that he wind up dead in mysterious circumstances that are never solved. Like the convicted pedophile who comes to live in your neighborhood. If he's found dead in a ditch tomorrow with a bullet in his head, you probably won't be crying about it as loudly as you would if the same happened to the local business owner who has been donating to charity for years.
Why is it wrong to mistreat a person on atheism?
Because other people think its wrong. And there are times when they don't think it is wrong (fights in locker rooms, ceaseless bullying, etc), and in those cases, all you can do is side with those whom you agree with, whether the victim or the bully.
If humans
have no moral value, then it seems that we have no moral duties towards one
another either.
That's true, but only for
objective moral value and duties. Once you admit the obvious reality and significance of subjective moral values and duties, your problems disappear.
To reject moral values is to reject moral duties. The denial of
the former entails a denial of the latter. If human life is worthless
No, under atheism life's worth is decided by people of differeing opinion on how much your life is worth, including whether it has any worth at all.
, it seems
like it wouldn’t be much of a crime to end it.
"Crime" is an "unlawful" act, an act that transgresses what our lawmakers have prohibited or criminalized. Once again, you have insufficient reasons for trivializing the concept of subjective morals and pretending that nothing means anything without objectivity. I can dictate the price of my used dvd player for the garage sale I plan next month, and that price is completely subjective. Only a fool would say that price is completely useless to me or my goals merely beacuse it isn't "objective".
Why is it an atrocity to kill
six million Jews but not an atrocity to exterminate an entire hill of ants?
Because as mammals we naturally sympathize with other human beings. But if you wish to be objective in your analysis, the fact is that lots of people don't really give a shit about the holocaust one way or the other. Not everybody is a bleeding heart Christian who forgets Deuteronomy 32:39.
What reason is there to think that there is a real moral difference between
these two situations?
There is no objective moral difference. But there is a subjective moral difference. Subjectivity is not a defect, it counts as part of the way normal human beings go about making value-judgements. Just because subjectivity isn't quite as "iron-clad" as objectivity, doesn't mean subjectivity is utterly pointless. Subjective value judgments are perfectly natural to mammals. They don't always agree in the lower-animal world, and nothing is different in the human world.
Not only do we not have any moral obligations on the
naturalistic worldview but it seems like there are no moral prohibitions
either.
Once again, that is true, but only in the case of objective moral values. If you are arguing that if there be no objective moral values, then murdering a human being cannot be reasonably or coherently argued to be far more detrimental to the democratic society we wish to live in, you are mistaken.
If human life has no objective value, then discarding it isn’t a moral
abomination.
Plenty of people, including Christians, do not think all discarding of humnan life is a moral abomination. That's because you have subjective reasons for thinking it better to kill than keep alive. That's why you constantly try to "defend" your bible-god's requireing the Israelites to slaughter pagan children. Whether slaughtering children is a moral abomination depends on whether God commanded you to do it...right? Or are you going to say it would be a moral abomination even if god required it? The last I checked, you are a classical theist just like Turek...whatever God commands is holy, just and good....right?
How ghastly it is to say such a thing, but, this is the logical
implication of the atheistic worldview!
No, it's the implication when we deny objective morals. It's not the implication as long as we follow subjective morals.
In his talk “Arguments For God’s Existence” at the Truth For
A New Generation conference in Spartanburg
South Carolina in 2012, J.P
Moreland gives another way to think about this. Dr. Moreland explained that we
can tell what is right and wrong because there’s a prescription of how
something ought to behave.
If God is so against abortion, why do Christians disagree on whether the woman has a moral right to abort a pregnancy caused by rape? Is one of the Christian groups in this dispute just not praying hard enough, or living in sin, so that they cannot discern the position God takes in that debate?
Dr. Moreland asked the audience at Truth For A New
Generation how we can tell the difference between a good carburetor and a bad
carburetor? We can tell the difference because there is a way a carburetor
ought to function.
As assigned by the person installing it. If the person installing it intended it to cause the engine to backfire, than how the carburetor "ought" to be installed is completely subjective.
It ought to make the car run.
Not if you had other plans, such as making the car run rough just to laugh at the next person who drives it.
If it doesn’t, Moreland says,
we conclude that it’s defective.
But car parts have already been assigned a function by us, so that we "know" defectiveness by the failure to perform as required. This is not analogous to human morality...Christians themselves disagree on scores of moral topics like abortion, gun rights, death penalty, taxes, including the degree to which one must put forth effort to avoid the immorality of sin. Shall we conclude Christianity is defective because after 2,000 years of trying to give the world objective morality, its adherents are no more in agreement than they were when it started?
It doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.
If you didnn't intend for the engine to backfire, then yes.
It’s
not behaving the way it was designed to work. It’s not working the way that its
creator intended it to work.
Now, let’s switch the analogy from carburetors to leaves
from an autumn tree. These leaves fell from an autumn tree and just so happened
to land on my front porch because the wind randomly blew them up there. Given
that there was no design involved, there’s really no prescription of how the
leaves should have landed.
There's also no intelligent life in dead leaves that blow around in the wind, so not even subjective morals would be placed at issue.
Moreland said that he couldn’t point to one
particular lead and say “You see that leaf? That’s a bad leaf! That’s a really
bad leaf!” He can’t say that because there’s no purpose to the formation of the
leaves on his porch. There’s no design involved.
your logic works well enough until you remember that "god designed" the physical laws that cause leaves to fall and get moved around in the wind. If we assume ID is true, then perhaps the way the leaves get blown around could possibly be immoral. Indeed, in Genesis God cursed the earth because of Adam, so there might be biblical precedent to say God is dismayed when he sees leaves die, fall off the tree and get blown around in the wind. That's rather stupid, but it's still "biblical".
But with the carburetors,
everyone knows there’s a way that they ought to perform,
And it's not a "defect" if the installer intends on making the car backfire and thus configures the carburetor to do so.
and we can look at one
functioning carburetor and call it “good” while looking at a non-functioning
carburetor and call it “bad”.
That's totally subjective. Somebody might think the less efficient one is "better". You aren't being very objective in your analysis if you simply dismiss anybody and everybody who have eccentric views about carburetors.
Now, on atheism, we are like those leaves.
There’s no purpose. There’s no design. We’re just here by chance + nature. So,
if atheism is true, it’s really odd to say that there’s a way we ought to
behave since we were not made by anyone who intended us to behave as such.
No, we are mammals born to other mammals that teach us what we need to do if we wish to have comfort and ease in the present world we live in. And most of us conform thereto because we desire comfort and ease more than putting our lives and freedom at risk.
If
theism is true, we’re like the carburetors. We were made on purpose and for a
purpose, and when people don’t function according to that intended purpose we
say that they’re “bad” people.
The problem being that Christianity doesn't do a very good job of specifying which people are "bad" beyond those who commit actions that any self-respecting mammal would find disagreeable. Worse, your Christianity says people are bad merely beacuse they were born in sin and are incapable of doing any "good" (Romans 3:10 ff) despite the obvious fact that most people routinely do "good".
What's worse: a completely subjective moral system? Or a moral system that says you aren't doing good even while you are doing obvious good?
But if atheism is true, we’re kind of like the
leaves on the porch. We just blew up there through blind, undirected processes.
There’s really no way that we’re supposed to behave.
That's true. There's no "really objective" way we're supposed to behave. Once again, your falsely assume that the disappearance of objective morals constitutes the disappearance of morality altogether. But subjective morals obviously exist, and therefore they obviously don't go out of existence if it be shown that merely "objective" morals don't exist.
So if there is an oughtness, there must be a personal being
who prescribed this sense of obligation within ourselves (as Romans 2:14-15
says).
That's true, but since we were all raised by other mammals who instilled their sense of values on us, its no surprise that we generally tend to hold to the same morals our parents or caretakers did back when we were kids. "you ought not murder other people" is only a general maxim; not everybody agrees to it, and the law cannot function properly in a democratic soceity unless it is evenly applied. But the need to even application to achieve our democratic ends does not mean there's some transendent moral the law is based on. The fact that murder generally hurts the pack...but not always...is precisely why we all agree murder is wrong...but some of us are willing to entertain exceptions when unlawful killing will achieve a greater moral good...which is probably why many good people are tempted to engage in vigellante justice
This is because only a personal being can give purpose to a system.
Blind forces don’t care how you behave; only a person would.
No, if you have kids, you likely are aware that they needed to have morals instilled into them from outside, as even your bible says foolishness is bound in the heart of a child but the rod of correction will drive it far from him.
There is no good reason to think we get our morals from anywhere other than genetic predisposition and environmental conditioning.
*snip*
See my rebuttal to Frank Turek's identical reasoning
here.
