Rebuttal to Frank Turek on Morality

Frank Turek "explains" why God allows natural disasters. See here. I responded first with Deuteronomy 28:15-63 to remind Christians that their "biblical" god is a far cry from the concerned empathizing Jesus they've invented in their heads.

I then responded with my own argument as follows (this was deleted by unknown person about 5 minutes after I posted it, hence, you no longer wonder why I cross post to my blog here).



Barry Jones1 second ago
Turek's "ripple-effect" argument is not convincing to anybody except the predominantly Christian audiences that are already desperately searching for anything that will help them feel better about their own faith.

Furthermore, the ripple-effect could be used to justify immorality. How do you know that God didn't want my stealing a car yesterday to play an integral role in the reason why African Bush tribes will hear the Christian gospel next year? 

You can tell yourself that the evil act remains evil even if God can use it for a greater good, but since many allegedly "evil" acts also produce morally good effects (the morally bad murder of a family member caused the good of the surviving family becoming Christian in faith), then how the hell do you know which effect determines the moral status of the act and which effect doesn't? 

Is rape evil because it hurts the woman, or good because by ripple-effect it causes Eskimos 5,000 miles away to hear the gospel for the first time 5 years later? 

Is rape bad because it hurts the woman, or good because it taught her to be more careful about walking home late at night? 

Is pedophilia bad because it hurt the child, or good because it came to the attention of a vigilante who later gunned down that pervert before he could molest more kids?

==========================

You will say "the ends don't justify the means", but I really have to wonder how many tears you'd cry if you found out the local pedophile who was recently released on parole was gunned down by unknown person.  Gee, that murder wasn't in conformity to American legal ideals, so you just won't be able to come in to work for a few days while you "get over" it, eh?  NOT.

Schooling theists on the stupidity of objective morality

"Capturing Christianity" invited Dr. Anne Jeffrey to write an article on the following subject:

CC021: If God Does Not Exist, Why Be a Moral Person?

I responded there, and somebody ("T.N.") who parrots Frank Turek's "argument for God from objective morality" challenged me with the typical "why should one bag of chemicals care about another bag of chemicals" stuff. See here. So far (July 31, 2019), TN has complained that my asking him/her/both/other to agree to the dictionary definition of "objective" made our debate more complicated than it needs to be

!?

Just in case that forum deletes the discussion, I cross-post our exchange here to make sure it is preserved.  Let's just say that Frank Turek will probably think it best to drop trying to prove god from "objective morality" if he gets hold of this discussion.

I already trounced Christian philospher Matthew Flannagan on the same subject, to the point that he stopped responding right exactly when he was hit with the hardest questions the relativists can ask.  See here.

from Barry

Not sure why Christians think it impossibly difficult for atheists to give a rational and normative justification for acting morally while denying god’s existence. If even Christians themselves disagree on a large host of moral issues (i.e., death penalty, divorce, birth control, gun control, the minimum age for marriage, the point when pre-marital petting becomes fornication, how often to bathe, how often to attend church, how disastrous or trivial “sin” is, etc, etc), then it doesn’t matter if a quick “God’s mysterious ways” can help you save face at that point; those Christian in-house disagreements about morality still rationally justify the skeptic to say it is more than likely that those disagreements exist because there is no god in the first place, therefore, there is no ultimately transcendent source of morality, therefore, being without ultimate guidance, mammals on this earth who compete for resources are naturally going to be in a perpetual state of moral disagreement. We are nothing but roaming dogs growling at each other after we both spot a fresh kill at the same time, we are merely a higher developed type of mammal. Asking how we can know which person is “right” as two people fight, is about as stupid as asking how we can know which bug is in the “right” as a spider attacks a fly. There is no reason to posit there is any moral “right” in the first place, therefore, the question is invalid, except in the uselessly subjective sense of which participant we think has views closer to our own standard of morality.

Furthermore, if you think morality is “objective”, you aren’t doing your job by presuming child rape to be objectively immoral, then asking the atheist to explain why they find it to be immoral. YOU are the one asserting such act to be “objectively” immoral, therefore YOU have the burden to demonstrate such. You aren’t demonstrating such by blindly appealing to the fact that “most people” think child rape is intolerable. If that act is “objectively” immoral, then because “objective” means “true for reasons independent of human opinion”, you should be able to demonstrate such objectivity without appeal to any human-based opinion or belief.

Finally, the atheist-argument that “god” as viewed in traditional religion, constitutes an incoherent proposition, necessarily makes any coherent naturalistic explanation for morality more likely or plausible. If the naturalistic explanation is at least coherent, it has much more going for it than any “god did it” explanation.
In short, not only does the atheist have good arguments for the purely naturalistic origin of human morality, but the atheist remains rationally justified even if they choose to cut off the discussion before hearing every last little trifle the apologist can marshal.

from T N

Barry,

When you say “Christians” or “theists” claim this or that, I would say you are pointing to people who happen to be largely philosophically incompetent (of which there are admittedly many). The question of whether or not God is necessary for morality can be understood in two senses: One is the question of whether or not a person needs to be an explicit theist in order to be moral, and, quite obviously one need not be (I believe you are arguing against this sense). The other is whether or not one can show by philosophical argument that morality is necessarily the result of a transcendent cause (i.e. God) independent of whether or not a given person understands morality as having its origin in such a cause.

As an Aristotelian I have no problem with arguments that base morality on natural causes such as “enlightened self interests”, or “survival of the herd”, or what have ya. But, this approach does not complete the argument because these claims lead to further questions as to the nature of “enlightened self interests”, etc. all of which can be shown to further depend on irreducible causes. For example: you offer an argument for the relative nature of morality and its indeterminacy, but you presume your analysis itself to be objective, abstract, and mind independent. Why? If morality is merely the product of some given neurons zigging instead of zagging, why do you presume your evaluation of the question to transcend merely material causes? In the act of denying objective morality, you are asserting that your opponents are objectively wrong. If you believe your position, you cannot assert that “wrong” exists. Your opponents are merely chemicals that produce a given result. There is no basis for claiming that chemical reactions can be “wrong”.

barry
Well, I just deleted several pages of detailed reply to you, because I sometimes overlook my own higher goal to resolve my disagreements with people like you one tiny step at a time. Most mature educated adults realizing that the more comprehensive the reply, the greater risk that important points will be avoided, lost or skipped…especially in the context of back and forth bickering on the internet and not on the context of the controlled confines of an academic debate.

My rebuttal to you was objective, but only on the condition that the dictionary has correctly defined “objective”. I wasn’t claiming pure objectivity, I was merely assuming you agree with me that the dictionary correctly defines the word “objective”.

Do you agree with the “being outside of the mind and independent of it.” definition of “objective” as provided by Merriam-Webster, yes or no?

T N
It’s not that complicated; simple English works fine. The question is why get mad at chemicals? Suppose I said that toothpaste is “wrong” because it doesn’t do photosynthesis. How does it make sense to say that chemicals have violated some hierarchy of values? Theists (and atheists) are merely chemicals that have their respective properties, how is it “wrong” for chemicals to possess the properties they have? What standard has been violated?
If you believe your position, you should just say you think what you think because your brain chemicals have that property, not that your brain chemicals can identify some objective, mind independent standard that has been violated. No?

barry
You said: “The question is why get mad at chemicals?”

I reply: No, you asked me to reply to your criticism of relative morality.

I made clear in my reply that I will be proceeding one baby step at a time.

I am taking one baby step at a time in order to establish as much common ground between us as possible on the issue of morality.

People who have more common ground on an issue are more likely to successfully resolve their differences, than people who have little or no common ground on the issue they argue about.

I will not permit you to jump away from my criticism just because you fear you cannot answer it without creating horrific empistemological problems for yourself.

The question is

Do you agree with the “being outside of the mind and independent of it.” definition of “objective” as provided by Merriam-Webster, yes or no?

If you object that using the dictionary to establish common ground between us on the issue of word-meanings unnecessarily infuses extra complications or confusion into the debate, please say so.

If you object that asking you to agree with the dictionary definition of “objective” is fallacious or otherwise somehow unnecessarily diminishes our ability to establish common ground here, then just say so.

If you think establishing common ground is a bad way to attempt to resolve your disagreement with another person, just say so.

What I fear from your latest reply is that you appear to think proceeding in baby steps is a bad idea (!?), when in fact because our positions are so radically opposed to one another already, our coming to agreement on as many possible facts about morality as we can, would obviously be crucial to resolving our dispute (or enabling the reader to more clearly determine who “won” this debate).

T N
Yes.
Does “mind”= brain?

barry
Yes. Does “bodily strength” = muscle? Or would you deny this common sense because some ancient text insists that bodily strength comes from another dimension and merely manifests using the muscles as a mere interface?

T N
Following your lead with “baby steps”, please cite any claims I made about “ancient texts”? Once you do that, I can answer your question about what my point is.

barry
I have no obligation to help you distract the discussion about your alleged prior claims about “ancient texts” as I never expressed or implied that you ever made any such claims. Go read my post again. I was “asking” you whether you would deny a common sense thing because of something written in an ancient text. The comment you refer to was in the form of a question, a question you chose to avoid answering.
Now that I’ve “done that”, do what you promised, and answer my question about what your point is, that is, your point in asking me whether I think mind = brain.

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-------will update later.

Cerebral Faith fails to properly defend the moral argument for god's existence

 This is my reply to an article by Cerebral Faith entitled

The Moral Argument NOT Debunked - Response To YouTuber Rationality Rules

 Posted: 12 May 2019 11:57 AM PDT

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.

Cold Case Christianity: Is God Real? God is the Best Explanation for Objective Moral Laws

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Cold Case Christianity:

Is God Real? God is the Best Explanation for Objective Moral Laws         

Posted: 20 Feb 2019 01:56 AM PST

We live in a world populated with self-evident, objective, transcendent moral laws.

 Thus indicating you aren't trying to convince atheists or skeptics, only bible-believing Christians.  Should you ever feel up to the challenge, grow a pair of balls and actually have a debate with an informed atheist the way Turek does.  Something tells me you are too afraid to do this.  Why threaten your fan base you've worked so hard to get?

“It’s never OK to torture babies for fun”

But the burden is on YOU to show that this is an objective moral.  You are assuming, without argument, that because most people agree this is morally wrong behavior, then presto, it must be objectively wrong. Not so.  You are assuming without proof that whatever morals are agreed to by "most people" are therefore representative of transcendent objective moral standards.  But it could just as easily be that most people think torturing babies for fun is wrong, for much the same reason that gorillas and other higher mammals don't go around torturing their own babies for fun.  It's mere natural instinct to survive.  The question of why we have that instinct goes beyond the moral question and gets into the muck of "intelligent design".

And regardless, your own bible shows God requiring his followers to torture kids (when the bible says you must hit your child with a "rod" its authors probably wouldn't think that leaving bruises and lacerations on the child's body was too much, see Pro. 20:30, and remember that many proverbs are strung together without concern for theme or context, so you cannot automatically assume v. 30 must be interpreted in a way harmonious with the "immediate context".

How torturous do you suppose it is for the child who watches as strangers over run their village killing everything in sight?  How long can a child fend off the man trying to murder it?  How much torture does that child endure in those horrific moments?  Where else could the Canaanites go after be chased out of the promised land, except to barren places already occupied by slave traders, where survival required criminal acts, or selling kids into slavery, or prostitution?

or (my new favorite from a blog reader) “It’s never OK to torture non-believers just because you don’t like them?” are two examples of such transcendent laws. How do we account for laws such as these?

 The better question would be to avoid begging the question of transcendence and ask instead "why do most people think it immoral to torture babies?" or "why has human history exhibited a pattern of disapproving of baby-torture?" 

Of course, I'd disagree that humans have agreed throughout history that baby torture is immoral.  That Israel found some babies expendable is clear (Numbers 31:17, 1st Sam. 15:2-3), and as already pointed out, if all Israel was doing was "dispossessing" the Canaanites, they were chasing them off the promised land and thus into dangerous barren territory where crime or worse would be the only way a family could stay alive.

We are mammals, and we instinctively avoid doing things that inhibit the survival of our young.  Furthermore, in our mammalian minds, any "benefits" we could get from torturing babies would be outweighed by the cost of inhibiting survival.  The fact is most mammals simply lack a desire to torture babies just like they lack a desire to torture forgotten invisible dust particles. What fool would pretend this cannot be accounted for except by positing space aliens controlling our minds with their beam-weapons?  How's that any different than your invisible god who can read minds?

Their existence points to a reasonable inference: the existence of a Transcendent Moral Law Giver.

Not if you define that TMLG as spaceless, timeless, immaterial, invisible, other-dimensional, and the other mantra that Turek repeats ad nauseum to his mostly Christian audiences.  That's nothing more than an incoherent definition which we are reasonable to dismiss.   The only theory you have, to justify such nonsense talk, (i.e., the big bang) is a theory that is manifestly not what the originally intended addressees of Genesis 1-2 would have thought when reading the creation account.   Try again.

But there are other alternatives typically offered by those who reject the existence of such a Being. Is God real? The insufficiency of the alternative explanations strengthens the argument for the existence of God:    

    Are Objective, Transcendent Moral Laws A Product of Genetic Evolution?

When you ask a loaded question like that, no.  If a moral was objective and transcendent, then no, mere genetic evolution would not create it.  Evolution cannot create something whose nature extends beyond the physical.

    As one friendly skeptic said recently, “We share 99.999% of our physical traits with our fellow humans . . . so why would our mental traits not be similarly shared?” Are moral truths simply part of our genetic coding?

 Yes, that's why newborn babies don't need to be taught to breastfeed.  Your theory that "god puts his laws into our hearts" is bullshit anyway, as testified to by billions of children, who obviously don't already have such morality, who only acquire it by learning from their mammalian caregivers.

There are good reasons to reject such an explanation. When someone claims self-evident moral truths are simply a matter of our genetic evolution, they are assuming the same evolutionary pathway for every people group. What are we to make of cultures that behave in a manner different than our own?

 It's called cultural conditioning.  We all seek after food, water, shelter and companionship, we just tend to go about it in different ways in different periods of history.

How can we justly adjudicate between the myriad of people groups, all of whom have their own genetic evolutionary pathway? This form of emboldened relativism is powerless to judge any form of behavior, good or bad.

 No, you are assuming that if all morals are relative, that we have no "right" to judge others.  That's total bullshit.  One "relative" moral instinct we have is to criticize others who do things differently than we do.  Our "right" comes from our innate desire to criticize outsiders.  Just like there is no "right" for one junkyard dog to bite another, nevertheless, they still do.  It's purely instinctive, as nuanced by a person's environmental conditioning.

There is no objective moral truth governing the carnivores chasing the herbivores on earth, but that hardly means we accuse them of being "inconsistent" for foisting their morals on each other.  It's just what creatures of instinct do when they have different ideas about survival, yet have to live together.

In fact, how can we judge any behavior if it is so connected to our genetic nature?

 The same way one junkyard dog decides to attack another junkyard dog.  If we feel uncomfortable with another person being in what we consider our personal space, we react.  We aren't reacting merely because we first figured out how to prove that our moral view was more "objective" than theirs, we simply "react".

We don’t blame people for being brunettes or having blue eyes; if our genes are the cause of our moral understanding, what right do we have to blame people when they simply express genetic moral wiring different from our own?

Because we all innately resist the attempts of others to harm the ability of ourselves and our favored groups from surviving and thriving.  Instinct. And since I deny freewill, yes, I think society is wrong to pretend that a criminal had a "choice" or ability to resist the temptation to do a crime.  Why some boys in a group shy away from stealing while the others go through with the plan, has to do with the boys having very different genetic predispositions and environmental conditioning.  $50 says in the group of 5 boys playing to steal from a store, the one who will actually not puss out, but go through with it, will be the kid whose genetics make him more aggressive, and/or the kid who is lacking any serious discipline at home.

Perhaps most importantly, even if my skeptical friend is right and commonly accepted moral truths are merely a product of our genetic encoding, we still must account for the source of this encoding. 

No, that gets into the question of intelligent design, which doesn't get you off the hook.  Your attept to prove that some morals can only be accounted for by a transcendent moral lawgiver, has failed.  You cannot correct that problem by simply insisting on intelligent design.  That's called moving the goal-posts.  The "moral argument" for God fails.  The "intelligent design" argument for God is another matter.

DNA is information rich. As Stephen C. Myers observes in Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, there isn’t a single example in the history of the universe in which information has come from anything other than an intelligent source. If our genetic code contains information about moral truth, we still must ask the foundational question, what intelligent source provided this code? All codes require encoders.

 Meyers is debunked here.

But I don't really care if a "god" exists, the NT provides evidence that makes it more likely Jesus stayed dead, so given that Christianity is a failure, whatever 'god' exists, is nothing to worry about. 

And it wouldn't matter if Jesus did rise from the dead, the idea that God will send to hell all those who fail to live up to whatever Christian light they had, is total bullshit and is denied by enough liberal Christian scholars  to justify the non-religious person in turning away from such an exercise in futility as "What does the New Testament teach?"  You people have been asking that for 2,000 years, you couldn't agree with each other in the lifetime of Jesus, the lifetime of Paul, by the second century many sects of Christianity were competing as "the" truth and calling each other "heretic", and the only thing Christianity did for the next 2,000 years was get more splintered and more complex.

    Are Objective, Transcendent Moral Truths a Matter of Cultural Agreement?

When you ask the question in loaded form like that, the answer is obviously "no".  Cultural Agreement cannot produce some invisible moral law that "transcends" humanity itself.

    If societies are the source of objective moral truths, what are we to do when two cultures disagree about these truths?

You are assuming there is a higher moral law to answer that in an objective way, and there isn't.  When we find other cultures with morals opposed to ours, then whether we attack or leave them alone is largely conditioned on the current generation's genetic predispositions and their environmental conditioning. Once again, there's no higher moral "truth" to govern when two dogs choose to fight, so its pretty stupid to ask what moral law governs when you confront another person whose morals are opposite to our own.  But that fact that human history has exhibited a tendency to war or to just stay away from those of differing persuasion makes a good case that there really are no higher moral truths to it, and what we "should" do goes no deeper than what we feel like we should do at the moment.

How do we adjudicate between two competing views of a particular moral claim?

By using our relative morals. When we all gasp about the criminal who was caught torturing children, this shows nothing more than that a bunch of people have formed a city, state or nation and they all pretty much have the same moral disgust for hurting kids.  While we may often act like putting such people in jail aspires to some higher moral law, this is not true, such act only aspires to the moral law that a bunch of mammals agree on.

If objective moral truths are simply a matter of “shared morality”, the societal majority rules; “might makes right”.

 Which is precisely what we have in our democratic "Christian" nation.  You either obey the majority's morals, or they will send their strongest representatives after you to put you in jail even if you don't wanna go.

In a world like this, anyone (or any group) holding the minority position in a particular moral argument is, by definition, immoral.

Yes.   A minority of men in America approve of homosexuality and/or pedophilia. Not really strange that they are automatically accounted "immoral" by the majority.

In fact, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson made this clear in his early career as a prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials following World War II. When the German soldiers who committed atrocities in the Jewish prison camps were brought to trial to face criminal charges, the issue of moral relativity was tested directly. The lawyers for the German officers argued that these men should not be judged for actions that were actually morally acceptable in the nation of Germany at the time of the war.

Those lawyers were just asking for consistency. 

They argued their supervisors and culture encouraged this behavior; in fact, to do otherwise would defy the culture and ideology in which they lived. In their moral environment, this behavior was part of the “shared morality”. Jackson argued against such a view of moral relativism and said, “There is a law above the law.”

 Jackson was wrong if he meant there was a moral law transcending humanity.  The fact is that before WW2, not everybody in the world agreed that they should go involve themselves in the affairs of other countries.   But then that's why they call it "war".  Us mammals tried but could not achieve peace, so we just fought it out.

    Are Objective, Transcendent Moral Truths a Consequence of “Human Flourishing”?

Not when you ask the question in that loaded way.  Once again, if the moral truth "transcends" humanity, than humanity's flourishing obviously did not create said law. 

    Sam Harris (author of The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values), argues we can establish the moral value of any particular action by simply evaluating its impact on human well-being (something Harris typically refers to as “human flourishing”).

 And Harris was wrong on the point, as are most moral objectivist atheists, since he fails to provide an objective definition of human well-being.  And indeed he cannot.

Harris likens the establishment of such truths to a game of chess. In any particular game, each player must decide how to move based on the resulting effect. If you are trying to win the game, some moves are “good” and some moves are “bad”; some will lead you to victory and some will lead you to defeat. “Good” and “bad” then, are evaluated based on whether or not they accomplish the goal of winning the game. Harris redefines “good” (in the context of human beings) as whatever supports or encourages the well-being of conscious creatures; if an action increases human well-being (human “flourishing”) it is “good”, if it decreases well-being, it is “bad”. What, however, do we mean when we talk about “flourishing”?

Good question, which is why I say atheist moral objectivists are just being silly.  If humanity is the highest form of life, then it us US, and nobody and nothing else, that decides whether a given act constitute moral goodness or moral badness. 

It’s one thing to evaluate a behavior in terms of its impact on survival, and if we are honest with one another, this is really what drives Natural Selection. But Harris recognizes survival, as a singular goal, can lead to all kinds of morally condemnable misbehavior.

 Condemnable only because of Harris's subjective and relative morals that he brings to the moral investigation table.  Harris might think the way the Nazis chose to 'survive' in WW2 is condemnable, but his basis for such criticism cannot be anything greater than his naturalistic relative morals.

Harris suggests the goal is something more; the goal is “flourishing”. Human flourishing comprises a particular quality of life; one in which we honor the rights of others and seek a certain kind of character in order to become a particular kind of human group that has maximized its potential.

That sounds nice, but doesn't solve the problem:  "Should" we allow the Taliban to "flourish"?  If not, then apparently "flourishing" is not a sufficient criteria for morality.

See the problem here? Harris has already imported moral values into his model, even as he seeks to explain where these values come from in the first place. One can hardly define the “maximization” of human wellbeing without asserting a number of moral values. What, beyond mere survival, achieves our “maximization” as humans?

Good question, I don't think Harris can answer it.  Dan Barker tried to answer it with "pain" by saying we naturally recoil from pain, which is true enough, but he draws back somewhat by acknowledging that some pain is required to achieve good, such as the doctor who sets the broken bone, or cutting off one's hand that is stuck between two huge rocks so that one can survive.

The minute we move from mere survival to a particular kind of “worthy” survival, we have to employ moral principles and ideas.

Correct.

Concepts of sacrifice, nobility and honor must be assumed foundationally, but these are not morally neutral notions. Human “flourishing” assumes a number of virtues and priorities (depending on who is defining it), and these values and characteristics precede the enterprise Harris seeks to describe. Harris cannot articulate the formation of moral truths without first assuming some of these truths to establish his definition of “flourishing”. He’s borrowing pre-existent, objective moral notions about worth, value and purpose, while holding a worldview that argues against any pre-existing moral notions.

Good for you.  You refuted Harris.  But you didn't refute me.  I've based humanity's morality in each human's mammalian instinct for individual and group survival, as flavored by genetic predispositions and environmental conditioning.  These naturalistic explanations account for all known moral issues.

    Try as we might, the alternative explanations for objective, transcendent moral truths are desperately insufficient.

Dream on.

    Try as we might, the alternative explanations for objective, transcendent moral truths are desperately insufficient. The moral law transcends all of us, regardless of location on the planet or time in history.

And there you go again, proving you aren't talking to skeptics but only to Christians just looking for anybody that can professionally articulate what they already believe.  Try having a live debate with an informed atheist, then take a poll of your fan base and see how many think you survived.

Or....continue running away from challenges and just tell yourself that periodically preaching to the choir must be something inspired by God because it happens to boost book sales.

Dr. Flannagan bases objective morality on what morality "seems" objective to him (!?)

 Update:  Dr. Flannagan ceased his dodging the issue and responded in a more direct way in one of his later replies on June 26, 2018, so I've changed the title of the post.

Dr. Flannagan has posted several articles displaying the fallacies of the moral relativist position.

I replied to each, challenging him to explain why he thinks torturing babies to death solely for entertainment is objectively immoral.

He has made his first response, and it is clear that he is less than forthcoming about those reasons.

I replied with 7 reasons why he need to stop focusing on the alleged errors of the moral relativist position and start providing the positive evidence for his own objectivist position.  My 7 reasons are cross-posted below for convenience, followed by my point by point reply just in case any Christian thought it couldn't be done. 

----------beginquote------------------------

Dr. Flannagan,

There are 7 important reasons why you should get down to brass tacks and provide your first reason for saying torturing babies to death solely for entertainment purposes, is objectively immoral:

First, I’ll do what philosophers routinely do, and concede my alleged errors *solely for the sake of argument*. 

Second, you are the one asserting that baby-torture is objectively immoral.  Suspiciously, you never get around to saying exactly why, you rather prefer to just balk at the fallacies in the moral relativist objections.  But it wouldn't matter if you were correct in your criticisms of me, that doesn't fulfill your own burden to provide positive evidence/argument in favor of what you believe.

Third,  despite your bible telling you that unbelievers are either completely incapable of, or else highly unlikely to, engage in correct thinking with respect to godly truths (1st Corinthians 2:14), you still provide many arguments to non-Christian philosophers and audiences.  I may therefore safely assume that, even if you judge me to be wrong in many of my views, this will no more slow you down in setting forth argument to me, than it slows you down from setting forth argument to other equally spiritually blind atheists. 

Fourth, you and I are not conversing in private, where you might otherwise think it legitimate to say my ignorance renders continued dialogue pointless.  There are obviously many Christians less educated than you, who are reading your posts here, and they would benefit from seeing your reasons for saying baby-torture is objectively immoral.   Even if you believed that your revealing here your first reason to say baby torture is objectively immoral, wouldn't benefit *me*, you could not hold such a negative view of all the other Christians who learn from your posts, and who, like most Christians, cannot imagine how they could demonstrate any act to be ‘objectively’ immoral apart from merely quoting the bible.  You are helping thousands or perhaps millions of Christians when you answer my challenge directly.

Fifth, you actually can't really say for sure whether God would or wouldn't open my understanding if you gave your first reason for saying baby-torture is objectively immoral.  Don't you believe that God somehow works through your online posts, even if He doesn't make them totally inerrant?  And if you believe in Ezra 1:1 and Daniel 4:32-33, you cannot deny the ability of the bible-god to make even his enemies believe  whatever he wants them to (i.e., Cyrus came to believe the Jews should be freed from exile, Nebuchadnezzar came to believe he should eat grass).   Don't underestimate the power of the Holy Spirit as he works through your posts.

Sixth, it doesn't matter how much you try to justify refusal to answer my below-repeated challenge directly, you can hardly "expect" a moral relativist to appreciate your reasons for saying baby torture is objectively immoral, if you constantly refuse to reveal those reasons.  It would be any different than the atheist who “expects” Christians to appreciate why he thinks God doesn’t exist...while never getting down to the business at hand and actually specifying those reasons.

Seventh and finally, your continual refusal to actually deliver the actual goods could be reasonably construed as your refusal to “correct those who are in opposition…” (2^nd Timothy 2:25), or to "provide a reason for the hope that lies within you (1st Peter 3:15), or a refusal to “contend earnestly for the faith” (Jude 3).  At the end of the day, your willingness to do apologetics eventually obligates you to do something more than merely point out inconsistencies in the non-Christian view and start laying the basis for your own positive case, a thing that doesn't require you to mention anybody else's fallacies or misunderstandings.

Now that you've discovered that the benefits of revealing exactly why baby-torture is 'objectively' immoral, outweigh any perceived risks, let's try this again:

You believe that torturing babies to death solely for entertainment purposes, is objectively immoral. Why?

Because the bible tells you so?

Because most humans say it is immoral?

Because you personally find it revolting?

Because all strong feelings about a moral issue necessarily come from God?

Some combination of the above?

Some other reason or reasons?

I cannot fulfill my burden to provide direct evidence of atheism by hiding behind continual attacks on the morality of the bible-god, and YOU cannot fulfill your burden to provide direct evidence that baby torture is objectively immoral, by constantly hiding behind complaints that the moral relativist position is fallacious. 

Let everything be done decently and in order.

I look forward to further dialogue with you,

Barry

---------endquote---------I now reply to him in point by point fashion

If that is true, then you should be able to establish the correctness of the proposition “torturing babies to death solely for entertainment purposes is objectively immoral” WITHOUT relying on what anybody else “believes or accepts” about that subject.

Ok two things here. First, that inference doesn’t follow: Even if a proposition is objectively true, it doesn’t follow that a person can demonstrate or establish its truth.

  That's irrelevant.  You've already committed yourself to the premise that child-torture and rape are objectively immoral.  If you are being serious, then you should have reasons for thinking such acts are objectively immoral.  Please reveal those reasons.

Second, no proposition can be established “without relying on what someone else believes or accepts”.

So under your logic, I cannot establish "trees exist" is objectively true without relying on what someone else believes or accepts.  Nice going. 

This because proof and argument always involves inferring a conclusion from prior premises, that one’s interlocutor believes.

 On the contrary, I see no reason to think I'd have to get a second opinion if I draw the conclusion that 2+2=4.

If you can’t appeal to what a person believes you can’t prove anything at all.

Ahhh...now we are starting to discover that whatever your proof for the objective immorality of baby-torture is, you are going to have to depend on at least something I currently believe in order to prove the proposition.  That's fine, but you talk all cocky about objective morals, as if they would be true even if no humans believed in them.  Well pardon me, but if you need to appeal to something the interlocutor believes, and yet none of them believes something you need to make your case, you are shit out of luck.

For example, you can’t establish that the physical world exists independently of anyone perceiving it without appealing to what someone else accepts or believes. Nor can you establish that events existed in the past independently of whether on remembered them or not without appealing to something some else believes or accepts.

Fine:  do whatever you think must properly be done to establish that fatal baby-torture is objectively immoral.

Indeed, the dictionaries tell us that “objective” means
“not dependent on the mind for existence”
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/objective

Unfortunately, you don’t define technical terms in a discipline like meta ethics by looking at dictionaries. Dictionaries only tell one common usage, they don’t necessarily convey the way terms are used or the precision they are used with within a discipline.

But you constantly use the word "objective" in connection with "morals" in the articles you expect the average person to read.  Yet you never carefully define "objective" in any way that might suggest you mean anything more narrow than what the dictionary means.  Indeed, your constantly analogies to the objective existence of physical things like the world make perfect sense upon the dictionary definition.

But it also seems to me this definition is mistaken as its too broad. Take the judgement: “John was in pain when Billy smashed him in the head with a brick” that judgement is either objectively true or false, by believing or willing John wasnt in pain doesnt make it so. However, seeing pain is a mental state its truth also depends on the existence of minds. So mind independence isnt a good definition of objectivity. What objectivity requires is that a judgement is incorrect independently of what philosophers call our evaluative attitudes towards it.

Ok, so go ahead and demonstrate that the judgment of the sociopath who says "torturing babies to death solely for entertainment is morally good" is incorrect independently of what philosophers call our evaluative attitudes towards it.

Our evaluation that the proposition is true or false or our evaluation that the action is good or bad. Evaluative judgements are obviously mental judgements, they are a specific type of mental act and not the same thing as mind generically. Consquently, doesn’t require complete mind independence.

Then perhaps my rebuttals to you did some good, and maybe now you'll update your attacks on moral relativity by reminding the reader that you were using "objective" in a philosophically narrow sense not as broad as the dictionary definition.  You can hardly blame a reader for assuming your unqualified words take their normative dictionary definitions.

    So go ahead…demonstrate that that the proposition...

Sure when you demonstrate physical objects exist without appealing to something someone believes or accepts.

That is a willful failure on your part to fulfill your own burden of proof.  You talk all day every day about the fallacies of moral relativism, sort of like the atheist who talks all day about the evils of the bible-god.  

But you never get around to stating your reasons for saying baby-torture is objectively immoral, sort of like the atheist who never gets around to stating the reasons for saying god doesn't exist.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that you are correct about this need to appeal to what somebody else believes in order to "demonstrate" something:  If you need to appeal to things you think are in my mind, feel free to do so.  Do whatever you need to do to prove the proposition that fatal baby-torture solely for the sake of entertainment is objectively immoral.

Does your inability to do so show that mean the physical universe depends on my mind for existence? Was I around at the big bang, if I died tomorrow would that mean you cease to exist and the whole universe is annihilated?

Sorry, hard to figure out what you are saying.

Another dictionary defines ‘objective’ as:
“having reality independent of the mind” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/objective
So go ahead…demonstrate that that the above-cited moral proposition has “reality independent of the mind”.

See above about relying on dictionaries to settle the meaning of technical terms and the mistaken definition your relying on

 You know…just like you also don’t need any human input whatsoever to demonstrate anything else that you would characterize as having “objective” existence, such as trees.

 That again doesn’t follow, obviously trees exist independently of minds, if every human being in the world committed suicide tomorrow the olive tree in my garden wouldn’t pop out of existence. However, it’s not true that you can demonstrate the existence of trees without appealing to something humans know or accept.

I disagree, but in the interest of furthering the argument, fine, then appeal to something I know or accept, to help you demonstrate the objective immorality of torturing babies to death solely for entertainment.

Your confusing the conditions necessary for something to exist with the conditions necessary to know something exists. Not the same thing.

On the contrary, you mislead the reader with your many uses of "objective" which you apply not only to morals but to physical realities that people commonly refer to as existing "objectively", such as when you appeal to the reality of the physical world.  Will you admit you could have made clearer your narrowly nuanced use of "objective", or will you insist that the average reader obtain their Ph.d in philosophy before they dare presume anything whatsoever about your use of language? 

 If you start asking me questions, you’ll be violating the definition of objectivity. You don’t need my input on anything, nor do you need to know whether I accept or believe any certain way about it, to achieve your own stated goal of demonstrating the above-cited moral proposition to be objectively true.

 That again doesn’t follow for the reasons I cited above, pointing out judgements are true or false independently of whether we think they are, doesn’t entail one can demonstrate or know they are without human input.
You’ll need to fix up that fallacious inference before your objection has any soundness.

 And you'll need to update your attacks on moral relativity so that the readers, most whom presumably don't have a Ph.d in philosophy, will recognize that when you say "objective", you don't mean the sense that the dictionary provides.

    You could also clear things up by directly answering the question of why you think said baby-torture is objectively immoral in the first place.

    Is it immoral because the bible tells you so?

    Is it immoral because most humans say it is immoral?

    is it immoral because you personally find it revolting?

    Is it immoral because all strong feelings about a moral issue necessarily come from God?

    Some other reason or reasons?

Unfortunately those questions assume the same mistake I mentioned above, your first question is about why I think a certain action is wrong it asks what my grounds or reasons for believing something is.

 Um.. Sir...asking you what grounds or reasons you have for believing something, cannot possibly constitute a "mistake", unless you think it is a 'mistake' for people ask you why you believe what you believe?  Is there some different Dr. Matthew Flannagan who engages in apologetics, who is different than you?  You are  C  L  E  A  R  L  Y   being evasive.  Those questions were legitimate even assuming I misunderstood you to a shocking degree.   

The problem is you then in the next few sentences take that to be the same as asking the question of why an action is immoral.

Ok, then forget my allegedly  fallacious understandings and give your reasons for saying baby-torture is objectively immoral.  We can worry about my ignorance and misunderstanding of your stated reasons after you state them and then after  I reply to your stated reasons.  You never know, I might address your reasons in ways that aren't fallacious.

That’s just a bad inference, I can ask a person why they believe sub atomic particles exist, and they might reply they believe it because they were taught it in a physics class.

 So apparently answering the question directly is actually possible, and in our case,  you just don't wanna.

That doesn’t mean that sub atomic particles exist because science teachers say so.

Agreed, but the direct answer clears the way to begin a more penetrating analysis.  While conversely, simply refusing to get in the ring and contenting yourself to shout from the sidelines has the clear benefit of preventing you from getting steamrolled.

If they exist, they existed a long time before science teachers or even humans came on the scene.

Ok...then if there are reasons to say baby-torture is objectively immoral, those reasons existed long before humans existed.  You are forced to agree to that by reason of your presupposition that God's morals have been the same from all eternity and were no different back before he created anything.

So, sorry, but your objections here seem to be just based on a series of non sequiturs.

 And I'm equally sorry that you did a rather unconvincing job of evading a direct challenge. It doesn't matter if I have a worse understanding of your position than a two year old would:  That would not intellectually or morally compel you to stay quiet about the reasons you think baby-torture is objectively immoral.

Dr. Flannagan, why can't you just forthrightly acknowledge that you think torturing babies to death is objectively immoral because the bible tells you so?

It doesn't matter if that simplistic basis could be shot out of the sky...it would still correctly reflect what you believe, wouldn't it?  It is dishonest to keep your true reasons hidden because you are afraid they can be refuted.

 Update: June 26, 2018:  Flannagan made another reply.  I responded briefly at his website and include that below, followed by more more lengthy point by point response:
------quote-----

Dr. Flannagan,
I provide a point by point response to you at my blog, but for now, it’s probably better to limit my posting here to resolving one of our important disagreements necessarily involved in the objective morality debate.
You have stated repeatedly in prior posts that when the moral relativist characterizes somebody else’s moral viewpoint as “wrong”, the relativist is necessarily implying an objective standard of moral right and wrong.
For example, you said that objectivity is presupposed when somebody admits any certain moral view was “mistaken”. 

“Stephen Evan’s similarly stresses that we assume or presuppose that moral judgments are the “kind of thing we can be mistaken about” and we criticise societies and other people for making mistaken moral judgments, all of which presupposes objectivity.”

“…or the fact we think some cultural mores or moral systems are worse than others and so on, all of which presuppose objectivity. Or the fact we engage in debate with other people over what is the right thing to do.”

 Your most direct statement on the subject was:

“…I put forward a hypothetical situation where a community endorsed the torture of children and asked whether you think a society which judged it was ok to do this was mistaken in doing so, or whether you thought there judgment it was permissible to torture children was correct. In fact, I put the challenge to you in the post? Most people judge that such a society does make a mistake, which shows that they presuppose that moral judgements are objective.”

I believe you were wrong to assume an objective standard of moral right and wrong is being presupposed when the moral relativist declares that somebody else’s viewpoint is “wrong”.

That is because there are numerous examples from real life in which we find it totally legitimate and justified to declare a person “wrong” on the basis of an admittedly non-objective, subjective or entirely relative standard.

Suppose I impose a 9 p.m. bedtime on my 7-year old daughter on a school night. When she says “I don’t have to do what you say”, I reply “you are wrong”. Is my assessment legitimate? After all, there is nothing in nature, any religious text, our deepest moral intuitions, or any viewpoint that most human beings agree on, which specifies what precise bedtime a child must obey on a school night, or specifies that a child must obey just anything the parent says at any time.

That situation is 100% subjective, yet it is legitimate for the dad to characterize his daughter’s rebellious attitude in that context as “wrong”.  Can you agree with me that “you are wrong” can be a legitimate moral criticism even in the absence of any objective moral standard?

I honestly cannot imagine how you could possibly infuse my chosen bedtime of 9 p.m. in this context with any objectivity, given that bedtime for kids is something parents wildly disagree about, precisely because there is no objective standard to apply in the first place.

---------endquote-----

here is my more detailed point by point reply:

Barry, you seem to have missed the key point of my last post. Which is your suggestion I am under some kind of burden to prove this is simply false.

But you'll have to agree the reader would be a bit curious that while you denying having a burden here, you still chose to proceed as if you believed you did.  Apparently, I struck a chord.

To demonstrate why I think its objectively wrong to torture babies for fun let me ask you some questions. These are to elucidate some premises which hopefully you and many of my readers will agree upon
1. If someone tortured a baby for fun, they grabbed a two year old and beat it repeatedly with a belt in front of you so it was bleeding and screaming in agony, and laughed as they did it repeatedly saying “I am doing this purely for fun, I have no other reason” would you d you honestly say that a person who did this did no wrong?

In my opinion, that child-abusing man would be morally 'wrong'. 

2. If as I suspect the answer to the above question is no, suppose the person who was whipping the flesh of the child in front of you told you he thought his action was perfectly ok, and there was nothing wrong with it, and that he was part of a community whose mores endorsed this sort of behaviour, would you change your opinion and claim that what he did wasn’t wrong, but was morally perfectly acceptable?

Inapplicable, see above.

Now I suspect, unless you’re a total Psychopath, that your answer to both these questions is “No”.

 It wouldn't matter if I was a total Psychopath...your duty is to "demonstrate".  You aren't "demonstrating" but only "assuming" if you simply assume total Psychopaths hold only those morals that are objectively wrong.

If it is however then, you have claimed both that (a) the action is wrong and (b) individuals and communities who judge it isn’t wrong are mistaken. If (a) and (b) are correct then morality is objective.

Incorrect.  I often tell my school-age daughter she is "wrong" to disobey my imposed bedtime of 9 p.m. on a school night.  But this does not imply she is objectively wrong, and my calling her "wrong" doesn't imply that I think she is violating some objective standard of morality.  My choice of what time she should go to bed is utterly relative, and differs wildly from parent to parent.  There is no natural law that says 9 p.m. is the proper bedtime for kids on a school night.  There is nothing in the bible that says 9 p.m. is the proper bedtime for kids on a school night.  And there is nothing in our deepest human intuitions that says 9 p.m. is the proper bedtime for kids on a school night.

Likewise, there is nothing in natural law, the bible, or our deepest human intuitions, that says a child should obey just anything at all which their parent might command at any time.   So my choice of bedtime for her is completely subjective.  Yet it is also legitimate and reasonable to characterize her rebellion toward this bedtime as "wrong".

Other examples, for the limited purpose of justifying wrongness on the basis of a completely subjective standard could be adduced:  We today spell it "connection", but back in the 17th century, the "correct" English spelling was "connexion".  But if any child in America today wrote it that way on a spelling test, the teacher would declare it "wrong".  It would be legitimate to declare such test answer  "wrong", meaning "wrong for reasons limited solely to the culture we currently live in".  Nobody would argue that by saying "wrong", the teacher is logically implying that there is an objectively correct way to spell that word. So you are incorrect to automatically accuse the moral relativist of necessarily implying an objective standard of moral right and wrong when they classify disobedience to some moral as "wrong".

Of course you could respond by biting the bullet and saying that in your opinon a person who beats a child in that way for fun does nothing wrong at all. But I would take that as a reduction ad absurdium of your position.

 Why?  It IS my opinion that this form of child abuse is morally wrong.  And in light of your other presuppositions, such as that I'm not god, and therefore cannot know everything there is to know about morality, casting my view as "opinion" constitutes justified reserve.

I suspect that many of my readers who you are so concerned about would have a similar response.

I don't see the relevance.  Unless you concede that an objective moral can be established by something which "many" people have to say, then what "many" of your readers would conclude about my viewpoint, has no relevance here.

If you have to say that there is nothing wrong with actions I spelt out in 1 and 2 to justify the kind of religious scepticism you want to justify then your position is implausible and to put it mildly close to sociopathic.

I'll play devils advocate here:  I detect an assumption in your argument that you haven't justified just yet: On what basis would you judge "implausible" the moral viewpoint that says it is good to torture children solely for entertainment purposes?  Your reference to "sociopathic" seems to indicate that your basis for implausibility here is what the majority of humans would have to say, since of course "socipath" refers to a person whose morals contravene those held by the majority of human beings.

Either admit your case for objective morals depends to some extent on what the majority of human beings feel is morally good/bad, or justify your intuitive disagreement with the sociopath without appealing to what the majority of human beings feel is morally good/bad.

Indeed, it is only a sociopath who seriously thinks it good to torture babies to death solely for entertainment, unfortunately, you are going to need something more than "most people would disagree with you!" before you can show the sociopathic position to be objectively immoral.

Perhaps you think I am under some kind of burden to prove 1 and 2.

You are.  He who asserts, must prove.  If you assert fairies exist, I'm under no obligation to believe they do until after you have provided some evidence in support.  That principle applies across the board, including applying to atheists who assert god's non-existence.

You think that when we see a child beating flayed with such intensity that its skin is bleeding and its screaming in agony we can’t claim that’s wrong until we have provided some kind of scientific empirical justification, cooly examining all the data, solving the is ought problem, and so forth. And that until someone does this the rational stance is to say that the person does nothing wrong at all.

First, "cooly" implies impartial unbiased research. So by saying we need not 'cooly' examine all the data, you are saying we need not conduct partial and unbiased research on the matter of whether torturing children to death solely for the sake of entertainment, is objectively moral or immoral.  But that implies justified reliance on your own existing moral prejudices/biases.  And whatever you conclude you arrive at by relying on your own existing moral prejudices/biases, that conclusion is hardly "objective".

You might think this, but I would just dispute that it seems pretty evident to me that’s simply an absurd and ridiculous stance to take.

So your case for 'objective' morals is necessarily premised, to some extent, on what "seems" to be absurd.  That's rather subjective of you.

I have already explained why I contend that your suggestion that anyone who asserts something carries some kind of burden of proof in my first post.

Yes indeed.  That's why you have a burden to demonstrate whatever you assert to be true, as would be the case with anybody else.

So until you actually respond to these criticisms you cant just assert that the burden of proof is on the person who opposes child flaying and the sadist’s position is the default one

Strawman fallacy, I never said the child flaying or sadist's position was the default.  I've made clear in this reply that a) I agree with you that such child abuse is morally wrong, but b) I am not necessarily implying the existence of an objective standard for morals in saying that, anymore than the teacher implies an objective standard for how to spell "connection"

seems to me to be mistaken,

Ok, sadism toward children solely for entertainment "seems" to be mistaken to you.  And sadism toward children solely for entertainment "seems" to be morally good to an extreme sociopath.  How would you "demonstrate" whose position was more objective?  I have an answer:  appeal to what the vast majority of people believe.  But that comes at the price of you admitting error, and admitting that what has "seemed" immoral to the vast majority of human beings, is a legitimate basis upon which to label their moral views "objective".

its similar to the position of a person who says they won’t believe the world isn’t a figment of there imagination until someone proves it actually exists. Or the solipsist who refuses to believe other people actually exist until someone proves it. Or the person who demands you prove the proposition “nothing is red all over and blue all over at the same time”.

I realize you feel strongly about your moral outlook.