Answering Apologetics Press and Dave Miller, Ph.D., on god killing children

This is my reply to an Apologetics Press article by Dr. Dave Miller, entitled

Did God Order the Killing of Babies?

by  Dave Miller,Ph.D.

 Skeptics and atheists have been critical of the Bible’s portrayal of God ordering the death of entire populations—including women and children.

Because the more infinite god is, the more options he has to solve sin problems without needing to inflict misery.  If limited sinners, can solve sin problems without mass slaughter, so can "god". 

Appeals to ripple-effect and chaos theory might help you save face, but foists not the least bit of intellectual obligation upon the person criticizing the bible's divine atrocities.  Hence appeal to such wishful speculations do not perform the function of making your fundamentalist position more reasonable than the position of a person who appeals to other dimensions to explain Bigfoot's uncanny ability to evade most attempts at detection.

For example, God instructed Saul through the prophet Samuel to “go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (1 Samuel 15:3-4, emp. added). Other examples include the period of the Israelite conquest of Canaan in which God instructed the people to exterminate the Canaanite populations that occupied Palestine at the time. However, if one cares to examine the circumstances and assess the rationale, the Bible consistently exonerates itself by offering legitimate clarification and explanation to satisfy the honest searcher of truth.

Ok, where does the bible teach that a person of infinite power "didn't have any other way" to resolve a sin problem except to inflict horrific misery on children and infants?   When we bomb cities in war and cannot avoid killing a few innocent people, it's precisely because we are limited in our power and knowledge.  If we have infallible ability to pinpoint where the innocent civilians were and where the guilty enemy combatants were, we would be able to solve the war problem without killing innocent people.

You know, the excuse of imperfection that your infinite god cannot use.

The Hebrew term herem found, for instance, in Joshua 6:17, refers to the total dedication or giving over of the enemy to God as a sacrifice involving the extermination of the populace. It is alleged that the God of the Bible is as barbaric and cruel as any of the pagan gods. But this assessment is simply not true.
 If the critic would take the time to study the Bible and make an honest evaluation of the principles of God’s justice, wrath, and love,

Which the bible says he cannot do unless he first converts to your religion (1st Cor. 2:14), so you are asking of the critic that which your own theology says is impossible.  Sort of like me asking you to lift 5 tons above your head with no other means beyond your personal unaided biological muscular strength.

he would see the perfect and harmonious interplay between them.

That's funny...most Christian scholars don't believe in biblical inerrancy, which means not even most Christian scholars find your fundamentalist "reconciliation scenarios" too convincing.  That is, even if I became a Christian, god still might be telling me that the divine atrocities of the OT truly contradict the divine love preached by Jesus.

God’s vengeance is not like the impulsive, irrational, emotional outbursts of pagan deities or human beings.

Of course not.  For example, when he determined to murder Moses for no specific reason, the wife felt so constrained by the urgent death threat that she used something more dull than a knife, which happened to be nearby, to circumcise her son, the only apparent way God would back the fuck off:

 24 Now it came about at the lodging place on the way that the LORD met him and sought to put him to death.
 25 Then Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son's foreskin and threw it at Moses' feet, and she said, "You are indeed a bridegroom of blood to me."
 26 So He let him alone. At that time she said, "You are a bridegroom of blood "-- because of the circumcision. (Exod. 4:24-26 NAU)

You will insist surely there was a reason God wanted to kill, even if the text doesn't express it, but on the contrary, God specifies that he can be incited to harm people "without cause":

 3 The LORD said to Satan, "Have you considered My servant Job? For there is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man fearing God and turning away from evil. And he still holds fast his integrity, although you incited Me against him to ruin him without cause. (Job 2:3 NAU)

Miller continues:

He is infinite in all His attributes and thus perfect in justice, love, and anger.

Ok, you are a classical theist.  But Greg Boyd and other conservative Christian scholars reject classical theism and use the bible to substantiate the opposite doctrine of open-theism (i.e., God is limited and makes mistakes).  In other words, the only way I could allow your classical theist presuppositions is if I convert to Christianity and decide that the Christians who advocate for open-theism are wrong. 

Not likely.  In the text of Genesis 6:6-7, God's regret is not toward the sinfulness of man, even if that was historically true.  His regret is toward his own prior choice to have created man.  That is, god is sorry he created man and this means pretty much the same thing the parent means when saying they are sorry they ever chose to have kids.  In both cases, one's confession of personal imperfection is clear.  Hence I deny any bible verses that extol God's power and wisdom, and refuse to read such classical theist concepts into the biblical wording to make the bible agree with classical theism.  The bible's teaching about God's limitations and imperfections cannot be changed merely beaccuse other parts of the bible give a contrary picture.

Therefore I am reasonable to take god at his word, and accept his personal confession of imperfection as the truth about him...and therefore recognize the bible to be full of theological error.  As if 2,000 years of Christian theologians attacking each other didn't already do the job.

Just as God’s ultimate and final condemnation of sinners to eternal punishment will be just and appropriate,

Ok, you aren't challenging skeptics here, you are preaching to the choir.  Rock on.

so the temporal judgment of wicked people in the Old Testament was ethical and fair.

Gee, how easy is it to blindly accept God's perfection in one part of the bible, to justify the conclusion that "surely the judge of the earth will do right" to quell any problems with any other part of the bible?  Like I said, preaching to the choir.  What you say puts no intellectual compulsion on skeptics, nor highlights any logical fallacies in their criticism of the bible-god.

We human beings do not have an accurate handle on the gravity of sin and the deplorable nature of evil and wickedness.

Yes we do.  Those who trivialize the moral wrongness of sin aren't expressing any greater cavalier liberalism than God did when he got rid of David's two death-deserving sins of adultery and murder...by simply waiving his magic wand:

 13 Then David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the LORD." And Nathan said to David, "The LORD also has taken away your sin; you shall not die. (2 Sam. 12:13 NAU)

How high is God's standard of justice?  Put your diapers on!....He requires a whole entire RAM to be sacrificed when a master rapes a slave girl, and by that sacrifice, he forgives the rapist completely:

 20 'Now if a man lies carnally with a woman who is a slave acquired for another man, but who has in no way been redeemed nor given her freedom, there shall be punishment; they shall not, however, be put to death, because she was not free.
 21 'He shall bring his guilt offering to the LORD to the doorway of the tent of meeting, a ram for a guilt offering.
 22 'The priest shall also make atonement for him with the ram of the guilt offering before the LORD for his sin which he has committed, and the sin which he has committed will be forgiven him. (Lev. 19:20-22 NAU)

I therefore soil myself at the thought of the bible-god's infinitely high standard of justice.  Clearly, he thinks the person who steals a pack of bubble gum from the corner store has made themselves worthy of eternally irreversible conscious torture by fire.

Human sentimentality is hardly a qualified measuring stick for divine truth and spiritual reality.

Said the Muslim terrorist to the American mother of three kids.  When idiots get it in their head that their god wants them to commit some horrible act, they necessarily become immune to common sense.

How incredibly ironic that the atheist, the agnostic, the skeptic, and the liberal all attempt to stand in judgment upon the ethical behavior of God when, if one embraces their position, there is no such thing as an absolute, objective, authoritative standard by which to pronounce anything right or wrong.

We don't need any moral to be "absolute" or "objective" in order to remain "reasonable" to foist our subjective morals on others.  I am reasonable to conform to my culture's apathy toward racism, even if no absolute morals exist.  By conforming to my culture, I make my own life far more pleasant...while contradicting my culture's morals could easily lead to me landing in jail or otherwise making my life miserable.
Acting lawfully in effort to make life enjoyable, by definition, is reasonable. 

That logic will not disappear merely because you can carp "who was right, Mother Theresa or Hitler?"  The question blindly presumes there is a way to objectively determine who was right, which means the question is begging the question of the existence of objective morals, when whether they exist is precisely the debate.

As the French existentialist philosopher, Sartre, admitted: “Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist.... Nor...are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimize our behavior” (1961, p. 485).

He was correct.  And due to the power of cultural and environmental conditioning, intelligent mammals are going to make changes in their lives that cause those who mostly agree on morals to band together in villages, cities, states, and nations. A whole bunch of people think raping a child is immoral, so it doesn't take a genius to figure out why such people choose to group together.  Yes, very often people are uneducated on moral philosophy and do indeed mistake their ultimately subjective morality for absolute morality, but thankfully, I'm not among them.

The atheist and agnostic have absolutely no platform on which to stand to make moral or ethical distinctions—except as the result of purely personal taste.

We don't need to ground our personal moral tastes in objective morality before our employment of those tastes to reach our desired goals can be reasonable and rational.

The mere fact that they concede the existence of objective evil is an unwitting concession there is a God Who has established an absolute framework of moral judgments.

Then you just encountered a rather extreme roadblock: I'm an atheist, I do not concede the existence of objective evil.  I am horrified at news that somebody slaughtered a schoolyard full of kids...but only because I was raised to adopt and reflect my culture's general morality...by parents who did the same.

Had I been born in 1915 in Germany, I might just as easily have taken the view that jewish kids "deserve" to be killed.  Now what are you going to do?  Find fault with a person for growing up to adopt their own culture's morals?  Ok, how about if I find "fault" with a man who grew up as a fundamentalist Christian and now thinks adultery is immoral?  Informed discussion about morality makes it clear that it is wrong to fault those who reflect the culture they were born and raised into.  We can disagree with them all day long, but we err in pretending the "American way" is "better".  We can't prove its' better except to shake our fist on Sunday and hear the claps of other people who already agree with us.  That doesn't prove the American way is objectively good.

The facts of the matter are that the Canaanites, whom God’s people were to destroy, were destroyed for their wickedness (Deuteronomy 9:4; 18:9-12; Leviticus 18:24-25,27-28).

John H. Walton (PhD, Hebrew Union College) is professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College and Graduate School.  He is author of The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest: Covenant, Retribution, and the Fate of the Canaanites" (IVP Academic, 2017).  Therein he insists

Proposition # 12: The depiction of the Canaanites In Leviticus and Deuteronomy is a sophisticated appropriation of a common ANE literary device.  Not an Indictment.

In other words, on the basis of the case made by Walton and Sandy, my becoming a genuinely born again Christian AND graduating from a Christian college AND conducting extensive review of fundamentalist Christian treatments of the Canaanite problem could easily still leave me thinking the fundamentalist view is incorrect. 

Now if becoming spiritually alive doesn't do anything to help me correctly understand God's justice, I'm not going to think becoming spiritually alive is anything deeper or more significant than a description of a purely  naturalistic process.

Miller continues:

Canaanite culture and religion in the second millennium B.C. were polluted, corrupt, and perverted.

Sorry, you don't have any archaeological evidence that any of them ever practiced bestiality with anywhere near the consistency that fundamentalist apologist typically accuse them of.  Instead, you read the ancient and politically biased accounts by the Israelites, and automatically assume these are just as easily understood and reliable as yesterday's headline in the San Francisco Chronicle.

No doubt the people were physically diseased from their illicit behavior.

The fact that the Israelites were so easily swayed into such idolatry on nearly ever page of the Pentateuch tells me your argument about who 'deserved' to be slaughtered is superficial.  If God was correct to slaughter the Canaanites, then since the Israelites were no better, they "deserved" to be slaughtered likewise.

If God could live with the Israelites who were just as bad (James 2:10-11), he could have lived with the Canaanites.

There simply was no viable solution to their condition except destruction.

Then I apparently know your bible better than you.  God could have just waved his magic wand and convinced all Canaanites to do whatever he wanted them to do.  See Ezra 1:1.

Their moral depravity was “full” (Genesis 15:16).

Yup, you aren't addressing skeptics, you are only concerned with the readers who automatically conclude "historically reliable!" every time they read something in the bible.  Perhaps that explains why your arguments here give skeptics little reason to worry about anything except their next beer.

They had slumped to such an immoral, depraved state, with no hope of recovery, that their existence on this Earth had to be terminated—just like in Noah’s day when God waited while Noah preached for years, but was unable to turn the world’s population from its wickedness (Genesis 6:3,5-7; 1 Peter 3:20; 2 Peter 3:5-9).

Nope, Ezra 1:1, God has a non-barbaric way of turning people from the error of their way...therefore his choice to solve the problem in an unnecessarily barbaric way means nothing less than what's implied when a parent puts a bullet in their child's brain to make them stop disobeying.  The fact that the parent had other options, is all we need to be reasonable to conclude that parent is evil and guilty.  Telling us that God is always a special exception and his ways are mysterious, etc, cannot be viewed as plausible unless and until some hardcore undisputed evidence of his actual existence is brought forward, lest we  find ourselves doing nothing more than making excuses for story characters.  I'm an atheist.  You aren't going to be bringing in any evidence of god's actual existence.

Including the children in the destruction of such populations actually spared them from a worse condition—that of being reared to be as wicked as their parents and thus face eternal punishment.

Which is the precise argument I use to prove that abortion is morally good.  How could it be morally bad to send a child to heaven in a way that protects them from the possibility of ending up in hell?  Isn't the spiritual perspective (going to heaven) more important than the earthly perspective (unlawful to kill)?  When we remember the bible god takes credit for all murders anyway (Deuteronomy 32:29), then we can know it is God who is causing a woman to get an abortion.

So if God cannot do anything morally bad, then is it morally good when God employs his Deut. 32:39 power, yes or no?

When you say God can orchestrate our sinful acts for his own good purposes without himself thereby becoming guilty of sin, you are clearly desperate to grasp at any stupid trifle nobody in their right mind would ever grasp at, to avoid admitting the god of the OT is nothing but an accurate reflection of the barbaric culture that created him. There is no possible reasoning that can justify the argument that you encouraged a person to commit a criminal act, but you yourself bear no moral responsibility for the criminal act.  If older brother James encourages younger brother Dennis to steal a candy bar from a store, does James bear any moral responsibility for this crime, yes or no?

All persons who die in childhood, according to the Bible, are ushered to Paradise and will ultimately reside in Heaven.

Well in any moral analysis, where the result of the act is morally good, the act itself was morally good (i.e, healthy kids because you made them eat healthy food).

If the result of the moral act is morally good, you are a fool to say the act itself could nevertheless be immoral, since the good result is precisely the reason to say the act producing the good, was itself good.  How do you know feeding kids healthy food is morally good?  The result.  That's sufficiently objective to make it reasonable for moral relativists to feel their actions morally justified, even if absolute morals don't exist. You will say "this is merely 'the ends justify the means' !", but that doesn't bother me, as ends-justify-the-means is a rather popular moral justification.  If I'm starving, I won't just look at somebody else's food and perish away, I'll probably try to get some of it even if I know this is stealing.

Children who have parents who are evil must naturally suffer innocently while on Earth (e.g., Numbers 14:33).

But only because your god chose to refrain from waving his magic Ezra 1:1 wand and causing those evil parents to do whatever he wants.

Those who disagree with God’s annihilation of the wicked in the Old Testament have the same liberal attitude that has come to prevail in America just in the last half century. That attitude has typically opposed capital punishment, as well as the corporal punishment of children.

Then count me out.  I'm not  fundamentalist Christian, but I'm not a card carrying ACLU radical.

Such people simply cannot see the rightness of evildoers being punished by execution or physical pain.

Said the Muslim terrorist leader to his followers when talking about the moral goodness of killing Americans.

Nevertheless, their view is skewed—and the rest of us are being forced to live with the results of their warped thinking: undisciplined, out-of-control children are wreaking havoc on our society by perpetrating crime to historically, all-time high levels.

And like the parent who has the ability to control the kids without killing or brutalizing them, God just sits around refusing to exercise his Ezra 1:1 magic.  So God is like the wealthy parent watching their own kids starve, because dad refuses, solely by choice, to withdraw money from the bank to buy food.  When you have ability and opportunity to prevent your own created situation from spinning out of moral control, and you don't, the evil that occurs is YOUR fault whether others can be implicated too. 

God is no different than the mother with three toddlers who constantly chooses to never guide them, and just lets them run all over hell and back, then bitches about the fact that they exhibit the natural characteristics of unguided children.  Or like the mother who never guides her kids by anything more than words.  Sorry god, "words" are not enough, thus "the bible says..." is not enough to solve actual real world problems, even if it's enough to dazzle the delights of believers every Sunday.

Those who reject the ethics of God’s destructive activity in the Old Testament, to be consistent, must reject Jesus and the New Testament.

Nah, plenty of genuinely born again Christians have had severe probelms with the moral contradiction between the OT and NT.  I therefore reasonably deduce it is a real problem and not merely a case of somebody lacking spiritual insight.

Over and over again, Jesus and the New Testament writers endorsed and defended such activity (e.g., Luke 13:1-9; 12:5; 17:29-32; 10:12; Hebrews 10:26-31).

Yup, you aren't arguing to convince skeptics, but only to convince "bible-believers".  Dismissed.

The Bible provides the only logical, sensible, meaningful, consistent explanation regarding the principles of retribution, punishment, and the conditions under which physical life may be extinguished.

Yup.  We'd all cry if America's ghettos were nuked clean, but I'm sure you'd probably find a bible verses that says nuking the ghettos is the "only way" an infinite god of infinite powers could  possibly solve the problem.

Answering the Catholic case for objective morals

This is my reply to an article by catholic apologist Christopher Akers entitled

God and Objective Morality

Christopher Akers

SATURDAY, JULY 8, 2017

There is a rather simple, yet nowadays rarely discussed, philosophical argument that can help lead to assent to the existence of God. It has the potential to change the hearts and minds of those who seriously consider it.

Which means you probably aren't a 5-Point Calvinist...one of those Christians who says unbelievers are so steeped in sin, they are "totally unable" to seek after God (First point of Calvinism; total inability), so that if a sinner does seek after god, this was not a combination of their freewill and god's grace, but solely of god's grace (leading to the question "why doesn't take away the total inability of all sinners?", and the Calvinist answers "because god does not wish to save everybody").  If you think the Calvinists don't know about John 3:16, 1st John 2:2, 1st Peter 3:9 or 1st Timothy 2:4, think again.

The argument, succinctly, is that for an objective moral system to exist, God must exist.

If you mean "objective" according to the dictionary system, then yes.  The reason any act of man is objectively immoral, by definition MUST be for reasons completely independent human belief or feelings.

For a moral system to be truly objective, moral law must stem from a source external to humanity. Otherwise, all we have is subjective human moral opinion, no matter how it is dressed up.

Agreed.

The implications of this are particularly fascinating, especially since the vast majority of nonbelievers live and act as if they believe in an objective moral system, while their own belief system makes this logically impossible.

I would agree with you that many non-Christians live out their morality in ways inconsistent with their beliefs about the origins of morality.

Musing on such questions played a key role in my own conversion to the Church.

That's too bad, as blaming morality on "god" is quite the absurdity, for myriad reasons.

Thinking deeply about objective morality forces you to question why you act as you do on a day-to-day basis, and what sort of rationale lies behind your moral choices.

We are physical mammals living amongst other physical mammals who compete for resources and in doing so, often find other mammals that help us survive, and still other mammals that threaten our survival.  Asking whether Hitler or Mother Theresa were "right" is like asking which bug is "right" as a spider attacks a fly.  The only morality governing the situation is the morality of the players, and the morality of any other life form that cares enough to cast its opinion on the matter.

If unbiased logic is employed, the conclusion is clear: without a divine lawgiver moral choices and actions must be subjective and ultimately meaningless.

This is true.  "ultimately meaningless" would mean our moral choices, regardless of what they might be, do not have any significance that transcends humanity.  Whether you burp at the table or mow down a schoolyard full of children with an AK-47, your actions mean precisely nothing beyond the human beings who care to comment about them.  However, if you get a lot of human mammals together who happen to agree on basic morals, "group-think" can set in and you can start errantly thinking that the majority view on morality is something that "transcends" the group of mammals who enjoy such agreement.

And maybe they cannot be blamed, since to engage in such mental error achieves an even greater degree of solidarity that is otherwise key to mammalian groups surviving and thriving.  Christianity is wrong, but that would be irrelevant if it could be shown that it leads to human beings enhancing their ability to survive and thrive.  Not all false beliefs are harmful.  "New Atheists" that shit all over religion like it's nothing but alien toxic waste are high on crack.

It is terrifying to understand the full implication of the words of Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, that “without God everything is permissible.”

"Ultimately, they are correct". How could child rape on this earth possibly be of concern to alien life forms that might be living 5 billion light years away?  Child rape is a terrible thing, but only in the context of earth-based humanity.  Looking at earth from a long distance, our hurting each other would likely be viewed by some advanced alien intelligence with about the same degree of concern as we have in watching insects kill each other.  We ourselves are a higher life form, and look how utterly apathetic we are to lower life forms when we feel such lack of concern will help us feel better about ourselves. 

Once again, child rape is certainly a terrible thing, but only in the context of human life.  If there is no life higher than human, then the wrongness of child rape is necessarily limited to earthly human life, since there is no evidence to suggest its wrongness extends beyond earthbound humans.

And yes, most people are not experts in moral philosophy, and they are also mammals with a nasty habit of mistaking their fist-pounding rah rah rah for divinely revealed ethics.  If people were just a bit more philosophically adept, they would be turtle-slow in automatically equating their basic moral opinions with divine decree.  They would correctly realize that cultural conditioning plays a gargantuan role in shaping our moral attitudes.

The longer you've been crediting god with your basic morals, the harder it is for you to honestly acknowledge the ultimately subjective nature of your ethics.  If a child is always taken to McDonald's for dinner every day, yes, they are going to feel taht something is "wrong" if an authority steps in and puts a stop to it.  So discovering there's no god and we are just mammals lost in space probably doesn't sound as appealing as perpetual Christmas in heaven, but mature adults eventually wake up and, even if reluctantly learn how to distinguish their dreams from actual reality.

Once you reach this point, the only choice left is between God and nihilism.

No, there are schools of thought out there which say life goes on after physical death, but not because of a "god" but because reincarnation and karma are simply how the universe works.

The more intelligent atheists realize this only too well, which is why this point is not often discussed.

Then I must be one of the more intelligent atheists, since I don't shy away at all from the taunting question "If god doesn't exist, then why do most mature adults in human history believe that child rape is absolutely immoral?"  To me the question is about as informed as "If god doesn't exist, then how could I ever know it is immoral for a girl to date before she is 18 years old?  Clever sophists can make certain conglomerations of words appear to be asking a legit question, when in fact the question is absurd.

Instead, the most heinous acts are simply “clearly wrong,” without any need to investigate further why this is so.

I agree that most atheists are inconsistent for aspiring to objective morality.  I agree with Frank Turek that atheists like Michael Shermer are inconsistent.  If there really is no life form higher than human, then what constitutes moral goodness is limited to what human beings think, and since they constantly disagree, the closest to "objective" you'll ever get is majority-viewpoint.  But majority viewpoints do not show objective truth, since majority viewpoints can be wrong.

Such an unsupported morality is literally nonsense, of course.

Agreed.

It makes you think of the maxim attributed to Chesterton, that “when a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything.”

An obviously false maxim, as few atheists believe "anything".   And a misleading maxim, since apparently, according to what we know of human history, believing in god never slowed down anybody from harboring false beliefs.  Christians would be forced to agree that the vast majority of non-Christian theists believe falsely about god.

To reiterate, the majority of individuals live as if an objective moral system exists, yet without God no such system can exist.

Once again, yes, even the people who don't believe in god are often guilty of living life as if their moral views originated in some "higher power".  It is an exceptionally rare atheist who will directly admit that we are little more than overgrown mosquitoes living on a damp dust-ball lost in space. Such brutal honesty simply doesn't score points with the other mammals in the group you are seeking to score points with.  But we all know that just chiming in and agreeing with everybody else dramatically increases the odds that one will score points with such groups.

C. S. Lewis lucidly outlined in the opening sections of Mere Christianity that people “appeal to some kind of standard of behavior that they expect the other to know about,” when moral disagreement rears its ugly head.

Yes, inconsistency reigns in the moral beliefs of many atheists.

The Tower of Babel by Marten van Vlackenborch, 1595 [Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden]
This is still the case in our own times, yet according to the mores of modern society, there is no one (more specifically, no God) to provide the standard. Logically, if this is the case, then the standard itself must fall.
I have debated this point often with atheist friends, some of whom have attempted to offer alternative “objective” ways in which one can understand morality. A certain interlocutor suggested that utilitarianism could be given as an example of a non-theistic objective moral system.

Only by violating the dictionary definition of the word "objective".  Any moral system, including utilitarianism, originates in humanity, therefore, it can never be truly "independent of the mind" (dictionary definition of objective).

Then again, morals can never be truly independent of the mind anyway, since they boil down to opinions which boil down to thoughts, which are themselves physical aspects of the brain, as proven from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

Utilitarianism, however, is merely a philosophical theory posited by man. For even if every person on earth accepted utilitarianism, no one would be obligated to follow it in the same way that we are obligated to follow the moral law of the Creator of heaven and earth. Utility is as nought compared to Love, as readers of The Catholic Thing will know. There is no subtle difference here; the distance between these ideas is quite great – and obvious.

Agreed.

Another friend suggested that we only act as we do because of biology, and argued that we can extract objective moral truths from pondering our biological makeup and surroundings.

Once again, only by violating the dictionary definition of "objective" since that word means existing outside and independent of the mind.

This would be a world where we only act out of self-interest, where self-sacrifice is a lie, and where love is merely a “chemical reaction in the brain.”
Any way you try to turn it, this argument is simply incomprehensible. For if God does not exist, then who is to say whether it is right or wrong to follow specific biological urgings?

Excellent point.

Take the horrific act of rape, for example. If you follow a moral system based on mere Darwinian biology, where the goal of life is ultimately the propagation of genes, then could not rape be taken as a good as it may ensure a more widespread transmission of said genes?

Yes, and whether rape is morally good or bad depends on who you ask, given that the world and human history is full of not only rapists, but rapists whose sole motive for refraining from rape is fear of jail.

Those who hate rape and those who love it will give you different answers, and when you pretend the rapist's views deserve to be automatically discounted, and you call them "insane", you stop being an objective investigator, and you start preaching to the choir by appeal to what they already believe.  I would argue that those who cannot distinguish god from their strong moral beliefs, are naive about the origins of morality.

I am not claiming that my dear friend would ever argue for this, but this is an obvious example of the absurdity of reducing morality to biology.

Only absurd to people who think rape is wrong.  You will discount the significance of those who think rape is morally acceptable, but that's where you stop being objective in your evaluation. What are you gonna say next?  The only people that matter are American capitalists?  True objectivity doesn't automatically discount opinions held by those adopting some minority view.  Then again, most people lack the ability of cool objectivity necessary to deal with people whose morals are contrary to society.  We just want the local recently paroled child pornographer to get the fuck out of our town, not caring whether or how he will manage when the next town tells him to move on.  That's herd-mentality for you.  It is characterized by lack of concern for the long-term consequences, and therefore also childish in nature.  But such short-sighted thinking has the benefit of preserving one's social group from breakup.  I guess you cannot blame herds for engaging in herd-mentality.

Not to put too fine a point on it, there is a world of difference between the beauty of human sexual love and the famously violent copulation of many species in the animal kingdom.

We would not expect a person with your religious commitment to realize how many men and woman enjoy being hurt during sex.  When you say such people don't count because they are clearly insane, that's the point where you stop being objective and change over to appealing to what your own group believes in an effort to convince them.  One place to start your education is the bible, which does a pretty good job of showing how easily even people who are being activily guided by god, can fall into lifestyles that you think are deviant and gross.  Apparently, the squeaky clean catholics that always show up for Mass in their Sunday best, aren't the only life forms that are representative of human morality.

And when you decide that a catholic lady's expressed disdain for sado-masochistic sex is genuine, you run the possibility of being wrong, and that she likes such acts, but is only pretending to be more moral than she is because she wishes to stay in the good graces of her chosen circle of equally Catholic friends.  Gee, Christians have been never been duplicitous, have they?  If a Christian found sexual deviance attractive, surely they'd make that clear to their church?  WRONG.

We can see all around us the disintegration of civilized ethics that has resulted from the confusion over objective morality.

A phenomena that has no more ultimate significance than the fact that lions reduce the zebra population in Africa.  Since you are not a zebra, you couldn't care less.  So we have to wonder, if there was a life form outside earth higher than human, why shouldn't we think it would be as apathetic to our plight as we are to the plight of the baby zebra being torn apart?  The answer is:  blindly assuming the higher life form gives even two shits about us just happens to define "hope", and by its nature, hope achieves its ends equally well whether its object is real or fake.  Doesn't it just feel good to know we have a heavenly father?

And the confusion is only compounded by the well-intentioned people around us who speak as if objective morality exists while rejecting all the things, including the One, that must underpin it.
The veneer of civilized ethics that we still enjoy is due only to the afterglow of a Christian civilization,

No, there are strictly empirical mammalian reasons why higher mammals find the "civilized" type of life more conducive to their instinct to thrive, survive, and carry on their genes.  Civilization dramatically reduces the chances one's genes will disappear from the pool. most higher mammals don't go around purposefully looking to put their own existence at risk. 

and without care our inheritance may be completely cast aside. The connection between God and objective morality must be restated firmly, clearly, and often by priests, apologists, philosophers, catechists, et al. In fact, it must be shouted from the rooftops!

Except that under the Christian-invented "Occam's Razor" rule of thumb, the very fact that "god" is the most complex possible being (i.e., infinitely complex because he himself is infinite, allegedly) means "god" is always going to be "infinitely" less likely the true hypothesis, than any coherent naturalistic hypothesis for morality.  We don't need methodological naturalism to knock the Christian view all the way out of the ball park of probability or possibility...we only need to show that the empirical evidence favors naturalism, in order to successfully arrive at being "reasonable" to adopt it.

You've done nothing in this article that even remotely attacks the empirical basis for naturalistic morality.

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.

-------------------------------------


-------will update later.

Atheist reply to Triablogue's typical Reformation preaching

This is my reply to an article at Triablogue entitled

Monday, July 29, 2019

The anatomy of unbelief

An excerpt from Fool's Talk by Os Guinness.

Posted by Hawk at 3:03 PM 

Do we truly seek to conform our thinking to reality, or do we also seek to conform reality to our thinking?

Fallacy of loaded question.  Humans are routinely guilty of both.

Is this clash between truth seekers and truth twisters merely a problem for intellectuals and those who enjoy the life of the mind?

It would seem so, given that the vast majority of humans shy away from intellectual jousting and simply run on autopilot...more worried about Twitter and Trump than truth.

Or are all humans double-faced, "dissonance in human form," as Nietzsche expressed it?

I agree with Nietzsche, and so does the bible.  See Romans 3:4, 7:18, 1st Cor. 2:14

What does Kant's view of the "crooked timber" of our humanity mean for our thinking and understanding?

Not much, its just an overstatement about humanity's negative tendencies.  Not much different than the pissed off man who says "this world is a nut house".

And what is it that W. H. Auden glimpses when he writes that "the desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews"? Is this merely a colorful metaphor, or is there more there that we should take seriously?

same answer.

The Bible's answer takes us to the very heart of its diagnosis of unbelief, for in the biblical view the central core of the anatomy of unbelief stems from its willful abuse of truth.

Which means you are a fundamentalist, and nothing about the obvious reality of Semitic exaggeration (Copan and Flannagan, 2010) makes you fear such tendencies infected the bible's theological statements.   When in fact is Copan and Flannagan are right, they are opening the door to the stark possibility that many bible passages, whose literal interpretation has been the basis of Christian doctrine for centuries, were never intended to be taken that literally.

In our treatment of truth we, and all human beings, are at the same time both truth seekers and truth twisters, and in a deep, mercurial, tenacious and fateful way. Sometimes we seek to conform our thinking to reality, and just as often we try to conform reality to our thinking.

Then you might wish to have a talk with that other guy who posts regularly at Triablogue...Steve Hays.  he is a staunch 5-point Calvinist.  His acceptance of the 1st point of Calvinism forbids him from saying anything morally good about non-Christians.  Sin has blinded them, and if predestined by God to go to hell, any "good" about them is purely temporal and thus too insignificant to be worthy of discussion.

As Sir Thomas More's protagonist Hythloday argued in his Utopia, and the seventeenth-century Jansenist theologian Pierre Nicole argued later, human beings "not being willing to render their actions to conform to the Law of God,

Then these men apparently never read Luke 1:6, they weren't inerrantists.

have endeavored to render the Laws of God to conform to their actions."

again, typical overstatement by a conservative Christian with Reformed leanings.

From Genesis and the story of the fall onward, a host of passages convey this understanding,

And a host of passages show the sinner's ability to actually please god by obeying the law. Luke 1:6, Luke 19:8-9, see also Moses' statement that obeying the entire law is not too difficult (Deuteronomy 30:11), and King David's boast that God approved of him because David was actually righteous in conformity to God's law (Psalm 7:8, 18:20-25, etc).  It is precisely the "earn your salvation by conformity to the law" stuff in the bible that forced millions of inerrantists to recognize that the only way to maintain biblical inerrancy is to become a dispensationalist (i.e., God's rules for salvation of humanity changed several times between Adam and Paul). Whereas a better explanation is theological evolution...later generations of biblical authors became dissatisfied with the old way and created new ways. 

but one of the deepest is in the first chapter of St. Paul's letter to the Romans.

Seems much wiser to build one's doctrinal foundation upon the one authority that is least likely to be wrong, Jesus, then argue that because the word of the undisputed Lord is sufficient, the complexities and potential for heresy brought about by trying to trust theological teachings more distant from Christ than the gospels, justifies shitcanning them.

Unfortunately, while the synoptic Jesus obviously thought people to be sinners, he didn't believe this made them wholly incapable of pleasing god apart from "grace".  The Jesus of John's gospel is mostly fictionalized history, and in the judgment of most Christian scholars, historical truth about Jesus is less secure in John and more secure in Matthew, Mark and Luke.  That much should have been obvious immediately after one reads the esoteric first verse of John. And his belief that you've seen all you need to see to get saved, after you merely read his words (John 20:31) is in sheer contradiction to today's Christian apologist, who denies that your reading of the gospel of John is perfectly sufficient to render you inexcusably accountable to God.  If they seriously believed that, they would find studies in the historical reliability of the gospels and all of the more complex issues that attend modern Christian apologetics efforts as utterly unnecessary and likely to introduce more complexity and confusion into the picture.

Bursting with gratitude and pride at the glory and power of the gospel and its way of righting wrong in the world, the apostle turns to consider human disobedience and its consequences. Among the many claims he makes in a famous passage on sin and cultural degeneration, he asserts that those who disobey God "suppress the truth in unrighteousness" (Rom 1:18).

Sort of like saying that if you disobey the posted speed limit, you are suppressing the truth of the speed limit.  Yet you don't know of any Christians that have ever drawn such extreme negative conclusions from disobedience to speed limit laws.  But Paul's argument for the entire worlds' accountability before god is worthy of dismissal since he premises his conclusion on his prior recounting of how a small portion of humanity once knew god and then apostatized.  The truth of ancient Israelite apostasy does not dictate what's true about every human being, and Romans 1:21 sets the context as the humans who once knew god, a description that is not true for the vast majority of human beings in history.  So Paul's induction from a small sample to a large generalization at this point is utterly fallacious.  You may as well conclude from the Calvinists that live in the United States, that everybody in the world knows that Calvinism is biblically justified..which would then, under your logic, compel the conclusion that Arminians secretly believe Calvinism is biblical, sin just makes them wish very hard that it was wrong.  Little else could represent prideful blindness than the Calvinist who is so cocksure in his imperfect theological opinions.

The Bible uses many strong terms to describe unbelief, including hardening, twisting, blindness, deafness, unnaturalness, lies, deception, folly, rebellion and madness,

The bible also uses absolute terms when recounting God's demand that his people slaughter children.  In Deuteronomy 20:13-17, the command to destroy all of the people in the nations near Israel is set in contrast to the prior command to spare the woman and children of the nations further away. If we must nevertheless agree with Copan and Flannagan (2010) that such absolute terms were a case of typical Semitic exaggeration (i.e., God didn't want the Israelites to kill off every last man woman and child in the nearby nations), we have to wonder just how many other words in the bible, whose surface meaning has been the basis for Christian doctrine for centuries, are in reality just more mere Semitic exaggeration.  You can start with Paul's out-of-context quotes in Romans 3:10-19.

but none repays reflection more than Paul's phrase in Romans. At the heart of sin and disobedience, Paul says, is a flagrantly deliberate and continuing act of violence to truth.

But common sense says not every transgression is willful.. Given how much the case for God and Christianity sucks, I have no fears that maybe the common sense is false merely because it contradicts the bible, I'm rather inclined to say if it contradicts the bible, its chances of being truthful are dramatically increased.

Sin and disobedience lay hold of truth, grasp it roughly, and will not let it be what it naturally is or say what it naturally says.

Or maybe human beings are just intelligent mammals and when they steal bubble gum from the corner store at 6 years old, it is nowhere near as complex as you dream, its about as simple as a dog stealing food from another dog.

In this way, the deliberate dynamic of unbelief is to suppress truth, stifle truth and hold truth hostage.

I can do that better that you:  When you disobey god's law, you are using a red hot steak knife to vaginally rape the innocent baby of truth while using a hammer to claw out its eyes while gleefully laughing at its groans of pain and misery...all while on national tv as the parents look on and die from grief alone.  If you are going to engage in obvious overstatement to make your readers remember whatever lesson you intend, why set limits?  The more shockingly gross the metaphor, the more likely your intended audience will get and retain the message, amen?

What may be known about God, Paul says, is quite evident still, but it is adamantly denied by the determined act of will that is sin and unbelief.

Only because he engages in the fallacy of induction and uses the apostasy of the ancient Israelites to broadbrush all of humanity.

The phrase grasp the nettle is too weak to picture what Paul is talking about, but it does begin to capture how the sheer force of a grip can be enough to counter the normal thrust of the nettle's sting. The experience of a hijacking comes far closer. When a terrorist hijacks a plane and holds the passengers hostage, he can put a gun to the head of the pilot and force him to fly wherever the terrorist wants, anywhere other than its intended destination. Just so, says Paul, unbelief looks at the undeniable truth of God's universe and at the unbeliever's own nature made in the image of God, but then denies their true force, suppresses their real meaning and turns their proper destination into a different one.

I have to wonder how many asshole Christian parents will use such glowing metaphor while scolding their children for typical disobedience.  Is little johnny holding his mother's imposed 9 p.m. bedtime "hostage", with a gun to its head...(!?)  What a fucking fool you are to imitate the ways of the deluded biblical authors.

The prophet Micah had charged that Israel's false leaders "twist everything that is straight" (Mic 3:9 NASB), but Paul goes deeper in analyzing that the heart of unbelief centers on its active abuse of truth.
It would be a mistake to hurry past this phrase or dismiss it as only a dramatic metaphor, for Paul's point grounds and underscores a variety of themes that run throughout the entire Scriptures when describing sin.

Only if you are sure that the typical Semitic exaggeration that Copan and Flannagan (2010) say inhere in biblical statement, do not inhere in Paul's admittedly Semitic styled writings.  But once you allow that Semitic exaggeration might also be true within Paul's theological statements, it assures the death of conservative Christian theology.  Every time the bible talks shit about non-Christians, this is likely just typical overstatement by an ancient Semitic author, or ancient Semitic NT author clearly trying to imitate the OT author.

Four prominent emphases recur most frequently, and together they form a multilayered view of the dark willfulness of sin, disobedience and unbelief.
First, unbelief abuses truth through a deliberate act of suppression. Unbelief seizes truth, grasps it roughly, silences its voice and twists it away from God's intended purpose. By itself, truth speaks naturally and clearly, but its voice is censored, blocked and silenced, so that it is no longer allowed to speak as it does naturally:
They say to God, "Leave us alone; we do not want to know Your ways." (Job 21:14 NLV)
You who hate correction
and turn your back when I am speaking? (Ps 50:17 NEB)
They have denied the LORD,
saying, "He does not exist." (Jer 5:12 NEB)
For crime after crime of Edom
I will grant them no reprieve,
because, sword in hand, they hunted their kinsman down,
stifling their natural affections. (Amos 1:11 NEB)
Second, unbelief abuses truth through a deliberate act of exploitation. Unbelief not only suppresses the real truth and twists it away from God's true ends, but wrests it toward its own ends and its own agenda.
The men who now live in Jerusalem have said, "Keep your distance from the LORD; the land has been made over to us as our property." (Ezek 11:15 NEB)
But you trusted to your beauty and prostituted your fame. (Ezek 16:15 NEB)
O Tyre, you said,
"I am perfect in beauty," . . .
they hung shield and helmet around you,
and it was they who gave you your glory. (Ezek 27:4, 10 NEB)
Your beauty made you arrogant,
you misused your wisdom to increase your dignity. (Ezek 28:17 NEB)
Listen to this, leaders of Jacob,
rulers of Israel,
you who make justice hateful
and wrest it from its straight course. (Mic 3:9 NEB)
Third, unbelief goes further still and abuses truth through a deliberate act of inversion. Unbelief not only suppresses truth and exploits it for its own ends, but seizes it and turns it completely upside down, inside out and the wrong way around, and then holds it there for its own purposes. Above all, through inversion we as creatures put ourselves in the place of our Creator, and we believe our own lie rather than God's truth. We make ourselves gods instead of God, so that proper self-love becomes prideful self-centering love. As Niebuhr states bluntly, "In an ultimate sense the self never knows anything against itself." In terms of truth, we are always self-right. In terms of goodness, we are always self-righteous. And in terms of God, we are always our own gods.

In John Milton's "Paradise Lost," Satan is unequivocally clear: "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven" or "Evil, be thou my good." Sartre expressed this dynamic famously when he said, "To be man means to reach toward being God." And before him, Nietzsche declared in the same spirit, "If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god?" Carl Gustav Jung recognized that this was the heart of Nietzsche's assertion of the Superman. It is "the thing in man that takes the place of God." After the triumph of the Russian revolution, Lenin even had "God-defying" towers designed to demonstrate his Babel-like and Promethean pretentions, though most of them were never built. As these examples show, sin is essentially and willfully narcissistic, and it includes both a truth claim ("God is dead") and a task ("I am now out to be God in my life").

Dismissed. 

Sin, then, is the claim to the right to myself,

And I'm guessing you think it fallacious for a human being to assume they have a purely naturalistic right to themselves.  What's next?  Presuppositionalism?  The unbeliever cannot even cough without thereby proving by his actions that Jesus rose from the dead?  LOL.  Or maybe you aren't really sure exactly how much time I should spend responding to Jeff Durbin and Steve Hays, or how much time I should spend reading Christian evidentialist critiques of Van Til?

and all our worldviews as unbelievers are in part a shrine to ourselves.

But since the bible's warning against idolatry are about as serious as a toddler's warning to "gimmie", it really doesn't matter if non-Christian views constitute idolatry.

This can be seen most clearly when atheism declines naturally into its religious phase, as it so often does (as in Auguste Comte's "religion of humanity," Alain de Botton's "religion for humanity" or Sam Harris's atheistic "spirituality"). We humans then become both idolater and idol, though we mask the folly from ourselves. The absurdity betrays itself, however, in various odd developments that take place. G. K. Chesterton, for instance, pointed out that the same people who scornfully dismiss the doctrine of three persons in one God as irrational, think nothing of worshiping seven billion persons in one God.

then count me out. As an atheist, I don't view anything as a "god".  That's not going to become fallacious merely because you ascribe to some asinine theory that equates one's efforts to survive and thrive, with "idolatry".  You may as well say I have turned a piece of dust in to an idol shine because I chose to wipe it off the table without asking God's permission to do so.  But we already knew you weren't writing for anybody except those who already agree with your beliefs.  So you are forgiven for the absurd weakness of whatever you are "defending".

Such statements are only the modern corroboration of the biblical view of sin, and the reason why John Calvin spoke of our human hearts as an idol-making factory.

According to 1st Kings 9:4, you'll have to exempt King David from that criticism (despite the fact that he was a polygamist and guilty of the capital crimes of adultery and murder).  Unless you wish to create disaster by committing to the premise that this bible verse is a case of typical Semitic exaggeration? Gee, I wonder how many other bible verses, whose literal surface meaning is the basis for the most ancient Christian doctrines, were also mere typical Semitic exaggeration?  Might we start with biblical statements that Jesus is God?

St. Paul made the same point centuries earlier. Unbelievers reject God and, in an act of absurd inversion, worship the creature rather than the Creator.

What would you say to a crazy unbeliever who was intentionally starving themselves to death?  If you had any Christian compassion, you would encourage them to eat something.  But according to your above-cited logic, you'd be encouraging them to commit idolatry, since without more, their taking your advice would result in their eating before they accepted Christ as savior, and according to your logic, doing ANYTHING in absence of faith amounts to worshiping the creature more than the creator.  The sheer stupidity of your logic is precisely why i occasionally exclaim "FUCK YOU" to the person I'm critiquing. I have no patience for fence posts who pose as theologians.

They swap the splendor of the immortal and infinite God for breakable images of things that are puny and mortal like ourselves,

You are assuming the bible-god is infinite.  Many Christians, called open-theists, would disagree.  What materials on the open theism/classical theism in-house Christian debate do you recommend I read, and how much time do you recommend I spend studying the subject before you'll agree it's enough to justify me in starting to draw ultimate conclusions about the issue...and how do you know your recommendations are reflecting God's desires?  (or do you get around that by simply being a Calvinist, and like Steve Hays, conveniently ascribe to God's infallible predestining decree just anything that pops out of your mouth?)

and they exchange the natural, God-given view of sexuality for unnatural forms.

that doesn't describe me.  I'm an atheist and I argue that all forms of male homosexuality are no less a deviation from nature than sexual intercourse between an adult man and a two year old girl.

Earlier still, the Hebrew prophets focused on this same inversion, and excoriated the skeptics and the enemies of God for the ludicrous absurdity of what they were doing in worshiping idols.
Shall the axe set itself up against the hewer,
or the saw claim mastery over the sawyer,
as if a stick were to brandish him who wields it,
or the staff of wood is to wield one who is not wood? (Is 10:15 NEB)
How you turn things upside down,
as if the potter ranked no higher than the clay!
Shall the thing made say of its maker, "He did not make me"?
Shall the pot say of the potter, "He has no skill"? (Is 29:16 NEB)
In your arrogance you say, "I am a god; I sit throned like a god on the high seas." Though you are a man and no god, you try to think the thoughts of a god. (Ezek 28:2 NEB)

Semitic exaggeration, you are building your doctrines on an incorrectly literal reading of those texts.

Fourth, unbelief abuses truth through a deliberate act of deception that ends in its own self-deception. Unbelief seizes God's truth, twists it away from God's purposes and toward its own, and is therefore forced to deny the full reality of the truth it knows.

Steve Hays, a Calvinist, would disagree.  In his word of absolutely infallible predestination, a world where God has secretly willed everything people do, including their violations of god's revealed will, any notion that somebody acted contrary to god's will, is logically impossible.  But if you more correctly stated that by sinning we disobey God's "revealed will",  we will naturally point out that because you didn't say our sin violates god's secret will, it remains possible that our sins are considered good by the god who wanted us to sin that way, in which case God has no moral right to bitch at us, lest you stupidly commit yourself to the premise that your god condemns and otherwise bitches at people for doing exactly what he wanted them to do, when he wanted them to do it, how he wanted them to do it, and where he wanted them to do it.

But in the futile act of trying to deny the undeniable, it both deceives others and deceives itself, and so becomes self-deceived.

But since this was in conformity to the (secret) will of God, God's condemning such activity is akin to the parent who disciplines and condemns a child for doing an act that the parent took great pains to make sure the child would commit.  God is like the parent who instructs the teen to avoid drinking alcohol, then leaves her alone for a week in a house stocked full of her favorite liquor, then pretends to be all upset when the inevitable happens...then the parent pretends she herself cannot be blamed for facilitating the sin because she didn't reveal her "secret" will that the daughter disobey mom's "revealed" will. FUCK YOUR GOD.  See here.

Unbelief therefore manufactures not only idols but illusions.

And if these are in conformity to God's secret will, your god would have to be insane to be angry that people manufactured idols and illusions.  You will say God doesn't get "angry" but the OT passages that say different must be interpreted in the light of how the originally intended largely pre-literate goat herders would have understood it.  Deuteronomy 9:19-20 says God has hot anger toward sinners, and NT writers themselves take the same type of language in literal fashion to prop up their own theological opinions.  See Hebrews 10:28-29, 1st Corinthians 10:6-11.

The philosopher Marar writes, "As our hearts can't stop pumping blood, so our minds can't stop pumping illusions."

and under Calvinism, who wanted human minds to operate this way?  The same god that condemns them for acting according to the sinful nature he wanted them to be plagued with?  How about the nurse who intentionally infects a child with AIDS, then condemns the child for exhibiting the symptoms that naturally attend having AIDS?  FUCK YOU.  No wonder you fucking idiots have a doctrine that god's ways are mysterious.  You already know biblical bullshit doesn't wash.

26 In that sense, all unbelieving worldviews are not only a shrine to those who hold them but a shelter from God and his truth.
The logic behind this drive to deception and self-deception is simple. If sin is the claim to "the right to myself," it includes the claim to "the right to my view of things." And since we are each finite, "my view of things" is necessarily restricted and simply cannot see the full picture. We therefore turn a blind eye to all other ways of seeing things that do not fit ours, and especially to God's view of things. As theologian N. T. Wright points out, trees behave as trees, rocks as rocks and the seas as the seas, but "Only humans, it seems, have the capacity to live as something other than what they are."

That's total bullshit and philosophically contradictory.  There is no such thing as living different than what you are.  The man who dresses and acts like a woman cannot do a successful job of it.  Not even God can do this, therefore, he would not have the power to create any life form that could do it.  But since you Christians believe in other similarly contradictory theology, like Jesus being a single person composed of "two natures", I guess we should expect such ignorance to seep into your other beliefs.

There is therefore a close link between the prideful love of self, its aversion to the full truth and its creation of illusions. Kierkegaard wrote, "But spiritually understood, man in his natural condition is sick, he is in error, in an illusion, and therefore desires most of all to be deceived, so that he may be permitted not only to remain in error but to find himself thoroughly comfortable in his self-deceit."

Something the Calvinist god is pleased with because its exactly what he ordered. 

St. Augustine and his later disciples, such as Pierre Nicole, developed the same point. A key part of deception and self-deception is the fact that evil must imitate good, unbelief must copy truth, and vice must mimic virtue. Thus whereas properly ordered love relates everything to God in trust,

In which case, the little girl who gets mad at god for not protecting her from rape, is inexcusably guilty of idol worship.

gratitude and humility, improperly ordered self-love relates everything to itself in prideful self-love. Such pride works constantly on behalf of its own body and its own mind in two ways. First, it serves the self-love of its body through the pursuit of pleasures; and second, it serves the self-love of its mind through the pursuit of approval and honor.
Needless to say, the latter is fateful as the source of our human hypocrisy. If we can act so as to produce the appearance and effects of proper love in spite of motives that are quite contrary and come from improper self-love, we can appear to be honorable and generous before our fellow humans. Just so did the Pharisees love to pray on street corners in the sight of all, and just so many big givers have loved to have their benefactions trumpeted to all when there is little real love behind their generosity. Just so, as we shall see later, does sin's imitation of good deeds provide a stalking horse for hypocrisy. We may despise blatant self-love when we see it in others, and we certainly do not want others to see it in us. So we mask our own motives to produce the consequences that will win us the approval and admiration of others. In Nicole's words, this is a "Traffick of Self-love," but one in which we "find satisfaction in this lovely Idea of ourselves."
The indissoluble link between prideful self-love, aversion to truth, self-deception and hypocrisy is one of the great themes of the Bible—for example, the drumbeat repetition that "the way of a fool is right in his own eyes" (Prov 12:15). Sinful minds therefore claim both self-rightness in terms of truth and self-righteousness in terms of goodness. This theme is prominent in St. Augustine's Confessions, and comes directly from his own radical self-scrutiny in light of the teaching of the Bible. "Falsehood," he wrote, "is nothing but the existence of something which has no being." But if this is so, "He who utters falsehoods utters what is his alone," for nothing is more private than a newly minted lie. There is therefore a lie at the heart of each person's unbelief, and Augustine speaks of it as "the huge fable which I loved instead of you, my God, the long drawn lie which our minds were always itching to hear." Augustine brings all the themes together in one extraordinary passage in book 10 of Confessions:
Man's love of truth is such that when he loves something which is not the truth, he pretends to himself that what he loves is the truth, and because he hates to be proved wrong, he will not allow himself to be convinced that he is deceiving himself. So he hates the real truth for what he takes to his heart in its place.

Once again, your god is a fuckhead, which seems to be the only logical explanation for why he pretends that the perfect fulfillment of hisd (secret) will by humans, makes him "angry"with them:

---Dad:   "Son, you took out the garbage in the exact time, place and manner that I secretly intended.  But in my revealed will, I told you to take out the garbage in a different time and manner.  Now shame on you for conforming perfectly to my secret will and for disobeying my revealed will!  You are grounded for a month and you should feel guilty for doing something in the exact way I actually wanted you to".
---Son: Why are you finding fault if my acts were in perfect conformity to your secret will?  Would you have been pleased if I had disobeyed your secret will?
---Dad:  Silence!  Who are you to talk back to me?  Romans 9:20"

LOL... and FUCK YOUR DOGSHIT CALVINISM.

Some people scoff at this passage as the jaundiced thinking of a Calvinist before Calvin. But there has never been so much evidence for the omnipresence of deceit, and there has never been an age like ours that offers so many inducements to deception. For a start, this is the era of the "looking-glass self" and of "impression management," an age that is bursting with multiple reinforcements of our capacity for deception. These range from the lack of face-to-face reality in the new social media to the proliferation of modern enhancements, such as cosmetics, Viagra, Botox and plastic surgery, to the improved science of selling, propaganda and manipulation. But even these are beside the point, for modern thinking has only deepened our understanding of how human and how common deception is and always has been. As Pascal wrote centuries ago, "Human society is founded on mutual deceit."
Consider the whole treatment of the unconscious, mixed motives, rationalizations, white lies, "cognitive dissonance," alter egos and "shadow personalities." Consider the place of "active forgetfulness" and deliberate "inhibition" in Nietzsche and postmodern thinking, and the former's view of humanity as "incarnated forgetfulness." Think of the enduring appeal of books such as Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. Or consider D. H. Lawrence's reflections on our human capacity for self-deception. Human knowledge, he argued, is broadly of two kinds—the things humans tell themselves and the things they find out. The trouble is that the things humans tell themselves are nearly always pleasant, but they are lies. Why?
Man is a thought-adventurer. He has thought his way down the far ages . . . which brings us to the real dilemma of man in his adventure with consciousness. He is a liar. Man is a liar unto himself. And once he has told himself a lie, round and round he goes after that lie, as if it was a bit of phosphorous on his nose-end. The pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire wait for him to have done. They stand silently aside, waiting for him to rub the ignis fatuus off the end of his nose. But man, the longer he follows a lie, becomes all the surer he sees the light. . . . Ahead goes the pillar of cloud by day, the pillar of fire by night, through the wilderness of time. Till man tells himself a lie, another lie. Then the lie goes before him like the carrot before the ass.
In Marar's survey of the modern understanding of deception, he summarizes the situation simply: "Our minds are equipped with a convincing knack for cooking the facts, whether future, present or past." Can there, then, be any quarrel with the diagnosis of the Bible, which has long seen deception and self-deception as an inescapable part of human living and a core feature of unbelief? Deceit and the folly of trusting deceit are core themes in the prophets.

I'm not seeing why you are apparently trying to motivate people to disobey god's secret will that they engage in idolatry and deception. If you already believe God predestined all sin, you are a fool to carry on as if sinners have any ability to control anything in their lives, the attitude most other people have when trying to teach.

For example, Jeremiah:
The heart is more deceitful than all else
And is desperately sick;
Who can understand it? (Jer 17:9)

Typical Semitic exaggeration.  Your theology is built on a falsely literal interpretation of ancient rhetoric.

Realism about deception and self-deception is a hallmark of the Christian mind.

more accurate to say "conservative Christian mind", because liberal Christians go nowhere near the theological house of burning cards you've constructed with this pathetically unnecessary detour into useless theologizing.

Reinhold Niebuhr was fearless in applying it to thinking about foreign relations, but how much more is it relevant to apologetics. Niebuhr argued that the folly of the modern mind is to make the precision of scientific thinking the model for all human thinking, and so to forget the bias, self-interest and moral defect at the heart of all thinking—sometimes even in thinking about science. According to his analysis, which makes St. Paul's diagnosis central, human thinking has caught itself in a triple bind. First, all human thinking is sinful. As finite, fallen and sinful creatures, our thinking can never be other than self-interested to some degree. Second, all human thinking is idolatrous. As humans made in the image of God, we still have a spiritual and rational power that can inflate even our worst and most self-interested thinking beyond its natural range. And third, all human thinking is hypocritical. Rather than acknowledging the bias and self-interest in our thinking, we are able to hide our dishonesty by aligning our ideas with higher ideals and more general interests—so that we can appear nobler and more generous than we really are.
So the moral defect perpetuates itself down through history, but we refuse to admit that our problem is much more than ignorance.

A refusal that god intended for us to engage in...leaving him no moral right to bitch, except perhaps on the condition that god's mind truly does appear to fulfill all elements humans require to be confident that the person at issue is authentically insane.  Getting mad at us for doing exactly what he wanted?  FUCK YOU.

It turns on the impossibility of genuinely disinterested thinking because of the demonic twisting of sin.

What the demons do is morally good, because the hyper-Calvinist god secretly willed it...and whatever God wants, must be a morally good thing...right?

Sin insinuates itself into all human thinking, so that even the loftiest and most high-minded thinking of both individuals and nations displays certain common features. There is, Niebuhr writes, an "implicit idolatry," a "constitutional self-righteousness," a "lurking dishonesty," a "stupidity of sin" and a "spiritual source of corruption" in history that leads to a "vain imagination" and finally to "spiritual impotence." This is the reason why human ideals are never able to fulfill the soaring visions of which they dream. It is also the reason why these recurring features stain all our thinking and sow the weeds of the ironies and unintended consequences that grow alongside our better ideas. Behind the crooked timber of our humanity are our crooked minds, and that crooked timber now warps even the brightest and best visions that flow from it.
If all this is so, can there be any question that our Christian advocacy must never be a matter of trundling out tried and trusty one-size-fits-all arguments and surefire proofs? Pascal described the challenge well. "We think playing upon man is like playing upon an ordinary organ. It is indeed an organ, but strange, shifting and changeable. Those who know only how to play an ordinary organ would never be in tune on this one. You have to know where the keys are."

Your post was a complete waste of time, since under Calvinism, god intended for humanity to engage in all the sinful behavior you describe...and if god willed it...then by logical necessity it MUST be morally good...so why are you trying to dissaude people from doing that which is morally good?  Because that sadistic lunatic you call a god simply burped and you felt obligated to bow?  LOL.

So, is it objectively morally good when a man rapes a little girl to death in conformity to God's secret will, yes or no?  Look at the logical syllogism that Calvinism and "god's secret will" implies:

Everything god wills, is by definition objectively morally good.
The Calvinist god wills men to rape children.
Therefore, the Calvinist god thinks men raping children is objectively morally good.

I thus reject Calvinism as a horrifically absurd example of the stupidity that can be put in motion when one takes bible inerrancy and bible canon further than the bible itself actually does.

Answering J. Warner Wallace on objective moral values

Some modern Christian apologists are really pushing this bullshit idea that you can prove God's existence by showing that some morals are objective, thus transcendent, and therefore, only a life-form higher than human life can properly account for the existence of such morals.  Some such apologists would be Frank Turek, Matthew Flannagan and Paul Copan.

And it seems that J. Warner Wallace has decided to cast his lot into this viper pit of word-games.  

Cold Case Christianity: Quick Shot: “There are no objective moral truths”

Quick Shot: “There are no objective moral truths”

 Posted: 22 Jul 2019 01:20 AM PDT 

 Response #1:
“It sounds like you’re saying that there are no objective truths about morality, is that correct?

Yes.  Morals are nothing but opinions that we get from either genetic predisposition or environmental conditioning, or both.  Furthermore, when you appeal to what most people believe about baby torture, you are violating the dictionary definition of "objective".

If so, how can that claim about morality be true?

Because the claim "there are no objective morals" is a factual statement, not a moral statement, therefore, the statement is not self-defeating.

If there are no objective truths about morality, then your claim about morality cannot be objectively true either.

I didn't say there were no objective truths.  I said there were no objective MORAL truths. Saying "there are no objective moral truths" is not self-contradictory, as the statement is not itself a moral truth.  There's no "should" about it.

Do you see the problem?

No, what I see is that you have confused an assertion of fact with an assertion of morals.  "There are no moral absolutes" doesn't say "there are no absolutes". 

Even you would have to admit that there is at least one objective truth about morality: that there are no objective truths about morality!

But that objective truth is not itself a moral, therefore, the statement is not self-defeating.  It is a statement of fact, and doesn't include a "should" component, therefore, the statement itself not a moral and thus cannot be self-defeating.

But if there are no objective truths about morality, your claim (that there are no objective morals truths) can’t be objectively true either.

Once again, the statement "there are no objective moral truths" is not itself a moral, it is rather a claim of fact.

This kind of claim is clearly self-refuting. The challenge isn’t whether objective, moral truths exist, the challenge is simply identifying them and explaining where they come from.

Good luck trying to do that.

From where do objective moral truths come?”

Fallacy of loaded question, there are no objective moral truths, and this factual claim is not itself a moral claim so it isn't self refuting.

Response #2:
“Let me give you an example of an objective moral truth that is not based on personal opinion or cultural consensus: ‘It’s never OK to torture babies for the fun of it.’

That is the fallacy of argument by assertion, you simply toss it out there as if there's no question that everybody would agree with it, and that those who disagree with it therefore do not have any significance.  Sorry, that's not objective, that's rather "picking and choosing".  You need to demonstrate why torturing babies is absolutely immoral, and you aren't going to do that by appeal to what most people believe about it.

As rational human beings, we recognize this simple truth.

Then as rational human beings, we recognize that your god is a sadistic lunatic, for torturing a baby for 7 days before finally killing it, which must have been solely for fun since God explicitly admitted beforehand that the sin in question had been "put away" and that David thus escaped the death penalty it deserved:

 11 "Thus says the LORD, 'Behold, I will raise up evil against you from your own household; I will even take your wives before your eyes and give them to your companion, and he will lie with your wives in broad daylight.
 12 'Indeed you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel, and under the sun.'"
 13 Then David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the LORD." And Nathan said to David, "The LORD also has taken away your sin; you shall not die.
 14 "However, because by this deed you have given occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme, the child also that is born to you shall surely die."
 15 So Nathan went to his house. Then the LORD struck the child that Uriah's widow bore to David, so that he was very sick.
 16 David therefore inquired of God for the child; and David fasted and went and lay all night on the ground.
 17 The elders of his household stood beside him in order to raise him up from the ground, but he was unwilling and would not eat food with them.
 18 Then it happened on the seventh day that the child died. A (2 Sam. 12:11-18 NAU)

Notice, God intended for the baby to die, but prolonged that baby's suffering with some type of grievous illness that tortured the baby for 7 days.

You will trifle that God didn't torture that baby for the "fun" of it, but according to Deuteronomy 28:63, God will take just as much "delight" to inflict similar sufferings on disobedient people and their children as he takes in inflicting prosperity and people who obey. See the parental cannibalism God threatens to cause in 28:53 ff

If a person (or even an entire group of persons) claimed it was acceptable to torture babies for fun, I bet you would reject their claim and do everything you could to make sure they didn’t engage in that behavior. Why?

Because of my genetics and environmental conditioning.

Because you innately recognize that this claim is not a matter of personal opinion or cultural consensus.

But the basis for the innate recognition is genetic predisposition and environmental conditioning.   If I had been raised in a criminal household or similar situation, my morals could have been corrupted enough to cause me to find fun in torturing babies after I become an adult.  Now what are you gonna do, say it is impossible to corrupt a child's morals?

You know that it’s objectively wrong to torture babies for fun.

Ah, you are preaching to the choir, not making an argument that refutes moral skepticism. Thanks for the clarification.  When you get in the mood to actually refute a moral skeptic, instead of just saying whatever needs to be said to make your followers feel better about their pre-chosen religion, let me know.

If you didn’t know that, we would question your sanity.

But your questioning the sanity of those who torture babies for fun, doesn't mean baby-torture is objectively immoral. 

The proper way to show a moral to be "objectively" true is to remember that the dictionary defines "objective" as

not influenced by personal beliefs or feelings;

 See here.

...then proceeding to show any moral to be objective without referring to anybody's personal beliefs or feelings.

You obviously fail that test immediately, because you immediately tried to premise the objectivity of the immorality of baby-torture on the fact that most people have personal beliefs or feelings that such act is horrifically unfair. 

Can you see how claims like this have to be objectively true?”

No, I can see that you prefer clever word games above arguments that are more plainly based on dictionary definitions of the key terms.

You know that it’s objectively wrong to torture babies for fun.

Then you are trying to draw the "objectivity" of the immorality out of my personal beliefs or feelings, thus violating the above-cited dictionary definition of "objective".  Thus you fail in this argument to show that baby-torture is "objectively" immoral.  Yes, I personally feel that baby torture for fun is immoral. But if you define "objective" according to the dictionary, you aren't allowed to use my personal feelings as a basis for declaring baby torture objectively wrong.  Most people think such act is wrong, but "most people" refers to most peoples' "personal feelings", again, forbidden by the dictionary definition of "objective".

Response #3:
“Some people have a hard time acknowledging the existence of objective moral truths because they seem difficult to identify. Is it wrong to lie? Maybe, but what if you are lying to avoid hurting someone’s feelings?

What if the Christian woman lies about the gun in her pocket to ward off a potential rapist?

Is it wrong to steal?

Depends on the morals of the person you ask.

Probably, but what if you’re stealing an activation code from a terrorist who wants to use it to detonate a bomb? How can any act be objectively moral (or immoral) if it can be justified in certain circumstances? Yes, it’s possible to rationalize certain acts, but to find the objective truth at the core of any action, simply add the expression, ‘for the fun of it.’

No, because the only way you can show that baby torture "for the fun of it" is immoral is by doing what you've already done...appealing to somebody else's personal feelings about the subject, thus violating the dictionary definition of "objective".

Is it ever okay to lie for the fun of it? To steal for the fun of it? The addition of these five words (‘for the fun of it’) expose the moral absolutes.

No, see above.  When you appeal to another's personal feelings about the matter, you are no longer demonstrating "objectivity".

It’s never morally acceptable to lie or steal for the fun of it.

Except when you are doing comedy to entertain others by saying things they know are not true or to get them to agree with you to a falsehood so the punch line is funny, whether in the context of professional stand-up comedy, or reading silly stories to a young child a bed-time. Once we find an exception to your proposed moral, it's no longer absolute...unless of course you wedge yourself down even further into the toilet of fundamentalism and insist that professional stand-up comedy and reading silly stories to young children at bedtime constitute sin?  Sure, you'd then escape this criticism, but you can also look forward to most of your Christian customer base thinking you went off the deep end.  They aren't going to stop watching Amy Schumer, nor are they going to stop reading nursery rhymes to their small children merely because J. Warner Wallace came up with a clever word-game.

These are objective, moral absolutes that apply to us regardless of our culture, location on the globe, or place in history. Can you see how these moral truths transcend our personal or cultural opinions?”

No.  If you are talking to a person who likes to torture babies for fun, your arguments fall completely apart, as you have nothing whatsoever to show such act to be objectively immoral, except the majority viewpoint of humanity.  But since majority views can be false, you aren't demonstrating the objectivity of the wrongness of baby torture by merely noting that "most people" despise it.

FAIL.

Answering cerebral faith on the absurdity of "before time"

Evan Minton admits his beliefs about god violate human language, but his case for blaming the limitations of human language, sucks.  The problem is with the concept, not the language used to convey it.

See here.   If the post gets deleted, here's how I replied:

barryJuly 22, 2019 at 11:13 AM

You say

"I suspect the biblical writers also struggled to convey God in the state of timelessness prior to (whoops!) creating all things."

------I find it quite revealing that you admit you cannot describe your god without violating language. As you struggle to maintain your god's existence as logically coherent, you are missing the point: If you cannot describe your god's existence without violating language, you cannot blame a skeptic for taking the language-violation to be a logic violation and concluding your view about God in this matter is illogical.

Secondly, you simply pontificate that the bible passages creating this problem shouldn't be interpreted too literally. But you give no grammatical or contextual justification for a less than literal interpretation. It appears you insist on it for no other reason than the fact that it is your only hope of surviving a fatal philosophical attack on what you believe. Regardless, its pretty clear the biblical authors believed in a logically invalid way about God, you cannot make that go away by merely pounding your fist and screaming that this would be too literal of an interpretation. Otherwise, gee, maybe the bible passages that say god has eternal love for us, are also not to be interpreted too literally...maybe they are just another of the many alleged cases of Semitic exaggeration?

Finally, your beliefs about God are indeed illogical:

Premise One: the phrase "before time began" is illogical.
Premise Two: you believe god existed "before time began"
Conclusion: therefore, this belief you have about god is illogical.

It doesn't matter if there really is some higher reality out there which goes "beyond" logic: You cannot fulfill the apologetics goal of "demonstrating" such "reality" if the only way you can do it is by violating logic. If language fails you as you try to "describe" your theology, you need to be open to the possibility that the confusion exists for the same reason that square circles also fail the language test.

No, none of your arguments for god's basic existence work, so you cannot fall back on a basic existence of some god and then pretend like the fault is with the limitations of human language.

Furthermore, I'm only interested in what the bible says. Every biblical description of god is most objectively interpreted in light of how the originally intended and pre-enlightenment audience would have understood it. Every biblical description of god in heaven indicates events there take place with no less a sense of temporal progression than they do on earth, and there is on textual evidence whatsoever in the bible that such descriptions are merely accommodating. You have no textual basis to justify arguing that the writer is merely using "language of accommodation" in such texts any more than you could argue they use that device when describing people talking to each other down here on earth.

Sorry, but you cannot blame a person for giving your theology the middle finger after they have successfully identified its language-violations. If there is a reality out there that is beyond the ability of human language to describe, that's your problem.

You might consider that your obsession with apologetics constitutes your implicit belief that the Holy Spirit does nothing in your ministry...you either prove it all with human argument like a lawyer in a trial, or you fear the jury will have no reason to think your case is sound. The Holy Spirit is nothing but a gratuitous afterthought, you only add it in because the bible says so...not because the evidence indicates there's any Holy Spirit doing anything whatsoever to convince people of Christianity. A lawyer may as well tell the jury that no matter how convincing his case is, the jury won't be able to appreciate its strength unless the tooth-fairy opens their eyes.

my latest challenge to Matthew Flannagan

Readers of this blog will note that Christian philosopher Matthew Flannagan, who makes such a big deal out of the "fallacy" of moral relativity, quietly and conveniently stopped responding to me after I started battering him with justifications for moral relativity.

I recently posted another challenge to him at another one of his blogs, see here.  In case that comment gets deleted, I'm preserving it below:

Barry Jones 11 minutes ago ·

Dr. Flannagan,

What do you believe is unreasonable about the person who uses your professed degree in contemporary analytic philosophy, and their reading of the book you co-authored with Paul Copan (i.e., "Did God Really Command Genocide?: Coming to Terms with the Justice of God", specifically the parts defending Wolterstorff's Appropriation Model and Speech Act Theory), that you live in sin (i.e., for many years into the past up to and including the present, you have been and always are intentionally seeking out opportunities to "wrangle words", the sin forbidden in 2nd Timothy 2:14)?

14 Remind them of these things, and solemnly charge them in the presence of God not to wrangle about words, which is useless and leads to the ruin of the hearers.(2 Tim. 2:14 NAU)

Is that verse so clear from its grammar and context that you can safely determine that the hair-splitting trifles of language you undeniably engage in, surely aren't what Paul was condemning in that verse?

If the atheist was forced to make a choice, which person should he view as more likely to engage in the sin of word-wrangling? The average Christian walking down the street? Or a Christian with a degree on contemporary analytic philosophy?

If you wish to insist that your ceaseless arguments with other people about the meaning of words and phrases ISN'T the type of "word-wrangling" that Paul was condemning in that verse, then please provide at least 3 different dialogue examples of the sort of arguing over the meaning of words, that you believe Paul meant the reader to understand in that verse. From the immediate context, it sure looks like Paul was condemning word-wrangling involving Christian doctrine.

What's Matt gonna do?  Wrangle with me over the proper meaning of "don't wrangle words"? LOL.

Does the bible require Christians to do apologetics?  Yes.  Does the bible allow them to do the type of apologetics that involves their wrangling of words?  No.  According to Titus 3:9-11, you don't have interactive dialogue with those who deny Paul's veracity.  You "warn" them twicej (warnings don't require dialogue), then you are to have nothing to do with them.

 9 But avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and strife and disputes about the Law, for they are unprofitable and worthless.
 10 Reject a factious man after a first and second warning,
 11 knowing that such a man is perverted and is sinning, being self-condemned. (Tit. 3:9-11 NAU)

Apparently, Paul placed more restrictions on his followers, than what he allowed for himself.  Probably because he felt that apostles had more privileges than non-apostles, or had greater spiritual power so that apostles could play such games with people without being as subject to the temptations of the devil as non-apostles.  So I don't care if Paul himself wrangled words, that doesn't automatically imply he wanted his followers to imitate everything he did.  Common sense says what the NT directly commands of Christians in general is far more imposing on their conduct, than their more indirect argument that they are allowed to do just whatever they find the apostles doing.  Paul also enraged entire cities to the point of his being arrested.  Gee, does that mean Paul necessarily wanted his followers to enrage entire cities and get themselves arrested?  If you did that, you wouldn't be able to form churches and obey the stuff in the pastorals on church government.  The last comment in Acts about how the Romans soldiers allowed Paul to promote, during house arrest, the very things that got him arrested, is absolute fiction.