Amy Hall: Will right and wrong always be obvious?

Here’s a post from Amy Hall of Stand to Reason that will cause you to think.

She writes:

A person doesn’t have to know the Bible in order to know right and wrong, right? Well, yes and no. It all depends on what value system is being fed to that person by society. A society saturated in a Christian understanding of morality will reinforce that understanding, even among its atheists. A society without the background of Christianity behind it will enforce a different understanding of morality. Atheists have the mistaken idea that objective morality is simply obvious to everyone, but the truth is, it’s not. All one has to do is look back through history (and in other cultures today) to see that this is so. Our damaged consciences are malleable.

Is murdering your child right or wrong? Ask these mothers in India, where it’s commonplace in some areas to let your girl die if you prefer a boy. Ask pre-Christian cultures. This is why I think atheists are being far too hasty when they argue that Christianity is expendable—unnecessary for a good society. If we see atrocious moral crimes in cultures not influenced by Christianity, we have no reason to think our current standards will continue in a culture that rejects Christianity.

[...]As I’ve written before, intrinsic human value has to be taught. A society’s view of the human person and its value will affect what that society views as being moral: We are just animals. Imperfect animals aren’t worth the trouble. Therefore, there’s a case to be made for killing them rather than caring for them. That conclusion reasonably follows from the non-Christian premise. As Christianity fades in influence and a different view of the human person gains acceptance, don’t expect that our society will continue to recognize that conclusion to be immoral. At that point, people will still consider themselves to be perfectly moral…but only because they’re judging themselves by a different standard of morality.

It’s difficult for us to recognize the depth our depravity when “everyone else is doing it.” Ask Gosnell’s nurses.

I like this post because it connects an apologetic concern to real life. This concern about right and wrong isn’t merely theoretical. It’s practical.

Think about the abortion really means, in practice. Basically, you have two-grown ups who are engaging in a recreational activity. In the course of that activity, they create a new innocent life that is distinct from their lives. A new human genetic code. This new person is weaker than either of her two parents. And her life imposes certain obligations on them. She needs food, and safety, and care. Like a baby bird who has fallen out of her tree. But when there is no God, there is no purpose to putting your needs second, and someone else’s first. You could do it, if it makes you feel happy. But having to take care of a newborn doesn’t normally make people who are have risky recreational sex happy. After all, people who have recreational sex instead of procreative sex are looking for recreation not responsibility.

And so what do these powerful people do to the new life they have created? Do they let this new life impose obligations on them? Do they let this new life lower the amount of happiness they themselves will have? No. They kill it. For the strong to refrain from killing the weak when the weak impose obligations on them, there has to be a design for human nature that makes moral obligations and selflessness rational, instead of merely pleasurable. Because we all know that being saddled with a newborn baby is not fun. There has to be something more going on than the pursuit of pleasure if the baby is going to live.

Similarly with no-fault divorce and gay marriage. First, we enacted no-fault divorce, which weakened the stability of marriage so that many children now grow up fatherless.  No one is careful about marriage anymore in order to provide children with what they need. Instead, we just “marry for love” and then dissolve it when it doesn’t feel good anymore. Same-sex marriage is the same thing again. The voluntarily removal of the biological father or mother from a child’s life. And why? Because the needs of children don’t matter. They’re smaller than we are, so we don’t care about them.

Is there anything more going on in our society other than the seeking of pleasure? I think that the seeking of “happiness” instead of goodness is now the dominant view. No one wants to be responsible for anyone else. No one wants to be obligated to anyone else. We all seem to want to be free of feeling bad. If we do wrong, we don’t want to be judged or reminded about what we did. If we hurt someone else, then we don’t want to have to make restitution for what we did. We try to hand our children off to strangers so that we don’t have to teach them ourselves. We don’t want to learn anything that might make us feel obligated to do the right thing instead of what we feel like doing. Other people are  just there to give us pleasure. It’s sad.

All of these concepts had meaning in a Judeo-Christian society that encouraged marriage and families. But those days are drifting away. Once upon a time, we had a social consensus that what mattered was doing the right thing – what we were designed to do. And it was OK to not feel good and to not feel happy, if you were doing the right thing. Happiness wasn’t the main goal of life. Now things are different.

Filed under: News, Abortion, Atheism, Bible, Child, Children, Christianity, Divorce, Gay Marriage, Human Rights, Judaism, Morality, Right to Life

Carson Weitnauer: putting atheism on the defensive

Here’s an article at Reasons for God that explains a few simple questions that you can ask your atheist friends.

He writes:

Though it has been persistently marketed to us as a worldview that stands for reason and science, the truth is that the atheistic worldview is riddled with contradictions and outlandish claims. And because most secular people haven’t studied why atheism is true, an excellent evangelistic strategy for you and your church is to understand these five challenges for atheism.

In my experience, it is only once people realize that their own worldview doesn’t work that they become interested in seeking something that does. While some would suggest you just have to wait for people to hit rock bottom, I think a more gracious and effective approach is to humbly challenge their pretense to have a sensible worldview.

By God’s grace, studying these five holes in the atheistic worldview can create a powerful opportunity for you and your church to share the wisdom and love of Jesus Christ.

[...]Because of their fundamental commitment to impersonal matter and laws, the atheist faces very difficult problems in at least five unique areas:

• Consciousness
• Free will
• Purpose
• Reason, including mathematics and science
• Objective moral facts, including universal human rights and the reality of evil

Here’s my favorite of the 5:

Leading atheists such as Sam Harris dismiss free will as a matter of course. Or as Tom Clark at Naturalism.org puts it, “Judged from a scientific and logical perspective, the belief that we stand outside the causal web in any respect is an absurdity, the height of human egoism and exceptionalism.”

Dr. Angus Menuge, the current President of the Evangelical Philosophical Society, explains the problem: “before we can talk of being responsible for our decisions, we need an account of why those decisions belong to us. But the trouble is, on a naturalistic view, there is no entity that can plausibly own any mental states, there is simply a plurality of parallel, impersonal processes in the brain.”

The denial of free will logically leads to the denial of personal responsibility for any of our behaviors or beliefs. But if everything about “you” is determined, then “you” could not have reasonably chosen to believe what you do. If a-rational things and laws determined your neurological structure, “you” literally cannot make any decisions about what you believe or why you believe it.

This article is worth a look if you want to start a discussion with an atheist.

Filed under: News, Apologetics, Atheism, Consciousness, Free Will, Morality, Naturalism, Purpose, Reason

Can the worldview of naturalism rationally ground mind, meaning and morality?

J. Warner Wallace, author of “Cold Case Christianity”, explains why it can’t.

Here’s just one of the three troubles with naturalism:

Morality

If naturalism is true, morality is nothing more than a matter of opinion. All of us, as humans, have simply come to embrace those cultural or personal mores that best promote the survival of the species. There is no transcendent, objective moral truth. Instead, cultures merely embrace the values and moral principles that “work” for them and have resulted in the flourishing of their particular people group. If this is the case, one group of evolved humans has no business trying to tell another evolved group what is truly right or wrong from a moral perspective. After all, each group has successfully arrived at their particular level of development by embracing their own accepted moral standards. Arguments over which moral truths provide for greater human flourishing are simply subjective disagreements; there is no transcendent, objective standard that can adjudicate such disagreements from a naturalistic perspective.

Click the link to read the other two!

It is fun to put naturalists on the defensive. I think that the most odd thing about naturalism is that they think that all moral statements are true or false depending on personal preferences. For example, slavery. Whether to own slaves or not is really the slave owner’s choice, on naturalism. Some societies in some places and times allow it, and others don’t. Naturalism has nothing at all to say about which view is correct, because there is no design for humans on naturalism – no way we ought to be. Every view is as good as any other, because there is no one to decide.

The justification for moral values and duties is important because the justification is what helps us to do the right thing when it involves self-sacrifice and self-denial. Anybody can be good when it’s easy. Being good when it’s hard takes rationality, and naturalists don’t have that in their worldview. When a naturalists says “I’m a good person without God”, you have to understand that they are making that statement as a statement of preference. On their view, there is nothing right or wrong with anything, as a matter of fact. They have determined themselves what counts as good, and they are in compliance with their own arbitrary preferences. That’s what they mean by “I’m good”.

Filed under: News, Atheism, Meaning, Mind, Morality, Naturalism

Chad Meister: can atheists rationally ground morality?

Philosopher Chad Meister takes a look at the attempts of some prominent atheists to make rational sense of morality within their worldviews.

Here is the abstract:

Atheists often argue that they can make moral claims and live good moral lives without believing in God. Many theists agree, but the real issue is whether atheism can provide a justification for morality. A number of leading atheists currently writing on this issue are opposed to moral relativism, given its obvious and horrific ramifications, and have attempted to provide a justification for a nonrelative morality. Three such attempts are discussed in this article: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s position that objective morality simply “is”; Richard Dawkins’s position that morality is based on the selfish gene; and Michael Ruse and Edward Wilson’s position that morality is an evolutionary illusion. Each of these positions, it turns out, is problematic. Sinnott-Armstrong affirms an objective morality, but affirming something and justifying it are two very different matters. Dawkins spells out his selfish gene approach by including four fundamental criteria, but his approach has virtually nothing to do with morality—with real right and wrong, good and evil. Finally, Ruse and Wilson disagree with Dawkins and maintain that belief in morality is just an adaptation put in place by evolution to further our reproductive ends. On their view, morality is simply an illusion foisted on us by our genes to get us to cooperate and to advance the species. But have they considered the ramifications of such a view? Each of these positions fails to provide the justification necessary for a universal, objective morality—the kind of morality in which good and evil are clearly understood and delineated.

[...]We can get to the heart of the atheist’s dilemma with a graphic but true example. Some years ago serial killer Ted Bundy, who confessed to over thirty murders, was interviewed about his gruesome activities. Consider the frightening words to his victim as he describes them:

Then I learned that all moral judgments are “value judgments,” that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either “right” or “wrong”….I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable “value judgment” that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these “others”? Other human beings, with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as “moral” or “good” and others as “immoral” or “bad”? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me—after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.⁵

While I am in no way accusing atheists in general of being Ted Bundy-like, the question I have for the atheist is simply this: On what moral grounds can you provide a response to Bundy? The atheistic options are limited. If morality has nothing to do with God, as atheists suppose, what does it have to do with? One response the atheist could offer is moral relativism, either personal or cultural. The personal moral relativist affirms that morality is an individual matter; you decide for yourself what is morally right and wrong. But on this view, what could one say to Bundy? Not much, other than “I don’t like what you believe; it offends me how you brutalize women.” For the personal relativist, however, who really cares (other than you) that you are offended by someone else’s actions? On this view we each decide our own morality, and when my morality clashes with yours, there is no final arbiter other than perhaps that the stronger of us forces the other to agree. But this kind of Nietzschean “might makes right” ethic has horrific consequences, and one need only be reminded of the Nazi reign of terror to see it in full bloom. This is one reason why thoughtful atheists, such as Christopher Hitchens, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and others don’t go there.⁶

But what about cultural moral relativism—the view that moral claims are the inventions of a given culture? Most thoughtful atheists don’t tread here either, and this is one reason why: If right and wrong are cultural inventions, then it would always be wrong for someone within that culture to speak out against them. If culture defines right and wrong, then who are you to challenge it? For example, to speak out against slavery in Great Britain in the seventeenth century would have been morally wrong, for it was culturally acceptable. But surely it was a morally good thing for William Wilberforce and others to strive against the prevailing currents of their time and place to abolish the slave trade. For the cultural moral relativist, all moral reformers—Wilberforce, Martin Luther King, Jr., even Jesus and Gandhi, to name a few—would be in the wrong. But who would agree with this conclusion? Thankfully, most leading atheists agree that moral relativism is doomed.⁷

So what do they affirm? Here are three accounts that recent atheists have defended: (1) objective morality simply “is,” (2) morality is based on the selfish gene, and (3) morality is an evolutionary illusion.⁸ Let’s take a brief look at each of them.

Have you ever heard any of these three categories of objections? If so, click on through and see Chad Meister’s responses.

Filed under: Polemics, Atheism, Atheist, E.O. Wilson, Edward Wilson, Good, Michael Ruse, Moral, Morality, Philosophy, Richard Dawkins, SAM, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

William Lane Craig debates Victor Stenger: Does God Exist?

Here are the details of the debate that I got from Cloud of Witnesses:

The OSU [Oregon State University] Socratic Club will sponsor a public dialogue entitled, “Two Philosophers Debate the Existence of God,” on Monday, March 1, at 7 p.m. in the LaSells Stewart Center on the OSU campus.  William Lane Craig will argue for the Christian view that a personal God exists and Victor J. Stenger the atheist position that there is no God.

In this debate, Victor Stenger does affirm his belief that the universe could be eternal in his second rebuttal (1:02:30), thus denying the standard Big Bang cosmology. He also denies the law of conservation of energy and asserts that something can come from nothing in his concluding speech (1:33:50). He also caused the audience to start laughing when he said that Jesus was not moral and supported slavery. There is almost no snark in this summary. Instead, I quoted Dr. Stenger verbatim in many places. I still think that it is very entertaining even without the snarky paraphrasing.

The debate includes 30 minutes of Q&A with the students.

Here is the MP3 file for the audio.

Here’s the video of the debate:

Dr. Craig’s opening speech:

• The ontological argument
• The contingency argument
• The cosmological argument
• The moral argument
• The resurrection of Jesus (3-fact version)
• Religious experience

Dr. Stenger’s opening speech:

• There is no scientific evidence for God’s existence in the textbooks
• There is no scientific evidence for God acting in the universe
• God doesn’t talk to people and tell them things they couldn’t possibly know
• The Bible says that the Earth is flat, etc.
• There is no scientific evidence that God answers prayers
• God doesn’t exist because people who believe in him are ignorant
• Human life is not optimally designed and appears to be the result of a blind, ad hoc evolutionary process
• The beginning of the universe is not ordered (low entropy) but random and chaotic
• It’s theoretically possible that quantum tunneling explains the origin of the universe
• The laws of physics are not objectively real, they are “our inventions”
• Regarding the beginning of the universe, the explanation is that something came from nothing*
• Nothing* isn’t really nothing, it is “the total chaos that we project existed just before the big bang”
• If something has no structure, then “it is as much nothing as nothing can be”
• Consciousness is explainable solely on the basis of material processes
• There are well-informed, rational non-believers in the world and God would not allow that

Dr. Craig’s first rebuttal:

Stenger’s argument that there is no objective evidence for God’s existence:

• First, it is not required that God rely only on objective evidence in order to draw people to himself (Alvin Plantinga)
• Second, God is not required to provide evidence to everyone, only to the people who he knows would respond to him
• Third, Craig gave lots of objective evidence, from science, history and philosophy
• Stenger asks for certain evidence (answered prayers, prophecy, etc.), but Craig presented the evidence we have

Stenger’s argument that the balance of energy is zero so “nothing” exists:

• if you have the same amount of assets and liabilities, it doesn’t mean that nothing exists – your assets and liabilities exist
• Christopher Isham says that there needs to be a cause to create the positive and negative energy even if they balance
• the quantum gravity model contradicts observations
• the vacuum is not the same as nothing, it contains energy and matter
• the BVG theorem proves that any universe that is expanding must have a beginning

Stenger’s argument that mental operations can be reduced to physical operations:

• mental properties are not reducible to physical properties
• epiphenomenalism: is incompatible with self-identity over time
• epiphenomenalism: is incompatible with thoughts about other things
• epiphenomenalism: is incompatible with free will
• substance dualism (mind/body dualism) is a better explanation for our mental experience
• God is a soul without a body

Dr. Stenger’s first rebuttal:

Craig’s cosmological argument:

• Craig’s premise is “everything has a cause”, but quantum mechanics has causeless events
• There are speculative theories about how something could have come into being uncaused out of nothing
• “I don’t know of a single working cosmologist today who believes there was a singularity prior to the Big Bang”
• “If there wasn’t a singularity then there’s no basis for arguing that time began at that point”
• “There’s no reason from cosmology that we know of that the universe can’t be eternal”
• “When I talk about an eternal universe, I mean a universe that has no beginning or end”
• The Hartle-Hawking model doesn’t have a beginning
• “There was no violation of energy conservation by having a universe coming from nothing”
• “The universe could have come from a previous universe for example or even just from a region of chaos”
• The paper by Vilenkin is counteracted by other papers (he doesn’t specify which ones)

Craig’s moral argument:

• Dr. Craig is arguing from ignorance
• But morality can be decided by humanity just like governments pass laws, and that’s objective
• Dr. Craig has too little respect for the human intellect
• I don’t need to tell me that slavery is wrong
• The Bible supports slavery
• Atheists can behave as good as theists
• Morality just evolved naturally as an aid to survival

Craig’s resurrection argument:

• No Roman historians wrote about the execution of Jesus but none of them did
• The empty tomb is doubtful because it is only mentioned in the gospels, not by Paul
• John Dominic Crossan says there was no empty tomb
• Christianity only survived because the Roman empire thought that they were useful

Dr. Craig’s second rebuttal:

Craig’s cosmological argument:

• There is no reason to prefer an indeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics
• Dr. Stenger himself wrote that deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics are possible
• The vacuum in quantum mechanics is not nothing
• The quantum vacuum he proposes cannot be eternal
• The cosmological argument does not require a singularity
• The Hartle-Hawking model is from 1983
• Hawking says that there is a beginning of space and time after that model
• The Hartle-Hawking model does still have a beginning of time – the model is not eternal
• The BVG theorem that requires a beginning for expanding universes is widely accepted among cosmologists

Craig’s moral argument:

• Stenger redefined objective to mean that most people agree with it – but that’s not what objective means
• Objective means right and wrong whether anyone accepts it or not
• Richard Dawkins himself says that on atheism there is “no evil and no good” – why is he wrong?
• Even Dr. Stenger says that morality is the same as passing laws – it’s arbitrary and varies by time and place
• But on his view, right and wrong are the same as deciding which side of the road to drive on
• But somethings really are right and some things are really wrong

Craig’s resurrection argument:

• Josephus is a Roman historian and he wrote about Jesus, for example
• There were four biographies of Jesus are the best sources for his life
• The scholars that Stenger mentioned are on the radical fringe

Dr. Stenger’s second rebuttal:

Knowledge and the burden of proof:

• Dr. Craig has to bear the burden of proof, not me – because his claim is more “extravagant”
• “I don’t have to prove that a God was not necessary to create the universe”
• “I don’t have to prove that a God did not design the universe and life”
• “I don’t have to prove that the universe did not have a beginning”
• “I don’t have to prove that God did not provide us with our moral sense”
• There are a lot of books written about how morality evolved naturally
• “I don’t have to prove that the events surrounding the supposed resurrection of Jesus did not take place”
• Bart Ehrman says that the gospels are generally unreliable (Note: Ehrman accepts all 3 of Craig’s minimal facts)
• Just because people are willing to die for a cause, does not make their leader God, e.g. – the Emperor of Japan

Aesthetic concerns about the universe:

• I don’t like dark matter and I wouldn’t have made the universe with dark matter
• I don’t like the doctrine of penal substitution
• I don’t like the doctrine of original sin
• I don’t like the heat death of the universe

Dr. Craig’s conclusion:

The case for atheism:

• Dr. Stenger had two arguments and he has to support his premises
• Dr. Craig addressed his two arguments and each premise and Dr. Stenger never came back on it

The contingency argument:

• Dr. Stenger has dropped the refutation of this argument

The cosmological argument:

• The theoretical vacuum he proposes cannot be eternal

The moral argument:

• He asserts that things are wrong, but there is no grounding for that to be objective on atheism

The resurrection of Jesus:

• There are surveys of scholars on the empty tomb and 75% of them agree with it
• Bart Ehrman agrees with all 3 of the minimal facts that Dr. Craig presented
• Ehrman’s objection to the resurrection is not historical: he’s an atheist – he thinks miracles are impossible

Religious experience:

• No response from Dr. Stenger

Dr. Stenger’s conclusion

The cosmological argument:

• “I argued that we have very good physical reasons to understand how something can come from nothing”
• “There is a natural tendency in the universe… to go from.. simpler thing to the more complicated thing”
• The transition from a vapor to a liquid to ice shows how something could come from nothing
• “It cannot be proven that the universe had a beginning”

The moral argument:

• Objective morality, which is independent of what people think, could be developed based on what people think
• “Jesus himself was not a tremendously moral person… he had no particular regard for the poor… he certainly supported slavery… he was for the subjugation of women” (audience laughter)

The resurrection argument:

• Bart Ehrman says that the majority of the gospels are unreliable

Religious experience:

• I don’t see any evidence that there is anything more to religious experience than just stuff in their heads

God’s purpose of the world should be to make people feel happy:

• God could have made people feel happier
• God could have made people not die
• God could could have made the universe smaller: it’s too big
• God could have made it possible for humans to live anywhere “even in space”

Filed under: Videos, Appearances, Atheism, Bible, Christian Theism, Cosmology, Debate, Empty Tomp, Evidence, Freethought, God and the Folly of Faith, God: The Failed Hypothesis, Jesus, Moral Values, Morality, New Atheism, New Atheists, Objective Morality, Philosophy, Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Rationality, Reason, Religion, Resurrection, Science, Stephen Hawking, The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning, The New Atheism, Theism, Truth, Unbelief, Vic Stenger, Victor J. Stenger, Victor Stenger, William Lane Craig