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 lectures on naturalistic alternatives to the Big Bang

Here’s the lecture, which was given in 2004 at the University of Colorado, Boulder. A very liberal university!

This lecture is suitable for intermediate and advanced Christian apologists.

The description of the video states:

This is quite simply one of the best lectures William Lane Craig (a philosopher of science) has given. Craig explores the origins of the universe. He argues for a beginning of the universe, while refuting scientific models like the Steady State Theory, the Oscillating Theory, Quantum Vacuum Fluctuation Model, Chaotic Inflationary Theory, Quantum Gravity Theory, String Theory, M-Theory and Cyclic Ekpyrotic Theory.

And here is the description of the lecture from Reasonable Faith:

A Templeton Foundation lecture at the University of Colorado, Boulder, laying out the case from contemporary cosmology for the beginning of the universe and its theological implications. Includes a lengthy Q & A period which features previous critics and debate opponents of Dr. Craig who were in attendance, including Michael Tooley, Victor Stenger, and Arnold Guminski.

Craig has previously debated Stenger and Tooley previously. And they both asked him questions in the Q&A time of this lecture. Imagine – having laid out your entire case to two people who have debated you before and who know your arguments well. What did they ask Craig, and how did he respond?

This lecture is based on a research paper published in an astrophysics journal, and was delivered to an audience of students and faculty, including atheist physicist Victor Stenger and prominent atheist philosopher Michael Tooley, at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The whole research paper that the lecture is based on is posted online.

Filed under: Videos, Agnosticism, Apologetics, Arnold Guminski, Atheism, Atheist, Big Bang, Big Bang Theory, Christian Apologetics, Cosmological Argument, Cosmology, Creation, Ex Nihilo, Kalam, Kalam Cosmological Argument, Lecture, Logic, Michael Tooley, Origin of the universe, Out of Nothing, Philosophy, Progress of Science, Reason, Science, Templeton Foundation, The Big Bang Theory, Theism, Victor Stenger, William Lane Craig

Brian Auten interviews Dr. Angus Menuge on philosophy of mind

Click here for the interview. It’s up at Apologetics 315!

Details:

Today’s interview is with Dr. Angus Menuge, Professor of Philosophy  at Concordia University, and author of Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science. He talks about his background and work, the philosophy of mind, what reason (or reasoning) is, what materialism is as a worldview, things excluded from a materialistic worldview, methodological naturalism and materialism, accounting for free will, materialistic accounts of reason, the epistemological argument from reason, the ontological argument from reason, finding the best explanation for reason, problems with methodological naturalism, implications of materialism, practical application of the argument from reason, advice for apologists, the International Academy of Apologetics, and more.

If what Dr. Menuge says in this interview is true, and I think it is, then a person who believes in materialism can neither ground free will nor rationality! So atheism wouldn’t really be freethought so much as it would be… un-free… non-thought.

In case people don’t want to listen to the podcast, then I’ve got some things for you to read below.

The ontological argument from reason

Dr. Menuge presented a paper at the real Evangelical Philosophical Society conference for students and professors of philosophy, and you can download the paper here in Word format. (here’s a PDF version I made)

Here is the introduction to the paper that Dr. Menuge read at the EPS conference:

The argument from reason is really a family of arguments to show that reasoning is incompatible with naturalism. Here, naturalism is understood as the idea that foundationally, there are only physical objects, properties and relations, and anything else reduces to, supervenes on, or emerges from that. For our purposes, one of the most important claims of naturalism is that all causation is passive, automatic, event causation (an earthquake automatically causes a tidal wave; the tidal wave responds passively): there are no agent causes, where something does not happen automatically but only because the agent exerts his active power by choosing to do it. The most famous version of the argument from reason is epistemological: if naturalism were true, we could not be justified in believing it. Today, I want to focus on the ontological argument from reason, which asserts that there cannot be reasoning in a naturalistic world, because reasoning requires libertarian free will, and this in turn requires a unified, enduring self with active power.

The two most promising ways out of this argument are: (1) Compatibilism—even in a deterministic, naturalistic world, humans are capable of free acts of reason if their minds are responsive to rational causes; (2) Libertarian Naturalism—a self with libertarian free will emerges from the brain. I argue that neither of these moves works, and so, unless someone has a better idea, the ontological argument from reason stands.

The paper is 11 pages long, and it is helpful for those of you looking for some good discussion of one of the issues in the area of philosophy of mind.

You may also be interested in Alvin Plantinga’s epistemological argument from reason, which is related to this argument. It shows that even to have the ability to think, you have to have a certain anthropology and you have to have mental faculties that are designed for reason, not survival.

Methodological naturalism

Dr. Menuge also wrote an article entitled “Is methodological materialism good for science?”.

Intro:

Should science by governed by methodological materialism? That is, should scientists assume that only undirected causes can figure in their theories and explanations? If the answer to these questions is yes, then there can be no such thing as teleological science or intelligent design. But is methodological materialism a defensible approach to science, or might it prevent scientists from discovering important truths about the natural world? In my contribution to The Waning of Materialism (Oxford University Press, 2010), edited by Robert Koons and George Bealer, I consider twelve of the most common arguments in favor of methodological materialism and show that none of them is convincing.

Of these arguments, perhaps the most prevalent is the “God of the gaps” charge, according to which invoking something other than a material cause is an argument from ignorance which, like a bad script writer, cites a deus ex machina to save our account from difficulty. Not only materialists, but also many Christian thinkers, like Francis Collins, worry that appeal to intelligent design commits the God of the gaps fallacy.

As I argue, however, not only is an inference to an intelligent cause not the same as an inference to the supernatural, it is a mistake to assume that all gap arguments are bad, or that only theists make them. If a gap argument is based solely on ignorance of what might explain some phenomenon, then indeed it is a bad argument. But there are many good gap arguments which are made both by scientific materialists and proponents of intelligent design.

So how do you make an argument like that?

As Stephen Meyer has argued in his Signature in the Cell, intelligent design argues in just the same way, claiming not merely that the material categories of chance and necessity (singly or in combination) are unable to explain the complex specified information in DNA, but also that in our experience, intelligent agents are the only known causes of such information. The argument is based on what we know about causal powers, not on what we do not know about them.

Since the inference is based on known causal powers, we learn that the cause is intelligent, but only further assumptions or data can tell us whether that intelligence is immanent in nature or supernatural. It is a serious mistake to confuse intelligent design with theistic science, and the argument that since some proponents of design believe that the designer is God, that is what they are claiming can be inferred from the data, is a sophomoric intensional fallacy.

If you think this is interesting, then do have a listen to the podcast. Dr. Menuge is not an ordinary academic – he is very direct. He calls materialism “a catastrophe” in the podcast! Not a shrinking violet.

Filed under: Podcasts, Apologetics, Science, Intelligent Design, Evolution, Darwinism, Alvin Plantinga, Rationality, Naturalism, Determinism, Free Will, Reason, Body, Materialism, Worldview, Soul, Mind, Brain, Reasoning, Freedom of the Will, Christian Apologetics, Philosophy, C. S. Lewis, Consciousness, Methodological Naturalism, Ontological Argument from Reason, Epistemological Argument from Reason, Angus Menuge, Agent

Support for my view of courting from… Jane Austen?!!

I get into a lot of trouble because I have this loooong list of questions that I pose to women during courtship in order to evaluate them for marriage, and to let them know how I want them to prepare for my plan for the marriage.   Basically, my view of courting is that it is the time for the man to present his plan to serve God as a married couple, and where he wants to be effective, and how he wants to be effective, and where the woman fits into to his plan. The purpose of the pre-marriage courting is for me to explain all of this, and then the woman has the opportunity to first decide if she wants to help with that plan and then demonstrate that she can help with it. My job after laying out the plan is to make sure that she has all the tools she needs and lots of affection and tenderness, too. I am auditioning for the roles of protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader. And she is auditioning for the roles of helper, motivator and nurturer.

Anyway, all of that is evil, if you ask any non-Christians and Christians today. The ladies in my workplace are always telling me that I am “too strict” and that I need to “lower my standards”. What they mean by this is that they resent me taking on the role of leader in the relationship and telling them what marriage to me will be about and what they need to be able to do to help. And they especially resent having to prove that they can do it. Men they’ve known in the past have been pacified with some earnest words of agreement, and maybe some hugs and kisses. But that doesn’t work on me. I want books to be read, and actions to be performed.

For example, I want public speeches defending marriage, presentations on abortion in church, apologetics book clubs, apologetics conference organizing, apologetics lectures and debates in the local university, economics degrees, law school degrees, and pro-family conservative political views. (These are all the things my current favorite lady and her predecessors have done / are doing). In short, if I am coming to the table with lots of evidence that I can do my roles, then I want to see evidence that she  can do her roles. I call this view of courtship the wisdom view, and the popular alternative to it I call the fairy tale view.

The funniest thing is that right now I am working together with a woman who is very very high up in her profession. Manages dozens of people, has her own receptionist, wins lots of awards. Her job is incredibly stressful. But the funniest thing is that she is actually the easiest one of all to lead. And that’s because she is a good listener and she reads a ton of books and then independently designs and executes operations designed to move the ball forward on the things that I care about. She thinks my vision for serving God is good, and she knows how to get the job done, without being micromanaged. Here is a close-up of some flowers that I sent her recently to recognize her. She is also the least attention seeking female of the ones I know. She doesn’t want public recognition for what she does.

And with that said, let’s take a look at a quote about my favorite British author, Jane Austen, courtesy of Reformed Seth’s blog:

[Austen] was committed to the ideal of “intelligent love,” according to which the deepest and truest relationship that can exist between human beings is pedagogic. This relationship consists in the giving and receiving of knowledge about right conduct, in the formation of one person’s character by another, the acceptance of another’s guidance in one’s growth. The idea of a love based in pedagogy may seem quaint to some modern readers and repellent to others, but unquestionably it plays a decisive part in the power and charm of Jane Austen’s art. And if we attempt to explain the power and charm that the genre of the novel exercised in the nineteenth century, we must take full account of its pedagogic intention and of such love as a reader might feel was being directed towards him in the solicitude of the novel for his moral well-being, in its concern for the right course of his development.

- Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 82.

There! I’m vindicated by someone who ought to know how these things work. When I was a young man, I read everything I could get my hands on from Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters. It’s nice to know that I wasn’t misinterpreting what they were telling me, and that I’ve applied it well. Just because it’s not “cool” today, doesn’t mean it’s not right.

Related posts

• Courting rules: how to respect a Christian man in the style of Ephesians 5
• Courting rules: what should a Christian woman be looking for in a man?
• Courting rules: how to tell if a woman is a committed Christian
• Courting rules: how men use self-control to make relationships count for God
• Are churches preparing women to choose real men for husbands?
• What is the meaning and purpose of white roses?
• Does being a virgin before marriage affect marital stability?
• How to communicate requirements to a Christian woman during courtship
• How Christian women can make Christian men marry without using sex appeal
• The rules for friendship and courtship between Christians
• What Christian men want from Christian women… in paintings!
• Should Christians marry non-Christians?

Filed under: News, Apologetics, Bible, Christian, Christianity, Conservatism, Conservative, Courting, Courtship, Dating, Disrespect, Emotion, Ethics, Father, Feeling, Female, Feminism, Feminist Studies, Feminist Thought, Feminization, Fiscal Policy, Friend, Gender, Goal, Guy, Help, Helper, Helpmate, Leader, Listening, Love, Male, Manoshere, Marriage, Men, Moral Leader, Need, Philosophy, Plan, Protector, Provider, Relationship, Research, Respect, Role, Sex, Sex Differences, Sex Roles, Shared Parenting, Social Policy, Spiritual Leader, Study, Support, Theology, Women

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