AS133: Moral Arguments, with Jeffery Jay Lowder

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:31 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to episode 133 of Atheistically Speaking. I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Joining me is Jeffrey Jay Lowder, how are you doing, Jeff?

0:00:42 Jeffrey: Good, how are you, Thomas?

0:00:43 Thomas: I'm doing great, welcome to the show, I'm really excited to talk to you, I've been following you on Twitter for quite a while, and I really like... I'm glad we're gonna get down in the nitty-gritty on some arguments.

0:00:53 Jeffrey: Well, good, thanks, I'm glad to be here.

0:00:56 Thomas: So, would you mind giving us a bit of your background, for anyone who's not familiar with you? I follow your secular outpost Twitter. How long have you been at it? What's your... how'd you start doing what you're doing? All that kind of stuff. Oh,

0:01:10 Jeffrey: So, I have kind of an interesting path. I chose to enroll in a Christian university, Seattle Pacific University, as an agnostic. I didn't enter a Christian and then become a non-Christian while I was there. I entered as a non Christian, and they were gracious enough, unlike some Christians universities, to be open to non-Christians uh attending, and I, my logic was that I wanted to study the the claims and evidence for Christianity from people who believe it rather than get some watered down, uh, lame version of it, uh, from someone who, you know, wasn't passionate about it.

Um, and I actually ended up writing my, uh, honors thesis on the historicity of Jesus's resurrection, um, and compared the arguments of William Lane Craig and Josh McDowell to the arguments that Michael Martin and Dan Barker and got a lot of praise from my Christian professors for how open-minded I was and how I was equally willing to criticize both Christians and atheists. And that's probably, you know, a good summary, if you will, of a lot of the work that I've done in philosophy of religion and counter-apologetics. I call it like I see it. I am an atheist now. I didn't start off that way. But I have no problem with criticizing bad atheist arguments or bad atheist objections.

0:02:12 Thomas: Wow. How

0:03:00 Jeffrey: I'll do that just as much as I feel it's necessary compared to criticizing Christian arguments and Christian objections. And if I think Christians have a good point, I will say so. Obviously, if I, I think that they've got a weak argument, I'll point that out as well. Same thing for atheists. So, you know, I Think probably perfect objectivity is a myth, but I do try as much as is possible for a human to, to be as objective as I can when evaluating the arguments and evidence. Something you might find interesting, I should have mentioned this before, when I was at SPU, SPU is a free Methodist university, and one of the conditions they require for all students, not just the Christian students, is that in addition to your academic credits, you have to get a certain number of chapel credits per quarter.

0:03:54 Jeffrey: And you can get a chapel credit by going to chapel, which is basically a church service at the Free Methodist Church right across the street from the campus. You could get it by going into a praise and worship session, or you could get it by going through a small group, which they call the cadre. And I went to the department that oversaw the chapel credit program. I think it was called Campus Ministries, if I remember correctly. And I said, look, you know, I'm not a Christian. I was very upfront about that when I applied. I could certainly go to chapel three days a week and sit in the back pew and take a nap or do homework like a lot of the people who claim to be Christians do.

0:04:42 Jeffrey: Or we could actually make this a productive use of our time and put together a discussion group to talk about, you know, arguments for and against Christianity. And they said, that's fine. Can you find a faculty sponsor, which I did. And so I ended up leading this skeptics cadre for, I think, three years at the university. And that was a lot of fun. And I actually made some good friendships with a professor who was the faculty sponsor, as well as someone with the Navigators Ministry from off campus. And I keep in touch with both of them to this day.

0:05:26 Jeffrey: I don't think there was a single deconversion that really wasn't my goal.

0:05:26 Thomas: Many deconversions? What are your numbers? No, I know. I'm just,

0:05:34 Jeffrey: I know, but it was interesting, just sort of thinking back, I'm sort of switching topics again, when I wrote my thesis on the resurrection, I never expected, it didn't even occur to me, that going to a conservative, conservative Free Methodist University, that the religion professor, who was one of two faculty advisors for my thesis, the other was a philosophy professor, that the religion professor would actually be out of alignment with the theological position of the university. So Free Methodists are a type of Protestant Christian. They're definitely not Catholic. And this religion professor, who's very smart, I mean, I have a lot of respect for him, was very impressed with the work of a theologian named Karl Rahner, as well as Hans Kuhn.

0:05:34 Thomas: I'm just joking.

0:06:38 Jeffrey: And they are Catholic, and they have a very different theology of the resurrection than the kind of people that you would expect to be studying under the guidance of a religion professor at a Free Methodist university. So I found myself in this really awkward position where I was an agnostic and I thought I had done a good job of selecting two spokespeople to defend the resurrection from a Christian point of view, selecting William Lane Craig and Josh McDowell. And lo and behold, my Christian professor of religion was not so enthusiastic about William Lane Craig or Josh McDowell, and required me, as a condition to actually get a passing grade on my thesis, to interact with the work of Hans Kung and Karl Rahner.

0:07:34 Jeffrey: And I remember, I just remember thinking this is a very odd situation. You know, here I am at a Christian university and I feel like I'm being more faithful, if you will, to the doctrinal commitments of the university than the professor of religion was. And it turns out that his contract was not picked up. He wasn't tenured yet. I could be totally off base here. I might be misremembering, but it seems like there was some controversy regarding his stance on feminism, meaning I think he was too feminist for the university as well. He was gone, I believe, the year after I graduated, I think. I could me misremembering, there was some other issue where there was a lack of alignment. It was kind of a strange situation, but it all worked out. It all worked out well.

0:07:41 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, let me, let me go back and clarify some details. So it sounds like you, were you raised Christian?

0:08:36 Jeffrey: Yeah, I was.

0:08:38 Thomas: Okay. But by the time you were getting around to going to college, you were considered yourself agnostic?

0:08:38 Jeffrey: Yep. That's correct. I was fortunate enough to have a high school teacher who he was primarily a history teacher, but he also was really into philosophy. And so I got to take a philosophy class in high school. And he exposed us to Bertrand Russell. And our primary text was The Problems of Philosophy. But we also read an outline of intellectual rubbish and why I am not a Christian. And he invited a Christian pastor in to give the other side. So all those creationists out there who say, you know, you need to give equal time to both sides. Well, my philosophy teacher, who was an agnostic, did did exactly that. So right after he taught us, you know, Birch and Russell's points and why I'm not a Christian and an outline of intellectual rubbish, he then had Phil Fernandez, who was in my hometown, come in and give the opposing viewpoint. And for your listeners who've listened to my debate, my first debate on YouTube will recognize the name Phil Fernandes because he's He's the guy that I debated back in 1999.

0:09:04 Thomas: Wow.

0:09:55 Jeffrey: That was not the first time we debated, though. The first time we debated, I was the captain of the debate team at my high school. And I did, as a fundraiser, we did a debate on creationism versus evolution. And I defended evolution and Phil Fernandez defended creationism. So we'd actually debated before.

0:10:14 Thomas: So that's really cool that you got got exposed that in high school. I have to say that my California public uh high school education was not nearly that good. I wouldn't have gotten anything like that. But uh, that's really cool, because I, I would have probably been more interested in philosophy earlier had I gotten that exposure to it. So would you say that it was those Bertrand Russell, uh, you know, those those readings you had to do that that really set you on the path of being more agnostic, or were you

0:10:44 Jeffrey: That was part of it. Another thing that happened, there were two other things that I read. One of them was a tract by the Jehovah's Witnesses. It was a little blue hardcover book. I think it's called Life. How did we get here by evolution or creation? And the funny thing about this is the guy was going door to door, but he had a very unique approach. I had to buy the tract from him, which I did for $1.50. I said, do you mind? I have to go down to my bedroom and grab my wallet. I'll be right back. No, that's fine. But I was so incredulous that, you know, someone would actually be going door to door badmouthing science that even though I thought it was ridiculous, I was more than happy to pay the buck 50 to get the track and read what they had to say.

0:11:36 Jeffrey: And I started going through it and I just thought, I apologize to any of your creationist listeners. I read the book and I thought, what a load of crap. I can't believe anybody actually buys, not buys this, I bought it, but anybody finds this convincing.

0:11:52 Jeffrey: And then I came across a copy of Richard Dawkins' Blind Watchmaker. And I think that was what really set things in motion for me because his argument for common dissent was so persuasive. And, you know, the alternative, I read a lot of stuff from the Institute of Creation Research, Henry Morris, John Morris, Dwayne Gish, Ken Ham, and it just, I could not believe how weak their arguments were. And um, you know, I just thought, you know, we need to get the word out, um, that there's these people who are using these really bad arguments and this is all pre-internet, you know, so there was nothing, there was no Secular Web, there was, you know, no podcast to go to. It was just kind of a lone wolf in the night, I guess we

0:12:34 Thomas: So right Well, it sounds like, then, you were, so were you raised creationist, even, not just kind of Christian, or because it Seems Like you're framing it as though a lot of your, you know, discovery was evolution versus creationism. That's interesting. Yeah.

0:12:51 Jeffrey: Didn't Read, yeah. Um, um, I'm not sure how to answer that. We didn't spend spend a lot of time talking about that. But I'm trying to remember back now, honestly. Honestly, it's hard for me to remember. But what I would say is this. It's not that I thought that evolution disproved Christianity. I mean, I don't think that's true today. I think that, you know, you can come up with clever ways of showing that Christianity is at least logically compatible with evolution, even If evolution has strong evidence against it. But it made me very suspicious of religious claims.

And although I didn't know it at the time, when I, you now, I went on to college, I actually have this binder of all the things I used to talk about at the skeptics cadre. And I'd actually written up an essay, I think, as a junior in college on evolution and the problem of evil. And little did I know that, you know, several years later, I would come across this amazing essay by philosopher Paul Draper on evolution, the problem with evil, where he combines the two pieces of evidence, evidence about evil and evidence about evolution, to start to build a cumulative case against theism.

0:13:14 Thomas: Yeah. Oh. That's Okay, right.

0:13:38 Thomas: Yeah.

0:14:26 Jeffrey: I didn't do anything as fancy as he did, but I just had this intuition that evolution, meaning common descent, not Darwinism, but just common descent, combined with certain facts about evil, were evidence against theism. And so I think that's probably why reading Richard Dawkins' book, as well as the other stuff, had such a profound effect on me, because I wasn't just thinking about it in terms of biology. I was linking it to the problem of evil.

0:15:03 Thomas: That's, that's interested. I mean, it seems like the problem of evil, uh, explained way better by evolution than than by theism, but what do I know? So that's interesting. So you still decide to go to a Christian college, and it sounds like it was a pretty good experience, though. It must've been unique. And did you, do you have any regrets, or are you glad you did what you did?

0:15:27 Jeffrey: Well, I mean, I met my wife there. So, so, so yes, but I do have to say that socially I was very isolated. I mean I have no no doubt that if I had gone to the University of Washington just down the road, I would have had a totally different social experience than I did at SPU.

0:15:29 Thomas: So yes? No, I'm just kidding. Right.

0:15:49 Thomas: You know, that's so interesting because this is not terribly interesting, but it's pretty similar actually. My parents wanted me to go to a very private Catholic college, um, because my older sister went and uh converted to Catholicism. I, I really didn't want to have anything to do with it, but I was kind of maybe similar to how you were. I was a little bit attracted to the just sort of the the the, I don't know what the word is, but like, like the ambiance of kind of learnedness that, you know, because there is something to be said for that. Like they were very about learning and about, especially like, you know, old texts or ancient philosophy and all that kind of thing. And it was kind of attractive. And they did seem very smart to me at the time when I was a freshman in high school.

0:16:37 Thomas: And I'm sure they are very smart, but the biggest reason I'm so glad I didn't go is that social aspect that you're talking about, because it's just so small and isolated. Like I'm really glad that I got exposed to more, just more people and more different ideas. I think it's uh, anyway, just reminded me of that.

0:16:57 Jeffrey: Yeah. And a side benefit of going to this smaller college was that, although it was a total nerd in high school, I was a walk-on NCAA athlete, actually got, I actually got a varsity letter in crew. Um, it's on my university's crew team and the University of Washington, I mean, they're a Pac-12 school. I'm, I'm what they would call lightweight, uh, and crew has two weight classes, uh.

0:17:26 Thomas: Oh. All. Right.

0:17:27 Jeffrey: The, uh, University of Washington doesn't mess around with lightweights. They wouldn't have given me the time of day ever. All of their rowers are, or, you know, the guys are like six foot four, 215 pounds with 1% body fat. And, you know, they're like, just one level below the US Olympics national team for rowing. So I never would have had a shot like that if I'd gone to.

0:17:27 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:17:53 Jeffrey: Gone to the UW. And being on the rowing team is one of my best memories about, about SPU, even if I, um, you know, uh, wasn't that close to the other rowers because of the, the religious differences. Uh,

0:18:09 Thomas: Yeah, well, interesting. So, uh, what did you end up, you studied philosophy or was it a liberal arts thing, or, oh.

0:18:17 Jeffrey: No, I actually studied computer science and math, uh. But by, by virtue of going to a liberal arts school and being in the honors program, I effectively have a minor in the, um, in literature and the humanities. It.

0:18:20 Thomas: Really, okay. Oh.

0:18:36 Jeffrey: Seems.

0:18:36 Thomas: I. See was.

0:18:37 Jeffrey: Like I did, um, Greek literature, medieval literature, modern literature, a whole year of Bible study, um, uh, so it was, you know, um, and uh, Christian philosophy was woven throughout all of those honors classes. Oh.

0:18:59 Thomas: It in your computer science classes, because that would have been interesting. I.

0:19:01 Jeffrey: No, there, there, you know, there really isn't a way to make a, uh, if there is, I, I can't conceive of what it would be. I don't think there's a way to have a Christian computer.

0:19:11 Thomas: Think.

0:19:11 Jeffrey: Science other than to open up with prayer, which, you know, would happen on occasion, but.

0:19:17 Thomas: It would. Be when you, when your computer gets a virus, you don't use antivirus software, you just pray it away, I think. That that'll.

0:19:17 Jeffrey: Yeah. Um. Yeah, so, um, so anyway, no, that's, that's what I studied. And I wasn't, uh, when I became, when I got to my senior, your year, and it was time to write the thesis, I originally had a thesis topic, um, I thought, and you know, this is in the early 90s, and I thought, well, it would be kind of interesting to, um, create a way to do email through your web browser. We didn't have webmail at the time.

0:19:50 Thomas: Never work.

0:19:50 Jeffrey: But. Then, but then being the, the, you know, the techie that I was, I thought to myself, well, that's, that's stupid. Who would ever want to use a web browser to do email when you could just go into your mail client? Well, that's why Bill Gates made a lot of money and I didn't, because I. didn't have the technical vision. So anyway, I went to the appropriate professors and just said, I don't really want to do a computer science thesis. Can I do one in philosophy instead? And they said, that's fine if you can get a faculty advisor. And I did. So it

0:19:50 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Neat.

0:20:24 Jeffrey: Worked out.

0:20:26 Thomas: And. Then can you, uh, bring us forward, uh, several hundred years? No, I'm just kidding. Well. That's.

0:20:30 Jeffrey: So while I was at SPU, the last year and a half at S.P.U., I hooked up with a guy named Brett Lemoine at Texas A&M University and we created a Web site which started off as the free thought Web and morphed into the secular Web and decided that we needed to have an organization to help run it. And so that was the creation of the Internet Infidels. And I was heavily involved with that after SPU, helping build out the SIT library, serving as its first president from 1995 to 1999, and then stepping down as president.

0:21:17 Jeffrey: I remain on the board for a while, you know, and all the time I'm writing and debating, I help lead a rebuttal to Josh McDowell's book, Evidence That Demands a Verdict, as well as writing critiques of Lee Strobel, Ravi Zacharias, William Lane Craig, and others. And anyway, you know, fast forward to today, I am involved with the team blog known as Secular Outposts. We're really more of a team blog on philosophy of religion from an atheist perspective. The other regular contributors are Keith Parsons, a professor at, if I remember correctly, the University of Houston at Clear Lake.

0:22:08 Jeffrey: And then Bradley Bowen, who is, I believe, all but dissertation, all that degree with a for a Ph.D. in philosophy from UC Santa Barbara. And so anyway, that's.

0:22:24 Thomas: Really interesting. So. That, let's bring it into our, our topic that I really am excited to discuss, moral argument, specifically, I guess, William Lane Craig's moral argument. Now, I can do a decent impression, but I'll go ahead and let you summarize.

0:22:25 Jeffrey: Yeah.

0:22:40 Jeffrey: OK. So William Lane Craig's moral argument, which he'll sometime, sometimes refer to as the meta-ethical argument for God's existence, is a, is a, has a very simple structure. It says premise one, if God does not exist, objective moral values do not, uh, do not exist. Premise two, objective moral values do exist. Three, therefore, God exists. Um, the thing to notice about Craig's arguments, and this isn't necessarily completely obvious if you haven't studied philosophy, philosophy, is that he is making an argument about metaethics. When people who haven't studied philosophy think about morality, they tend to group a whole bunch of things together that philosophers would split out.

0:23:35 Jeffrey: So at a very high level, you can picture sort of a tree that It looks like an organizational chart. And at the very top square, it would say, it would say ethics. And then under that, it would branch out into three, three nodes. One of them would be meta-ethics, which means literally about ethics. Another one would be normative ethics, which would be things like, you know, cons, categorical, imperative, utilitarianism, that sort of thing. And then the third node would be applied ethics, which would be things like, is homosexuality immoral or is abortion immoral? Things like that.

0:24:22 Jeffrey: A lot of atheists, when they, and I guess actually you could add a fourth node to this organization chart that I'm describing. You could have a node that's called descriptive ethics, so that would be like statistics about, uh, I guess crime rates in different countries, um, uh, you know, the tendencies of children to have or not have certain moral intuitions, a bunch of, you know, statements about what is rather than statements about what ought to be, um, so when a lot of people hear William Lane Craig or one of his, um, uh, followers, if you will, uh, defend this metaethical argument for God's existence, they, they hear the word moral values and, um, whatever it is that they think of, it's pretty obvious that what they're not thinking about is what philosophers mean by metaethics. Um, and the reason I say it's obvious is because if you read any discussion board or discussion forum where people are debating this particular moral argument for God's existence, the kinds of objections that are brought up against it have nothing to do with meta-ethics.

0:25:44 Jeffrey: It appears that a lot of people think that the argument is about descriptive ethics, and so they will respond to it by saying, but atheists can be moral without God, which is to utterly and massively missed the point of the whole argument. The argument says nothing about whether or not atheists are moral. The person making that argument could grant that atheists are, for the most part, moral people. They're no more moral or less moral than theists. And in fact, William Lane Craig actually does that. He actually believes that, or at least he says he believes it. So to bring up the fact that atheism can be moral without God is just to completely miss the point.

0:26:32 Thomas: Yeah, it's a separate argument. It really is. I've always thought that. It doesn't have, it may be something you could bring up independently if you wanted to, is would we expect that atheists are more moral or, you know, than theists or something under theism versus naturalism. It's something you could talk about separately, but it really doesn't get to the point of the argument to begin with. So I agree. Well,

0:26:33 Jeffrey: Exactly. Exactly. Another response that you'll see, and actually, um, so that response isn't just made by people on discussion forums. I also see it made, but see it made by a lot of the people who are representing atheism in debates with people like William Lane Craig. And the people who make that response, as you might predict, are people who are not philosophers.

0:27:24 Jeffrey: Another response that I'll see made a lot of the time is some variation of, but we can know what's moral without God. And again, to make that respond is to massively miss the point of the argument. The argument doesn't say anything about whether or not we can know what's moral with God or without God.

0:27:50 Thomas: I'm going to, I'll go with you for now, but I think later on I'm gonna come back to this, because I do think that could actually be brought into the argument properly, but we'll see if maybe I'm wrong about that. But I'll just side note that and go on.

0:28:04 Jeffrey: Okay, sounds good. So, you know, William Lane Craig and others will point out that they, on their view, as Christian theists, they believe that humans are made in the image of God, and part of what it means to be made or created in the image of God is to have an awareness of the moral law, whether they would describe it as something you have through conscience or through moral intuition or what have you. The point is on their viewpoint, they believe that everyone has the ability to recognize right from wrong.

0:28:04 Thomas: Right,

0:28:51 Jeffrey: So when they say that objective moral values can't exist without God, they're not saying knowledge of objective moral values can's exist without God, because they believe the opposite. In fact, based on my research, it seems like their interpretation of the Bible pretty much commits them to the position that atheists can know what is moral or not moral without believing that God exists, so they're, they're happy to grant that. And again, that's why when you, um, when you watch these debates or go into discussion forums and people respond by saying, but we know, uh, uh, you know, what's, um, what's. Moral without having to bring God into the picture, that I just shake my head, that completely, completely misses the point, um, yeah.

0:29:46 Thomas: I think another version of it is to say, but look at the Bible, look at how immoral they are. I think that's another version of what you're saying that doesn't actually address the argument.

0:29:55 Jeffrey: I'm not sure how I would would characterize that. It doesn't neatly fit into my little organizational chart or taxonomy of disciplines of morality, but you're exactly right. That was another one I was going to bring up. So it could be the case that Christianity is false. The Bible is a pack of lies with a bunch of immoral commands attributed to God, and objective moral values exist, and God exists.

0:30:26 Thomas: Right.

0:30:26 Jeffrey: Right. Um, so attacking the Bible, um, uh, you know, that that creates a problem for, um, at least some versions of Christianity, but it really doesn't undermine, uh, the kind of argument that Craig is giving. One, one final, uh, red herring that comes to mind is, uh, when you hear evolution brought up, um, you know, well, of course we would come to believe that there are, uh, objective moral values because evolution would select for that, um, now I actually happen to think that that's a true statement, but the question is, how does that refute Craig's meta-ethical argument, or a related objectional here is, yeah, but someone like Franz de Waal has shown that other primates have behaviors that seem to show that they have a morality.

0:30:26 Thomas: That's

0:31:22 Jeffrey: And whenever I hear that, I just shake my head and think, but you're not getting it. That's not what he's talking about. So it's pretty obvious that there's a fundamental misunderstanding of this particular argument. Argument. And as a result of this misunderstanding, I think that a lot of the time, not all of the time, but a lot Of the time atheists in debates with William Lane Craig, or people like Paul Copan, or Michael Warner, or Frank Turek, or Norm Geisler, people like that, a lot of times the atheists look frankly, very stupid, because they give these completely irrelevant relevant objections to the actual argument that the theist is making.

0:32:07 Jeffrey: And instead, the atheist is tearing down a straw man of their own creation. So that, I mean, that's what I would say in terms of, you know, the common misunderstandings of the argument, which then raises the question, okay, fine, louder, but then how do you correctly respond to the argument? Well, Well, the way you correctly respond to that argument is the same way you would correctly respond to any argument. You either attack it from a logical perspective and say that the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises, or you attack one or more of the premises. The conclusion follows from the from the premise. So that's not going to be a fruitful way to go about refuting the argument.

0:32:54 Jeffrey: But what about the two premises? Some atheists are skeptics or outright deniers of the existence of objective moral values, and so they want to immediately refute the second premise of the argument, which claims that objective moral values exist, but not all atheists are in that camp. There are many atheists, including myself, who say that actually I think objective moral values do exist. So my recommendation would be, even if you're a moral subjectivist or a moral error theorist, to not put all of your eggs in one basket and respond to Craig's moral argument only by attacking the idea that objective moral value exists.

0:33:44 Jeffrey: Because for a lot of people, that argument is a non-starter. You could have the most killer argument in the world for that position. But for a lot of people, you know, the existence of God may be negotiable, but the existence of objective moral values is not. And hearing an atheist say, well, the only reason the moral argument for God doesn't work is because objective moral values don't exist.

When they hear that, what they're going to translate that to in their mind is, well atheists are immoral people because they deny morality. Now, that's a total straw man of what the atheist is saying, but that's what they're going to hear. And since they're probably already coming into the debate with a preconceived notion of what atheists are like, which is typically a preconcieved notion that atheists are immoral, they're rebelling against the knowledge of God that they have so that they can pursue an immoral lifestyle and have lots of sex. Perhaps, yeah, so to then hear the atheists say, well, but there are no objective moral values, that just totally feeds into their preconceptions.

In my opinion, a better strategy, even if you don't believe in objective moral value, a much better strategy is to attack the first premise of the argument and say, no, premise one is false. If God does not exist, that says nothing about whether or not objective moral balance exists. Objective moral values, it could be the case that objective moral values exist, and God does not exist. There's no logical contradiction between those two claims, and furthermore there's no reason to believe that the existence of objective moral values even provides evidence that would make theism probable.

0:34:42 Thomas: My plan.

0:35:33 Jeffrey: It doesn't even do that. So it's a complete red herring.

0:35:38 Thomas: Now, here I think, and maybe you're going to get into this, but I think the response would be from Christians that I've seen in debates would be, well, if there's no God, then who's telling you? What's to say? You know, how can you actually have an objective moral belief or moral dictate without a dictator? Tater, how can you, uh, you know, it's just up to vote is what I think I've heard, uh, William Lane Craig say, are

0:36:03 Jeffrey: Yeah, so that's just just an embarrassing comment that would reveal whoever's making that statement that, um, you know, if they're being sincere, if they, if that isn't just, um, um, some sort of tactic that they're using in a debate, but they really believe that, then that's just embarrassing for them, because it shows they haven't read very much philosophy, specifically metaethics, the, there was a book, book written by philosopher Quentin Smith called Ethical and Religious Thoughts in Analytic Philosophy of Language, published by Yale University Press in 1997. Not exactly on the bestseller list. I mean, this is a technical book in philosophy. But the reason I bring it up in conversations like this is that it is basically a history of 20th century moral philosophy.

0:36:55 Jeffrey: And anyone who's familiar with the history of 20th century moral philosophy knows that it contains several significant efforts by philosophers to describe a metaethics that does not include God. God, starting with G.E. Moore at the turn of the 20th century, is well known for the position that moral facts are so-called non-natural. And that terminology is really unfortunate because in the context of metaphysical naturalism and theism, when people hear non-natural, they immediately think of ghosts and gods and things like that.

0:37:42 Jeffrey: What he really meant was just that moral facts and properties are irreducible. You can't take a moral fact and reduce it down to something physical the way that you could take a computer chip and reduce down to atoms. So according to G.E. Moore, moral facts, moral properties are non-natural, they're so generous. And so G.E. Moore's position is actually, in one sense, you could say it's a form of neoplatonism, because platonism says that basically, you know, there's this form of the good. There are these abstract objects that represent things like justice or truth or kindness.

0:38:38 Jeffrey: And those things are the foundation of objective moral values. G.E. Moore was basically, in one sense, you could say he was giving the 20th century version of that. And there were other approaches like that. Much more recently, Eric Wielenberg, an atheist philosopher, I can't remember the name of his university. I want to say it's DePauw University. It's somewhere in the Midwest. Has written a number of journal articles, as well as a couple of really good books on metaethics, including one that just came out in the last year from Oxford University Press. And he describes in great length what it would mean for objective world values to exist without God. So when someone says, well, you know, of course, premise one of William Lane Craig's argument is true. How could it not be? Wouldn't it just, you know, come, wouldn't it Just come up, come to a vote or whoever's in power?

They're not, they're not even engaging or showing that they're familiar with the work done by non-theistic philosophers in the 20th century. Typically, in my experience, the reason that premise one, if it seems appealing at all, the reason it seems to have something going for it is because of what I call the moral laws require a moral lawgiver argument.

0:40:11 Jeffrey: And so you see that argument in all sorts of slogans, like laws require lawgivers, prescriptions require a prescriber, commands require a commander, and so forth. And there is kind of an intuition that goes along with that. And I think this is another mistake that a lot of atheists and would-be debaters make when they take on the moral argument, is they seem completely completely oblivious to the force of the intuitions which seem to support the moral arguments. And in fact, the atheists who respond to these arguments, it's as if they don't know that the intuitations exist, or they don't care, but they don't even try to acknowledge them, much less the

0:41:01 Thomas: You talking about the intuitions that there is an objective morality, like, just our

0:41:05 Jeffrey: Intuition That there is an objective moral value, morality, and the intuition that, um, uh, laws require lawgivers, so There's You know, there's more than one intuition here, and it's not like you can't go against an intuition, there's no law of philosophy or logic or rhetoric that says you can't go against intuition, but by the very nature of the case, and if you're going against an intuition, you're going against something that seems like it's very likely to be true. So you better have a pretty compelling argument for why you should not believe the intuition. And what I see is atheists don't do that. So what I would say is in response to premise one of the moral argument, I would say no, objective moral values can exist, even if God does not exist. Laws do not have to have lawgivers, it seems like they do. Because when

0:41:05 Thomas: Oh Okay, yeah Let

0:42:02 Jeffrey: You think about laws, you're probably thinking about the kind of laws that you associate with the government, and government laws do have lawmakers by definition, but there are other kinds of laws that don't have to have lawmakers. Besides the laws of morality, we could talk about the laws of logic, the laws, mathematics, the laws, or rationality, if you accept that those things are laws, and why wouldn't you? By the very nature of the case, those are not things that used to be false and then became true one day by fiat because a bunch of people got together and voted to make them true. Those things are just necessarily true. It's not even possible for them to be false.

0:42:49 Jeffrey: And by analogy, objective moral truths could be objectively true in the exact same way, which which is to say that they could be necessarily true. So and, you know, Craig has a response to that. We can talk about that. But yeah, so

0:43:06 Thomas: Me ask you first real quick, uh, before we Get too far away from it, I'm guessing I already know the answer, doesn't have a great track record among philosophers, but do you think that Sam Harris's Moral Landscape contributed anything to this, or, or at least referenced, referenced any of the same arguments you're talking about? I'm assuming You're Familiar with

0:43:23 Jeffrey: I have a confession to make with all due respect to Sam Harris. I haven't read his book, so I don't want to strawman him by speaking about something I haven'T read. So I wish I had something to say, But I haven't read it. I've actually been kind of heads down reading the writings of people who are specialists in meta-ethics and pretty much ignoring what anybody else has to say about it.

0:43:26 Thomas: Haven't read It Okay Okay Yeah, that's Fine That's fair enough Well, I think the answer to premise one seems pretty simple. I mean, like you said, it, it, it seems to me, and you can tell me if I'm making any errors here, what you think, but it seems to me, if I were to take a crack at premise one, I just think when you're given a set of objectives, once at that point, there can be an objective route to those goals. I used objective twice in two different ways, so I'll switch it to goals. We're all born into this system where we have some goals. We roughly all agree that we want to flourish in some way and not be violent or whatever. And the the constraint on that is just physical pain. It's just physical, just bad things that will happen to us if we don't all kind of come to this loose agreement.

0:44:43 Thomas: And once you have that, it's just like a game of chess. I mean, once you agree that the objective of chess is to, you know, capture theirs to, checkmate the king, and the pieces move the way they do, then there's an objective way to find that, I mean, there's may not be one, but there are going to be objective ways you can achieve that goal, and it, to me, it's, it's seems like it's just like that, we, we, roughly speaking, and it's not perfect, that's the thing, that's a thing that I think is evidence more for naturalism, is that you may come across someone who doesn't share these goals, you may come across somebody who says, now that the goal of chess is to capture the rook, and it is like, okay, well, I guess we can't really play chess, I mean, we can try to.

Similarly, if you find someone who thinks the objective of life is to make everyone as miserable as possible, honestly, it's not like they're wrong. It's just that we don't want to live in that world. And that's my sort of layman's take at it based on the reading I've done. What do you think about that?

0:45:46 Jeffrey: Well, there's a lot of – I would agree with a lot OF what you said. I wouldn't call that objective, not in the sense that philosophers like William Lane Craig are talking about. And this is actually going to be my next point, is that a big source of confusion in these debates I'm actually going to lay responsibility for on theists for doing such a lousy job of defining their terms. I had kind of an epiphany moment when I was living in Philadelphia at the time, and I drove about an hour over to Amish country to, I think it's Franklin and Marshall College out in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where Paul Kurtz, the late Paul Kurtz, was debating William Lane Craig on morality with and without God. And I took very detailed notes, what they call a flow that people on debate teams use, and ended up writing an article about it for the Internet Infidels newsletter.

0:45:57 Thomas: Hmm. Oh, okay.

0:46:48 Jeffrey: Letter, and it was, you know, I had been following a lot of Craig's debates and I'd read his book, uh, Reasonable Faith, but it wasn't until I went to that debate and listened to how Craig explained his argument, responded to Paul Kurtz, that I had this epiphany about how Craig was defining the word "objective" when he talks about objective moral values, and then it became very, very clear. The reason that people like Paul Kurtz, who was a philosopher, were doing such a poor job of responding to his argument is because Craig, in turn, had done such a poor job of explaining it up front.

0:47:39 Thomas: Well, I have to sort of apologize because, believe it or not, that was like just as good of a place to stop as any other because it never stopped with Jeff. Jeff has a ton of just knowledge on this subject and was able to speak completely in an organized fashion eloquently just nonstop, which is a skill I wish I had. And for that reason, we really didn't have much of a break in the conversation for pretty much the entire hour and 40 minutes. That's right. There's about another hour and it's even better, I think, than the first hour. So look forward to that on Thursday. Or if you are a Patreon on patreon.com/atheist, you can look forward to that very soon.

0:48:27 Thomas: I'm going to post it right away, no later than the end of the day on Monday, so you can enjoy that very early if you are very patron. So thanks to all those who are patrons, and again, if you want to hear that early, patreon.com/atheist, and it's, it's really good, I'm excited about it. Thanks so much to Jeff, and looking forward to part two. See you later.