Giford, a brother in the search for truth, unto Christopher, our beloved brother across the pond.
Hello again Christopher. Hope all is well with you; I hear you were on form at the recent Texas Freethought Convention - I hope that was more than just a chemo good day.
Now, I promised some notes on your response to the moral questions during your panel debate. Sadly, I lost my original notes, so I hope that this poorly remembered rehearsal will suffice.
Some of the panel members - in particular William Lane Craig - challenged your basic premise, which was that religion is immoral. Given the length of time that you spent arguing by example that this is true, this was a serious challenge to your case. And, to a very limited extent, I agree with that challenge; I don't think that religion is inherently evil, or even inherently harmful. It is capable of persuading people to do good things or bad. I do have reservations about whether an inherently close-minded system is desireable, and I certainly don't think that its premises are true; but I could not support a statement such as 'religion poisons everything'.
But Craig goes further, and alleges that as an atheist, you can have no basis for morality, and indeed that your claims that some things are wrong imply that a divine moral lawgiver - by which he means the Christian God - must exist. And here I think you really ought to have drawn the line.
Firstly, secularists can have a much better understanding of what morality truly is than theists can.
We are evolved creatures, not just physically but mentally also. And we are tribal; a lone human has little chance in the world. Our strength comes instead from our ability to live and work together. And that means that we need strong societies. A group of humans that permits its members to kill each other or to steal from each other will not survive - or, more acurately, will have a lower chance of survival than a group that is slightly better at preventing those things. The genes for moral behaviour will be favoured.
Of course, those genes are not too nuanced. They cannot make judgements about how genetically close we are to another individual. They simply assume that if we see someone a lot, they are kin. (There seems to be a slightly better judgement in the case of parent/child relationships, but even that can be confused, by adoption for instance.) So as the 'global village' shrinks, we find ourselves feeling more compassion for the proverbial starving African children who we might not even have been aware of a century ago, or may even have seen as the 'out group' - different from 'us' and therefore rivals to be feared and hated.
This view - aside from being pretty obvious really - makes sense of a whole range of otherwise confusing details about morality. Why do we disagree so often about what is right? Because there is no transcendental standard of morality.
The counter-argument will no doubt come that by this standard, all morality is relative. You or I have no reason to say that murder or rape are wrong, only that in our opinion they are. But this will not stand a moment's thought. Some standards are universal among humans because they are basic to what is needed for a society to survive - the wrongness of murder, for instance, as explained above. But more importantly, just because something is decided by humans, it does not follow that it is decided by each individual human for themselves. The English language, for instance, is clearly a human creation - no-one but the most uneducated (and mythical) American Congressman would claim it is given to us by God. Yet clearly there are right and wrong uses of English - decided not by the individual, but by a broad consensus.
So with morality. We decide it - not as individuals, but as a group. And yes, different groups can have different moral opinions, and yes that can make it hard in cases such as female genital mutilation, where different groups have opposing moralities. All we can do is try to influence.
Secondly, contra Craig, theists can have no divine basis for morality.
This is essentially the Euthyphro argument, which predates your co-panelists' religion, and with which I cannot believe you are not familiar. It breaks down into two options.
The first option is that God doesn't make things right or wrong, He merely tells us what is right and wrong.
There are numerous problems with this - you dwelt extensively on the problem of how people know what God wants - but perhaps the most basic is that it leaves the theist in the same position Craig claims you are in - if God does not create morality, the theist is left with no explanation for its existence.
So it would seem that Craig is forced to the second horn of the dilemma, that God actually decides what is right and what is wrong. Unfortunately, this fares no better.
For a start, it is every bit as arbitrary as Craig's caricature of relative morality. 'Before' (if I can use the word metaphorically) God decided murder was wrong, there was nothing at all wrong with it. Had God decided that murder and rape were true virtues and helping little old ladies across the road was the greatest sin, that would be true. And indeed, if God changed his mind (and, as an orthodox Christian, Craig is commited to the idea of a Old and a New Covenant), murder might become a moral virtue tomorrow. (As you pointed out at length, how would we even know that this had happened?)
It is tempting to think that the response to this is to say that the Christian God would never make murder good, because to do so would be evil - but this assumes that there is something inherently wrong with murder. But that takes us right back to the first horn of the dilemma, where God can't make things right or wrong, and we've already seen that that fails.
So in fact, Christian theists can have no basis for their morality unless they are prepared to join us secularists. This is a debate that Craig and his like cannot win - and, whilst it requires some length to be made convincingly, I think your time would have been better spent there than in the task of trying to prove that no good has ever come of religion.
I sincerely hope that we have not heard the last of your voice in this field; but I also hope that you can find the intellectual rigour to match your turn of phrase.
ttfn,
Gif
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