I’ve written before about the moral argument. To summarize, if God exists, then objective moral values exist. God is the source of these objective moral values. There is no other possible source.
So, do objective moral values exist? I believe in God, so I hold that they do. If you are an atheist, you may either:
- Affirm that they exist, but have no basis for believing so.
- Deny that they exist, yet live as if they do.
- Deny that they exist, and live as if they don’t exist
Most atheists fall into the first two categories. They don’t realize that their worldview is intellectually inconsistent. That’s the thing about cognitive dissonance, when you have it, you can’t see it. I believe most atheists fall into the first category. Most atheists reject Christianity, yet they try to keep the parts of that moral system that they like, while rejecting those that they don’t like. Take sexual morality. They reject it. It is perhaps the largest stumbling block for atheists. They want to be promiscuous or perverse and to force others to accept it, thinking that will make them happy. It makes sense in theory, but not in practice. Christians actually have the best sex lives. Funny, when you conform to God’s design, things work out better on average. Sexual morality is firmly rejected, unfortunately by many Christians as well.
There are a few atheists that realize that they can’t admit that moral values exist. Richard Dawkins is one example. He falls into the second category, however, because he states that raising a child with a Christian worldview is wrong and is equivalent to child abuse. Imagine that, claiming there is no such thing as right or wrong and at the same time condemning religious education as child abuse.
When you throw a rock into a herd of pigs, the one that got hit is the one that squeals. The best evidence for the existence of objective moral values appears when one is wronged. Atheists will usually support such perversions like gay marriage. Look at what happens when the government enshrines this absurdity as a “right”, and then someone violates that “right”.
Pigs are just amoral animals, but if you offend a human they squeal just as loudly. The reason is that they believe that you are wrong to offend them. They believe they have the right to live unmolested. But that is a moral argument, and if morals exist, God exists. They act as if refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding is wrong. Not just illegal, but actually wrong. In doing so, they are affirming that objective moral values do exist, and therefore affirming the existence of God.
Those atheists in the third category are more rare. Most of them may pretend that they believe moral values exist, in order to take advantage of their fellow man. They expect you to honor a contract, even though no moral law has been broken if you don’t. This is the most dangerous kind of atheist. Stalin and Mao are examples that have killed tens of millions of people. Never put an atheist in a position of power for this reason.
Atheists, you claim that moral values don’t exist. We can tell, however, that you don’t really believe that, when it’s your ox that gets gored.
It is possible to assert morality is objective absent anything else. Does mathematics exist?
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2015/04/great-math-mystery/
Does 2+2=4 because it can’t be otherwise, or because God created it that way?
An Atheist (e.g. Stefan Molyneux and his “Universally Preferable Behavior” or Ayn Rand’s Objectivism) would simply say they are discovering morality through reason not unlike Euclid discovered the rules of geometry.
The problem Atheists have is mainly with sex. They will admit violence and theft, and even cheating are bad, but not debauchery, homosexuality, etc. though if they reasoned through them (as Molyneux has) they would come to the same set of morals as Christians have. They won’t call the evolutionary dead end, disease spreading gay lifestyle wrong, not because every bit of objective reason and evidence says so, but because it wouldn’t be nice. Transgender is even worse.
It is possible to assert morality is objective absent anything else.
It is possible to assert. It carries no authority. 2+2=4 because it can’t be otherwise. That is simply advanced counting. You have 2 apples, you add to more, you have 4 apples. You don’t have 4 apples because you ought to, you have them because that’s how many you have.
Morality is a different category. Morality dictates what you ought to do in a situation. You see a 20 dollar bill hanging out of someone’s back pocket. Is it wrong to take it? You can’t answer that question with science or math. You can attempt it with reason, but you can reason your way in to evil as easily as good.
There’s a hint there in the phrase “universally preferable behavior”. It all depends on whose preferences, doesn’t it?
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