Category: Ethics - franz kiekeben

RELIGION AND MORALITY

1/12/2019

It is often claimed that morality comes from religion — that without the Ten Commandments and such things, we would not know right from wrong. On this view, atheists can be moral, but only because we “borrow” our values from the religious principles that permeate society. Even some who aren’t religious, or aren’t in any sense orthodox about their beliefs, sometimes say such things. Thus, the influential psychologist Jordan Peterson argued not long ago that Sam Harris is “fundamentally” a Christian because “he doesn’t rob banks, doesn’t kill people, doesn’t rape.”

Yet there’s a simple argument that shows morality doesn’t originate in religion: If it did, we wouldn’t find anything in religion to be morally problematic. In other words, if we learned right and wrong from the Bible, then we wouldn’t find any of the moral pronouncements there to be disturbing. The religious wouldn’t struggle with how it could be that God commanded the mass killing of infants, for example. They would simply accept that as yet another instance of God’s perfect justice and goodness.

Now, one possible objection to this argument concerns the fact that the principles one finds in the Bible, at least if taken at face value, are inconsistent with one another. God says, “thou shall not kill”, yet also sometimes commands us to kill. Might this not be the explanation why we find the command to kill disturbing? No. If we truly viewed the Bible as the source of morality, the contradictions would be disturbing only in the sense that they would raise questions regarding what really should be done. We might have a problem figuring out what constitutes an exception to “thou shall not kill”; we wouldn’t be disturbed by the fact that in some cases infants can be killed in mass numbers. Moreover, there would be no reason to consider one commandment as more problematic than its opposite. If we learned morality from the Bible, then after learning of the killing of infants, we might wonder how it could be a good thing for God to command us not to kill!

Perhaps some will say that the great majority of God’s injunctions are of one type (against killing, for example), and that the problematic ones are those that appear to go against the majority. But actually, most of what God commands is rather bad, so if we go by this logic, our reactions should be the exact opposite of what they are. We should be disturbed by the fact that God sometimes commands us to love our neighbor. How could he command such a thing, when it goes against most of what he teaches?

(The Jordan Peterson claim can be seen here, starting at about 22:10.)

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

PETER KREEFT ON THE NATURE OF MORALITY

11/28/2018

In the Prager University video “Where Do Good and Evil Come From?”, religious philosopher Peter Kreeft makes so many mistakes that if you blink, you’ll probably miss some. This post points out the most glaring ones.

The video’s overall purpose is, of course, to demonstrate the existence of God by means of the moral argument — that is, that objective morality exists, God is the source of that morality, therefore God exists. But there are explanations of morality that do not depend on God. Kreeft therefore begins by criticizing these “atheistic” accounts (two of which we will look at here), before proceeding to the religious one.

Some atheists appeal to evolution as an explanation of morality. Kreeft rejects this approach by first pointing out that on such a view, morality changes — that is, evolves — over time, and then arguing that if it “can change for the good or the bad, there must be a standard above these changes to judge them as good or bad.” He uses the example of slavery to make the point, reminding us that it existed for most of human history, yet for the longest time “no one questioned it.” (Interestingly, he neglects to mention that one of those who didn’t question it was God. I’m sure this was just an oversight, though.) The idea, then, is that, just because slavery was once accepted, that did not make it acceptable — and so there must be a standard which applies independently of our change in attitudes.

This is a rather strange criticism, however. Those who appeal to evolution as a basis of morality aren’t talking about cultural changes, like the one that took place over slavery. Their point is that human beings evolved to have a particular nature, and that nature determines what for us is right and wrong. But instead of presenting an argument against that, Kreeft presents one against cultural relativism.

Perhaps he just means that the evolutionary account implies change in the long run, and so fails for the same reason cultural relativism does. Unfortunately, he then tries to argue against relativism by claiming that, if you can say that something might be accepted without being acceptable, “you are admitting to objective morality.” This, however, ignores alternatives to objective morality other than relativism. I can say that slavery is unacceptable, by which I mean that according to the standards I accept, it is wrong — even if it is accepted by some. And in saying this, I do not have to claim that the standards I go by are objectively true. In fact, I don’t.

The next explanation for morality Kreeft considers is the attempt to justify it on the basis of reason. Now, I agree that reason isn’t the ultimate source of morality. Kreeft’s way of showing that it isn’t, however, is complete nonsense. He presents two arguments. The first is that, even though criminals use reason to plan and commit crimes, their reason fails to tell them that what they are doing is wrong. But if reason were the basis of morality, that shouldn't be the case.

There are at least three things wrong with this argument. To begin with, it could be that the criminals realize that what they are doing is wrong, and simply don’t care. I’m sure Kreeft would admit that people sometimes knowingly do evil, yet he seems to forget that here. In the second place, if the reasoning they employ has to do with how to commit a crime, it has no more to do with morality than, say, reasoning about mathematics does. If the criminals aren’t reasoning about morality at all, then Kreeft certainly hasn’t shown the failure of reason to tell us the difference between right and wrong. And third, even if the criminals are reasoning about morality, it doesn’t follow that they are reasoning correctly about it. Their failure to conclude that crime is wrong doesn’t show that morality isn’t based on reason, any more than their failure to prove the Pythagorean theorem would show that geometry isn’t based on reason.

Kreeft’s second argument against this view is, if anything, even worse. He brings up the example of people who saved Jews during the Holocaust, and claims they were obviously not doing that as a result of reasoning — for risking one’s life in that manner, he tells us, is very unreasonable. But this is just linguistic confusion. The unreasonableness in this case has nothing to do with right and wrong. If morality is founded on reason, and the right thing to do in such a situation is to risk one’s life, then correct reasoning about it will show that. The fact that that’s unreasonable from the point of view of self-interest is irrelevant.

After having disposed of all atheistic views in this manner, Kreeft presents his case for God as the explanation by uttering the usual nonsense: “there are no moral or immoral atoms, or cells, or genes,” he informs us, therefore morality is non-physical, and therefore it must come from outside the physical universe. At this point, the video is just one obvious non-sequitur after another, so I’ll leave it to readers to see it for themselves.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

STEALING FROM GOD: MORALITY, PART 2

6/7/2018

As expected, Turek criticizes atheists for expressing moral opinions, for on his view that’s inconsistent with atheism. If without God there can be no objective morality, then on what basis do atheists condemn wrongs? Unless, of course, they are once again "stealing from God."

Turek begins his case by pointing out that in the absence of an afterlife, there is no ultimate justice. As Richard Dawkins (who agrees with this part of the argument) put it, “in a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt and other people are going to get lucky; and you won’t find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice.” But if there’s no justice, Turek reasons, then neither is there any injustice — so how can Dawkins criticize, say, the actions of pedophile priests?

This, of course, is yet another example of Turek’s poor reasoning. He interprets Dawkins as claiming that the concept of justice has no application, when what Dawkins is in fact saying is that the world is ultimately unjust: We cannot expect good people to be rewarded and evil doers punished. And that has no bearing whatsoever on the issue of moral objectivity.

But supposing one does in fact deny the existence of objective moral principles: Is it inconsistent in that case to approve of certain things and disapprove of others, as Turek and so many others insist? Is it true that on the atheist view, the murder of a child has “no more moral significance than wearing white after Labor Day,” and that as a nonbeliever, “you need to suppress your most basic moral intuitions”? Not at all. That morality is not objective in no way implies that we do not have moral views, or that it is illegitimate to have them. I don’t believe in objective moral principles, but that doesn’t stop me from having opinions as to what should or shouldn’t be done.

The really strange thing about Turek’s overall argument is that, after claiming that on atheism nothing can be right or wrong, he goes on to describe the morality that he believes in fact follows from the Darwinian worldview — which of course is the view held by just about every atheist:

“If you follow the Darwinian principles consistently, you get the kind of moral outworking that [philosopher] James Rachels suggests.”

But if according to atheism there are no moral principles, as Turek maintains, then there cannot be any principles on an atheistic Darwinian perspective. Turek is confused once again. Even worse, he misrepresents Rachels’s views so as to make them look really bad. He quotes the following passage from Rachels' Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism, claiming that the doctrine being discussed is the Darwinian one:

“What are we to say about [certain brain-damaged individuals]? The natural conclusion, according to the doctrine we are considering, would be that their status is that of mere animals. And perhaps we should go on to conclude that they may be used as non-human animals are used — perhaps as laboratory subjects, or as food?”

Turek then asks his readers if they think he is “making this up,” adding: “Who could believe there’s nothing really wrong with such horrible acts? Atheists. [And] not just Richard Dawkins and James Rachels…”

I’m sure Turek’s readers were convinced more than ever of the evils that atheism and Darwin’s theory lead to. And yet Turek is in fact — whether intentionally or not — “making this up”! The doctrine that Rachels is considering in the above passage is not Darwinism at all, but rather “the idea that humans are in a special moral category because they are rational, autonomous agents” — a view that Rachels rejects in part because it leads to the above consequence! And Turek either knew this, in which case he is lying (in a chapter on morality, no less), or he could easily have checked by reading the two preceding pages (184-186) in Rachels’ book, in which case he was negligent (which also carries with it moral culpability).

Near the end of his chapter, Turek mentions that he often asks atheists, “If Christianity were true, would you become a Christian?” He insists that to answer “no,” as many do, is entirely unreasonable. But it isn’t. To be a Christian isn’t merely to believe in the truth of its doctrines. After all, the devil and his minions presumably believe in the Jesus story, yet aren't part of the flock. To be a Christian, one also has to live in accordance with its doctrines. It follows that anyone who has moral objections to the religion can’t be a Christian, even if they come to the conclusion that the story is true. Turek, however, is so blinded by his assumption that God is the basis of morality that it never occurs to him that someone might have moral reasons for disagreeing.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

STEALING FROM GOD: MORALITY, PART 1

6/1/2018

Continuing with Frank Turek's book, Stealing from God:

What can one say about a chapter informing us that “morality isn’t made of molecules,” and that attempts to stump nonbelievers by asking such questions as: "What does justice weigh?", "What is the chemical composition of courage?", and (my personal favorite) "Did Hitler just have ‘bad’ molecules”? It’s hard to know where to start. But I’ll begin by addressing the underlying argument Turek uses tying morality to God.

Unsurprisingly, Turek maintains that in a godless universe, there can be no objective moral principles. Now, I happen to agree with that — but then I also think that there cannot be objective morality in a universe with a god. God’s got nothing to do with it.

Turek is — again unsurprisingly — also a proponent of the modified divine command theory. This is the new and supposedly improved version introduced as a way to avoid a problem with the older theory. Only it doesn’t.

In the original version, something is good because it conforms to God’s desires. So kindness is good because God desires us to be kind. But that means that if God desired the exact opposite, the exact opposite would be good. If he desired us to kill one another, murder would be right. And a divine command theorist cannot escape this by claiming that God only desires what is good (and thus would never desire murder), for that implies that there is a standard of goodness that is independent of God.

In the modified version, something is good because it conforms to God’s nature. So love and justice are good because God is loving and just. But now the exact same problem arises: If God were hateful, hate would be good. And once again, a divine command theorist cannot escape this by claiming that God’s nature is good (and thus could not be hateful), for that implies that there is a standard of goodness that is independent of God.

Proponents of the view might object that God is necessarily the way he is — so that it is impossible for him to have had a different nature — but that misses the point. (And if that objection worked here, it would work for the original version as well: One could as easily maintain that God couldn’t have desired anything other than what he does desire. So why invent a new theory to avoid that problem?) The reason this misses the point is that it fails to address the underlying question: What makes something good? Is it because it conforms to God’s nature irrespective of what that nature is, or is it because it conforms to God’s good nature? If the former, then the original problem remains. If the latter, then goodness doesn’t depend on God. For in that case, there must be something that makes God’s nature good other that it simply being God’s nature.

We can also understand the problem this way: In order to find out what is good on the modified divine command theory, we must first find out what God’s nature is, and then adjust our behavior accordingly. Now, we may think that we already know what that nature is. But if tomorrow we discover that, actually, God is by nature a liar, not only would we have to regard truth-telling as evil, we would also have to now do the opposite of everything he commands. After all, that stuff about him wanting us to love our neighbor would have been just another one of his deceptions.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

IS SAM HARRIS REDEFINING MORALITY?

3/14/2018

As most people reading this probably know, Sam Harris claims that morality is concerned with well-being, and thus that science can, at least in principle, determine which are the correct moral values. However, some critics have claimed that Harris is talking about morality in a non-standard sense, and that as a result his argument doesn’t work.

Whether Harris is redefining morality came up in a recent discussion between Matt Dillahunty and YouTuber Stephen Woodford. (I didn’t watch the whole video, but the question is briefly discussed starting at 1:12:54.)

Woodford defended Harris by arguing as follows: Morality is about right and wrong, and Harris agrees with that, so he isn’t redefining it. He merely claims that right and wrong have to do with well-being. He is therefore using a different standard than what many others use to determine right from wrong, but is nevertheless still talking about morality. Dillahunty sort-of agreed with this.

But Harris’s position does amount to a redefinition. If he were merely defending a utilitarian ethic — in other words, if all he was doing was arguing that the right action is the one that increases well-being the most — he wouldn’t be redefining anything. In that case, he would only be talking about what he thinks is the correct moral viewpoint. But Harris doesn’t stop there. He also wants to maintain that morality is objective — that there is a fact of the matter regarding what is right and what is wrong. And in order to do so, he claims that morality is about well-being. Briefly, his argument is that, since moral questions are questions about well-being and well-being is an objective property, morality is objective.

But morality isn’t about well-being. It is, as Woodford said, about right and wrong.

The difference here is somewhat subtle, so I'll try to make it as clear as possible. What Harris is doing isn’t merely claiming that the correct standard to use in determining right from wrong is well-being. He’s also claiming that that is the only standard that even makes sense. For him, “right action” just means “an action that increases overall well-being.” And that’s a very different claim. Harris’s view implies that anyone using “right” in a different sense isn’t merely disagreeing on a moral matter. Instead, anyone who does so is using the word incorrectly.

But in fact, it is Harris who is using the word incorrectly. Right and wrong, good and bad, are not by definition about well-being. Someone who disagrees that increasing the overall amount of well-being is always the right thing to do isn’t misunderstanding the meaning of “right.” He just has a different moral view.

This is all the more important because Harris’s argument isn't just wrong: It is also tied to a utilitarian ethic that probably most of his followers wouldn’t support if they actually understood it.

Dillahunty says that the only people who disagree that morality is about well-being are divine command theorists. But that’s obviously not true! I think what’s going on here is that many atheists see only two possibilities. On the one hand, there are the religious moralists who base their ethics on a holy book, irrespective of whether that is conducive to human interests. (If God wants women to be deprived of equal rights and to wear burkas, too bad for the women.) On the other hand, there are those who see morality as being about the well-being of all of us. And of these two, which is better?

But if we are interested in having moral views that correctly reflect what actually concerns us, the above is far too simplistic. It completely ignores some very important moral distinctions.

Here’s one example. Most of us would say fairness is a good thing. Everything else being equal, a fairer outcome is better than a less fair one. The problem is that one cannot consistently say this while maintaining that the only thing that matters is the overall amount of well-being. For if two possible outcomes have the same net result in terms of well-being, they must be equally good, even if one is more fair than the other. In other words, overall well-being doesn't say anything about how that well-being should be distributed. What’s worse, an outcome may result in a greater amount of overall well-being while being less fair — which means it might reasonably be viewed as the less desirable outcome. And it’s not just with respect to fairness that this problem occurs. The same thing can be said regarding justice and rights.

I’m not denying the importance of well-being. We should all be concerned with it — and not with what is in some old holy book. But that doesn’t mean that morality is or should be exclusively about well-being.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

WILLIAM LANE CRAIG AND ALTRUISM

10/19/2017

[The following was originally published on the Patheos blog A Tippling Philosopher as a guest-post:]

In a debate with Paul Kurtz, William Lane Craig contrasted theism and atheism with respect to self-sacrifice. He claims that on the theistic view,

“God holds all persons morally accountable for their actions. Evil and wrong will be punished; righteousness will be vindicated. Despite the inequalities of this life, in the end the scales of God’s justice will be balanced. We can even undertake acts of extreme self-sacrifice that run contrary to our self-interest, knowing that such acts are not empty and ultimately meaningless gestures.”

On the atheistic worldview, on the other hand, acts of self-sacrifice are “just stupid”:

“A firefighter rushing into a burning building to rescue people in danger… does nothing more praiseworthy, morally speaking, than an ant that sacrifices itself for the sake of the ant heap… The absence of moral accountability from the philosophy of atheism thus makes an ethic of compassion and self-sacrifice a hollow abstraction.”

In fact, this is exactly backwards. As philosopher Don Hubin pointed out in an excellent analysis of Craig’s position*, theism as Craig sees it actually makes it impossible for someone to perform a morally praiseworthy act of self-sacrifice. After all, anyone doing a morally praiseworthy act that incurs a loss to them in this life will be rewarded in the next, and thus will not actually have sacrificed anything.

What is particularly interesting, however, is what this implies about the motivation for doing good on Craig’s view. As Hubin points out, even a theist who believes as Craig does can perform altruistic acts. That is, such a theist can do something for the sake of others. Provided they perform the act, not in order to benefit themselves, but from selfless motives, then they behave altruistically. (And this is possible even if they believe they eventually will benefit.) But note that exactly the same selfless motives must be present whenever someone behaves altruistically without the belief that they will eventually benefit. In other words, an atheist who intentionally performs a self-sacrificial act does so from precisely the same motives as a theist who does so for altruistic reasons. And yet this is what Craig describes as “just stupid.”

The obvious conclusion is that according to Craig’s position, the only reason for “loving one’s neighbor as oneself” is because of what’s in it for us! Craig says that on the atheistic view, we “should resist the sociobiological pressures to… self-destructive activity and choose instead to act in our own self-interest.” But in fact, his argument implies that this is what one ought to do whether or not there is a God.

Needless to say, Craig’s entirely egoistic ethics would probably come as a surprise to most of his Christians followers!

* Donald C. Hubin, “Empty and Ultimately Meaningless Gestures?”, in Garcia and King, Is Goodness without God Good Enough?

THOSE SINFUL ATHEISTS

10/17/2017

A common criticism of atheism is that we atheists “just want to sin.” Dinesh D’Souza, for example, said that “the perennial appeal of atheism” is that it “liberates us for the pleasures of sin and depravity,” while Lee Strobel claimed that prior to becoming a Christian, he had a strong motivation for remaining an atheist – namely, a “self-serving and immoral lifestyle” that he would have to give up if he ever became a follower of Jesus.

Of course, if we are nonbelievers just so we can sin, then this fact should be reflected in our behavior – and as we all know, that’s simply not the case. Moreover, if our desire to sin is the reason we fail to accept Jesus, then what about members of other faiths? Presumably, people like D’Souza and Strobel would agree that religious non-Christians have reasons other than a desire to sin for not following Jesus. But if so, then why can’t the reasons atheists give – such as lack of evidence, the incoherence of the Christian doctrine, or a scientific worldview – also be accepted as sincere?

Another problem with the “atheists just want to sin” claim is that, even if it were true, it wouldn’t show that atheists are wrong! The claim that there is no god, or that there is no reason to believe in a god, is separate from whatever motivates someone to accept it. One therefore cannot be justified in dismissing atheism this way.

And there’s at least one additional problem with the claim: an argument can be made that if one wants to sin, then one should actually be a Christian – and many believers accept this, at least implicitly. As Koseighty put it in the comments section [at Debunking Christianity] a few days ago, “Some of the wildest girls I knew in college were Christians. They were quite comfortable doing the things they did because they'd been saved.”

One can see the Christian logic here by means of a Pascal-style argument:

If I want to sin and God doesn’t exist, then it makes no difference whether or not I believe: either way, I won’t get punished. But if God does exist, then it matters: I will only be punished if I don’t believe. Therefore, if I want to sin, I should become a Christian.

Maybe we should start claiming that Christians just want to sin?

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

IS EVERYTHING PERMITTED? ATHEISM VS. THE DIVINE COMMAND THEORY

10/4/2017

It’s a common claim that if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. In particular, those who accept some form of the Divine Command Theory (DCT) tend to say this. It’s not true, of course — but given what their theory implies, it is rather ironic that proponents of DCT claim such a thing.

On the traditional DCT, God determines right and wrong by issuing commands. Moreover, from a moral standpoint, these commands have to be arbitrary. (If they weren’t — if there were some moral reason why God commands one thing rather than another — then there would be something other than God’s commands making things right or wrong.) But this arbitrariness means that, morally speaking, God can command anything he wants. There are no moral rules preventing him from doing so. It is therefore in principle possible for God to permit anything. It follows that on the traditional DCT, anything might be permitted.

Nor is this problem entirely solved by modified DCT. Modified theorists say that God’s nature is such that he can only command those things that are compatible with his nature. Thus, they may argue that God is by nature a loving being — and therefore that we can say that cruelty, for example, will never be permitted.

However, if the most fundamental principle of modified DCT is that it is God’s nature that determines what is good, then it follows that that is the case even if theists are wrong about what that nature is. But in that case, they must admit that it is possible that they are wrong about what might be permitted. In other words, if what makes something right is that it is a command that follows from God’s nature, and theists might be mistaken about that nature, then they cannot rule out anything being permitted.

At this point, some theists might of course reply that they cannot be wrong about God's nature. And yet, these are the same people who on other occasions say that no one can truly understand God's ways. Or who, when something bad happens, say that God must have had his reasons — reasons which he obviously has kept from us. But then God may also have a reason to hide his true nature from us.

It appears that it is the DCT, then, and not atheism, that creates this kind of problem for morality.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

ARE CHRISTIANS EVIL?

8/16/2017

[Note: I've been invited to contribute to John Loftus's blog, Debunking Christianity. However, I will re-post here whatever I write for that site. The following is my first such post.]

Orthodox Christianity holds that those who don’t “make the cut” end up suffering for all of eternity, and this has of course been the cause of much criticism of the religion. Something that is rarely considered, however, is what this doctrine says about Christians themselves. For the Christian must of course view the eternal suffering of sinners as justified. And yet, by the moral standards most of us accept, eternal punishment is never justified – much less for individuals who aren’t really evil. Perhaps some would consider that kind of suffering as appropriate punishment for Hitler or Ted Bundy. But what about all the average non-Christians who end up in hell – people like your neighborhood atheist or Hindu? An orthodox Christian must be in favor of eternal suffering for such individuals as well. If he were to witness their being thrown into hell fire on Judgement Day, he would have to find that perfectly proper and right. Does this mean orthodox Christians are evil?

There is of course some debate regarding what the orthodox view is. Many apologists these days claim that all that talk of hell fire is metaphorical, and that eternal punishment is merely separation from God. But that doesn’t really help much. For even if the language is metaphorical, it must represent something really bad – why else use such terrible imagery? And in fact those who say that hell is merely separation from God then turn around and point out just how truly horrible that separation is. But if it is so terrible, then the problem remains: how can it be right?

One thing we might say in defense of the average Christian is that most may only be paying lip service to the doctrine of eternal punishment. They may say that they believe in the Bible, but they don’t really think about what it actually states. The doctrines of their religion are far removed from their everyday concerns. I think this is the case with most of my neighbors, for example. There are many others, however, who take their faith more seriously, who really think about it, read scripture, and seem to literally believe what it says. And it is these people that present a problem here. Do we really want to say they are evil? That would mean, for me, having to call my own grandmother (among many others) evil – and probably similarly for most of you. And what about atheists who used to believe? Did they use to be terrible people who are now redeemed?

None of that sounds even close to being right. And yet I’m not sure what the solution is. How can someone’s approval of eternal suffering be excused?

The best suggestion I have is to point out how people tend to compartmentalize their beliefs. A few weeks ago, I wrote in a comment that “If I told my neighbors I was going to sacrifice my son tomorrow in the backyard because God told me to do it, they'd call the police. Yet they regard Abraham's obedience to God as a virtue.” How can one explain this inconsistency? I think it’s because their religious beliefs are kept separate form their everyday beliefs. They apply different standards to them. If the reality of divine “justice” was right in front of them, if it was every bit as real as their everyday experiences, they would find it horrible. It is only because they keep such ideas in a separate compartment at the back of their minds that they can claim to endorse them. Thus, in a sense, they don’t really believe it.

I’d love to hear what others think about this.

CAN CRAIG CLAIM THAT A WORLD WITHOUT GOD WOULD BE BAD?

7/24/2017

There is an interesting inconsistency between William Lane Craig’s understanding of a godless universe and his acceptance of the moral argument for the existence of God. Craig likes to convince his readers that the atheist’s universe is ultimately a depressing, unattractive, god-awful place. But he also likes to argue for God’s existence based on the idea that moral values depend on God. Now, at first these two claims may not appear to be at odds with one another. But take a closer look at what he says about each one:

According to Craig, objective value depends on the existence of God: “If God does not exist, objective moral values… do not exist.” And since “when we speak of moral values, we’re talking about whether something is good or bad,” it follows from this that if God does not exist, nothing can be objectively bad. [Reasonable Faith, 3rd ed., p. 172 (emphasis added)]

And yet, Craig also claims that a godless universe is really bad. He argues that it is “only by recognizing that the world really is a terrible place” that an atheist “can successfully come to terms with life” in it. “This,” he goes on, “is the horror of modern man.” And he asks of is readers if they truly “understand the gravity of the alternatives” here. For “if God does not exist, then all we are left with is despair.” The world that the atheist believes in is, in other words, dreadful. [Reasonable Faith, 3rd ed., pp. 73-78 (emphasis added)]

So, to sum up, if there is no God, nothing is objectively bad… and yet that would be really bad!

Now, maybe one could try to defend Craig’s views here by claiming that, when he says that a godless world would be “a terrible place,” all he means is that he personally finds the idea distasteful – in other words, that he is expressing his subjective opinion about such a world, not arguing that it would be objectively bad. But to begin with, it seems clear that he means the latter – that it is a fact that a godless world would be bad. Moreover, we need to keep in mind that this is a man who regularly takes atheists to task for claiming that this or that is bad when, in his opinion, they have no basis for believing in objective values. But then by the same logic, he has no basis for claiming that things would be bad if atheists were right.