Atheist Debates - Do we need God for Morality? Matt Dillahunty, John Ferrer Oct 2018

howdy thank you all for coming tonight questions of right wrong good and evil are some of our most profound for many people God plays the central moral lawgiver in their life and this raises the concern that if God's not true if God's not real if we don't have God in our lives how can we truly have a solid foundation for our moral beliefs as Nietzsche once said morality has truth only if God is the truth and it stands and falls with God could this fear be overblown do we really need God for morality this will be the discussion for tonight [Music] I first like to get started by thinking about the Association of former students and the Christian faculty Network without them this program simply could not have happened they provided a lot of pivotal help we were in neat and very thankful for them the host for tonight's event is the Texas A&M secular Student Alliance and ratio Kristi I myself from the president of the first Nathan turning right here is the president of the ladder see both of our organizations really seek to create events that stimulate provocative thought discussion things of the sort and we really try to bring people from a diverse set of backgrounds beliefs ideologies etc etc together to have you know meaningful fruitful discussions very much like what we're trying to do here tonight when you came in you would notice that you were handed both a pencil and a info card we ask that you take that out now and pharrell out fill out the front side of the card if you could just take a few minutes to do that yeah also on the front side there's something that says if you would like to stay in contact with ratio Christi go ahead and leave your email unfortunately we didn't have time to put the cycleyou Student Alliance organization on there as well so if you want to be on our our mail list as well just go ahead and write the SSA or anything like that on there and we'll go ahead and get you on our mail list as well all right so kind of a style of this debate or discussion or I should say is we're gonna have opening statements from both of our presenters tonight followed by a quick 10-minute break we're then gonna switch into more of a facilitated discussion with Professor Garcia not sure where he is right now but he will be facilitating the discussion and also during any time during the debate if you see the hashtag right here if you have any questions I just pop into your mind you don't have anything to write it down on you don't want to lose it you can go ahead and tweet any of your questions to a hashtag immorality debate TAMU and those questions will be included in our Q&A at the end of the discussion I'd like to take a quick moment to introduce both of our speakers our first speaker is dr. John Ferrer he's an educator and former associate pastor hailing from South Carolina he earned his PhD in the philosophy of religion from southwestern Baptist University sorry southwestern about this Theological Seminary and it's currently a teaching fellow at the Equal Rights Institute he also runs the intelligent Christian faith blog as well as volunteering for the Pella profe life and local student for life chapter at Central College our other speaker tonight is mr. Matt Dillahunty mr. Matt Dillahunty is a American public speaker avid gamer magician and Internet personality he was actually originally seeking to become a minister but his investigation into religious truth led him to kind of Ashu those religious beliefs and he actually became very prominent in the atheist community over time he now identifies as both a skeptic humanist atheist and he engages in many formal debates discussions and the like you know tries to engage both those who he does and does not agree see [Applause] all right we will now have our first presenter to come up and give a 15 minute introduction and then we will have our other speaker come up and we will get into the discussion [Music] hello everybody thank you for having me I've got a lot of ground to cover so I'm gonna move fairly fast here but I think I've got a way to help you keep track I'm gonna give three arguments essentially these arguments can be represented with three images here a house a mirror and a doorknob a house a mirror and a doorknob the first image of a house refers to what I'm calling the cumulative case for Christian ethics since this is a moderated dialogue I'm going to lay out a whole bunch of stuff just kind of kind of throw out a general case which I I couldn't possibly defend all of it meticulously in in a 15-minute time but I'm gonna throw it out there so it'll be some nice provocative stuff for the Q&A period but it's a cumulative case for Christianity I refer to a house because in many ways I understand Christianity as kind of like Christian ethics specifically but we could refer to theistic ethics and have a stream down version of this but Christian ethics as a house is kind of this place you could move into it's a fully furnished house with lots of moral furniture that's been worked over through so many years of theologizing and philosophizing and it's a well furnished place so that it's ready to live in and in contrast the image I have of secular ethics is more like a barren desert now I know if I just left it at that that would look like an insult but I'm gonna try to make a case for that so the cumulative case starts off with something that's not contentious at all we should favor the overall better explanation that seems like a good rule of thumb generally speaking the second one's really contentious Christian ethics is a better overall explanation compared to secular ethics and three therefore we should favor Christian ethics now here's how I'm going to defend number two because I assume that's the one people are going to contest people can do good or even be good without having a strong account of all the facets of morality that's a given I grant that yet ignorant on these facets that we're going to mention is still problematic for example metaphysics the nature of being in existence if histology what kind of a thing is moral knowledge moral psychology referring to moral judgments and reasoning and moral motivation and then normative ethics these are moral systems like utilitarianism Conti and deontology and stuff like that social ethics ethics applied interpersonally and then practical ethics this is boots on the ground going out and doing good type of stuff now how does Christian ethics fair use it painting with a really broad brush here metaphysic the the metaphysics of morals for Christians traces back to grounding in God we identify goodness not just by opinions or preferences or arbitrary outcomes of natural forces but rather in a divine mind which takes us to the second one realism based in God's mind our moral theory in terms of what can be known morally we understand moral facts to be things that can be independent of human minds yet they're grounded in a divine mind now that may sound like subjectivism but we're referring to an unchanging and necessary mind which as as grounded as something could possibly hope to be moral psychology the key here is moral agency if people are forced to do everything that they do by biological or by theological necessity then then it's difficult to make the case that they're still morally responsible but Christianity at least major portions of it allows for moral agency in free will regarding morally charged situations and then normative ethics there are several options here I won't go into all of it but I'm a fan of virtue ethics natural law ethics graded absolutism and divine essentialism and then socially in terms of social ethics and practical ethics Christianity I contend fares better for example the abolition of slavery I've done a good deal of research on this and people love to point out abuses of the church in regards to supporting slavery in in the American South but when you do a broader survey across the history of modern civilization you find that almost every civilization that has formally abolished slavery had to be thoroughly Christianized first even though they all had atheists in some men almost almost all of them had atheists in some measure before that but Christianity also played an instrumental role in helping Rome in the in the early centuries of of this millennia or the first millennia to abolish infanticide and gladiator games and Christianity also served a formative role in helping to found the first universities and even some of the first hospitals now how does a theism fare I suggested it's it's a barren landscape now you can't survive in a barren landscape if you smuggling goods from outside naturalism that is the the view of nature most common among atheists consistently applied is to barren to live in metaphysics the answer is that the answer to metaphysical grounding is a grounding problem I suggest which I'll get into argument too when it comes to the theory of knowledge there's a circularity problem which will be my argument three moral psychology biological determinism though not every atheist I've met runs into this many of them support determinism which if applied consistently tends to suggest there's no real moral responsibility and those that don't affirm determinism oftentimes I interact with them and their appeal to freewill is is kind of shallow or they don't know how freewill could have emerged from a mechanistic universe and then normative ethics when it comes to our ethical theories many atheists suffer from a problem I call a minimalist ethics or lowest-common-denominator ethics that's what the LCD refers to where there's one or two moral principles that everything is supposed to revolve around like liberty or pleasure and some would would incorporate an element of evolution and that would refer to survival but many times that's too flimsy to build a family or society off of ethics must justify self-sacrifice work courage undying loyalty in bold convictions even sometimes martyrdom if you're going to have a well-established morally grounded kind of civilization social ethics the landscape for much of atheism and again I don't want to say every atheist is like this but the landscape is often too lonely statistics have shown a tendency towards lowered marriage rates higher divorce rates and less community I don't know if that's a correlation or causation but it's still significant and then practical ethics as I argued earlier Christianity I think fairs better number two so that's the house it's a livable house as opposed to a barren landscape number two the metaphysics of morals I want to point out moral facts how do you tell if a mirror is a good mirror while you compare it to the thing it's reflected does it distort it is it is it stretching or shrinking it somehow that would be a bent mirror well moral facts are kind of like that a fact is a fact only insofar as it correctly represents or correctly corresponds to its reference point a moral fact for it to be a moral fact must correspond to its referent reference point I suggest that Nature doesn't have reference points that could make any of our moral claims true now that looks like an argument for nature alone cannot make moral facts more claims true and thereby factual yet moral facts exist this is something that Matt and I have both agreed on so I'm not going to defend that I'll take it as a given therefore nature isn't all there is conversely super naturalism is true ie at least some sort of some sort of supernatural being exists now a fuller treatment of this would take it into you need a sufficient mind to ground morality and that would have to be closer to a divine mind than anything else now I've made the claim that nature doesn't have truth makers well to make moral claims factual there's a big problem for a naturalistic outlook and that's the is art problem how do you go from descriptions of how nature is including humans and we're part of nature unless you're super naturalist how do you go from descriptions of how nature is to how anything whatsoever should be should is a hypothetical it's not a material State should is not something that exists materially speaking naturally speaking if you're a materialist it doesn't and yet all of morality is statements of what should be or should not be what should be done or should not be done that's a pretty big leap to go from natural facts of is to moral facts of what should be more over science isn't necessarily gonna bridge the gap by itself either because science is a descriptive exercise - not a prescriptive exercise it's not saying do this don't do that it's saying if you want to survive here's how to do it if you want to save the whales maybe here's some options to do that to do that but it's not saying you should want to survive or you should want to save the whales or you should do anything whatsoever number two appealing to evolution doesn't help very much as that would render all morality trivial arbitrary and unreliable nature happens to have made made us according to a naturalist perspective so that we consider rate to be awful unbearable evil wrong well give it time nature could change they could nature could change us apparently in in animal history and perhaps human history rape has been considered morally permissible or at least it has been common enough to be morally accepted if not morally condoned atheism isn't a worldview this is oftentimes beaten on on Vyas it's just godlessness it has no commitment to morality atheism fits with every ethical outlook that happens to lack God belief it can include philanthropists and charity workers or sociopaths and criminal deviant that's just how it is now I gave you a reference to a house a reference to a mirror and now a reference to a doorknob I'm referencing here a circularity problem we were at dinner today and suppose I excused myself from dinner and went to the bathroom and I did my business wash my hands and then turn around to face the bathroom door and it turns out oh no this isn't a lever that you can use your elbow on it's not one of those walkways that there's not really a door so you just walk it's a doorknob and I happen to know that doorknob in a bathroom oftentimes is a dirtiest thing you're gonna have contact with in a bathroom it's got all kinds of fecal microbes and germs and nasty stuff snot and whatnot and that's just how doorknobs are so I turn to I turn the knob and then oh now I need to go wash my hands I turn around and wash my hands and then I go turn the knob and now my hands are dirty again I've got a small scale loop here a circularity problem now similar problems that might be more more restrictive might be for example I can't get a job because I don't have a car but I can't get a card because I don't have a job I'm stuck or if you go to the movie theater and they're selling tickets at the drink counter but they check for tickets at the front door you have to you have to present a ticket that you can't buy yet before you can get and so that's a circularity problem I contend that the brain creates a circularity problem for secular ethics the circularity problem in argument form looks something like this we know some moral facts to know moral facts implies a reliable means of knowing nature alone can't offer that because of the circularity problem a famous guy with a white beard I think Santa Claus said with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals are of any value or at all trustworthy would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind if there are any convictions in such a mind I ran into this problem in discussion with John Loftus he's John Loftus is a atheist writer he wrote on Facebook our brains lied to us because they didn't evolve to arrive at truth but just aids survival well I challenged him on it and I said can you trust your brain to tell you the truth about how your brain is chronically lying that sounds circular sufficient objective evidence is a corrective here he said your circularity problem is a concoction of you're lying brain John well I was a little snarky did you're lying brain tell you that should I or should I not trust my brain well he tried to recalibrate and come at a different angle he said you don't have a choice anyway there's no free will he's a biological determinist I said you're lying brain forced you to say that because you were determined do you see where the circularity problem comes this boils down to something like my brain is reliable according to my brain so if we're just products of blind pitiless material forces then our lying brains are the only way we can know anything but that lying brain also interferes with everything you might otherwise use to correct the mistakes of your lying brain how am I going to look at the objective evidence that lets me know how my brain is lying to me I got to use my lying brain to look at that objective evidence and that's the chronic problem we have and so going back to the argument we find the conclusion that follows therefore in nature is not all that exists I suggest Christian ethics offers a an improvement on this because we don't say the mind is reducible to the brain we allow a soulish element that can offer some leverage that isn't stuck in the same material circle material loop that all these brain problems are and conversely a supernatural mind exists so if you remember the three images we've got the house the mirror and the doorknob I think there's a good case to be made for Christian ethics being morally superior well just being superior to secular ethics thank you I can put it at the top if you want [Music] hi he's wrong yeah you're supposed to go with the joke so I'll start with that so is God needed for morality now there's two facets to this question fifteen minutes thank you one is it's gotten you to four the motivation to do good and the other is is God needed for the foundation for good now we're both in agreement we're not going to bother with the motivation obviously he agrees that I can do good and non-believers can do good so there's no point wasting time on there so it's all about is God needed to serve as a foundation for morality and I find myself in a lot of debates tempted to say well the answer can't be yes which is different from saying the answer's no in this case I can not only say that the answer is no but I think that the answer is obviously no because the only thing that's needed for morality as a package is a desire to do good and a belief about what is good now the secondary question that comes up after this is how do you know that your belief about what is good is correct and that's probably I hope where we'll spend the bulk of our time but all you really need is a desire to do good at a belief about what is good now this motivation being set aside what about this belief I believe this is good well setting aside for a moment how I would go about figuring out what good is isn't that enough I mean if we're stuck in this world and we have different views about what good is how do we resolve those questions how do we address this if I think something's good and you think it's evil or you think something's good and I think it's evil or if we're ambivalent about whether or not you know it's good or evil how do we know how do we come to agreement now in the many many objections that people raise to secular morality I'll point out that I'm aware of no objection to secular morality that is in any way any real way solved by appealing to a god I am though aware of objections to theistic notions about morality that is are in fact solved by secular moral systems and I'm advocating for a very I think simple and simplified which is free reign for everybody on YouTube to just say that Matt's too stupid to understand morality and that's why you simplified it but I think that morality ultimately is far simpler than we tend to make it and I think that you can construct the moral system beginning with purely arbitrary goals because what we're assessing when we assess the moral valuation something is the consequences of an action with respect to a goal and for me the goal is well-being and the most common objections that well while being isn't really well-defined you're right because we are still in the process of defining well-being there's nobody nobody including theists should be claiming that we have solved morality and we have an immoral explanation for every possible situation I am NOT a moral relativist which means that I don't think that something is moral merely because your culture says it's moral I think people can be wrong about their opinions and beliefs about morality I am a situational ethicist and then I think all of the factors of a situation go to determine whether or not something is moral and that in many cases we oversimplify it thou shalt not kill boy that doesn't tell me a lot especially if the same source is telling me to go kill people it's not particularly helpful there's a reason why we have a rather robust laws surrounding murder and involuntary manslaughter and things like that but I don't want to confuse the law with morality because we don't legislate merely on the basis of morality everything that is moral is not that is immoral is not necessarily illegal and vice-versa so what I think religions tend to do is say gosh this is a really difficult problem and I don't think they're necessarily doing it now and I don't think that anybody's thinking this process which you probably understood but gosh sorting out what good is it's kind of difficult so we'll just say that God is good done I've defined God as being good I've offered no demonstration that God is in fact good I just say that God is by definition good and now not only if I solved the problem of a moral found I've solved the problem of moral motivation hooray let's go to the after church dinner god is good and this also provides a motivation because if you don't do what God says he will mess you up you will pay the price you are now out no longer consistent with what God views as correct now we don't need for it to be the case that a God is real in order to have these views all we need is belief that a God is real if you're convinced that there's a God and you're convinced that God thinks a B and C about morality and you care about doing what is good you're done whether or not a God exists is kind of secondary but it is important and this will come up I'm sure as we discuss more with regard to secular secular morality how do we know that God is in fact good how do we know that what secularists are calling good is in fact good where is the demonstration how do we find this now generally I would say that if you define something it would be nice to have objective criteria rather than just a bald assertion and so what is the objective criteria that God is in fact good for believers who believe in a good deity and an evil being of some kind God and Satan whatever my question of them is always how did you discover that God is the good one and Satan is the evil one well God has written his moral code on my heart oh cool but that tells you nothing about whether or not it's good it just tells you that that's the entity that told you that they're good you're judging God by his own standards you judge me by my standards I'll probably come out fairly shining as well especially if I have exceedingly poor standards that would allow me to endorse an advocate slavery and misogyny and war and all sorts of things like that if I also if I placed myself above the law where the law applies to you and so even if you find something that's inconsistent in my standard it's only inconsistent in that you have to follow these rules that I've come up with I'm not necessarily subject to those rules so how do you build a moral system from the ground up well fortunately we don't have to do it it's what we've been doing forever John alluded to it in the sense that these are problems that have been reasoned out through theologians if you take a look at Jewish history they recognize they hey there's a big problem with the Torah and the Tanakh and that it doesn't go far enough and telling us about how to live in this world so Jews have been working on the Talmud to kind of revise the problems in the Old Testament and there's a ton of rabbinical teaching that shows that they've gone through and said you know what this really isn't robust enough and it doesn't fit with our modern world and this is this is not right so what did they do they reasoned and I applaud them for that I think that they are doing what secularists are doing they are reasoning there's a reason you know you can cite all day long how essential it was for Christians to help in the abolishment of slavery and you're absolutely correct but it doesn't change what the Bible has to say about slavery the Christians who abolish slavery did so by cherry-picking other verses and ignoring the ones that specifically specifically endorsed having owning slaves beating him in as long as they know died within a couple days a separate set of rules for Jewish slaves and there was for non Jewish slaves all of those things are in there if you were God and you were truly the source of morality and you were truly good and slavery owning another person is property and beating them if that was in fact immoral as I think it is then the only thing you could ever say is thou shalt not own another human being his property there's no way that you could not only not forget to say that in your guidebook but it would be impossible for you to say or inspire people to say the exact opposite of that now I'm not here to knock the Bible or not Christianity we're talking about the foundations of morality and when I say that it's simpler than I think some people make it out to be I like to use a chess analogy in the don't know how many chess players there are but the rules of chess are arbitrary we made the game up and yet we still can assess positions and discover which moves are better than others because we have a goal of not losing the game and that allows us to determine whether or not a particular move or sequence of moves is likely to lead to a better position or a worse position and the fact that we don't know the absolute best move in any given situation does not mean that we are without any idea of which moves are better than others not having a perfect understanding of what morality is does not mean that you just toss the board aside screw it we're done I'm not playing this game if I can't get the perfect answer I have nowhere to go now you know something about which answers are better than which aren't and it's worth noting than the same way there are chess experts there are probably and almost certainly people who are moral experts people who have spent a great deal of time evaluating the situation situations in reality determine what actually makes the world better and I'm advocating for good well-being as a foundation for morality you could begin with death it's generally preferable to life and you will find very quickly that this is not a good principle to start with because everybody dies off so you flip back and you say life is generally preferable to death and you do these this kind of guidelines and you build it up from there I can actually with fairly simple beginnings get to where we are now in the sense that hey I like my stuff and you like your stuff it's probably in our best interest to protect our stuff and create a society that cares about protecting our stuff but wait a minute Matt what in the universe intrinsically compels you to care about this that's kind of a side question because I don't think there is anything in the universe that intrinsically compels you to care about good or well-being any more than there's something in the universe that intrinsic intrinsically compels you to care about winning or not losing a game of chess but we have to share space with each other and by and large I'm pretty sure that is there anybody here well I don't want to pull the audience during this but I would ask at another time if there's anybody here who doesn't care about well-being doesn't care about trying to do the right thing or trying to find out what the right thing is I don't think there's that many of them and I think they've excluded themselves from conversations about morality oops I scroll down to something too far away so as I'm living my life I want to do the right thing and I want to find out what the right thing is how do I do that how do I know that what I think is the right thing is the right thing well first of all I'm probably wrong quite a bit I was massively wrong on Sunday show about something that I'm gonna have to apologize for was an ass it was awful but recognizing that you're probably wrong is what allows you to keep pursuing the right answer as soon as you say God did it whether you're talking about the origin of the universe or the biological level diversity or morality you're done we're done because that's depending on essentially revelation now how do you verify how do you tell the difference with somebody who actually got a revelation from God and somebody who thinks they got a revelation from God I can't I wouldn't know how to tell that for myself I certainly don't see how anybody else could tell whether or not my revelation has been true and what benefit is it for anybody else what we've done what John has talked about doing with the theologians I forget the exact language that he used but it doesn't matter we'll get to it later thinking about these things and creating a more robust morality that is based on a God based on what people say that a God wants in biblical foundations etc is the same thing that rabbinical Jews have done with the Talmud and everything else and they're all doing exactly the same thing that seculars are doing except that we are not beginning with a holy book and trying to say this is the foundation let's massage it until it fits what we've discovered to be true we're beginning by saying we have the benefit of being the survivors of all these other peoples so that I can now create a thought experian in my head and say what are the consequences of my actions likely to be we know a lot more about the world than our ancestors did and so we now can have a better understanding of what is likely to increase our well-being what's likely to decrease our well-being and how we can create a better world how do I know if it's true we're physical beings in a physical universe those physical laws dictate the consequences of our actions and they also dictate our well-being I can't survive without oxygen that's just a physical fact depriving me of oxygen is bad for me to the extent that we want to view this as moral to the extent that we want say oh you ought not deprive Matt of oxygen the is our problem is one that I deal with in a number of different ways but this is one's fairly simple and that is you ought if if you care about my well-being you ought not deprive me of oxygen problem solved if you don't care about my well-being well there's no ought there and this is why I was saying earlier that I don't think the universe has any intrinsic aught that you ought to care about what this is the first objection I get when I talk about secular morality well why should I care about well-being Matt what in the universe tells me I should care about well-being nothing but you do and you know you do and if you don't then we're not talking about the same thing if you want to say well when I talk about morality I don't mean well-being then we're not talking about the same thing because I care about well-being I think it's a good foundation for morality I'm gonna try to find out what's good and if it happens to lead me to a God being co-equal to good so be it but if it leads me to the conclusion that our God who exists is not good or a God who people believe exists is not good then I have no need of that God because that God is not the foundation you don't need God for morality you need good for morality and there's no demonstration that God exists or is good which is why we get into philosophical arguments about a necessary mind that must do this because nature is insufficient well I'm not convinced that nature is insufficient because I don't put extra impositions on nature I don't have to require doesn't have to have some intrinsic goal or purpose for my life or encourage me to do anything for me to have a goal and purpose in my life or to try to do the right thing I don't need good I just need God and it's more than just one letter difference there Thanks did I say that backwards did I say that backwards at the end flip that I'm not seeing I'm not perfect all right we're gonna go ahead and take a quick 10-minute break and then transition into our discussion and then finally our Q&A at the end all right we're gonna go ahead and get into our moderated discussions so I can enjoy so I'm Robert Garcia I'm a professor in the philosophy department here and thanks for coming my job is to moderate this exchange so I've been told that my role is really to be the liaison between mom Matt and John and and you so I'm supposed to ask you know what kinds of questions would our audience be having so if I hear things that aren't quite clear or I feel like a term is not defined I might interrupt these guys and ask them to be a little clearer so if I do interrupt it's only to push for clarity or if you don't answer the question I might ask you to answer the question so the first we're gonna have four rounds of questions the first question is just a request for a rebuttal and you'll each have eight minutes to just offer a response anything you want to say and then after that we'll move on to a different question so I think John goes first okay you have eight minutes I would do it from a seated position except I've got slides prepared for when he brought up slavery I did a extended presentation on it now was it come on I've got no cursor but that's I don't see that slide there we go do I need this or can I use that okay all right said to do good all you need to I think he said to do good or for morality to operate without God all you need is a desire to do good and a belief about what's good that only works if my time was counting while I was setting up o desire to do good with a belief about what's good that only works if there is such a thing as good you can do what you think is morality but there's no great guarantee that it's morality unless good first exists which I think now he was he wasn't rebutting me in his opening statement or at least I don't think he was trying to do that too much but the for that to be the case to be able to do to have morality without God there must be good without God and that remains to be seen because of the is aa problem basically I think the house I gave was a was a cumulative case argument that it's it's it's dicey it's challenging the moral facts argument I think is a serious challenge to the idea that there's any moral facts whatsoever if nature is all it exists and then the circularity problem creates what what may potentially be a inescapable circular reasoning when it comes to acquiring moral knowledge now he also said you ought to do such-and-such if you feel compelled that's a question of moral motivation not a question of the metaphysics of whether good exists sociopaths could potentially have moral knowledge even if they lack the sentimental or the the compassion aside that would help motivate them to do what's right just from sort of an instinctual primitive level even if we don't have those we could still potentially know what's right and do what's right without any feelings corresponding with it whatsoever we could be morally numb we could be on heavy medication and still do the right thing even if we don't have any empathy motivating that but again that's dealing with motivation and not necessarily the epistemology or the metaphysics issue he said the rules of chess are arbitrary and and after that point you can have perhaps objectively better and worse moves but because of that arbitrary basis I think he's admitting exactly what I was pointing to in the problems with naturalistic secular istic atheistic materialistic ethics now he mentioned slavery and that's when I hear a lot and typically I hear from people who haven't really done their history work to know what the Bible is actually saying Matt and I actually argued now he can read it just fine and he's not a not a terrible her minutest insist if that's how it's pronounced when it when he puts his mind to it but does the Bible promote slavery permit yes in a vastly different culture than ours promote no biblical principles clearly identified Liberty as the ideal it is for freedom that Christ has set us free stand firm then and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery Galatians 5:1 so if the son sets you free you will be free indeed do to others as you would have them do to you and that probably doesn't include enslaving them and see also Philemon 16-17 scripture encourages people to escape slavery wherever it's possible 1st Corinthians 7 21 and 23 slavery was a punishment or a curse which should be avoided according to Genesis 15:13 Isaiah 14 3 Jeremiah 34 Ezekiel 34 27 scripture is relevant to all cultures and societies not just abolitionist ones to say that the Bible is wrong for having instruction for folks that are in a in a slavery society to have instructions for them is somehow forbidden is to dictate that scripture only speak to societies that have the wherewithal to access the the privileges that we take for granted now which is includes abolition to demand scripture only dictate abolition is to wish it were relevant to for most of history and most every culture in history historical and literary context often utter undercut critical claims before passing judgment on ancient societies for answering their problems with slavery you need to offer a better answer first if you don't care to know the historical context then you don't care what the passage means meaning is contextual I had a back-and-forth with Matt on this subject a couple years ago which actually motivated me to do more extensive research and at one point he actually said he doesn't care about the historical context well then I would contend if you don't care about the historical context then you don't care what the text means because meaning is contextual a hole in one means one thing on a golf course verses in a laundromat anachronistic fallacy reading contemporary sense of slavery such as 19th century race-based Chatel slavery chattel slavery into every instance of the the Greek is doulos the Hebrew as a bed most of the slavery passages are casuist ik meaning their case law if this is going on then here's what prescription follows but it doesn't say that you should start there it doesn't say that that case is something you should emulate it just says if that case happens here's how to mitigate the loss or the fallout or the problems from it five scripture opposes all sorts of oppression be it physical or spiritual six scripture explicitly opposes / undermines different kinds of slavery Chado kidnapping was banned in exodus 21 16 runaway slaves were not to be returned to their masters but were free to live when where they want without oppression it was presumed that they were being treated unjustly against war slavery in second chronicles 28 8 to 15 there should be no poor among you Deuteronomy 15 4 which would be an indictment against generating conditions that create debt slavery foreigners were especially provided for because they were especially vulnerable to debt slavery uns and wage slavery and things like that Israel is warned against slaving practices which they endured in Egypt race-based Chatel slavery I'm sorry chattel slavery number nine the Hebrew word Abed and Greek doulos both have a wider range of meaning than our typical sense of slave whenever someone says the Bible promotes slavery I asked them which sense of slavery are you talking about most contemporary critics have never thought about the six or seven different kinds most of which solve things like debt slavery which if you've got a better solution such as debtors prison in a society that doesn't have standing prisons then I'm all ears propose something that solves the problem at a practical boots on the ground level and then we can start talking number ten the most common biblical instruction regarding slavery was an indictment against it a cursed past never worth repeating remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you that is the most common reference to slavery and it's telling them as a warning don't act like the cruel slave masters that you lived under don't be don't be that don't create conditions that push people into that avoid that at all cost if as a case loss you end up in a situation where you've got you've got warfare which we can talk about that if you want to bring that up in a case of warfare slavery by some arguments under a Hebrew law offered more liberty to people that would have been free quote free citizens in their their within their native people and it offered a chance for people to assimilate into the victorious civilization and then have a life afterwards as opposed to being killed because prisoners of war were oftentimes killed because their baggage when you're on a military campaign thank you so much [Applause] well I guess I'll stand it's fine so maybe someday we'll actually have a debate about slavery because I'm I'm evidently not thinking about it properly because when I read the Bible I read what it actually says and I don't go cherry picking verses that have nothing necessarily to do with slavery the fact that you shouldn't allow yourself to be slaves is not a condemnation against slavery the Bible says that you should buy your slaves from the heathen that surround you indentured servitude by the way is also grossly immoral which the Bible should recognize but John's biggest problem seems to be that I don't care about the historical context and he's right I don't the thing is it's silly I have no way to look at this other than that this is a desperate attempt to try to rehabilitate something that is so obviously grossly immoral and it would it would serve as a cannon ball to destroy the foundations of somebody's moral foundations if their point of the Bible because what's undeniable is that if we consider the context of the time there were people who were eating shellfish and wearing mixed fabrics and God was powerful enough and wise enough to make sure that there were proclamations in the Bible to prohibit the eating of shellfish and the wearing of mixed fabrics so we don't have to was God so weak that he could not say don't own people as property instead it says own people as property they are your money you can beat them as long as I don't die within a couple days you can pass them on to your children how backward could you possibly get it but as I said when we were doing this earlier this is not a debate about slavery I'm not here to necessarily condemn the Bible because it could be the case that there is a God who serves as the moral foundation that has nothing to do with the Bible or any avocation for slavery all I'm saying is the Bible permits it which gets it exactly wrong and some another it was important to outlaw shellfish so I'm eating sushi tomorrow I don't care about the historical context because we can in the past every way you can have incorrect understandings of morality we now benefit from the mistakes that other people have made in their understanding of morality and so one of the things is things may change over time something that used to be moral or immoral could change to be the opposite if the circumstances change if the nature of human beings change etc for example if all the sudden I evolved gills then a whole depriving me of oxygen and holding me underneath water might not be as immoral but it may still be immoral in the sense that you are imposing your will over somebody else's and violating their freedom and autonomy these are the questions that we need to sort out now John points out that this is only relevant if there is good well good in the sense that I'm using it is that which achieves the goal so it's only the goal okay so I don't think that good is something that exists out in the universe I don't think the universe has any intrinsic good anymore than it has an intrinsic ought the problems that he's raising I I agree there's no intrinsic aught and there's no intrinsic good in the universe good is an assessment that we make about the consequences of actions with respect to the goal and if you don't care about the goal obviously you couldn't call it good so good doesn't exist in that sense during his discussion he talked about Christian universes universities about Apollo yeah abolishing slavery and building universities and things like that and yes religions including Christianity have done mountains of good for the world and mountains of harm but first of all we're comparing in that particular sense he was comparing Christianity to atheism and saying atheism was this barren wasteland as if that was a fair comparison between the two and then he goes on a moment later to say that atheism is just godless and isn't its wild world view correct it's not which it means atheism is in fact a barren wasteland oh my god did you just agree with yes because the fair comparison is not Christianity versus atheism it's Christianity versus secular humanism or secular morals that is the fair comparison and so when it's convenient let me just put Christianity up against atheism what is atheism done for us well maybe not much but there's also this privileged position that Christianity and other religions have had where they are exempt from taxes where they have a privileged position in society where they can build universities and hospitals and there's not a single time in history where secular humanism has enjoyed that level of privilege to where it could do that and despite this despite the fact that religions had thousands of years of advantage secular humanism is doing all of that stuff right now one of the one of the most prestigious colleges in London is headed up by Antony grayling there are secular charities left right foundation beyond belief on Sundays in Austin we work with atheist helping the homeless and secular humanists at work to feed the homeless without having to give them a sermon the the fact that we had to start from an underprivileged position and work to catch up is the thing to consider because that's what we're doing and the fact that Christianity and Christians I think that's probably more accurate Christians were critical in abolishing slavery doesn't tell you anything at all about whether or not Christianity is true the fact that Christians can do good things the fact that atheists can do good things doesn't tell you anything at all about whether or not they're right or whether or not their moral foundation whether the thing that they point to is their moral foundation is real says that nature can't make moral claims true but truth is that which is consistent with more with reality as far as I'm concerned in nature is reality I'm not into our not in any point arguing for an intrinsic should or a natural should and there was a point where I have this conversation that he posted with John Loftus um where Loftus was talking about our brains lying to us our brains do lie to us our brains we engage in self-deception the wonderful thing is that we have the capacity and ability to tell when our brains are lying to us we can discover optical illusions we can discover things that have deceived us when John says that our brains lie to us that is not the equivalent of saying our brains cannot inform us about truth the fact that in John's view our burns didn't evolved to find truth so much as to find that which allows us to evolve doesn't preclude truth because finding truth helps us evolve finding truth helps us stay alive in the universe truth in the sense that this is real this is consistent with reality the ability to tell the difference between a rustling and the bushes whether or not it's a tiger getting ready to jump me or just the wind we can investigate we have investigated I'm sitting here standing on a stage and one of the great universities oh sorry that's cheap one of the greatest universities on the planet talking to you through a microphone because of our understanding of electricity it is possible that my brain is lying to me about a great many things right now but it is also possible for me to research investigate and discover the truth and we do that how not by merely relying on our own understanding to paraphrase from a Bible but by independent confirmation and this is critical this is how science is done is that we avoid self-deception this is how we manage to minimize the effect of our biases independent confirmation and when it comes to claims about morality and the moral foundations secular moral systems like the one I'm advocating is all about independent confirmation the the data of the facts from reality that point to which world is better the world that allows slavery of the world it doesn't because in the short term slavery is incredibly beneficial to the slave owners in the long term it's bad for everybody and in the short term it can be good for a slave who the Bible advocates for the really nice version of slavery as long as the nice version of slavery is beating people if you want to as long as they don't die now I don't think anybody in this room if you were the source of morality could possibly get this as wrong as this and then sprinkle other verses that other people have to interpret as saying you know that thing where it says you can own people as property that wasn't quite right but we're not here for slavery we're here for good Thanks [Applause] great the second question originally has gonna have to do with objective morality but I already mentioned to both John and Matt I've revised the question a little bit in light of what they've already said so I have a question for each of you a different question for each of you I hope it's fair to ask in this way so the first one is for John is this too close to my mouth okay so your position is that objective morality requires or as best explained by theism the existence of God now it's often recognized that moral properties are rather strange they're not natural properties like at the macro physical level you don't find such a thing as wrongness you find other kinds of interesting properties so moral properties are rather unusual mm-hmm so somebody might be motivated on those grounds to think well I I don't think there are any objective properties and if they think that way they might be inclined to run to your argument in the other direction and say well if objective morality requires the existence of God these there are these objective moral properties a rather strange on want to believe in them so I'd rather just give up on objective morality okay so what would you say to a moral relativist he said I'm gonna give up on objective morality because I think it's just too weird I might ask him if I can have a stereo because if he doesn't believe that that his ownership of that stereo constitutes some sort of at least approximating an objective moral wrong then I might want his stereo more than he's willing to stop me from taking it and so I think at core when it comes to more relativism moral objectivism people tend to be relativistic serves them and they tend to be Objectivist when it serves them and most everybody when you punch them in the face they're an Objectivist about how that was wrong that wasn't just your instinct that led me me I was wondering about as I was listening to Matt I saw a lot of hints of relativism and didn't really see the the kind of grounding or foundation to be able to pull back and escape the pitfalls typical of relativism although I grant that he considers in his system to be some sort of moral objectivism I just don't know what that means given the way he explained it it sounded like relativism to me and so if someone were appealing to relativism it can be difficult the moral argument for God's existence which is part of what we're doing today is in some ways it's it's really messy and very difficult to make work because it deals with stuff that it's kind of hard to prove like to know what is the good I understand good in an Aristotelian sense good is that which is desirable for its own sake and to say why should I desire the good is to say why should I desire what you should desire for its own sake it doesn't make sense why should I do what I should do well because you should do it there's I understand that to be the intrinsic ground intrinsic nature of what good is and I think there's a strong defense and a historical defense not just in Christianity but but otherwise if someone however doesn't want to grant that I would I would I I don't want to sound condescending but I think that deserves pity more than than an analytic argument I think that kind of approach can suggest that a person is either not being honest about what they know and at that point in the past I have asked what are you so committed to that you're willing to release moral this what I think is moral knowledge so you could hold on to this other thing and people will do that I could imagine myself doing that that's not just other people I in moments of weak will I could understand making a serious moral compromise because I want this thing so bad or because I'm addicted or because I'm in love or something some you know one of the typical irrational excuses we use that makes sense to be not logically but emotionally because I'm a human being so at that point I don't know that I would use a straight up philosophical argument to try to help a person leaning relativistic lead to to I mean I've got if you want I got slides for it but I assume you don't you don't want that I mean there's a philosophical case to be made that relativism ends up in all kinds of outcomes that that people probably don't really want but I think the problem isn't so much a logical problem though it may seem like that I think there underneath it if they're really stuck in it I think that there's a chance that there's more things going on than just a rational conclusion I don't think I need to respond to that so for me relativism is this notion that something is moral because a culture says it's moral and I would agree with John that good for the sake of good is a kind of a difficult thing to sort through but I'm not saying that that in any way that I should do good because good is good I'm saying if I care about doing good then I should do good and if they're not using should in the odd sense it's more about this is how you achieve this goal and I also agree that I could certainly rationalize justifications to do things but I think that if push came stood comes to shove and we would have a conversation about it I would not I would recognize that not only was I not doing good but I probably didn't think I was doing good at the time hey I'm gonna do this because it suits me right now and we probably know that we're not doing good so the fact that I can rationalize stuff like that it doesn't change whether or not something is or isn't good and I'm only viewing good as you know is is the consequence of my action consistent with the goal of a better world of well-being and I think probably the most important concept which hopefully everybody in the room is already familiar with but if you're not and you hear nothing else hear this John Rawls veil of ignorance can be used to great effect in many different areas but also with regard to morality and in a short version design the sort of world you're willing to live in not knowing who you will be in that world should we allow slavery remember you've come in as a slave owner or slave or somebody who's neither which would you prefer design their work this gets us to the most unbiased assessment of fairness we could possibly achieve we're always going to be biased but if you start with that design the world you want to live in not knowing who you're gonna be how much wealth is too much wealth for one person to have designed the world with the economic system that you're willing to come in under not knowing which end of the spectrum or where in the spectrum you might be when I'm assessing moral situations I ask myself a couple of different questions and I do it with the knowledge that we don't have the answers to every moral quandary we could but one is all right how does this fit in with a veil of ignorance and the other one is if the entire world took the action that I'm contemplating would we be better off or worse off or would it make any difference because I do recognize that there are things that maybe don't have any sort of you know if the entire world ate chocolate ice cream instead of vanilla ice cream well there may be moral implications to that you do hey if we're gonna put people out of work or change dramatically change economies all of those things have an effect you don't have the capacity to consider all of the potential consequences in a butterfly effect of your action or all of the things that led to your action so you have to do the best you can in the time allowed with the information allowed do it with the understanding that you're probably going to get things wrong but as long as you care about doing good when somebody points out this thing that you thought was good actually isn't and they make a case for it that is convincing if you still care about doing good you will not do that thing again you will do the new thing that you now have a better understanding is good this is where secular moral systems are superior in the sense that there is opportunity for progress we're not reliant on ancient revealed wisdom we are reliant on reason and pointing at the evidence and nobody's pretending we have it all sorted out but I know that if I was designing the world I want to come in to slavery would not be a thing thank you so now I have a question that we will ask Matt first and then John you can respond as you will and this will sound familiar because it's touching on something you've said several times and even Matt has raised this so you said that you oddity something you have an odd if you care if I care then I should do good so this seems to suggest and what I'd like you to clarify is whether and how or whether it doesn't suggest it seems to suggest that whether I have a moral obligation depends upon whether I have certain psychological states or not and the latter seems to be a rather contingent fact about me so it seems like there's no it's hard to see how we have objective moral obligations on this of you what we have is an objective fact about the conditional yes if I've got desires then I've got obligations but there's no objective fact of the form I have obligations yeah so this actually raises a curious thing for me because I've done a bunch of debates and I remember a one debate in particular that wasn't about morality but morality always comes up and it was with John and I stated that I had a solution to the problem because you can't get to a knot from it is but you can get to a nod from two iza's and John pointed out that all I was doing was smuggling in and art as it is and he was right and I acknowledged it and I dropped that however when I say I I agree with the assessment that he made when I say the universe doesn't have any intrinsic aught I mean it there's no reason at all there's no enforcement or desire or implication from the universe that I should care or ought to care about right behavior and so it is a psychological component it is entirely I do in fact care about right behavior however it's not just a fluke and it is not arbitrary when I say what we all care about right behavior course mean most of us there are people who clearly couldn't give a rat's ass if they're acting in the right way they have a number of psychological conditions that are gonna be different from mine but I'm convinced that you can get to altruism through purely purely selfish foundations and that this desire that I have to do right may in fact be rooted in utter selfishness and selfishness has gotten such a bad name oh you're too selfish you're so selfish why would you go with your selfish desires and everything else I okay let's say that I am selfish let's say that I am almost perfectly selfish I share space with other people my actions my the consequences of my actions have effects on them and what they do has an effect on me I have to share space it is absolutely impractical for me to find any place on this planet to go be by myself and it would be a bad idea anyway we know this from game theory we're reliant on each other and so game theory alone coupled with my selfishness dictates that it is in my best interest to do good things because they benefit me why on earth would you go out and help somebody who's homeless because one of these days I might be homeless and it's in my best interest for me to encourage the sort of world that helps homeless people that's an utterly selfish motivation do I think that's the only one no I think that I'm the descendants of people who cared about people and so when I care about somebody it feels good it was an evolutionary benefit for me to care about other people because I benefit from that that way I don't get ostracized from the tribe that way I'm not the one that's thrown out that has to forage all the food and everything else and survive by myself that has nobody to watch over them when they're asleep at night I'm not saying that this is all the product of evolution but it is about our psychological makeup which is all about the fact that we have to share space with people and if I think and even if I were utterly selfish in in in almost the worst possible sense you can still from there get two motivations to do good because it benefits you that's the thing that beats some people overlook is that oh well why would you sacrifice your life for somebody else well it may sound a little silly but if I were to sacrifice myself I've said before on stage and by the way I'm not meaning this to be insulting this is a bit of a joke no not completely but it's a bit of a joke Jesus I didn't have any great sacrifice he gave up a really bad weekend of what would be horrible torment for a regular human being and then he got to go be Co a cool with God for the rest of eternity I will let you torture and kill me right now if there's a guarantee that it will end a poverty and suffering throughout the planet forever and you don't have to revive me and make me co-equal to God that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make now I have to acknowledge that one of the reasons I would say such a thing is because man if I did that I probably would you lionize statues all this look at this great good method it's so much better than Jesus but it's not the only motivation for saying it because I honestly believe that that sort of change in society would be so beneficial to I don't have offspring but if I had my own offspring that could be a potential goal it I am the product of what makes me feel good to do this and that's a good enough motivation for me so it sounds like the question and correct me if I'm not paraphrasing you appropriately but it sounds like you're asking about how psychological states translate into the question of moral objectivity how do we have real moral objectivity not just relativism when there's so much of our psychological States involved in is that what you're asking yeah that's fair okay not from what it sounded like I'm still hearing egoism ethical egoism not necessarily psychological egoism but though that's usually a part of it relative buncha isms I apologize to people who don't know these isms defined egoism egoism is a self-interested ethic minimally it could also say that your self-interest is somehow good but some forms of egoism acknowledge that calling your self-interest good is a bit arbitrary at some point because ya may help further the species might might serve your interest but where did you get into morality and all of that that's just describing how things work and we're dealing in functional arts but not moral odds we're dealing in conditional morality not not categorical morality if you if you're familiar with Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative good we haven't entered morality until we're doing good for the sake of good and not for the sake of some other interests when it becomes a conditional or a hypothetical imperative that we're doing it for the sake of some arbitrary goal we have we're not dealing in morality anymore we're dealing in functionalism and there's all sorts of things we can do that could function to say help the poor improve someone's marriage bless the community but none of that's really telling us anything about morality because that's just more description that's just more of what is now now hear me I'm I commend atheist secularists skeptics who are doing altruistic things who are going to soup kitchens good for you I think that's good I think we need more of that and if we're going to disagree on religion and and God believe forevermore I expect some of that at least we can be on the same page when it comes to helping others I affirm that but I think you happen to know that that's good I happen to know that that's good but I don't think that could even be good unless we get from the is to the odd and I don't hear anything beyond combinations of psychology and interpersonal psychology that that Matt's using to try to give us some grounding to know what's good and what's evil he can only tell us for example if you want to be fair then followed John Rawls veil of ignorance ascribed to that thought experiment but what if you don't want to be fair what if you are will a really high functioning sociopath now I that's an exceptional case but that's a classic defeater for people that rely too much on motivation as the primary means for knowing good and evil a person doesn't have to have any any instinctual or primitive motivation to still be able to know what's right and wrong a friend of mine not a personal friend of mine but an acquaintance was he he was chemical I forget if it's psychopath or sociopath but it seems like from birth he had a had a muted empathy response but he still knew what he should do and shouldn't do so even if your motivations are muted or or in error it's still possible to have moral knowledge and I think the moral knowledge is possible because there can be moral facts and there can only be moral facts if we figured out some way to bridge from the is to the odd and so I'm trying to talk about something that helps us tell when someone doing good for goods sake is actually good versus doing good for the wrong sake that's a mixed motive and there's evil swirled in there might have good outcomes but overall I think you're right in saying that morality is messy ethics is messy I'm not sure to what extent I agree that it's simple you mentioned that in a different context different setting psychologically speaking I don't think human psychology is enough to get out of the the punishing problems of relativism I really like ask quick questions actually the we have 10 minutes before doing Q&A okay and I just might forget by then okay well you'll ask it you'll get to ask it because the next 10 minutes we have we get each of you gets to ask one question or the other oh so you do get a question but we have five minutes before we got to be pretty strict about it 10 total so you get to ask John a question and the John you to ask Matt a question okay yet a question that was it was a picture of Facebook that my man just sent me which popped up over my notes so I didn't get to take notes on my question I actually didn't see that was yeah I don't think it's fair to fall to secular moral system for solving a problem that you haven't demonstrated is real or one that you haven't you haven't demonstrated that your system actually solves it either because I don't have any access to a god or what God thinks or knew that but the question is if you and I go out under at i-35 and six Street on some Sunday morning and we both had sandwiches two homeless people you could we can both look at that and say hey we've done some good we've done maybe equivalent good what extent when we're talking about morality that's what I would view is we've done something that's good brought good to the world it seems that you're saying if you're doing it because you think God wants you to and I'm doing it because I selfishly think it's a good thing that somehow you're morally superior is that correct no are they essentially morally equal then maybe maybe not I mean there's there's a lot going on there I'm saying that if we're uncertain then isn't that admission that the motivation isn't part of this evaluation of moral you you the uncertainty was in regards to a hypothetical situation all things being equal sure they're equal but I don't know that all things are being equal but but sure for the for the sake of sake of argument it's it's equal but I'm not saying I think you're framing it in a way that's operating on a presumption that I don't have in principle an atheist and a theist Christian theist even could be equally moral in doing the same thing but it sounds like you're bringing in the word good but you haven't shown that that prescriptions even make sense on a naturalistic I view it as prescriptive it's descriptive oh it's descriptive so you're using a a non moral sense of good so if descriptive is the foundation for morality is this concept of well-being and what is good is what supports well-being so it's a descriptive of my action okay so we're about in nature or your your your frame of reference your worldview which includes atheism and secular humanism so on we're about in there do you get a sense that humanity should survive a prescription I don't know I've said I don't know anytime tonight I don't think there is such a prescription I don't goes into any intrinsic requirement that we care about good or that we do good or that we survive okay so following with that then if suppose a rapist is seriously deranged he took a heavy blow in the head and and his moral functioning is pretty off but he's doing the best he can and he thinks that if he were to exercise that rape instinct that he now has it would somehow create a better world for everybody but he's but he's wrong he believes it though is it good for him but not there not other people thinks it for him but it is not good we know that he's wrong we can demonstrate that he's wrong so okay okay we can demonstrate that he's that he's wrong if it's good for him but it is but he's not it it sounds like you said we can get a contingency you had adamant if they're motivated to it but what if they're not motivated to do it so this is the thing that you kind of faulted secular systems before what do you what do you do with somebody who's not motivated and I mentioned this in my opening that I get this all the time well why should I care about you know well-being well there's no intrinsic motivation from the universe for you to care about well-being but we do and that's that's the foundation yeah I can say the same thing why should I care about morality why should I care about God there's no motivation because it's morality would be my answer I think there's an irreducible truth that's magic it's just to say I should care about morality because it's morality it's just a magical circular assertion ultimately everything has a point at which asking further scrutiny of it is just proving your failure to understand what you're asking everything has irreducible levels at some point materially speaking maybe there's something smaller than a quark but potentially quarks are the irreducible element for same material but when we come to other things asking why should I do what I should do is an incoherent question let me interject so John you have the option to ask a different question or okay this question yeah five minutes um let's see I got two a couple of them are ready well he did ask questions during I did I did I did okay if you want him to ask I mean I don't have a ready question here I mentioned yeah it sounds like you're kind of going where I was trying to lead so I don't have any we can keep because oh I got a question okay are you familiar with moral subjectivism or ethical subjectivism and and if so please characterize in your words so I'll just say no so that you can give the description you mean and then I can assess it from there okay as I understand subjectivism and I'm sure there's different senses of the term it's kind of like when it comes to relativism you've got moral facts are only true relative to some some contingent reference point so conventionalism is cultural relativism your reference point is culture I'm doing what fits with this culture well if a culture says exterminating Jews is okay then it's good to exterminate Jews relative to that culture and that's one of the classic rebuttals to cultural relativism subjectivism tends to have even less support socially speaking among ethicists in part because it it can make it even more subjective to the individual so the reference point is our own subjective psychology do you ascribe to subjectivism in the sense that good is only what is good relative to features that are that are in my mind my psychology no ok can you can you clarify how that's not the case sure as I mentioned as physical beings in a physical universe that universe the laws of university Kate what is or isn't in my best interest through no subjective it's objectively against my best interest for you to come over here and lop off my head right now I would be dead so that that is against my well-being and this is why so I say no more well to this because this is an appeal to culture I'm not I'm not completely clear on the distinction between moral relativism and moral subjectivism but but essentially you seem to be there's a lot of invidual psychology instead of the the culture in this reality and I would reject both of those because what I so you've got the level of the individual for a subjective then the culture for relative okay and then I would be going to something even bigger which is even though well-being is far from thoroughly defined we it's not like we're completely clueless about what is an interest is and is not in our best interest and so with something like slavery we've seen how it affects societies we know that by and large a culture that allows slavery is going to end up worse off both the slaves and the slave owners so we are relying on that understanding about the facts of reality it is not I could say it's my personal opinion that slavery is a good thing and we would be able to show that I was wrong by pointing to the data that show that slavery has been it sounds like you're pointing to facts and data but if you remember the the mirror I'm sorry the the dirty doorknob illustration grab a paper towel is it exactly that's the solution right that's the solution that's my point you can't just use the dirty doorknob you have to have something besides your brain which has accumulated all the germs has accumulated all the the taints of evolutionary naturalistic and aimless process I washed my hands with reason you needs and I grabbed a clean towel that was data and I'm using that clean hand with data to open the door knob which would be wonderful if you were able to to turn if you're able to access that doorknob and it not be okay my analogy is that that doorknob is your brain but you need something besides your brain to be able to get out don't you you need something besides your brain but look at that paper towel now filter through your brain all the analogies get a little twisted here yeah you have the data which is not my brain the the physical facts about whatever success data aside from your brain no that's my point well you have never accessed objective whoever a side so you grab both sides of your brain what's that have you ever accessed data besides theory yes in my mind I'm not a naturalist I don't agree with mind brain identity theory okay I'm a duelist I'll just let that sit then yeah is a good time to sweeten your you attempt because you're a duelist okay yeah you could we could go into your brain believe I just introduced it there's a whole there's a whole debate about that but we could go into that if you want okay Sean are you gonna introduce the Q&A great we are having a Q&A section now we have mics both here and here we ask that if you do have a question please approach the mics from the back don't try to like go in front and then go behind it and nature of it is we have been taking a few questions off of Twitter so we're kind of going to oscillate between tortor questions that Mike that Mike rinse and repeat so if you do have a question you can approach the mics now [Music] so we will start with a Twitter question while people are lining up with the mics and that way they have to stand there longer and get more and more nervous about it and also please if you're at the mic asking a question ask a question don't give it a little speech just being friendly here okay so this is a question from Brooks and it's for John do you believe morality should be derived from all of the Bible or only specific selections and if so which selections actually I don't think morality should be derived strictly from the Bible although I do grant that the whole Bible should be considered in context I affirm natural revelation and special revelation natural revelation being knowledge we can have aside from say reveal prophetic word or a miraculous event but say I believe one of the reasons why there's there's actually a high degree of agreement among skeptics atheists Muslims Hindus at least on some moral basics is that I think we all have innate knowledge that is indeed knowledge of facts that are properly basic and to asked why should we do these things to a common person who isn't necessarily a grad student in philosophy will sound kind of like why should we do what we should do well obviously I think our direct access to it is is at least sufficient preliminary indication that we should recognize it as true and so natural revelation special revelation and the rule of what's it called the the not the rule of thumb anyway I think we should be fair to the whole scripture not just proof texts great let's start with the question on this side my questions for John mainly and then I guess for Matt's respond to what do you think of Christianity is evolving morality throughout history so like Christian morality was not the same 2,000 years ago today should if you think it's an objective morality you shouldn't it be unchanging and absolute yes I think if you if you read the whole of Scripture not just proof texts as I pointed out there's a a libertine ideal where Liberty is the idea we should reach for as far as we can reach it but if you have to do a whole lot of damage and wreck wrecked your family ruin society just to be able to reach your own liberty then it might not necessarily be a net good even though we recognize that slavery all things considered is is reprehensible I think Scripture still affirms that but I think we have moral knowledge that that is basic to us and and some of that at least points us in the right direction to where we're not all totally on a different page there's enough agreement that we can have these kinds of conversations unfortunately our moral knowledge and the facts to be able to correct them are the equivalent of the the paper towel dispensers on the other side of the bathroom door we have to open the door before we can get to the paper towels and then we've tainted them again now that'd be great if we didn't have to go back to the bathroom eventually and get our hands tainted again because we have to use our brain with everything we do but we can still have moral knowledge because I don't think we're brains and bodies I don't think that the materialists account is overall effective when it comes to things like consciousness when it comes to things like moral knowledge God's a terrible bathroom designer I could design a better bathroom I could design a better world not without getting into the you know the notion of whether or not we're in the best of all possible worlds I find it really confusing that there's a God who is created us and stuck us down here and given us brains although some of us think we have brains and minds even though I don't know what the demonstration of that is I have a dirty mind and a dirty brain don't care I think that the fact that what Christians view is moral now that it's different from the past is more a testament to the fact that the world's changing which is one of the more robust aspects of the secular moral system we're not tied to the past in order to renegotiate the past we can correct it and usually we can correct it a little quicker because we're relying on data that's on this side of that door the problem with revelation as humid out is it it's necessarily first person and everybody else that's hearsay and there's another problem with revelation and that not only can't do do I not know how I could confirm that I've actually received revelation as I mentioned before I don't know how to tell the difference between someone who has and someone who thinks they have but what do you do when you have two people who are convinced that they've got a revelation from God that points to two completely different conclusions that's why Christianity has over a thousand different denominations and the second Baptist Church can tell you why the First Baptist Church is wrong there the objection that people raised against secular morality is that there's no mechanism by which somebody should care about well-being or why you should require to sit that doesn't it's not fixed by appealing to a God well there's no way to make sure that you you can settle these disagreements about what it is is or isn't moral because somebody can just say nah that's not fixed by appealing for it to a God either because somebody else can say no there is no God and somebody else can say no that's not what God said so there's there's no apparent solution to this and and and the but there are problems with a theistic model that I think are solved by the secular model because we don't have the baggage and we don't have the revelation what we have is a robust exploration of the universe the effects the consequences of our actions and how that affects us which is I think what we care about even though some people seem to care about something special more added to morality thank you let's take a question from this side yeah I have a question for a metal on tech yeah so in your rebuttal speech you articulate you express some sort of outrage over the past historical events of slavery which I think we all find understandable but I found your outrage somewhat confusing okay because I guess I interpret I interpret the emotion of outrage to be that things are clearly not as they should have been or they're clearly inferior to how they could be and we're angry and upset about that now from your beliefs it seems to be what you're saying that moral obligations come from moral obligations come from our caring about something so because we care about human well-being we are obligated to therefore do something about it or we're obligated to follow some set of actions so given that the slave owners clearly thought that it was somehow okay that they didn't sense if there was any immediate obligation to relieve their slaves is your outrage over the fact that they were doing something that you just inherently perceived to be wrong or was your outrage over the fact that they so badly miscalculated what was in their own interests oh good thank you this is actually kind of easy and will be incredibly telling and probably divided the audience even more my outrage has nothing to do with the fact that they were wrong about slavery my outrage has to do with the fact that the Bible is wrong about slavery and yet the Bible is held up as a moral guide from the moral author of the universe and when I talk to people instead of admitting that the Bible when it says that you can own people as property is advocating for something immoral instead of acknowledging that which by the way Ray Comfort has Ray Comfort response to this was essentially I don't believe everything in the Bible I believe that there was stuff in the Bible that people got wrong that would be a great response they got it wrong instead what I get from many apologists is hey the Bible didn't get it wrong you're just not really studying it enough for you haven't really considered what it has to say you're not considering the context you haven't looked at these other verses over here I've looked at all the verses many times and I am completely confident that if I were God which is by the way the title of my new book which is not out yet but it's if I were God and I were going to do the stupid thing of communicating with people in languages that would die out and change I might might not get everything right but I would never inspire or write a verse that Perm expressly permitted something immoral it is patently absurd to outlaw clothing of different fabrics and shellfish it is patently absurd to place women as second tier citizens and it's patently absurd to make all of those claims and to endorse and allow slavery and to have two sets of rules there's a separate set of rules for Jewish slaves than there are for non-jewish slaves Jewish slaves you have to let him go after seven years unless you trick them by giving them a family in which case they become your property forever so the Bible even tells you how you can trick your Jewish slaves into becoming your permanent slaves the the outrage is that this is so obviously clearly immoral to every person walking the earth right now with a brain and yet people will bend over backwards to make excuses for it rather than just saying yeah it's immoral the Bible didn't get everything right which would seem to me to be a much more honest and reasonable response that would allow us to have a conversation beyond that but as long as they're going to just try to defend it I can't do that conversation John there's a lot going on there I think the core of your question a lot of it still unaddressed though you did help clarify exactly what the what your outrage is and it's your you think the Bible your the way you understand the Bible is reprehensible I agree that the way you understand the Bible is reprehensible but there are let's see how could how can i how can i clarify this the slavery there might be more slaves today in America now it's hard to count slaves because you know pimps and and den wardens and whatnot aren't exactly answering census questions or anything like that but there might be more slaves in America today than there were in 1862 or 1860 or 1850 because of wage slavery and sex trafficking and the irony of it is and this is what I've seen as I studied history and I haven't found anyone who who has been able to rebut this as much as as Matt wants to lambast the Bible because of its instruction on slavery what instruction do you give society to people who live in societies that aren't going to abolish slavery for hundreds of years how do you give them counsel those are cultures that scripture is relevant to that enlightenment humanism probably doesn't seem to have an answer to yet scripture has not only that answer but it testifies in the examples I gave to to the ideal that as far as we're able we should be striving for Liberty we should be striving to abolish slavery and that's what we've seen in history that's why hundreds of countries have abolished slavery but only after they have been Christianized I don't know of any that that became that had to become majority atheist first before they abolish slavery from what I've if you know any I mean I'm not historian if you know any I'd be interested I don't know but what what we're talking about is in the real world boots on the ground slavery gets abolished with with Christianity with this book that you hate so much I want with the book it was that now with the book the people let's move to the next question over here how did this one's format so we seem to be using a very strict definition of God and more of a formulaic this is a religion Christianity has a building a church but it seems that you sort of just taken an abstract like well being made that your God and then you're trying to build up a sort of common law religion around that on how to act and what not and I guess second part is in that common law if self-interest is the only or one of the main guiding tenants then wouldn't self-interest be different say for a king than a serf and then you could train morality into serfs if it's in their best interest not to get killed and maybe a king would have in his best interest to perpetuate his kingdom but maintain his kingship sure so when you say that I've turned well-being into my god no offense but that tells me a lot about where you're coming from because I didn't turn well-being into a god I could believe that there's a God I could be a Christian who believes in worships of God and still care about well-being the reason I you stop at well-being is basically Occam's razor hey I care about me I care about this I care about that I care about well-being does God care about my well-being is there any evidence that any God ever has cared about what's in my best interest now you've raised a really difficult issue and this is one that comes up and we start talking about well-being as a foundation the conflict between what is apparently in my best interest versus what is in the community's best interest or somebody else's best interest and when those things come in conflict and that is in fact a real problem I'm not claiming that the stuff has been solved however in most of those situations when we get down to it what's happened is someone is convinced about what is apparently in their immediate interest and they're just a little too myopic to see the broader base because if you are the king and it's in your best interest to expand your community what are the consequences of that maybe you should treat the people better rather than having them be serfs rather than having them poor right maybe you should be building universities that allow them to better your kingdom and make your kingdom better and then maybe at some point you should you should make alliances with other kingdoms because you benefit from this as well and maybe at some point you'll realize that instead of having a king in front of in charge of that kingdom that that sort of dictatorial view is not necessarily in the best interest and you broaden out in oh wait a minute I'm talking about the history of the world that would also apply to politicians versus mechanics sure but what's that democracies the worst or the best system except whatever system except for all the other except for all the others yes there you go so well-being potentially could be relative to class distinctions if well-being if class distinctions had a similar foundational standing as well-being and our moral duty to it I don't know that they are so I'm not quite sure that I tend to affirm general humanitarian principles of equal rights from from creation onward and we know biologically that we're that the creation of an individual biologically distinct individual human being biologically speaking is at conception so I would I would have firm equal rights from conception onward at least as so far as they're accessible and that thing at least has a life so that they may not have you know a driver's license but they have life and so that seems like something that a humanitarian society would work to at least reduce I think even pro-choicers would be able to say that that abortion is not a not necessarily some celebratory great thing and it'd be better if we could kind of reduce the circumstances that generate abortion and and maybe reduce abortions but you mentioned Occam's razor last point Occam's razor I think is great if you're not using it to avoid the the full consequences of your your system and I think when we apply the the dirty doorknob and and the mirror we find that that secular ethics doesn't necessarily get deep enough to ground this kind of stuff so that we're dealing in facts about reality instead of facts about mentality okay here's we're gonna do or here's what I've been told we're gonna do for the next questions are gonna be directed at a single person and there's only gonna be one of you that gets to respond so what do you got this is a question for mister Dillahunty my question was what is your take on the is art problem do you think it's a problem how do you approach it I think as it's been presented it's a legitimate problem that I don't have any solution for and since I have two minutes first of all the notion that secular morality doesn't go far enough it which was one of the comments you say that may be true it goes as far as I can reasonably see us going I think you want to extend things beyond what we can reasonably do but that's the whole reason we're doing a debate and not to turn this into a debate on abortion and there's somebody who's gonna say Matt you should have stopped talking easier to stop talking I'm fine with the notion of granting equal rights for a fetus within reason as you're talking but the people who are opposed to abortion aren't granting equal rights to free versus the granting special rights to fetus they're granting it to the right to use someone else's body without their consent next question there's a popular short story those who walk away from Omelas by there's the wind that imagines a society of maximum human flourishing predicated on the abuse of one individual or the complete trampling of one I guess what would that be a moral system inside your framework or another way of asking it is is slavery only immoral because it's not an economic winning strategy economically winning strategy yeah I think one of the I think that example is dishonest because it it begins by excluding the one person from the whole and saying that this is the maximal flourishing of the whole but that one person is part of the whole and this is why I would rely on the veil of ignorance you know we could maximally flourish maybe if we killed everybody except for the eight most adept people in the world we're gonna be done after a generation because they're all gonna be women sorry I had to add a little joke in there like that it's probably true the fact that we may be myopic in assessing what is maximally good or whatever I'm not even I think that the idea of a utopia can drive us towards betterment but never achievement of utopia because we're flawed and the second we're willing to say this person isn't part of the whole if we can sacrifice them to benefit the whole I think we've missed the point thank you next Matt you your moral framework seems to be grounded in the axiom of well-being and you also conceded that not everyone may share that accident and I agree on both counts so given that how does your moral framework or does your moral framework give you any authority to tell someone else what they ought or ought not do and why it doesn't give me any authority what it does is it gives me the ammunition to attempt to convince them the difference between prime and most theistic models and and secular models is that the secular models there's problem how do you change minds it's done through discussion debate and data and through theistic models it tends to be done through coercion and conversion and that's one of the reasons why I give it a serial III don't superior I don't claim any moral authority but what I may have if I may have justification and matter of fact I would argue that I perhaps do have a justification and an obligation to engage others beyond discussion I'm not I'm not a pacifist if if a country is engaged in gross human rights violations where we're convinced they're wrong I think that that can be sufficient justification to take action the fact that we don't agree it doesn't change whether or not we believe in a God or not it's not solved by aa God told me you were wrong or the data told me you're wrong we still have to make some kind of action hopefully this is a question for John but we'll find out sorry so you you refer to a sort of objective data to determine morality is it historical data that you're referring to in some cases I mean when we when we look at how societies have have flourished we you know I mean technically okay all data is historical we know some things about what is an inter what is and is not in our best interest we basically have a good understanding that individual liberty and bodily autonomy and and and those freedoms allow nations to flourish more than caste based systems even though they may be more ordered in most cases the factors that you would have to consider are so incredibly complex that we may not be anywhere near the right answer the the one true answer to rule them all but we can identify clearly wrong answers or a relative comparison between answers that are better or worse and so a friend of mine put it this way in any given situation and I'm talking about situation being the primary thing you consider when you're evaluating an action in any given situation there are a finite set of actions I could take and we know that some set of one or more actions lead to a better world under any number of objective standards and some set of actions I could take lead to a worse world we may not know which of those is best we may not even have access to the best when Sam describes Sam Baris describes this is the moral landscape we are now on on perhaps hopefully a higher plateau to see more broadly that landscape to pick out the next high point and move our way towards that if that makes sense hi my question is for Matt sorry I'm gonna let both of them respondents it sounds good okay Matt I have found your trajectory and have to say that your arguments and ideas have helped me in the process of figuring out my stances on morality so thank you for your input thank you and my question is I've noticed that your strategy for conversing about these sort of topics have gone from more passionate and intense tone like in your radio talk show to a more relaxed and parsimonious approach what experiences made you change I guess that can't be a question for John's yeah I'm gonna tell you why this question is so ironic because on Sunday I had there's a lot of stuff going on and I'm human and I had a pretty bad day and was clearly Moody and as soon as the show I did do a live call-in show and as soon as the show was over I got three or four emails which despite the fact that there are thousands of people watch it I am neurotic enough that I care what those three or four people actually had to say and not only did I make a mistake and and basically completely mistreat someone I got something in the Bible wrong and told him he had it wrong and hung up and was like go study your Bible and then as soon as I said it I was like oh is that right and then somebody emailed and they're like you're wrong dude and I wasn't asked to a couple of people and so one of the things is people will watch clips from the show and get an impression of me and it depends on which clips you watch and the 14 plus years I've done the show you can put together a montage of me being the a dick like oh my gosh does this guide to do it ever do anything but call people names and hang up on him because I've done that you could also put together a really long clip of me being incredibly patient and marching through this I didn't intentionally make a change to my style i I do acknowledge and I think oh I don't know how minutes are the show John's watched but there there's a different tact when I'm on stage in public then there is on the show and that's because when you're on a show you got time constraints I got six callers waiting this call isn't necessarily good enough when I'm on stage this is well I was gonna say the best I'm gonna get but it's good or I wouldn't have accepted in the first place John is somebody that I want to talk to and want to have long conversations with in front of people and and because of that it's in my best interest to work this way and it's in the best juicer for everybody else because this is somebody's first introduction to atheism this is somebody's first introduction to secular humanism and if I'm up here and the only thing they leave with is oh my god this jackass made fun of Jesus giving up a weekend and you know was you know but just snarky and everything then I have failed John I don't want to be obviously I can't speak for formats evolving personality over time but I do hope someone finds a gif of him pointing to me and saying this is the best I'm going to get I want a gif of that that I I can use that's awesome I think there's a humanitarian impetus that that if you're not learning it over time then you're not paying attention and you're and you're bringing bad assumptions or some sort of some sort of defect to the to the table we should be growing in our sensitivities to others we should be growing in our ability to recognize what other people are going through just this weekend I'm coming from a funeral my wife's sister passed away from stage four cancer and I can't think of how many times as a young man I would I would give some glib proof texts from Scripture saying you know all things work together for the good of those who love him I'll pray for you buddy and then move on but when you when you actually have life experience you come to realize you could you can develop your empathic response like you're working a muscle practice can grow that in you and if you have any willingness to be self-aware you'll realize that you can always improve occasionally I'll hear people say oh I don't have any regrets and I want to tell them well you're an idiot if you don't if you could have never done anything better than you did in the past if you don't have anything that you wish you could unsay then either you're not paying attention or you're just deluded because there's always ways we can be improving and a lot of that is I'm finding for me this is as a husband as a grown man a lot of my improving is learning when to shut up hug oh yeah yeah shut up shut up we have one more question and then we're gonna let each of you after this after you answer this question if we still have time well each give you a chance to do a brief closing statement so John you said you can't just use your washed hand to open the doorknob that you need something else mm-hmm Matt agreed with you and said just use a paper towel my question to you John is as a Christian what would you say that something else is what would I say that something else is as a Christian I'm not restricted to a strictly materialist understanding of the human being one of the benefits of being a a Christian is I hold to a supernaturalists worldview I can embrace all the vindications of naturalism I can embrace all of the achievements of science insofar as they're describing the natural world how things are in this present reality and all that but I don't have to stop there I can keep asking questions I can keep digging deeper even when I run up to a hard spot that reductivism materialism ISM ism when those aren't solving it anymore I can still keep asking questions and some of those questions that I can keep asking include the is off fallacy and how do we get around it how do we how do we solve this problem of the circularity of our brains and how I have to use my brain to access data that's supposed to help me discern what's wrong with my brain and so on and I can i can use questions like that i suggest we have immaterial souls that inform our bodies similar to how information informs language it's it's called Tomas tomecek high/low morphism that's a big long word that basically means you are a body soul unity you're not a soul in a body you are a soulish body and that way we have some account for things like like consciousness which David Chalmers talks about the hard problem of consciousness which drove him away from simple simple materialism and and he's one of the one of the world-class one of the top level philosophers of mind but that material aspect of us makes sense in part because I I don't think ultimate reality is material I think ultimate reality behind all of material is mined in our minds can potentially reflect the mind of God sometimes at least insofar as we can have moral knowledge of facts just as he does great yes it's Jesus yeah simple-minded Christians yes yes thank you for the questions we have time for a short closing comments how long should we give them so you should have three minutes for your closing statement you expect us to leave we start with John okay yeah please keep your eyes on that paper Zack can't okay okay tell you wouldn't it be quiet I I want to affirm a lot of what Matt said I don't want to come out as sound like I'm strictly a contrary and like all the things he agrees with me on like I'm not noticing them I do believe that morality is very complicated it's very messy and and I think it's a stopgap sometimes when we say Occam's razor we shouldn't complicate it more than we need to I think the fact that we don't have a resolution to things like the is op problem and the circularity problem those are reasons why we shouldn't settle we shouldn't say Occam's razor let's simplify let's stop here that's a good reason to keep pressing on and and if our materialism is forcing us to weird conclusions and I think we might have heard some today but I have to go back and make sure I heard you correctly because I'm not sure I I want to make sure I understand exactly what you're saying there morality is messy even in a Christian framework and there's lots of disagreement I grants all of that the only thing I hope to accomplish ultimately with this with this moderated dialogue slash debate was to establish that for there to exist good we need morality I'm sorry we need a moral basis for facts and that points us to God classic moral moral facts argument as I developed it I think Christianity on the whole has a superior account I think the proofs in the pudding historically you see the vindications of successful Christian societies now you see a lot of messy stuff too you see the Crusades you see the Salem witch trials you see people twisting scripture into something that that denies people access to Liberty when it's right there in arm's reach acting as if those passes aren't in Scripture you still see that sometimes because unfortunately the church is populated by people and we're on the wrong side of heaven if you're looking for perfection so I'm not I'm not judging this society according to utopia the map mentioned utopianism earlier I think the the worst most grave atrocities we've seen in world history have been foisted on mankind in the name of achieving utopia once in Utopia here under under natural resources using governmental systems using individual liberties we don't end up in utopia we end up in dictatorships or Anarchy we end up in a lot of gross problems but fortunately we've got a lot of correctives in society even atheists can still have moral knowledge but I don't think they can get that moral knowledge from nature and many Christians are able to build on that with with the framework of moral knowledge so we can interact with with it through say the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount and at least some some guiding principles that can help us understand this I don't think we should be dumb about it I think we need to make sure we're interpreting it correctly and we need to take historical context very seriously otherwise we're not concerned about what the text really means thank you all right so Occam's razor wasn't used to declare a stopping point too at all there's nothing you know John talks about how he doesn't have to stop asking questions well neither does it do I mean if there's anybody else if anything religions have stopped questions and science has not stopped questions doesn't mean all religion stops all questions or anything else Auggie's razor was only used because of Humes axiom which is to reject to the greater miracle and to and now comes razor to not multiply entities necessarily doesn't mean that stopping at the point where I'm forced to stop out of necessity doesn't mean I'm stopped there forever the second that there is sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a God that is a foundation or to even accept if there is something special and Beyond about morality I can accept that but I don't get to go there just because I want that to be the case and so it's I agree with him for in the sense that he's de finding good defining good when he says that for good to exist there must be whatever foundation I don't think good exists in the context that he's defining it to exist I don't think that good exists as a thing I don't think good exists as an int as a universal imperative or sometimes of intrinsic quality within the universe or some sort of aught like motivation good as I pointed out is a descriptive label of how we view consequences with respect to go and it's not a subjective thing in which I think it's good it is does this correspond to this it's like grabbing a ruler and saying yes we have declared arbitrarily this is 12 inches and then walking up and measuring this table with it it doesn't matter if the universe cared about inches or proclaimed some sort of standard by which we measure we can still objectively determine what what the height of this table is through completely arbitrary means because we're doing it in that context and it doesn't change just because we want it to and to complain that there's no universal standard of measure unless there's a God who declared that there's an inches an inch is no more impactful than saying that it was a king's finger knuckle that declared an inch an inch and the foundations can be arbitrary the goals can be subjective the assessment of the consequences of actions with respect to those goals is non subjective in the same way that when you make a move in chess no matter how good you thought it was has no bearing on whether or not it was a good move and we can objectively assess whether or not moves we're making are good if that's not what you mean by morality then we're talking about two different things I'm talking about well-being I'm talking about the type of society we live in what happened and how we proceeded and whether or not we're in a better world or a worse world that's what I care about if you don't think that's morality then we are talking about two different things and all I care about is do you also care about a better world it kind of beat me to the punch of giving a round of applause to our people can we have one more round of applause thank you this video is made possible by supporters of the atheist debates patreon project you can find more information and add your support at patreon.com slash atheist debates

Channel: Matt Dillahunty

Views: 97,011

Keywords: atheist, debate, morality, Matt Dillahunty, John Ferrer, Texas A&M SSA, Ratio Christi

Id: EigYzeXngq4

Length: 121min 0sec (7260 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 02 2018