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William Lane Craig’s moral argument, and five objections to it

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Which argument for God is the most accessible? To really sustain the cosmic beginning argument and the cosmic fine-tuning argument, you have to learn some scientific evidence. Same for the resurrection of Jesus – you have to learn some history. But what about the moral argument? All you need to make that argument is for your opponent to think that something is morally wrong.

First, let’s review the moral argument, from William Lane Craig.

He writes:

We are going to turn now to a discussion of the moral argument for the existence of God. So far we have been looking at philosophical and scientific arguments. This is an ethical argument. There are a wide variety of moral reasons for believing in God, but this is a particularly simple moral argument that I have used over and over again with university students and I find very effective. It really grabs people where they live. This is not just a matter of scientific evidence or philosophical issues that may not impact your life. This is an issue that is vitally important because everyday as you live you make moral choices. So everyday by your behavior you answer the question whether or not you believe that God exists. The argument consists basically of three simple steps:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.

2. Objective moral values do exist.

3. Therefore, God exist.

That is a very simple argument for the existence of God and is easy to memorize. It is just three steps. It is logically valid. If those two premises are true then the conclusion follows necessarily and logically. The only question is: are the two premises true?

But there are some objections to the moral argument. CrossExamined.org has posted a list of five objections to the moral argument from philosopher Paul Rezkalla.

Here are the 5 points:

  1. “But I’m a moral person and I don’t believe in God. Are you saying that atheists can’t be moral?”
  2. “But what if you needed to lie in order to save someone’s life? It seems that morality is not absolute as you say it is.”
  3. ‘Where’s your evidence for objective morality? I won’t believe in anything unless I have evidence for it.’
  4. ‘If morality is objective, then why do some cultures practice female genital mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and other atrocities which we, in the West, deem unacceptable?’
  5.  ‘But God carried out many atrocities in the Old Testament. He ordered the genocide of the Canaanites.’

That last one seems to be popular, so let’s double-check the details:

For starters, this isn’t really an objection to the moral argument. It does not attack either premise of the argument. It is irrelevant, but let’s entertain this objection for a second. By making a judgement on God’s actions and deeming them immoral, the objector is appealing to a standard of morality that holds true outside of him/herself and transcends barriers of culture, context, time period, and social norms. By doing this, he/she affirms the existence of objective morality! But if the skeptic wants to affirm objective morality after throwing God out the window, then there needs to be an alternate explanation for its basis. If not God, then what is it? The burden is now on the skeptic to provide a naturalistic explanation for the objective moral framework.

If you have heard any of these objections before when discussing the moral argument, click through and take a look.

And if you have a non-Christian in your life who likes to make moral statements, it’s a good conversation to have. Where does your standard come from? Is it from your own desires? Is it from cultural conventions, that vary by time and place? Is it from Darwinian evolution? Find out what the answer is, and then respond to it.

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Why do so many law-abiding Americans carry legally-owned firearms?

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I’m not originally from the United States, and when I go back home to visit, one of the questions that I get asked a lot is “why do Americans own so many guns?” My favorite writer on the gun ownership and self-defense issues is Amy Swearer, who writes for the Daily Signal. Below, I’ll link to two recent articles where she talks about recent examples of self-defense in America.

Here are some examples from August 2024:

  • Aug. 5, Albuquerque, New Mexico: A disabled Vietnam War veteran awoke to the sounds of someone using a knife to open his bedroom window, police said. The veteran grabbed a pistol from a nightstand and, as the intruder raised the window, fired a single shot that killed him.

  • Aug. 15, Brookhaven, Georgia: Police said that a woman called a neighbor for help after her home surveillance system detected four armed men had broken in. The neighbor confronted the men and, according to witnesses, exchanged 15 to 20 rounds until police arrived and the suspects fled in a car. After a chase and a second exchange of fire with officers, three of the four were taken into custody, police said.

  • Aug. 21, Liberty Hills, Texas: As a homeowner surveyed his backyard with a contractor, he saw a machete-wielding man climb a fence, enter his property, and try to get into his residence, police said. Afraid for his wife and two young children, the homeowner locked up before getting his gun and confronting the man on a deck of the residence. Seeing the gun, the intruder began to walk away and was arrested by police. He was charged with criminal trespass.

  • Aug. 23, Falls Mills, Virginia: Police said a would-be carjacker assaulted a female driver at a rural gas station, telling her child in the back seat: “I’m going to rape your mommy.” Bystanders, one with a handgun, heard the woman’s screams and came to her aid. The carjacker charged at the armed good Samaritan, who shot and wounded him. Police said that the assailant was wanted on outstanding criminal charges. The local sheriff publicly praised the bystanders who intervened, telling reporters, “This could have been a very different outcome.”

  • Aug. 24, Medford, Oregon: An armed resident fatally shot an intruder who forced his way into an apartment and threatened another resident with a knife, police said.

And here are some examples from July 2024:

  • July 2, Bullhead City, Arizona: Police said Mayor Steve D’Amico heard someone banging on his front door and “messing with” the doorknob in the middle of the night, so he armed himself for a potential confrontation. While still in his underwear, the mayor opened the door, located the would-be intruder (who’d somehow gotten past a locked gate), and detained him at gunpoint until police arrived. The suspect faced charges for trespassing and disorderly conduct.

  • July 8, California Valley Village, California: Police said two intruders broke into what they believed was an unoccupied residence and came face-to-face with an armed homeowner. After a “scuffle” in which one intruder used pepper spray against him, the homeowner opened fire, hitting one intruder and sending the other fleeing with an accomplice waiting in a getaway car. The wounded suspect was identified as a repeat offender recently released on probation; his extensive criminal record included arrests for burglary, robbery, and illegal gun possession.

  • July 18, Towns County, Georgia: Police said an armed homeowner helped end a dayslong search for an escaped prisoner who walked away from an off-site work detail. The homeowner ordered him to the ground and held him at gunpoint until police arrived. The homeowner’s dog had alerted him to an intruder on the property; when the homeowner investigated, he saw the man in an orange prison jumpsuit. The escapee had been at a county detention center awaiting a court appearance on charges including two counts of burglary, drug offenses, and violating his probation.

  • July 22, Ogden, Utah: Police said a pair of pit bulls attacked two neighbors, who shot the dogs to avoid being bitten. The growling dogs had hemmed in one neighbor, who shot and killed one dog when they went after him; the other neighbor shot and wounded the second dog when it charged. The dogs had a history of biting, police said.

  • July 28, North Vernon, Indiana: An intruder entered a house through an unlocked door, helped himself to food, went into the room of a female resident, and chased her around the property, police said. The homeowner armed himself and held the intruder at gunpoint until police arrived. The suspect faced charges of burglary and unlawful residential entry.

It’s especially important for people living in blue cities or blue states to arm themselves, because the police forces in these areas have had their budgets slashed by Democrats. “Defund the police” sounds so good, but it just gets a lot of peaceful, law-abiding people killed.

It’s very important to ask secular leftists who want to ban law-abiding people from owning firearms “what do you expect people to do when criminals want to hurt them?” The answer I get from my atheist Democrat friend is that he expects them to call the police, and wait for them to arrive. There is a real suspicion among secular leftists of law-abiding people defend themselves – especially men. A man defending his family? Why, that’s “sexist”. Better to call the police and wait for them to arrive.

The peer-reviewed research

Whenever I get into discussions about gun control, I always mention two academic books by John R. Lott and Joyce Lee Malcolm.

The book by economist John Lott, linked above, compares the crime rates of all U.S. states that have enacted concealed carry laws, and concludes that violent crime rates dropped after law-abiding citizens were allowed to carry legally-owned firearms. That’s the mirror image of Dr. Malcolm’s Harvard study, which shows that the 1997 UK gun ban caused violent crime rates to MORE THAN DOUBLE in the four years following the ban. But both studies affirm the same conclusion – more legal firearm ownership means less crime.

One of the common mistakes I see anti-gun advocates making is to use the metric of all “gun-related deaths”. First of all, this completely ignores the effects of hand gun ownership on violent crime, as we’ve seen. Take away the guns from law-abiding people and violent crime skyrockets. But using the “gun-related deaths” number is especially wrong, because it includes suicides committed with guns. This is the majority (about two thirds) of gun related deaths, even in a country like America that has a massive inner-city gun violence problem caused by the epidemic of single motherhood by choice. If you take out the gun-related SUICIDES, then the actual number of gun homicides has decreased as gun ownership has grown.

For a couple of useful graphs related to this point, check out this post over at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Study: white progressives are more racist against minorities than white conservatives

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What’s the definition of racism? Well, it seems to me that a person is racist if they treat people of a different skin color differently than they treat people of their own skin color. So, if a white person treats a black person differently than they do a white person, then the white person is a racist. Because they’re discriminating on the basis of skin color. So, who are the real racists? Conservatives? Or Progressives?

The Yale School of Management reports on an academic study that provides the definitive answer to the question:

According to new research by Cydney Dupree, assistant professor of organizational behavior at Yale SOM, white liberals tend to downplay their own verbal competence in exchanges with racial minorities, compared to how other white Americans act in such exchanges. The study is scheduled for publication in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

[…]Dupree and her co-author, Susan Fiske of Princeton University, began by analyzing the words used in campaign speeches delivered by Democratic and Republican presidential candidates to different audiences over the years. They scanned 74 speeches delivered by white candidates over a 25-year period. Approximately half were addressed to mostly-minority audiences—at a Hispanic small business roundtable discussion or a black church, for example. They then paired each speech delivered to a mostly-minority audience with a comparable speech delivered at a mostly-white audience—at a mostly-white church or university, for example. The researchers analyzed the text of these speeches for two measures: words related to competence (that is, words about ability or status, such as “assertive” or “competitive”) and words related to warmth (that is, words about friendliness, such as “supportive” and “compassionate”).

[…]The team found that Democratic candidates used fewer competence-related words in speeches delivered to mostly minority audiences than they did in speeches delivered to mostly white audiences. The difference wasn’t statistically significant in speeches by Republican candidates… There was no difference in Democrats’ or Republicans’ usage of words related to warmth.

More testing confirmed the patronizing white supremacist attitude of whites on the political left:

They designed a series of experiments in which white participants were asked to respond to a hypothetical or presumed-real interaction partner. For half of these participants, their partner was given a stereotypically white name (such as “Emily”); for the other half, their partner was given a stereotypically black name (such as “Lakisha”). Participants were asked to select from a list of words for an email to their partner.

[…]The researchers found that liberal individuals were less likely to use words that would make them appear highly competent when the person they were addressing was presumed to be black rather than white. No significant differences were seen in the word selection of conservatives based on the presumed race of their partner.

Conservatives aren’t racist at all – they’re color blind.

One of the reasons why I get along so well with white conservatives is that they don’t patronize me with low expectations, the way that white leftists patronize non-whites. The view of white progressives is similar to the view of white supremacist racists – they think that there is something defective about people like me because of our non-white skin color.

White supremacists and white progressives agree on this: that non-white people aren’t competent enough to make our own decisions. We need help from big government in order to do what whites can do without help. We need to be told what to think for our own good, and shamed if we step out of line. It’s amazing to me that white racist progressives are seen as “compassionate”, when they are the ones who actually believe in the racial inferiority of non-whites.