Moral Duties: Have to do with whether something is right or wrong, and insist upon a moral obligation; what one ought or ought not do.
(Good/Bad are different from Right/Wrong- It is good to become a doctor, but one is not morally obligated to become one)
Objective Values and Duties: Independent of people's opinions.
Subjective Values and Duties: Dependent upon people's opinions.
The Moral Argument goes like this:
1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.
This is a logically air-tight argument. If premise 1 and 2 are more probable than their negations then the conclusion follows necessarily, regardless of whether anyone likes it or not. The reason why this deductive argument is so powerful is because it uses the Modus ponens inference:
- if p is true, then q is true
- p is true
- therefore, q is true
Defense of Premise 1
Objective Moral Values require God
Traditionally, moral values have been founded in God, who is by definition the highest Good. But what if God does not exist? What would be the basis for such moral values? Namely, why think that human beings have any moral worth? For on atheism, moral values are nothing more than the by-product of biological evolution and social conditioning. Just as a troop of baboons may exhibit a sort of self-sacrificial behavior because natural selection has determined such a thing to be advantageous in the struggle for survival, so their primate cousins Homo sapiens exhibit similar behaviors for absolutely the same reasons.
To think that human beings still have intrinsic moral worth, even with these propositions in place, would be to succumb to the temptation to speciesism, which is an unjustified bias toward one's own species. Once one removes God from the equation, all were left with is a sort of ape-like creature living on an infinitesimal speck of dust beset with delusions of moral grandeur.
Objective Moral Duties Require God
Traditionally, moral duties were thought to spring from God's commandments (such as the 10 Commandments). But if God does not exist, what reason is there to think that we have moral obligations to one another? Animals in the wild may kill in order to survive, but they do not murder one another- there is no moral dimension to such actions. And if humans are animals, which on atheism we are, what reason is there to think that we have moral obligations?
For example, certain actions such as rape or incest may not be biologically and socially advantageous and so in the course of human development have become taboo. But if God does not exist, what reason is there to think that such acts are morally wrong? Such behavior occurs all the time in the animal kingdom. The rapist who goes against traditional herd morality is doing nothing more serious than acting unfashionably, similar to burping at the dinner table.
If life ends at the grave, and there is no punishment for anything we have done on earth, I see no reason to believe that a moral law exists, or that humans should care for it. For if there is no transcendent Moral Lawgiver whom holds us to a standard, then there is no Moral Law.
Defense of Premise 2
Moral Experience
There is no more reason to distrust our moral experience than there is to distrust the experience of our 5 senses. I believe that my 5 senses communicate to me that there is an actual world with physical objects out there. Although my senses are not infallible, that doesn't lead me to think that there is no external world around me. Similarly, in the absnse of some reason to distrust my moral experience, I should accept what it tells me; some things are objectively good or evil, right or wrong.
(Notice that I am not arguing what the morality is, or how we know, or interact with a Moral Law. A further explanation can be found in my "Moral Relativism Failure #1: Self-Refuting" blog in which I differentiate between Moral Epistemology and Moral Ontology)
Now, there are a large amount of people whom I speak with that give lip-service to Moral Relativism, but can then be quickly convinced that objective moral values do exist after all. All I have to do is produce a few illustrations and let them decide for themselves.
I will be using the famous Atheist, Professor Richard Dawkins, as a prime example. Here is a famous quote by Dawkins in his book "The God Delusion", in which he states, "Humans have always wondered about the meaning of life...life has no higher purpose than to perpetuate the survival of DNA...life has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference." Notice that Dawkins strongly affirms the truth of Premise 1 of the Moral Argument. So therefore, in order to avoid the conclusion (that God exists), he must deny Premise 2 of the argument.
What is hysterical is that Dawkins is a very stubborn moralist. Even within the pages of the very same book, he strongly denounces the Doctrine of original sin as "morally obnoxious". He rigorously condemns such actions as the harassment and abuse of homosexuals, the religious indoctrination of children, and the practice of human sacrifice. Dawkins even goes so far as to create his own rendition of the 10 Commandments, as a guide to moral behavior! Similarly, he declares himself "mortified" that the Enron Executive, Jeff Skilling, declares Dawkin's book "The Selfish Gene" to be one of his all-time favorite books! Subsequently, Dawkins calls compassion and generosity to be "noble emotions". All the while completely oblivious for the logical contradiction of such claims when combined with his ethical subjectivism.
It is very hard to believe that all of Dawkin's moral denunciations of such actions are just "his opinion". It would be obtuse to conclude that in spite of all the vigorous condemnation that he finds himself whispering to his colleagues "I really don't think that anti-homosexuality and child abuse are wrong; its just my opinion. You can go ahead and believe whatever you want. It doesn't matter, because there is no moral objectivity." Therefore we conclude that Dawkin's truly does affirm the existence of objective morals, even though it is incompatible with his atheism. Since Dawkins seems to affirm both of the premises, he is then forced to affirm the conclusion: God exists.
If anyone believes that certain things are truly wrong, then you affirm the existence of objective morals and in turn affirm the existence of God.
Therefore, God exists.
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