Objective Morality

Who is this guy and why is he smiling?

Daniel Craig seems to make a living challenging atheists to debates. I saw him debate Sam Harris. Now, you wouldn't want to try and light a Christmas tree with this guy, he's not the brightest bulb in the box, but he's pushy.

His argument goes like this: Only God can provide objective morality. He doesn’t say it outright (well, he does elsewhere, but not in the debate I saw), but what he means is that his Christian God is the only god that can provide objective morality; but even were he to broaden it to any old god, it still merits closer inspection.

The reason it has to be his Christian god is that, if it’s simply god alone somewhere out there in space, there’s no way for that god’s will to be known. Enter The Bible. Look, we conveniently have the word of God, right here.

The problem with that is that, even if you and I know The Bible to be God’s own truth, a lot of the great unwashed pray to false gods. We all know that. And that’s not counting the heathens, pagans, anti-Christs, and miscreants. So, when we all get together to hammer out rules of conduct between ourselves, we don’t have any one set of rules that we all agree upon; hence we’re forced to make agreements amongst ourselves following what we think is right and wrong, not by what a theoretical creature may or may not have said, but by what we truly feel. That’s how we do make agreements in a pluralistic society. Even should there be a god, we don’t make use of it; we’re forced to make agreements with each other based on mutually accepted codes of behavior. Such as, if you don’t bomb me, I won’t bomb you. There may well be a god, but we certainly don’t need and don’t use one to devise codes of conduct.

Objective morality? No such thing.

There, I’ve said it.