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The Religious Canard about “Objective Morality”
How preposterous religious convictions can taint the theist’s philosophical analyses
What are the chances that if you were very confused about one thing, you’d be confused about some other things too?
True, we’re able to mentally compartmentalize so that we might excel at some tasks even if we’re hopeless at others. A Christian, for instance, might surrender her critical-thinking skills when practicing her religion, yet adopt those skills in other areas of life.
But there’s also a spillover effect, especially when the same fallacies we perpetrate in one line of inquiry might find purchase in others. Similarly, when pride drives us to excuse some of our cognitive deficiencies, we might taint our involvement in other matters. This would be like the one lie that snowballs into many lies. (“What a tangled web we weave…”)
I’ve noticed this snowballing pattern in Christian apologetic talk of the so-called problems with secular morality. The problem of evil is supposed to count against theism, but theists attempt to turn the criticism around on atheists, arguing that atheists need a robust sense of morality even to frame the question of why God would allow evil to occur, a sense that requires a divine lawgiver.
For instance, a self-professed former atheist who became a Christian theologian, Guillaume Bignon, made this point in 2015 in reference to the Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris. According to Bignon, “to deny God is to deny objective good and with it, objective evil.” Hence, atheists had no business condemning the attacks as substantively wrong. All they could do was express their arbitrary opinion.
Bignon says, “to be a consistent atheist one must affirm that the Islamic terrorists in Paris didn’t do anything ‘wrong’, as such. They only acted out of line with our personal preferences, (and in line with theirs). If there’s no ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, that’s all we are left with.”
Yet contrary to that relativism about morality, “we all sense there is something really, deeply, objectively evil about this. That intuition can only be true if there is a transcendent God, a moral lawgiver, who gives…
