Why "mysterious ways" don't matter.

[davidMC1982]

If you object to this:

1. If God exists, objective moral values exist
2. Objective moral values exist
3. Therefore God exists.

I know others have already addressed this but this argument bugs me every time I see it.

1. Why? If God exists, why assume he has morals? If he does, why assume they're objective? If he can create the universe surely he's capable of changing his mind? What happens to the objective morals then? Why even assume he's good? Use your imagination and you can come up with so many possibilities that all refute this statement.

2. Why? Everything you know about the world tells you this isn't so. There is no evidence for objective moral values. There are things we have broad agreement on, but even something like "thou shalt not kill" is not an absolute.

3) Doesn't follow from 1 and 2.

Replace "God" with "Howard the Duck" to see why this argument is spurious. Or replace "objective moral values" with "cheese". Arguments like these are what gives philosophy a bad name.

Just think of this for a moment. When we know something to be true, do we ever have to make these types of philosophical arguments to demonstrate it? If I were to say to you that all objects fall to the earth at 9.8ms-2 do I have to make a philosophical argument or do I just describe my experiment and calculations?

How about playing a small game? Take a yellow highlighter pen and mark every passage in the bible that you think we (atheists) might consider immoral. Slavery, genocide, overt lies, rape, inequality etc. Take a pink one and do the same for all the things you think we (atheists) would consider scientifically false or unsubstantiated. Things like virgin births, rising from the dead, water into wine, light before stars etc. Then ask yourself how you justify those things and whether, at any point in your argument you have to assume god exists and assume something about his nature. Finally, ask yourself if you have anything else, apart from God, you hold to be true that you couldn't easily demonstrate to another person.

You'll probably notice that all the things that are hard to demonstrate as being true are things related to inner experience. The same applies to morality.