The Moral Argument for God

[Esquilax]

First, can you describe how it it possible to have objective moral values without a god?

Snipty, the Objective Moral Values Raccoon. He's a raccoon, and he has the power to make objective moral values.

What objections can you bring against Snipty that wouldn't also apply to god under the same premises? There's no evidence for Snipty? Well, there's no evidence for god either; if there was you wouldn't need to resort to logical arguments, you'd just point to the positive evidence. Only people who can't prove their claims do exist need to fall back on proving that their claims must exist.

Moreover, the fact that god can be switched out with Snipty in the argument, without significantly changing the formulation of the argument nor appearing any more or less connected to objective moral values than god is a huge red flag: if I can insert a magic raccoon into your argument without changing a single other thing, then your argument probably doesn't demonstrate that god exists any more than it does that Snipty exists. At the very least, you now have an argument that, if we assume the premises to be true, now has two equally sufficient conclusions, and no justification within the argument itself for selecting one over the other. Therefore, the argument as it stands cannot be used to justify god over Snipty, and thus the logic of the argument is false.

This is the problem when the first premise of an argument simply assumes a connection between two concepts based on simple assertion rather than anything readily demonstrable: you can switch out either concept for any other concept and the argument would remain exactly as viable. It can be used to prove anything, and thus is good for proving nothing.

 The challenge for the non-believing crowd, as I understand it, is that without a fixed reference point, there is no way to establish the "objective" aspect of morality; everything becomes subjective. Have a go at that (and thanks in advance, btw).

I'm a little torn on how I should answer this, since there's a clear problem with the formulation, yet my actual position on the matter is different from the one that objection raises. So first of all, this point you're making is based on an equivocation that theists use regarding the term subjective, which is that subjective only means "completely up for individual determination in every respect," which is false, but it helps them set up their false dichotomy of "magically objective," versus "no morals beyond opinion at all," so they're happy to not think about it anyway. But we routinely function via a sort of group subjectivity every day, which is one of many types of subjectivity that has upper and lower bounds of intelligibility: the way we diagnose mental illness, for example, is by comparing the subjective experience of the patient versus the commonly held subjective experiences of everyone else and finding inconsistencies between the two. Both are subjective experiences, but we still understand that there are limits to that, because we understand that our subjective experiences correspond with an objectively real world that we're all forced to inhabit together by necessity. People don't just go around allowing mentally ill people to do whatever because mental health is subjective and thus limitless, and our moral principles have similar physical consequences, why wouldn't we treat them the same, subjective or not? To do otherwise is to deny the objective world we share, which is just solipsism.

Also, I do have to point out that there is an objective reality, which I would suggest is a perfectly adequate objective source for morality, no god required. We are physical beings, inhabiting a physical reality, and there are objective facts that can be known about us: what's good for us, what's bad for us, these things are objectively demonstrable, and they are a sufficient basis for the formulation of an objective moral system. Stabbing a person objectively goes against their welfare, after all, and if morality doesn't concern itself with the welfare of thinking beings then it's effectively useless. This is my position on morality: reality serves as a perfectly adequate objective moral basis from which to build a moral system, no god required.

But I also object to your framing this as a "challenge," because what it really is is an argument from consequences fallacy. "If there is no objective morality then everything is subjective, therefore you have to account for that," isn't a valid form anyway, but it also isn't a challenge that needs resolving because "If X then something bad will happen, therefore Not X," is not a true statement. What if morality is just subjective in my estimation? That doesn't make the claim of objective morality any more true just because you'd find it uncomfortable, and thus it poses no challenge.

Second, it seems to me that we know that objective moral values do exist because we behave this way every day. Whenever we say, "That's not fair!", we are measuring the action in question against some standard that everyone is somehow expected to know. Even little kids on a playground recognize that when someone cuts in line to go down the slide, an injustice has been done. Where do we get these notions from?

How did you determine that this indicates an objective moral value, rather than just a consistently shared subjective one?

This is the problem: you're not doing any legwork. You're just taking observations and arbitrarily tacking on the label of "objective," just because they're consistent across human cultures, but that's not the hallmark of an objective attribute. All that is is fiat assertion. Something can be held in common by every human being on the planet and still be subjective. What makes a thing objective is that it exists external to any mind apprehending it, and in that sense I don't even know that "objective morals," is a coherent claim to make, because morals are conceptual by nature. They aren't entities, they're judgments rendered based on actions or thoughts, so in what sense could they be objectively real?

To be absolutely clear, a moral system handed down to us by a god would not be objective merely by dint of coming from a god, either. God is a subjective mind, his opinions on morality are no more woven into the fabric of the universe just because he holds them than ours are. And if they were, then you'd be able to find that out within reality and report upon that, but thus far I've never so much as heard a clear definition of how a moral precept could exist objectively. Theists just sort of take it as read that if it comes from god then it's objective, but what they really have there is a subjective morality imbued with an absurd amount of authority, and that's just not the same thing.

Finally, even if, as you say, it's possible "to have a god that doesn't provide objective moral values", this fact doesn't really aid the freethinker, does it? I mean, he might argue, "I don't believe in objective moral values" but you'd counter that a god might still exist. If you're right, then the atheist can no longer use the argument that "there are no objective moral values" as justification for denying the existence of a god. Meanwhile, the believer might lose the use of this one argument but not the belief in his god. 

Who has gotten the better of that exchange?

But we're not talking about the existence of god, we're talking about the argument from morality. The complete lack of positive evidence for god is all I need to be an atheist and "win" the epistemological debate, and the fact that that is the state of affairs is why we only get these scrabbling, desperate logical arguments from theists in the hopes that we'll mistake them for positive evidence if repeated enough times. You'd said that the logic of the argument from morality was sound, which is why I had to point out that a god can exist without providing objective morality, because that shows that the logic is not sound: obviously if an "if P then Q," proposition in reality could equally be "if P then not Q," or in reverse, either "if Q then P," or "if Q then not P," then that first proposition is effectively saying nothing. The moral argument relies upon the premise that if there's P, then Q will be the state of things, but I've already demonstrated how P does not entail Q, or at least that it entails Q or Not Q equally, and that Q in no way entails P.

That falsifies the claim that the logic of the argument is sound.