My views on objective morality

[Kiekeben]

If I understand you correctly, you are saying that because God created the moral laws, whatever he decrees is true by definition. Is that it? But if so, do you believe that if God had said that torturing babies for fun is good, it would be good?

He is God, so killing babies would be whatever He made it be. But in the world we live in, and the God I know/believe in defines goodness as loving your neighbor as yourself, treating others the way you want to be treated, feeding the hungry, giving drink the to thirsty, clothing the naked, etc... things like that. That is what He has established to be goodness. If killing babies was good, then the word "good" would literally have an entirely different meaning, considering it directly contradicts the very way good has been defined by God. Also, God (the one I believe to be real) is love. If He wanted us to torture babies, He would be a completely different entity than the God I would have thought existed.

Okay, I think we're actually getting somewhere here (which is more than I can say for most online discussions), so I hope you bear with me - especially since this is going to be a bit long. What you're defending is known as the Divine Command Theory, and you may not realize this, but plenty of Christians have rejected this theory (in fact, the Catholic Church officially accepts natural law theory, which strictly speaking is incompatible with DCT). 

To begin with, it's important to realize that discussing what makes something morally good is not the same thing as discussing what the four letters g, o, o, d, in that order, happen to mean in our language. I say this because you stated that if God said torturing babies was good, "good" would mean something else.  I'm not concerned with how else the word might be have been used - I'm talking about the concept of goodness. IOW, if you say that what we should do is by definition whatever God says we should do, then in a world where God says "thou shalt torture babies", we should torture babies. It would be good, on this understanding of what makes something good, to torture babies - and "good" would mean the same thing - that is, it would denote that which we should do.

Now, the question I'm asking is, do you accept that torturing babies (keeping in mind that it would still cause pain and suffering) would be good in such a world? From what you've said so far, it seems your answer is (fortunately) no! 

But now, the reason you're claiming that it would not be good, it seems, is that you're saying God is a loving being who would never want to see babies tortured. But (and this is the part people often fail to understand) if that's the case, then what you are claiming is that God is good because he is a loving being. If God were different and wanted us to torture babies, then he would not be good! But do you see what you're really saying here? Good is no longer whatever God says just because he's God and what he says goes - good is what a loving being believes is good. It is only because God has a good nature that his commands are good. And this is incompatible with the DCT - and with your initial claim. Good is limited to what a loving being regards as good - it cannot be just anything that God (whether he is loving or not) might want.

And here's the clincher: if what you really mean by "good" is what a loving being would agree is good, then I as an atheist do not need to believe there is a God in order to agree with your understanding of it. Good, in this case, depends on what is loving, what is caring and considerate of others, and so on, and thus does not depend on the existence of a being to make a declaration that this or that is good. To put it another way, good is what a loving being would want irrespective of whether this loving being exists. The right thing to do is necessarily limited by the sort of action it is - by whether or not it causes suffering, for example - and an atheist can see that without having to believe that there is a creator who informed human beings about morality.

I hope that makes it clear why the DCT is just wrong, but I'll happily discuss this further (if you're not already really tired of this by now!). And BTW, I wrote a bit more about all this in Ch. 5 of my book The Truth about God (by Franz Kiekeben), in case you're interested.