God & Objective Morals

[Neo-Scholastic]

1. The term objective does not always or exclusively refer to things that are physical and/or quantifiable. For example, law is objective - it is established externally to any one person's will or opinion - and yet it isn't quantifiable.

And how is this person’s will or opinion in any way objective? The law is objective only in the sense that the symbolic expression is observable. That to which the symbolic expression refers, the person’s will or opinion, is not objective.

2. Your idea that only physical things or processes are quantifiable is also incorrect. For example, we quantify intelligence using an IQ scale, thus indicating that non-physical can be objective as well as quantifiable.

Not so. The IQ test measures the efficacy and efficiency of the brain as a physical symbolic processor.

3. Considering morality to be unquantifiable would also be incorrect. In fact, we quantify it every day, judging some actions to be morally worse or better than others.

Objective things can be quantified, but not all things can be objectively quantified.

4. … it is incorrect to assume that pleasure and suffering simply cannot be measured - when in fact they can and have been measured.

Once again, objective things can be quantified, but not all things can be objectively quantified. Following surgery, hospital staffers ask patients to rate the degree of their pain on a scale of 1 (annoying) to 10 (unbearable). I do not believe such a survey objectively measures any real similarity of pain experience between a pansy like me and a Navy Seal. Qualitative experiences lack the attributes that make physical events empirically verifiable. What the Navy Seal experiences as a 3, I might rate as an 8. And even then, how we rate our pain might depend on our moods or other factors.