On Morality and God’s Existence, Determinism and Sadism, and a Question about Objective Morality without God
AN IDEA FROM ME
Ben Watkins: Correct me if I'm wrong, but you ground moral truths in some fact about God. So if there is something like objective morality, that would be evidence that God exists. Is that right?
Joel Settecase: Yeah, that's pretty close, although I generally don't argue from the existence of morality to God, as if morality is evidence for God's existence. Morality and moral obligations can be evidence for God, but you already have to presuppose so much about the world, your heart, your mind, and how reality works by the time you’re talking about morality, that I usually do it in the opposite order.
So, we start by talking about God, and from there, we work our way towards moral obligations. But you're right in saying that I would ground any moral obligations that exist in God and His nature.
—Source: my dialogue with avowed atheist and host of the “Real Atheology” podcast, Benjamin Blake Speed Watkins, on the question, “Does objective morality require God?” Find it here: https://pod.link/1462722483/episode/5e296fa0d2d9e2e839482b1006889e32
A QUOTE FROM SOMEBODY ELSE
Modern people, as I have said, see themselves as in a deterministic situation where morals have no meaning; but they cannot, and do not, live this way….
The Marquis de Sade said that since everything is chemically determined, then whatever is, is right. Think about that for six months. The simple fact is that there is no way around that conclusion. De Sade is right. And sadism is the perfectly logical result.
Obviously nature made man stronger than the woman; therefore man has the right to do anything he wants to a woman. That was de Sade’s particular form of sadism. Nobody who holds any concept of determinism, either chemical or psychological, can explain why the Marquis de Sade is wrong.
Determinism leads in the direction of cruelty and inhumanity, whether it takes the specific form of de Sade’s sadism or not.
—Francis A. Schaeffer, Death In the City (Wheaton: Crossway, 2002), 111.
SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT
Most of the time, atheists will argue that morality is subjective. However, I recently spoke with an atheist who claimed that, while God is not real, objective morality is (see the link above for that conversation). How would you defend the idea that objective morality is impossible without God?