A continuation of a series of commentary on the Sam Harris and William Lane Craig debate. This is an opinion piece.
William Lane Craig is just starting his rebuttal to Sam Harris’ opening argument. He has spent the first 1:23 or so discussing semantics and ontology and hasn’t at this point begun the counter argument.
Harris states that his first premise is that good is grounded in God and second is that our moral duties are grounded by God’s commandments (such as to kill people who light fires on the Sabbath). WLC discounts Harris and my objection to grounding morality in the God of the bible by saying that many people believe in god but don’t believe in the Bible. My immediate reaction to that is of course, without the holy books how do you know what God’s commands are? If you don’t know what god’s commands are how can you ground your objective morality and object moral duties? WLC takes a moment to plug someone’s book, I’m not quite sure why he has done this it seems a bit out-of-place given the nature of the debate. WLC takes his argument for God being a solid grounding for objective morality as a given, which I don’t think it is and I think he is ignoring quite a large moral maze, and continues to the question if God does not exist do we have a solid grounding for morality. WLC points out that religion doesn’t provide the objective moral values and what religion brings is universal values, which is not what the debate is about. WLC again attempts to discount Harris’ argument through word play saying that the well-being of conscious creatures is of course a good thing but it doesn’t provide an objective stick to measure morality against. He makes a valid point in that if god doesn’t exist, why would we think that the well-being of conscious creatures is an objective good thing, it is obviously a good thing from a subjective standpoint as a species, but what makes it objectively good? He is speaking to my moral relativity but is failing to convince me that it is a bad thing. WLC notes that Harris uses the terms good and bad in non-moral context, such as chess. WLC continues to expand on this non-moral use of language. WLC asserts that Harris’ example of most suffering isn’t a moral living standard, just a standard of pleasure, and WLC doesn’t see a connection between pleasure and misery; and good and evil. WLC points out that Dr. Harris has identified good with the condition of conscious creatures flourishing and hasn’t offered any support to this assertion. WLC points out that the continuum of well-being and the continuum of morality are not the same giving the example of a flourishing psychopath who has excellent well-being but poor morality. This shows that morality and well-being are not the same thing and William Lane Craig say that this knocks out Harris’ argument.
WLC continues to speak about moral duties, he stipulates that atheists have no moral duty to do anything. As an atheist, a husband and a parent I can immediately disagree, I have a moral duty to my wife and children and that negates his argument. WLC says that without a God there is no one to give moral direction. I disagree because it can come from within, I tell myself that I have a moral duty to provide for my wife and children or that it can come from a consensus that we all have a moral duty to tell the police about crime. WLC returns to the argument that if we have no freewill then we have no morality and therefore cannot have moral duties.
Sam Harris takes the stage for his rebuttal: Harris starts with the assertion that Christianity’s entire goal is the safeguarding of human souls and keeping them from hell, though there is no evidence that Hell exists. Harris continues by pointing out that 9 million children under the age of 5 die each year. The parents of these children pray to God to spare their child but God doesn’t spare them because either he can’t or won’t, and is therefore either impotent or evil. Harris asserts that WLC’s world view means that many of these children will go to hell for praying to the wrong God. “Through no fault of their own they were born into the wrong culture, where they got the wrong theology, and the missed the revelation.” Harris points out that there are 1.2 billion people in India and most are Hindu and therefore in Craig’s view doomed to hell (even though there is no evidence for hell). In contrast an American serial killer who spends his life killing and raping need only come to God on death row in order to spend his eternity in heaven. Therefore this God view of morality has nothing to do with morality.
The video ends and I will review part 5 tomorrow.
/edit part 5 has been reviewed
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