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Religious apologists often overlook secular reasons to be decent to our fellow man in order to make their arguments that morality can only be grounded in God. For them, I present these ten secular incentives to ground one's morality in reason. Points one and two can be seen as a catch all and that all following points can be seen as subsets of one and two. The truth is, by making one and two so broad was the only way to cover all the ways people can come to what we consider good behavior. The rest are just some specifics that are probably obvious to all but the most religious of apologists. 1. To avoid negative consequences. Try to kill, rape, or steal from someone and that someone will be pissed. If the person is able to hurt you, he or she is much more likely to hurt you as a punishment of your previous action. The motivation for the retaliation could be revenge or just to put you on notice that if you try that shit again then you�ll be hurt again. If that person is unabl...

Religious apologists often confuse the word objective with words like absolute, transcendent, and universal--especially when talking about morality. To illustrate what objective means, I will now insult these people. They are stupid...at least in the subjective sense, which is a judgement I'm making influenced by personal feelings and opinions. However, in the recent past, I could test these people and state objectively that they are morons, imbeciles and idiots--each of these labels corresponding with an IQ score of 51�70, 21�50, and IQ of 0�20 respectively. A metric, like an IQ score, means that feelings and opinions can't factor in. Your IQ is your IQ regardless of what I personally think of you, and therefore objective.?

Are you healthy? I don�t know much about you, reader, but if you are the average American your answer is probably close to �sure...I guess� or maybe even a straight up �I don�t know.� That�s because the term �healthy� is an imprecise word that means different things to different people. A judgement of health, when poorly defined, is subjective and not very meaningful. If, on the other hand, I asked if you are overweight then provided a scale, tape measure, and the calculation to determine your Body Mass Index, we could objectively see if your BMI is over 25 and therefore overweight. In debates with religious apologists, I�ve noticed their moral arguments rely on the imprecise meaning of right and wrong--of good and evil. Ask them to define them clearly and you will be met with resistance. Define them secularly and those meanings will be dismissed. Push, and you will likely hear one of two meanings. Good or evil are inherent properties of the action in question. That which is right is t...

The moral argument for God is very convincing to Internet apologists because they believe in something called transcendent morality. It comes up by many names including objective morality, absolute morality--and as I prefer, cosmic morality and magical morality. Regardless of the name, it is seen as a moral standard that exists somewhere independent of the minds of mere mortals and supersedes alternative judgements. That�s the claim. Is there proof? No. Is there evidence? No. The defense for the claim is essentially finding a moral value agreed upon between the apologist and the non-apologist, such as �murder is wrong,� and using that shared common ground to say all other assessments aren�t just wrong from their perspective, but wrong independent of perspective. What do you think, is murder wrong independent of perspective? In my experience, �wrong� means different things to different people. It is like saying not murdering is better than murdering. �Better,� like �wrong� in this case,...

Search �morality� in Merriam-Webster and the first definition you�ll see is �beliefs about what is right behavior and what is wrong behavior.� That�s beliefs, plural. This implies that what I believe is right and wrong isn�t the only belief out there, which should be obvious. Add the word �objective� in front of a word with a definition like this and the result is an oxymoron. Morality, by definition, is subjective. Case closed. Well, of course the case isn�t closed. I can�t cite Merriam-Webster and expect millennia of philosophy to buckle.  Honestly, it isn�t even justified. Merriam-Webster has four definitions for the word �morality,� and MW is hardly the only dictionary in circulation. Should I go with the terminology of Google? Wikipedia? Who is the linguistic authority here? Few theists will deny the reality that different beliefs of right and wrong behavior exist, they just believe one in particular belief is true in an absolute and objective way, conveniently, it�s their own...

Some theists claim that when atheists judge the character of God in the Bible as immoral, they show that they have a sense of objective morality which could only be present if God is a foundation for morality. By claiming this they are implying that the atheist's judgement is objectively correct. These theists either must agree that God is objectively immoral or admit that the atheist's judgement isn't objectively true thereby discounting their claim that the atheist's judgement shows that we have a sense of objective morality.?

The following is my personal assessment of the validity of popular apologetic arguments. The list goes from most valid to least valid. The Fine Tuning of the Universe: Could be valid, currently based on assumptions. There are a vast number of physically possible universes. A universe that would be hospitable to the appearance of life must conform to some very strict conditions. Everything from the mass ratios of atomic particles and the number of dimensions of space to the cosmological parameters that rule the expansion of the universe must be just right for stable galaxies, solar systems, planets, and complex life to evolve. The percentage of possible universes that would support life is infinitesimally small (from 2). Our universe is one of those infinitesimally improbable universes. Our universe has been fine-tuned to support life (from 3 and 4). There is a Fine-Tuner (from 5). Only God could have the power and the purpose to be the Fine- Tuner. God exists. This argument, had we jus...

Atheists usually argue that morality is subjective because, well, theists argue that morality is objective. Some atheists also argue this because they accept the reality that people define their morality in different ways. This is undebatably the way it is, but doesn�t have to be. If everyone defined morality identically, it could be objective sans deity. Apologists claim that God is needed for a moral standard. The way I see it, a moral standard is needed and this standard not only needn't be God, but it can�t be God. I define right conduct as simply that which benefits others more than it harms. Wrong conduct is obviously that which harms others more than it benefits. This is a moral standard. From here we can take any action and determine it�s morality objectively. Going on a shooting spree causes direct harm to everyone hit and therefore is morally wrong. Stopping the shooter benefits all those who would have been hit and is therefore morally right. Even if one must kill the s...

I admit, I�m a strange bird. I�m always keeping an eye out for content for this blog which has me coloring even the most secular interactions in my day-to-day as metaphors for religion. When I see something that inherently does have religious themes, I�m so distracted about how to leverage it into a post that I stop living in the moment. This weeks opening movie, Man of Steel , has inherent Christian themes--yet I barely realized until retrospection. This goes to show, as much as I think about Jesus, I think even more about Superman. Spoilers follow. Sure, Man of Steel depicts Kal-El as a miraculous birth who grows up to stand beside stainglass windows of JC and float out of space ships crucifixion-style, but as I said before, I barely noticed in the awesomeness that is Superman. The only thing that bothered me enough to take me out of the flick was a mid-fight speech in which General Zod�s right-hand woman waxed poetic about the merits of evolution over morality. To sum up, she said...

I wrote in my last post how a newly popular Christian apologetic argument is claiming that God is needed as a foundation for logic. I was trying to classify the argument and the best I could come up with is simply a bundle of talking points I�ll label the Foundation Arguments . What strikes me as particularly fallacious about each example of this type of reasoning is that they clearly don�t take into account the entirety of the deity they argue for. Let�s go over a few. God is needed as a foundation for logic. And yet God, as many Christians define him, is omnipotent, omniscient, and eternal--qualities that break logic in several different ways. Examples follow. An omnipotent God can�t both make a stone so heavy that he can�t lift and then lift said stone. An omniscient God can�t know what is it like to learn considering he has always known all, yet he must know what it is like to learn in order to know all.  An omnipotent God can, by definition, commit suicide; yet an eternal God...

A Catholic apologist I follow recently said that �religion isn�t required to show that an unborn child is a human being.� The particular phrasing of this statement makes it obvious. A child of a human is a human. No need for debate there. The less clear question is this: is an unborn zygote or fetus a child? For the sake of argument, let�s say yes, but that still isn�t entirely the point. After all, the corpse of a human is still a human. The morality of abortion must take into account more than black and white definitions. Killing cells isn�t a morally wrong act by anyone�s standard. If it was, everything from sun tans to common medical procedures would be stigmatized or illegal. A fertilized egg is a very active collection of cells. In my opinion, the main distinction between human cells and human people is consciousness. While the moral argument of aborting a mind cannot be made until the brain develops, the moral argument for aborting a soul can be made at conception...providing o...

For this to make sense, please check out my post exchange with Dr. Luke Conway here and here . You might as well check my Rebuttal, Part One  and Rebuttal, Part Two also. I�ve covered the moral argument for God multiple times on this blog and consider it the worst argument in the long, sad history of apologetic arguments. The only way I can address this again and remain sane is if I break up Dr. Conway�s post and address it in segments. The bold bits are the words of The Apologetic Professor. Here it goes. Theism provides a more coherent view of morality than atheism. No, it doesn�t. It doesn�t. It. Does. Not. If you are an atheist, you believe in a universe that has absolutely no moral will. This part is true. I believe the universe has no will, moral or otherwise. The materialist must assume that I have a moral will for the same set of reasons that I have blue eyes or a love of the Indigo Girls, or that the sky appears blue or rocks are solid substances � they are the...

Meet Bob. he�s the last person on planet Earth. Due to a massive Goat Flu epidemic or a hydronuclear summer or a quantum-volcano eruption, the vast majority of the world�s population has expired. Bob, who was held up in an adamantium mine shaft or a bug-out bunker or an abandoned Blockbuster, managed to survive when no one else could. Good for Bob. I pose this unlikely scenario to ask this question: is morality relevant to Bob moving forward? Christian apologists argue that morality is an objective truth that transcends human experience. If this is accurate then hypothetical Bob still has valid morals to follow. Granted, most Biblical laws don�t apply to Bob�s situation. He can�t very well kill, steal from, or covet his neighbor�s wife, for example; he has no neighbor. However, Bob can surely violate some religious rules. He could masturbate, he could make a false idol, he could have any number of impure thoughts, or he could attempt to make love to an irradiated buffalo corpse (which...

�Objective morality is revealed to us by God� --this is as close to a Christian universal as I can get. A question I often ask is: how do we know what actions are objectively right and which are objectively wrong. I get one of two answers: (a) that the Word of God is spelled out in the Bible and we should follow it�s guidelines for morality, or (b) that we are born with a moral compass that shows us God�s Nature. The first answer is an assertion that their holy book isn�t just a good idea, it�s the law--and that�s all it is. Claims can be made about anything when there is no expectation to back them up. The second answer is more interesting, and one in which I have gained extra insight in the last couple years. I�m the father of twins, a boy and a girl. It certainly seems like they were not born with morality. They are born to suck. It�s wired into their little brains to find a boob or bottle and suck vigorously. When they get a little older, their nature is to crawl. Before they have ...