Last week, I was on Eric Murphy’s show to talk about moral arguments for God’s existence. We didn’t get very far but we had a lot of fun doing it, so we tried again this week. And lo and behold, in the last two minutes, we finally got around to talking about God! The rest […]
moral objectivism
Is Morality Objective or Subjective?
Can objective moral value exist without God? Revisiting the Question
Yesterday Kerk commented in the blog: Randal, I keep seeing well educated philosophers such as yourself claiming that on the atheist worldview objective morality is impossible or at least inscrutable. But surely you are aware that there are platonic atheists who believe that morality exists objectively on its own outside the temporal reality just like […]
Can atheists be trusted?
Last week Stephen Maitzen, a very fine philosopher of religion, provided the links for two of his papers. The popular distillation of the argument is “Does God Destroy our Duty of Compassion?” (Free Inquiry, (Oct/Nov 2010), 52-53). That is the place if you want a quick overview of the argument. The second paper, ostentatiously titled […]
God and the Goddish Good
Jerry Rivard asks: “Do you have a reason why objective morals can’t exist without an omnipotent omniscient deity? (And please don’t just say “well where else would they come from”.)” I’ve dealt with this topic in a previous blog post, “If there is no God then is everything permissible?” Let me give the nuts and bolts […]
Gingerbread lattes and Gary Ridgeway
You might call it a case of double dipping. I decided to put a response to James in a post. But since it was buried in a few threads back and the issue is so important (and since I’m in a crunch period this week) I felt thrice justified in doing so. James is concerned […]
On being skeptical of the skeptics
In “Surely you can’t be serious” I wrote that “The evil of the cannibal seeking to eat Jim is, to put it bluntly, a metaphysically necessary truth.” Brenda responded: “Well, that is a claim. One you have not proved must be true. I don’t see how you can ‘prove’ that cannibalism is necessarily wrong the […]
Surely you can’t be serious!
“Airplane” inexplicably did not win the Palme ‘d’Or at Cannes. Looking back, it is hard to believe that it was passed over when you have riveting scenes like this. But this discussion is not really about “Airplane”. Rather, it is about the fact that there are things people say to us to which we rightly respond “Surely you […]
Can rape be objectively wrong?
The problem of evil is often presented to Christians as the objection to the existence of God. Sometimes it is presented as a logical problem — the existence of an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God is logically inconsistent with the existence of evil — but more often these days it is presented as a matter of probabilities — […]
