Edge.org ran an excerpt from philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's new book, 36 Arguments For the Existence of God which is actually a novel. I read the excerpt (the entire first chapter), and I can't quite say where it is going, but Christopher Hitchens gave it a very favorable review, if that tells you anything. The book is basically about an atheist author in the mold of a Hitchens or Dawkins, who is, after writing a book (a book that takes on thirty six arguments for the existence of God), experiencing fame for the first time. It was a decent read. At the end, she wrote the appendix to this fictional book, which is a helpful primer to the thirty-six arguments and their rebuttals.

The arguments and their rebuttals were mostly familiar. The debate over God is in deadlock, and always will be. Neither side can prove anything, and each side can respond to the other's with equally devastating precision. No arguments hold up. Faith must be faith, reason must be reason. The two can blend, but they will ultimately part ways.

There was, however, one argument that caught my eye. It was the argument from Morality, that basically states that because we have intuitive morals, there must be an objective, transcendent source for these morals (and this we all call God). Postmodern types might dispute the idea of objective morality, and I would agree with them on some things, but sociologists and psychologists have shown, I think convincingly, that there are certain moral intuitions that are universal across cultures and times. They manifest in different ways (for instance, filial piety looks different in ancient China than it does in the modern U.S.), but the principle itself remains in tact.

The fact that some moral intuitions appear to be universal is not, in itself, a problem for atheists. We all have some kind of sense of what is right and wrong and what is fair and unfair. Humans, in general, have a very strong sense of reciprocative justice. This does not necessarily require God. It's possible that some of our moral feelings grew out of evolutionary necessity, and others developed as a necessity of society. The problem for atheists is that if our sense of right and wrong is simply a function of evolution or society, then what ground is there to stand on? How can we really say something is morally right or wrong if it's all based on something entirely physical?

The most honest atheists - people like Nietzsche - see this as a serious problem. Nietzsche believed that the only way to overcome it was to create a new morality for ourselves (its fundamental principle, for him, was the affirmation of life). I see this as the honest response. Nietzsche couldn't escape certain moral feelings he had, but he didn't pretend what he was doing was not based on perspective. He said, we have killed God, and now we have to create our own morals.

Goldstein, however, (who I'm sure knows Nietzsche WAY better than I do) grants the idea of objective moral truth (though, she later leaves room to deny that premise) and argues this:

Reference to God does not help in the least to ground the objective truth of morality. The question is: why did God choose the moral rules he did? Did he have a reason justifying his choice that, say, giving alms to the poor is good, while genocide is wrong? Either he had a good reason or he didn't. If he did, then his reasons, whatever they are, can provide the grounding for moral truths for us, and God himself is redundant. And if he didn't have a good reason, then his choices are arbitrary—he could just as easily have gone the other way, making charity bad and genocide good—and we would have no reason to take his choices seriously. According to the Euthyphro argument, then, the Argument from Moral Truth is another example of The Fallacy of Passing the Buck. The hard work of moral philosophy consists in grounding morality in some version of the Golden Rule: that I cannot be committed to my own interests mattering in a way that yours do not just because I am me and you are not.

Before I get to my rebuttal, I want to note that Plato's Euthyphro argument deals with the problems of polytheism in relation to morals. Socrates doesn't deny the idea of God or, at least not of a transcendent reality. Socrates' God has a remarkable resemblance to the Christian God (400 years before Christ), so I'm not sure how the argument in Euthyphro really applies, at least when it comes to monotheistic religions, but I'll take the point anyways.

I do think it is a misunderstanding of theo-centric morality to say that God sat down and placed actions in categories of right and wrong. In the context of Christianity, the concept of morality, as I understand it, is our attempt to relate to Righteousness. In short, we make it more complicated than it really is (our minds are not equipped to deal with all-encompassing simplicity). The moral principle of Christianity - the ONLY moral principle - is Love. Love of God and, through that, Love of His creation. We make it more complex when we say it is moral to not murder, to not commit adultery, to not steal, to not lie, when they are really all the same thing. You cannot love your neighbor and also kill him. In that sense, God decided nothing, He simply is.

Even in a non-Christian context, God is understood to be a being possessing all perfections necessarily, and this includes, presumably, moral perfections. So, even then, morality is not decided by God as much as it exists out of Him.

This proves nothing, of course. Pointing out flaws in an argument does not make the opposite true. My point was not to prove anything, but I found Goldstein's point interesting, and it was one I hadn't encountered before. I've long believed that God must be taken as a matter of faith, and to trust and believe is to take a leap in the dark. Even if we were to prove God to be the only possible source of morality, it would lead directly to the problem of evil, which is easily the most devastating problem for Theism.

My feeling is that either God exists or He doesn't. If He does not exist, moral truth is illusion. As grim as that sounds, it doesn't really matter how we feel about reality, because human feeling doesn't affect it at all. We exist, anyways. There's no changing that.