Part 4: The Myth of Moral Subjectivsm

Please see parts 1-3 before reading this

[This may be my final response to several posts between another commentator named "Jeff Dixon" on this Zionica.com article.]

You stated in a post above, “No, the creatures do not judge the creator. People judge the concept of a god that other people developed.” I replied by saying that we have FINALLY hit the nerve of the issue. I’m dealing with it here, because we ran out of room above.

I will first state my case. I assert that without the Christian God, Jesus Christ (Who is YHWH), the conditions required to build a foundation upon which to build the intelligibility of human experience are removed. Hence, the very foundation of all logic, reason, meaning, hope, morality, and truth vanishes. All are fully dependent upon the existence of YHWH, who created all of them.

Before I get to the main thrust of the issue, let’s review two important points that have been made. First, you admitted in a previous comment that in order to be consistent with the worldview you profess – namely, atheism – you cannot say, without exception, that you can be certain that it is always absolutely immoral to molest a 5-year-old child [cf. “It is an interesting question. And one I cannot give a definite answer to. On the surface it would seem that there should be no reason to ever moleste [sic] a 5 year old child. But, since I do not have all the knowledge in the universe, it is impossible for me to say that there could not be a reason that currently I am unaware of.”]. Second, in another comment you state, “If in a billion years, people cease to exist, I guess you could say it was meaningless,” in reference to my previous point that atheism reduces life to meaninglessness.

To the first point, which illustrates your worldview’s stance that objective moral values do not exist, it must be realized that this same stance of moral relativity applies to every single instance where a moral judgment may be made. Whether the dilemma at hand is that of child molestation, sexual abuse, physical abuse, war, genocide, corporal punishment, capital punishment, or any other experiential instance of mankind where a moral judgment is given, your worldview has no basis upon which to take an absolute stand. You can state your subjective feelings about such experiences, you can state society’s subjective feelings about them, but neither you nor society can condemn them outright without violating your own worldview. If you do claim that you can make an absolute condemnation, you fall into a conflict with the law of non-contradiction (assuming you do not recant your previously stated position on this topic).

To the second point, you have admitted that your worldview (atheism) cannot account for ultimate meaning. Instead, the only “meaning” that exists is a temporal, finite meaning that will ultimately be meaningless. Hence, your worldview, when taken to its logical conclusion, asserts that all human experience is ultimately meaningless (yes, I know it may – or may not – be temporally and temporarily meaningful to you, in a subjective sense, but it is ultimately meaningless).

Thus far, you have reduced morality to the subjective feelings of society, which are meted out in a manner that is dependent upon the current mores in a particular time period. They are fluid, ever changing, and can be self-contradictory from one time period to another (i.e., our morals today may contradict our morals of 200 years ago, etc.). You have also admitted that there is no ultimate meaning in life; that it is only temporally and subjectively relevant, but in the end it all comes to naught.

Given these things alone, already you have been reduced to absurdity in your thinking, and you are already proving the existence of YHWH without even realizing it. The evidence for this conclusion is that you do not live in a way that is consistent with your worldview. Your worldview, ultimately, leads to abject skepticism, wherein not only are objective morality and ultimate meaning lost, but so too is their kinsman, truth. You cannot determine whether something is or is not objectively (i.e., absolutely) moral, because you assert that morals are subjective. The underlying presupposition here is that you also cannot know whether something is absolutely true or not as well.

How can I make come to such a conclusion? Just as the reason why you cannot know whether something is absolutely moral or not is because “I do not have all the knowledge in the universe,” you also cannot know whether something is absolutely true or not, because you “do not have all the knowledge in the universe.” Something may be true as far as you currently know, but you could learn something different tomorrow to prove that your version of “truth” as you see it today is false. So now in addition to loosing objective reality and ultimate meaning, you also must give up absolute truth.

At this point, whether you like it or not, you have lost the argument – if indeed there has even TRULY been an argument at all (you could always learn that this whole experience has been a hallucination that was induced by a medical procedure, and it was all a figment of your imagination). Without absolute truth, you now have no foundation for the laws of logic upon which you rely to make the very arguments you make. Without absolute truth, you have no foundation upon which to use reason by which you apply those laws of logic. Your worldview, when taken to its logical conclusion, is abjectly absurd, is self-contradictory, and is impossible to live out in a manner that is consistent with it.

You may say, “Aha! But I DO use logic and I DO use reason!” Yes, you do! And this is the proof that far from living in accordance with the atheistic worldview that you profess, you actually live in accordance with the Christian worldview that you deny. What you are doing is akin to a child who hates broccoli and concludes, therefore, “Broccoli doesn’t exist!” Once again, just as you correctly pointed out in an earlier comment that my subjective feeling of astonishment was irrelevant to the issue at hand (which, again, I never asserted it to be relevant – it was just a statement of fact), your hatred of YHWH is irrelevant to the question of whether He exists or not. You cannot simply wish YHWH away, because you don’t like Him.

YHWH either exists or He doesn’t. If He doesn’t, and your worldview is true, then you cannot even logically know that (your worldview precludes all truth, logic, and reasoning). Admittedly, I have not built the specific positive case for my assertion that YHWH exists. If needed, I can do that in another post or series of them. However, atheism’s absurdity is laid bare on the table before us. You can continue to hold to such a foolish, self-contradictory, and illogical worldview if you subjectively like it more than the Christian worldview. I prefer to choose objective morality, logic, reason, meaning, hope, truth, and most of all, Jesus Christ – the foundation of them all – over such meaningless drivel.

Soli Deo Gloria!