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From: Brumar89	5/18/2012 1:57:31 PM
	of 36472

This Paper Discusses Problems With the Evolutionary Tree That You Didn’t Learn in Biology Class If only evolutionists would tell the world what they tell each other. In the popular media, in detailed books about evolution and in textbooks a unified front is presented: Evolution is a fact as much as is gravity or the roundness of the Earth. It would be perverse and irrational to conclude otherwise. The scientific evidence for evolution is overwhelming. There are no scientific problems of substance with evolution, just scientific questions about details. Simply put, we know evolution occurred, just not how it occurred. But deep in the bowels of academic libraries, the highly technical research journals tell a different story. The scientific evidences which evolutionists often refer to as so strongly confirming evolution, in fact, do not. Yes there are evidences that are consistent with evolution, but there are also many that are not. In fact there are many evidences which argue against evolution. This is evident in the many fundamental predictions made by evolution which have failed. There is a gaping mismatch between the high claims of evolutionists and the actual science. For example, here is what the introduction of a 2009 journal paper said about the evolutionary tree: The genome sequence is an icon of early twenty-first century biology. Genomes of nearly 2000 cellular organisms, and from many thousands of organelles and viruses, are now in the public domain. … At the same time, one cannot but be struck by the diversity of genomes, both across the living world and, in many cases, within genera or species. … Perhaps most unexpected of all is the substantial decoupling, now known in most, although not all, branches of organismal life, between the phylogenetic histories of individual gene families and what has generally been accepted to be the history of genomes and/or their cellular or organismal host lineages. The tree of life paradigm consolidated by Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), but itself arising from a much older tradition of natural history, seems likely to emerge, if at all, from the multi-genome era much more restricted in scope, and subject to many more qualifications, than could have been anticipated a dozen years ago. The decoupling discussed above refers to the many inconsistencies between the traditional evolutionary tree of life, as determined from the visible features of the species, and evolutionary trees determined from the newer genetic data. In fact, not only is there a decoupling between the visible and genetic data, there are substantial inconsistencies within each group. In fact, it is impossible to construct a realistic evolutionary tree using all the data. Evolutionists routinely construct evolutionary trees using a select, more cooperative, subset of the data. And even then the resulting trees are unrealistic. That is, they require evolutionary change for which there is no known mechanism. This is true even according to evolutionists who are quite liberal in allowing for speculation. The problem is the species may be similar in some aspects, but not others. So neighboring species on the evolutionary tree may have a great many similarities, but in many cases they have some big differences, which evolutionary theory cannot explain beyond vague speculation. The paper concludes: The rapid growth of genome-sequence data since the mid-1990s is now providing unprecedented detail on the genetic basis of life, and not surprisingly is catalysing the most fundamental re-evaluation of origins and evolution since Darwin’s day. Several papers in this theme issue argue that Darwin’s tree of life is now best seen as an approximation—one quite adequate as a description of some parts of the living world (e.g. morphologically complex eukaryotes), but less helpful elsewhere (e.g. viruses and many prokaryotes); indeed, one of our authors goes farther, proclaiming the “demise” of Darwin’s tree as a hypothesis on the diversity and seeming naturalness of hierarchical arrangements of groups of living organisms. The authors of the paper are evolutionists, and so are sympathetic witnesses. They believe evolution is true, and yet even they must admit that the evolutionary tree has problems. Even they admit that the evolutionary tree may be passé, or at least will be subject to many qualifications, restricted in scope and at best an approximation. Between the introduction and conclusion there are plenty of interesting details. For example the paper discusses a particular example species where the evolutionary tree “does not appear to be helpful, or even especially meaningful.” And the paper mentions alternate models such as a ring, network or other topology. To be sure the authors still see much value to the traditional evolutionary tree model. But the paper highlights the fact that this traditional evolutionary tree model is, well, just that—a model. In fact the paper, which is a brief survey, does not discuss several problems with the tree model. For instance, the paper implies that the more complex eukaryotic species fit the evolutionary tree model well. That is not true. There are plenty of contradictions to go around, including in the eukaryotes. And so if the evolutionary tree model is just a model, with warts and blemishes that are not uncommon with scientific models, then where does this leave the evolutionist’s high claims in the popular media, in detailed books about evolution and in textbooks, that evolution is a fact—overwhelmingly supported by the science? There is a wide gap between the truth claims evolutionists make, and the science. Here we looked at the evolutionary tree, but the story is the same in the other evidences for evolution. Over and over, there are the high claims of evolutionists, and then there is the science. Whenever a theory is presented in an inaccurate light, then science loses. Scientists lose the public trust, and students lose the opportunity to learn the real science. Posted by Cornelius Hunter http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2012/05/this-paper-discusses-problems-with.html

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To: Brumar89 who wrote (26228)	5/18/2012 2:05:26 PM
From: Brumar89	of 36472

Dawkin's misrepresentation of Augustine - a famous quote by Augustine isn't genuine: Dawkins and His Poor Scholarship Posted by jlwile on May 16, 2012 St. Augustine as imagined by Sandro Botticelli in the late 15th century. (Public Domain Image) I was speaking to a group of people in Portland, Indiana last night. As always, I took questions from the audience, and after the session, people came up and asked me more questions. In this individual question/answer session, one man said that he had read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and he was wondering if I had any insight into something Dawkins claimed in the fourth chapter, “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God.” The man didn’t have the book with him, but he said that Dawkins claimed that St. Augustine (properly pronounced uh gus’ tin) encouraged people to avoid learning about the natural world, as gaps in our knowledge of the natural world glorify God. In other words, if we were to understand everything about the natural world, there would be nothing left to attribute to the Hand of God. I read The God Delusion a few years ago, and I didn’t remember Dawkins making such a statement. I told the man that I am neither a philosopher nor a historian, but I can’t imagine St. Augustine saying any such thing. Augustine was very concerned about all manner of learning, and although he rarely wrote about anything related to science, I couldn’t imagine him saying that we shouldn’t learn about the natural world. I promised the man that I would look into it and write him back. This morning, I looked around in Chapter 4 of my paperback edition of The God Delusion and found the portion to which the man was referring. In a subsection of the chapter entitled, “The Worship of Gaps,” Dawkins discusses Intelligent Design. He says that it basically promotes scientific laziness, because as soon as you attribute something to the Hand of God, there is nothing more you can learn about it. He then goes even further and says that an advocate of Intelligent Design would actually tell scientists to stop learning about something that is amazingly complex, so it can always be attributed to God. He then says:1 St Augustine said it quite openly: ‘There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.’ (quoted in Freeman 2002) The reference he gives (Freeman 2002) is The Closing of the Western Mind by Charles Freeman. Like his discussion of Intelligent Design before it, this quote is 100% false. Once again, I am neither a philosopher nor a historian, but I know how to do a bit of digging, so I decided to look into this quote. I found it in many places, all attributed to Freeman. This bothered me, because if it were a real quote from St. Augustine, you would expect to find references to one of Augustine’s work. Eventually, I ran across an article entitled “ Outright Lies, illiteracy, or just bad scholarship?” from Athanatos Christian Ministries. The author of the article, Anthony Horvath (a Facebook friend of mine), had already done the heavy lifting for me. He has some other very good articles about The God Delusion ( here, here, and here), but in this specific article, he shows that Dawkins simply accepted Freeman’s quote blindly, not bothering to check to see if it was accurate. In the article, Horvath gives the actual quote, which comes from Confessions, Book X, section 35. You can go to Horvath’s article if you want to read the entire quote, but suffice it to say that there are 447 words between the phrase that is equivalent to “fraught with danger” and the one that is equivalent to “This is the disease of curiosity.” Note that the quote as given by Freeman and unquestionably reproduced by Dawkins has no ellipsis or anything. Thus, there is nothing to tell you that 447 words have been omitted. Furthermore, if you read the entire passage, you will see that Augustine is talking about the kind of curiosity that leads people to gawk at mangled corpses “simply for the sensation of sorrow and horror that it gives them.” This has nothing to do with scientific curiosity. So clearly Augustine isn’t saying anything close to what Dawkins (and Freeman) claim he is saying. Because Dawkins relied on Freeman’s quote without doing even a modicum of checking to see if it was accurate, you have to wonder what other mangled quotes you can find in Dawkins’s works. This situation is very interesting, because creationists are often accused of quote mining, but here is a clear case where one of the greatest evolutionary evangelists of our time is doing it. I also want to spend a moment addressing Dawkins’s claim that attributing something to the Hand of God immediately stops all scientific investigation on the subject. This is, of course, nonsense. Newton attributed the amazing design of our Solar System to the Hand of God, and he went on to give us the Universal Law of Gravitation, which explains exactly how the planets stay in orbit around the sun. Carolus Linnaeus attributed all plants and animals to the Hand of God, and he was the father of modern taxonomy. Attributing things to the hand of God didn’t stop their scientific inquiry! In fact, many scientists (past and present) study the secrets of nature specifically because they think that nature was made by God. For example, Dr. Henry F. Schaefer III is the Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Center for Computational Chemistry at the University of Georgia. He is among the most cited chemists in the world. He has earned a bevy of major awards, and both The Journal of Physical Chemistry and the Journal Molecular Physics have published issues in honor of him. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and was among the inaugural class of Fellows of the American Chemical Society. Clearly, he has advanced our understanding of chemistry significantly. Here is what he says about his scientific endeavors:2 The significance and joy in my science comes in the occasional moments of discovering something new and saying to myself, “So that’s how God did it!” My goal is to understand a little corner of God’s plan. Those of us who attribute the natural world to the Hand of God do not stop investigating just because we believe that God did it. That wasn’t the case for Newton, Linnaeus, or the other great scientists of the past who were Christians, and it isn’t the case for Dr. Henry F. Schaefer III or the other great scientists of the present who are Christians. Instead, the fact that we want to know how God did it encourages us to investigate nature’s mysteries even more. REFERENCES 1. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2006, p. 159 Return to Text 2. Henry F. Schaefer, Science and Christianity: Conflict Or Coherence?, The Apollos Trust 2010, p. 42 http://blog.drwile.com/?p=7590

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To: LLCF who wrote (26230)	5/18/2012 5:58:22 PM
From: longnshort	of 36472

Eternally shifting sands of Obama's biography By MARK STEYN Syndicated columnist It used to be a lot simpler. As E.C. Bentley deftly summarized it in 1905: "Geography is about maps File: This 1960's photo shows Barack Obama with his mother Ann Dunham. Dunham met Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr. from Kenya, when both were students at the University of Hawaii at Manoa; they married in 1960. But Biography is about chaps." But that was then, and now Biography is also about maps. For example, have you ever thought it would be way cooler to have been born in colonial Kenya? Whoa, that sounds like crazy Birther talk; don't go there! But Breitbart News did, and it turns out that the earliest recorded example of Birtherism is from the president's own literary agent, way back in 1991, in the official bio of her exciting new author: "Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii." So the lunatic theory that Barack Obama doesn't meet the minimum eligibility requirements to be president of the United States was first advanced by Barack Obama's official representative. Where did she get that wacky idea from? "This was nothing more than a fact-checking error by me," says Obama's literary agent, Miriam Goderich, a "fact" that went so un-"checked" that it stayed up on her agency's website in the official biography of her by-then-famous client up until 2007: "He was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister." And then in April 2007, someone belatedly decided to "check" the 16-year-old "fact" and revised the biography, a few weeks into the now non-Kenyan's campaign for the presidency. Fancy that! When it comes to conspiracies, I'm an Occam's Razor man. The more obvious explanation of the variable first line in the eternally shifting sands of Obama's biography is that, rather than pretending to have been born in Hawaii, he's spent much of his life pretending to have been born in Kenya. After all, if your first book is an exploration of racial identity and has the working title "Journeys In Black And White," being born in Hawaii doesn't really help. It's entirely irrelevant to the twin pillars of contemporary black grievance – American slavery and European imperialism. To 99.99 percent of people, Hawaii is a luxury vacation destination and nothing else. Whereas Kenya puts you at the heart of what, in an otherwise notably orderly decolonization process by the British, was a bitter and violent struggle against the white man's rule. Cool! The composite chicks dig it, and the literary agents. And where's the harm in it? Everybody does it – at least in the circles in which Obama hangs. At Harvard Law School, where young Barack was "the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review," there's no end of famous firsts: As The Fordham Law Review reported, "Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995." There is no evidence that Mrs. Warren, now the Democrats' Senate candidate, is anything other than 100 percent white. She walks like a white, quacks like a white, looks whiter than white. She's the whitest white since Frosty the Snowman fell in a vat of Wite-Out. But she "self-identified" as Cherokee, so that makes her a "woman of color." Why, back in 1984 she submitted some of her favorite dishes to the "Pow Wow Chow" cookbook, a "compilation of recipes passed down through the Five Tribes families." The recipes from "Elizabeth Warren – Cherokee" include a crab dish with tomato mayonnaise. Mrs. Warren's fictional Cherokee ancestors in Oklahoma were renowned for their ability to spear the fast-moving Oklahoma crab. It's in the state song: "Ooooooklahoma! Where the crabs come sweepin' down the plain." But then the white man came, and now the Oklahoma crab is extinct, and at the Cherokee clambakes they have to make do with Mrs. Warren's traditional Five Tribes recipe for Cherokee Lime Pie. A delegation of college students visited the White House last week, and Vice President Biden told them: "You're an incredible generation. And that's not hyperbole, either. Your generation and the 9/11 generation before you are the most incredible group of Americans we have ever, ever, ever produced." Ever ever ever ever! Even in a world where everyone's incredible, some things ought to be truly incredible. Yet Harvard Law School touted Elizabeth "Dances with Crabs" Warren as their "first woman of color" – and nobody laughed. Because, if you laugh, chances are you'll be tied up in sensitivity-training hell for the next six weeks. Because in an ever-more incredible America being an all-white "woman of color" is entirely credible. Entering these murky waters, swimming through it like a crab in Mrs. Warren's tomato mayo, Barack Obama refined his own identity with a finesse that Harvard Law's first cigar-store Indian lacked. In 1984, when "Elizabeth Warren – Cherokee" was cooking up a storm, the young Obama was still trying to figure out his name: He'd been "Barry" up till then. According to his recently discovered New York girlfriend, back when she dated him he was "BAR-ack," emphasis on the first syllable, as in barracks, which is how his dad was known back in Kenya. Later in the Eighties, he decided "BAR-ack" was too British, and modified it to "Ba-RACK". Some years ago, on Fox News, Bob Beckel criticized me for mispronouncing Barack Obama's name. My mistake. All I did was say it the way they've always said it back in Kenya. But Obama himself didn't finally decide what his name was or how to say it until he was pushing 30. In the shifting sands of identity, he picked his crabs carefully. "I suppose he'd had the name ready for a long time, even then," says Nick Carraway in "The Great Gatsby." "His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people – his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself... . So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end." In a post-modern America, the things that Gatsby attempted to fake – an elite schooling – Obama actually had; the things that Gatsby attempted to obscure – the impoverished roots – merely add to Obama's luster. Gatsby claimed to have gone to Oxford, but nobody knew him there because he never went; Obama had a million bucks' worth of elite education at Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Law, and still nobody knew him ("Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him"). In that sense, Obama out-Gatsbys Gatsby: His "shiftless and unsuccessful" relatives – the deportation-dodging aunt on public housing in Boston, the DWI undocumented uncle, the $12-a-year brother back in Nairobi – are useful props in his story, the ever more vivid bit-players as the central character swims ever more out of focus, but they don't seem to know him either. The more autobiographies he writes, the less anybody knows. Like Gatsby presiding over his wild, lavish parties, Obama is aloof and remote: let everyone else rave deliriously; he just has to be. He is, in his way, the apotheosis of the Age of American Incredibility. When just being who you are anyway is an incredible accomplishment, Obama managed to run and win on biography almost entirely unmoored from life. But then, like Gatsby, he knew a thing or two about "the unreality of reality."

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To: LLCF who wrote (26232)	5/18/2012 10:26:52 PM
From: longnshort	1 Recommendation of 36472

Drop George Zimmerman’s murder charge by ALAN DERSHOWITZ George Zimmerman has been charged with second-degree murder in the killing of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin. A medical report by George Zimmerman’s doctor has disclosed that Zimmerman had a fractured nose, two black eyes, two lacerations on the back of his head and a back injury on the day after the fatal shooting. If this evidence turns out to be valid, the prosecutor will have no choice but to drop the second-degree murder charge against Zimmerman — if she wants to act ethically, lawfully and professionally. There is, of course, no assurance that the special prosecutor handling the case, State Attorney Angela Corey, will do the right thing. Because until now, her actions have been anything but ethical, lawful and professional. She was aware when she submitted an affidavit that it did not contain the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. She deliberately withheld evidence that supported Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense. The New York Times has reported that the police had “a full face picture” of Zimmerman, before paramedics treated him, that showed “a bloodied nose.” The prosecutor also had photographic evidence of bruises to the back of his head. But none of this was included in any affidavit. Now there is much more extensive medical evidence that would tend to support Zimmerman’s version of events. This version, if true, would establish self-defense even if Zimmerman had improperly followed, harassed and provoked Martin. A defendant, under Florida law, loses his “stand your ground” defense if he provoked the encounter — but he retains traditional self-defense if he reasonably believed his life was in danger and his only recourse was to employ deadly force. Thus, if Zimmerman verbally provoked Martin, but Martin then got on top of Zimmerman and banged his head into the ground, broke his nose, bloodied his eyes and persisted in attacking Zimmerman — and if Zimmerman couldn’t protect himself from further attack except by shooting Martin — he would have the right to do that. (The prosecution has already admitted that it has no evidence that Zimmerman started the actual fight.) This is a fact-specific case, in which much turns on what the jury believes beyond a reasonable doubt. It must resolve all such doubts in favor of the defendant, because our system of justice insists that it is better for 10 guilty defendants to go free than for even one innocent to be wrongfully convicted. You wouldn’t know that from listening to Corey, who announced that her jobs was “to do justice for Trayvon Martin” — not for George Zimmerman. As many see it, her additional job is to prevent riots of the sort that followed the acquittal of the policemen who beat Rodney King. Indeed, Mansfield Frazier, a columnist for the Daily Beast, has suggested that it is the responsibility of the legal system to “avert a large scale racial calamity.” He has urged Zimmerman’s defense lawyer to become a “savior” by brokering a deal to plead his client guilty to a crime that “has him back on the streets within this decade.” But it is not the role of a defense lawyer to save the world or the country. His job — his only job — is to get the best result for his client, by all legal and ethical means. Listen to the way a famous British barrister put it in 1820: “An advocate, by the sacred duty which he owes his client, knows, in the discharge of that office, but one person in the world, that client and none other . . . Nay, separating even the duties of a patriot from those of an advocate, and casting them, if need be, to the wind, he must go on reckless of the consequences, if his fate it should unhappily be, to involve his country in confusion for his client’s protection.” The prosecutor’s job is far broader: to do justice to the defendant as well as the alleged victim. As the Supreme Court has said: “The government wins . . . when justice is done.” Zimmerman’s lawyer is doing his job. It’s about time for the prosecutor to start doing hers. Dershowitz, a defense attorney, is a professor at Harvard Law School. nydailynews.com

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To: ponokee who wrote (26224)	5/19/2012 1:13:33 AM
From: Greg or e	1 Recommendation of 36472

The Evidence for God: Morality Graham Veale Jewish history records that Alexander Janneus had 800 of his enemies crucified at his palace while forcing them to watch the execution of their wives and children. The King and his concubines dined and cavorted together as they watched the evening’s “entertainment”. The humane response to that story is to be deeply horrified at the King’s actions, and to feel pity for the condemned men and their families. Our reaction should remind us of how central morality is to our understanding of the world. We need some account of good and evil, right and wrong; and theism offers the best explanation. Some atheists deny that there are any moral facts, arguing that morality is an illusion. We can adequately explain reality through a scientific world-view that only appeals to (non-moral) physical facts. We have no need to appeal to objective norms to explain human behaviour; disciplines like evolutionary biology and psychology are sufficient for predicting and understanding human behaviour. We can appeal to sociological or evolutionary explanations for why we have moral feelings. Morality is explained away as a useful fiction: an illusion forced onto us by our genes to promote co-operation. So do any of these theories explain morality away? Suppose one reason that we put our children’s well-being ahead of our own is because Natural Selection favoured those ancestors who had developed parental love. Does knowing why we feel that obligation mean that we don’t really have that obligation? Can we reasonably set aside our obligations to our children? Not at all. The social sciences could plausibly explain the rise and development of science. That would not mean that our scientific beliefs are false. Biologists explain why our perceptual systems developed. That does not mean that we should doubt our senses. It’s difficult to see how any scientific explanation of moral feelings would allow us to live as if there were no moral demands on us. It also seems impossible to live as if morality is an illusion; Dawkins calls morality [1]a “blessed, precious mistake”, and he believes it. But if morality is a mistake nothing can be blessed or precious. Suppose our moral feelings are nothing more than an instinct to co-operate with other humans. If something like this is the case, then a mother’s instinct to care for a threatened child is no more “blessed”, “precious” or “good” than an impulse to sneeze. That strikes us as wholly implausible. In fact, we often have to appeal to moral facts to explain the world. It is impossible to understand the writings of Richard Dawkins without appealing to concepts like “moral outrage”. Dawkins and other New Atheists rely heavily on moral intuitions to motivate reader to challenge the injustices of organised religion. It would be practically impossible to fully understand New Atheism merely in terms of neurons and cognitive functions. We are regularly forced to use moral concepts like “malicious”, “compassionate”, “courageous” and “selfish” to deepen our understanding of other persons, to predict their behaviour and to recommend courses of action. The simple fact of the matter is that moral concepts have great explanatory power; furthermore the experience of morality is a central feature of human existence. Any worldview which attempts to explain morality away is deeply unconvincing. Atheism must be able to account for moral realities if it is to be a convincing worldview; this is why many atheists accept that there are objective moral values, but attempt to identify these with “natural” states of affairs[2](as opposed to identifying morality with a “supernatural” state like the will of God.) So the “good” might be identified with whatever benefits our species, or our society. If most people live by the rules of morality then most people will benefit. Or perhaps the good is whatever satisfies the greatest number of human preferences and desires. But these accounts do not seem to capture what is important about morality. Suppose we discovered an intelligent, alien race, very much like our own. Imagine that this species has survived through cannibalism and other cruel practices. Further suppose that the stability of their society was founded on public displays of infanticide and ritualised torture. Finally, imagine that this race argued that “the good” was whatever promoted their survival. [3] Even if it could be demonstrated that these practices satisfied the majority of the desires held by members of that race, and even if it was demonstrated that their murderous and cruel activities allowed them to thrive in their environment, we would not say that their practices were “good”. This is not merely an abstract thought experiment. Humans do not merely desire compassion and love; if history teaches us anything, it is that we often prefer progress, war, sated lust and gluttony to helping our fellows. Hitler’s vision of the “good life” glorified hatred and callousness. “Moral” visions that promote greed, naked power or cruel oppression remain deeply wicked no matter what material benefits they bring. The point here is not that we are on a “slippery slope” to moral nihilism if we embrace atheism. Far from it; the atheist knows right from wrong. The point, rather, is that atheism cannot adequately explain why certain moral truths obtain. For example, when we say that we abstain from child torture because it is cruel, we do not merely mean that it is bad for society; we certainly do not mean that we spare children from suffering out of enlightened self-interest. We mean that even if the torture of a child was beneficial for our family, our society, or even our species we should not engage in it. Consider the statement “the sadistic torture of children is wrong”. That statement expresses a rule – “don’t torture!”- but it also appeals to a value. The underlying value, on which the rule is based, is the preciousness of innocent human life. Human life is precious; it is not a disposable good. Love and compassion are appropriate responses to such a fragile treasure. Cruelty is an irrational desire which seeks to destroy or harm a great good. Now theism explains why each individual person is of immense, objective value; why the dignity of the person can “trump” the long term interests of society.We have immense significance because the creator of the Cosmos values us, made us to be like him, and can enter into a relationship with us. We have a great value because we are significant to God. If atheism is true we are unplanned and insignificant on a cosmic scale. If atheism is true the only value that we have is the value that we choose to give ourselves. And what the human race gives, the human race can take away. In contrast God would be a transcendent source of moral value, the source that we need to make sense of ethics. If everything else depends on God for its existence then the value that God has for everything else cannot be surpassed. God is supremely rational, and his power cannot be limited by the irrational and chaotic effects of evil. The earth and the opinions of human beings will pass away into the void. God’s values are eternal. His judgments can be trusted, and his worth is inestimable. Therefore God is the supreme good. Theism does not simply explain why persons have great intrinsic value, and why the moral life is a rational life[4]. It also explains why we have obligations to other persons and to ourselves; we are to pursue the good of every individual. We must fulfil our potential as best we can by developing virtues like friendship, compassion and courage. But we often do not want to develop these virtues; after all, this takes effort. And pursuing liberty and justice for all requires sacrifice and service. Honouring the moral values might be rational, but there are other values. We can also rationally pursue art, business, honour or knowledge. Morality is meant to “trump” all these other pursuits. If Gaugin has a choice between pursuing his art and caring for his family, his moral duty is to his family. If our business interests or political ambitions incline us to support a violent regime in a foreign land, we had better put those interests aside. We are to adhere to moral principles even when we could violate them without cost; we are also to obey the demands of morality even when there are terrible material costs. Morality is meant to “override” other considerations; it does not make suggestions, but imposes obligations. How can we explain this key feature of morality? Theism offers a neat explanation of moral obligation. Duties and obligations are always to someone, rather than to an impersonal principle; on theism, our obligations are to God. God would be the ideal observer. He would know all the long and short term consequences to our actions. He would not only be impartial; having unlimited love, God would earnestly desire the best for us. As creator God has the power to merit our respect; and as creator God has “property rights” over his entire creation. God has the knowledge, the character and the power to be the perfect moral authority. This explains why obligations exist and are binding; God’s instructions to human beings become our duties. Theism also explains why the moral life is a rational life; being moral is not a matter of taste. Morality often demands that we make sacrifices, but quite often these sacrifices are in vain. Morality comes at a “this-worldly” cost. We should uphold the law when everyone around us profits from corruption and cheating. How can such practices be rational? If the material world is the only world then a moral life would be needlessly self-destructive for many individuals. Morality seems to be even less rational when we realise that many of our moral projects are little more than noble failures. We invest emotional energy trying to turn a wayward youth back on to the right track knowing that we will probably fail. We try to bring relief to the poor, but we are thwarted by the vagaries of power politics. Perhaps all that we are doing is draining valuable resources away from the (rational) goals of economic and technological progress. The extreme effort needed to cultivate moral virtues like compassion and fidelity might be useless; and our moral actions might be counterproductive. If theism is true then we live in a moral universe. The moral life is not a long term exercise in self-harm because God is the guarantor of our trust in the value of goodness and virtue. God can meet our deepest desire for goodness, justice, forgiveness and love through eternal fellowship with him; conforming to God’s desires for us is not only good, but very much in our own interest. Furthermore, if there is a God, none of our moral projects are in vain. God created us to be good; when we are good we are fulfilling one of our purposes. We literally increase the number of valuable states in the universe when we are moral, because God values morality. If there is a God, in the long run there are no noble failures. Can’t the atheist posit a Platonic realm of moral facts? Couldn’t these moral values just exist, independently, as abstract facts or necessary truths? But then, how did we acquire knowledge of these moral truths? Natural selection might favour cognitive systems that give us an accurate picture of the physical world around us. Accurate information about the natural world helps us to avoid dangerous falls and predators. But what possible reproductive advantage could knowledge of abstract moral truths bring? Isn’t it more likely that natural selection, and inevitably flawed cognitive systems, would lead us into moral error? If theism is true we have been designed by God to have moral knowledge. If atheism is true we should be sceptical of all our moral beliefs. Perhaps we could say that moral truths are what a hypothetical ideal observer, who is well-motivated, and who has all the relevant facts, would desire for each of us. So we simply imagine what this observer would want, and that gets us a definition of the good. But, once more, why should we trust our moral imaginations if we were not designed? And how can the imagined desires of a hypothetical observer have any authority? If we don’t live in a moral universe, how do we know that virtues like courage and compassion, justice and mercy, won’t always be in conflict? That is, why should we assume that an ideal observer could ever reach a conclusion about the best course of action if our universe was not designed with morality in mind? And doesn’t this hypothetical observer sound a lot like, well, God? We must re-iterate, the moral argument does not insist that the atheist is committed to moral nihilism.It is not assumed that a person needs access to a special revelation from God, or any religious community to have knowledge of the moral norms established by God. Conscience and nature are effective witnesses; a rich natural law tradition, beginning with the Apostle Paul, insists that the knowledge of God’s law is universally available. Rather, the moral argument need only reason that theism provides the best explanation for morality. The moral argument does not conclude that atheism will lead to morally chaotic or totalitarian societies; nor does it reason that atheists cannot be morally good. . Again, the argument is that morality can be given a neat theistic explanation[5]. Bibilography David Baggett and Jerry Walls Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (Oxford:2011) J Budzisewski The Line Through the Heart (ISI Books:2009) J Budzisewski What We Can’t Not Know (Ignatius:2011) John Hare Why Bother Being Good? The Place of God in the Moral Life (IVP:2002) John Hare God and Morality (Blackwell:2006) Mark Linville “The Moral Argument” (Craig and Moreland ed.) Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (Blackwell 2009), George Mavrodes “Religion and the Queerness of Morality” in (Louis P Pojman ed.) Ethical Theory: Classical and Contemporary Readings (Wadsworth: 2001) Linda Zagzebski “Morality and Religion” in (Quinn ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion (Oxford:2007) [1] Dawkins’ position on moral objectivity isn’t clear; he often writes like a moral anti-realist, but on other occasions he implies that moral values can be identified with natural properties. [2] Some philosophers reason that moral values are objective, but that they “supervene” or “emerge from” certain physical states of affairs. This merely leads us to ask why and how value and obligations emerge from impersonal forces or particles. We do not explain a fact merely by labelling it emergent. [3]. Something like Peter Jackson’s interpretation of the Orcs in the “Lord of the Rings” films; or one of the ancient insidious creatures which ooze their way out of the twisted imaginations of modern horror novels. I have a particular loathing of this genre; but it is interesting that horror is only effective because it upsets our moral expectations. This tells us something about the meaning of morality. Lovecraft’s cruel and malevolent gods disturb us because we believe that any universe which contained such creature would be an evil place. Even if such a species thrived, even if such creatures enjoyed their existence, we would believe that the universe would be a better place without them. 4 The theistic doctrine of creation also explains why animal life and our environment have value. [5] Perhaps the atheist’s best response to the moral argument would be to argue that we do not seem to live in a moral universe; or to argue that theistic religious traditions are associated with abhorrent moral commands (for example the slaughter of the Canaanites). Both these issues are discussed elsewhere on the site.

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