What Does Atheism Have to Offer? The Atheist Value Proposition

Over the past few hundred years, the move to "secular rational modernism" has supplanted "traditional religious" views in many parts of the West. Atheists sometimes think Christianity will one day be toppled and atheists of the past century such as Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao Tse Tung certainly gave that effort their best shot. …

A Football Analogy for the Euthyphro Dilemma and the Divine Source of our Morality

The Euthyphro Dilemma Socrates and Plato once discovered what they determined to be a dilemma, which some have used to try to crack holes in the moral position that God is the grounding of our objective morality. They wondered whether someone is loved by the gods because he is pious or whether it is because …

Moral Values and Duties are Universal, Objective, and Grounded in a Benevolent God

“You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built. Now, from this second bit of evidence we conclude that the Being behind the universe is …

Utilitarianism or Evolution Do Not Explain Grounding for Our Objective Moral Duties

Do we have universal and objective moral values and duties to do what's right? If we do, what grounds them? Atheists and agnostics frequently suggest our social development, the heritability of social traits, or utilitarianism offer an explanation of grounding, yet these explanations fail for several reasons. Below I have identified the reasons. Do we …

Philosophers Point to God as a Source of Our Objective Terminal Values

In times of increasing “Euro-secularization” and decreasing religiosity in many countries in the West, many youth have gravitated away from God. For those who seek God, however, God answers their calls, often through spiritual experiences, churches, Biblical studies, or Apologetics. “Ask and it shall be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and …

The Weeds in Sam Harris’ Moral Landscape

Revised and updated June 17, 2018 Sam Harris, who is a best-selling author, outspoken atheist, and neuroscientist is considered one of the “four horsemen” of New Atheism, with Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens. Yet his views contrast the views of other “New Atheists” because he endorses objective morality instead of relative …

Why Dawkins’ “God Delusion” is a Delusion

“New Atheism is, in fact, a pop-cultural phenomenon lacking in intellectual rigor and blissfully ignorant of the revolution that has taken place in Anglo-American Philosophy” (Craig, 2017a). Highly educated atheists have begun to attract the attention of the innocent by using well-articulated, yet philosophically deficient theories to explain their positions. Among these “New Atheists,” Daniel …