(Book: On Guard, by William Lane Craig. Chapter 6: “Can We Be Good Without God?”)
Last week, Dr. Craig ended on an exceptionally misanthropic note, declaring that if we take away God, humanity is nothing more than “an apelike creature on a speck of solar dust beset with delusions of moral grandeur.” Our intrinsic moral value—the value we have in and of ourselves, with or without 3rd parties like God—simply does not exist, in Dr. Craig’s view. (Wow.) Having settled that question, he moves on to moral duties.
Traditionally our moral duties were thought to spring from God’s commandments, such as the Ten Commandments. But if there is no God, what basis remains for objective moral duties? On the atheistic view, human beings are just animals, and animals have no moral obligations to one another.
Already he has “forgotten” what he himself wrote on the preceding page of his book:
Just as a troop of baboons exhibit cooperative and even self-sacrificial behavior because natural selection has determined it to be advantageous in the struggle for survival, so their primate cousins Homo sapiens exhibit similar behavior for the same reason. As a result of sociobiological pressures there has evolved among Homo sapiens a sort of “herd morality,” which functions well in the perpetuation of our species.
He originally conceded this point only because he thought it would be useful to him in dehumanizing mankind so that he could claim we have no “moral grandeur” without God. Now that he wants to talk about duty, however, he forgets all about this fact, even though it applies much more directly to moral behavior (i.e. “duties”) than it does to moral values. There’s a very clear sociobiological basis for the kinds of behavior we perceive as “duties,” and even though Dr. Craig himself alluded to it just one page ago, he now claims that no such thing exists.
Looks like we’re off to a good start, eh?