Any true creator would not contradict our most deeply held moral sentiments.

Only a counterfeit would demand we cast our own conscience aside.

After all, isn't discarding our own conscience the very definition of immorality?

I think this topic of objective morality and subjective morality is really more important than I had realized before.

I'm starting to see that the appeal to an objective morality is one of the foundational attractions to these belief sets of, like, Christianity and Islam.

And I feel like if people had more tolerance or acceptance of subjective morality, they wouldn't be so drawn to these authoritarian ideas and even totalitarian systems of government.

And these fundamental misunderstandings of objective morality and subjective morality are really preventing the possibilities of cooperation and negotiation that would otherwise be there.

So Frank goes on to make these assertions in the following video clip I'm about to play, as well as in his book, Stealing from God.

But I've identified at least five false assumptions, and each false assumption individually would actually falsify Frank's conclusion.

So I really want to get into depth on what objective morality is and what subjective morality looks like.

Because I think that a lot of people are drawn to the security and structure and sense of orderliness that comes with having a predefined set of moral beliefs.

People feel the only alternative is complete and total relativism, which I think the true state of things is an ultimately subjective morality, but with a lot of objective aspects to it.

And having a better understanding of the true state of things will really improve conversations and help us to move forward in a better way.

And just to be clear, the definition of objective that I'm going by is something that holds consistently true in all situations, regardless of who perceives it or any conditions.

And the definition of subjective that I'm using is an idea formed by a specific mind that may or may not hold true under different conditions or when perceived by a different mind.

So I want to clear up misunderstandings on subjective moral values and really present the idea that objective morality is just an illusion anyway.

Neither side actually has access to an objective morality.

But I do think that any attempt at establishing objective morality or claiming that there's some inherent objective morality is really just an attempt to elevate one's own subjective morals to a higher level than it actually warrants.

It's like saying, no, my opinions are, of course, the correct ones, because to the individual, it really seems and feels through their perception that their moral values are correct.

We need to have this ability to see outside ourselves and how our minds are forming our own subjective moral values and a totally different entity, their mind is going to form somewhat different moral values.

And this misunderstanding gives people the inclination to judge the other side more harshly.

And we saw this even in the 30-year war between Catholics and Protestants, where both sides thought that they had the correct moral values and the other side was objectively wrong.

And because of this, they felt justified in brutally killing each other.

About 4 to 8 million Christians were persecuted by other Christians during this 30-year time frame.

And this is one of the reasons I think it's important to build up a comfort with subjectivity and to just acknowledge the true state of things rather than to have to impose our own subjective moral values as the one objective morality.

And that's what I want to discuss here.

But first, let's hear what Frank Turk has to say.

If you're going to complain that Christians have been judgmental or evil or done wrong things, fine.

I can agree, Christians have been judgmental and evil and have done wrong things.

But those things wouldn't be wrong unless God existed.

But atheists don't have God in their worldview.

So they actually have to steal from God to argue against him.

They, in effect, have to sit in God's lap to slap his face.

So if I had to kind of paraphrase what Frank Turk is saying here, I think his logic is that Christianity offers the objective moral framework.

So those who are detached from Christianity don't really have a moral objective framework to point to.

So without that reference, atheists are not able to even contribute to the discussion of moral topics.

In many cases now, I've seen conversations being shut down where a theist will say, well, you have no right to speak on moral topics because you don't have an objectively moral framework to reference.

But this is just built on many misunderstandings of morality.

And here I'd like to discuss some of the false assumptions that underlie Frank Turk's assertion.

So let's take a closer look at false assumption number one, which is that God has successfully communicated an objective set of moral values through his Holy Bible.

So the Bible does prescribe some moral values, but many of them are either too vague or contradicting each other in other areas that they can't be used in an objective way by even the most well-meaning Christians.

Hence why we find so many different Christian denominations working to find a unifying message in the Bible, yet one cannot be found.

I discussed this phenomenon a bit in one of my previous videos, chapter three of my deconversion journey.

So I'll just play this clip here.

Different denominations of Christianity were literally doing completely different things trying to get to this heaven and evade this hell.

The Bible was too vague about the specifics.

Why didn't God take this more seriously?

Why didn't God use his best efforts to communicate to us what's needed?

Is salvation by faith, works, grace, saying the sinner's prayer, being baptized, once saved, always saved?

You know, who knows?

I will again reference the Catholic and Protestant wars where over a period of 30 years, four to eight million Christians were brutally killed by other Christians, both sides truly believing that they interpreted God's objective morals correctly.

Virtually every concept expressed in the Bible is under interpretational dispute.

So whether or not there actually is a God trying to communicate a single set of morals to humans, it's pretty much irrelevant because it's just not working.

It fails to do so.

There's just too much of a disconnect between the text and fallible humans who are trying their best to understand a unifying message from it.

In topics of such great moral significance as slavery, both sides attempted to justify their position through the text of the Bible.

So we see that the Bible wasn't this unifying objective message, but it was individual minds applying their own morality to the Bible and using it to justify their own positions.

We also see this in matters such as women's rights and homosexuality.

The Bible ultimately fails at providing Christians with a unifying, consistent morality.

So that brings me to false assumption number two, which is that God has instilled the same set of moral values on the hearts of each of his creation, and therefore there is a truly objective morality for Christians to reference with authority when discussing moral topics.

But if that is a false assumption and everyone, including any potential God, actually has their own moral values, then morality is ultimately subjective and values are unique to each mind perceiving it.

Most evangelicals, like Frank, subscribe to a philosophy called divine command theory, which at least provides the illusion of an objective morality.

Let's hear a description from a YouTuber who did a really great job at describing it.

What is divine command theory?

According to the philosopher and divine command theorist John Hare, it is the view that what makes something morally wrong is that God forbids it, and what makes something morally right is that God requires it.

There are three main components in that description.

One, divine commands.

Two, moral obligations.

And three, a relation between the two.

Divine commands can be communicated through a number of means, including special revelation and conscience.

The relation between divine commands and moral obligations can be understood in different ways.

One way is causal, meaning that God's commands cause our moral obligations.

A second way is constitutive, meaning that God's commands constitute or ground our moral obligations.

A third way is one of identity, meaning that God's commands are identical to our moral obligations.

One final point needs to be made.

Contemporary defenders of divine command theory do not say that God's commands make something morally good.

One can have a different account of moral value.

Rather, defenders of divine command theory offer the theory merely as a theistic account or explanation of our moral obligations.

So what he's saying is that the older school of thought regarding divine command theory was that God has instilled the same set of morals on each person.

But now the more contemporary thought is in recognizing that people will have separate opinions on morality from God.

And I think this is an acknowledgment of how people are finding discrepancy between their own moral values and what's portrayed in the Bible.

Important here is that we see an acknowledgment that our moral intuitions are sometimes separate from the God of the Bible.

We're able to see something he does and it triggers our conscience.

Since our values are not by necessity equal to God's, this indicates that each party has a separate set of inner core moral values.

So through this contemporary perspective of divine command theory, all the values are still subjective to the mind perceiving it, except that we're commanded to actually disregard our own moral values and instead adopt this foreign set that's imposed on us by Christianity.

Let's consider another evangelical apologist named William Lane Craig as he discusses divine command theory with Alex O'Connor.

Highly understandable why one would be troubled by this.

I remember when I first heard Philip Quinn, a philosopher at the University of Notre Dame, speak on divine command morality and these cases in the Old Testament.

It made me feel terribly uncomfortable.

I mean, it is very difficult.

But as a philosopher, I'm required to say what I think about something, not how I feel about it.

And when I dispassionately weigh metaethical theories about the sources of moral obligation and prohibition,

I can't think of any other moral theory that better grounds objective moral values and duties than divine command morality.

So in this clip, William Lane Craig actually acknowledges that his own conscience is triggered by the actions of the God of the Bible.

It's just that he's learned to suppress or disregard his own feelings, his own moral sentiments are to be disregarded, and favor of whatever the Bible God does is good.

And the justification he provides for doing this is that he feels divine command theory is the only path to an objective morality, which he seems to think is the only tolerable solution to moral questions.

Basically, he has no tolerance for subjectivity.

Divine command theory is essentially a denial of our own morals in exchange for an external set of beliefs.

This is an eradication of self and any of the moral safeguards that we formed for good reason.

If it were truly the case that God had imparted his moral values on our hearts, then we wouldn't see these discrepancies between his proclamations and his actions and our own moral sensitivities.

It should be one and the same. It should be simple for us to view him as good.

So when we start to view the Bible and his actions as being against our own conscience,

I think that's a pretty good signal that it's a counterfeit.

Since we have contradicting values with the God of the Bible, this falsifies the claim that the God of the Bible wrote his morals on our hearts.

So either God exists and created us with subjective values, or that the portrayal of God from the Bible is false.

So this idea is not merely similar to totalitarian ideas. It is one and the same.

The idea of replacing and disregarding your own self, your own conscience, and moral values with an externally imposed set is exactly what happens in these dictatorships, such as Kim Jong-un in North Korea demanding that his values are the objective moral code.

So bam! Now there's an objective set of moral codes that everyone can reference in conversation, but that doesn't make it actually the inherently superior moral values.

It's just the moral values of the person who's in charge.

Like with Christianity, it's merely the moral values of the God character being imposed on everybody else.

And although morals are ultimately subjective, we can identify some very ubiquitous shared moral values that are deeply ingrained in the DNA of most humans, such as empathy, and we can appeal to those and say, the way you're treating people goes against our core instincts of empathy.

There are several common areas of moral contention that the average person finds when they look into the God of the Bible and the God of Christianity, and some of those are God-commanding practices such as stoning to death of disobedient children, the subjugation of women being treated as property, and the instructions and acceptance of slavery.

The New Testament also presents some ideas that we would find deeply immoral, such as eternal punishment for finite offenses, prioritizing God and religion over a family, including our own children who are completely dependent on us.

And we even see God punishing unrelated parties for the crimes of someone else, such as original sin, where women are given very painful birth as the result of Eve's sin.

And we see many occurrences of this throughout the Bible.

Some other ideas that I have trouble with is that belief without evidence is a virtue, and also that it's healthy to fear those who we love.

The Bible really teaches that fear and love go hand in hand, and that it's a healthy relationship to fear those who claim to love you.

And when we question these moral stances, it's not that we're actually questioning God, it's that we're questioning the validity of the texts that ascribe these attributes to God.

If the Bible had actually come from a Creator God, then it would be the simplest thing in the world for us to view Him as morally superior and even the epitome of goodness, because it would have been Him who wrote our values on our hearts, so there wouldn't be these constant conflicts.

So to me, that's a signal of the Bible being a counterfeit, that it's not actually describing the same God who created me, if a God created me at all.

So if we find morality lacking throughout the Bible, then we should question whether it actually came from a God, or if it just came from the minds of men who lived at that time.

In fact, this is a huge part of the deconstruction movement.

So many people are citing moral reasons for wanting to deconstruct their beliefs.

They're starting to find some parts of the Bible so intolerable that they need to reinterpret it through the lens of their own subjective morals.

This actually really reminds me of a conversation I had with my youth pastor way back when I was a teenager, still a Christian.

He told us that he had a bold prediction, and that was that within the next decade there was going to be a new trend of people actually saying that the Bible is immoral.

And at the time, that just blew my mind.

I didn't understand it, because under all that indoctrination,

I so perceived the Bible as pure goodness.

And I just asked him, like, why? How is that possible?

How are people going to say the Bible is immoral?

And he was wise enough to not really answer, so he didn't say anything.

But later in the service, he actually played for us a clip from Edward Currant, the atheist YouTuber. I believe he's the one who coined the phrase

Checkmate Atheist.

Checkmate, checkmate, checkmate, checkmate, checkmate, checkmate, checkmate, checkmate, checkmate, checkmate.

Proving once again that godless atheists are dumb and deluded, this has been Edward Currant.

And he did a video on Pascal's Wager that our pastor played for us.

And so basically, it just dawned on me that he was probably going on YouTube and finding all of these YouTubers talking about how the Bible is immoral.