[Questioner] You accused the second questioner I believe of caricaturing Christians, and I believe
that you've committed the same crime towards atheists. From your presentation it seems that
you're making us all out to be a bunch of nihilists, kind of like the guys from The
Big Lebowski, and in the end I would be forced to say that a lot of our morals are not based
on this idea of sort of you know humanity being insignificant in the end. And this accusation
of speciesism is, you know, I don't really think that such a concept necessarily has to
exist. My question to you is based on you know my beliefs that, you know, our morals are informed,
are based on our feelings, our relationship to the people around us, our empathy for our fellow
human beings, how is that less valid somehow than some belief in an absolute moral system
posed by God? [Craig] Alright, it seems to me that the view you just expressed is the
view that you said I was caricaturing atheists with, namely that our moral values are based
in our feelings our relationships with other people, things of that sort. I don't think I
caricatured atheists; in fact what I'm arguing is that atheists should be nihilists, not that
they are nihilists. As I said to the previous question, I don't think anybody can really live
like a nihilist. Even Nietzsche couldn't. But I think that the atheist should be a nihilist,
given his worldview. Why? Well because if morality is just based in feelings, and
relationships with other people, and the way we were raised you know by our parents and society,
then it's all relative. Someone who has different feelings or raised in a different society
might have a vastly different set of values and moral duties, and therefore it's not objective,
it's purely subjective, and really it's just the result of human sociobiological conditioning.
So it seems to me that the view you expressed is exactly the view that I'm saying atheists
ought to hold to. [Questioner] In light of that, my question is more along the lines of,
why is that such an unacceptable thing? In one of your YouTube videos you were talking about a
position I think that was the difference between something being intellectually
defensible and emotionally defensible. If these values and all provide us with the
complete fulfillment that maybe the acceptance of absolute morals would provide a religious person,
why are these so indefensible, so unacceptable? [Craig] Well I think I would say two things there
as to why I think it's unacceptable. First would be because it's false, that is to say,
I'm convinced that there really are objective moral duties and values, that the Holocaust is not
just something that is wrong relative to Western democratic standards but right for the Nazis,
so that if the Nazis had won World War Two and everybody believed the Holocaust was good,
on that atheistic view then it really would have been good. That to me is morally unconscionable;
I think that's just false. I think there are objective moral values and duties. So that's
the first reason I would say this is unacceptable, it's just false. The second reason is because it
leads to a worldview which is I think unlivable. It's incapable of being lived consistently and
happily. You cannot live consistently and happily as though moral values and duties are just the
results of feelings and subjective impressions. You're going to want to say for example
that apartheid was really wrong, that the killing fields of Cambodia were really wrong, and you
can't do that if it's just based in feelings. So those would be the two reasons I think that it's
unacceptable, is if it's false that's fundamental, and then the second one would be it's unlivable.