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.