Explanation for Objective Morality? Another Fail.

December 15, 2016 By Bob Seidensticker

Let’s revisit the question of objective morality. We have another contestant who thinks he can convince us that objective morality exists.

But before we consider that, here’s Christian apologist Tim Keller to set the stage:

The Nazis who exterminated Jews may have claimed that they didn’t feel it was immoral at all. We don’t care. We don’t care if they sincerely felt they were doing a service to humanity. They ought not to have done it. We do not only have moral feelings, but we also have an ineradicable belief that moral standards exist, outside of us, by which our internal moral feelings are evaluated.

“They ought not have done it”? How do you know?

This is the problem with how this topic is typically handled within Christian apologetics: a moral situation with one obvious answer is tossed out, and we’re supposed to infer ourselves into the apologist’s moral viewpoint. This is insufficient. There’s a difference between a widely believed or strongly felt moral opinion and objective morality. Don’t make the remarkable claim of objective morality (Keller’s “moral standards exist, outside of us”) without evidence.

Enter our contestant …

Let’s give a warm welcome to J. Warner Wallace of the Cold Case Christianity blog. He interviewed me on his podcast once, and we’ve had occasional email exchanges. He’s unfailingly polite and a good reminder to all of us that dialing back the anger makes one’s arguments more palatable.

In one post, Wallace first notes that the simple moral dictates that we find in the Ten Commandments (don’t kill, don’t lie, etc.) are insufficient because sometimes these actions are justified. How do we escape from this moral morass? He offers this rule:

When we simply insert the expression “for the fun of it” into our descriptions of these moral actions, we discover the objective moral foundation to these claims. [With this applied to killing and lying], we’ve just discovered two objective moral absolutes.

So we shouldn’t kill or lie just for fun. I confess that I’m unimpressed. Do we now have a useful moral roadmap where we didn’t before? Does this rule illuminate issues that frustrate society like abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and capital punishment so that the correct path is now clear to all?

Nope. We’re no wiser than we were before. And note that the Nazis didn’t kill Jews just for fun, so this rule does nothing to help Keller’s example.

The point of this exercise is only to spit out yet another example that we can all agree to. Keller pointed out that exterminating Jews was bad, and Wallace points out that killing or lying without justification is bad. I’m sure we all agree with these claims, but this isn’t news. Nothing has been illuminated.

And the correct answer is …

The problem, of course, is the remarkable claim of moral truth grounded outside humanity—“moral values that are valid and binding whether anybody believes in them or not” as William Lane Craig defines it. Why would you pick this explanation? A far more plausible explanation is morality as a combination of

a fixed part (moral programming that we all pretty much share since we’re the same species) and
a variable part (social mores).

This explains morality completely without an appeal to the supernatural.

Wallace next anticipates some reactions to his position.

What do we do when two groups disagree on a moral issue?

Wallace first imagines Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.

When a society defines an objective moral truth and the vast majority of its members agree, on what basis can a lone reformer make a call for change?

Obviously not through an appeal to an objective moral truth. If such a truth were accessible to all of us, how could we be in disagreement? Or does Wallace imagine that objective moral truth is not reliably accessible? But if it’s inaccessible, what good is it?

Wallace puzzles over how MLK could’ve caused change, but where’s the difficulty? History tells how it happened. America is not a simple democracy where the majority rules. We have a Bill of Rights that protects the minority against the tyranny of the majority. We have a free press. And we have a long history of (slowly) changing our minds on moral issues.

The majority opinion is that and nothing more. The moral claim “Jim Crow laws are wrong” is grounded only by everyone who agrees with the statement. It’s not objective moral truth.

Next, what about two societies that disagree? He gives as an example the Nuremburg trials of Nazi war criminals, during which a prosecutor said, “There is a law above the law.” Yes, that sounds like an appeal to objective morality, but that appeal is no more supported by this guy than by Wallace himself. The laws used during the trials came from the Allies, not from God.

Since morality changes, doesn’t this overturn the idea of objective morality?

Wallace gives an anecdote about four witnesses with conflicting descriptions of a purse snatcher. Does this disagreement mean that there was no purse snatcher? No, Wallace says, and similarly, disagreement about what objective moral truth is doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.

But if we can’t agree on the description of the purse snatcher, then why bring up objective truth? All you’ve shown is that the description is inaccessible, so why bring up “objective” anything?

And back to our subject, if different people give different answers to today’s moral issues, where does “objective” fit in? There may be an objectively correct resolution to each, but we can’t access it. The Big Book of Moral Truth is locked up in God’s library.

Wallace might’ve given us slightly more than other apologists, but this is woefully insufficient to overturn the obvious natural explanation of morality.

Can God make a rock so heavy that hitting His head with it
would explain the change in personality He underwent
between the Old Testament and the New Testament?
— commenter GubbaBumpkin

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/21/13.)

Explanation for Objective Morality? Another Fail.

August 21, 2013 By Bob Seidensticker

Let’s revisit the question of objective morality. We have another contestant who thinks he can convince us that objective morality exists.

But before we consider that, here’s Christian apologist Tim Keller to set the stage:

The Nazis who exterminated Jews may have claimed that they didn’t feel it was immoral at all. We don’t care. We don’t care if they sincerely felt they were doing a service to humanity. They ought not to have done it. We do not only have moral feelings, but we also have an ineradicable belief that moral standards exist, outside of us, by which our internal moral feelings are evaluated.

“They ought not have done it”? How do you know?

This is the problem with how this topic is typically handled within Christian apologetics: a compelling example is thrown out like chum, and we’re supposed to infer ourselves into the apologist’s moral viewpoint. This is insufficient. Don’t make the remarkable claim of objective morality (Keller’s “moral standards exist, outside of us”) without evidence.

Enter our contestant …

Let’s give a warm welcome to J. Warner Wallace of Cold Case Christianity. He interviewed me on his podcast once, and we’ve had occasional email exchanges. He’s unfailingly polite and a good reminder to all of us that dialing back the anger makes one’s arguments more palatable.

In a recent post, Wallace first notes that the simple moral dictates that we find in the Ten Commandments (don’t kill, don’t lie, etc.) are insufficient because sometimes these actions are justified. How do we escape from this moral morass? He offers this rule:

When we simply insert the expression “for the fun of it” into our descriptions of these moral actions, we discover the objective moral foundation to these claims. [With this applied to killing and lying], we’ve just discovered two objective moral absolutes.

So we shouldn’t kill or lie just for fun.

I confess that I’m unimpressed. Do we now have a useful moral roadmap where we didn’t before? Does this rule illuminate issues that frustrate society like abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage, and capital punishment so that the correct path is now clear to all?

Nope. We’re no wiser than we were before. The point of this exercise is only to toss out yet another example that we can all agree to. Keller pointed out that exterminating Jews was bad, and Wallace points out that killing or lying without justification is bad. I’m sure we all agree with these claims, but this isn’t news.

And the correct answer is …

a fixed part (moral programming that we all pretty much share since we’re the same species) and
a variable part (social mores).

This explains morality completely without an appeal to the supernatural.

Wallace next anticipates some reactions to his position.

If morality is not objective but shared, what do we do when two groups disagree?

Wallace first imagines Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.

When a society defines an objective moral truth and the vast majority of its members agree, on what basis can a lone reformer make a call for change?

Obviously not through an appeal to a single objective moral truth. If such a truth were accessible to all of us, how could we be in disagreement? Or does Wallace imagine that objective moral truth is simply inaccessible? But if it’s inaccessible, why bring it up?

The majority opinion is that and nothing more. The moral claim “Jim Crow laws are wrong” is grounded only by everyone who agrees with the statement. It’s not objective moral truth.

Next, what about two societies that disagree? He gives as an example the Nuremburg trials of Nazi war criminals, during which a prosecutor said, “There is a law above the law.” Okay, I get it—that sounds like an appeal to objective morality—but that appeal is no more supported by this guy than by Wallace himself.

Since morality changes, doesn’t this overturn the idea of objective morality?

Wow. I feel like I’ve walked through Alice’s looking glass. If we can’t agree on this objective moral truth, then what good is it? It’s useless. The “Big Book o’ Moral Truth” is locked up in God’s library, and we can’t access it.

Wallace might’ve given us slightly more than other apologists, but this is woefully insufficient to overturn the obvious natural explanation of morality.

Can God make a rock so heavy that hitting His head with it
would explain the change in personality He underwent
between the Old Testament and the New Testament?
— commenter GubbaBumpkin

Photo credit: Art Resource

Objective Morality Reconsidered

October 22, 2012 By Bob Seidensticker

Leah Libresco at the Unequally Yoked blog has responded to my blog post about objective morality, as have many commenters. I’ll try to hit the ball back over the net and respond to some of these ideas.

A serving of vegetables that we need to get out of the way first is the definition of “objective.” I tried to nail down the definition that I wanted to use, but I still think many readers and I were not on the same page.

Here are three definitions that I see being used. Each is reasonable, but we need to agree on the one we’re using.

1. Objective means “strongly or viscerally held.” Christian apologists often use this. “By ‘objectively wrong,’ we refer to those things that we all know are just wrong,” they’ll say, and then give something hideous (torturing babies is popular) as an example.

2. Objective means “universally held” or “that which reasonable people can be argued into accepting.” Consider this statement: “Bob’s car is yellow.” No one cares much about this claim, but ignore that—suppose that you wanted extraordinary evidence. I could send you a photo of me in my car. I could email you the names of people who could vouch for this claim. I could show you my driver’s license (connecting my face to my name), my car registration (connecting my name to a particular car’s vehicle ID number), and then the yellow car in my garage (with that VIN). And so on.

I think that this is what the Declaration of Independence means when it says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” “These truths” are such that someone either already accepts them or can be convinced that they’re valid.

3. Objective means “grounded outside humanity” or, as Merriam-Webster defines it, “having reality independent of the mind.” 1 + 1 = 2 may be objectively true by this definition, for example. Leah’s example: “Russell’s teapot is orbiting the sun.” This claim is hard to prove, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s either true or false.

Each of these definitions has its place, and I can accept each. But now let’s focus on the topic at hand: objective morality. Objective morality by definitions 1 and 2—strongly held or universally held moral beliefs—certainly exists but I see no evidence for objective morality of the third kind. Return to William Lane Craig’s definition for objective morality: “moral values that are valid and binding whether anybody believes in them or not.” This is what I see no evidence for.

Consider this parallel to humans’ common moral instinct: our common appreciation of cuteness. Small, helpless, big-eyed things like babies or kittens provoke caring feelings in most of us. “Kittens are cute” is probably objectively true by definition 2. We can analyze why we feel this way (evolution probably selected adults who are drawn to help human babies and similar-looking things) but that doesn’t matter. What’s interesting is that it’s a sense shared among most humans.

Why do we react instantly when we see someone in serious danger—stepping in to pull someone out of harm’s way, shouting for help, and so on? We just do, and almost everyone would act in a similar way. We can analyze the action from an evolutionary or physiological standpoint, but again the point is that this is a shared human instinct.

About Leah’s debate with Hemant Mehta, who shares Leah’s sense of objective morality, she says,

I was trying to press him on where the yardstick or rulebook or whatnot comes from.

My answer is that morality is composed of an instinctive part (the Golden Rule, perhaps) along with a societal part. The first part explains the commonality among people, and the second explains the differences.

Obviously, the instinctive part doesn’t express itself identically in every person. For example, the popular TV series Dexter is about a sociopath (someone without this instinct) who was taught how to pass in ordinary society. Similarly, every person from Seattle doesn’t express an identical Seattle moral sense. These are tendencies, not immutable constraints.

There’s my answer, but how do proponents of objective morality answer this? I’d like to know more about the external grounding of this morality, and I wonder why it’s even introduced since it seems a far more fanciful explanation that no better explains the morality that we see in society.

Leah said:

[Bob is] claiming that we can’t even ask if [a widespread moral] consensus is correlated with anything, since there’s nothing for the consensus to be true about.

I’ll agree that there’s nothing absolute for the consensus to be truth about. When we say, “Capital punishment is wrong,” there is no absolute truth (the yardstick) for us to compare our claim against. Is capital punishment wrong? We can wrestle with this issue the only way we ever have, by studying the issue and arguing with each other in various ways, but we have no way to resolve the question once and for all by appealing to an absolute standard.

Let me bring up accessibility again. If there is objective truth about capital punishment but we simply can’t access it (as if God’s Big Book of Morals exists but we don’t have a library card for God’s library), the objective moralists have won a pyrrhic victory. Yes, objective moral truth exists, but if we can’t reliably access it, what good is it?

If Bob doesn’t think there’s some external standard that his personal understanding of morality can grow to more perfectly resemble, then I’m really baffled about how he approaches new questions. Is the goal just to more perfectly and consistently live out your essentially arbitrary moral preferences?

Again, I get stuck on this idea of an external standard. I’ve seen no evidence of such a thing.

As for “arbitrary,” my morals may be arbitrary in an absolute sense, but of course they don’t feel arbitrary in a throwing-darts-at-a-list-of-possibilities sort of way. I consult my conscience with moral questions, and it gives me answers. No need for an external anything. (If you say, “Wait—where did that conscience come from? Didn’t that get put in there by an external agent?” then I point to evolution as the source.)

If we were bears or Klingons, we’d evaluate situations differently. We can be horrified at the actions of other species, but by what external standards do we judge those actions objectively wrong?

As it stands, I don’t understand why Bob feels a particular loyalty to his arbitrary moral preferences. Any debating atheist knows that we’re running on buggy hardware [that is, we have lots of biases]…

As for loyalty, that suggests that I have a choice, but all I have is a conscience that tells me what’s right and what’s wrong. I have no higher authority to appeal to to check its imperfect moral claims. If Leah’s point is that we shouldn’t be too smug about what our fallible brains tell us, I agree. But these imperfect brains are all we’ve got.

There’s no reason for Bob to treat his moral preferences as any more sacred or central to his identity than his gastronomic preferences.

My moral preferences certainly aren’t any more sacred in an absolute sense (as if God tallied my morals but didn’t care about what I ate). But from my perspective, I think that my morals are more important. If you violate my moral sense, I might tell you that you’re mistaken or I might even take action to stop you, but not much happens if you violate my culinary sense.

Either [moral or gastronomic preferences] could be maladapted to his current environment, and it’s worth poking around to see if he can come up with something better. Does he really think we’re powerless in the face of these questions?

There’s evidence that evolution built us to think that rape and slavery are okay, as long as you’re on the giving end. We see this attitude in the Old Testament, for example. However, modern society teaches us something different. This is the instinctive moral sense being overridden by the societal moral sense. Sam Harris writes about this in his The Moral Landscape. As I understand this, he argues for an objective morality of the second kind—one that we can hone with science and reason.

Here I agree with Leah that we aren’t stuck with our evolutionary programming. We can and do rise above our instincts.

I’m left rejecting objective morality (again: I’m using the William Lane Craig definition, above) for two reasons. First, this resolves no puzzles. The natural explanation is sufficient. And second, I see no evidence for it. The dictionary doesn’t appeal to an objective element to morality, and I see no need to either.

Religion gives people bad reasons for acting morally,
where good reasons are actually available.
— Sam Harris

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Atheists don’t have morality, apparently

December 13, 2021 By Bob Seidensticker

In part 1, we looked at the odd interpretation of atheism by “John the atheist.” Several commenters have suggested that it’s such a bizarre interpretation that it must be a Christian parody.

In part 2, we looked at the even odder embrace by Christian apologists of John’s conclusions. I suppose John’s ideas fit their agenda to make atheism look ridiculous, but do they not stop to consider whether John’s views are shared by other atheists? Or if the views are at all defensible?

Let’s consider one final Christian reaction to John, this time from the Wintery Knight blog. Its enthusiastic embrace of John’s message is clear in the title: “An atheist explains the real consequences of adopting an atheistic worldview.”

Atheist Richard Dawkins cited

First, this post tries to establish that John is not some maverick, either an idiot who doesn’t know which end is up within atheism or a prescient pioneer who sees what no one else can see. Rather, he says that this is already admitted by other atheists and should be a standard part of the discussion. He quotes Richard Dawkins:

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. . . . DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

This is supposed to mirror John’s position? Nope. Dawkins is simply observing that there is no evidence for a benevolent supernatural that looks out for us or a wise supernatural that created us. And this Christian blogger offers no reason to believe otherwise.

Nature just exists without emotion or mind. Mt. Everest doesn’t care who climbs it or dies trying. It doesn’t celebrate if you get to the top, and it doesn’t lament if you fall to your death. When a fox chases a rabbit, “good” is relative, and what’s good for the fox is bad for the rabbit and vice versa. Germs don’t want to replicate or hurt you—it’s just biology. The tea in my cup doesn’t want to stay hot or cool down—it’s just physics. Why imagine the universe as a whole acts any differently?

Dawkins points out that there is no human justice in nature, but that doesn’t mean that there is no justice. Merriam-Webster gives several definitions of justice (none of which appeal to objective anything) including “the assignment of merited rewards or punishments,” “the administration of law,” and “the quality of being just, impartial, or fair.” It’s clear that humans can strive for this kind of justice, even though we don’t have the objective or transcendent kind.

Atheist Michael Ruse cited

Next, the Christian blog quotes philosopher of science and atheist Michael Ruse.

Morality is an [evolutionary] adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. . . . Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate when someone says, “Love thy neighbor as thyself” [but] such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, . . . and any deeper meaning is illusory.

And again, this is quite different from what John said—John imagined that only objective morality exists, and any other morality doesn’t count. That the blogger doesn’t understand this simple distinction between objective morality and the regular kind as defined in the dictionary threatens my lofty evaluation of Christian apologetics.

Wintry Knight’s conclusion

The post draws its conclusions:

I see a lot of atheists these days thinking that they can help themselves to a robust notion of consciousness, to real libertarian free will, to objective moral values and duties, to objective human rights, and to objective meaning in life, without giving credit to theism. . . . [As Cornelius Van Til observed,] atheists have to sit in God’s lap to slap his face. We should be calling them out on it.

Wait—who should be calling out whom? You’ve got no argument. You’re just presupposing God into existence. With no sense of irony, a sentence later in the same paragraph begins, “This is not to say that we should go all presuppositional on them,” but I’m afraid that ship has sailed.

You can point to issues that science still has questions about, like consciousness, but let’s not imagine Christianity is any better (that is, that it gives reliable answers backed up by evidence). And as for objective morality and meaning, the ball’s in your court to show that these exist apart from the ordinary kind that we all experience in our own lives.

A better metaphor

The image shouldn’t be sitting in God’s lap to slap his face. Instead, imagine unwrapping a present from God on Christmas morning to find a book. The book is one of your favorites. At first you marvel at how well God knows you to give such an appropriate gift, but then you notice your name written on the inside cover. In your handwriting. And all the margin notes that you added. And the gap on the bookshelf where you remember that book being.

Morality isn’t something we get from God. Morality is already part of humanity, but “God” wants to pretend to give it back to us.

I think it’s particularly important not to let atheists utter a word of moral judgment on any topic, since they cannot ground an objective standard that allows them to make statements of morality.

Why complain about atheists’ lack of an objective standard when you don’t have one yourself? All you have are empty claims.

Further, I think that they should have every immorality ever committed presented to them, and then they should be told “your worldview does not allow you to condemn this as wrong.” They can’t praise anything as right, either.

I will with pleasure judge things as right and wrong. You’ll say that those would be subjective judgments. Yes, that’s true—just like yours.

The problem for most Christians is that they can’t fairly judge God’s actions. I’m happy to label his crimes as bad, from hardening Pharaoh’s heart to maximize his downfall to the global flood to hell. Those Christians can’t call God wrong if they declare whatever God does as right by definition.

It can be hard making an honest characterization of your opponent’s position. This, I’m afraid, isn’t an example.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma,
a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt
to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
— Umberto Eco

.
(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2017-9-4.)

Image from flickr

Bad atheist arguments: “Morality doesn’t come from god”

August 12, 2021 By Bob Seidensticker

In today’s filling episode, Fred has become a vegan. They’re at a vegan restaurant, and our hero isn’t happy with his unappetizing vegan pizza. He’s shocked when Fred sprinkles tuna on his half. “It’s not meat if it lives in the water,” Fred says. Ducks live in water, so they’re on the menu as well. And cows live near water, so they’re also kosher. He justifies his lax attitude as a “progressive” approach to a vegan diet, though our hero wonders if one can define words according to convenience.

This continues our review of The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist by Andy Bannister (part 1), which critiques a number of atheist arguments. There are three more chapters after this one, and I hope that this has been a useful, if lightweight, workout. I don’t completely fault the author. I think he’s doing about as well as he can, considering.

Can words mean whatever you want them to?

Atheists make a big deal about morality—violence and intolerance are bad, while humanism and science are good. Bannister tells us, “[Atheists think that they are], in fact, better than religious people, because atheists do good for no ulterior motive.” But is morality a win for atheists? Bannister gives Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass as an example of someone who defined words however he wanted.

I agree that changing definitions to suit your whim is a bad idea, but Bannister might want to get his own house in order first. “Faith” is an important concept that has two incompatible definitions, and many Christians switch between them as convenient to make their argument (more here). Another slippery area for many Christians is morality. They imagine that any moral statement must be a claim to objective morality, even though that’s not how morality is defined (more here).

Bannister demands, “Who gets to define what the words ‘good’ and ‘evil’ mean?”

Uh . . . humans? The definitions are in the dictionary, and humans create the dictionary. But if he’s asking how we put moral actions into the Good bin or the Evil bin, we do it with the imperfect sense of right and wrong that we got from evolution and society (more here and here). If he wants to carve out a spot for God and show that only with godly insight can we have morality, he’s done nothing to argue for that.

He notes that as long as two people with very different views on things “can agree not to try to suggest that the other one is wrong, everybody can get along famously.”

But of course, we often correct each other’s morality. We talk it over. We debate. We argue. Can he have never seen how humans try to resolve disagreements? It’s not always pretty, and minds often don’t change. But no supernatural is required to explain morality, as he wants to imagine.

Tough love time!

Bannister makes clear atheists’ error:

Quite frankly, my first reaction, when I meet anybody who tells me that they sincerely believe that we decide what is ‘good’ and ‘evil’ based on our preferences or our feelings is to lean over and steal something from them. When they protest (“Give me back my seal-skin gloves!”), I simply say, innocently and sweetly: ‘But I thought you said “good” and “evil” were just questions of personal preference. Well, my preference is that I’m smitten with your mittens.’ That usually changes the conversation quite rapidly.

So Bannister thinks that there’s a universal moral code and violating it has drastic consequences, but he’s happy to do so to make a point? His own argument undercuts his position (h/t commenter Anthrotheist).

Does he really want to steal my stuff? If that doesn’t fit with my plans, then I have society and the law to back me up. Theft where I come from is illegal. But if he’s just making a point, what’s the point? That people can steal things? Yes, they can—is that a revelation? We live in an imperfect society with many moral disagreements. If harm is involved, that’s usually central to society’s resolution of the problem.

Maybe he’s saying that his stealing something will snap me out of my simplistic reverie and return me to the real world. But what insights does he imagine he’s given me—that people don’t like being stolen from? That we share morals? We already know that. None of this is new, and none of this argues for objective morality.

Next, Bannister moves on to fret if might makes right.

Yeah—sometimes it does. The Allies defeated Germany in World War II, so guess whose laws were used during the Nuremburg Trials. A German concentration camp commandant might have honestly thought that he was carrying out a noble mission, that he was right. However, the Allies disagreed, and since they won the war, they decide the standard of “right” used in the court. That commandant was wrong . . . by the standards of the Allies.

In the West today, criminal defendants sometimes say that they were unjustly convicted. Is it right that they be punished? Not objectively so, but there’s no reason to imagine objective morals. Appeals may overturn a conviction, but until that point, might will prevail over someone in prison. Society’s laws are the best approximation to right that we have.

And what is Bannister’s viewpoint? He loves “might makes right”! He just wants it to come from God rather than society. The Old Testament has lots of stories of God throwing his weight around—drowning every living thing in the Flood, destroying Sodom and Gomorrah, ordering genocide, and so on (h/t commenter Michael Neville).

Consequences of the secular viewpoint: 3 challenges

Bannister moves on to highlight some of the problems with human morality, and I largely agree with his concerns. What he wants to imagine is that he can solve these problems with a godly morality. And maybe he could, if such a morality existed, but he never gets beyond the, “Wouldn’t this be nice?” phase.

Challenge 1: If we go back to the U.S. in the 1950s and tell people that by 2021 we’re largely pleased that same-sex marriage is finally legal, most people would be horrified. Now imagine that the tables are turned so that we are the horrified, regressive people compared to people in society fifty or a hundred years in our future. What society declares as “good” changes with time.

Response: Obviously. Morality changes, and each society thinks that it has things largely figured out. Any society will have moral dissidents—some will long for the morality of the Good Old Days and some will push for progressive new attitudes that.

This causes no problem for my position, but I’m not the one who needs to justify the Bronze Age morality in the Old Testament.

Challenge 2: Without God, you can (1) let everyone decide good and evil for themselves. Or (2) the state decides, but then might makes right. With (1) morality is impossible, and with (2) morality is meaningless. In both cases, you have no absolute authority with which to overrule another person or state. But there is a solution: “If goodness were something bigger than us, something outside us. Only then could ethics, morality, and law actually work.”

Response: You know what it’s like to tell a joke and have it fall flat? That’s like Bannister’s suggestion that ethics, morality, and law might actually work if God were behind it. He supports this claim with nothing. He imagines that God is the authority who will resolve moral dilemmas, but how is that possible when you can find Christians today on every side of every moral issue? His claim has been tested within his own religion, and it fails!

Challenge 3: Sam Harris wants to use science to find morality. “I do give Harris credit for at least realizing something that many other atheist writers have failed to grasp—that atheism has a major problem when it comes to the question of goodness.”

Response: Atheism says nothing about goodness. That’s not a problem, just like it’s not a problem in chemistry or geology. It’s not supposed to—atheism is simply a lack of belief in god(s).

There are more “challenges,” but you get the idea. He imagines that atheists are made uncomfortable by his tough hypotheticals. If his questions are uncomfortable, that’s only because they make me reach for a barf bag. They’re not driven by evidence. They’re forced. This reminds me of Christopher Hitchens charging a Christian with “trying to slip God through customs without declaring him.”

With Bannister’s argument, we never discover God waiting inevitably at the terminus of a logical sequence of evidence; rather, God is shoehorned in. It might sound cute coming from a five-year-old, but it’s obnoxious coming from an adult. “Wouldn’t it be great if there were a god to put things right for us?” Maybe, but why bring it up? Wouldn’t you like a unicorn, a submarine, and a ham sandwich? Maybe, but how is that relevant to the conversation when I’m very unlikely to get them?

Bannister asks us where morality comes from, and he desperately wants us to pick God. Sorry—natural explanations are sufficient, and the God explanation is ridiculous.

To be continued.

Any God who would grant prayers for football championships
while doling out cancer and car accidents to little boys and girls
is unworthy of our devotion.
— Sam Harris

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/16/17.)

Image from Wikipedia, public domain

Soft Theism: Where Does Morality Come From?

March 24, 2021 By Bob Seidensticker

We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits make it acceptable? Read part 1 here.

This is post 10 in this series, and the topics are Jesus and the problem of morality.

Jesus

Atheist: And what about Jesus? You still give Jesus a lot of respect, right?

Soft Theist: No. No. No. I respect his courage, but I do not respect his persona, or his message. I think he was a misguided religious extremist, who constantly overstated . . . You cannot present yourself as the all-compassionate one, and at the same time threaten people with Hell if you they don’t accept your theology.

People are so culturally indoctrinated to think of Jesus an ideal, good and wise, man. Same as people in the Muslim world are taught to think of Muhammad as embodying the highest ideals. But, I think both men . . . were religious extremists, if you study what they actually taught . . . objectively.

Cross Examined Blog: But you don’t accept the supernatural claims made about Jesus. It’s good to hear that you reject the wise and loving Jesus stereotype, but how much of the Jesus story do you accept? If you reject the supernatural claims, then is Jesus 100% legend, or do you think there was a real (though mortal) Jesus at the beginning?

Christians’ morality argument fails

Do you think the existence of morality is evidence for God?

I think the morality argument never gets anywhere.

Great to hear. I agree that it fails (more here).

Christians will say—If we’re just a bunch of chemicals, then there’s no such thing as morality. But we know morality DOES exist. We know . . . torturing babies for fun, is, objectively . . . immoral. There IS a cosmic moral order, an objective standard that exists, and, points to God. [Christian apologist William Lane] Craig says that without God, morality would be subjective, and we’d be lost in CULTURAL RELATIVISM

Craig must first show that objective morality exists and that we can reliably access it. He never does because he can’t. But that’s not a problem, because objective morality isn’t necessary to explain morality as it exists within human culture. Look it up and you’ll see that “morality” is defined without the word “objective.”

Religious and moral relativism

. . . But then—here’s where I think Craig’s argument fails—the reality is, that even WITH God, we are lost in . . . RELIGIOUS RELATIVISM, because, WHICH God is the right God!? The Christian God, the Muslim God, David Koresh’s God? Believers are not exempt from the problem of subjectivity. A theistic worldview guarantees nothing. ISIS thinks it’s operating under the . . . objective morality of its God.

You’re right that if God exists, he’s doing nothing to stop the continued fragmentation of Christianity into thousands of denominations. Worse, we’ve had two world wars and the Holocaust on his watch. Woody Allen said, “If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse.”

We also have moral relativism. Take any moral issue, and you will find Christians on opposing sides. Either objective morality doesn’t exist, or we humans can’t reliably access it. Either way, the moral argument fails.

And the Bible is full of outmoded moral attitudes on slavery, genocide, polygamy, and more with God’s moral stance looking very antiquated.

I said to a Christian that morality should be based on reason, and he responded by saying one person’s “reason” will differ from another’s. And I said right, but so will one person’s religion differ from another’s. That’s why I say the argument gets nowhere. The human condition is that we simply don’t have an unequivocal authority.

Well, Christians think they do and that their authority talks to them, but your point about religious relativism defeats that. There are now 45,000 denominations within Christianity.

[Michael] Shermer points out that even if there is no ultimate authority, no Archimedean point, shouldn’t lying and murdering, be wrong anyway? Isn’t it obvious?

Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I think Shermer has the right solution for identifying objective morality—use science, meaning social science and statistics, to determine ideas that result in the greatest well-being of society, without violating any individual rights. That would constitute objective morality.

We may have two different definitions of objective morality here. Craig defines it as “moral values that are valid and binding whether anybody believes in them or not.” But your definition of objective morality appears to be morality grounded in objective facts. To take a Sam Harris example of such a fact, women allowed to choose their own clothes thrive better than those forced to wear burkas.

Atheists’ morality

I think . . . evolution and the value of reciprocal altruism is a solid explanation for the existence of morality.

Yeah, I think that’s largely a good explanation, but, as Craig says, if morality is an evolutionary adaptation, then any deeper meaning is illusory, and morality is simply a human consensus. We might have a social contract not to rape, but that does not mean it’s really wrong; it’s just an agreement.

I disagree. Morality is a lot more than an agreement. Here is Penn Jillette:

The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero.

The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine.

Where does Penn’s rejection of rape and murder come from? From his own makeup, which was shaped by evolution. This also applies to those of us who aren’t sociopaths. Yes, we are shaped by society (and vice versa), but there’s also our innate sense of moral right and wrong.

Now, on a personal level, aside from any intellectual argument, and, aside from any reciprocal altruism, I do intuitively feel a profound sense of . . . cosmic morality, that I think comes from God.

Next time: Afterlife and homeopathic religion

[The Christian god is] a being of terrific* character,
cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.
— Thomas Jefferson

[*that is, terrible or terrifying]

Image from Joseph Vasquez (license CC BY 2.0)
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Soft Theism: Objective Meaning and Spirituality

March 8, 2021 By Bob Seidensticker

We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits turn it into something plausible? Read part 1 here.

We continue with two questions about the atheist mindset, objective meaning for our lives and spirituality.

Meaning in Our Lives

Atheist: Why would the existence of a God give your life any more meaning than it would without God? I have no problem finding my own meaning in life.

Soft Deist: Yeah, I know . . . the atheist approach is to make your own meaning. That’s one of the big tenets of existentialism—there is no set meaning to life, humans make their own meaning.

Cross Examined Blog: I think the human approach is to make our own meaning, not just the atheist approach. Just because theists point to the supernatural and imagine objective meaning and purpose, that doesn’t mean it exists.

And . . . I know that the atheist attitude is that because life is temporary, it is thereby MORE meaningful, more precious. But I . . . just don’t see it that way. I think if life is temporary, then it’s just not as . . . objectively meaningful.

How valuable would gold be if it were as common as clay? How excited would you be for the weekend after you’d already experienced a trillion of them?

That’s not to say that I’ve proven that one lifetime’s worth of days is more valuable than countless days in heaven. But when the number of new days you’ll get is both limited and unknown, the value of any one day on earth must be much more than that in heaven.

And even if you’re right and forever in heaven with a God-defined purpose is better than threescore years and ten here on earth (as the King James Version phrases it), that does nothing to argue that it’s anything more than mythology. The days on earth are the only ones we know for sure we’ll get.

William Lane Craig—he’s a Christian philosopher—says the universe doesn’t acquire meaning because a person gives it one. Without God, meaning in the universe remains a matter of subjective opinion; a universe without God is objectively meaningless.

“Meaning” for humans is defined by humans. As for objective meaning (presumably this means meaning grounded outside humans, which would exist whether humans did or not), Craig needs to show that such a thing exists. The ordinary kind as defined in the dictionary exists and works well.

Well, that just it. The universe does NOT have an objective meaning or purpose. There are only subjective meanings that we ourselves create in our lives.

I think . . . the very fact that we CAN find meaning in our lives, indicates that there is some ultimate source for that meaning. To my way of thinking, partial meaning cannot exist, without ultimate meaning, without a source . . . like a branch cannot exist by itself, but, must have come from . . . a tree, a source. That’s not so much an argument, but an analogy of how I think of it.

This sounds like C.S. Lewis’s Argument from Desire: we feel hunger, so there must be food. We feel thirst, so there must be drink. And we yearn for ultimate meaning, so it must exist, too. I reject that argument here.

How would a world with objective meaning or purpose look different from one with the ordinary kind, the kind defined in the dictionary? Once we have an unbiased distinction that theists and atheists can agree on, we can move on to figuring out which world is ours.

(I also question objective meaning here and here.)

Reification

Dan Barker [from the Freedom From Religion Foundation] says that the mistake theists make is “reification”—you treat ideas as though they are something real, something objectively out there, when they are just . . . ideas.

Well, that’s the thing; I think ideas ARE real; it’s just that they are . . . not physical “things” . . . I’ll give you an example of what I mean: Say, a good friend of yours, is killed by a giant boulder. Which is the greater reality, the boulder, or your friendship? Surely, the boulder is the greater reality; it killed your friend. Surely, your friendship is the greater reality; it meant a great deal to you, whereas the boulder is just an inanimate object. So . . . how does one reconcile these two powerful realities? I do it by perceiving the world dualistically. I see life as a constant interplay between both these realities, the physical and the spiritual.

Where is the spiritual in this example, and what’s there to reconcile? We have good days and bad days. Stuff happens.

Let me compare the boulder killing the person with a nature TV show with a fox chasing a rabbit. Our allegiance is probably for the rabbit, and we don’t want to see it killed. But maybe the fox has pups back home, and they’ll die if they’re not fed. Also, the fox is keeping the rabbit population under control to avoid overgrazing. We may want the rabbit to live and the pups to eat, but it’s a zero-sum game in reality. And, if we don’t like seeing the rabbit eaten, we must remember that, unless we’re vegetarians, we’re part of the problem.

Seeing a physical/spiritual duality doesn’t explain anything with the fox vs. rabbit contest, and it doesn’t explain anything with the boulder vs. the friend.

Spirituality

Now, I am not a dualist in the sense that there is some magical spirit world that frequently breaches the laws of nature. But, I am a dualist in the sense that, in addition to the physical world, there is a spiritual world that emerges from it—experiences, of love, beauty, deep emotion. All these admittedly fuzzy and abstract things, I think DO exist. They resist scientific verification, but they are real, and absolutely critical to our identity as human beings.

You think my mistake is reification, regarding these things as real. I think your mistake is reductionism, experiencing these things yourself as real, yet claiming they are not really real, because they are not physical.

So the spiritual world is just the emotional component of the natural world? There’s no supernatural involved? I can accept that, but you imagine the supernatural exists since you imagine God. You might want to clarify.

Obviously I agree that love, emotion, and the experience of beauty exist. Some things are physical (rock, car, sun), and some are abstract (love, frustration, courage). I don’t see the difficulty they pose for science.

Yes, there is more to learn about them. If you’re saying that science will forever be stuck analyzing human experience at the chemical or hormonal level, that sounds unlikely. Physics and chemistry are indeed low level—not usually the most productive place to discuss love or beauty—but physiology, psychology, artificial intelligence, and other disciplines are bridging that gap.

A focus on the lower level may be inappropriate or unhelpful, depending on what you’re thinking about, but that doesn’t make it invalid. Here’s an example that bridges that low-to-high gap. Suppose you saw 123 on a calculator display. You know that those digits are just representations. Sure, it might look like 123, but this is just electrons turning bits of liquid crystal dark or light. Are physics and semiconductors of any use when the topic is a cerebral math problem? Obviously, the answer is yes.

Where did logic come from?

But ideas are not things in and of themselves. For example, logic is not a thing. If all life died out, then there would be no logic.

Not quite. There’s a difference between logic and the laws of logic. An example from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance illustrates this. Before Isaac Newton, there was no Newton’s Law of Gravity, but of course there was still gravity, and it was still true that F = Gm₁m₂/r² (the formula that Newton discovered). The thing and the laws describing the thing are different.

Oh, I disagree. I think if a new form of intelligent life arose, that life form would find itself operating in a cosmos with the very same logic that was there before. I don’t think we create logic. We discover it. We activate what was already an inherent, existing, part of the cosmos.

But that brings its own conundrums. In our world, 2 + 2 = 4, and something can’t be a potato and not-a-potato at the same time (the law of excluded middle, one of logic’s three traditional laws). Is God constrained by these axioms? If he is, then we get these axioms from a greater reality than God. It’s reality that teaches us that 2 + 2 = 4, not God.

Or, if God is not constrained by these axioms, then God created the rules of addition and the laws of logic. But now they could be anything. God could’ve made 2 + 2 = 9 and created different laws of logic.

My assumption is the former, that God is constrained by an external reality. But if you say that the buck stops with God, then show us how God could’ve made 2 + 2 = 9 and could’ve made a thing that’s a potato and not-a-potato at the same time.

(You may be familiar with the morality version of this argument, the Euthyphro dilemma.)

Next time: Evolution and human intelligence

See also:

In the end the Party would announce
that two and two made five,
and you would have to believe it.
– George Orwell, 1984

Image from daily sunny (license CC BY 2.0)
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BSR 17: There Are No Objective Moral Truths

May 28, 2020 By Bob Seidensticker

Summary of reply: Rejecting a claim on a flimsy technicality is cowardly, claims of objective morality fail, and adding “for fun” doesn’t help.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: There are no objective moral truths.

Christian response #1: “This kind of claim is clearly self-refuting. The challenge isn’t whether objective, moral truths exist, the challenge is simply identifying them and explaining where they come from.”

BSR: They’re trying to get a lot of mileage out of this tired and (in my opinion) cowardly charge that arguments are self-defeating. Specifically, the attack here is that “There are no objective moral truths” is itself an objective truth claim, which means that the statement defeats itself. But this charge fails.

What would work is dropping the “moral” part. Now, “There are no objective truths” is an objective truth claim and technically defeats itself. But let’s go back to the original challenge. “There are no objective moral truths” does not claim to be an objective moral truth, so the self-defeating charge fails.

My own position would be something like “I see no evidence for objective moral truths; if you have some, provide it.” Phrase it this way and, yet again, the self-defeating claim dissolves away.

And let’s highlight the second sentence in the response. It basically says, let’s not worry about whether objective moral truths exist; let’s assume they do and find out where they come from.

Uh, no, let’s not assume that. That objective moral truths exist is a bold claim that must be defended.

“That argument is invalid on a technicality, and I won’t respond” is a popular but cowardly retreat by which Christian apologists try to avoid difficult arguments. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: Here’s an objective moral truth: “It’s always wrong to torture babies for fun.” You would fight anyone who didn’t see this truth limiting their behavior.

BSR: Yes, I would reject the claim that it’s okay to hurt someone for no good reason, but who says that’s objective morality? That moral claim about torture is both strongly felt and universally agreed to, but that doesn’t make it objectively true (that is, grounded outside humanity and true whether there are humans to appreciate its truth or not).

Notice the appeal to emotion. Here’s something that we all feel strongly about, and the argument wants to cheat by avoiding the difficult intellectual argument and claim success based on emotion. But it doesn’t work that way. Look up “morality” in the dictionary, and you’ll find no mention of objectivity.

Objective morality is unchanging morality. If slavery and genocide are wrong today, they should have always been wrong, but the Bible shows God supporting slavery and demanding genocide. If “slavery is morally wrong” is objectively true, then God was objectively wrong.

Or consider moral dilemmas today that divide society like same-sex marriage, abortion, euthanasia, contraception, sex education, or capital punishment. Are there objectively correct moral stands for each of them? And are these objective moral truths reliably accessible by ordinary humans? If so, then why don’t we agree?

Consider society’s current moral dilemmas: SSM, abortion, capital punishment. Are there objectively correct moral stands on each? Are these objective moral truths reliably accessible by ordinary humans? If so, why isn’t it obvious? [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: How do you find objective moral truths? Lying is bad, for example, but what if you’re protecting someone’s feelings? Solution: add “for fun” to the end of the moral statement.

BSR: Here’s the idea: take a moral statement like “Don’t steal” for which there seem to be exceptions. For example, what if you’re stealing because your family is starving? What if you’re stealing from a thief? The solution is to add “for fun” on the end. Now we have “Don’t steal for fun,” which shrinks the scope of the rule so that it is universally true.

But how does this help? Okay, I shouldn’t steal for fun. That seems to admit no exceptions, but I already knew that. And the moral questions remain: what if my family is hungry—is stealing okay then? Or take a persistent moral issue within society like abortion. I’ll agree with “Don’t have an abortion for fun,” but again, where is the new insight?

Sure, we can add “for fun” to any moral statement (“Don’t steal FOR FUN”), but how does this help? This teaches us nothing new, and it does nothing to resolve moral issues like abortion or same-sex marriage. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue with BSR 18: Being a Good Person Is All that Really Matters

For further reading:

How can [God] be a source for any sort of morality
if [he’s] not held morally responsible?
— commenter Susan

Image from Alice Alinari, CC license
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BSR 1: There Are No Objective Truths

March 19, 2020 By Bob Seidensticker

What kind of truths can be said to be objectively true?

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: There are no objective truths.

Christian response #1: Subjective truth claims are grounded in individuals and their opinions, while objective truth claims are grounded in (and tested against) reality. Dismissing objective truth—what causes disease, how fire can be mishandled, or 1 + 1 = 2—would lead to a dangerous society.

Objective truth isn’t the issue. Yes, it exists. The interesting question is whether objective moral truth exists. Christianity claims to be the gatekeeper to objective moral truth, but this bold claim is made without evidence. We can use the definition of objective morality from Christian apologist William Lane Craig: “moral values that are valid and binding whether anybody believes in them or not.” No, objective moral truth isn’t merely strongly felt or universally agreed-to morals.

Objective moral truths? The burden is on the Christian to show that moral values grounded outside of people exist. And these moral truths are useless unless they’re reliably accessible by everyone.

These objective moral truths should be obvious, so where are they? Not only do Christians disagree among themselves on abortion, same-sex marriage, contraception, euthanasia, and every other current moral debate, but modern Christians disagree with the Bible on God’s support for slavery, his demand for genocide, and more.

Objective moral truths? The burden is on the Christian to show that moral values grounded outside of people exist. And these moral truths are useless unless they’re reliably accessible by everyone. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: “If there are no objective truths, then the statement, ‘There are no objective truths,’ can’t be objectively true.”

People interested in the truth respond to the strongest formulation of their opponent’s argument. Instead of straw-manning their argument (erecting an intentionally weak version and then knocking it over), a more honest approach is the reverse. Before you rebut an argument, improve it to be so clear and effective that your opponent would be satisfied using it themselves.

The gambit used in this Christian response attempts to get an argument dismissed on a technicality rather than face it, but the gambit fails. It’s easy to change “There are no objective [moral] truths” to “I see no objective moral truths; please show that they exist” or something similar. With a moment’s effort, we’ve changed a statement that self-destructs into a challenge that puts a central claim of Christianity in the crosshairs.

Change “There are no objective moral truths” to “I see no objective moral truths; show that they exist.” With a moment’s effort, we’ve changed a statement that self-destructs into a challenge that puts a central claim of Christianity in the crosshairs. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue to BSR 2: Jesus Is a Copycat Savior

For further reading:

Dorothy: “We want to see the Wizard of Oz.”
Gatekeeper: “That’s impossible.
No one has ever seen the great wizard.”
Dorothy: “Then how do you know he exists?”

Image from Federico Pitto, CC license
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Morality’s Ruby Slippers

June 15, 2017 By Bob Seidensticker

Near the end of the movie The Wizard of Oz, after the wizard has been exposed as a fraud, he still tries to grant the requests of Dorothy and her friends. The scarecrow wanted brains, the lion courage, and the tin man a heart. To the scarecrow, the wizard gives a diploma; to the lion, a medal labeled “Courage”; and to the tin man, a pocket watch shaped like a heart. They’re delighted, but the wizard doesn’t give them what they wanted. Instead, he gives them only an acknowledgment of what they already had.

Throughout their journey these characters had already been developing the very traits that they said that they wanted most of all. Though the wizard no longer stands behind a curtain pretending to be what he isn’t, he still takes credit for giving everyone what they already had.

God as wizard

Sound like Someone we know? Christians tell us that God gives us morality, purpose, logic, and meaning, though this is the same morality, purpose, logic, and meaning that other believers get from their god(s) and that atheists get from reality.

The Christian may respond that objective or absolute version of these traits must come from a supernatural source, but until the Christian shows that there are objective versions of these traits, this is an empty claim.

No, these are traits that we have always had. They’re borrowed by Christianity, and much is made of God’s generously giving us back what we already had.

Christianity’s most generous gesture would be to drop the imaginary gatekeeper role. Draw back the curtain to show Christians that the power to improve or destroy is (and has always been) ours, not God’s. Help Christians grow and reject their dependence on the supernatural.

Want a better society? It’ll happen only as a result of our hard work. Want to improve yourself? There’s no higher power guiding your progress in AA or any other self-help program. If you went through such a program and have gotten rid of some dependence, congratulations, because it was you (with the help of supportive friends and family) that made that radical change. God did nothing.

Use your ruby slippers

At the end of the movie, it’s Dorothy’s turn. Glinda the Good Witch tells Dorothy that her ruby slippers can return her home. She had been able to get what she wanted all along.

And so it is with us. Morality and meaning are to us what Dorothy’s ruby slippers were to her. We’ve always had the answer, and the supernatural claims were all lies. We just need to realize that.

Dorothy: You’re a very bad man.

Wizard: Oh, no, my dear; I’m a very good man.
I’m just a very bad wizard.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/8/14.)

Image credit: Cary Bass-Deschenes, flickr, CC