God Exists (Moral Argument)

My opponent has said, "There is no moral law. Society as a whole decides something is immoral, then it may as well be. This is similar to money. It has no intrinsic value, but we pretend it does." Perhaps you"ve seen the movie, "The Giver". It"s very good, and I would recommend it to you. It seems to be much like the "Hunger Games", "Maze Runner", and "Divergent". In "the Giver" humanity has survived some sort of apocalyptic event and has restructured society in order to ensure that the event cannot happen again. The way they did this was by developing a pill that everyone takes to kill their ability to experience normal human passions (like love, anger, etc). Their purpose was to kill the passions that led to whatever apocalyptic event (war?), and therefore prevent it from happening again. Anyway, in the movie morality is completely removed from people by use of the pill. People still act rather civil (remember that all passions are gone as well), but you can tell that something is missing. People do what is expected of them, and they have no emotions or aspirations to go beyond that. They do, however, keep one guy around who still has all of the emotions, a man they call "The Giver." I won"t spoil the movie for you, but there is a scene in the movie that is relevant here. The Giver is training an apprentice to replace him and he is watching a live feed of a nurse at a clinic of some sort who is working with babies. They watch as the nurse measures the two babies, and then the nurse decides that one of them is to be rejected. The nurse then inserts a large gauge needle into the top of the baby"s skull and injects a solution in order to kill it, saying to the baby, "Oh, I know it hurts, but it"ll be over soon," as the baby begins to cry, struggle for a few moments, and then lie still. The apprentice (who has gone off of the pill) is horrified and starts to cry out, "What is he doing? He"s killing it?!?! Doesn"t he know it is a baby?!?!" To this the Giver replies, "He knows it"s a baby, but he doesn"t remember why it matters." We then cut to the nurse as he puts the baby in a box and inserts it down a trash chute. Unfortunately we need not go to fiction in order to find horrors such as these. Recently there was a gas attack in Syria. I remember the carnage being described as men, women, and even infants writhing in agony and foaming at the mouth as they died painfully. My question for you is this, is this wrong, or are we just pretending that it is? Do you remember why it matters? If you agree with me that such things are really wrong, that we are not just pretending, if you remember why the lives of these children matter, then you"ll agree with me that at least some things really are wrong. This entails that at least some objective moral values and duties exist. My opponent has given you no reason to doubt that they exist, he has only made the assertion that they don"t. Do you believe him? Do you find his assertions more persuasive than your own personal experience of morality? Do you remember why some things are really wrong, why things like babies are really valuable? My opponent has made a few statements that I"m obliged to respond to. He said that minds are the same as brains, and that therefore God can"t have a mind because he doesn"t have a brain. He is just asserting that minds are the same as brains, but he hasn"t given us some reason to think that this is true. Things are only identical if everything that is true of one is true of the other. Your mind can think about things. You can, for example, be thinking about the content of this sentence right now as you read it. Brain states, however, cannot be "about" anything. The chemical reactions in your brain are just that, chemical reactions in your brain. They aren't "about" anything. Since your mind can be "about" things and your brain cannot, then they are not the same thing. As my opponent pointed out, you cannot have free will if you are nothing but your brain. You have your own obvious experience of free will, however, which gives you reason to think that you are more than just your brain. He brought up the questions that Hitchens had asked about a moral action that a believer could take that Hitchens could not. If I remember correctly someone had answered tithing, which was a bit funny. This question misses the point, however. No one is arguing that you need to believe in God in order to behave morally. That simply isn"t the argument. Many atheists are some of the most caring and loving people around. The argument is that there is no intrinsic difference between moral and immoral behavior if God does not actually exist. You may remember the movie "Beowulf". It is based on an old poem whose authorship we do not know. Now suppose someone told you that there was no author, and defended his position by saying he can experience and appreciate Beowulf just fine without believing that the author existed. You wouldn"t need to believe in the author in order to appreciate the poem, but the author would have to actually exist for there to be a poem to appreciate. In the same way, you can experience and appreciate morality just fine without believing in its author, but there would be no morality to experience and appreciate if no author existed. Consider my opponent"s main argument, that there are no objective moral values. He seems to understand that if God does not exist, then there are no objective moral values and duties. In other words, his argument is that there is no author so there is no poem. The same sort of mistaken understanding is going on when it comes to "moral improvement". As we grow in our understanding of morality, and as more people turn their behavior toward morality, we can have moral improvement. Only if morality doesn"t really exist, if we are "pretending", is moral improvement impossible. If there is no intrinsic difference between societal understandings of morality, then one stage of society can be no more or less moral than another stage. They are just different, without one stage being morally superior to another. My opponent appeals to moral improvement and tries to describe how it happens, but this is evidence that there is such a thing as morality in which one can improve. In other words, we aren"t just pretending. This is just where my opponent"s argument breaks down. Even he cannot help but believe in morality. He says, "Any version of [morality] is better than no version at all." This is precisely what he cannot say if he believes there is no such thing as morality. If there is no real objective morality, than a society dominated by racism, bigotry, murderous hatred, and sexual exploitation would be morally equivalent to a society dominated by compassionate tolerance and understanding. If there is no such thing as morality, and we really are just pretending, then there simply is no real difference between two such societies. My opponent acknowledges that there is a difference when he says, "Any version of [morality] is better than no version at all." The fact is that morality does exist, and we all know it by experience. My opponent has given you no reason to doubt your experience, no reason to think that you are just pretending. If morality exists, then that entails that God exists since there is no other candidate to ground objective moral values and duties.