William Lane Craig's opening remarks in his debate with Sam Harris on 7 April 2011

So far I've listened only to Craig's 20-minute speech but I want to comment while it's fresh in my mind. I'll listen to the rest of the two-hour program later.

Craig's opener was largely centred around his old claim that there would be no objective moral values without an absolute authority to provide them. That authority, he assumes and asserts, is God.

My problem with objective moral values - i.e., moral rights and wrongs that are independent of human minds - is that we have only the human mind with which to consider them. Craig seems to think we can observe and comment on things that are outside our minds, but in doing so he awards himself a kind of omniscience. Consider an example. You come upon a man in the act of cutting off a child's finger with a penknife. The child screams in pain and shock. Surely there can be no doubt that the man's action is wrong. But then we learn that the child had just been bitten by a venomous snake, and the man with the knife is a reptile expert who knows that the only way to save the child's life, in the absence of antivenom, is to amputate the bitten extremity as quickly as possible. He judges that the pain, risk of infection, and permanent mutilation are a better option than certain death, which is the only alternative. Please note that I am not defending cruelty to children here. My point is that in order to judge the man's actions as moral or otherwise, we need to know everything about his actions.

No doubt a theist would respond to this in two ways. Firstly, God knows everything, so he knows that the man's actions are not morally wrong. Secondly, the concepts of moral rightness and wrongness exist, and that in itself needs to be explained.

Both these responses are hogwash. The first is easily dismissed, for it is asserted without reason or evidence. The second is slightly more interesting, but disappears when it becomes apparent that the idea of moral rectitude comes from human responses to perceived situations.

If, as in the real world, our information is necessarily limited, then the best we can do is to make judgements based on what we have. Obviously those judgements will be affected by our preconceptions. If we have a preconception that people are more valuable than non-human animals, then we can expect to be biased accordingly. Such a bias may prick our conscience less if we can dump the responsibility for it onto an all-powerful, invisible absolute authority who just says it has to be that way.

To my mind there is nothing remotely moral about an all-powerful being who demands that his subordinates must love him with all their souls. This is the proclamation of a despotic tyrant, not a loving father. Besides, love which has to be commanded is worth little, as it is not genuine.

Echoing Pierre-Simon Laplace's remarks to Napoleon, we have no need of the God hypothesis to explain the human capacity to act morally toward other sentient creatures. Moreover, if God does exist in omnipotent form, we have every need for him to account for the plentiful immorality by which we are surrounded.