Yes, morality really does need God.

In this video, I discuss why I believe that the existence of a moral dimension of reality in all likelihood requires the existence of God.

[quad]

Why would Moral-Platonism require God's existence?

[TestifyApologetics]

Just found this channel, good version of the MA. Keep it up!

[benjaminschaefer]

I did not know how much I needed this esoteric, intellectual, minute-physics-style, apologetics in my life. Thank you

[majavmg]

Objective principles DO NOT need a standard. It’s beyond me why people can’t understand this.

Does God have to exist for mathematics to be objective? Could God just flat out change what 2+2 equals or just change the value of pi? No, it’s why mathematics is objective.

Objective principles don’t need a standard or a law giver or any such thing. Morality is and has always been about principles and guidelines that we come up to maximize human happiness and productivity in communal environments.

How does religion have a monopoly on this? As if religious morals had a great record of success

[Nickesponja]

"...but we all understand what the special property is, and we've named it morality"

"we don't all agree on what the standard is"

Hmmm. That seems like saying "we all understand that one color is better than the others, we just don't agree on which color". Does that mean there is a color that is objectively better than the others?

At the end you say that we can replace "facts about preferences" by whatever the skeptic tries to reduce morality to. But the thing is, in that case, the skeptic would obviously disagree with premise 2 (since that would be their definition of morality). So this argument has 0 convincing power :/

[silversilk]

This was really cool! I liked the breakdown of flourishing, standards, "better", etc. It makes sense now!

[cygnusustus]

1. Prove that objective morals cannot exist without God.
2. Prove that objective morals exist.

[melchiordeduser]

04:33 "we
all know and experience that there is one standard which has something more to it"
I experience the opposite: different standards of morality in time (eg human/women/gay/animal rights movements ) and space (e.g. christian contries vs islamic ones). Furthermore people from the same location in the same period of time can have different standards (eg trolley problem).

[oh-k-den]

The reality is morality is absolutely subjective and arbitrary, as proved by vegans crying about people eating animals, and us normal people not caring. Morality is a tool, used in different ways to different ends.

[Hugowtum]

1. Why should morality need to have a metaphysically special grounding? What if morality doesn't exist, and what we call morality is just our emotional premises trying to justify as being good or bad something that make us feel good or bad, thus, calling this morality?
2. How can God justify practically why murder is wrong? It sounds like a logical problem if we say that because something is (in that case, God's existence), we ought to do something else (act "morally"), and it sounds hypocrite to demand that we justify our moral opinions, but not to demand the same thing from God.

[aikendrum]

You said in one of the comments that Premise 2, “‘morality’ is more than facts about preferences”, is based on our subjective moral experiences. But that seems to make your idea of ‘morality’ just an extrapolation from all the different “better1”, “better2” moralities that are based on preferences, sort of an imagined Platonic ideal, and you don’t establish that such an ideal exists or even makes sense of talk about (i.e. can you define it and use it without running into contradictions?). Saying that it is a real but mysterious component of the universe that emerges somehow from our subjective intuitions is pretty dubious.

As a rough analogy, I might have some ideas about what things are beautiful, based on appearances that are correlated with health and human flourishing. Different people have different preferences related to beauty, of course. I might have a subjective feeling that there is some ideal, absolute, objective Beauty (which resembles my wife closely, of course 🙂), but most people would just dismiss that as a meaningless, undefinable abstraction.

Indeed, ideal Beauty and the ideal “morality” that you talk about seem to correspond very naturally to the imagined extrapolations of the human preferences that were developed over millions of years of evolution (with a heaping spoonful of arbitrariness inevitably thrown in), rather than to any real thing that exists in the world, that would need some special metaphysical grounding. After all, if we had evolved to resemble very intelligent black widow spiders, our ideas of beauty and morality would doubtless be very different.

At the end of the day, morality may just be nothing more than what we can all agree on, and the desire to proclaim an “objective morality” may be nothing more than an attempt to say that your “better” is better than my “better”. Just like proclaiming an objective Beauty would be no more than an attempt to say that your wife is prettier than mine. (She’s not; mine is objectively prettier. 🙂)

Anyway, interesting video and cute graphics. If you do a follow-up, I’d suggest trying to bolster and discuss Premise 2 a bit more.

Have a nice day! 🙂

[TinySkySky]

Wonderfully put together video and response when Atheists like Dawkns refer to morality by social construct (agreed upon 'human flourishing'). Your video honestly helps a lot. I'm going through a period of battling doubt and it can be really hard when concepts like moral relativism and postmodernism are shoved down your throat by society every day. God loves us all and wants what's best for us. If there's one thing I've learned trying to determine our own reality/be our own God always fails! Thank you so much for all the time and effort you took to make this video and keep making more please! Thanks to channels like you and Inspiring Philosophy faith is not illogical it is reasonable and not just a leap into the unknown. May God bless your ministry work!

[DarwinsGreatestHits]

8:10 You say morality is not reducible, but DCT is reductionist both in terms of values and duties. A reduction is when you have two things that you initially thought to be distinct but it turns out to be one thing; e.g. water and H2O, or the morning star and the evening star. In the case of DCT you have good = God or God's nature, and being obligated to x = being commanded by God to x. It's a reduction. To have a nonreductive view, you need something like Moore's non-naturalism or Cornell realism. But maybe you're thinking of reduction differently.

[appieb.]

Morality doesn't "exist". It's a concept about behaviour/actions regarding a certain goal. Therefore it's grounding has always a subjective foundation. A God doens't make it objective. The example you gave of morality in regard of human flourishing is actually a good steel man of (at least according to my view) secular morality. Props! The metaphysical grounding for its morality is our society based on empathy, reason and evidence. Point 4 is a non-sequitur, therefore the argument is flawed.

[chrisb]

Ooh new channel! 🤩 channel was discussed in a CapturingChristianity group. Had to sub 💯

[Loganedward]

In the book The Ultimate Proof the concept of morality as a man made construct is broken down. It is the most convincing case for God being the source of morality I have ever read and rebuttals every criticism I found in the comments to this video.

[mesplin]

7:45 I'm skeptical of claim #2. I don't see morality as something more than facts about preferences. Do you have anything that supports this claim?

[xavierhiggo]

Can our morality just been pinned down to survival, dont kill, dont steal, all things that help the group survive, kinda like the evolutionary morality argument?

[kravitzn]

How do you know we would ALL say there was this same one standard? Each of us would say some standard was special, but we differ as to which is special.
Is abortion permissible? Is capital punishment? Is eating meat? Is $15 min wage? Is slavery? Nuking Japan in WW2? We disagree on a lot of things, but each is confident she is right and the other wrong. Why think there is a metaphysically real special "better" at all? My explanation: each person thinks his own "better" is the REAL TRUE "better".

[stratosmactra]

Why cant moralitys irriducibility be purely due to subjectivity? Like in your morally blind example, if he sees suffering without reason, and knows he himself would not want to suffer without reason, then he can infer that to him personally, such suffering is bad, and the absence of such would be good.

Why does morality necessarily have to be any more than that?
We all choose what we believe is good or bad, and that choice dictates our actions. Those actions being our only connection between observable reality and our perceptions of morality. And that perception is only applicable to ourselves. What you or I, or any higher power deems is morally good or bad, obserably has no impact on what others percieve as good or bad. Thus, in all practical sense, morality is only a personal, subjective idea of what actions we deem worthy or unworthy, based on our own experiences and perceptions. As nice as it would be for there to be more to it than that, I don't know any reason why there would be.