Shermer versus Koukl on the Hugh Hewitt Show (Updated)

This week on Hugh Hewitt's radio program, Hewitt continued his "Great God Debate" series by matching skeptic Michael Shermer against Greg Koukl.

Though I heard only portions of the program, I came away greatly impressed with Koukl.  He displayed an excellent command of the moral argument and great rhetorical skill in pressing the argument against Shermer's defense.

As for Shermer, he seems like a genuinely nice guy who happens to bring a poor set of arguments to the table.  His arguments are as bad as Christopher Hitchens' in terms of logic, and Shermer lacks the rhetorical skill that frequently allows Hitchens to produce an effective debate performance despite his bankrupt basis for argument.

Hewitt has a transcript posted, but unfortunately it is mostly worthless until the formatting is changed.  I'll pull out some interesting bits to illustrate the portion of the argument I found riveting.

Koukl frames the key issue as he sees it:

Actually, the big question here, Hugh, is whether it’s possible to be good without God. Now I’m not talking about whether it’s possible to be good without a belief in God. I certainly think that’s possible, but be good without God. And the answer to that question hinges entirely on precisely what you mean by good. And so I was going to give an illustration. So a man drags a young girl into the alley, he sexually abuses her, strangles here, and tosses her into the dustbin. Is that act wrong? Now I think everybody listening is going to admit it is wrong. But here is the real question. What do we mean when we say that that act of rape and abuse and murder is wrong? Are we describing the action itself, the object? Are we saying that the object, the rape, the murder, has a quality of being wrong, and therefore, wherever that rape goes, the wrongness follows it, just like your height, 6’ 2”, or whatever it is, is an objective quality of you. Wherever you go, your height follows you in the same way. Does the wrongness follow the rape? Well, if it’s a quality of the rape, if it’s an objective quality of the rape, then it does. And it doesn’t matter what people think about it, or what cultures decides, or what your evolutionary conditioning is. The rape is still wrong. The other alternative is that you’re not talking about the rape. You’re talking about yourself.

What I heard of Shermer's attempts to deal with this issue were practically amazing in the degree to which they failed to supply a real answer.

Shermer, addressing whether morality is objective or relative:

"Well, I don’t think it’s quite so black and white. That is to say I think there are provisional moral truths that exist whether there’s a God or not. In other words, it’s wrong, morally, absolutely morally wrong to rape and murder. And that would be true whether there was a God or not."

Shermer went on to sketch something akin to the Euthyphro dilemma, making it appear that he advocates a moral realism that requires no divine foundation.  Shermer continued:

I think it really exists, a real, moral standard like that. Why? Well, because first, you could ask the person who is being affected, we should always ask the moral recipient of the act, how do you feel about being raped or murdered or stolen from or lied to. And the moral actor will tell you, it doesn’t matter whether, if I could use a current example, I haven’t any idea if Tiger Woods and his wife are religious or not. But you can just ask his wife whether it was morally right or wrong, and she’ll tell you.

Koukl responded perfectly, including the following:

"What I’m trying to do is to be able to answer the question that came up initially, is God necessary for morality, which Michael denies. It’s to say well, what is it that morality, that we’re trying to describe? It is either objective, and therefore an immaterial obligation that applies to certain behaviors, or it is subjective. The things that Michael described were variously subjective, evolutionary elements, subjective cultural elements, but then he affirmed that we all have good and evil in our nature, or an awareness of that. I agree with that entirely. We all are aware of those things. That’s why even if we don’t believe in God, we can still know morality and follow it. The question is what accounts for real, genuine objective morality?"

Thus Koukl put it back in Shermer's lap to coherently describe what type of objective morality would exist minus a god (such as God), noting that through this point in the debate Shermer had described it in terms indistinguishable from subjective/relativistic morality.

Shermer seemed incapable of addressing the point with his response:

I’m not arguing for cultural evolution. I’m actually arguing as part of our, what you described as materialistic, natural selection, Darwinian evolution, that it’s not enough to just pretend or fake being a good group member. You actually have to believe it, feel it, and live it. So what I’m arguing is that natural selected certain moral sentiments, as Adam Smith called them, moral feelings, an actual empathy, Adam Smith talked about, we actually empathize with somebody else, we can put ourselves into their shoes and feel their pain, I’m arguing that’s very real.

I earlier encountered a response similar to Shermer's over at the Center For Inquiry discussion board.  Apparently some skeptics think that if subjective impressions are real then it therefore follows that morality based on those subjective impressions somehow adds up to moral realism (objective existence of moral precepts themselves).   That seems ridiculous on its face, and a simple reductio ad absurdum follows:

If Fred thinks that it is wrong for Tom to do X at time t while at the same time Tom thinks that it is right for Tom to do X at time t, then we have a case in which Fred and Tom have apparently established "real" moral precepts that directly contradict one another.

Koukl adopts a slower process to bring out the same point:

"Regardless of what our sentiments happen to be regarding moral actions, we can feel good or feel bad or whatever, the problem is that morality is prescriptive, not merely descriptive. That is it tells us not just what we did, but what we ought to have done in the past, and what we ought to do in the future. That is not something that any Darwinian mechanism can describe, because nothing about my biology can inveigh upon me to act a certain way for moral reasons in the future. It doesn’t tell me why I should be good tomorrow."

In other words, the "is" of "Fred thinks that it is wrong for Tom to do X at time t" does not make it that case that Tom ought not do X at time t any more than Tom's opposite belief entails the converse moral precept.  Put simply, Shermer has come upon the is/ought divide (the problem of deriving an "ought" from an "is") without providing reasonable evidence that he has solved the problem.

Shermer surely founders with all of his subsequent attempts to solve the problem.  Indeed, it remained difficult to tell whether he even perceived it as a problem.

HH: Michael Shermer, when we went to break, Greg had made the argument that the Darwinian model simply cannot explain immaterial concepts like morality, that there’s just no way you can rearrange the molecules to get there. You’re saying well, yes you can.

MS: Yeah, I think so, because if we think of morality as another suite of emotions that are involved with other people’s behaviors, the consequences of our actions, how we feel about them, how people feel about us when we do these things, that’s as every bit as important a biological part of our nature as anything else we talk about.

See what I mean?

I would encourage all interested parties to read the whole conversation, assuming that Generalissimo Duane gets around to properly formatting the text.

Props to Koukl for an excellent debate performance.  If Koukl is as good when treating other major issues in the God argument then I could easily place him up there with Dinesh D'Souza for effectively engaging nonbelievers in debate.


Update:

Until Generalissimo gets around to properly formatting the debate transcript, Wintery Knight has created a legible version at the blog of the same name.