“But why exactly do we believe that human life should be valued?” Justin Brierley asks (p. 52). Nowhere in his quest for an answer does he ever resort to asking experts in moral psychology or sociology what science has found the answer to this question empirically to be, or even consult the over two thousand years of secular philosophy on this question (from Aristotle and Epicurus to David Hume and Philippa Foot, and so many others, who have a lot of value to say on the subject). Brierley ignores everything—every fact, every element of intellectual progress and understanding humankind has made—and instead regurgitates the standard Christian apologetic line, known as the Moral Argument for God, which is the argument that we need God to believe any particular morality is worth conforming our lives to, and therefore there must be a God (both a factually false premise and a logical non sequitur). Then, several chapters later, Brierley contradicts this by trying to excuse all of (what he has just insisted was a perfectly moral) God’s evident evils—despite that being as decisive an epistemic failure of his hypothesis as one could have observed.

This is the second expansion on my general summary of Justin Brierley’s book Unbelievable? Why After Ten Years of Talking with Atheists, I’m Still a Christian (see “Unbelievable: Justin Brierley’s Epistemic Failure”), illustrating again how Brierley rests his Christian faith on failures of fact and logic. Last time I covered his discussion of meaning and purpose. Here I’ll illustrate the same in respect to his third chapter, “God Makes Sense of Human Value” (pp. 51-70), and seventh chapter, “The Atheist’s Greatest Objection: Suffering” (pp. 145-66). Because, on the one hand, these two chapters link to his arguments about meaning and purpose, and, on the other hand, because they conspicuously contradict each other. Everything Brierley says about morality requiring and coming from God in chapter three, he effectively abandons in chapter seven, when it comes time to defend every immoral behavior God must be engaging in to explain the actual observations we make of the universe and its total lack of just or wise construction or government.

The General Problem

Atheists have already worked out that the Moral Argument for God is logically impossible to carry off because there is literally no epistemic access to what God even thinks about morality (much less that it’s all the specific things Brierley hopes and claims it is), nor is there any way to argue from “that’s what a god thinks” to “that’s what we should think too.” I already covered this problem in respect to meaning and purpose last time. You actually can’t make the argument Brierley is attempting in his third chapter. Because you have to actually do the hard work instead of defending why God’s values (such as Brierley insists them to be) are worthy of any appreciation or emulation from us. God could be a completely alien monster whom we should reject and revile (think, Azathoth, or Gozer, or “The Supreme Being” in Time Bandits). So you have to explain why he’s not (especially because, uhem, from Brierley’s own scriptures he sure looks to be; as also is evident in the callous design and governance of the universe). But the moment you succeed at that, all the reasons you have advanced that justify agreeing with God on moral values already suffice as reasons to agree with those moral values. You no longer need God to exist. This is the Catch-22 theists can never escape. There is either no reason to care about what God values; or there is, and that’s then the reason to care about those values—the actual existence of God is irrelevant. The Moral Argument can therefore never succeed.

And that’s all before you get to the even bigger problem that you have no evidence your god shares any of those values. Theists start by working out what values they wish a god would have, then explain we should adopt those values because this god does. But that’s unsound logic. You can’t get to that conclusion until you can establish as true the premise on which it is founded. But we can’t phone God to ask what values he endorses (revelations and scripture always give contradictory answers; few of them actually defensible or admirable). And we have no way to “observe” God’s behavior so as to infer what values he actually moderates his own behavior by. Insofar as one even can do that, we observe God to be an absolute moral monster—the serious empirical problem Brierley struggles desperately to avoid in his seventh chapter. Brierley’s cause is thus doomed before it has even begun. See my discussion in The Moral Bankruptcy of Divine Command Theory, all of whose points apply to Divine Nature theory as well. So don’t get hung up on thinking (as Brierley on p. 65) that you can evade its conclusions by denying morality consists merely of what god commands; those same conclusions follow fully as well from any reason you contrive as to why god would command them.

So what’s left? All we can do is try to empirically ascertain what’s best, from observing how societies go well or poorly, how human lives go well or poorly, how human individuals’ inner quest for satisfaction goes well or poorly, to build up evidence for which values actually statistically perform better on all three metrics. In other words, all we have left is Ethical Naturalism. And this is true even if God exists. Because he has left us no credible source of information about what is moral other than that. His revelations and scriptures are full of individually and societally toxic, often even horrifically immoral advice. And his “behavior” (in his construction and government of the natural world as we observe) is even worse (more on which point shortly). So all we have left is to empirically observe what morals actually go better for us all to adopt—and lo, what we find generally accords with much of what Brierley hopes it would (see The Real Basis of a Moral World and Your Own Moral Reasoning: Some Things to Consider). At the very least the theist has to admit that that couldn’t be what we observe but for the fact that God arranged the world so that we would. It therefore has to be what God intended for us to ascertain. Or else, of course, there just is no God; and since there is inevitably going to be, in all possible worlds, some best way to behave for the members of any social system in whatever world, the fact that we should be capable of discovering what that is is no surprise requiring any further explanation.

Once again, the evidence of human moral inquiry is also the reverse of what Brierley wants. Rather than an argument for God, it’s actually one of the clearest arguments against the existence of God—once you put back in all the evidence apologists like Brierley left out. As I wrote before:

[A]theism predicts that moral rules will only come from human beings, and thus will begin deeply flawed, and will be improved by experiment over a really long time (each improvement coming after empirically observing the social discomfort and dissatisfaction and waste that comes from flawed moral systems) … [and] only slowly over thousands of years, because humans are imperfect reasoners. And that is exactly what we observe. Just look at the examples of slavery and the subordination of women in the Bible [Old Testament and New].

By contrast, theism predicts a universe directly governed by justice-laws, or a kind and just stewardship, or the enacting and teaching of divine justice and mercy, everywhere, from the start. But we observe no such laws built into the universe, and no stewards or law-enforcers but us, and no perfect moral code has existed anywhere throughout history. The best moralities have always just slowly evolved from human trial and error (see Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature and Shermer’s The Moral Arc). Thus, the evidence of human morality (its starting abysmal and being slowly improved by humans over thousands of years in the direction that would make their societies better for them) is evidence against God, not evidence for God.

As well, the reason why atheism entails moral progress over time is that it’s still the case that “we all want to live in a just and kind and honest world” because that’s a world in every way better for us to live in, “which desire is sufficient reason for us to try and create” such a world. And because we are social animals (we wouldn’t even have civilization if we weren’t, much less be interested in discussing moral philosophy), it is unsurprising that we have evolved some useful equipment to obtain “more and deeper joy and satisfaction” from “feeling compassion with others,” and preferring truth and courage over lies and cowardice.

In other words, the actual evidence establishes morality did not come on high from any perfect moral reasoner, but came from poorly reasoning humans and then improved over time only in reaction to empirical evidence supporting the possibility and preferability of better worlds to worse. This makes no sense if God exists. But it is exactly what we would observe if God didn’t exist. For example, Brierley’s “God” commanded and endorsed slavery, indeed for centuries even genocidal sex slavery. We now know that is a disastrously toxic moral value to endorse or embrace. Realizing that is good for us (apart from how long it took us to empirically admit it), because it means we were thereby then able to build a better world for ourselves. But this conclusively proves Brierley’s God does not exist. No moral being can have had anything to do with the morality pushed in the Bible. The Old Testament is especially evil. It therefore is certainly bogus. But if the Old Testament is bogus, and the New Testament is based on it (and it is), the New Testament must be bogus as well. And we have moral verification of that from all the immorality it, too, still promotes, proving none of its content can have come from any morally perfect God either. Slavery is still nowhere condemned in it. Women are still deprived of human rights therein, and their oppression commanded as righteous. The mass genocide of nonbelievers, to be performed by God’s angelic armies, is still promoted as a morally just outcome. If there is a morally perfect God, he can’t have had anything to do with the Bible. Which means he can’t be the Christian God.

It’s of course a much simpler explanation to say there is no god at all. Because it’s not just the Bible that is a moral failure. There is no divinely inspired scripture for any religion in the world whose content is legitimately moral. So there just is no god interested in giving us moral advice. Moral progress has always come from human beings themselves, outside and without any god’s revelations to us—and often against intense, even violent opposition from every god’s most devoted believers. Which is a further proof there just is no god involved here, least of all a moral one. There is a reason Christianity succumbs to the Argument from Meagre Moral Fruits (see Jonathan Pearce and Emerson Green and their mutual discussion). No true religion could. That’s how we know it’s false.

Brierley’s Response

How does Brierley aim to escape all these fatal conundrums? By ignoring them, pretending they don’t exist, and then advancing illogical emotional reasons to cling to the false hope of a moral god. As Brierley says, “I find it very difficult to come up with a convincing answer on an atheistic worldview” (p. 52), and part of the reason he finds this difficult is that atheists too often don’t grasp what it is he is asking them for (as I discussed recently in Erik Wielenberg and How Atheists Keep Missing the Point of Grounding Morality). They keep giving him the wrong answer, so he thinks there isn’t one—rather than actually researching what has been compiled as the answer to the question he actually wants the answer to: why should anyone prefer being moral to being immoral? This is actually inextricably linked to the question of what is moral. Because everything is a false morality if there is no sufficient reason to adhere to it. So answering the question “Why be moral?” is literally identical to asking “What is moral?” You can’t answer one without answering the other; the answers are literally the same, as I demonstrated under peer review in “Moral Facts Naturally Exist (and Science Could Find Them)” in The End of Christianity.

I explained last time that Brierley actually isn’t answering his own question here either. Saying “God said so” is a non sequitur. It doesn’t get you to “We should agree with God.” Any reasons Brierley can give for why we should heed God’s morality are already the reasons we have to be moral anyway. So if Brierley can’t think of why we should be moral without a God, he can’t be giving us any reason why we should be moral with a God either. He’s just screwed. Until he can figure out what the answer really is to this question of “why” be moral—which would also lead him to what the true morality is. For example, is it a morality that condemns homosexual sex, or not aligning one’s gender with their sex? Is it a morality that prioritizes the interests of a non-existent person (a fetus) over those of an actually suffering person (anyone who is pregnant)? Is it a morality that condemns teaching empathy to children? Christianity often comes with some pretty bad moralities. And they often have far clearer biblical support than alternative Christianities can claim. So how can you empirically resolve which moralities we should be adopting? You can’t appeal to God. He’s a no-show. He will never tell you. Just as he never told any other Christians the toxic things they claim are moral.

Brierley resorts to a kind of uncritical moral intuitionism here, speaking only of what he “feels” is the right thing to do, without any actual justification for why it is the right thing to do. He then just leaps to “God.” But this is illogical. He has adduced no evidence God agrees with him; or any reasons we should agree with God. So it doesn’t work. When Christians lobbied Uganda to engage in the mass state murder of gay men (and they did), they are, like Brierley, appealing to their own uncritical moral intuitionism. How can Brierley claim they are wrong, when they are appealing to exactly the same evidence for their view as Brierley is appealing to for his own? This is why moral intuitionism is bankrupt as a methodology. It lacks any means to tell which intuitions are true and which are false. Brierley thus needs to do a lot more work here. He is giving us nothing of any use. And this is one reason why his avoidance of moral debates, as I noted in my initial summary, “remains a logical problem.” If he cannot explain why his Christian morals are right about gay people and those of the Uganda Lobby wrong, then he actually has produced no answer to the question of why we should be moral either.

Think about it. What if God is with those guys? What if God agrees gay people should be executed—as in fact he is supposed, on Brierley’s worldview, to have actually said? Would God’s existence then be any reason for us to be moral in Brierley’s sense, as in opposed to such barbarism? Or would Brierley then join the Uganda Lobby? This is a problem. Brierley cannot give us any reason to be moral by appealing to God. He has to actually answer the question of why we should be moral—and that means moral in the sense Brierley wants. Why condemn the Uganda Lobby? It can’t be because “God does.” Because we have no real knowledge that he even does. But even if he did, how would that be any more a justification than if we found out God supports the Uganda Lobby? Should we on that basis switch sides and start calling for the mass murder of gay people? Brierley’s intuitive revulsion against that outcome should clue him in: God is useless here. It cannot matter what values God has. Whether they are moral or not can only be ascertained on principles other than that he is a god. And that’s the case even if he exists. So Brierley’s handwaving about how he can’t explain why anyone should be moral without appealing to his God should actually worry him. Because it means he himself has no actual reason to be moral…any more than the Uganda Lobby do.

The UN Declaration of Human Rights

This is why Ethical Naturalism is crucial to human morality. You can never have any justified moral system without it. So even theists should get busy developing that, and stop lazily appealing to God here, which is nothing but a dangerous non sequitur—as the Uganda Lobby illustrates. So let’s walk through an example of how Ethical Naturalism works, one that Brierley even gave yet completely missed the entire point of, having no idea how to actually justify his own morality: the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The fact that this was published only in 1948, and appears nowhere in the Bible, Old or New, nor was struck upon by any Christian nation, much less a democratic majority of them, for nearly two thousand years, doesn’t occur to Brierley as what it truly is: rather damning evidence against the truth of his religion. But what is relevant to my present point is how Brierley quotes this, but doesn’t understand the logical structure of what he quotes and how it in fact already answers the question he claims he can’t answer.

About this Declaration, Brierley writes (p. 53):

Its opening paragraph affirmed that ‘recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’. [But] … the belief that humans are created free, equal and with inherent dignity only makes sense if there is a God. [And this] … is a piece of evidence for God’s existence.

Brierley says he finds this argument “very compelling” and “one of my personal favourites” (p. 53), making this another example of how his Christian faith is based on failures of both fact and logic. Because this argument is, again, illogical. That there would be no basis for our moral sentiments does not entail or even imply that God exists; there might, in fact, just be no basis for our moral sentiments. They may simply be the detritus of evolving as a social species and of institutional attempts to control society (as ample brain science and social history would support being the case). That would suck. But as I explained last time, that something sucks in no way argues it is not true. So Brierley here finds a completely illogical argument “compelling.” Because he can’t do logic. And that’s why he is a Christian.

But Brierley also can’t do facts. And that’s also why he is a Christian. It may have sucked had it been the case that morality was vain; and that just would be one more thing about what already sucks about the world, from tsunamis to child cancer. But it happens to be false. The moral (as in, what is morally true; not false moralities) is tautologically always nothing more than “what we ought most to do,” as in what we ought to do above all other things that we have the option to do. And it is logically necessarily the case that there will always be, in every possible universe (with gods or not), some fact of the matter as to what we ought most to do. Thus morality—indeed, outright objective moral facts—always exists, in every possible world. The only question left to ask is which moral facts are the true ones, and which not—which things ought in fact we most do. And this is where we get to Brierley’s purely emotional reasons for clinging to Christianity: he does not know how to do the hard work of explaining why such things as being compassionate and honest happen to be the things we ought most do.

It’s not as if the sciences of psychology and sociology, especially across the subjects of game theory and cognitive wellbeing, haven’t been hard at work on this for quite a while already. See the five volume Moral Psychology series so far from MIT, with entries on evolution, neuroscience, cognitive science, free will and responsibility, and the social psychology of virtue and character; see also the Routledge introduction to Moral Psychology, and abundant related work, such as Personality Identity & Character, which I use as a textbook in my online class on the science and philosophy of moral reasoning; or the many works I cited on the connection between individual human happiness and a moral life last time. These all provide actual reasons to prefer cultivating yourself into a compassionate person over a callous one, an honest person over a dishonest one, and all the like. Brierley, by contrast, gives us no reason at all. “Because God wants you to” isn’t a reason even if it were true. And yet he offers no evidence it’s even true.

Instead Brierley relies on illogical reasoning like (I am paraphrasing here), “I would not like the world if my moral intuitions did not come from a god; therefore there is probably a God” (the same fallacy of Argument from Emotion I took to task before) or “I would not likely feel these moral intuitions if there was no God; therefore there is probably a God.” That latter argument (unlike the former) at least would be in a formal sense valid; but it remains unsound, because its premise is false, and therefore so is the conclusion. There is ample scientific, empirical evidence that Brierley feels those moral intuitions because of a confluence of evolutionary and historico-cultural causes. And as I noted, the evidence of this is far more what we expect on atheism than on theism. That it took thousands of years for humans to even get to where Brierley is on matters of moral conviction; that humans, even the most devotedly religious and god-fearing, have for eons credited God with toxic and horrid moral expectations instead, and obeyed them to everyone’s ill; that it is god-believers who remain still today the most common, vicious, and potent enemies of further moral progress: none of that is expected on Brierley’s hypothesis. But it is all expected on atheism. Hence the actual facts of human morality are evidence against his God, not for it.

How Morality Actually Works

Let’s go back then to Brierley’s quotation of the UN Declaration of Rights. He seems to think the sentence from it that he quoted is just “affirming” that “humans are created free, equal and with inherent dignity.” It’s not. It never mentions being created that way. That would be empirically false. It’s obvious no one is born into freedom or equality or respect for their dignity; these things have to be purchased, built, and at notable cost—which is not what we expect if there is a god who arranged and governs the world, but is entirely what we expect if there isn’t one. But more importantly, Brierley is mistaking this as a mere “affirmation” in need of evidence for its truth (to which he then plugs in his God as being that evidence, however illogical that is), rather than realizing that the sentence he just quoted is a causal conditional: it is referring to the evidence of its statement’s truth.

That “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” is “the foundation” of “freedom, justice and peace in the world” is stating an empirically determined fact: you cannot have “freedom, justice and peace in the world” unless you “recognize” those things. In other words, only societies that choose to respect, at all levels, “the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights” of all human beings can reliably expect to enjoy “freedom, justice and peace.” And they’re right. Remember. There is a reason this is being asserted in 1948—and by the recently-created United Nations. You might recall a certain big global thing that had just happened proving the point of its own statement. So, insofar as you want reliable access to “freedom, justice and peace” you have to adhere to those instrumental causes. There is no other way to reliably obtain them. Indeed, the degree to which a people respect everyone’s dignity and treat certain things as everyone’s equal and inalienable rights will strongly correlate with the degree to which they all enjoy “freedom, justice and peace.” This is a provable empirical fact. Indeed, it’s probably an inevitable fact of all social systems in all possible worlds. But we needn’t claim it to be. That it is in evidence as a fact of the matter in our world is all we need in order to affirm that it is true. We have no need of appealing to any god.

There is more to morality, of course, than merely its effects on the social system it creates that we must then live in. There is more to it than even the also-true realization that one can never rest assured any privileges—any moral exceptions—that they have secured for themselves will remain, unless they get busy ensuring they remain for everyone. The rich can always become poor. The well can always become sick. The secure can always be assaulted. The powerful can always become powerless. The persecutor and oppressor can always become the persecuted and oppressed. The people you screw over today can always form an alliance greater than any you can call upon in your defense when they come for you tomorrow. The reason why we build systems like constitutional democracies now—an idea nowhere found in the Bible, nor ever preached by Jesus or any of his followers—is because of this principle. If you arrange the system so that a leader of your own party can subvert democracy without consequences, then you have left a system in place that a leader of your opposing party can then use to subvert democracy without consequences. Only an abject fool doesn’t realize this. Yes, this means our leaders are often abject fools; and so are we for electing them. But this doesn’t change the fact of the matter. And this is why even for mere reciprocal, systemic reasons trying to cultivate “a different morality for us than for them” is doomed to fail. You will rue the day when your refusal to admit this bites out your throat. Better to admit it before that happens, and act wisely now instead. This is a sound argument whether God exists or not; it doesn’t matter who is too foolish to grasp it.

But that’s just the systemic basis for moral facts. More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle, Zeno, and Epicurus had more wisdom to convey on this point than anything credited to Jesus (who, as depicted in the Gospels, was a rather terrible philosopher, far behind the curve of his peers). Those men already realized and articulated all of what I just said. But they also realized that this wasn’t the sum reason for being moral. Adding to all that is the psychological fact that one’s own personal inner life will be much improved thereby as well. Becoming and being a person like those you can admire and like and enjoy the company of will lead to greater inner contentment with oneself, as you can then harness nothing but true beliefs about yourself and the world and still like and admire yourself, and enjoy your own company (the one person you can never escape the company of). Whereas becoming and being a person like those you would loathe and hate and can’t stand the company of will lead to inner discontentment with oneself, as you cannot then harness true beliefs about yourself and the world and still like and admire yourself or even enjoy your own company—to the contrary, you must inevitably lose yourself in self-defeating false beliefs, or else come to loathe and hate yourself, becoming literally the sort of person you can’t stand the company of.

The empirical fact is, you can only really be a fully sane and contented person if you are also a moral person, in the very sense Jesus is claimed to have articulated (borrowing a sentiment already from secular philosophies of his era): “in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you” (Matthew 7:2). In other words, if you deem it right and good to engage in petty theft solely for the needs of survival and then suffer only mild consequences for it if caught, then you must deem it right and good to be the victim of petty theft of your goods by, say, a needy child, and to expect only mild consequences upon them for it. This can be reasoned out without any appeal to gods. It simply follows from the way things always are, in every possible world. It has solely to do with what you can be comfortable with once you are fully cognizant of all—not a select few, but all—the actual facts pertaining. This is why true moral facts always follow when anyone reasons to what they ought most to do without logical fallacy and from nothing but all the pertinent facts; and why all disputes about what is or is not moral always reduce to disputes about what factually is the case and what logically follows therefrom. Gods never enter into it.

This is why you can never persuade anyone—nor have any right to expect to persuade anyone—that, for example, “you should refrain from gay sex, because God said so” or “because God wouldn’t like it” or any such premise. Because there is no reason to care what God thinks. God may well be a bastard (like he is clearly depicted to be in the Bible). His opinion thus counts for nothing. If you want to really make a true statement, about what people actually truthfully ought to do, you have to appeal to real, actual things that matter to the person you are saying this of. It has to be bad for the actor in some real way, and in ways that really are avoidable with better outcomes by acting differently. And this has to be true for them. If some outcome isn’t factually bad for them, then there is no valid or sound reason for them to avoid it. Thus, you simply always have to appeal to what an individual actually already wants most for themselves (like peace, justice, freedom, or contentment), and you simply always have to appeal to real, honest, trustworthy, and compelling evidence that the behavior you are recommending actually will produce that outcome—or will do to a higher frequency than any alternative behavior available.

The UN Declaration also recognizes this. Of course it also gives those equally-true social-causal reasons for building and helping to realize a moral society. Just as it says in the very next bit after the one Brierley quotes:

[D]isregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people, [because] it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law.

Thus it describes the universally undesirable causal consequences of disregarding human rights. It likewise goes on to mention the causal relationship between behaving in accord with its principles and the ability of nations “to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.” But then it closes with its 29th article, whose first lemma states: “Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.” This statement recognizes the causal relationship between one’s commitment to moral behavior and also the development of their own inner wellbeing. And the empirical evidence for this causal relationship has been laid out by philosophers and scientists for eons. We don’t need any further reason to be moral than this.

The problem with the callous, selfish, dishonest sort of people Brierley describes as outraging his conscience is not only that they are making their own world worse for themselves, but also that they are living hollow, delusional, self-defeating lives cut off from the goods accessible only to moral persons (the awe of real wisdom and understanding, the joys of empathy and community and genuine friendship, and of a healthy world—physically, politically, economically, emotionally, aesthetically), and they stumble far more frequently into dissatisfaction—becoming increasingly angry, paranoid, frustrated, often even outright made miserable by the causal consequences of their own behavior or its emulation across the community they cannot escape; and repeatedly acting against their own interests in consequence of the delusions they must maintain to avoid realizing how much they would hate themselves if they didn’t.

Brierley himself is disgusted by and terrified of these people; he would thus be disgusted by and terrified of himself if ever he became one of them. And that is all the reason he needs not to. More to the point, this is the only argument he could ever make to these people that would change their minds. His appeal to God is fruitless. They’ll just respond by declaring God agrees with them instead of him, or that Justin can’t show them any evidence any god exists who doesn’t agree with them, or even (if they are particularly philosophical) that they have no reason to care what god thinks even if he exists. And indeed they wouldn’t. The only way Brierley could make his argument logically valid and sound is to appeal to real evidence that would compel them (if they respond to evidence rationally) to agree things will be better for them if they comply. They might not recognize any of this—he can’t “argue” them into accepting facts or thinking logically—but what he would be saying to them would still be factually true. And that’s all he could hope for even if his God existed. Because irrational people set on dismissing evidence couldn’t be persuaded by any logically sound arguments from the truths of God either.

Brierley almost grasps this fact when he ends up in the only place he logically can here: pushing the standard heaven-and-hell threat. In a rare instance of making a controversial confessional admission, Brierley declares himself an annihilationist. So his idea of hell is simply ceasing to exist when dead. But this is still the same ad baculum fallacy, albeit a “kinder” one than most of Christendom (Christ included) has endorsed. Brierley intuitively recognizes there can be no reason to care about what behavior God wants unless there are physical consequences that the moral agent wants (or wants to avoid) more than any alternative outcome. “Hey, being a callous, selfish, dishonest person means you’ll miss out on eternal paradise” is just another “Hey, you’ll have a richer, more satisfying life.” The question then is: who is giving actual empirical evidence that their causal model is true? There is zero evidence of anyone (much less people who engaged themselves in any particular behavior over others) ending up in an eternal paradise. So Brierley has no empirical facts to offer. His offer is just another Nigerian Prince. Only Ethical Naturalism has actual, verifiable evidence for its claims to consequences. And there’s just no getting around that.

This is true even if we assume Brierley actually adopts a works-over-faith theory of atonement, which is unlikely (few Christians do). Remember, theories of atonement are one of the serious problems with his religion that he declared in his introduction he will avoid. And here we run into why this is a logical problem for his case for Christianity. If the callous child-murderer that Brierley opens his chapter with (pp. 51-52) gets baptized and declares for Jesus (or indeed, for all we know, already has), then he gets eternal paradise—no matter if he goes on callously murdering children. As the wealthy and murderous psychopath Mason Verger says in Hannibal, even he had “immunity from the risen Jesus; and no one beats the riz.” Hence Christianity doesn’t even offer a coherent causal reason to be moral—unless it embraces the view that somehow Jesus doesn’t save everyone who accepts him, that he didn’t die for “everyone’s” sins, that he will still judge them for their deeds.

This is a conundrum for Christians though only because Christianity is internally incoherent. I am more concerned with what we can empirically prove. We have no evidence for this “no one beats the riz” nonsense either. But what matters more for the present point is that there is no evidence of any causal consequences to our behavior other than what nature and human society already provide. You can’t try to change people’s behavior with vain declarations that it will earn them “pie in the sky when they die.” That’s simply a lie. You are just making up the causal connection you want to push. You are thus behaving no more logically or credibly than the Uganda Lobby who declare that God will deny billions paradise and send them instead to hell if we don’t enact the state murder of gay people. Once you have a made-up causal consequence (“Do x, or else God will kill you someday and deny you eternal paradise”), you can attach any morality to it, no matter how vile. This is the problem with the Moral Argument for God. It’s essentially just an argument for every conceivable evil. The rest of us want to know what’s actually true. And not being fools, we don’t believe things you have no evidence for. That’s the only epistemic stance that can protect anyone from becoming evil like the Uganda Lobby.

What Brierley is really worried about, of course, is the fact that humans are deeply fallible, and human social systems still (for all their immense socio-moral advancement) quite badly designed, so we lack perfect justice. We do better than worse. But people still fall through the cracks. Thus, we live in a world where the fact is that a callous, dishonest person has, say, an 80% or whatever chance of a poor contentment outcome, and a compassionate, honest person has, say, only a 70% or whatever chance of a good contentment outcome—when we should prefer both these numbers to be 100%; or at least as near to as makes all odds. But that is only what we’d have gotten if there really were a God. That it isn’t what we get, that we get a world where moral behavior gives us not a guarantee but only a significantly better shot at a better life, is what we expect on atheism. It therefore is evidence for atheism. You can’t escape this consequence of the evidence by saying “I don’t like the way the world really is, therefore a god must exist who will more reliably balance the scales later somehow.” Because that’s both illogical (what you want bears no epistemic relation to what actually is the case) and not in evidence (Brierley produces no evidence of anyone benefiting from his god after dying—or even while alive, beyond the same psychological benefits all false religions confer).

Christian Naivety

Brierley never realizes any of this because he is too lost in an annoyingly common state of Christian naivety. He thus makes assertions that he thinks are profound but really betray his failure to actually research their truth or relevance, or think about them any more deeply than serves his apologetic excuse-making. For example, he says “my belief that racism is wrong can’t just be the subjective result of a changing cultural zeitgeist” (p. 56), but then shows no signs of ever actually bothering to find out the actual reasons given by anti-racism experts for why racism is wrong (pro tip: it’s not “because the cultural zeitgeist has changed”). Likewise, he says “the only way we can speak of things being truly right and wrong is if there is a reality about these matters which stands apart from the material world” (p. 57) and “[if] there is nothing more to the universe than the matter and energy that everything consists of” then “the most that our moral beliefs can be are feelings” that we evolved for trivial reasons of reproductive success (p. 58), whereby he once again commits the modo hoc fallacy I already took him to task for last time. Nothing in the physical world is “just” matter and energy; nothing evolved in us is “just” an aid to reproduction. Neither physics nor evolution actually work that way.

That certain behaviors and dispositions have physical causal effects on the social system and an individual’s psychological wellbeing entails that moral truth does not “stand apart from the material world.” In fact, it literally never could—for even the existence of a god and his plans for eternal life would then just be more physical-causal facts, and thus in no relevant way different from being just yet more components of the material world. I’ve already explained that point. But my point here is that this also exemplifies how Brierley’s not knowing things is a product of a kind of careless naivety often found in Christians. For instance, he says if moral sentiments like condemning racism are evolved, then “some people [will] evolve a belief that racism is fine, while others evolve a belief that racism is wrong,” and these would thus be “merely opinions, useful perhaps for survival value, but there’s no truth about the matter” (p. 58). This is not how evolution works; nor how moral sentiments against racism developed historically. Nor does it land anywhere near the actual reasons widely given for abandoning racism.

Indeed, what Brierley means by racism was invented by Christian slave empires in the 15th century. As W.E.B. Du Bois once pointed out, before that there were no “white people” or “black people” as social categories. But even the rather different (and more ancient) phenomenon of ethnocentrism (a cultural, rather than biological prejudice) has a complex history that had already met with effective criticism by secular philosophers in the West even before the time of Jesus. An ethnocentric stance is both factually false and illogical. It therefore can be condemned epistemically—we don’t even need a moral critique. That Brierley doesn’t grasp this is another example of the simplistic naivety that defines much of Christian thought. Ethnocentrism (like the later invention of racism) rests on premises about people and cultures that are demonstrably not even true; and once iterated as a motivating premise, it cannot even be maintained as a coherent principle—ironically, Brierley’s own point: if ethnocentrism is just an arbitrary subjective cultural opinion, it makes no logical sense to maintain it. You simply can’t justify it. Brierley is thus already stating ample reasons for abandoning racism that require no god to exist—and he doesn’t even realize he just did that.

Brierley’s declarations here are also lazily self-contradictory. If condemning racism “is useful for survival,” then, contrary to his own assertion, there is a “truth about the matter.” By his own declaration racists are literally behaving self-defeatingly. All else being equal, cooperative species will outperform any species at war with itself. But even just saying it’s merely about reproductive success is naive. There actually is a much larger aggregate reason racism is factually (and thus truthfully) bad for us all, reasons both external in terms of social system effects, and internal in terms of personal psychology and coherent self-respect—just as with every other moral phenomenon, as I’ve already explained. The same naivety shows again in Brierley’s seeming lack of awareness of the fact that “racism” as a phenomenon is often not a moral issue at all. It can be, and in alarming frequency is. But most racism today is systemic or noncognitive, and thus not a moral failure in people but an epistemic one.

Which all further illustrates that Brierley is not well informed about anything he is talking about; in result, everything he says becomes a gobbledygook of true and false statements. You can’t build any effective argument for God that way. Whereas if you worked to overcome this epistemically fatal naivety, you’d find you have no argument for God—because everything you are worried about is already taken care of by the facts of the world as they are. We thus don’t need to appeal to God to soundly argue racism is wrong, or anything else that actually is (even if such an argument weren’t already a non sequitur).

This hopeless naivety arises particularly when Brierley repeats the same naive arguments of C.S. Lewis (pp. 59-62) that we can’t explain where we get our concepts and standards of justice without appealing to a God. This isn’t even remotely true. As I’ve already explained, we get our ideas of justice from what we ourselves find good and bad—as in, benevolent and helpful and satisfaction-enhancing, on the one hand, and malevolent and harmful and satisfaction-impairing, on the other hand. None of this comes from God. It comes from empirical observation of the facts of the world, and our ability to ascertain what phenomena and behaviors cause all the things that genuinely harm, frustrate, or threaten us—fully justifying our disliking and condemning them—and all the things that genuinely hurt, help, or defend us—fully justifying our liking and praising them. To not have figured this out is painfully naive. Yet Brierley devotes several pages to this being a reason he believes in God.

There are several other examples of what I’m talking about here. For instance, at one point Brierley endorses the argument that “we, as humans, seem to have an uncanny access to this realm” of moral knowledge (p. 61), thus betraying the fact that he knows nothing about the evolved neurophysics of moral reasoning in the human brain, which fully explains this “uncanny” access—and I mean fully: unlike Brierley’s theistic hypothesis, secular science explains also why so many people feel like they have this same “uncanny access” to contradictory moral truths (especially in conjunction with the brain science behind the phenomenology of intuition generally: see Sense and Goodness without God, index, “intuition”). The Uganda Lobby feels just as intuitively certain as Brierley does in their moral sentiments, just as most of humanity (including Christian humanity) throughout history had very different moral beliefs that they also thought they had “uncanny” access to, all of which establishing that these brain mechanisms that we’ve well studied empirically are not tapping into any cosmic truth of the matter. They are, instead, quite clearly tapping into a construct in the brain that is largely molded by the historical happenstances of enculturation and personal development.

What brain science has established is biologically held in common among all healthy humans are far more generic functions of intention assessment (empathy) and tit-for-tat reasoning (justice), which often generate conflicting assessments that our brains then have to try to harmonize, illustrating their non-intelligent, ad hoc design. Like any other reasoning circuits our brains evolved, they are embarrassingly flawed and imperfect, but still substantively better than random at generating judgments about reality that actually help us navigate that reality more successfully—and in every possible sense of “successfully.” How those entirely generic functions then produce specific beliefs and principles (like “we ought to murder gay people” or “we ought to be monogamous” or “we ought to oppose the owning of slaves”) is all installed after birth; it isn’t genetic, and isn’t cosmic. Nor is it always arbitrary, since we see it is empirically improved by human cultures over time. Some of it is demonstrable bullshit (like C.S. Lewis’s example of the “first dibs” rule on public seating, which he naively believed evinced a cosmic moral truth; in the Coast Guard we had exactly the opposite rule at sea, and we all understood why ours was the better rule to adopt in that context, thus refuting Lewis); but some if it is a correct assessment of how the world really does work, and would work even better if people grasped that fact (e.g. how humans are able to empirically work out different seating rules according to situational utility, not cosmic truths).

Ultimately, Brierley’s naivety (echoed by all the Christians he quotes and references in this same chapter making the same naive assertions) fails to grasp that he is operating from a false dichotomy throughout, one he endorses with the words of another Christian radio interviewee: “morality is something we discover like archaeologists, not something we build like architects” (p. 62). In fact it’s both. And it is terminally naive to not realize that (see How Can Morals Be Both Invented and True?). If you get hung up on thinking it has to be one or the other, you’ll never realize the truth: morality is just one more craft tool in the human arsenal, no different from agriculture, surgery, diplomacy, pedagogy, business administration—and indeed, even architecture. In all of these domains of craft knowledge, we are inventing things—tools, procedures, standards and practices. Yet at the same time we are also discovering truths when we invent these things and test them out: we are discovering, by hypothesis and experiment, the most effective ways to grow food, perform surgeries, maintain a healthy international peace, teach skills, run businesses—and build bridges and offices and homes. So there is a truth we are gradually discovering in all these domains—but it’s one that is fully entailed by the causal properties of reality. The same is true of morality, which is just a behavioral tool for social and personal contentment. Ergo, the moral system that most effectively obtains social and personal contentment is simply for that very reason the true one—as in, there is no other alternative tool we should be adopting instead, once we accept that our primary goal is social and personal contentment. And as I’ve already pointed out, factual reasons that this should indeed be our principal goal are abundant.

Which all means that even if God himself told us to adopt some other moral system, one that was less effective at optimizing social and personal contentment—one that led to dissatisfying, dysfunctional minds and societies instead—we would have no reason whatever to agree with him. Which means his claim that we ought to would simply be false. And this is in fact why the entire Western world has abandoned every actual Biblical morality (radical pacifism is actually immoral; criminalizing blasphemy and sexuality, immoral; endorsing the entire Torah law code, immoral; subordinating women, immoral; slavery, immoral; condemning or executing gay people, immoral). Those moralities, we found, are simply dysfunctional. And we have extensively proved that empirically, across countless sad lessons of history.

Which Gets Us to the Elephant in the Room

Brierley addresses the Problem of Evil in his seventh chapter. And the oddest thing about that chapter is that it is written as if he “forgot” the entire contents of his fourth chapter. The moral nature of any person can only be ascertained by observing their behavior. On Brierley’s theory, all the innate horrors of the natural universe, and all its lack of wise governance or design, and all the defectively abhorrent morals taught in the Old and New Testaments, necessarily reflect the bahavior of God. His moral character can therefore be judged thereby. But the evidence then completely refutes everything Brierley claimed in chapter four. God’s morals are self-evidently nothing at all resembling what Brierley there insists they have to be. His fourth chapter is therefore refuted by his seventh.

Even if you tried to insist God is a “do nothing,” that he just “let” his Bible become immorally corrupted, and didn’t prevent and still doesn’t fix any of the world’s bad design, never tells us anything, nor provides any humane or just governance over what he made (even despite billions of people begging him for some), you are still making a declaration about God’s moral character. Because inaction is an action. It is a moral choice. It therefore reflects the character of the one choosing it (see Everything Is a Trolley Problem). There is simply no escape from the conclusion here. None of Brierley’s apologetical excuses hold any logical or factual merit. They consist of nothing more than handwaving, the stringing together of a bunch of armchair hypotheses based on no evidence of any kind, and which he never tests against the evidence—and which when so tested are always falsified, as everyone already knows (see Is a Good God Logically Impossible?). Brierley’s delusional defense mechanisms are thus more evident in this chapter than any other. He has no actual arguments; just the appearance of having made arguments. Which can be emotionally satisfying; but doesn’t really establishing anything.

Exemplifying Delusional Reasoning

As an example of what I mean, consider Brierley’s opening example of having to cause an infant pain to save its life with an injection of antibiotics (p. 144). The argument he constructs from this is a fallacy of false analogy. As his intended argument would have it, “maybe” all the world’s evils are all actually wonderful good things, the best of all things even, and God just can’t explain to us how that is the case, because we’re all as dumb as babies. This doesn’t work as an argument because adults are not relevantly similar to infants in respect to cognitive ability. Explaining that shot’s importance to the infant is only impossible because that baby lacks language and the ability to assimilate abstract-categorical-hypothetical knowledge. But once you have a capacity for those two things, there is very little that can’t be explained to you in a way you would understand. Indeed, this ability is possessed already by any average tween. Even what few things might remain “above your head,” they will do so only in minute particulars, not general principles. This is why it is entirely possible to teach the basic principles of even relativity theory and quantum mechanics to a twelve-year-old, without having to expect them to grasp the minute details of either.

So for Brierley’s “some inexplicable reason” to exist, we have to presume something extraordinarily improbable. And that improbability commutes from premise to conclusion. Which means Brierley’s God is extraordinarily improbable. This is the folly of trying to make up excuses for the evidence not going your way; and then having no evidence to present that your excuses are even plausible, much less anywhere near probable. That’s why this apologetic has never been logical. It has always been an illogical emotional attempt to “make the problem go away” by saying something that seems like it addresses it, but really doesn’t even come close. There is no credible way all the evils of the world, natural and human, and God’s complete and total lack of governance or assistance or advice, and the evils and bad advice advocated in God’s name across the entirety of His own Bible, are really “just and good” for some reason not only that we can’t figure out, and can’t even find any evidence of, but even for some reason God can’t explain to us. That’s right. God. Literally a flawless, infinitely wise, and omnipotent communicator can’t explain something? That would have to be something extraordinarily complex and bizarre. Which for that very reason is extraordinarily unlikely.

This is even more the case given that on Brierley’s theory we aren’t just talking about a flawless, infinitely wise, and omnipotent communicator, but a flawless, infinitely wise, and omnipotent communicator who decided how capable we would be of understanding anything. That’s right. It’s not like God stumbled across this universe and found that, aw shucks, there are only beings here with a limited IQ, and for some inexplicable reason those beings are magically immune to Godpowers and thus he can’t even just “up their IQ” to the requisite capacity. No. God chose what intelligence and ability to comprehend the world that we’d have. So “I can’t explain that to you because you are too dumb” is not really an excuse that is ever available to him. In plain fact, the evidence of the world’s bad design and lack of governance, the lack of access to divine advice even when sought, and the immoral corruption of the contents of the entire Bible simply falsifies Brierley’s god theory. None of it is what we expect if his God existed. All of it is what we expect if he didn’t. You cannot pretend you are acting logically when you dismiss all that evidence with a made-up excuse that you can’t even explain to yourself the logic of.

To give you just one example of what I mean, consider that Brierley constructs this whole analogy from a modern baby being saved from debilitating or even lethal illness with…antibiotics. A substance Jesus never heard of, had no idea about, and didn’t teach us to make. One cannot really claim then that he was God. God surely knows about antibiotics. Likewise vaccines. So unless we are defying God’s will by using them—and God really wants to kill half the world’s children in every generation, and will damn us to hell for daring to save them—then it cannot be claimed that teaching us about them in 30 A.D. would have been evil, but letting us invent them thousands of years later is a fundamental good.

Think this through. That means Brierley’s God actually came here, actually went around talking to people and answered their questions and cured a few dozen people of mild ailments, but didn’t cure a single lethal world disease. He just let half of all the children alive when he arrived, tens of millions of children, die of horrible illnesses before he left. And then he let that happen again and again and again every generation thereafter, for a hundred generations or more. Half of all kids. Dead by their mid-teens. Including a third of all babies before finishing their first year, and a quarter of all toddlers. You know all about antibiotics, go to that world, and then withhold them? No one with a moral conscience could ever do that. Indeed, this would have to be the most evil God conceivable. And that’s by Brierley’s own imagined divine standards of evil, as laid out in detail in his fourth chapter. This is a prediction made by his own theory of God. That’s why atheists correctly see this as conclusively falsifying his theory. He’s just done. His theory simply cannot be true, any more than the moon today can be made of cheese.

All the irrational armchair attempts to evade this uncomfortable conclusion get even more into the weeds, ending up only making our point stronger rather than weaker. Again as just one example, a desperate Christian might blurt out something stupid like, “Well, Jesus couldn’t give them antibiotics and vaccines because if all those kids didn’t die the world would be overrun by overpopulation.” Um. Think this through. God can just limit conceptions to sustainable levels, so that isn’t any actual consequence on your own theory. So what you are really saying is that God decided to enact “population control” through the mass genocide of children—using biowarfare even, all the lethal and crippling pathogens he manufactured and spread. This is fucking evil. And you should be ashamed to be the one trying to defend it—all just to avoid an emotionally uncomfortable conclusion. Of course, it’s really evolution, not God, who actually “decided” to enact “population control” through the mass genocide of children using biowarfare; but since evolution is blind, dumb, and amoral, this does not create any contradiction. It is, to the contrary, exactly the kind of callous, capricious, barbaric solution to any problem that evolution is likely to come up with. This evidence thus supports the unplanned, unguided, undesigned evolution of life on Earth; but absolutely refutes the existence of Brierley’s God.

In short, you can’t have Brierley’s chapter 4 and get anywhere with his chapter 7. Chapter 4 simply entails predictions about Brierley’s God that are conclusively refuted in chapter 7. And that’s that. The mere existence of diseases suffices to make this point; even if we just stick to viruses and bacteria, which have no deliberate reason to exist at all. No engineer with any empathy whatever would ever make them, much less allow them to be made. But we could add to that genetic and nutritional and environmental disorders, and the parental and societal violence and abuse that has also been busy killing and maiming children, and then accidents and natural disasters, and so on. But I don’t want to overwhelm you with how horribly evil this world would have to be if it were intelligently designed to be that way. I think you get the point without my having to belabor it. A god who acts this way toward us now we can have no justified trust will behave well toward us in respect to any afterlife either. If he is a negligent, murderous bastard in this world, we have every reason to expect he’ll be a negligent, murderous bastard in any other. Any faith in it being otherwise is always going to be a faith contrary to the evidence. Which is foolish.

So how to escape this truth? Brierley first tries to evade these facts by claiming we can’t judge the world by moral standards without a God (p. 149). I’ve already disproved that claim; it’s false. But more importantly, this is a non sequitur. Hence not only is the premise of his argument factually false, the argument itself isn’t even logical. The moral standards I am appealing to here are inherent to his theory: it is his theory about God that entails we should not observe any appreciable amount of these evils. I do not have to appeal to any other moral standard here. It does not matter if “moral standards would not exist without a God.” His theory makes predictions. Those predictions fail. And that’s that. No amount of “but then we couldn’t complain that it was immoral” changes that outcome. You can’t escape the conclusion that way. Brierley’s theory is simply self-refuting.

Of course, we don’t need “moral truth” to complain about a world being built with monstrously callous disregard for our welfare anyway. That remains a plain, indisputable, and legitimately dislikable fact about it. Brierley isn’t telling the truth when he claims that without God suffering and injustice would be “meaningless” (p. 151). We’d still care a great deal about it; it wouldn’t be meaningless to us. That’s why we came up with antibiotics, and Brierley’s Jesus didn’t. But I already covered that last time. And of course, we don’t really complain about this anyway. Because we don’t believe the world was intelligently designed. If it were, it would be morally evil by Brierley’s own God’s standards. But since it wasn’t, then it’s just an amoral inconvenience of happenstance that we now have to cope with and correct for. Even Brierley, if being honest with himself, would have to agree. Just imagine if Elon Musk built an immersive computer game that literally killed half the kids who played in it. Would Brierley then become an apologist for Musk, inventing reasons we should nevertheless still believe Musk is the most benevolent of beings we should hitch our allegiance to? Or would Brierley join us in denouncing this Elon Musk as quite demonstrably a horrifically evil monster? … Or, on being faced with ample evidence there wasn’t even any such person, that this computer game killing kids wasn’t intelligently designed or marketed by anyone, would Brierley simply admit that—like we now do?

Brierley’s second attempt to escape these facts is to punt to another worn-out Christian apologetic: the “free will defence” (pp. 152-54). This is so profoundly illogical I don’t know how any adult today can still think it holds any credence. It’s as stupid as arguing that we should prohibit police from wearing bullet-proof vests because it violates the free will of criminals who want to shoot them. Which reflects another example of Christian naivety: they have done no work whatever in understanding the political science of freedom and autonomy, and thus never notice how harebrained their appeal to free will here is. They sound like crazy anarcho-libertarians who claim laws prohibiting theft, fraud, and murder are evil because they violate the free will of thieves, frauds, and murderers, and “therefore God should get to use biowarfare to effect the mass genocide of children for tens of thousands of years.”

As anyone actually versed in the findings of political science will explain to you, freedom decreases (it does not increase) the less you police criminal violations of human autonomy and freedom. In other words, the more criminals (and indeed, even natural disasters) that are left unchecked, the less free the inhabitants of a society are. Because crime is an abuse of power that represents an unchecked violation of autonomy—of freedom (see any index of freedom today, from the Fraser Institute to Freedom House). For example, you cannot “increase” freedom by killing half the children in the world. To the contrary, you’ve just erased the freedom of billions of human beings! Likewise, letting thieves and frauds run rampant hugely impairs people’s ability to go about, live, trade, and accomplish goals; a massive reduction in their freedom. Or take a more obvious example we’ve mentioned a lot already: slavery. You’d have to be literally insane to think that “allowing” (and indeed, commanding) mass slavery for thousands of years represents a moral respect for free will.

This is why everyone agrees a well-policed society like New Zealand is better to live in than a poorly-policed society like Somalia. No one goes around condemning New Zealand of mass violations of free will, and then praising Somalia as the ideal society. Brierley’s claim that policing evil “would force a greater evil on the world” (p. 153) is therefore just completely and utterly false; indeed, it’s outright bonkers. This is where Christianity really does start to sound like QAnon or Flat Earthism. But I won’t belabor the point. I already thoroughly cover this argument in Why I Am Not a Christian (pp. 18-27) and Sense and Goodness without God (IV.2.7, pp. 282-90). There is also, of course, an internal incoherence here of Christianity in regards to whether or how we can have free will in heaven—either we won’t, which means it’s not morally important to have it; or we will, and heaven will be as bad as the world is now; or it won’t, proving free will cannot explain why this world is worse than heaven will be.

Brierley’s third attempt basically amounts to, “but, demons and stuff” (pp. 154-57). This is even more bonkers. Now not only are we repeating all the same fallacies, we’re adding non-existent monsters and meddling alien worlds and cosmic conspiracy theories, for which we have no evidence whatever. This is like the opposite of Ockham’s Razor: “Thou shalt multiply wildly bizarre epicycles for no empirical reason.” Even half a minute of thinking this through would have nixed it as even plausible. God didn’t have to make or allow demonic powers, and could wish them away instantaneously, and in an instant fix everything they broke; but really, being all-wise and all-good, he’d have never made demons or a breakable world in the first place. This “cosmic war” malarkey not only has no evidence to support it, it is flatly predicted not to exist by Brierley’s own theory. It therefore cannot be posited to rescue it.

Brierley’s fourth attempt is a vague suggestion of some unspecified “soul-building” theodicy, whereby somehow all this horrific design and villainy, from eons of brutal slavery to the mass-murder of children, is “necessary” to make us into better people. That’s illogical, of course, because God can just make us into better people; he doesn’t have to torture us into it. That would be, again, evil. But it’s also scientifically false; trauma does not make us stronger or better in the aggregate. To the contrary, almost all crime and immorality has been scientifically linked to the abuse of children by their parents or larger society. That’s why better policed, more just societies produce fewer criminals and scofflaws, and happier, more fulfilled citizens. There is therefore no empirical basis for thinking God’s total non-intervention is in any way good. It plainly isn’t. Did Ukraine need Putin’s invasion to be a great society worth living in? Or would Ukraine in fact be in literally every conceivable way better off if God had turned all Russian munitions into flowers the moment they attempted to deprive millions of people of that “free will” Brierley claims God is supposed to care about so much? It’s obvious this argument is bonkers. It’s so illogical and contrary to all evidence, in fact, that even Brierley himself can’t really swallow it, confessing “I don’t claim to know how God is able to achieve” this (p. 157). In other words, he can’t think of any possible way what he is saying could be true. That is, in any logical line of argument, reason to reject the premise, not affirm it.

Jesus Having a Bad Day Cannot Justify Evil

Brierley’s fifth attempt to escape the consequences of gratuitous evils is outright unintelligible. Somehow, this argument goes, God gets to do and allow any evil thing conceivable to us and we should praise it as the best thing ever, because Jesus had one bad weekend. There isn’t even a discernible argument in here to critique. Instead all we get is a lot of delusional Christian homily (pp. 161-64), which amounts to claiming God can do and allow all the evils he does because he (as Jesus) suffered just as much as the total sum of millions of enslaved, maimed, disabled, disease-ravaged, gangraped, bomb-blasted, starved, drowned, burned, and other tormented and abused people throughout human history, which is not only illogical (the conclusion does not follow from the premise), but it’s also outrageously false.

As actually claimed in the Gospels, Jesus suffered only a few hours of moderate torture (oddly far less than most crucifixion victims even, who normally suffered days, not hours—an order of magnitude worse), and all while knowing full well he’d get completely repaired and revived in just a couple of days. He wasn’t gangraped. He wasn’t made to live as a blind quadriplegic for decades. He didn’t suffer the torment of a sky wheel for days (because, of course, only Christians could come up with, and employ en masse, forms of execution far more horrific than crucifixion). He wasn’t enslaved and beaten and forced to live in fear his whole life. He didn’t suffer crippling migraines for decades. He wasn’t an abused spouse. He didn’t battle cancer. And moreover, he had nothing to lose. His near-immediate resurrection and full sci-fi body replacement was assured. He’s no more an admirable martyr than Six in Battlestar Galactica.

Christians really need to stop going on about this. Even in fiction, Jesus’s suffering is eye-rollingly brief and trivial compared to what has been abundantly endured worldwide throughout history; and it was completely pointless. It served no function. To say God couldn’t just fix things, that he had to engage in a bizarre masochistic theatrical display first, is not really defending God as anyone sane or good. This is not a person whose judgment we should be calling commendable. Christianity’s obsession with blood magic and torture is actually one of the clearest arguments against it being true. But to claim Jesus’s few hours of torment would make up for or even remotely approach equality with the world’s entire history of natural and human evil is a vain insult to the entirety of humankind (and to animals: see John Loftus, “The Darwinian Problem of Evil,” in The Christian Delusion).

Indeed, his Gospel-depicted “bad day” doesn’t even match the torments inflicted for years upon Oscar Wilde, whom Brierley quotes a fantasy from but doesn’t seem aware was horribly abused by Christians for being gay, literally ruining his life, and eventually contributing to his death. A cute fantasy cannot excuse harsh reality. God could have intervened in the simplest way possible: by telling his devoted followers to leave gay men alone. Only the most callous of sociopaths, a literal moral monster, would have refused to do even that tiny little thing, for a human being whose freedom, equality, and dignity that God supposedly cared about were being thoroughly crushed in His name. There can be no excuse for this. But it’s even worse when you try to claim that that sociopath going out and having only one rough Friday excuses all of it. That’s an appalling insult to Wilde’s memory and centuries of gay men of like fate. And yet even if God could suffer anything as bad as to actually equal eons and eons of worldwide human suffering and victimization, that still could not morally justify any bit of it. “I get to drown a million people if I briefly drown myself” is no kind of logic. Brierley’s argument here is therefore just another glaring non sequitur.

If God exists and is even in any way a moral being and not a monster, he owes us decency, not indifference. He has not made us as equals, if he will not defend our equality. He has not given us freedom, if he will not endeavor to ensure we remain free. He has not given us dignity, if he does nothing to preserve it. There are only two possible explanations for the absence of all this: God is not a moral being (and therefore Brierley’s entire worldview is false); or there is no God. And the latter remains the simplest and most explanatorily successful theory of the world. To propose God made the entire world and its whole history look exactly like it would if no God existed requires some bizarre, inconceivable, convoluted rationale for which no evidence whatever exists—and requires positing a bizarre, practically impossible entity for which no evidence exists either. But to propose there is no God, requires no improbable suppositions of the kind, yet explains every observation we make. That proposal therefore is vastly more probable.

Conclusion

In some respects Brierley is a victim of poor intel from atheists here. Atheists have a hard time understanding what Christians are asking for when they ask for “the grounding of morality” and thus tend to present irrelevant things in answer to that; or they don’t give much thought to the grounding of morality, and thus don’t know how to explain why a life of honesty and compassion is simply, factually, a better life to live. Atheists are even the ones who gave Brierley the false claim that “you can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is'” (p. 65). This has never been true, and was refuted even by the philosopher, David Hume, to whom this assertion is still falsely attributed (see my discussion in The End of Christianity). Atheists, often, in other words, don’t know what they are talking about. And this makes it harder for any Christian to become aware of the actual grounding of morality. Which in turn leads to all the mistakes Brierley succumbs to, which I have documented here. Which in turn leads to the illogical conclusion that somehow there has to be some evidence for a god in all this.

But that isn’t entirely a legit excuse. If someone takes these questions seriously, then it really is their moral and epistemic obligation to do the work, and not count on people you just randomly encounter to have informed you effectively. Since I was able discover all the facts that I relate here (such as on the actual nature and history of racism, or on the neuroscience and sociology of morality, or on all the philosophy of moral grounds that has anticipated or been based on those scientific facts; even the fate of Oscar Wilde and its significance), so could Brierley have. But that requires not just lazily waiting for someone to randomly come into your studio and get you up to speed. You have to do what I did: actually go out actively looking for the specific things you need to understand in order to explore what possible grounds morality may have, where our moral intuitions come from, why they have been so contradictory and changed so much over time. You have to actually study the sciences on the matter; you have to actually read the philosophers who have addressed it; and, indeed, you have to look at their critics, and their responses to their critics, so as to assemble both thesis and antithesis and therefrom derive a proper synthesis of what actually can be defended as true.

And you have to actually interact with all this critically, even your own arguments. For example, had Brierley critically analyzed his own argument, and those of the often misinformed atheists and theists he listened to, he would have realized that he himself is deriving an “ought” (moral directives) from an “is” (God’s existence, nature, commands, and plans), thus refuting his claim that that can’t be done. He’d also realize his arguments are illogical, and his theories contradict the evidence as actually observed. Because he would then have a disciplined sense of what makes or breaks a logical argument, and applied that knowledge—which would have exposed literally every argument he advances in his fourth and seventh chapters as indefensibly illogical, even when not founded on factual falsehoods.

“If moral intuitions exist, then God more likely exists” simply isn’t true. That argument lacks any logical validity. You can’t get any logical argument for the existence of a God from the observed facts of human morality. To the contrary, all the evidence in that subject actually piles up against the existence of God. God is the least likely explanation of the actual slow evolution of human morality from crappy systems to superior, and of the complete absence of those superior systems in any holy scriptures. Meanwhile, on the logically unrelated question of whether there are true moral facts (since one cannot circularly presume there are, “because God,” and then argue “therefore, God”), there are fully adequate, empirically observable reasons to be moral without any God (and thus also by which to tell the difference between a better morality and a worse). Whereas the existence of God could never answer that question. For what morals he endorsed could have been vile, or poorly met actual human needs. So you still would have to defend the morals of God as the best rules to follow. But once you can do that, you don’t need God to exist to defend those morals as the best rules to follow.

And that’s already the case before we even get to the even-bigger problem that we have no evidence regarding what any God’s morals even are. According to Christianity, Judging from his supposed scriptures and from His observable behavior in organizing, designing, and governing the world He supposedly made and rules over, God’s morals look to be quite terrible, and certainly nothing that we can defend as the best way to behave. Brierley thus has no coherent argument to make. He has no actual explanation for why the world looks exactly like no God had anything to do with it—it exhibits no moral design or governance whatever, nor even any reliable cosmic source of moral knowledge. All Brierley has are made-up excuses about maybe God having some sort of greater reason for making the world look in every pertinent respect exactly like a world without any god in it, some reason we can’t comprehend and that he can’t find any reason to inform us of. But that’s not evidence. It’s a mere insistence that “maybe” something exists that is, quite simply, extraordinarily improbable. We therefore have no reason to believe that it exists. That does not actually defend belief in God. It logically destroys belief in such a thing, by vastly reducing its probability.

Brierley does not grasp this because he doesn’t do logic, and is dismally poor even at getting essential facts right. Which is why he is a Christian.

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