A common argument against Christianity and the Bible is that the God of the Bible is immoral. For example, popular atheist Richard Dawkins writes this in The God Delusion:
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
The purpose of this video isn’t to specifically address each of these accusations, but rather to talk more generally about standards of morality, since the issue of the Bible’s morality is ultimately about worldviews. Of course, there are certainly answers to everything Dawkins mentions, and we’ll explore those answers in other videos.
When someone says that the God of the Bible is immoral, two fundamental questions that need to be asked are:
One, “By what moral standard are you judging the God of the Bible to be immoral?”,
And two, “Is the moral standard you are using a legitimate moral standard by which you can judge the God of the Bible to be immoral?”
Most likely, the moral standard used to argue against the Bible’s morality is a secular moral standard. Wikipedia has this list of secular moral frameworks:
- Consequentialism, which starts with goals and includes probably the most well-known moral framework, Utilitarianism.
- Freethought, which doesn’t seem to have any specific examples here.
- Secular humanism, which focuses on the way human beings can lead happy and functional lives and posits that human beings are capable of being ethical and moral without religion or God.
So, in future videos, we’ll aim to do two things:
- First, evaluate the validity of the various non-biblical moral standards that are used to judge the God of the Bible to be immoral. We would argue that all of these non-biblical moral standards fail in some way.
- And second, answer specific objections against the morality of the God of the Bible.
Note: This video is merely planned, and has not been created yet.
