STEALING FROM GOD BY FRANK TUREK CLAIMS THAT A LEADING ATHEIST IS WRONG TO GROUND MORALITY IN SCIENCE NOT GOD

Christian Frank Turek of https://impactapologetics.com/ is a prime defender of the Christian faith. He wrote the runaway best seller Stealing from God. This book argues that using science to refute God is misplaced. 

Some may simply try to replace God with science hoping the idea will go away.  Attempts to show you don't need God to make sense of moral ideals such as mercy, fairness, respect, loyalty and compassion can be seen as part of that.  They can lead to it. If they don't do well at making sense in the first place using God will not help and will make it worse.  Attempts to centre God are signs that the believer is not really very confident in moral values.

Regarding Sam Harris's book, The Moral Landscape Turek has this to say.  Harris's thesis is that science not God grounds objective morality which is about wellbeing - he says morality is just another word for wellbeing.

The problem with Harris’s approach is that he is addressing the wrong question. The question is not what method should we use to discover what is moral, but what actually makes something moral? Why does a moral law exist at all, and why does it have authority over us? The Moral Landscape gives us no answer. It’s a nearly three-hundred-page-long example of the most common mistake made by those who think objective morality can exist without God. Harris seems to think that because we can know objective morality (epistemology), that explains why objective morality exists in the first place (ontology). You may come to know about objective morality in many different ways: from parents, teachers, society, your conscience, etc. (Harris talks about brain states.) And you can know it while denying God exists. But that’s like saying you can know what a book says while denying there’s an author. Of course you can do that, but there would be no book to know unless there was an author! In other words, atheists can know objective morality while denying God exists, but there would be no objective morality unless God exists. Science might be able to tell you if an action may hurt someone—like if giving a man cyanide will kill him—but science can’t tell you whether or not you ought to hurt someone. Who said it’s wrong to harm people? Sam Harris? Does he have authority over the rest of humanity? Is his nature the standard of Good? To get his system to work, Sam Harris must smuggle in what he claims is an objective moral standard: “well-being.” As William Lane Craig pointed out in his debate with Harris, that’s not a fail-safe criterion of what’s right. But even if it was, what objective, unchanging, moral authority establishes it as right? It can’t be Sam Harris or any other finite, changing person. Only an unchanging authoritative being, who can prescribe and enforce objective morality here and beyond the grave, is an adequate standard. Only God can ground Justice and ensure that Justice is ultimately done.

Comment: Okay so we are told that morality is related to wellbeing but is not wellbeing. If that is so then that in fact does not matter. If you were forced to choose between wellbeing and asking why morality has authority you would have to choose the first. Morality would demand you do so for morality has to be practical. Authority is no good for morality if morality is not practical. Thus morality is incoherent when you bring in authority and God. By a process of elimination, Harris is vindicated.

Harris might not get a clear morality from his views but if that is the best that can be done then that is just the way it is.  Science for example tells us to do something about murderers even if it does not get specific and cannot.

Turek thinks Harris is treating science as a method for working out what is moral and confusing how you might discover something to be moral with what makes it moral. Discovering something is moral has nothing to do with the reason it is moral. Discovering what is moral and prescribing what is moral are different and separate things.

That seems logical.

It is not.

Morality and communication go together. Morality communicates something though it is not a radio or person or thing. 1 and 1 = 2 communicates something too without being any of these. Having established that, morality and discovery are different but not separate. Discovery is part of the ingredients. So Harris is not far wrong. He is right enough.