Imagine if your grade schooler brings home a few books from the school library with these titles:

1. Giving the Death Sentence to People who eat Forbidden Fruit

2. Drowning Millions of Children for the Crimes of their Parents

3. How to Murder First Born Children in their Beds

4. The Genocidal Annihilation of Evil Foreign Peoples is Justifiable

You would be horrified that your local school would allow such books in a library for children, wouldn't you? But yet fundamentalist Christians would love to have the Holy Bible in the same library and would not bat an eye at the bloody, barbaric violence and twisted justifications for that violence and immoral behavior contained therein.

"Oh but that was in another Era of time. It is a mystery why it was necessary for God to do these shocking acts, but we must simply accept by faith that God had good, moral reasons for his actions in the Old Testament."

Ok...so we will sweep all that barbaric behavior under the rug because Jesus has changed everything. All that bloody violence is no longer necessary because Jesus has ushered in the Era of Grace. We now are to love our neighbor as ourselves...not slaughter him in righteous anger.

But there is one little problem: Slavery.

I don't see how putting shackles around the neck, ankles, and wrists of your neighbor and calling him your property is in any way, shape, or form "loving your neighbor as yourself". And I also don't see why a loving, just, Jesus would not have condemned this evil institution, which he did not, nor why the Apostle Paul would condone it, which he very much did.

Any book that condones slavery is evil and should not be in any school library...nor on your child's nightstand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i3mX0YRrjM

Yep, you're under the right impression Tim. I argue that God's existence makes no difference to the truth of moral realism.

For what it's worth, I more or less share Graham Oppy's sentiments about the prospects of a successful problem of evil against theism:

"Perhaps it is worth saying at the outset that I do not attach very much importance to the arguments from evil. At best, arguments from evil create problems for the hypothesis that there is a perfect being, that is, a being that is omnipotent, omniscience and perfectly good." - Oppy, Graham. Arguing about Gods. New
York: Cambridge UP, 2006. p. 259

"Why do you call me good?" Jesus answered. "No one is good--except God alone.
Luke 18:19

Since morality is ultimately the seeking of goodness (over badness), and Jesus in Luke 18:19 asserts that there is no good to be found except in God, and we are not God, it follows that all human morality must necessarily be subjective.

Since Joe asserts God is necessary, and God Himself (in the person of Jesus) asserts that a truly objective morality is unassailable by we creatures, the foundation of his position is rendered moot.

Since Joe's arguments that objective morality requires God is negated by God, rebuttals are inconsequential.

All that remains, is for Steven to prove that "morality is objective" excluding any reliance upon God.

I agree that if one has a wrong hierarchy of goods one will make many mistakes in seeking the good.

Kevin,

If, as Cicero says, the true law is "right reason", and if by "right reason", one can come to knowledge of God, how can there exist a "true law" which does not acknowledge God?

I agree the law can be found by natural reason (with the clarification that it must be "right" reason). Where I disagree is whether there can exist a true law which does not acknowledge God and give Him what is His due. (And what is His due is the love of the whole heart, mind, soul, and strength).

The Catechism seems to say the atheist *can* and quotes Cicero in support.

If the atheist can know the physical order of the universe apart from God why can't he know the moral order? Also, if the atheist cannot know the moral law, how are his bad actions blameworthy?

This is what Paul says (Romans 2):

13 For it is not the hearers of the law who are
righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified. 14 When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. 15 They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them 16* on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.