Joel McDurmon is an odd fellow. Founder of American Vision, he is simultaneously an old school arch-conservative who thinks all taxation is theft and public schools must be abolished, and a passionate, well-reasoned advocate for liberal talking points like that the United States should take in and care for immigrants and refugees—because the Bible commands us to and anything else is less than godly. He advocates for traditional marriage and gender hierarchy, while simultaneously admitting most of Christendom has been a tool of evil. And so on. If you read his articles on his blog, no matter where you are on the political spectrum, you are likely to find yourself oddly agreeing with him half the time. It’s weird.

McDurmon is a “Biblical Libertarian.” That’s right. He thinks something akin to the Libertarian political platform is in its core essence endorsed by the Bible and thus by God. But he’s also against any ideology of greed and selfishness. He thinks if taxes are going to be abolished, the rich are obligated by God’s Law to voluntarily pony up and pay the expenses of society. He’s nothing if not consistent. But his weird combination of views is hard to find anywhere else. And that has launched a whole odd sequence for me this month, as my tour has taken me into the company of many unexpected Christian worldviews, from McDurmon’s untraditional conservativism, to a club of friendly eclectic Christians and atheists who hang out, read books from both sides, and talk about what they’ve read, and finally a room full of liberal theologians and pastors arguing we don’t need a real God to worship God (more on that oddity in a later article).

Earlier this month I debated which worldview was “better” with Joel McDurmon in a Lutheran church in Houston. Our focus wasn’t on which worldview was true, but which would work out best. That kind of can’t avoid the truth question—since its being false is largely what makes his worldview dangerous and ineffective. But we tried our best to focus on utility. I defended evidence-based morality and policy-making, on a platform of secular humanism. He defended his unusual Conservative Biblical Libertarianism. I can’t say the debate made much progress. It illuminated over and over again what the differences were in each worldview, but little in the way of evidence was presented that his worldview actually accomplishes anything it promises. So all I had to keep repeating was…that. All he had left was “the evidence proves x,” which was literally identical to what I was saying: “if the evidence does prove x, we should do x.” Since the evidence always determines x, we have no need of gods, Bibles, or Christianities.

You can watch the whole thing now if you want to see what I mean.

This does indeed relate to my online course starting later this week, on improved counter-apologetics, teaching skills and advice to argue effectively for naturalism and humanism, and against all forms of sovereign supernaturalism. So please do join that! And on December 1st (my birthday in fact!), start asking me there all the questions you have about how to counter this or any other theological apologetics.

Meanwhile, those who want a fuller take on the Carrier-McDurmon debate, read on.

Some Useful Context

For useful context, you should read, indeed even bookmark, McDurmon’s recent article on conservative attempts to dismiss slavery as ever having been a real issue. As McDurmon explains:

In virtually any discussion of the Civil War, southern apologists quickly make the case that the War was indeed not about slavery, but about other factors. Among the first pieces of evidence exhibited in this case is the statement like this: ‘Only about 4 percent of the population actually owned slaves.’ So, it is implied, the majority [of] people obviously had no concern for slavery much at all, let alone as a cause of the war. Further, it is implied by this that slavery in America was mostly limited to a handful of ruling elite families, and would because of this, among other factors, die out very soon.

McDurmon then proceeds to eviscerate all these claims, with facts, logic, and a sound use of math. It’s so good, you should point folks to this article every time you hear this baloney-yet-popular conservative talking point.

I mention this to illustrate that McDurmon is not a crank nor a puppet of any commonplace ideology. He can reason brilliantly against even conservatives that try to dodge the truth. He is more than willing to get in trouble with his conservative peers for all sorts of things, from defending social justice or caring for immigrants and refugees (and he’s not always alone in this; see a comparable example I wrote on before).

By sect, McDurmon is a Reformed Presbyterian. He is also a presuppositionalist of some sort. But McDurmon wrote in a recent article, most Evangelicalism teaches an unbiblical individualism, promising personal salvation, but not really promoting moral action. He concludes:

[My chosen] doctrine teaches that the free gift of grace is accompanied by an internal change in man’s heart. Joy and gratitude follow, and along with these, good works. Good works circle right back to the absolute standard of that sovereign God—that is, his law. For each of these works in every area of life, the Reformed—i.e., biblical—believer should find himself or herself asking, “Autonomy or Theonomy?” [i.e. self-governance or submission to God], and then proceeding according to the absolute standard of the sovereign God.

The principal problem with this, as I pointed out in our debate, is that no one can agree what God’s law even is, or how it’s supposed to be understood or applied. God doesn’t tell us. Only fallible, biased, individual human judgment can decide what in the Bible is obsolete and what still applies, and how certain commandments are to be applied, or even why. Even the assumption that things will go well if we do this, is based on individual human judgment, and is so disconnected from any actual access to God that it differs in no meaningful sense from what secular humanists are already doing: looking at the evidence, figuring out from that what works well and what doesn’t, and developing our standards accordingly.

In the end, what he calls “theonomy” always reduces to autonomy anyway. There is only us. And what we can see happens. And what we decide from it. That’s it. As I noted with Divine Command Theory when defended by Flannagan: it either is devoid of any usable content or reduces to ethical naturalism. So we may as well just stick with ethical naturalism, and give up the game of pretending it comes from God. No one talks to God. So no one knows what comes from him. Or that anything does. Even before we get to the question of whether God is giving us good advice or not. We can’t even establish what his advice actually is. Atheists conclude that this is because there isn’t a God; while theists make up excuses for how this can be, and still there be a God.

But once you realize those excuses are all made up, there is only one thing left: to admit the best ethics and policy are just a fact we must discover about the natural world. We have to simply observe what creates and sustains the best environment for us, and the most genuinely satisfying life. What remains, when we purge all delusions and false beliefs, about how to be most satisfied with the kind of person we’ve become and the kind of life we can enjoy, is all that remains as the only sensible thing left to do. Because everything else is self-defeating, dissatisfying, or irrational.

The Debate in Essence

You can watch the debate for the actual arguments and exchanges if you want to see how those went. But here I will just add a summary, conclusion, and helpful links to supplement my main points.

My framework for the debate was of course my fully articulated worldview in Sense and Goodness without God.

McDurmon’s framework was of course the Bible, God’s Law, and his unusual sectarian interpretation of both, to discover the “best view of good” which means, he said, “the best view of how good overcomes evil.” He never gave any definition of what actually is good or evil, or why humans should care about either as he defines it. But in the course of the debate it seemed as though it was ultimately the same thing we all mean: good is what conduces to human happiness and evil is what conduces to human misery.

McDurmon imagines some sort of extra future life in which this happiness or misery can play out, but of course we have no evidence of that, much less that he has the correct blueprint for navigating it. There is no evidence that people who do things his way get the eternal happiness and not the eternal misery or whatever. The only evidence we have is what happens here in this life. So only human happiness and misery here in this life matters—because we can’t know what works or doesn’t for any future imaginary life, much less whether there even will be one. So we can’t have valid beliefs regarding it. Saying “the Holy Spirit” tells him is circular reasoning. Because everyone says that. Including all the Christian sects he condemns as bad for the world. It therefore is evidence of nothing. (On this point, see John Loftus’s ever excellent The Outsider Test for Faith.)

In the end, only actual observable evidence of what causes human happiness and misery in this life exists, and thus only knowledge of that exists. Therefore only that matters. And for that, no God is required. Secular humanism is all you need. Indeed it can’t possibly get different results than Christianity if all we are doing is deciding what the best way to live is, what the best policies are, from actual, correct, accurate factual knowledge of what actually happens when we do things, and what people really ultimately do want for their lives, what actually makes their lives worth living. Which is a fact about them. Not a fact about gods.

Hence I noted the United States is actually founded on rejecting, indeed outlawing, most of the Bible’s guidelines for morals and law. Not based on the Bible saying we should. But based entirely on observing how much the world sucked for so many centuries until we did. Constitutional morals and policy were based on evidence. Not on scripture or revelation. And we know this, because its very writers and framers explicitly told us. (See my article That Christian Nation Nonsense.)

Indeed the morals and policies of the Bible are often horrific and have ensured human misery for thousands of years. (See my article The Will of God.) Even now statistics show that the more Christian (or even just more religious) a county or state or country is, the more screwed up it is. The more inequality there is. The more crime there is. The more poverty there is. The more drug abuse and teen pregnancy and illness and death there is.

As I wrote once before:

[The] claim that religion is adaptive ignores the fact that religion, in its delusional form, inculcates an epistemology that is significantly maladaptive, by both increasing the frequency and intensity of false beliefs, and in turn causing behaviors, e.g. persecution and discrimination, that become systematically dysfunctional for a society.

Atheism is not immune to the same dangers. There are delusional atheist beliefs that perpetuate godless forms of misogyny, homophobia, and racism, for example … . But that just means those ought to be combated just as much, and for the same reasons and in the same ways. They cannot be defended on the principle that they are “adaptive.”

[The] claim that religious belief produces wellbeing is also false. The evidence shows that it has no correlation, or a negative one. All the benefits attributed to religion derive from socialization and sense of identity whether associated with religion or not. See my survey of the evidence, and how it has been misused to dupe even atheists … in “Atheism Doesn’t Suck” and “Bad Science.”

In fact, religiosity is strongly correlated with several markers of societal misery and dysfunctionality. See Gregory Paul, “The Chronic Dependence of Popular Religiosity upon Dysfunctional Psychosociological Conditions” [Evolutionary Psychology 7.3 (2009), pp. 398-441] and “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable SocietalHealth with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look” [Journal of Religion and Society 7 (2005)] and Gary Jensen, “Religious Cosmologies and Homicide Rates among Nations: A Closer Look” [Journal of Religion and Society 8 (2006)]. [To which can now be added R. Georges Delamontagne, “High Religiosity and Societal Dysfunction in the United States during the First Decade of the Twenty-First Century,” Evolutionary Psychology 8.4 (October 2010): 617–57.]

When we look at the most godless and advanced countries in the world, like Sweden or Japan or Germany, we see far better outcomes (as documented, for example, by Phil Zuckerman). We see actual universal caring for the sick and the poor. We see less murder. Less inequality. More contentment. Not because of Christianity. Christianity has never caused a nation to do that in thousands of years. No, the cause of the first world’s development of a nation that cares about its people was ultimately secular, and evidence-based.

And we now can see after decades of running those tests, that this works out better for everyone. The people in these countries are on the whole happier and better cared for than people in our own. These nations are not perfect. They are not devoid of problems. Many improvements could still be made. But they have fewer problems than most Americans. And far fewer than Americans in the most Christian of states. This does not indicate Christianity is better for the world. If anything, it indicates it’s worse. And even at best, it indicates it has no relevant effect. So why take it on, with all its damaging and dangerous baggage in tow? (See my article What’s the Harm.)

Trying to Wiggle Out

At most McDurmon kept saying that Christianity alone (meaning, his obscure fringe version of it, and thus not most Christianity practiced today or ever) offers “guarantees” of the best outcome. But it doesn’t. Claiming a guarantee, is not actually a guarantee. There is no evidence that guarantee will be honored by anyone. So there is in fact no guarantee. Christians are just as screwed by uncertainty and imperfect outcomes as the rest of us. All we are left with is the evidence of what works and what doesn’t, and with the unfortunate chore of risk management. No guarantees exist. No perfect justice. No perfect outcomes. So we manage risks instead. We make improvements where we can. And lament the inability to do more—until we can. That’s common sense. But it’s also all there is to do.

McDurmon also sort of tried to suggest the Bible (and thus “Christianity”) invented things like laws against theft, but he quickly dropped that when I mentioned such laws long predate the Bible, everywhere from ancient Egypt and China to Hammurabi’s code, which really the OT code is just a poor and obsessively more superstitious imitation of. Conversely, McDurmon tried to suggest all I have as a basis for morality is the savagery of evolution, but that’s simply not true. Moral facts are facts about social systems. What evolution came up with is moot. It no more commands how we should think reliably, than it commands how we should live well.

McDurmon tried most of all to push a kind of moral presuppositionalism, arguing that morality by being created by humans must be “above nature” and therefore “supernatural”…and therefore (supposedly) must have God as origin, though he never got there. Because I caught him out in his word games at the start and stymied his line of reasoning. Morals being invented by humans no more makes them “above” nature than agriculture, surgery, automobiles, logic, or science being invented makes those things “above” nature.

McDurmon was actually relying on an equivocation fallacy between “natural” as a word meaning “good” or “normal,” and “natural” as a word meaning “caused by natural forces and consisting of natural materials and properties.” The latter is not always good or normal. Death and cancer and tidal waves are natural, but not good for us. And modern languages are good for us but not “normal” (almost nothing in nature, from rocks to animals, uses them, and they didn’t exist in the universe until very recently, at our contrivance), but it is entirely and without remainder a product of nature. Likewise civilization; democracy; commerce. And so on.

McDurmon also tried to suggest Christianity cures sociopathy and crime. But as I pointed out, that hypothesis has been thoroughly falsified. It’s simply not true. The only chance we have of curing those things will come from science, especially political science and cognitive science. No God is helping us. No holy book’s instructions have any measurable effect. Indeed, that God would even allow the existence of the physical brain disease of sociopathy is already a strike against him existing or being at all anyone we should trust as having our back. Naturalism at least explains their existence. Christianity simply does not.

McDurmon also weirdly tried to push on me the antiquated and unscientific errors and nonsense of Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade. A non sequitur if ever there was one. I was defending neither of their worldviews. And McDurmon presented no case that either of their worldviews had any support in the evidence against mine. To the contrary, both were writing in an age long before vast amounts of scientific progress in psychology, sociology, anthropology, even political science and economics had been achieved. And neither was even a good analytic philosopher. Nothing they wrote would pass peer review in philosophy today. Much less in the sciences.

McDurmon also tried to challenge secular humanism by saying it “always changes,” as in, we abandon false beliefs about right and wrong as we discover errors and replace ignorance with knowledge. How that is a defect, he never adequately explained. This is in fact the primary asset of secular humanism, and why it is the best worldview for the world to adopt. It allows us to learn and make progress, rather than trapping ourselves in past errors and ignorance.

Although, of course, one can just as easily note, as I did, that Christianity also “always changes.” So even if that were a defect in any worldview, Christianity is just as defective. But the clincher is this: Christianity has only ever changed under pressure from secular evidence of the misery its errors caused and permitted. It thus has moved further and further away from what the Bible’s authors thought was true, toward what evidence shows is true. It’s thus just becoming secular humanism. We might as well finish the process.

The bottom line is, “right” and “wrong” are not opinion—whether our opinion today or the opinion of the ignorant and superstitious authors of the Bible. To the contrary, “right” and “wrong” consist of empirically discoverable knowledge of what conduces to human happiness and life satisfaction (in light of the true facts of themselves and the world), and what does not. This is a fact. Not an opinion. Aristotle was already getting this right, precisely when the Bible was getting everything wrong: cultivated virtues make our lives better by improving our external interactions with society and our internal contentment with ourselves; and this is a fact of human societies and psychologies. No gods required.

McDurmon and I agreed the best values to embrace are compassion and integrity. It’s not clear why he thinks those are any good for anyone. For myself, I observe them to be. And this is what McDurmon seemed repeatedly not to understand: we conclude what’s good or bad, by simply observing whether it is. McDurmon himself repeatedly relied on this same principle without seeming to be aware he was doing it. For example, his biggest fear was of “collectives” making decisions “for him.” But he could not show this was bad, without presenting evidence of it being bad. But that then becomes all the reason we need to reject that policy model: the evidence shows it’s bad. No God needed.

Not that the God of the Bible ever said anything like this; to the contrary, the Bible declares a small unelected council of old men should make all decisions for us, deciding our very life or death, on even trivial aspects of our private lives and thoughts and conduct. The Bible never mentions democracy. It only ever mentions, and praises, political monarchy and legal oligarchy. And if McDurmon is bothered by “collectives” making decisions for him…wait until someone shows him what happens when it’s kings and unelected oligarchs making decisions for him!

Of course sometimes we do need collectives making decisions for us. We are not all medical experts. We are not all educated and trained in law. We are not all trained police or generals or administrators or fire marshals or civil engineers. In matters of expertise we lack, decisions have to be made by people who know what they are doing. Because otherwise, we observe, disaster results. What we do to manage this problem is elect representatives who hire or fire the experts we need to depend on, and minimize their authority by constraining it with a system of rights-based liberties. A system we had to figure out the hard way. Because it’s certainly nowhere to be found in the Bible.

Ultimately, McDurmon didn’t present any evidence his worldview was even useful, much less best for the world. Whereas I presented ample evidence that naturalistic, humanistic, evidence-based reasoning produces outcomes better than any known alternative. Q.E.D.

Sideshows

There were a few oddities in this debate that didn’t get addressed much because they weren’t directly on point. For example, McDurmon’s claim that the Bible endorses Libertarianism. That could have been extensively challenged. But we were asked to debate the benefits of our respective worldviews, not their truth. So I didn’t want to bog the debate down in a digression over what scripture actually says about welfare and tax policy.

But it’s worth pointing out that there is no biblical prohibition on social welfare; if anything, the Bible and Jesus both command it, and Acts glorifies it, even trying to terrorize Christians into it (Acts 4:32-5:11). And there is no biblical opposition to taxation, either. It is never categorized as “theft.” Theft is the taking of what’s not owed. Not the taking of what is owed. To the contrary, the Bible consistently supports the latter, with many endorsed biblical taxes, including on food, animals, labor, and income, even setting up gleaning as a tax on agriculture supporting a social welfare program. (See “Taxation in Biblical Israel” by Robert A. Oden Jr. in The Journal of Religious Ethics 12.2 (Fall 1984), pp. 162-81; the Theology of Work commentary on gleaning; and this collection of verses on Biblical tithes.)

There is also no discussion in the Bible of rights. At all. Rights are not a thing in the Bible, Old Testament or New. There are only obligations and prohibitions, which include such extensive, micro-managed regulation of thought and commerce and private life as would horrify any actual Libertarian today. By contrast, organizing the law and polity around personal rights was an idea invented by the Greeks, and most extensively defended as a concept by the Stoics. They arose out of democratic constitutions and federations. And developed from civil rights (the rights of citizens) into human rights (the rights owed all human beings) through philosophical and even pagan theological contemplation. (See, again, my article on That Christian Nation Nonsense.)

You can only get Libertarianism out of the Bible by twisting your interpretation of it in such elaborate knots as to render the text useless to begin with. If you have to read it as saying countless things the exact opposite of what it plainly does, you aren’t really using the scriptures as a source anymore. You are, rather, explaining them away, and trying to replace them—by extensive and strained rationalization—with your own, human ideas. Which is really what all Christians do now. Except the super scary ones who actually want to execute gay people and apostates and outlaw pork and shellfish consumption. Which is why Christianity is a dead idea for reforming society. As written, it’s bad for society. And as “reinterpreted,” it’s just another manmade contraption, as likely to be false and thus as much in need of testing as anything else. And no version of Christianity actually tests all that well. Except versions so devoid of particularity as to be indistinguishable from secular humanism.

Another sideshow arose when McDurmon threw out a comment about abiogenesis. We weren’t supposed to debate the truth of our worldviews, so I also set that aside after a brief remark. But it bears repeating that abiogenesis is not a scientific law. As all life arises from lifeless chemistry, from every cell on earth, and every cell in the body, to every germ in every seed and every fetus in every womb, McDurmon’s imagined “law of abiogenesis” (life cannot come from non-life) is actually well refuted by science. It all comes from non-life: mere atoms and electrons.

What McDurmon was confusing was the fact that life requires a complex ordered molecule, which can arise spontaneously only by extremely rare chance accident, and otherwise arises only by replication from pre-existing life, which means reactions of lifeless chemicals with existing living molecules, causing copies of the latter to arise. But this is not a law of life. It’s a law of probability: there is no law against life spontaneously arising from non-life; there is only a law against this happening commonly enough to be observed more than once in a given vastness of space (even under laboratory conditions). Otherwise, the ways it can happen entirely naturally have been well explored, and multiple available pathways are known. (See my most recent summary.)

Similarly, McDurmon once threw up some unfinished thought about Gödel’s Theorems disproving naturalism by disproving knowledge…or something. And again that had nothing to do with our assigned topic of debate. But it’s also confused. Gödel’s theorems only showed that certain axiom sets for formal arithmetic can never be deductively proved true; they can only be inductively (empirically) proved true (as in, to a high probability, not a certainty). That in no way bars knowledge. Because empirical knowledge is knowledge. Just because we lack deductive certainty has no relevance to that. But it’s also mistaken. In fact Gödel’s theorems have been rendered moot now by axiom sets that are immune to them, such as Willard Arithmetic. Which do produce deductively certain conclusions in mathematics. So McDurmon was off the reservation twice over on this one.

Somewhat more relevant was McDurmon’s attempt to claim we can’t have evolved a propensity for compassion and honesty. Which is another “is it true” claim, not an “is it good” claim. Nevertheless, I did note that all the available science refutes that notion, and has well proved these propensities not only did evolve, but would always have evolved in any cognitively aware social animal that produces a society or civilization to live in. Quite literally because without them, no society or civilization could ever be produced.

McDurmon still wonders how then we can be good without God watching us 24/7. But the answer is obvious: our own conscience is watching us 24/7. And as soon as we realize we’ve become the sort of person we loathe, we will always be trapped in some psychological manifestation of self-loathing; and only by becoming the sort of person we respect, will we be able to honestly respect ourselves. But we also can’t reliably hide our actions or habits from everyone all the time anyway. Even just in terms of their social effects, bad habits risk inevitable bad consequences. Good habits, by definition, do better.

Conclusion

Secular humanists want a world where everyone can get along and live a satisfying life. They believe only evidence can tell us what behaviors and policies get that outcome; and only evidence can persuade anyone they want that outcome, because all the alternatives actually suck. Christianity has nothing to offer. No fringe or popular version of it has any evidence that any of its unique claims are true; and all its other claims are already demonstrably true without it. Meanwhile history shows Christianity has failed to produce a better world for thousands of years; if anything, it has typically made the world worse, leaving humans to clean up its mess.

But even from the most charitable point of view, one has to ask:

Does God even want us to live a satisfying life? If he doesn’t, why should we follow his advice at all? And if he does, why doesn’t he help us with that? Like, say, giving us better health care, less poverty and crime, and educating us in all the ways we need to make good and informed choices. Why is it that only humans provide those things? Why is it no one but us is helping us do them better? Why is it that from the Christian God we supposedly instead get garbage instructions in a savage book promoting slavery and fear and poverty and the oppression of women?

The real answer is obvious. Few Christians though are willing to admit it.

Really, we should be working together to build a better world. Not trying to govern our lives by the ancient errors of ignorant primitives.