My Debate with Ray Comfort: Can Moral Facts Exist without a God? • Richard Carrier

"Value only comes from us; we decide what we want from ourselves and the world. This would be true even if there were a God: we ourselves still have to choose to value anything that God says. Values come from our nature. And God or not, we are cognitive and social beings. If we wish to live as fulfilled as possible, we must cultivate empathy to share the joys of others, else we lose a whole dimension of happiness; and we must cooperate and get along with each other as much as reasonable, so we can manifest by that cooperation a functioning social system, that we all benefit from. Only moral systems that create rather than destroy human happiness have any value to us, and as such, only they are "true," in the sense that we have sufficient reason to obey them. Accordingly, we as humans have decided to label evil everything conducive to our misery; and good, everything conducive to our happiness. And moral good and evil, as a subset of all, is that which derives from human decisions, which can be changed through reason, persuasion, education, and self-reflection. This standard comes from nothing outside of us. It comes from us. Moral facts are facts about us, about what will most likely lead us each to a better life."

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