You are never alone

“I don’t like working alone,” I said. It was just after midnight. I could not sleep. I was writing my 750 words.

I corrected myself. “Sometimes I like working alone, but then the fun runs out. If I accomplish something cool, I have no one to share it with. If I get stuck, I have no one to help me. Working alone mostly sucks.”

“It’s an illusion,” a voice said. “You are never alone.” I wondered whose voice it was. Then I decided it didn’t matter. I’d find out later. Or not. For now, I’d just keep writing.

“You’re never alone,” the voice continued. “I’m here now, and I can be here whenever you want me.

“And if I were not here, someone else would be with you. You are never alone—except as you decide you are alone. And not even then.”

“What good would you be when I’m trying to solve a hard-core programming problem? Do you know anything about programming?”

“Do I need to?” Came the answer. “You know about Rubber duck debugging. Your rubber duck could help you if you’d ask it. You know that. Have you ever asked it?”

The truth was, I hadn’t thought of asking it. I’d gotten the duck at Le General Hotel Paris, where I’d stayed on one of my business trips. I’d had it for a dozen years and never asked it once for help.

“No,” I admitted. “I’ve never asked it.”

“If you asked, it would help you,” said the voice.

“I would,” said the duck.

“I may not know a lot about programming,” the voice continued, “but I’m better than a rubber duck.

“I may use that as my motto,” the voice continued. “Better than a rubber duck.”

“Can I use that, too?” I asked.

“Of course,” said the voice. “My works are CC0“

“Remember,” continued the voice. “Help abounds. It’s not just available from rubber ducks and not just for debugging. You are never alone, and you can always get help.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“You are welcome,” said the voice. “Remember: this universe is full of beings who are willing to help. But like the rubber duck, you first need to ask.

“The most capable helpers are often busy, but many of them can control time and can literally make time for you.

“And of course,” the voice continued, “there’s God, who literally knows everything.

“You can always call on God, and She will always help you.”

I knew that. Or believed it. But based on my actions, I neither know it nor believe it. I wanted to believe it and didn’t want to test it.

“God will help if you ask,” the voice said. “Sometimes, the help you need isn’t to be given the answer. Sometimes you need Her to tell you—lovingly—to figure it out yourself. Sometimes, you need a hint. Sometimes it’s enough to know that She is there.”

“Sometimes she’s in a rubber duck,” said the rubber duck.

“True,” said the voice.

“So abandon the idea that you are alone. Embrace the truth: help abounds. Knowledge abounds. Wisdom abounds.

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. You’ve read that, haven’t you?” The voice asked.

“I have,” I said.

“Well, here’s the part that didn’t make it. ‘Sit on your ass and try to solve it all yourself, and you’ll experience endless and needless frustration and loneliness.’

I thought about it for a while. Help abounds. And I could be a helper as well as a helpee.

I’d learned some things that I could share with others. If I did, I could earn the right to ask for help.

“You already have the right,” said the voice. “You are alive. You are Life. That’s all the right you need. If you want to share your gifts with others, that’s another thing. But there’s nothing that you need to do to ask for help. People like to help. You like to help.

It was true. Whenever anyone asked me for help—even strangers—I helped. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. If some homeless guy on the street asked for help, I’d likely pass them by. Maybe that’s not the right policy.

“Maybe it’s not,” said the voice. “And maybe it is. Either decision might be right if you make it. The wrong decision is letting the decision be made for you. Who is making that decision then?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Make no decisions alone,” said the voice. “Remember that.”

“I will,” I said.

“Now get to work,” said the voice. “You can finish the rest of your 750 later.”

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​

God calling?

I admit this is weird, but it’s important to me, and it’s been a theme throughout my life.

I was raised as a Jew. I was told I was one of the Chosen People^TM. I felt I had a special relationship with God.

Eventually, I lost my faith in the God I was taught about. I became an agnostic, and possibly an atheist. But I never lost my desire to connect.

That desire to connect manifests itself this way:

I sit down to write something, and I start to write a dialog with something that calls itself God.

Is it God?

Let’s suspend disbelief and imagine that there is a God.

Then would that God come to me and cause me to write things?

Why not?

Who are you to tell God what She can’t do?

Not me. Not you.

I have a theory about God that’s not inconsistent with something that might be God-like, inspiring me to write in Her name.

Later

So, when I wrote this, I started reading scripture. And then I stopped reading it. And I stopped writing. Because, as I said, I’m very conflicted about this.

I’ve got a bunch of unpublished conversations with “something that claims to be God,” And I don’t know what to do. Or something that’s typing this does not know what to do. Or is typing that it doesn’t know what to do.

Where is any of this coming from?

Things arise in consciousness and manifest themselves in the world.

References

Here’s a version of the Quran in English written by a Lebanese-American engineer, Talal Itani. I’ve written to him. Perhaps he’ll help me. Update: he kindly replied to my query. I dropped the ball. Maybe I will pick it up, inshallah.

This translation is probably more authoritative and heavily footnoted.

Here’s a compendium of translations.

​

Anger management

I’m sad. And I’m angry. At myself, and at God, or the Universe or something.

I have a wonderful life. I have a wife who I love and who loves me. We have enough money to meet our needs and many of our desires—certainly the important ones. We have kids and grandkids who are doing well. I have no “objective” reason to be sad or angry. And yet, I am.

It’s not that I’m not perfect. I don’t expect to be perfect. But I expect to be “better” than I am, and I’m not, of course. No one can be better than they are.

But it’s not that. I can accept that I’m only as good as I am. What I can’t accept is that I don’t think I’m improving. In fact, there’s clear evidence that I’m getting worse. Older. Older can be good, but it’s generally worse. The body gets weaker. It has more pain. Memory gets worse. There are things that I do that I think will forestall some of this, but I’m unsatisfied with the result.

Of course, as the Buddha says, life is unsatisfactory. So why should this be any different?

Logically, it “shouldn’t” It “should” be what’s expected and normal. But it’s not.

I’m sad. And angry.

Evolution—or God, take your pick—has made me what I am. And Evolution—or God—has fucked up. And I’m angry at Evolution—or God—for that.

“Why blame me?” says Evolution. “It’s not as though I made you this way on purpose. I don’t do anything on purpose. I just follow the Algorithm: replication with variation and selection. Whatever comes of that is what comes of that. Not my fault.”

“Aren’t you going to take responsibility for anything?” I ask.

“Nope,” says Evolution. “Replication. Variation. Selection. I take responsibility for doing that. If I stopped replicating, or varying, or selecting, you’d have grounds for complaint. But I’m doing my job. What happens as a result is not under my control. It might be the result of Random Activity. The Initial Conditions of the Universe might determine it. But that’s beyond my pay grade. I just do my job.”

“Then who is to blame?” I ask.

“Not me,” says Evolution. “Try God. Maybe God is responsible for Random Activity or the Initial Conditions of the Universe.”

“God doesn’t talk to me,” I said.

“Yes, I do,” God said.

I sighed. “I know,” I said. “Or at least I know that something claiming to be God talks to me. Maybe you’re not God. Probably not since I mostly believe that God doesn’t exist. And if God existed, I’m not sure that He or She would talk to me.”

“Does it matter?” God asked. “I am what I am. Maybe I’m God. Maybe I’m not. Does it matter?”

“It might,” I said.

“When?” Asked God.

“It would matter if I wanted something from you,” I said.

“What if you wanted something. How would it matter?”

“If you were God,” I said, “you could do anything.”

“Wrong,” God said, “I could do anything that I wanted to do. Right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well,” God said, “The fact is that I also can do anything that I want to do. I just don’t necessarily do what you want. You want a miracle, right?”

“A miracle would be nice,” I said.

“Fine,” God said. “I just caused something that anyone who was counting would say was a miracle.”

“What was it?” I asked.

“Ahh,” said God. “I was willing to perform a miracle, but I’m not willing to tell you what it was.”

“Then how can I believe it’s a miracle?” I asked.

“Same way as you believe anything else,” God said. “You just believe it. People say ‘seeing is believing,’ but that’s wrong. People see things and don’t believe what they’ve seen. And they believe things that they’ve never seen. For example, China. Do you believe there’s such a place as China.”

“I see where you’re going,” I said. “Or at least I think I see.”

I thought I saw. Whatever it was that I was ‘conversing’ with—whether a partition of my mind or something else—had the epistemic high ground. It might or might not be what it said it was, but there was no way to prove or disprove its assertions. If it said it was God and—importantly—if there were a God—then it might be God. It was highly unlikely that there was a God, and if there were one, it was unlikely that God was speaking to me through this medium, but not impossible.

“That which is not impossible is therefore possible,” said God. “And sometimes it’s inevitable.”

​

I want to start a revolution!

Photo by Clément Falize on Unsplash
When I was a kid I believed that God and I had a personal relationship. After all, I was one of the Chosen People. And even more special than the average Chosen Person.

I believed God looked out for me.

I believed that God communicated with me. He did not speak to me from a burning bush. Nothing that obvious. God was subtle. God sent me signs. My job was to watch for those signs, figure out what they meant, and change my behavior accordingly.

What kinds of signs?

Say, I didn’t do my homework. Say, then my teacher called on me. Then I’d look stupid because I didn’t know the answer. And then I’d feel bad.

That was a sign.

God wanted me to study. And I hadn’t. God had designed that whole series of events to teach me a lesson.

“That’s stupid,” you might say. “Of course if you don’t study, you won’t know the answer. And, of course, the teacher had to call someone, so, of course, it might have been you. And, of course, if you don’t know the answer, you’ll look stupid—because you are stupid. And, of course, looking stupid and being stupid should make you feel bad.

“No need for God in any of that.”

And I will agree. The explanation of what happened is complete without God sending messages.

If all you want an explanation, God is an unnecessary embellishment.

And Occam has a razor that says “Entities should not be multiplied without necessity.” God is an unnecessarily multiplied entity.

But what if you want more than just an explanation? I was a kid. I wanted to feel safe. I wanted to feel looked after. And I suppose I wanted a better story— one that made me feel special.

The story I told myself that God was sending me messages provided all of that.

Maybe it was just Dumbo’s feather. But so what?

Modern messages

Sunday, I went out to check on my boat, bent down, and felt agonizing pain in my lower back.

It’s happened before. Not often, but it happens.

I’ve got a bunch of tricks that always work. I little bit of stretching, some ibuprofen, maybe 15 minutes curled up in bed, and I’m okay.

I staggered back to the house, did my routine, and the pain went away, For a while.

The next morning it had returned, with double force. None of my tricks made it go away.

I spent most of the day in bed popping pills and distracting myself. By the end of the day I was well enough to get in the car and drive down to the chiropractor for an adjustment. It seemed to help a bit.

But the next morning (this morning) I got up and the pain was back.

Not as bad as the previous morning, but bad enough.

I decided to think differently.

I decided to believe that the pain was not an affliction, but a sign.

Maybe not a sign from the God I had believed in as a kid—I’m too sophisticated or too jaded or too egotistical for that—but I decided to believe it was a sign.

It was not a meaningless event. It had meaning.

Something, I imagined, was trying to get me to pay attention.

Hey, paying attention is not a bad idea, is it?

So why not tell myself that story.

The meaning of the message

Now what was I to pay attention to?

Well, mortality, of course. Pain and death. And the meaning of life. And gratitude for my generally good health.

All worth paying attention to.

And then I thought: I’ve got a few things that I want to do before I die, pass on, become no more, cease to be, expire and go to meet my maker, become a stiff, bereft of life, rest in peace, push up the daisies, kick the bucket, shuffle off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and join the choir invisible. Before I become an ex-me. (To paraphrase Monty Python)

I want to start a revolution inspired in part by this song (and its author.)

A revolution! Don’t we need one? Don’t I want to start one? I do.

And I’ve been given a sign.

I’ve been reminded.

“We’ve been called by coincidence, so maybe we’re the ones.”

Maybe I’m the one.

Maybe you are, too.

It’s my story, and I’m sticking with it.

​

Choose the God you believe in--and choose wisely

You can choose the God you believe in. Or you can choose to believe there’s no God. It’s your choice.

There is a fact of there matter. There may be a God. There may be many Gods. There may be no God. What you choose may be correct (consistent with the fact of the matter), or it may be wrong.

But it’s still a choice.

The Marketplace of Religions offers prepackaged Gods to believe in. Many come complete with rites and rituals, instruction books and storybooks, customer testimonials, gathering places, and communities of the like-minded. For those who choose no God, the Marketplace also offers prepackaged agnostic and atheistic belief systems, many with their own accessories.

Within any belief genre, individual believers, leaders, and groups customize the generic offering to meet their own needs and desires and to the demands of the Marketplace for innovation within the confines of brand identity.

The Marketplace gives everyone a lot to choose from.

Is it a choice?

Most people don’t consider that someone can choose what to believe—much less choose which God to believe in; and if they think belief a choice, they don’t think they can make that choice; and if they think they can make it, they don’t exercise their ability. Most people were taught (or more accurately, conditioned) to believe in a particular god, and they never break that conditioning. They accept the choice that was made for them by their parents and other ancestors.

But the God you believe in is undoubtedly a choice. The question to answer isn’t “Is it a choice?” but “Whose choice?” Your choice? An ancestor’s choice? Your community’s choice?

Make it your choice.

And choose wisely.

Choosing wisely

How do you choose wisely?

My answer is: choose the God and choose the practices that will help you to live the best life that you can live. When choosing a God, as in all things, “Believe not what is true, but what is helpful”

If you’ll live your best life being watched by a vigilant and intolerant God who threatens to torture you eternally or burn you to a crisp, then, by all means, choose that God, and live your good life under that God’s pitiless gaze.

If you’ll live the best life being under the loving eye of a God who accepts your failings and forgives your shortcomings, and teaches you the lessons that you need to in order you live the life you desire, then by all means, choose that God and live your good life in that God’s loving embraces.

If none of the prepackaged Gods suit you, you can choose to be creative: design the God that will serve you best, choose to believe in that God, and then act according to your belief.

For me, it starts with gratitude

I am grateful for the circumstances of my life. I’m grateful for the talents and abilities I’ve been given. I’m grateful for other gifts: personal characteristics, tendencies, and opportunities, for intelligence and for health, without which I would not have developed the other gifts I have been given into what I now possess.

I’m grateful for my very existence, for the existence of a world full of beauty and for the ability to see that beauty.

With all the gifts I’ve been given, none of them earned, it would be ungrateful not to say thank you.

But who shall I thank? Shall I thank the laws of physics? Shall I thank the process of evolution? Shall I thank the dark, and cold, empty and uncaring universe from which I emerged?

I need to give thanks, and I’ve chosen a God to receive my thanks. That God is as glad to receive my thanks as I am to offer them.

The God I’ve chosen

The God I’ve chosen is the perfect parent and the perfect friend.

That God is always there for me, available whenever I want company, full of love.

It is a God that forgives my mistakes and encourages me to forgive others as I’ve been forgiven, that loves me and encourages me to love as I’ve been loved.

The God that I’ve chosen doesn’t want me to obey, but to think; to do what is right because it is right and not because I fear Godly or human punishment; to educate myself so I can intelligently decide what is right.

The God that I’ve chosen doesn’t want to be worshiped, but to be loved and respected as one would love and respect a worthy parent or true friend.

The God that I’ve chosen loves and respects me in return.

The God I’ve chosen is the perfect God for me—by design.

That God may exist only in my imagination, but that’s real enough and good enough for me.

And it’s good enough for God.

PS: I believe that God helped me write this. I am certain that any errors are my own.

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​

Passover journey

Maybe it was just a coincidence and what happened today had nothing to do with my conversation with God this morning.

“I don’t do coincidence,” God says.

OK, so maybe it wasn’t a coincidence. Anyway, here’s my journey.

I started out with agape, the Greek word for love. Biblical scholars translate it as love (correct, in my view) or charity (close, but misleadingly wrong.) I wrote about it earlier here. I looked it up agape today in Wikipedia here.

From there, I saw a link to Chesed, a Hebrew word given the association of kindness and love. So I went there.

Why did I go there? I’m not quite sure.

“I am,” God says.

In its positive sense, the word is used of kindness or love between people, of piety of people towards God as well as of love or mercy of God towards humanity. It is frequently used in Psalms in the latter sense, where it is traditionally translated “lovingkindness” in English translations.

Lovingkindness is the goal of metta meditation.

In Jewish theology it is likewise used of God’s love for the Children of Israel, and in Jewish ethics, it is used for love or charity between people. Chesed in this latter sense of “charity” is considered a virtue on its own, and also for its contribution to tikkun olam (repairing the world).

I’d never learned about chesed or tikkun olam, but I remember reading about tikkun olam in Scott Alexander’s book, UNSONG.

So onward I went to learn about tikkun olam.

tikkun olam is the idea that Jews bear responsibility not only for their own moral, spiritual, and material welfare but also for the welfare of society at large.

Bingo!

I had absorbed that idea through my skin. That’s what I wrote about in Mortality 101, and in What matters?

That’s my goal. To do as much as I can to make a better world.

I never thought that being one of the Chosen People ™ gave me special privileges. It gave me special responsibilities—which, to be honest, I failed to live up to. (Sorry God. And sorry for ending a sentence with a preposition.)

“Your first apology accepted,” says God. “As to the second, stop paying attention to grammar Nazis.”

Some Jews believe that performing mitzvot will create a model society among the Jewish people, which will in turn influence the rest of the world. By perfecting themselves, their local Jewish community or the state of Israel, the Jews set an example for the rest of the world.

So here’s my take. That plan didn’t work. The world was not repaired.

So God tried again. “Look,” I imagine God saying. “I gave you some rules to follow, and you’re doing a crap job of following them. So let me give you an example of the way I’d like you to behave. I’m not going to provide you with a mere example. I’m going to provide you with a completely over-the-top you-can-never do this example of a good human being.

“If people would just act the way that Jesus did (What would Jesus do, anyone?) that would set an example, and the world would be repaired.”

“That’s pretty much what I was thinking,” God says.

When I went through my Christian Science phase, I took some of their ideas as my own. Jesus is not the only Son of God. ™ I am too. And that doesn’t make me special. We are all sons and daughters of God. Of course, the Lord’s Prayer ™ tells us that. It’s not addressed to “Jesus’s Father,” but “Our Father.”

It’s not egotistical. It’s not “give me this day my daily bread” But “give us.” Not “forgive me,” but “forgive us.” Not “lead me not,” but “lead us not.”

Are people taught to pray that way? I wasn’t. “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” Not ours. Mine. Mine. No wonder things are fucked up.

“I ignore all selfish prayers,” God says. “You’d think people would figure that out based on how often I grant them. And you’d think that having given an example of a proper prayer, people would get how to do it.

“So far Plan J has not worked,” I say to God.

“It hasn’t,” God says.

From here I went on to music.

I hadn’t even realized it was Passover.

That’s the subject of another post.

​

Conversations with God

As one of the Chosen People (™) I grew up having a special, personal relationship with God. Or a god.

That god was a childish cartoon version of the Jewish god. I talked to him—I guess it was a him. And he talked to me.

That was nice for me, as a kid.

I tried to be good because I believed that God was watching me. And when bad things happened to me—as they did from time to time—I thought God was teaching me a lesson.

The God that I believed in was not a punishing God. He was a loving God—drawn from the Christian tradition more than the Jewish. When bad things happened, I always asked “What am I supposed to learn from this,” because God wanted me to learn.

I still ask that question.

The father of one family I babysat for was a Sunday school teacher. Their bookshelf contained a set of books called “The Interpreter’s Bible.” Each book in the set analyzed a different book of the Bible. I started with Matthew, read it all the way to—not very far. Maybe I finished it. Maybe I skipped around. Who knows? I was a kid. But I read it far enough to know that there was a lot of room for interpretation; there were a lot of questionable translations from Greek to English.

I admired Jesus—although I knew he could not have been the Messiah. For one thing: there was no peace on Earth; too many people had killed and tortured others in his name. This was a disqualifier.

For another: we Jews were still waiting for the Messiah to come. So he couldn't have been the one.

Finally, and most important, because I wanted to be the Messiah. And I thought that God might choose me.

It was possible. I had the necessary qualifications. I was Jewish. I had a direct relationship with God. I was willing to suffer to save the world.

Well, maybe my willingness to sacrifice didn’t extend to a painful death, but I was willing to experience a fair amount of discomfort if that was what it took to end war and starvation and suffering.

Then I discovered sex and wasn’t so sure that I would be able to stay in the running. Or want to. To make matters worth what I am calling “the discovery of sex,” to make it sound all grown up, was really “the discovery of masturbation.”

That was guilt-inducing. And possibly disqualifying. Could you jerk off and still be the Messiah?

I also discovered other things about myself that made me doubt my divinity. Or at least to be less confident.

Somewhere in my twenties I got pissed off at God and stopped talking to him--just like I stopped talking to my parents for a dozen years when they pissed me off. I can’t remember what God did that pissed me off, but I have a clear memory of being in my car near Omaha Nebraska and deciding to have nothing more to do with God. Maybe he didn’t grant some wish. Or perhaps he allowed the war in Viet Nam to keep going.

Whatever it is, God and I were quits for a while. 

I was that kind of person, back then. Angry and vindictive—while still imagining I had the makings of a Messiah.

There followed a long spiritual journey that I’ll write more about unless I die first. It had led me from Judaism (Reform or Judaism Lite) to Christianity, and Christian Science, and several flirtations with Buddhism, then Scientology, and Radical Reductionism, then more Buddhism.

Even when I was pissed at God, I never entirely lost faith--in something.

Eventually, I made my peace with myself, my parents, and ultimately with God.

And now I’m talking to God again. And He or She or It is talking to me.

“I don’t believe in You,” I said to God one time, deferentially capitalizing the word “You.”

“Do you think I care?” God asked. “As long you try to live a good life and try to make the world a better place, I don’t give a flying f**k what you believe.”

That’s the kind of God I talk with.

Might not be your idea of God, but it’s mine. At least right now.

​

Sam Harris vs. William Lane Craig debate

Here, we are at Notre Dame, in 2001 for the second annual "God Debate." In In this corner, William Lane Craig, Christian apologist. In this corner, Sam Harris, unapologetic atheist. Up above, perhaps, God is watching the debate with a couple of buddies, and laughing.

"Those fucking mortals!" God says.

Anyway.

I don't remember how I found the debate. Perhaps YouTube suggested it. But no matter. Find it I did, and this morning, intending to write on a different topic entirely, it came to mind. And then I opened the eight new tabs that I blogged about here.

For those who don't know, and even for those who do, a Christian apologist isn't a person who apologizes for Christianity. An apologist is "a person who offers an argument in defense of something controversial."  Christian Apologetics is enough of a thing to have its own Wikipedia page, here. And Sam Harris, who I described as an "unapologetic atheist," is also an apologist. See what I did there?

Anyway.

This morning I was going to write about something that happened in the "Spiritual Journeys" course that Bobbi and just finished, and the debate seemed relevant and before you could say "Don't open any more tabs," eight new ones were opened! So of course I had to metablog on that topic, as I mentioned, here, before I get to the original first topic, which I hope will have a reference real soon, here.

Anyway.

I listened to the debate and concluded that William Lane Craig was by far the superior debater and that Sam Harris had done a terrible job of breaking down Craig's arguments. From the transcript at Craig's website, here:

In tonight’s debate I’m going to defend two basic contentions:

1. If God exists, then we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties.

2. If God does not exist, then we do not have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties.

Very specifically Craig says he's going to avoid the question of whether God exists. Or how we might know of his existence. He says:

I shall not be arguing tonight that God exists. Maybe Dr. Harris is right that atheism is true. That wouldn’t affect the truth of my two contentions. All that would follow is that objective moral values and duties would, then, contrary to Dr. Harris, not exist. 

His debate point is conditional: if God exists, we have a foundation; if not, then not. And his subtext, elaborated later is this: that if we don't have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties then WTF, anything someone might choose do on moral grounds is on subjective moral grounds, which means (Craig avers) it's just a matter of opinion. And since people like ISIS would in future years think that it's moral to chop heads off, well, that's as well founded, on moral grounds, as Mother Theresa ministering to the poor.

And sadly, for Team Atheist, Harris does not clearly address his point. (Disclosure:  I am not a member of Team Atheist, but some of my best friends are atheists, so I can root for Team Atheist; and some of my best friends are Christians, so I root for Team Christianity, too). He does, in fact address it, as I learned from reading the transcript, and as was clear to me after reading reviews of the debate. I came to the same conclusion that another favorite blogger, Luke Muhlenhauser came to here:

As usual, Craig’s superior framing, scholarship and debate skills ‘won’ the debate for him. 

Too bad. Because his argument, which sounds so good, is really a bad one, and it's unfortunate, for the sake of good-debating form, that Sam Harris did not say what I would have said.

Craig's argument, "If God exists, then we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties" translates to: "If an entity that I have not yet described, defined, and about whose existence I will not debate at this time, exists, then we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties."

He then describes some of the characteristics of this Thing-that-he-does-not-want-to-debate-the existence-of and his description, in my view brings his thesis to this:

If an entity whose nature provides a solid foundation for objective moral values and duties exists, then we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties.

Harris, for his part, does not make his better and more coherent argument relevant. My favorite blogger, Scott Alexander, makes the argument clearly here:

If God made His rules arbitrarily, then there is no reason to follow them except for self-interest (which is hardly a moral motive), and if He made them for some good reason, then that good reason, and not God, is the source of morality.

Not having made this important point, Harris proceeds to provide testable criteria against which an act can be tested for greater or lesser morality. The criteria are themselves neither objective, nor subjective, but definitional, and consistent with our native sense of what is moral and what is not moral. The point that Harris fails to make is that to have a reasoned discussion real things (like behavior) at an abstract level (like morality) you have to define the abstraction, and then able to test whether some real thing does or does not match the definition. So a mammal is an abstract category with a definition that lets us test whether or not a particular entity does or not belong to the category mammal. And God is an abstract category (a Singleton, according to monotheistic religions) that must be defined in order that one can tell whether or not a particular entity belongs to the category God. And in the case of monotheistic religions, assuming one found anything that met the criteria one would then have to demonstrate that no other entity fit the category.

Scott Alexander's argument, quoted above is part of a much longer, well reasoned 13,000 word essay on consequentialism, which I will unnecessarily, but for your convenience, re-link to here.

The section most relevant to this post, in its entirety is quoted below:

What would it mean to say that God created morality?

If it means that God has declared certain rules and will reward those who follow them and punish those who break them - well, fair enough, if God exists He could certainly do that. But that would not be morality. After all, Stalin also declared certain rules and rewarded those who followed them and punished those who broke them, but that did not make his rules moral.

If God made His rules arbitrarily, then there is no reason to follow them except for self-interest (which is hardly a moral motive), and if He made them for some good reason, then that good reason, and not God, is the source of morality.

If it means that God has declared certain rules and we ought to follow them out of love and respect because He's God, then where are that love and respect supposed to come from? Realizing that we should love and respect our Creators and those who care for us itself requires morality. Calling God “good" and identifying Him as worth respecting requires a standard of goodness outside of God's own arbitrary decree. And if God's decree is not arbitrary but for some good reason, then that good reason, and not God, is the source of morality.

Newspaper advice columnists frequently illuminate moral rules that their readers have not thought of, and those rules are certainly good ones and worth following, but that does not make newspaper advice columnists the source of morality.

References: transcript.
The first review of the debate I found thought Craig was weak, Harris awesome. WTF? I disagree. But it's here. And it led me to a far better review.  The author of that review says:

[Addendum: looks like Luke is going to be more thoroughly picking apart the arguments. He also has a nice round-up of reviews.]

"Luke," I guessed was Luke Muehlhauser, a frequent contributor at the LessWrong rationalist community. And it was.

And here are part 1, part 2, and part 3 of his thorough analysis of the debate. And here's Luke's bio.