Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Human Rights and Other Weighty Topics

In my novels In the Absence of God and Bridging the Abyss (See the links at the top of this page) I make the argument that belief in objective human rights, belief in an objective overarching meaning to one's life, and belief in objective moral values only makes sense on a theistic worldview. Naturalism offers no ground for any of these. On naturalism human rights, meaning and morality are all nothing more than subjective preferences, a state of affairs which essentially undercuts any significance any of them might have in our modern world.

I recently came across some short videos by a British philosopher named Andy Bannister which make this same point in an interesting fashion. His first video presents a discussion of why naturalism renders life meaningless:
The second video addresses the problem of how there can be objective moral values and duties given naturalism:
Bannister's last presentation makes the case for the claim that human rights, to be in any sense real, must be established by, and rooted in, a transcendent guarantor of those rights: