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Due to overwhelming public demand,* here is my take on Pastor Paul Dean's attempt to demonstrate the superiority of Christian "philosophy" over that of non-believers, particularly atheists and agnostics. For reasons which should become obvious, your mileage may vary.

First and foremost, Dean's argument amounts to a semantic ploy.

It should be noted at the outset that Dean was not the originator of this argument. Because of a coincidence of timing and given the wild peals of laughter I am sometimes rewarded with, on occasion I listen to Hank Hanegraaff's "Bible Answer Man" radio program during a long evening commute. I have heard this stratagem recommended there any number of times over the years.

The heart of the ploy is to attempt to get a person to make a "truth claim" (or something the evangelist can assert is a truth claim) and then argue that "absolute truth" can only come from God ... particularly the Christian God. A favorite target of the ploy is the more-or-less post-modernist statement "All truth is relative":

Relativism claims to speak truth about at least one thing?namely, that truth can be "true for you but not for me." Yet it contradicts itself by claiming nothing is really true or false. Why believe the relativist if he has no truth to utter?

The claims of relativists are like saying, "I can't speak a word of English" or "All generalizations are false." Our most basic reply to the relativist is that his statements are self-contradictory. They self-destruct. They are self-undermining.

But look closer at the meaning of "truth" that each person is actually using. To begin with, the evangelical is speaking of some "objective" truth existing outside of and independent from human knowledge. Indeed, he asserts that it can only be known through non-human means, i.e. through divine revelation. On the other hand, the relativist, whether or not he or she knows it, is speaking of knowledge at a different level, namely, the sum total of human truth claims about normative ethical behavior. On that interpretation, the statement "All truth is relative" actually translates to something like: "People make many different truth claims about morals and there is no test universally accepted among human beings by which such claims can be measured."

For example, Pastor Dean's claim that Christians have a certain set of "absolute truths" through revelation is, in fact, belied by the fact that there are many other claims of revelation, both inside and outside nominally "Christian" circles, that are equally alleged to be the absolute truth, though different than Pastor Dean's version in significant part. Thus, relativism in this sense is a simple observation that there is no morality that is accepted by all. To turn the tables a bit, any claim by Pastor Dean that there is a universal morality is contradicted by his own need to evangelize, which is a tacit admission that his account of what "absolute truth" is not the only one available to humankind.

Pastor Dean's attempt to equate "objective" moral claims with the kind of "objective" human knowledge delivered by empiric investigation, shared broadly among people of widely differing philosophies, is of no avail. Certainly , as in Pastor Dean's example, there is wide agreement, based on our humanly derived knowledge of the underlying phenomena and on long experience, that the sun will "rise" again tomorrow. But even there the knowledge is not "absolute." At midnight my time the Sun might explode and the Earth could be gone before the next scheduled sunrise. In any event, empiric knowledge is of a significantly different type than ethical norms. As David Hume long ago pointed out, "ought" cannot be derived from "is."

What is more, based on his article, Pastor Dean obviously rejects the empiric evidence for evolution. Thus it is equally obvious that he rejects that sort of empiricism as delivering absolute truth. Where, then, is Pastor Dean's absolute knowledge of truth to come from?

Pastor Dean is in the same boat as the rest of us humans. His claim to absolute knowledge is ultimately based on his uncertain, and relative, "knowledge" that his, out of many possibilities, is the one and only "true" revelation from God.

The remainder of his semantic games are easy to refute based on the realization that any individual's acceptance of moral claims as "true" is equally well explained as the outcome of natural processes as by positing some supernatural morality arbitrator. Cultural (and perhaps biological) norms that are widely, but not universally, adopted within local groups of humans can credibly be traced to the instinct for survival (a trait shared with all, mostly amoral, organisms on the planet) or to other strategies for reproductive success, such as empathy arising out of the differential success of cooperative societies over fractious ones. These traits, in turn, can gain the emotional force we equate with "obvious" or "absolute" truths through the process of socialization.

In short, I ain't impressed Pastor Dean.
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* Well, only Larry Moran has publically demanded it, but he can be pretty overwhelming.
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