Sam Harris

I challenge you to suggest a repeatable, scientifically rigorous experiment to help define absolute morality that leaves God out of the picture.  Please try to create a simple, elegant experiment that doesn’t take more than three (3) months to run and has a budget of less than one hundred US dollars (<$100.00)

The question you pose is irrelevant because there is no such thing as a moral absolute. Example: Killing a person is normally seen as morally wrong, but there is cases where doing this action can be some what acceptable(i.e. self defense). Another example: If there ever was a dictator who sought to destroy the human race and had a large following, would you let him live if you captured him even though there was a strong possibility that his followers would free him to continue his conquest.

Are there moral absolutes or any other kind of absolutes? No, things are just consistent like “killing a person is morally wrong”.

Three months? Less than $100? Okay, so you’re not really serious, then.

Moral experiments take decades and involve millions of people—at the very least. You are in one now, if you live in America, and yes, the experiment is called America. You see, the people who founded that country were close enough to the bad old days of Europe to understand that if you based your morality upon God, you then had to ask, whose God, and the answer always involved some sort of theocratic totalitarianism (see Iran as an example. They’ll give you more God than you can stomach.) The original pilgrims fled a state religion. The people who created your country remembered this.

So they resolved to remove God from the basis of the state, and just accept arguments on their own merit. Evidence and reason seemed to do very well for them. As Aristotle noted in the introduction to the ethics, man is a social animal. Everything else is based upon that—there are optimal ways to arrange society. And then there’s Iran…

I think most self-described atheists argue for something like objective morality, but just not a theogenic or God-given morality. In fact, Socrates pretty well showed that theogenic morality was impossible several hundred years before Christ: the Euthyphro Dilemma says that either morality is arbitrary or it is secular and objective; either virtue is virtuous because God says so (arbitrary) or God says so because it’s virtuous (objective but naturalistic), but there’s no viable third alternative.