The existentialist philosopher Albert Camus, in his "The Myth of Sisyphus", writes concerning what he calls the 'absurd'. In the spirit of other existentialist philosophers such as Kierkegaard and others such as Hegel, he remarks about how the world as we experience, is seemingly at complete dissonance with the same world as we try to explain it. What we call a tree, a stone, music, love, all have a basic meaning as we experience them. But our explanation of what "redness" is in terms of physics, or explaining what a tree is in terms of atoms and electrons, in a significant way fails to explain what redness or a tree is. When we experience the colour red in an object, or an elm tree, we are not talking about atoms. Scientific explanation, in fact the use of reason, seems to reduce everything in experience into completely something other than what we in fact experience. What in fact is an atom? What in fact is a quantum particle? In the end, he claims that the world we experience and know, is in this way absurd because if science really do explain our experience, they explain it away.
The point of that introduction is to lead into a point about the reality of our moral experience. A premise of the Moral Argument is that object moral values exist. Yet, if something as real as the experience of colour is reducible to psychology and physics which in the end is colourless, what of our moral beliefs? Albert Camus writes about Kierkegaard, who observed the same seeming absurdity in the world. He criticised Kierkegaard because he, although knowing of the absurdity, chose to make a "leap of faith" in order to make sense of existence. Albert Camus argued that the reasonable thing to do was to fact the absurdity head on. Admit that the world IS absurd, but live as if it made sense and has meaning.
I think that Albert Camus' criticism of the Moral Argument, is that it denies the fact that ultimate reality is incomprehensible to our minds. Camus would I think, as any thinking person to admit that although we have these experiences of reality, we are stabbing in the dark when we try to understand it at it's depth. So yes we may have these moral intuitions, just as we have other intuitions, but just as Kierkegaard took an unwarranted "leap of faith" in accepting Christianity to explain the absurdity and meaningless of the world, it is unwarranted to make decisive conclusions from the fact we have such intuitions about right and wrong behaviour. Our experience of moral truths, does not warrant our belief that objective moral beliefs exist.
Dr Craig responds to such criticisms by appealing to an analogy with external objects. Just as we can't prove that external objects exist, we are justified in believing that external objects exist given our experiences. But such a reply is precisely the kind of reasoning Camus was rejecting, precisely because science reduces the question of "external objects" or "other minds" and other posits of experience, as meaningless or atleast reducible to meaninglessness.
How does the one advocating the Moral Argument, answer this existentialist concern?
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