With this article by Dennis Prager, the Free Press officially raises its flag as “We are totes pro-religion!” In article after article, the site has touted the benefits of religion as a palliative for an ailing world, but you’ll never read a defense of atheism or nonbelief. Here Dennis Prager, conservative podcaster and founder of an online “university,” touts religion as the only “objective” source of morality. I suspect the “we love religion” mantra of the FP ultimately comes from founder Bari Weiss, who is an observant Jew.
But Prager is wrong on two counts. First, religion is not the only source of morality—or even a good one. Second, there is no “objective” morality. All morality depends on subjective preferences. Granted, many of them are shared by most people, but in the end there is no “objective” morality that one can say is empirically “true”. Is abortion immoral? How about eating animals? What is wrong with killing one person and using their organs to save the lives of several dying people? Can you push a man onto a trolley to save the lives of five others on an adjacent track? If these questions have objective answers, what are they?
First, the FP’s introduction:
If you were to name the defining figures of the 21st-century conservative movement, Dennis Prager would surely rank near the top of the list. A longtime radio host and founder of digital educational platform PragerU, he is one of the world’s best-known public intellectuals, publishing more than a dozen books on religion, morality, and the foundations of Western civilization.
His latest book, “If There Is No God: The Battle Over Who Defines Good and Evil,” hits shelves next week. Drawn from a weekend-long lecture Prager delivered to 74 teenagers in 1992, it is a full-throated defense of objective, biblical morality at a time, he says, when more people dispute its existence than ever before. Though rooted in an earlier moment, the book holds new weight: In 2024, Prager suffered a catastrophic fall that paralyzed him from the waist down.
“A certain percentage of this book,” he reveals in the introduction, “was written by dictation and editing from my hospital bed. Were it not for Joel Alperson, who also organized and recorded the entire weekend, the book would not have been finished. We completed the book together. It is a testament to how important we both consider this work.”
Next week, our Abigail Shrier will interview Prager from his hospital room, so stay tuned for their full conversation. And below, we bring you an exclusive excerpt from his book, answering a question that many of us ask every day: In a world where profoundly evil things happen, how do we raise good people? —The Editors
I’m hoping that Abigail Shrier does not throw softballs at Prager, and asks him about “objective” morality and his evidence for God. But I’m betting she won’t: one doesn’t harass a man recently paralyzed from the waist down, and Shrier is employed by the Free Press.
Click, read, and weep.
At the beginning, Prager raises one of these moral questions, and argues that yes, there’s an objective answer—one that comes from the Bible (bolding is mine):
One of my biggest worries in life is that people these days are animated more by feelings than by values.
Let me explain what I mean. Imagine you are walking along a body of water—a river, lake, or ocean—with your dog, when suddenly you notice your dog has fallen into the water and appears to be drowning. About 100 feet away, you notice a stranger, a person you don’t know, is also drowning. Assuming your dog can’t swim, and also assuming that you would like to save both your dog and the stranger, the question is: Who would you try to save first?
If your inclination is to save your dog, that means you were animated by feelings. Your feelings are understandable, and as I own two dogs, I fully relate. You love your dog more than the stranger, and I do, too.
But the whole point of values is to hold that something is more important than your feelings. There is no ambivalence in the Bible about this. “Thou shalt not murder” is not for one group alone. “Thou shalt not steal” is not for one group alone. It is for every human being. Human beings are created in God’s image. Therefore, human life is sacred and animal life is not. You should save the stranger.
Unfortunately, those universal values are not what we’re teaching people today.. . . .
What? You can’t murder a dog? What if the drowning person is Hitler? And aren’t five human lives on the trolley track worth more than one? What would Jesus do?
And what other Biblical values should we take literally? Should we levy capital punishment for homosexuality? Is it okay to have slaves so long as you don’t beat them too hard? Was it “moral” for the Israelites to kill all the tribes living on their land? Is it okay for God to allow children to die of cancer? (Of course, sophisticated theologians have made up answers to these questions so that, in the end, they find nothing immoral in Scripture.)
When Prager says that our big problem is that feelings have replaced values, I wonder where those “values” come from. Apparently they come from God. But that raises an ancient question: is something good because God dictates it, or did God dictate it because it was good? (This is Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma.) And if the latter is true, then there is a standard of morality that is independent of God’s dictates.
This is not rocket science. But Prager sticks to the first interpretation, adhering to the “Divine Command Theory“:
In fact, the Bible repeatedly warns people not to rely on their hearts. If you want to know why so many people reject Bible-based religions, there it is: Most people want to be governed by their feelings and not have anyone—be it God or a book—tell them otherwise.
The battle in America and the rest of the Western world today is between the Bible and the heart.
And Prager sticks to his guns, arguing that atheists and agnostics have no guidelines for morality:
Millions of people today are atheist or agnostic. If you are one of them, my goal is not to convince you that God exists. But I am asking you to live as if you believe God exists, and by extension, as if you believe objective good and evil exist.
Why? Because for a good society to maintain itself, we need objective morality. What would happen to math if it were reduced to feeling? There would be no math. Likewise, if we reduce morality to feeling, there would be no morality. In other words, if values and feelings are identical, there would be no such thing as a value.
Imagine a child in kindergarten who sees a box of cookies meant for the whole class and takes them all for himself. Most people would acknowledge that the child has to be taught that this is wrong. But if values were derived from feelings, this child would keep all the cookies on the basis of his personal value that whoever gets to the cookies first gets to keep them. It’s not as though this philosophy is without precedent. It has been the way many of the world’s societies have looked at life: “Might makes right.”
Again, this palaver appears in the Free Press, which apparently thought it worth publishing.
What Prager doesn’t seem to realize is that an atheist can give reasons for adhering to a certain morality, even if in the end those reasons are directed towards confecting a society that (subjectively) seems harmonious. For example, John Rawls used the “veil of ignorance” as a way to structure a moral society. Others, like Sam Harris, are utilitarians or consequentialists, arguing that the moral act is one that most increases the “well being” of the world. But even these more rational moralities have issues, some of which I raised in my questions above. The systems adhere largely to what most people see as “moral”, but they are not really “objective”. They are subjective.
But adhering to the word of the Bible, and twisting it when it doesn’t fit your Procrustean bed of morality, is palpably inferior to reason-based morality. Indeed, the fact that theologians must twist parts of the Bible so that, while seeming to be immoral they turn out to be really moral, shows that there’s no objective morality in scripture.
Does Prager even know his Bible? Have a gander at what he writes here:
That’s precisely why the Ten Commandments outlaw stealing. Because stealing is normal. The whole purpose of moral and legal codes is to forbid people from acting on their natural feelings.
Consider another example, this one far more serious. In virtually every past society, a vast number of women and girls have been raped. In wartime, when victorious armies could essentially do what they wanted, rape was the norm, with few exceptions, such as the American, British, and Israeli armies. Only men whose behavior is guided by values rather than feelings do not rape in such circumstances.
Both of these vastly different examples prove the same thing: To lead good lives, people must first learn Bible-based values, mandated when they are children.
Has he read Numbers 31? Here’s a bit in which, under God’s orders, Moses and his acolytes not only butcher a people, but save the virgin women for sexual slavery (my bolding, text from King James version):
And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying,
2 Avenge the children of Israel of the Midianites: afterward shalt thou be gathered unto thy people.
3 And Moses spake unto the people, saying, Arm some of yourselves unto the war, and let them go against the Midianites, and avenge the Lord of Midian.
4 Of every tribe a thousand, throughout all the tribes of Israel, shall ye send to the war.
5 So there were delivered out of the thousands of Israel, a thousand of every tribe, twelve thousand armed for war.
6 And Moses sent them to the war, a thousand of every tribe, them and Phinehas the son of Eleazar the priest, to the war, with the holy instruments, and the trumpets to blow in his hand.
7 And they warred against the Midianites, as the Lord commanded Moses; and they slew all the males.
8 And they slew the kings of Midian, beside the rest of them that were slain; namely, Evi, and Rekem, and Zur, and Hur, and Reba, five kings of Midian: Balaam also the son of Beor they slew with the sword.
9 And the children of Israel took all the women of Midian captives, and their little ones, and took the spoil of all their cattle, and all their flocks, and all their goods.
10 And they burnt all their cities wherein they dwelt, and all their goodly castles, with fire.
11 And they took all the spoil, and all the prey, both of men and of beasts.
12 And they brought the captives, and the prey, and the spoil, unto Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and unto the congregation of the children of Israel, unto the camp at the plains of Moab, which are by Jordan near Jericho.
13 And Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and all the princes of the congregation, went forth to meet them without the camp.
14 And Moses was wroth with the officers of the host, with the captains over thousands, and captains over hundreds, which came from the battle.
15 And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive?
16 Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord.
17 Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
18 But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.
I suppose that Prager thinks that not only atheists and agnostics lack moral standards, but that’s also true of all the non-Christians of the world, as morality not based on the Bible is evanescent at best:
Again, you don’t need to believe in God. But deciding between right and wrong is essentially impossible without a value system revealed by God. If there isn’t a God who says pushing little kids down—or raping women—is wrong, then all we have to go by are feelings, and then doing whatever you feel like doing isn’t wrong at all.
We’re not talking about theory. We’re living in a country where every few minutes a woman is raped, every minute a car is stolen, and every few hours a human being is murdered. The people committing these crimes don’t act on the basis of biblical values; they act on the basis of feelings.
This is not a wholesale indictment of feelings. Feelings are what most distinguish humans from robots. Feelings make us feel alive. Without feelings, life wouldn’t be worth living. But feelings alone are morally unreliable. Guided by feelings, every type of behavior is justifiable: If you feel like shoplifting and act on your feelings, you’ll shoplift. If a man is sexually aroused by a woman, he will rape her. And, of course, if you have deeper feelings for your pet than for a stranger, you’ll save your dog and let the stranger drown.
If we rely solely on feelings, everything is justifiable. And a society that justifies everything stands for nothing.
So much for Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims, who march along with us atheists thinking that nothing is immoral.
This is not only stupid, but it’s not new, either. It was Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s novel who said, “Without God, everything is permitted.” Prager (and by extension, the Free Press) is making a Swiss cheese of an argument here, one that’s full of holes. If Abigail Shrier doesn’t dismantle it in her interview, I’ll be very disappointed, for I’m a big admirer of her work. And she’s way too smart to buy into Prager’s nonsense.
Here’s Prager’s new book:
So is he a Young Earth Christian? Because you’d have to be to think that “God” gave us laws like “do not kill” and pretend that they didn’t develop in cultures that never heard of God, Israel, or the Bible, especially in ones that ante-date the Bible. And the whole, believe this subjective laws as if they were objective, doesn’t make any sense.
He’s a conservative Jew. Not sure if he is a young earth creationist…I would bet “no” but you are correct that his worldview almost requires that Genesis narrative to be true to hold together.
My argument is that a particular religion has been a useful particular fiction for the particular society that derives its particular social morality from it (and other social factors).
I say this because – by observation – there are other societies with other religious fictions and other derived moralities.
You can argue that a particular religious fiction became less useful and that becoming a more useful fiction again might encourage social cohesion.
But religions are just fictions, still.
The only unique element God provides to morality is an inability to question it. If God says something is good (or, as more wary theologians will have it, God’s intrinsic nature is such that this something is inherently good) then what you and I think about it cannot matter. How we feel doesn’t matter either. Ditto for whether it leads to human flourishing or human destruction. Who are we to hold God to any of our standards? Literally anything goes, including torturing babies for fun.
And no use appealing to your “God-given intuition” or “what the Bible clearly states” (hahaha) — unless, of course, you get to jump over the human evaluation process and just pretend that your views on God are premises which stand in for God. As the humbled believer is wont to do.
I’ve seen more and more Christians arguing that only religion can combat “woke” ideology. And what’s so bad about woke ideology? Why, its advocates behave just like the religious faithful — sure of themselves, self-righteous, authoritarian, controlling, and with a refusal to debate and a thirst for demonizing their enemies. It’s almost like they’re citing truths from God!
So let’s do that, too — only harder.
If suffering is taken as the yardstick for objective morality, as Sam Harris suggests, the answers to your questions are almost self-evident:
Is abortion immoral? No, if it prevents great suffering for the mother and the child.
How about eating animals? No, if the animals have a happy life without suffering. (If we did not eat them, we would deprive them of a happy life because they would not exist in the first place.)
What is wrong with killing one person and using their organs to save the lives of several dying people? A culture that views fellow human beings as a means to an end is guaranteed to cause a lot of suffering. Therefore it is wrong.
Can you push a man onto a trolley to save the lives of five others on an adjacent track? Dito.
In the vast majority of social interactions the participants are not ends in themselves but are performers of relevant roles. Masters/slaves, employers/employees, buyers/sellers, cops/robbers, ad infinitum.
Every day in almost every way, moral issues involve doing not just being. True “to a moral certainty” is equivalent to true “for all practical purposes“.
Prager comes so close to getting it here and then completely misses his own point. Math cannot be reduced to feeling because math follows specific rules. We can change those rules in some contexts such as non-Euclidean geometry, but we can’t change them after agreeing on the core axioms. There are no such clear, mutually agreed and rigorously followed postulates within Christianity, let alone across all extant religions.
As far as saving my dog before saving a stranger, that reflects not feelings but my values, specifically my value of doing whatever is necessary to protect those I love.
Thanks for addressing the math example. I saw that and thought, “whoa, that was quite a leap!” Prager seems to often do this, using comparisons that might sound equivalent but aren’t.
“… comparisons that might sound equivalent but aren’t.”
Such are the starting materials in the alchemy of dialectic – unification of opposites.
Here, appears to be negative dialectics.
This is bizarre because certainly Prager is aware of dialectic and its role in Woke Left and Right mystification.
Humans are raptorial apes with very long social memories. They are also notoriously ferocious organisms with frighteningly effective weaponry. If you treat a human unkindly, he and/or his relatives might kill you and your kin, erasing your descendants from the future, leaving alive and supporting other humans who have not harmed him, etc. Within a society this produces over time a morality, i.e., “Do not treat others as you would not like to be treated, lest you be killed,” an inclination not to harm other humans (unless you think they “deserve” it).
I see no requirement in this sort of feedback loop for belief in any magic gods.
I know that Prager has his audience, but the little I’ve read from him—or have seen on video—strikes me as no more than the same old appeals to authority that are taught as logical fallacies in every first semester logic class. It’s all nonsense, and it’s a shame that we have little choice but to respond to it. What a waste.
Morality coming from “the God” is obviously BS since the different people believe in different Gods. There is no legit argument from these God-touting ones why their God is the right one. So, I am surprised that we are still having to fight over these.
On the other hand, some opportunistic people do try to avoid personal responsibility by arguing that all of morality is subjective. Yes, technically speaking, it is. But, the most important part of morality is its shared nature. There are so many interesting things about how the shared moralities evolve over time, that I find it hard to take these super simplistic God-related arguments seriously at all.
Dear Mr. Prager:
Which god?
You still have all your work ahead of you.
Best Wishes,
Mark
He presents emotion and values as distinct, independent characteristics. This is a mistake. The relationship between the two is far more complex. Our emotional responses have given rise to many of our values.
I had that thought too. Some values (especially some taboos) seem to be just retconned emotions.
I am 100% sympathetic to what Prager is trying to get at. There is something in that stew of in-the-moment experience. At best, a projection of human Nature into something nobody can control.
I’m also pretty sure Prager presented a false dilemma, in two dimensions :
One material, the other intangible (emotion, values, etc.). If the unification of these dimensions is a leap of faith in God – even if it might be wrong – this is not how to show it.
“Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”
H. L. Mencken
From “The Divine Afflatus“, section IV in
Prejudices : Second Series
1921
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/53467/pg53467.txt
I feel compelled to note the ancient art of sophistry. FWIW here is a Stack Exchange — Philosophy question related to rhetoric vs. sophistry :
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/103454/how-should-the-difference-between-rhetoric-and-sophistry-be-characterized-when-t
… there are links there to pieces on e.g. demarcating sophistry from philosophy.
Maybe one day I’ll understand it all.
That headline would be a surprise to moral philosophers…and ancient Greeks!
Not to mention the billions of people in thousands of cultures (past, present, and future) who do not accept Prager’s God.
Prager’s arguments are the stupidest I’ve yet heard in a respectable outlet such as the FP. I get the impression he really isn’t very smart. There are a thousand holes in his arguments. I don’t have the patience to bother with them all, but here are a few points.
“Human beings are made in the image of God; animals are not.” So Hitler looks like Prager’s god? Whereas Prager’s dogs do not? A Buddhist would say all sentient beings are images of the Divine. What makes Prager’s take true and the Buddhist take false? The Buddhist take is more compassionate than Prager’s as it extends empathy to other sentient beings besides humans – beings who can suffer too.
Feelings of empathy, compassion, attachment and fairness are the basis for moral behaviors independently of religious dogmas, unless you are a psychopath, a person who lacks such feelings. Prager’s arguments assume everyone is a psychopath, or at least a sociopath, as evidenced by his hypothetical of a young child taking all the cookies for himself. Prager assumes everyone is like such a child with an undeveloped prefrontal cortex, which is also a trait of adult psychopaths. And young children will often show spontaneous sharing behaviors, so he is even wrong about kids. But Prager’s model of humanity is a psychopath model where everyone is a psychopath and acts as such unless they believe they will be punished by an angry god. I agree that religions can help to control psychopaths to the extent they wish to avoid eternal punishment, but most people are not psychopaths, therefore most atheists don’t go around raping women, stealing from others, committing murders etc. One has to wonder if maybe Prager’s fall caused some brain damage.
Is Dennis also paralyzed between his ears? That’s the way it seems to me.
Even “if there is no God,” I think it is still reasonable to say that torturing an infant is wrong. Yes, some people may argue that I just “feel” this way, but would they disagree with me?
As I said, there are some sentiments that most people agree with. However, torturing and killing infants was a fairly standard practice among American soldiers who were wiping out Native Americans in the early and mid-nineteenth century. They thought they were doing good: ridding the world of barbarians.
I do not steal, rape or murder and have no belief in any form of god. I am fairly sure that there have been many people with a certainty that a god exists who have done such things. Where does Prager think I get my morality from?
How does Prager know if the God of the Bible isn’t actually a demon? Would God demand his own son to be tortured and killed? Believers have no way to distinguish malevolent celestial beings from benevolent ones.
OK … broadly speaking, I see where Prager is coming from … sorry, I was away for the weekend.
If we believe in determinism, indeterminism, or some combination, then an independent morality seems completely unlikely. OK, we have a sense of morality and a concept of morality. We can define morality into and out of existence. Does it exist beyond a definition? Answers on the back of a postcard, please.