= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
MixedNuts comments on By Which It May Be Judged - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (934)
The standard religious reply to the baby-slaughter dilemma goes something like this:
Sure, and to the extent that somebody answers that way, or for that matter runs away from the question, instead of doing that thing where they actually teach you in Jewish elementary school that Abraham being willing to slaughter Isaac for God was like the greatest thing ever and made him deserve to be patriarch of the Jewish people, I will be all like, "Oh, so under whatever name, and for whatever reason, you don't want to slaughter children - I'll drink to that and be friends with you, even if the two of us think we have different metaethics justifying it". I wasn't claiming that accepting the first horn of the dilemma was endorsed by all theists or a necessary implication of theism - but of course, the rejectance of that horn is very standard atheism.
I don't think it's incompatible. You're supposed to really trust the guy because he's literally made of morality, so if he tells you something that sounds immoral (and you're not, like, psychotic) of course you assume that it's moral and the error is on your side. Most of the time you don't get direct exceptional divine commands, so you don't want to kill any kids. Wouldn't you kill the kid if an AI you knew to be Friendly, smart, and well-informed told you "I can't tell you why right now, but it's really important that you kill that kid"?
If your objection is that Mr. Orders-multiple-genocides hasn't shown that kind of evidence he's morally good, well, I got nuthin'.
What we have is an inconsistent set of four assertions:
At least one of these has to be rejected. Abraham (provisionally) rejects 1; once God announces 'J/K,' he updates in favor of rejecting 2, on the grounds that God didn't really want him to kill his son, though the Voice really was God.
The problem with this is that rejecting 1 assumes that my confidence in my foundational moral principles (e.g., 'thou shalt not murder, self!') is weaker than my confidence in the conjunction of:
But it's hard to believe that I'm more confident in the divinity of a certain class of Voices than in my moral axioms, especially if my confidence in my axioms is what allowed me to conclude 4 (God/morality identity of some sort) in the first place. The problem is that I'm the one who has to decide what to do. I can't completely outsource my moral judgments to the Voice, because my native moral judgments are an indispensable part of my evidence for the properties of the Voice (specifically, its moral reliability). After all, the claim is 'God is perfectly moral, therefore I should obey him,' not 'God should be obeyed, therefore he is perfectly moral.'
Well, deities should make themselves clear enough that (2) is very likely (maybe the voice is pulling your leg, but it wants you to at least get started on the son-killing). (3) is also near-certain because you've had chats with this voice for decades, about moving and having kids and changing your name and whether the voice should destroy a city.
So this correctly tests whether you believe (4) more than (1) - whether your trust in G-d is greater than your confidence in your object-level judgement.
You're right that it's not clear why Abraham believes or should believe (4). His culture told him so and the guy has mostly done nice things for him and his wife, and promised nice things then delivered, but this hardly justifies blind faith. (Then again I've trusted people on flimsier grounds, if with lower stakes.) G-d seems very big on trust so it makes sense that he'd select the president of his fan club according to that criterion, and reinforce the trust with "look, you trusted me even though you expected it to suck, and it didn't suck".
Well, if we're shifting from our idealized post-Protestant-Reformation Abraham to the original Abraham-of-Genesis folk hero, then we should probably bracket all this Medieval talk about God's omnibenevolence and omnipotence. The Yahweh of Genesis is described as being unable to do certain things, as lacking certain items of knowledge, and as making mistakes. Shall not the judge of all the Earth do right?
As Genesis presents the story, the relevant question doesn't seem to be 'Does my moral obligation to obey God outweigh my moral obligation to protect my son?' Nor is it 'Does my confidence in my moral intuitions outweigh my confidence in God's moral intuitions plus my understanding of God's commands?' Rather, the question is: 'Do I care more about obeying God than about my most beloved possession?' Notice there's nothing moral at stake here at all; it's purely a question of weighing loyalties and desires, of weighing the amount I trust God's promises and respect God's authority against the amount of utility (love, happiness) I assign to my son.
The moral rights of the son, and the duties of the father, are not on the table; what's at issue is whether Abraham's such a good soldier-servant that he's willing to give up his most cherished possessions (which just happen to be sentient persons). Replace 'God' with 'Satan' and you get the same fealty calculation on Abraham's part, since God's authority, power, and honesty, not his beneficence, are what Abraham has faith in.
If we're going to talk about what actually happened, as opposed to a particular interpretation, the answer is "probably nothing". Because it's probably a metaphor for the Hebrews abandoning human sacrifice.
Just wanted to put that out there. It's been bugging me.
[citation needed]
More like [original research?]. I was under the impression that's the closest thing to a "standard" interpretation, but it could as easily have been my local priest's pet theory.
You've gotta admit it makes sense, though.
To my knowledge, this is a common theory, although I don't know whether it's standard. There are a number of references in the Tanakh to human sacrifice, and even if the early Jews didn't practice (and had no cultural memory of having once practiced) human sacrifice, its presence as a known phenomenon in the Levant could have motivated the story. I can imagine several reasons:
(a) The writer was worried about human sacrifice, and wanted a narrative basis for forbidding it.
(b) The writer wasn't worried about actual human sacrifice, but wanted to clearly distinguish his community from Those People who do child sacrifice.
(c) The writer didn't just want to show a difference between Jews and human-sacrifice groups, but wanted to show that Jews were at least as badass. Being willing to sacrifice humans is an especially striking and impressive sign of devotion to a deity, so a binding-of-Isaac-style story serves to indicate that the Founding Figure (and, by implicit metonymy, the group as a whole, or its exemplars) is willing to give proof of that level of devotion, but is explicitly not required to do so by the god. This is an obvious win-win -- we don't have to actually kill anybody, but we get all the street-cred for being hardcore enough to do so if our God willed it.
All of these reasons may be wrong, though, if only because they treat the Bible's narratives as discrete products of a unified agent with coherent motives and reasons. The real history of the Bible is sloppy, messy, and zigzagging. Richard Friedman suggests that in the original (Elohist-source) story, Abraham actually did carry out the sacrifice of Isaac. If later traditions then found the idea of sacrificing a human (or sacrificing Isaac specifically) repugnant, the transition-from-human-sacrifice might have been accomplished by editing the old story, rather than by inventing it out of whole cloth as a deliberate rationalization for the historical shift away from the kosherness of human sacrifice. This would help account for the strangeness of the story itself, and for early midrashic traditions that thought that Isaac had been sacrificed. This also explains why the Elohist source never mentions Isaac again after the story, and why the narrative shifts from E-vocabulary to J-vocabulary at the crucial moment when Isaac is spared. Maybe.
P.S.: No, I wasn't speculating about 'what actually happened.' I was just shifting from our present-day, theologized pictures of Abraham to the more ancient figure actually depicted in the text, fictive though he be.
I've never heard it before.
After nearly a decade of studying the Old Testament, I finally decided very little of it makes sense a few years ago.
The problem has the same structure for MixedNuts' analogy of the FAI replacing the Voice. Suppose you program the AI to compute explicitly the logical structure "morality" that EY is talking about, and it tells you to kill a child. You could think you made a mistake in the program (analogous to rejecting your 3), or that you are misunderstanding the AI or hallucinating it (rejecting 2). And in fact for most conjunctions of reasonable empirical assumptions, it would be more rational to take any of these options than to go ahead and kill the child.
Likewise, sensible religionists agree that if someone hears voices in their head telling them to kill children, they shouldn't do it. Some of they might say however that Abraham's position was unique, that he had especially good reasons (unspecified) to accept 2 and 3, and that for him killing the child is the right decision. In the same way, maybe an AI programmer with very strong evidence for the analogies for 2 and 3 should go ahead and kill the child. (What if the AI has computed that the child will grow up to be Hitler?)
A few religious thinkers (Kierkegaard) don't think Abraham's position was completely unique, and do think we should obey certain Voices without adequate evidence for 4, perhaps even without adequate evidence for 3. But these are outlier theories, and certainly don't reflect the intuitions of most religious believers, who pay more lip service to belief-in-belief than actual service-service to belief-in-belief.
I think an analogous AI set-up would be:
What you call rejecting 3 is closer to rejecting 4, since it concerns my confidence that the AI is moral, not my confidence that the AI I programmed is the same as the entity outputting 'Kill your son.'
I disagree, because I think the analogy between the (4) of each case should go this way:
(4a) Analysis of "morality" as equivalent to a logical structure extrapolatable from by brain state (plus other things) and that an AI can in principle compute <==> (4b) Analysis of "morality" as equivalent to a logical structure embodied in a unique perfect entity called "God"
These are both metaethical theories, a matter of philosophy. Then the analogy between (3) in each case goes:
(3a) This AI in front of me is accurately programmed to compute morality and display what I ought to do <==> (3b) This voice I hear is the voice of God telling me what I ought to do.
(3a) includes both your 3 and your 4, which can be put together as they are both empirical beliefs that, jointly, are related to the philosophical theory (4a) as the empirical belief (3b) is related to the philosophical theory (4b).
Makes sense. I was being deliberately vague about (4) because I wasn't committing myself to a particular view of why Abraham is confident in God's morality. If we're going with the scholastic, analytical, logical-pinpointing approach, then your framework is more useful. Though in that case even talking about 'God' or a particular AI may be misleading; what 4 then is really asserting is just that morality is a coherent concept, and can generate decision procedures. Your 3 is then the empirical claim that a particular being in the world embodies this concept of a perfect moral agent. My original thought simply took your 4 for granted (if there is no such concept, then what are we even talking about?), and broke the empirical claim up into multiple parts. This is important for the Abraham case, because my version of 3 is the premise most atheists reject, whereas there is no particular reason for the atheists to reject my version of 4 (or yours).
We are mostly in agreement about the general picture, but just to keep the conversation going...
I don't think (4) is so trivial or that (4a) and (4b) can be equated. For the first, there are other metaethical theories that I think wouldn't agree with the common content of (4a) and (4b). These include relativism, error theory, Moorean non-naturalism, and perhaps some naive naturalisms ("the good just is pleasure/happiness/etc, end of story").
For the second, I was thinking of (4a) as embedded in the global naturalistic, reductionistic philosophical picture that EY is elaborating and that is broadly accepted in LW, and of (4b) as embedded in the global Scholastic worldview (the most steelmanned version I know of religion). Obviously there are many differences between the two philosophies, both in the conceptual structures used and in very general factual beliefs (which as a Quinean I see as intertwined and inseparable at the most global level). In particular, I intended (4b) to include the claim that this perfect entity embodying morality actually exists as a concrete being (and, implicitly,that it has the other omni-properties attributed to God). Clearly atheists wouldn't agree with any of this.
I can't speak for Jewish elementary school, but surely believing PA (even when, intuitively, the result seems flatly wrong or nonsensical) would be a good example to hold up before students of mathematics? The Monty Hall problem seems like a good example of this.
But that's just choosing the other horn of the dilemma, no? I.e., "god commands thing because they are moral."
And of course the atheist response to that is,
Not that anyone here didn't already know this, of course.
The wikipedia page lists some theistic responses that purport to evade both horns, but I don't recall being convinced that they were even coherent when I last looked at it.
It does choose a horn, but it's the other one, "things are moral because G-d commands them". It just denies the connotation that there exists a possible Counterfactual!G-d which could decide that Real!evil things are Counterfactual!good; in all possible worlds, G-d either wants the same thing or is something different mistakenly called "G-d". (Yeah, there's a possible world where we're ruled by an entity who pretends to be G-d and so we believe that we should kill babies. And there's a possible world where you're hallucinating this conversation.)
Or you could say it claims equivalence. Is this road sign a triangle because it has three sides, or does it have three sides because it is a triangle? If you pick the latter, does that mean that if triangles had four sides, the sign would change shape to have four sides? If you pick the former, does that mean that I can have three sides without being a triangle? (I don't think this one is quite fair, because we can imagine a powerful creator who wants immoral things.)
Three possible responses to the atheist response:
Sure. Not believing has bad consequences - you're wrong as a matter of fact, you don't get special believer rewards, you make G-d sad - but being immoral isn't necessarily one.
Well, you can be moral about most things, but worshiping my deity of choice is part of morality, so you can't be completely moral.
You could in theory, but how would you discover morality? Humans know what is moral because G-d told us (mostly in so many words, but also by hardwiring some intuitions). You can base your morality on philosophical reasoning, but your philosophy comes from social attitudes, which come from religious morality. Deviations introduced in the process are errors. All you're doing is scratching off the "made in Heaven" label from your ethics.
Obvious further atheist reply to the denial of counterfactuals: If God's desires don't vary across possible worlds there exists a logical abstraction which only describes the structure of the desires and doesn't make mention of God, just like if multiplication-of-apples doesn't vary across possible worlds, we can strip out the apples and talk about the multiplication.
I think that's pretty close to what a lot of religious people actually believe in. They just like the one-syllable description.
The obvious theist counter-reply is that the structure of God's desires is logically related to the essence of God, in a way that you can't have the goodness without the God nor more than God without the goodness, they are part of the same logical structure. (Aquinas: "God is by essence goodness itself")
I think this is a self-consistent metaethics as metaethics goes. The problem is that God is at the same time part of the realm of abstract logical structures like "goodness", and a concrete being that causes the world to exist, causes miracles, has desires, etc. The fault is not in the metaethics, it is in the confused metaphysics that allows for a concrete being to "exist essentially" as part of its logical structure.
ETA: of course, you could say the metaethics is self-consistent but also false, because it locates "goodness" outside ourselves (our extrapolated desires) which is where it really is. But for the Thomist I am currently emulating, "our extrapolated desires" sound a lot like "our final cause, the perfection to which we tend by our essence" and God is the ultimate final cause. The problem is again the metaphysics (in this case, using final causes without realizing they are mind projecting fallacy), not the metaethics.
As I explained here, it's perfectly reasonable to describe mathematical abstractions as causes.
My mind reduces all of this to "God = Confusion". What am I missing?
Well, I said that the metaphysics is confused, so we agree. I just think the metaethics part of religious philosophy can be put in order without falling into Euthyphro, the problem is in its broader philosophical system.
Not quite how I'd put it. I meant that in my mind the whole metaethics part implies that "God" is just a shorthand term for "whatever turns out to be 'goodness', even if we don't understand it yet", and that this resolves to the fact that "God" serves no other purposes than to confuse morality with other things within this context.
I think we still agree, though.
Using the word also implies that this goodness-embodying thing is sapient and has superpowers.
Or that it is sometimes useful to tell metaphorical stories about this goodness-embodying thing as if it were sapient and had superpowers.
Or as if the ancients thought it was sapient and had superpowers. They were wrong about that, but right about enough important things that we still value their writings.
How would a theist (at least the somewhat smart theist I'm emulating) disagree with that? That sounds a lot like "If all worlds contain a single deity, we can talk about the number one in non-theological contexts".
It seems like you're claiming an identity relationship between god and morality, and I find myself very confused as to what that could possibly mean.
I mean, it's sort of like I just encountered someone claiming that "friendship" and "dolphins" are really the same thing. One or both of us must be very confused about what the labels "friendship" and/or "dolphins" signify, or what this idea of "sameness" is, or something else...
See Alejandro's comment. Define G-d as "that which creates morality, and also lives in the sky and has superpowers". If you insist on the view of morality as a fixed logical abstraction, that would be a set of axioms. (Modus ponens has the Buddha-nature!) Then all you have to do is settle the factual question of whether the short-tempered creator who ordered you to genocide your neighbors embodies this set of axioms. If not, well, you live in a weird hybrid universe where G-d intervened to give you some sense of morality but is weaker than whichever Cthulhu or amoral physical law made and rules your world. Sorry.
Out of curiosity, why do you write G-d, not God? The original injunction against taking God's name in vain applied to the name in the old testament, which is usually mangled in the modern English as Jehovah, not to the mangled Germanic word meaning "idol".
People who care about that kind of thing usually think it counts as a Name, but don't think there's anything wrong with typing it (though it's still best avoided in case someone prints out the page). Trying to write it makes me squirm horribly and if I absolutely need the whole word I'll copy-paste it. I can totally write small-g "god" though, to talk about deities in general (or as a polite cuss). I feel absolutely silly about it, I'm an atheist and I'm not even Jewish (though I do have a weird cultural-appropriatey obsession). Oh well, everyone has weird phobias.
How interesting. Phobias are a form of alief, which makes this oddly relevant to my recent post.
I don't think it's quite the same. I have these sinking moments of "Whew, thank... wait, thank nothing" and "Oh please... crap, nobody's listening", but here I don't feel like I'm being disrespectful to Sky Dude (and if I cared I wouldn't call him Sky Dude). The emotion is clearly associated with the word, and doesn't go "whoops, looks like I have no referent" upon reflection.
What seems to be behind it is a feeling that if I did that, I would be practicing my religion wrong, and I like my religion. It's a jumble of things that give me an oxytocin kick, mostly consciously picked up, but it grows organically and sometimes plucks new dogma out of the environment. ("From now on Ruby Tuesday counts as religious music. Any questions?") I can't easily shed a part, it has to stop feeling sacred of its own accord.
Thought experiment: suppose I were to tell you that every time I see you write out "G-d", I responded by writing "God", or perhaps even "YHWH", on a piece of paper, 10 times. Would that knowledge alter your behavior? How about if I instead (or additionally) spoke it aloud?
Edit: downvote explanation requested.
It feels exactly equivalent to telling me that every time you see me turn down licorice, you'll eat ten wheels of it. It would bother me slightly if you normally avoided taking the Name in vain (and you didn't, like, consider it a sacred duty to annoy me), but not to the point I'd change my behavior.
Which I didn't know, but makes sense in hindsight (as hindsight is wont to do); sacredness is a hobby, and I might be miffed at fellow enthusiasts Doing It Wrong, but not at people who prefer fishing or something.
1) I don't believe you.
2) I don't respond to blackmail.
My usual response to reading 2) is to think 1).
I wonder if you really wouldn't respond to blackmail if the stakes were high and you'd actually lose something critical. "I don't respond to blackmail" usually means "I claim social dominance in this conflict".
What???!!! Are you suggesting that I'm actually planning on conducting the proposed thought experiment? Actually, physically, getting a piece of paper and writing out the words in question? I assure you, this is not the case. I don't even have any blank paper in my home - this is the 21st century after all.
This is a thought experiment I'm proposing, in order to help me better understand MixedNuts' mental model. No different from proposing a thought experiment involving dust motes and eternal torture. Are you saying that Eliezer should be punished for considering such hypothetical situations, a trillion times over?
Why should s/he care about what you choose to do?
I don't know. That's why I asked.
Isn't blackmail a little extreme?
Yes, which is why I explicitly labled it as only a thought experiment.
This seems to me to be entirely in keeping with the LW tradition of thought experiments regarding dust particles and eternal torture.... by posing such a question, you're not actually threatening to torture anybody.
Edit: downvote explantion requested.
You can eliminate inconvenient phobias with flooding. I can personally recommend sacrilege.
EDIT: It sounds like maybe it's not just a phobia.
I think there's a bug in your theist-simulation module ^^
I've yet to meet one that could have spontaneously come up with that statement.
Anyway, more to the point... in the definition of god you give, it seems to me that the "lives in sky with superpowers" part is sort of tacked on to the "creates morality" part, and I don't see why I can't talk about the "creates morality" part separate from the tacked-on bits. And if that is possible, I think this definition of god is still vulnerable to the dilemma (although it would seem clear that the second horn is the correct one; god contains a perfect implementation of morality, therefore what he says happens to be moral).
Hi there.
Are you a real theist or do you just like to abuse the common terminology (like, as far as I can tell, user:WillNewsome)? :)
A real theist. Even a Christian, although mostly Deist these days.
So you think there's a god, but it's conceivable that the god has basically nothing to do with our universe?
If so, I don't see how you can believe this while giving a similar definition for "god" as an average (median?) theist.
(It's possible I have an unrepresentative sample, but all the Christians I've met IRL who know what deism is consider it a heresy... I think I tend to agree with them that there's not that much difference between the deist god and no god...)
I typically don't accept the mainstream Judeo-Christian text as metaphorical truth, but if I did I can settle that question in the negative: The Jehovah of those books is the force that forbade knowledge and life to mankind in Genesis, and therefore does not embody morality. He is also not the creator of morality nor of the universe, because that would lead to a contradiction.
I dunno, dude could have good reasons to want knowledge of good and evil staying hush-hush. (Forbidding knowledge in general would indeed be super evil.) For example: You have intuitions telling you to eat when you're hungry and give food to others when they're hungry. And then you learn that the first intuition benefits you but the second makes you a good person. At this point it gets tempting to say "Screw being a good person, I'm going to stuff my face while others starve", whereas before you automatically shared fairly. You could have chosen to do that before (don't get on my case about free will), but it would have felt as weird as deciding to starve just so others could have seconds. Whereas now you're tempted all the time, which is a major bummer on the not-sinning front. I'm making this up, but it's a reasonable possibility.
Also, wasn't the tree of life totally allowed in the first place? We just screwed up and ate the forbidden fruit and got kicked out before we got around to it. You could say it's evil to forbid it later, but it's not that evil to let people die when an afterlife exists. Also there's an idea (at least one Christian believes this) that G-d can't share his power (like, polytheism would be a logical paradox). Eating from both trees would make humans equal to G-d (that part is canon), so dude is forced to prevent that.
You can still prove pretty easily that the guy is evil. For example, killing a kid (through disease, not instant transfer to the afterlife) to punish his father (while his mother has done nothing wrong). Or ordering genocides. (The killing part is cool because afterlife, the raping and enslaving part less so.) Or making a bunch of women infertile because it kinda looked like the head of the household was banging a married woman he thought was single. Or cursing all descendents of a guy who accidentally saw his father streaking, but being A-OK with raping your own father if there are no marriageable men available. Or... well, you get the picture.
You sure? They believed in a gloomy underworld-style afterlife in those days.
Well, it's not as bad as it sounds, anyway. It's forced relocation, not murder-murder.
How do you know what they believed? Mordern Judaism is very vague about the afterlife - the declassified material just mumbles something to the effect of "after the Singularity hits, the righteous will be thawed and live in transhuman utopia", and the advanced manual can't decide if it likes reincarnation or not. Do we have sources from back when?
As I said, that's debatable; most humans historically believed that's what "death" consisted of, after all.
That's not to say it's wrong. Just debatable.
Eh?
Google "sheol". It's usually translated as "hell" or "the grave" these days, to give the impression of continuity.
No, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge (of Good and Evil) were both forbidden.
My position is that suppressing knowledge of any kind is Evil.
The contradiction is that the creator of the universe should not have created anything which it doesn't want. If nothing else, can't the creator of the universe hex-edit it from his metauniverse position and remove the tree of knowledge? How is that consistent with morality?
Genesis 2:16-2:17 looks pretty clear to me: every tree which isn't the tree of knowledge is okay. Genesis 3:22 can be interpreted as either referring to a previous life tree ban or establishing one.
If you accept the next gen fic as canon, Revelations 22:14 says that the tree will be allowed at the end, which is evidence it was just a tempban after the fall.
Where do you get that the tree of life was off-limits?
Sheesh. I'll actively suppress knowledge of your plans against the local dictator. (Isn't devil snake guy analogous?) I'll actively suppress knowledge of that weird fantasy you keep having where you murder everyone and have sex with an echidna, because you're allowed privacy.
Standard reply is that free will outweighs everything else. You have to give people the option to be evil.
There is no reason an omnipotent God couldn't have created creatures with free will that still always choose to be good. See Mackie, 1955.
No, if I give the creator free will, he doesn't have to give anyone he creates the option. He chose to create the option or illusion, else he didn't exercise free will.
It seems like you require a reason to suppress knowledge; are you choosing the lesser of two evils when you do so?
Presumably the creator did want the trees, he just didn't want humans using it. I always got the impression that the trees were used by God(and angels?), who at the point the story was written was less the abstract creator of modern times and more the (a?) jealous tribal god of the early Hebrews (for example, he was physically present in the GOE.) Isn't there a line about how humanity must never reach the TOL because they would become (like) gods?
EDIT:
Seriously? Knowledge of any kind?
Yes. Suppressing knowledge of any kind is evil. It's not the only thing which is evil, and acts are not necessarily good because they also disseminate knowledge.
This is a classic case of fighting the wrong battle against theism. The classic theist defence is to define away every meaningful aspect of God, piece by piece, until the question of God's existance is about as meaningful as asking "do you believe in the axiom of choice?". Then, after you've failed to disprove their now untestable (and therefore meaningless) theory, they consider themselves victorious and get back to reading the bible. It's this part that's the weak link. The idea that the bible tells us something about God (and therefore by extension morality and truth) is a testable and debatable hypothesis, whereas God's existance can be defined away into something that is not.
People can say "morality is God's will" all they like and I'll just tell them "butterflies are schmetterlinge". It's when they say "morality is in the bible" that you can start asking some pertinent questions. To mix my metaphors, I'll start believing when someone actually physically breaks a ball into pieces and reconstructs them into two balls of the same original size, but until I really see something like that actually happen it's all just navel gazing.