Many of my students are fascinated with Sam Harris, one of the new village atheists. Harris argues, rather uniquely among many atheists, that objective morality exists and can be established or discovered using scientific ‘moral’ reasoning. I’ve characterized Harris’s attempt to find objective morals in this way as wishful thinking. But many of my students are convinced that Harris has indeed done it thanks to his massive skills as a thinker (he’s a nueroscientist by trade, not an ethicist or philosopher or theologian). Unfortunately for them, they have been duped by Harris’s fallacy of equivocation, when he takes words that have two or more meanings and uses them indiscriminately as if they only have one. William Lane Craig explains in this short clip from his debate with Harris:
thereformedmind 