The bible does not present a uniform set of morals, much less an Objective one.
Refutation
This trades on an equivocation between *moral law* and *positive (civil/ceremonial) law*. Aquinas's classical threefold division of Torah (*Summa Theologiae* I-II q.99) distinguishes the moral law (rooted in the imago Dei and natural law, epitomized in the Decalogue and the double love-command), the ceremonial law (Israel's cultic/sacrificial system, typologically fulfilled and thus retired in Christ per Hebrews), and the judicial law (Israel's specific civil statutes as a theocratic nation-state, time- and place-bound). Dietary codes and sacrificial regulations belong to the ceremonial category; their New Covenant abrogation (Acts 10; Hebrews 9-10) is not a reversal of moral judgment but the intended fulfillment of a typological system, explicitly announced in advance (Jer 31:31-34's promise of a new covenant). The moral core is in fact remarkably stable across the canon: the Decalogue's prohibitions on murder, theft, adultery, and false witness are reaffirmed and intensified, not relaxed, in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5:21-48). Walter Kaiser's *Toward Old Testament Ethics* traces this consistent moral center running beneath the surface variation in civil application, the same way a nation's unchanging commitment to justice can produce different specific statutes as circumstances change without implying moral relativism. A further honest point: even within positive law, God's own character (Mal 3:6, Jas 1:17) is presented as the fixed reference point that positive law variously approximates given Israel's 'hardness of heart' (Jesus's own diagnosis of the Mosaic divorce provision, Matt 19:8) — the text itself names some provisions as concessive rather than as expressions of the ideal, which is a very different claim than 'the Bible has no stable morality.'
Positive case
Divine command theory grounded in God's essentially and necessarily good nature (Robert Adams, *Finite and Infinite Goods*) supplies the only stable metaphysical ground for objective moral facts: goodness is not arbitrary divine fiat (contra the Euthyphro dilemma's false dichotomy) but flows from God's own unchanging nature, of which His commands are an expression. The natural-law tradition (Aquinas) further shows that the moral core of biblical ethics coheres with what is, in principle, knowable by unaided reason reflecting on human nature and its proper ends — precisely the stability the objection denies exists.
Steelmanned objection
The moral requirements found across the canon vary significantly: dietary restrictions, animal sacrifice, capital punishment for numerous offenses, and purity laws are prominent under the Sinai covenant but absent or reversed under the New Covenant. If morality were genuinely objective and grounded in an unchanging God, one would expect a single fixed moral code rather than this variation — the variation instead looks like the shifting, evolving output of human communities revising their own norms over time, exactly what we would expect if there is no transcendent moral lawgiver at all.
Incoherence of the alternative
Atheistic naturalism cannot ground objective moral facts at all. J.L. Mackie, an atheist, conceded exactly this in his 'argument from queerness': objective moral properties would be metaphysically strange entities with no place in a purely physical universe, so moral realism sits uneasily with naturalism. If there is no transcendent, necessarily-existing Good, then 'objective morality' on atheism reduces to evolved preference, social convention, or brute assertion — which is precisely the variability-without-foundation the objection claims to find in Scripture. The critique, if sound, boomerangs far more damagingly onto secular ethics than onto a theological ethic that at least identifies a candidate ground (God's unchanging nature) for the moral core it claims is invariant.
Fallacy tags
equivocation
Sources cited
- Robert Merrihew Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods — modified divine command theory
- Walter Kaiser, Toward Old Testament Ethics — on the moral/civil/ceremonial distinction and OT ethical coherence
- Edward Feser, The Last Superstition — on natural law and the incoherence of grounding objective morality in naturalism
Scripture referenced
Matt 5:21-48, Jer 31:31-34, Matt 19:8, Mal 3:6, Acts 10, Hebrews 9-10
Confidence
strong
Review status
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Source locator
Positions → row 2
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