Syllogism on Circular Reasoning in Morality, Free Will, and God
Premise 1: Morality requires individuals to be responsible for their actions.
Premise 2: Responsibility requires free will (because if we have no free will, we cannot be responsible).
Premise 3: Free will is only meaningful if morality exists (since free will is generally understood as the capacity to choose morally right or wrong actions).
Premise 4: Therefore, morality depends on free will, and free will depends on morality.
Premise 5: This mutual dependence is circular reasoning, making the foundation for morality logically incoherent.
Premise 6: Furthermore, a secular state cannot base its legal or moral system on unprovable metaphysical claims like free will or divine authority.
Premise 7: The existence of free will has not been satisfactorily demonstrated; it remains a matter of interpretation without solid evidence.
Premise 8: Without proving free will is real and meant for morality, objective morality cannot be established.
Premise 9: Religious arguments that claim morality depends on God’s nature commit circular reasoning: "God is morality; God exists; therefore, morality exists."
Premise 10: This circular definition makes morality depend on the existence of God, and God’s existence is justified by the need for morality.
Premise 11: Instinctive knowledge of right and wrong cannot be attributed solely to God without committing an argument from ignorance.
Premise 12: True moral knowledge requires knowing how and why we know it, not merely "just knowing."
Conclusion:
Any argument that grounds objective morality on free will or God relies on circular reasoning and fails to provide a logically coherent, evidence-based foundation for objective morality.
THE ARGUMENT
Morality depends on you being responsible for what you do. To say that morality depends on free will is saying we need morality; therefore, we have free will, for free will is only for morality. That is circular reasoning and makes no sense. Free will would be no good to us if we cannot be reasonable in believing it. Also, we cannot ask a secular state to adopt a view that is a religious, spiritual, or philosophical guess. If we cannot be sensible to believe it, then there is no free will to be sensible, and that is not free will at all. A cosmetic free will is useless.
You need to prove not that morality exists but that free will exists. That makes it possible for morality if there is such a thing. You also need more than possible. If free will is not meant for morality, then there is no morality. You need to prove or satisfactorily demonstrate that it is meant for it. This cannot be done. The evidence needs to be solid, and it is not. It is a matter of interpretation. Morality is too serious to base on a guess or opinion, for that makes it contradict itself. It becomes tyranny in the cloak of virtue. For example, should we moralize about murderers and judge, condemn, and jail them on the basis that we guess they are morally accountable? Obviously not!
Analysis
Argument: "There is no morality if there is no God. There can be no way to value compassion, love, justice, gratitude, and kindness unless there is a God who values these things. Morality is grounded in God's character."
The religious use that argument to show that morality is facts, not opinions. For example, stealing a child's doll is wrong—as in factually wrong.
But it does not follow that the argument helps them become moral. They still seem to care more that instinct says certain things are wrong or right. Many care only about that.
It is obvious that truth does not depend on God. It is obvious that the religious belief that ALL truth comes from God is rubbish. If there were nothing and no God, it would be true that there is nothing. Objective morality is more about truth than anything else. It says it is true that you cannot use a baby as a football. Clearly, if truth is truth regardless of what God thinks or wants, then so is morality.
The argument that God creates morality; therefore, morality is true is a circular argument and thus a lie. Using God in that way ruins objective morality.
We think we know by instinct what is right and wrong. Believers say that God gave us that instinct and we can trust it for we can trust Him. But that is an argument from ignorance. The argument goes, "I don’t know how I got the instinct; therefore, it was probably God."
Obviously, the instinct is more important than God. To say that instinct tells you that right is right and wrong is wrong is to say the instinct matters more than the cause. If you see, you don't care what causes you to see. And the cause is not as important as seeing.
To say that real moral values exist because I somehow know they do is immoral, for you cannot really know unless you know how you know. Saying you "just know" something is a cheat.
It is a moral value that a circular argument is to be rejected.
Bringing God in makes the circular problems worse.
CIRCULAR DEFINITION
Those who say objective morality is God's nature of justice and love and so forth are guilty of saying, "God is morality. God is real, so morality is real." God is turned into a definition of morality, and morality is turned into a definition of God.
The moral argument for God says that right is right and moral is moral no matter what you think or anybody believes or thinks they know. That independence of morality from what anybody or everybody thinks of it or believes is NOT a definition of what objective morality is. It is a consequence.
The definition is that objective morality means that the rightness and goodness of three things—justice, mercy, and love—is a fact. Stepping over a cliff edge objectively means you will fall. You would not say that it is objectively true that you will fall simply because you will fall, even if you swear and are convinced that you would not. While the independence of objective facts from what we think is a good help in seeing what is objective fact or not, it is a tool and is not the definition.
FINALLY
God [or more accurately, the one who says he is real] is the enemy of objective morality.