Is a fact a value?  That's the question we discussed at my atheist discussion group last night.  In a book he published a few years ago, Sam Harris, well known for the several books and countless speeches he's disseminated about the foolishness of religion and the virtue of atheism, insists that a fact is a value.  Why does he do so?  In regard to morality, he says, if a fact, for instance, the fact, as he sees it, that all humans should experience well being, is a value, then we do not need an external source to construct our sense of morality.  If a fact is not a value, however, his argument collapses.
     But is a fact really a value?  A fact is only a value if we deem it so.  Yet to do this is to make a judgment of value!  It becomes very circular.  Moreover, if, as Harris insists, human well being is the highest fact/value, how do we determine what that is?  What if people around the world have different ideas about what constitutes well being?  How do we decide who's right?  Although Harris claims he has developed an objective way to determine morality apart from a transcendent measure, he really has not.  In the end, his solution lapses into subjectivism.
     Bottom line, there are really only two ways to approach this.  One, it is to admit that we need a transcendent source of moral value to adjudicate issues of value.  Two, it is to acknowledge that we are permanently consigned to resolve issues of value on the basis of our own subjectivity.  To adopt the first alternative is to of course invoke the idea of God; yet to adopt the second is to admit that we really have no way to determine what is universally true.
     And is this the world we want?