The Moral Argument for God

Another classic argument for God is the Moral Argument.  For this blog I am using William Lane Craig’s section on the Moral Argument in his book Reasonable Faith as an outline.[1]

If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.

You do not have to believe in God to be good and the Bible agrees.  Romans teaches that God’s moral law is written on the hearts of all men – not just believers.[2]  You can know what a book says and deny the author exists, but there would be no book without an author.[3] The premise is that if God doesn’t exist, then any moral laws are simply subjective, like a favorite flavor of ice cream.

If there isn’t a fixed standard for moral law, then it is not objective.

Just like you need a point of reference before you can do almost anything in science, you must have a point of reference before you can call something objectively wrong or evil.  When calculating displacement, a defined “zero-level” is necessary to know your exact location.  Objective standards of length, time, and mass are necessary to make meaningful measurements.  We understand that to be scientifically objective you must have a point of reference.  The same is true with morality.  You must have a standard of good and evil for moral laws to be objective; the right and wrong must refer to the moral action (the object), not someone’s thought, belief, or preference (the subject).

Michael Ruse, philosopher of science is correct when he states that any thought of morality being objective without God is an illusion.

The position of the modern evolutionist...is that humans have an awareness of morality...because such an awareness is of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth.... Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” they think they are referring above and beyond themselves.... Nevertheless...such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction...and any deeper meaning is illusory….[4]

The objective nature of morality is inexplicable without an outside fixed reference point.  Without God as the standard, morals become simply personal preferences.  Without God, what does anyone mean by good and bad?  Without God, what grounds (other than personal survival) would anyone have to care about the environment?  Without God who says you should help the poor?  If God does not exist, morality is simply what you think it ought to be – a personal preference and nothing else.   

Furthermore, in a naturalistic world view, any moral laws that might objectively exist would be beyond our grasp, and we would have no objective or rational reason to obey them if they did exist. If atheism was true then nothing ultimately mattered in the end since meaning and purpose are merely subjective illusions conjured up in the minds of men in a universe that couldn’t care. Nothing mattered. This is Dennett’s ‘universal acid’ and Darwin’s ideas applied that acid to the human condition. If molecules led to cells, and cells to organs, and organs to bodies, then the ‘molecules-to-man’ hypothesis was true. We are really just wet computers responding to external stimuli in mechanical and unconscious ways. No soul, no consciousness.  Just machines.[5]

Naturalistic explanations for moral laws are subjective

On the naturalist view, if morality evolved as a means of survival, then there is no right or wrong!  Richard Dawkins agrees with this when he makes the point that, from his naturalistic world view, life has no purpose and there is no such thing as evil or good.[6]  This means that the only way to decide who is good and bad is with personal preference.  Hitler could be labeled good.  Mother Teresa could have been evil. If there is no God, and therefore no objective standard, the definition of good is whatever you personally want it to be, just like what flavors of ice cream you like or dislike.

A typical response to this claim is that we as a society decide good and evil; we do what is best for us as a group.  This actually makes the point that morals are subjective without God – we decide.  Was the Third Reich “good” because their policies helped the most numbers of people?  Did their policies then become “bad” when the rest of the world found out what they were doing? Can a single person like Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King decide for society that what the group thought was good is now bad?  It is pretty clear that we all know objectively that murder and oppression are always evil; like helping the poor and caring for the environment are always good.

Another response to this argument is that our sense of right and wrong has evolved along with us.  This again shows that morality is subjective without God.  If our moral beliefs have been naturally selected for survival, then we have no basis to believe that what was selected is actually true and objective. Is rape always wrong or do we only think it is wrong because it helps us survive? Is torturing children for fun always evil or do we only think that because it aids in our survival? There is no way you can say something is the truth if it was selected only for its survival value.

Explaining how we know objective right and wrong isn’t an explanation for the moral laws.

If one argues instead that morality didn’t change as we advanced, but “evolution” is how we came to know objective right and wrong, then they are making the logical error of the genetic fallacy.  Showing how we came to know something does not falsify the fact that it exists.  The existence of objective moral laws is ontological.  How we know what the laws are is epistemological.  Arguing against ontology by using epistemology doesn’t work. The same error is made when one argues that society taught us what the moral laws are.

“In short, on an atheistic, naturalistic world view, there seems to be no basis for affirming the existence of objective moral values and duties. Certainly we have a sense of morality, but on naturalism that sense is an illusion wrought by socio-biological conditioning.”[7]

Conclusion:  God Exists

Since objective moral laws actually do exist (murder is wrong, torturing babies for fun is evil, self-sacrifice is noble, helping the poor is good), then there must be a transcendent standard for such laws. It is therefore reasonable to claim that God exists.

Here is a 5-6 minute summary video from Reasonable Faith: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxiAikEk2vU

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[1] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, Crossway Books, 2008

[2] Romans 2:14-15

[3] I heard Frank Turek say this, but can’t find the exact reference

[4] Michael Ruse, “Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics,” in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 262, 268-9.

[5] Rossiter, W. 2015. Shadow of Oz: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God.

[6] Scheff, Liam. 2007. The Dawkins Delusion. Salvo, 2:94.

[7] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, Crossway Books, 2008