Objective morality and God

Atheists can be good, can tell right from wrong, and can raise decent children, and many do. Christianity itself expects this: Paul wrote that people without the Jewish law still “show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness” (Romans 2:15).

The question here is what makes a moral claim true in the first place, which is a different matter from how you know right from wrong or whether you live up to it. When you say an act is really wrong, and not merely unfashionable or forbidden by your culture, what is that a fact about?

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes moral arguments for God as a family of arguments that start from some feature of moral life and reason to God as its best explanation. This page follows one branch of that family. It does not prove Christianity. At most it points toward a good, personal source of moral reality, and you can weigh it against the alternatives below.

The first is obligation. Most people, on reflection, hold that torturing a child for entertainment is wrong, and would still be wrong if every society on earth came to approve of it. That is a claim about how things are, not about how we happen to feel. It also binds: it tells you what you must not do, whether or not you want to.

The second is human worth. You likely treat people as having a dignity that does not rise and fall with their usefulness, their strength, or the opinion of the majority. The disabled, the prisoner, and the enemy each keep a worth that rules out certain treatment. Opposing slavery and protecting refugees both depend on that conviction.

If you hold both of these, the question is what kind of world makes them true. Christianity answers that human beings are made “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:27), so their worth is given by their maker, not earned by achievement or granted by society. Whether or not you accept it, it is an answer. The secular alternatives come next.

• Morality is an evolved instinct. Our moral feelings very likely have an evolutionary history. That explains why we have them. It does not show they answer to anything true, or that they bind us when betrayal would pay. The philosopher Sharon Street has pressed this point from the other direction: if evolution shaped our moral beliefs for survival, we have little reason to trust they track moral truth at all.
• Morality is a social agreement. This makes the majority the standard. A society that agreed to persecute a minority would be doing nothing wrong, only something others dislike. Few people believe that. The reformer who stands against a whole culture is often right against it, which means agreement was never the standard.
• Moral facts exist on their own, with no God. This is the most serious option. The philosopher Erik Wielenberg defends what he calls “godless normative realism,” on which basic moral truths need no further grounding. The atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie took a different path: he judged that objective values would be too strange to fit the world, and concluded that there are none.

Mackie’s conclusion is consistent, and it has a cost: your outrage at real evil becomes, strictly, a mistake. The debate between Wielenberg’s view and the theistic one is live among philosophers and is not settled here.

The classic reply comes from Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro. Is something good because God commands it? Then goodness looks arbitrary, and God could have commanded cruelty. Or does God command it because it is good? Then goodness stands above God, and we never needed him to explain it.

The main theistic answer rejects both options. It grounds goodness in God’s own character, which Christians hold to be necessarily and unchangingly good, so goodness is neither an arbitrary decree nor a standard outside God. God does not consult a rule of love and justice, and he does not invent one. His commands express what he is, so cruelty was never a live option. The philosopher Robert Adams developed a version of this view by distinguishing the good from what is obligatory and holding that God is essentially good.

You may think this moves the puzzle rather than solving it, and some philosophers argue exactly that. It does show that the dilemma, as usually stated, leaves out the option most theists hold.

If some things are really wrong, then the wrongs in the world are real, and that is what gives force to moral objections against God, including the charge that hell is unjust. Those objections need a real standard of justice to stand on. The moral argument asks you to take that standard as seriously as your objection does.

A real moral law also applies to the person who invokes it. Christianity’s account of sin, meaning wrongdoing understood as a wrong against God as well as against other people, starts from the claim that everyone falls short of that law. Its answer is what it calls grace, kindness given to people who have not earned it, centered on the claim that Jesus bore the penalty for wrongdoing in his crucifixion.

Nothing on this page establishes that claim, which is a historical and theological question of its own. The argument here is narrower: if you are confident some things are really wrong, you already hold a conviction that fits more naturally in a world made by a good God than in one without him.