Objective Morality and God

The moral argument is constantly misheard, so state it precisely. It does not claim that unbelievers cannot be good, cannot tell right from wrong, or cannot raise decent families. They plainly can and do. The argument is not about moral knowledge (how we come to recognize right and wrong) or moral practice (whether we live up to it). It is about moral ontology: what kind of reality could make moral obligations genuinely binding on us in the first place.

The Stanford Encyclopedia survey describes this whole family of arguments as reasoning from some feature of morality to God as its best explanation. The Christian is not insisting that atheists have no morals; he is pressing a question the atheist must also answer: when you say an act is truly wrong, not just unfashionable or forbidden by your tribe, what makes that true?

Two features of moral life resist easy reduction.

The first is binding obligation. Most people, on reflection, hold that torturing a child for entertainment is not just distasteful or socially counterproductive but really, mind-independently wrong, even if every society came to approve of it. That is a claim about how things are, not about how we happen to feel. A standard form of the argument grants exactly this: there are objective moral facts, and then asks what best explains them.

The second is human worth. We treat persons as having a dignity that does not rise and fall with their usefulness, their power, or the consensus around them. The weak, the unborn, the enemy, and the prisoner each retain a worth that forbids certain treatment. But if a human being is finally just rearranged matter, it is hard to locate where that non-negotiable worth could come from. Christianity grounds it in persons being made in the image of God: a dignity conferred by the Creator, not earned by achievement or assigned by society.

The unbeliever has real answers here, and they deserve real engagement rather than caricature.

• Morality is an evolved instinct. Very likely our moral feelings did emerge through evolution. But that explains the feeling, not the obligation. If “do not betray your friend” reduces to a useful impulse inherited from our ancestors, then in the cases where betrayal would actually pay, the impulse carries no authority to bind me. Explaining why we have moral sentiments is not the same as showing those sentiments answer to anything true.
• Morality is a social contract. Useful, but it makes the majority the measure. A society that agreed to exterminate a minority would, on this view, be doing nothing objectively wrong; only something others dislike. Almost no one truly believes that. The reformer who stands against his entire culture is often right against the consensus, which means the consensus was never the standard.
• Moral facts simply exist, with no God. This is the most serious option: a non-theistic moral realism on which values are real, abstract features of reality. It should be weighed honestly. But it strains to explain how an abstract value could obligate a person or issue anything resembling a command. The atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie felt this so acutely that he judged objective moral facts would be metaphysically “queer,” too strange to fit a purely physical world, and so denied they exist at all. That is consistent, but notice the cost: moral outrage at real evil becomes, strictly, a useful illusion. Theism lets us keep the conviction that some things are really wrong.

The classic counter is the Euthyphro dilemma: is something good because God commands it (then goodness is arbitrary; he could have commanded cruelty) or does God command it because it is good (then goodness stands above God, and we never needed him)?

The Christian answer declines both horns. Goodness is neither an arbitrary divine decree nor a standard hovering above God; it is grounded in God’s own necessary and unchanging character. He does not consult an external rule of love and justice, nor invent one on a whim. He is love and justice, and his commands express what he is. Cruelty was never a live option, because it contradicts his nature.

Here the argument turns pastoral. The same moral law that lets us name evil for what it is also turns and indicts us, which is the honest weight underneath every appeal to the problem of evil. If there is a real moral law, we have all broken it. Christianity does not flinch from that verdict; it answers it with a cross. The God who grounds the law is the God who bore its penalty.