God is the best explanation for objective moral values and duties (the moral argument)

God is the best explanation for objective moral values and duties (the moral argument)

We might not agree on all moral truths. One person might think sex outside of marriage is wrong, another person might think it’s right. One person might think it’s okay to drink alcohol, another might think it’s wrong. We might not agree on exactly what is morally right or morally wrong, but nearly all of us can agree on this: There is such a thing as moral right and moral wrong, moral good and moral evil. And we have a duty to do what is morally good.

This idea is what we might call “objective” morality. Nearly everyone agrees these moral values, and our inherent duty to adhere to them, exist. It seems to just be ingrained into us from birth. Again, different cultures might teach different morals, but all teach that there is such a thing as morals.

What objective morality is not

Objective morality is a commonly misunderstood concept, and many people who deny that morality is objective are in fact denying an improperly defined version of it. So it’s important to clarify what exactly I’m talking about when I talk about “objective morality” or “objective moral values and duties” (a phrase used by William Lane Craig that I think sums up what we’re talking about quite nicely).

Objective morality does not mean:

– Simplistic platitudes like “always tell the truth.” Rigid principles like this are plainly false. If you were hiding Jews in your home in Nazi Germany and the Nazis came to your door asking if any Jews were around, not only would most of us agree it’s morally permissible to lie to the Nazis, but we’d probably agree that it’s right and courageous to lie to the Nazis.

– That we only do good because we’re afraid God will punish us. This is a pretty common caricature leveled at theists by skeptics, and it’s not helped by the fact that some theists do say stuff like this. But I have addressed this misconception in detail here. In short, we don’t do good because we’re afraid God will punish us otherwise. We do good because we acknowledge that God is good, and we want to be like our Creator.

– A neat classification of every decision, event, and person into good and evil. I have talked before about how we like to turn people into heroes and villains depending on how they fit into the narrative through which we see the world. Of course, we cannot classify people that way, nor is it always easy to classify actions that way.

For example, there is the trolley problem, in which a switchboard operator is faced with the dilemma of allowing a train to kill five people tied up on the railroad tracks or diverting the train onto a different track where one person is tied up, killing him. It’s very hard to arrive at a certain answer to this problem, and it’s obvious in such a situation that there are no “good” choices. But we would likely not hold the switchboard operator morally culpable for making either choice.

A more positive example would be making the choice to become a doctor or a pro athlete. Neither choice is a morally wrong choice, even if one might save more lives as a doctor than as a pro athlete. Maybe if a person has bad motives (like greed for riches and fame), that would color our evolution of their choice. But if a person’s motives are genuine, we would not morally fault a person for pursuing athletics over medicine or vice-versa.

But that does not mean good and evil don’t exist. In fact, if we can agree that just one act is either objectively morally good or objectively morally evil, then we can show that absolute moral values and duties do exist. If even one instance of moral good or evil can be demonstrated, that is enough to show that moral good and evil exist.

What objective morality is

A simple definition of objective morality is this: A moral truth that holds true, no matter what you or I or any sentient creature believes. For example, we all agree that the Holocaust was evil. (I hate overusing Nazi analogies, but they are just the most obvious.) Even if Nazi Germany had won World War II and gone on to conquer the entire world, and everyone in the world today believed the Holocaust was good, that would not change the fact that it was morally evil.

We can think of other examples. It is evil to torture someone for fun. It is good to genuinely love your neighbor. These are moral truths that hold no matter what anyone else thinks. We don’t need anyone to scientifically prove this. We just know it, as surely as we know the world wasn’t created last Thursday. Atheist philosopher Michael Ruse puts it this way: “The man who says it is morally permissible to rape little children is just as mistaken as the man who says that 2+2=5.”

Why objective morality cannot exist without God

But if the secular worldview is correct, and we are just highly evolved primates, it makes no sense to say objective moral values and duties exist. First, they are immaterial — they can’t be measured with scientific instruments or revealed by scientific experiments. Second, if we are just highly evolved animals, it makes no why these moral obligations would apply to us alone, and not the other animals. Any sense of morality we had would just be a sort of herd adaptation — a delusion that convinced us to treat each other with humaneness and helped us survive. It would not be objective. Modern moral beliefs would reflect nothing more than the cultural preferences of different people groups, and the personal preferences of the individuals who have those beliefs.

And maybe some would agree with this. Maybe some would say that, as much as we would like to believe in it, morality is just an evolutionarily advantageous delusion. It may seem to some like denying objective morality is making the hard choice to accept the cold, hard truth of reality. But in actuality, it is nothing more than adopting a philosophical worldview. It’s making claims about the nature of morality that are no more grounded in science than those of any other worldview. And if such a worldview is true, then morality is indeed just personal preference. Saying that rape and genocide are wrong would carry no more objective weight than saying asparagus is distasteful to you. And that seems far more implausible than the idea that rape and genocide are, indeed, morally evil.

What ground do moral truths have to stand on?

Thankfully, pretty much everyone agrees that there are objective moral values and duties, including secularists. In fact, in the United States, it’s the political left wing — usually known for being less religious — that prides itself on taking moral stands on issues like racism, sexism, generalized bigotry, immigration, climate change, gun control, etc.

But what is the ground for that moral truth? To what can a secularist turn for support for his claim that racism is morally evil?

Not science. Morality isn’t something you can measure with scientific instruments. It’s a philosophical concept, not a scientific one. If you deny the existence of the immaterial, then you must deny the existence of morality.

You also can’t turn to societal consensus, as we’ve just seen in the Nazi example above. Moral values cannot be summed up as the general consensus society has decided upon.

Nor can the grounds of morality be, as atheist Sam Harris claims, whatever leads to human flourishing. If we, like all other creatures, are just the material products of a 4-billion-year process of evolution, the claim that we and our flourishing are somehow more valuable than the flourishing of apes or ants or super-intelligent aliens is just “species-ism.” It’s the species-level equivalent of racism or sexism — an unjustified belief that our species is superior to others.

The Euthyphro dilemma

There is one other objection that skeptics often bring up, and that is the Euthyphro dilemma. The Euthyphro dilemma, in the modern day, is often framed like this: Is something good because God wills it, or does God will something because it is good?

It’s sometimes meant to be a gotcha question. If you say something is good because God wills it is good, then the skeptic will reply that the standard of good and evil is arbitrary. If God willed that we murder one another, that would be good. But if you say God wills something because it is good, then that means God acknowledges and adheres to an objective standard of morality that exists independently of himself.

For as often as this objection is brought up, theologians have been answering it for centuries. The Euthyphro dilemma tries to trap the theist into giving an either/or answer, when it’s actually neither. Rather, God by nature is good. The very nature of God is goodness in perfection. God is the source and the definition of goodness. Goodness is whatever reflects God’s nature — his love, mercy, grace, beauty, wisdom. Evil is whatever does not.

So the Euthyphro dilemma fails as an objection, and actually provides us an even stronger foundation for objective moral values and duties by pointing us to who God is, not just what God wills.

God is the best explanation for objective morality

All material explanations for the objective moral values and duties we all know exist fail. The grounds of morality must lie outside this world and outside the material realm. There must be a higher standard by which moral good and evil are defined. Since there is a moral law, there must be a moral Lawgiver.

And evidently, that moral Lawgiver cared enough about that law that he gave us an awareness of it, along with a conscience that tells us we ought to do good rather than evil. That would strongly imply that the moral Lawgiver is by nature good — perhaps perfectly good — and wants us to be good as well.

Moral law, then, would be grounded in the nature of God, the foundation and source of all reality. God, as the maximally great being, defines moral perfection. Every being that wants to pursue goodness must do their best to model their lives after God’s character.

Questions:

• When faced with a choice whether to act morally or immorally, what is usually your motivation to make the morally good choice?
• Do you think the moral argument is a good argument? Would you use it to help make the case to a skeptical friend of God’s existence?

• How would you answer the Euthyphro dilemma?

About the Author

Clay