Defense Laboratory / Can morality exist without God?
1. The objection
“People say you need God to be good, or that without God there is no right and wrong. But I know plenty of atheists who are kind, honest and fair, and I know religious people who are cruel. Christians themselves cannot agree on what God commands, and the Bible approves things we now call evil, such as slavery and the killing of whole peoples. If God’s command is what makes something good, then morality is just power. If God commands things because they are already good, then goodness does not depend on God at all. Either way, we do not need him.
2. Investigation
Assumptions
- That the claim being made by believers is that atheists behave badly, rather than a claim about what grounds moral truth.
- That the question whether people can know right from wrong is the same as the question what makes right and wrong real.
- That Christians who hold that morality depends on God must hold that it depends on arbitrary commands.
- That disagreement about what God commands, or difficult passages in Scripture, show that morality is not grounded in God.
- That moral truths are real and binding on everyone, which the objection itself seems to assume when it calls cruelty and slavery evil.
Evidence and historical claims
- What does Romans 2:14-15 say about people who do not have the law, and what does it say is written in their hearts?
- What is the Euthyphro question in Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, and how did Christian thinkers such as Augustine and Aquinas answer a version of it?
- How does the natural law tradition, as taught by Aquinas and in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (paragraphs 1954 to 1960), say that moral knowledge is available to all people?
- What do secular moral philosophers, including those who defend moral realism and those who defend other views, say grounds right and wrong?
- How have Christians understood the difficult passages of the Old Testament on war and slavery, and how do Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant and Jewish readers differ?
- What does the historical record show about how Christian and non-Christian societies have treated moral questions, and what are the limits of drawing conclusions from it?
Philosophical and theological claims
- Are moral facts discovered, like mathematical truths, or made, like rules of a game?
- If goodness is real, what kind of thing is it, and could it exist if nothing else did?
- Does a view that grounds goodness in God’s nature, rather than in his commands, escape the Euthyphro dilemma, and is that answer persuasive?
Logical structure
- Premise 1: If morality depends on God, then people who do not believe in God cannot be moral.
- Premise 2: Many people who do not believe in God are moral.
- Conclusion: Therefore morality does not depend on God.
- Test each premise. Ask whether Premise 1 confuses moral knowledge or behavior with the foundation of morality, which is the claim most defenders of a divine foundation actually make.
3. Christian responses
Response A: Moral knowledge is open to all, moral truth rests on God (Catholic natural law)
The Catholic tradition teaches that the natural moral law is written into human nature and can be known by reason, so that people of any belief, or none, can recognize much of it. Paul speaks of Gentiles who do by nature the things contained in the law and who show the work of the law written in their hearts (Romans 2:14-15). Catholic teaching therefore does not say that unbelievers cannot be good.
What the tradition does claim is that the order of goodness has its source in God, who is the highest good, and that law is rooted in his wisdom. On this view the Euthyphro dilemma is a false choice: God neither invents goodness by decree nor submits to a standard outside himself, because goodness is the nature of God.
Response B: Goodness is participation in the life of God (Orthodox emphasis)
Orthodox theology tends to speak less of law and more of a person’s likeness to God. Virtue is understood as sharing in the divine life, and sin as a distortion of what human beings were made to be. The conscience is real in everyone, and Orthodox writers have often honored goodness found among those outside the church.
In this view the question is not whether a person without belief can do a good act, but what goodness ultimately is and what human beings are for. Orthodox Christians would say that the fullness of the answer is found in Christ.
Response C: Conscience is real, but sin darkens it and moral law has a Lawgiver (many Protestants)
Protestants of many kinds affirm that God has given everyone a conscience and a measure of moral knowledge, and Reformed writers call the goodness shown by unbelievers a gift of common grace. Many also hold that moral obligation is best explained if there is a God whose character is good and who holds people accountable, an argument made popular in the twentieth century by C. S. Lewis, among others.
Protestants differ on how far human reason is damaged by sin and on whether the divine command or God’s nature is the better ground. They generally agree with Catholics and Orthodox that the objection, to the extent it is aimed at the claim that unbelievers cannot be good, is aimed at a claim few Christian thinkers make.
Response D: Morality stands on its own grounds (secular and many philosophical views)
Many secular philosophers hold that morality does not need God. Some argue that right and wrong are grounded in human well-being, in the equal worth of persons, in the requirements of reason, or in agreements that make shared life possible. Some defend moral realism, the view that moral truths are real and objective, without any appeal to God; others hold that morality is a human construction and that its force does not require a divine source.
These thinkers add that the Euthyphro problem is real and that the best Christian answers, grounding goodness in God’s nature, only move the question one step back: why is that nature good? They also note that Christian moral views have changed over time, for example on slavery, and that this suggests that moral progress comes from moral reasoning more than from divine command.
4. The strongest counterargument
The strongest reply to Responses A through C is that locating goodness in God’s nature does not remove the difficulty. If we call God good, we already have some idea of goodness that we apply to him, and if goodness simply means whatever God is like, then the statement that God is good says nothing. Critics also point to the fact that believers disagree sharply about what God requires, so that appeal to God does not in practice settle moral disputes, and that the Bible contains passages that most Christians today read in ways that earlier Christians did not.
The strongest reply to Response D is that it has to explain what makes moral truths objectively binding if nothing more fundamental than human nature or human agreement stands behind them. Many secular philosophers admit that this is a hard problem, and some give up on objective moral truth. Defenders of a divine foundation argue that if human beings are the product of unguided natural processes, there is no clear reason why our moral feelings should track anything real. Secular thinkers reply that the same worry applies to our sense of logic and mathematics, and that this does not lead us to abandon them.
5. Your independent defense
- Write the objection in one sentence in your own words.
- Separate the question of moral behavior (can unbelievers be good?) from the question of moral foundation (what makes anything good?). Write a sentence on each.
- Read Romans 2:14-15 in the King James Version. Write two sentences on what Paul claims about moral knowledge outside the law.
- Read a short account of the Euthyphro question and write it out in your own words. Then write how a Catholic, an Orthodox Christian and a Protestant might each answer, in a form each would recognize.
- Read a defense of morality without God written by a secular philosopher. Summarize the strongest point in a paragraph its author would accept as fair.
- Choose your own position and write 300 to 500 words defending it. State what you believe makes things right or wrong, how you answer the Euthyphro question, and how you handle the passages of Scripture that trouble you.
- Write the strongest objection to your own position. Make it as strong as you can, then answer it.
- Write one sentence on what would change your mind.
- Keep this in your own notebook or document. Do not send it anywhere.