If there's no God, is anything really wrong?

1. 1

   Start with the case nobody argues about

   Philosophers usually reach for the same example, because it is the one that stops the conversation: torturing a small child for fun.

   Almost every person who has ever lived would say that is wrong. Not distasteful. Not against the local rules. Wrong — and wrong for the man doing it even if he enjoys it, even if his whole society applauds, even if nobody ever finds out.

   That conviction is doing something unusual. It reaches past what people prefer and makes a claim about what is actually the case. It is the kind of thing that can be true whether or not anyone agrees with it.

   You do not have to prove that conviction is correct to notice how strange it is. Almost nothing else we feel behaves this way. Nobody thinks their dislike of olives binds a stranger.

2. 2

   The argument in three sentences

   First: real moral facts exist — some things are wrong for everybody, not just disapproved of by some people.

   Second: real moral facts of that kind need a ground outside of human opinion. A fact that binds every person cannot be manufactured by any person, or by a majority of persons, or by the species as a whole.

   Third: a ground for goodness that is outside of us, above us, and personal enough to obligate us is what people have always meant by God.

   That is the whole argument. Notice what it does not say. It does not say a person must believe in God to know right from wrong. It says the opposite: everybody already knows, and the argument is about what that knowledge is evidence of.

3. 3

   The quarrel test

   C.S. Lewis opened his best-known book with an observation about arguing, not about God. Listen to two people fight, he said, and you will hear something odd.

   Neither one says I want that seat. They say things like that is not fair, or you promised, or how would you like it if someone did that to you. Each one is appealing to a standard he expects the other to already accept.

   In Lewis's words (Mere Christianity, Book I): “Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are.”

   The point is not that the standard is always applied honestly. People bend it constantly and in their own favor. The point is that the bending is itself a tribute — you cannot cheat at a game that has no rules.

4. 4

   Paul made the same observation, much earlier

   Writing to Rome in the first century, Paul argued that people with no access to the Jewish law still act as though a law exists, and still accuse and excuse themselves by it.

   He calls this the work of the law written in their hearts. It is not a claim that everyone's conscience is accurate. It is a claim that everyone has one, and that its presence is a witness.

   Read carefully, the passage is doing evidence, not sermon. It points at a common human experience and says: that is a fingerprint.

   • “Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law.”

     Rom 2:14 — for when Gentiles that have not the law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are the law unto themselves→

   • “So they show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts either accusing or defending them”

     Rom 2:15 — in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith→

   • “He has shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?”

     Mic 6:8 — He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God?→

5. 5

   The oldest objection, stated fairly: the Euthyphro question

   Around 400 BC, Plato wrote a short dialogue in which Socrates corners a man named Euthyphro with a trap that has never gone away.

   Here is the trap, put in modern words and put fairly. Is a thing good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good?

   Take the first branch and goodness becomes arbitrary. If God had commanded cruelty, cruelty would be good — which makes the word good mean nothing more than whatever the strongest being says.

   Take the second branch and God becomes a middleman. If goodness is a standard God consults, the standard is above him, and you did not need God for the argument after all.

   This is a genuinely good objection. Anyone who waves it off has not understood it.

6. 6

   The answer that has been given for sixteen centuries

   The classical Christian reply is that the dilemma offers two doors when there are three.

   God does not invent goodness by decree, and he does not consult a goodness above himself. God's own character — his steady, unchanging nature — simply is what goodness is. Commands flow out of that nature; they do not create it and they do not answer to something beyond it.

   So the question could God have commanded cruelty? is like asking could a circle have had corners? It is not a limit on God's power. It is a statement about what the word means.

   Is this a dodge? A fair critic will say it relocates the problem rather than solving it, and that you may still ask why that nature counts as good. The honest reply is that every account of goodness eventually reaches a stopping place it cannot get behind. The question is which stopping place explains the most. A person whose character is the standard explains obligation — being answerable to someone — in a way that a free-floating abstract fact does not.

7. 7

   What this argument does not prove

   It does not get you to Jesus. At most it gets you to a moral source — not to the cross, not to the empty tomb, not to any particular religion.

   It does not prove that atheists cannot be moral, and any version that suggests so is a cheap version.

   And it is not a mathematical proof. It is a case that one explanation fits the evidence better than the others, and reasonable people look at the same evidence and rank the explanations differently.

   What it does do is put a real cost on the alternative. That cost is the subject of the objections below, and each one is printed here at the strength its defenders would want.

Each objection below is stated the way the people who hold it state it. If you hold one of these and think it is put unfairly here, that is a failure on our part — tell us.