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The Evidence Room · The Standard

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

Summary

Almost nobody can actually live as though cruelty is merely unpopular, and a real right and wrong is far easier to explain if goodness is rooted in someone's character than if it is only something our species happens to feel.

  • Almost nobody lives as though cruelty were merely unpopular, and that intuition is close to universal.
  • Every account of the intuition has a bill to pay, and the page prints each bill.
  • Grounding goodness in the settled character of a personal God pays one too, and the hard commands are where it comes due.
  • The argument delivers a comparison between explanations, never a proof.
  • It reaches a moral God, not Jesus, and it never showed that unbelievers cannot be good.

THE CLAIM

Real right and wrong is easier to explain if goodness has a source.

  1. 1Start with the case nobody argues aboutWitness
  2. 2The argument in three sentencesManuscript
  3. 3The quarrel testWitness
  4. 4Paul made the same observation, much earlierThe text
  5. The remaining 2steps →

WHERE IT STANDS

The intuition is near-universal; its best explanation is a person.

moderate confidence

Marcus Brown wanted this question asked first, and put it in one line: absolute good means there is an absolute God.

Take the case philosophers reach for when they want an argument to stop: a man who tortures a small child for entertainment. Almost every person who has ever lived would call that evil: not distasteful, not against the local rules, but wrong for the man doing it even if he enjoys it, even if his whole society applauds, even if nobody ever finds out.

How the question is being taken here50 words

The question is what makes it wrong. When you say he is doing something evil, are you reporting a fact about him, or a fact about you and the culture that raised you?

Every answer to that costs something, and the cost of each is printed below at full strength.

Walking it through

  1. 01Witness

    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.

    The rest of this step116 words

    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. 02Manuscript

    The argument in three sentences

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

    The rest of this step109 words

    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. 03Witness

    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.

    The rest of this step131 words

    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. 04The text

    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.

    The rest of this step59 words

    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.

  5. 05Manuscript

    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.

    The rest of this step106 words

    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. 06Manuscript

    The answer that has been given for sixteen centuries

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

    The rest of this step161 words

    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.

The objections, at full strength

Each objection below is stated the way the people who hold it state it, at the same type size as the answer. If you hold one of these and think it is put unfairly here, tell us.

  1. THE OBJECTION01Evolution already explains why we feel that wayOur moral intuitions have an ordinary history. Creatures that protected their young, punished cheats, and cooperated in groups left more descendants than creatures that did not. Over a long time, natural selection would install exactly the feelings we have: powerful revulsion at harming children, strong reactions to betrayal, a sense that these feelings are objective.Michael Ruse and E.O. Wilson argued the illusion of objectivity is itself the adaptive part: an intuition we could shrug off would not do its job. So the universality you find so impressive is precisely what you would predict on a purely natural story, and no God is required anywhere in it.

    THE ANSWER

    This is a strong explanation, and Christians should grant everything it actually establishes: there is very likely a natural history behind our moral feelings, and it may be exactly the one described. But notice what it explains. It explains why we have the feelings.

    It does not touch the question of whether the feelings are ever right about anything. The account works just as well if cruelty is genuinely wrong and if it is not, which means it is not evidence either way about the truth of moral claims. And it comes with a bill.

    If moral intuition is a useful adaptation and nothing more, then torturing a child for fun is not wrong; it is something our nervous systems were built to hate. Some who hold this view accept that conclusion openly, and their honesty deserves respect. The point of this page is only that the conclusion is the price, and it should be paid in daylight rather than quietly avoided.

  2. THE OBJECTION02Moral facts can be real without GodThere is a serious position here, and it is not a dodge. Erik Wielenberg has argued (Robust Ethics, Oxford University Press, 2014) that basic moral truths are simply brute necessary facts: true in every possible world, depending on nothing, explained by nothing further, in the way the truths of mathematics are. Nobody thinks two and two make four because a person decided it, and nobody thinks that makes arithmetic arbitrary.On this view moral properties supervene on natural ones: causing gratuitous agony just is wrong, necessarily, and asking what grounds it is like asking what grounds the number seven. The theist stops explaining at God's nature; this view stops one step earlier. Neither has an infinite regress, so neither can accuse the other of one.

    THE ANSWER

    This is the most serious version of moral realism without God, and it cannot be dismissed with a slogan. Two honest observations. First, it is a real cost that the view leaves obligation unexplained.

    Facts do not command anybody. A brute necessary truth can tell you that an act has the property of wrongness, but it is difficult to see how it puts you under an obligation, or to whom you would be answerable, which is a large part of what people mean when they call something a duty. Wielenberg has answers to this and they are worth reading in full.

    Second, the parallel with mathematics may cut the other way: many philosophers who think numbers are real also think their reality is a genuine puzzle for a purely physical picture of the world, not an easy case to lean on. Where this lands honestly is that a thoughtful person can hold this position, and the theist's claim is comparative (that grounding goodness in a personal character explains obligation better), not that the alternative is incoherent.

  3. THE OBJECTION03Morality is just an agreement we make with each otherHobbes saw it clearly in Leviathan (1651): outside of agreed rules, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Rules against killing, stealing, and lying are not mysterious cosmic facts; they are the terms rational people would accept in exchange for everyone else accepting them too. This explains the data economically.It explains why moral rules cluster around cooperation and harm. It explains why they are enforced by shame and punishment. It explains why they vary at the edges and converge in the middle: societies face similar problems and reach similar solutions.And it does all this with nothing but people, interests, and reason.

    THE ANSWER

    Contract theory explains an enormous amount, particularly about law and about why moral rules take the shape they do. Its limit shows up at the place where the contract has no grip. Consider anyone who cannot retaliate, cannot contribute, and will never be missed: an infant, a person in a coma, a stranger you will never meet again, a generation not yet born.

    The contract gives no reason to protect them, and yet nearly everyone believes they must be protected, and believes it most fiercely, not least. The other limit is history. If morality is the agreement in force, then a society that agrees to enslave a minority has done nothing wrong by its own lights, and the reformer who says otherwise is not correcting an error but merely proposing a new deal.

    Most of us do not believe that about abolitionists. The judgment that a whole culture was wrong is exactly the kind of judgment the contract cannot underwrite.

  4. THE OBJECTION04Cultures disagree about morality, so there is no universal lawLook at the actual record rather than at a thought experiment. Societies have practiced infant exposure, human sacrifice, slavery, blood feud, honor killing, and caste, and did not think of themselves as villains. They had reasons, texts, and priests. The claim that everyone deep down knows the same law looks like a claim made from inside one tradition, looking out. And the moral consensus of the modern West, which apologists tend to treat as human nature, is a few centuries old and still changing.

    THE ANSWER

    The disagreement is real, and any argument that pretends otherwise deserves to lose. But look at where the disagreement sits. It sits mostly in the answers to two questions that are not themselves moral: who counts as a person, and what is actually true about the world.

    A society that exposes infants usually does not believe an infant is yet a full member of the community; a society that burns witches usually believes witches really are killing children. Correct the factual and boundary beliefs and the underlying rule turns out to be shared: do not murder members of the community; keep faith; care for your own; do not take what is not yours. What almost no culture has ever taught is that betrayal as such is admirable or that cruelty to your own children is a virtue.

    And there is a deeper point. The fact that a culture can be wrong, which is what almost everyone says about slaveholding societies, only makes sense if there was something for them to be wrong about.

  5. THE OBJECTION05A God who commands killing is not a ground for goodnessThis objection turns the argument around and it is the sharpest one in the set. The Bible contains commands to destroy entire populations, laws regulating slavery, and penalties that most Christians today would call monstrous in any other book. If God's character is the standard of goodness, then either those commands were good, in which case goodness includes things you would call atrocities anywhere else, or they were not, in which case the standard is not doing the work claimed for it.Worse, the reply that God's ways are higher than ours empties the argument of content: if you cannot tell in advance what a good God would command, you cannot use your moral sense as evidence for him.

    THE ANSWER

    This deserves a straight answer rather than a redirect, and it deserves more room than this page can give it, so treat what follows as the beginning and not the whole. First, an honest concession: these texts are the hardest thing in the Bible for a believer to hold, and any presentation that treats them as easy is not being truthful. Second, a real distinction: the moral argument on this page is about the existence of a moral ground, not about the interpretation of any particular text.

    Whether some commands in Joshua are correctly understood as hyperbolic conquest language, or as judgment on specific societies at a specific time, or as something a reader must simply wrestle with, is a separate and very live question, and it does not change whether right and wrong are real. A person could be persuaded that objective morality points to God and still be unfinished with these passages. Third, on the charge that appealing to higher ways empties the argument: the objection is right that it would, if used as a stop-sign.

    So it is not used that way here. The claim being defended is that goodness is God's own settled character, which means his commands are open to being examined against that character, and that examination is a legitimate thing for a reader to do. This site would rather leave the question standing open than close it with a sentence.

WHERE IT STANDS

The intuition is near-universal; its best explanation is a person.

moderate confidence

The intuition is real and nearly universal: most people, most of the time, believe some acts are wrong for everybody and not merely unpopular.

Every account of that intuition has a bill to pay. If it is only an evolved feeling, then cruelty is not actually wrong, and some who hold that view say so plainly. If moral facts are brute and godless, obligation is left unexplained. If morality is a contract, the powerless fall outside it.

Grounding goodness in the settled character of a personal God pays a bill too: the hard commands in Scripture are exactly where it comes due.

The argument delivers a comparison, not a mathematical proof: of the available explanations, a personal moral source accounts for obligation better than the alternatives. Reasonable people rank the same explanations differently. It gets you to a moral God, not to Jesus, and it never showed that unbelievers cannot be good, which is a separate question and a cheap version of the argument. For Jesus, the next door is the empty tomb.

What would overturn this A godless account that explains moral obligation as well as it explains the moral feeling would take the comparison away.

The limits

What the evidence does not settle

  1. Whether moral facts can be real without God is argued in good faith by serious philosophers on both sides.

    What would settle it Nothing dug or found. It turns on which account explains obligation, and the page prints the best statement of each.

  2. The hard commands in Scripture are the cost of the account this page prefers, and nothing here removes them.

    What would settle it The conquest question takes them up on the evidence and leaves a residue of its own.

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