Can objective moral values exist without God?
Recently I have been listening to some debates and podcasts where debaters and hosts are talking about the problem of pain and suffering along with ideas such as justice and happiness. This is not new of course, as these ideas have been discussed since the time of Plato. Plato once said, “To prefer evil to good is not in the human nature, and when a man is compelled to choose one of the two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less”. It’s much easier to discuss evil, Plato moves directly to discussing the “lesser of two evils” idea right away while leaving out good. Good to Plato was the form to which all other things conformed to and all those other things could be much more clearly understood. In addition, we can easily look around us and point out the evil in the world and many are often quick to do so. The news is replete with horrible crimes on a regular basis. However, good is another story, we don’t hear the stories nearly as often, and people often just assume themselves to be mostly good. Maybe, because as it turns out, good is a much more complicated idea than evil.
When we think of good and evil, we often think of things that people do. If I help an elderly person across the street, I have done a “good” deed. If I knock him or her over as I am running to beat the light, I have done a “bad” thing. If someone does a very bad thing like murder or rape someone, that person might be called “evil”. So we don’t think of good or evil as something that has being or is a real thing but simply an action or something that doesn’t actually exist.
What we don’t think about as much are people being bad or good, and even less so, the origin of either bad or good. The good we often think of is just something that emanates from people naturally as the quote from Plato above suggests, and it’s evil that sometimes detracts from that good. It’s not in our human nature to be bad and we naturally choose the lesser evil. So good is what is natural and bad is something different. Many people if polled think this way, however Augustine of Hippo, who learned much from Neoplatonism, took the ideas of good and evil to another level.
Augustine said that good was an actual thing and evil was just the reduction of that thing. Therefore, evil was just the absence of good, but where did good come from and how do we come to act upon it? Evil was a result of the will of man acting against what is good. Since good was an actual thing that saw its ultimate perfection in God, evil was the willful turning from the good. Hence, anything that is not God could commit evil and do so freely. This is what created the conditions for the best of all worlds. One that sees the overcoming of evil by good.
This is what led to the great debate between Martin Luther and Erasmus in the 16th century. Erasmus said that people could choose good (obeying God) or evil (not obeying God) freely while Luther responded with his work called “The bondage of the will” where he explained that it was the commands of God, that flowed out of the being of God, showed us our inability to do good and this is why we needed to be changed or “saved”. Being good without God was not possible. This debate rages on even today.
Now this is not to say that people can’t do what is perceived to be good without believing in God. People who know nothing of God seemingly do good things all the time. When Atheists talk about this issue they will make this explanation. When they talk about justice and suffering, they can see those things in action and even engage in them just like anyone else. On the surface it seems that there doesn’t have to be a law giver for there to be laws, or a God for there to be good in the world. However, a closer look reveals something quite different that is rarely understood.
This is the idea that what is good or moral must not only be a thing like Augustine said, but rather it must be an objective and transcendent thing. If it isn’t then moral values and things that are good are simply human creations that are relative and not the same for everyone. If that it true, then we have no ability to say someone else is good “objectively speaking” while another thing is bad. Stalin thought that the Gulags were a good idea, but we know that they weren’t because what happened goes against objective moral values that aren’t defined by Stalin or anyone else. As stated in the podcast we did on this topic, If the former Soviet Union had won the cold war and proceeded to take over the free world and implement the gulag system everywhere it still wouldn’t be good. Slavery was once the norm over the entire planet, but it still didn’t make slavery good. In fact, if human beings are not around to do good deeds good still exists.
What this leads us to then is logical proof for the existence of God. Now I am not saying that this proves the Judeo-Christian God exists, but if it’s not logical that moral values are subjective, then it does follow that a transcendent being must exist. Or stated another way, if God does not exist then moral absolutes do not exist and they can only be of finite human origin. Practically speaking, if God exists than Stalin’s gulags, or atrocities like them through history, are wrong no matter if they exists or not. If God does not exist, then we have no objective grounds to say such a thing.
This has even further ramifications in the area of justice that many atheists like to talk about as something that is important to them. If God exists, then moral values are grounded in his being and therefore he is the arbiter of such things. This means that he will judge things as actually good and bad regardless of what we think good and bad is. Some people think that this is actually not good because they perceive bad things happening to good people and therefore God is evil for allowing these things. However, when you think these things through you can see the error clearly. The real problem is if God does not exist because then you have no basis for good or evil and no true justice for the largest evils we see in our time. Did Hitler truly receive justice for the death of millions of Jews? Even if we as a society decide that what Hitler did was bad we have no real ability to enact justice. God, however, promises to provide justice for all actualized evil that man is freely responsible for and he will administer it. So I God exists, and therefore objective moral values exist, then true justice also exists. If God does not exist then morality is subjective and no true justice is available.
The final argument against this is that people can’t be responsible for their actions if God created these people and God knows all things. This too is false and it’s why free will is important, as Luther and Erasmus argued although in different ways, and often not understood. Finite people act freely within space and time. We have no infinite knowledge of anything and so God’s knowledge of all things has no bearing upon us as his creatures. The action of evil is our responsibility and God is the just judge of all true evil because he is the source of all good.
So, the problem of good is objective moral values, that good is born out of, do not exist in a post-modern world where moral relativism reigns. Some say we are making great progress moving toward a secular utopia as religion in America and the western world declines. The problem is they say this while still living in places where their “rights” are secured by the fact that a creator exists, whether it’s codified in the documents or simply assumed and taken for granted. What happens when that isn’t the case? The 20th century showed us many examples and it we shouldn’t presume a 21st century implementation is any better.