A very interesting claim is made in the Scripture of Romans 2:15, the author writes, “They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them”. Many theological discussions and points can be made around a claim like this, but the question I am focusing on here specifically is this: does our understanding of objective morality prove the existence of God?
You might have heard it put this way:
- If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
- Objective moral values do exist.
- Therefore, God exists.
As well as this way:
- Objective morality exists.
- Objective morality implies an authority sufficient to bind all moral agents under its law.
- Objective obligation implies a person to whom one is finally bound.
- The only possible source of moral obligations is an Absolute Person (God).
Either of these serve as good road maps for the discussion. To begin, we start with the claim that objective morality exists. For some, this is a point that can be instantly agreed upon; however, others argue that there is no such thing as objective morality and rather all morality is subjective or a product of evolution and so on. In a statement from C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, he writes “the moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other.” Simply, what is this standard that is being measured up too, or what is this objective morality? By “objective”, I mean it’s valid or binding independently whether anyone believes them or not. Continuing with this line of thinking, moral values being objective means that they are binding or irrevocable whether anyone believes them or not.
An example that might help wrap your brain around this point; if I said that the enslavement of a people group based on their race is objectively evil even though people in different societies and civilizations throughout history said it was good, it is still evil. Even if slavery was never abolished and was still prominent in the United States today to the point that every single American believed it to be good: it would still be evil. This is what I mean by objective morality.
Let me give another example from a slightly different angle. Say you arguing with your friend about something and you are sure he is in the wrong (for the sake of this example take it as something that is not an opinion such as whether soccer is better than baseball). There would be no sense in doing that unless you had some idea and agreement as to what right and wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying a soccer player committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of soccer.
A common objection goes this way: “now although that may be true if morality was objective, I believe morality is subjective.” By subjective I mean it is rooted in the individual’s feelings, like a personal preference. So when an atheist might say morality is subjective, what they are saying is everything morally is a matter of personal preference, or dependent upon how they perceive reality in that given time. This is also called Moral Relativism. To follow this to its true moral conclusion, to prefer love over murder is just the same as to like chocolate ice cream over vanilla ice cream. It’s all opinion, and it has to be because there is no standard. Who are you to tell me that chocolate is better than vanilla? Who are you to tell me being faithful to one woman is better than multiple? One may say that’s a straw man, but it’s perfectly reasonable. To claim that one thing is better than another thing on any subject without a believe in a higher power, you must first steal the grounds from a Godly worldview. Let’s take to this quote by famous atheist Richard Dawkins; “In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” And to believe that morality is subjective, this is an answer that reflects its outcome. Some people get hurt and others get lucky. There is no true justice other than what societies create; morality is only a socio-cultural relative and it can be tossed away whenever ‘new moral progression’ comes along. There is no real evil and there is no real good, and most of all there is no real purpose.
Subjective morality turns out to be logically coherent. If we can each decide our set of morals (or even if a particular society can decide their set of morals) then it is a free for all. Now, if you want to believe that, go ahead, but you cannot honestly live that out. The moment you say “it is wrong to do x,” you’re stepping out of what the other person/society believes to be right into what you believe to be right. Many famous atheists including the likes of Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens say we can define morality itself by human flourishing. Atheism cannot explain why the flourishing of humanity is good. It can assume that we can know it is good due to our biological drive to survive and avoid suffering as much as possible, but not it cannot define it independently. This is where atheists confuse ontology with epistemology. Ontology is about what actually exists (the thing itself, morality), but epistemology says how we can know it exists (or the principles of how we can know). So an atheist can say that we know that there is right and wrong because of xyz, but they cannot answer (in their worldview) how you define what good and bad behavior is in the absence of God. In other words, atheists answer by assuming that human flourishing is good, but with no foundation or basis for it. Why not dolphin flourishing? Why human flourishing specifically? This begs the question of what makes humans intrinsically valuable. That is a separate question that will not be covered here, but the point is that all of these questions have to be answered, but they cannot be in an atheistic worldview.
Another objection I have to cover before continuing further is this question. “If morality is derived from God, then how do you account for different standards of morality among countries and civilizations across different periods of time?” Personally I believe that taking a steel man of an idea is the most productive way to tackle it, and this is one of the most reasonable claims to make if you are wrestling with the idea of objective morals. First, let me point out this is an epistemological question, which means it is not actually answering whether moral right and wrong actually exists or not, rather how different cultures come to know what right and wrong is. Nevertheless, there are two main ways you can answer this question. This is the first answer. It is absolutely true to make the claim that in different cultures we can observe that some are more moral and some are less moral. This would at least prove that there is a standard for morality, because we would in no way be able to measure it otherwise, but that doesn’t answer the question directly1 . Now, imagine a comparison of yourself and someone such as Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin. It is reasonable to quickly assume that you are more moral than either of them. There is no reason to not believe that this isn’t the case among cultures too. It is actually biblical to suggest that when incorrect views on what is morally right are prevalent within a culture, there are usually negative consequences. Some obvious ones being slavery and now especially, abortion. Within the Godly worldview this is explained by the sin issue within humanity, but that aside, poorly taught morality is bound to have these consequences. Even though we have an innate sense of right and wrong, our actions can be influenced by other powerful forces that can lead us to violate those principles. This does not disprove that there is an objective moral standard, but it instead recognizes -to even ask the question- that there is a standard and when people with their free will do wrong, they infringe upon it. Objective morality exists even though perceptions of how it exists may be flawed.
The second way to answer this builds upon this first answer. C.S. Lewis in the Abolition of Man investigates this question quite well. The moral differences among cultures are not as different as we first might think. James Rachel in The Elements of Moral Philosophy points out 110 virtues that are all found within different cultures. These include a basic concern for human welfare, the importance of not causing unnecessary harm, a sense of fairness and so on. Other things like no lying, nurturing children and telling the truth also agreed upon values that allow cultures to function. Then the eskimos are given as an example. The eskimos of northern Canada and Greenland in the 20th century have been known to kill healthy infants, especially healthy girl infants. Now that is something that would be appalled in our culture today. But why did they do that? Well a number of reasons, they were nomadic and couldn’t cultivate food, leading to very little consumption. They also moved around often in the extreme temperatures and it was difficult to carry them along. Not only that, men were the primary hunters and they had higher death rates, so it was more common to let the girl infants die first in order to sustain an equal population. Through a deep examination you see that the eskimos’ infanticide was not solely for the reason of their disregard for children, but more so to ensure the groups survival. And even then, killing the children seemed to be a last resort (which it is commonly a first resort to many today, as over 1 million abortions were performed in just 2023 alone). So what does this mean? We can agree on moral values but disagree on the expression or application of that value. How else would Hitler have convinced the nazis to kill 6 million jews, homosexuals, gypsies and Catholics? He convinced them by creating what he believed the standard should be; by saying that these people are not human therefore not worthy of life. But even Hitler would agree that killing a German soldier in an unjustified way would be immoral. Even the most extreme example there is still some line of morality drawn for murder, as plagued as it may be. We all suppress the truth for different reasons; in the case of the eskimos it was because it made survival easier, and in the case of Hitler it was in order to stay “strong” or “racially pure.” Even though there are differences among the periphery, there is a core moral code that transcends every civilization. We all agree there is a line, even if we disagree where that line is.
Now, after disputing these objections let us go back to premise one: if God does not exist, there are no objective moral truths. If there is no God, then there are truly no human values, there is no natural law; we are all just primordial slime evolved to a higher order. If there is no God then your birth was an accident, your death will be an accident, and the only thing that lies between those two accidents is another accident- your life. If that sounds harsh, then perhaps that’s because it is. Albert Camus, a 20th century French philosopher, raises a very profound existentialist question: “There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide.” This question launches a book that he later authors on Greek myth about a man named Sisyphus. He was condemned to roll a rock up to the top of a mountain, only to have the rock roll back down to the bottom every time he reaches the top. He sees his life is a constant struggle and any attempt to deny or avoid the struggle is just a distraction from reality. He is aware that he will struggle forever and Camus argues that is the exact same awareness that one must have in this life in order to be intellectually honest about their belief- that since there is no Absolute Power above, the struggle we have here on earth is meaningless, so why go on struggling? But what if there truly was more and maybe, just maybe, there was a purpose to all of this? Possibly it is not at all an accident and there is a real explanation, apart from evolution.. an answer that is already within us? That answer is our conscience. The sense of right and wrong that all human beings innately have that tells us that “starving the poor is wicked, napalming babies is bad, buying and selling each other is depraved, and there is in the world such a thing as evil.”2 This very thing is what the Judaic-Christian values call the moral law, and it is exactly what is described in the aforementioned verse, Romans 2:15.
Our conscience deeply suggests there is some source in which these feelings (that are so deeply ingrained in us it seems silly to even point out) originate from. Everyone knows this right or wrong and humanity is bound to it just as we are bound to the law of gravity. It is placed upon on us by something. It is not just arbitrary product of what societies have created and has passed down; rather, it is the essence of our consciousness. There is something pressing on us that reveals the state of objective morality. Although we choose to deny it, and we even get it wrong on what we believe it is, it is there. Because of this, I believe this to be one of the most compelling arguments for the existence God.
Above I have briefly brought in another argument, the argument from consciousness, because I believe coincides heavily with understanding how we can know there are objective morals in the first place. Understanding this is evidence that premise two and three are true. We as free will moral agents have moral obligations, and because that is true, it must be true that there is some outside power to which us moral agents are bound. We can know that there is some sort of standard for morality that we hold every deed, action and characteristic up too. We can know that we are not the ones that create morality. We can know that it has to come from somewhere. Knowing all of this, we can conduct that God is the best explanation. There is some Absolute Power that has placed within His creation an innate understanding of knowing good. We can call this God’s voice in Mankind. This aim of this defense does not tell you that this God is necessarily the God of the Bible3, but it is an attempt at the breaking down The Moral Argument For God. It is not just reasonable, but probable to believe that there is something more than the natural world, something outside, something supernatural.
To read more on this topic and to find out if objective moral truths can be brought about through evolution, click here to go to Part 2.
Footnotes
- This is because anyone who brings up this question of cultural relativism from the atheistic perspective is most likely taking the morality from evolution approach, so the disagreement wouldn’t be the idea of a standard but where the standard comes from. ↩︎
- from Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law, written by Arthur Allen Leff, an agnostic who wrestled with morality. ↩︎
- I mention this because even though I believe the Christian God is the only true God, the point of this to provide the ontological argument that objective morals do exist, therefore proving some sort of power above humans must be the source. ↩︎
Unity in the Cross 
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