I just love Greg Koukl! In his most recent issue of Solid Ground he provides a wonderful response to a challenge atheist Michael Shermer likes to lodge against theistic moral objectivists: “If there was no God, would you still be good?”
Shermer expects an affirmative answer from his theist detractors. If theists would be good even without God, he reasons, then God is not necessary for morality as the theist claims. While this is a clever rhetorical device, it misses the point entirely. The theist’s argument is not that one must believe in God to behave in ways people generally consider “good.” Our argument is that if God does not exist, there is no such thing as “goodness” at all. As an individual or as a culture we might prefer to help a grandmother cross the street as opposed to running her over with our car, but neither behavior is morally superior to the other. All human acts are just molecules in motion, and the last I checked, neither molecules nor motion come in “good” and “bad” varieties. Morality is not a quality of matter, but of mind.
Greg Koukl offers a nice response to Shermer’s question that makes this point in a concise, tactical manner. Koukl writes, “I’ll answer your question if you answer mine: Would you still have to be faithful to your wife if you weren’t married and never had been? Clearly, the question doesn’t even apply. The same is true for your question. If there is no transcendent standard for morality, then ‘good’ means either following my own individual or cultural morality, or responding to my evolutionary impulses.”
Just like it makes no sense to speak of being faithful to one’s spouse if they are unmarried, it makes no sense to speak of “good” if there is no transcendent source of moral goodness we are exemplifying. If there is no God, behaviors we consider “good” and “evil” are, in reality, no such thing. Objective goodness, if it exists, must be grounded in something that transcends human opinion/preference/belief, and physics.
March 23, 2010 at 3:09 am
Speaking from personal experience, I can say that without God, I would not be good; in fact I was not good, when I was without God.
If I somehow existed and yet God did not exist, I suspect I would be very much how I was before God came into my life: subjectively moral and immoral, with no sense of accountability to any standard of right or wrong except that which I determined for myself to be true. And that, of course, is not good at all.
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March 23, 2010 at 10:15 am
Goodness and God are inexorably connected by their very etymology. Something good is god-like. The only reason the concept of goodness is real to us is through our ideas of the expectations of divinity.
No, we can’t be good without God. We wouldn’t even have a reference point for what goodness is.
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March 23, 2010 at 11:08 am
Aaron,
Very true. Some people would not do good if they thought there was no God. Others would continue to live basically good moral lives, if for no other reason because it’s practical and personally beneficial. I think a lot of the things we would do differently if there was no God are “lesser” evils like fornication, lying, drinking, etc. But most people would still not murder, rape, etc.
Jason
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March 24, 2010 at 6:40 am
Jason,
Wouldn’t you say that people are “not good” because God exists? Without God, one has to act in accordance with one’s morals. But with God, you can act with impunity, confident that God will forgive and remit your sins, clearing your conscience. I heard one woman say that about Roman Catholicism, that she likes being able to have a priest forgive her sins. Evangelicals do this all the time, sinning and either asking for forgiveness or not even needing to ask, as their sins are covered by the blood.
It reminds me of Steven Levitt’s book Freakonomics and the effect of a “late fee” on parents who pick up a child late. One might think that it would deter late pickups, but in fact in encourages it by transforming a moral obligation into a monetary one. Instead of being a “bad parent,” you become simply a person who owes a $3 fine that can easily be repaid. The fine backfired.
Similarly, a forgiving God takes wrongs against other persons or society that should make the perpetrator feel bad and transforms them into wrongs against God which are easily and promptly forgiven. The result is more evil in the world.
Arthur
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March 24, 2010 at 1:42 pm
Arthur,
People do both good and bad, but they could do neither unless God exists as the ontological grounding of objective moral values. That’s the point of my post.
As for your claims, I think you may describe the few while ignore the majority. Most people who believe in God (particularly the God of Christian theism) are motivated to do right because they believe not only that there is an objective good, but that God will judge us for how well we conformed to that good.
Who you seem to be describing are some Protestants who have misinterpreted forgiveness, grace, and salvation to be licenses to sin. Not only do I think this group is a minority, but I don’t think most of this group is comprised of Evangelical Christians. If anything, it would describe more mainstream Protestants within the Reformed tradition. Evangelicals tend to be the most morally conservative of all Christians, and generally opposed to cheap grace.
Jason
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March 25, 2010 at 12:35 am
“I think a lot of the things we would do differently if there was no God are “lesser” evils like fornication, lying, drinking, etc.”
Sadly, there are many who continue to do these acts of “lesser” evil knowing full well that there is a God, so, if the theists, especially of the Christian variety, cannot or will not contain their immorality, where would they (and us) be if they suddenly stopped believing in God, or found out He didn’t exist?
“But most people would still not murder, rape, etc.”
Reminds me of something I once read about Jeffrey Dahlmer. I cannot, at this time, vouch for its accuracy, but it was stated that he said the reason he did what he did is because he believed there was no God, and therefore, nothing was “off the table” so to speak, when it came to the evil he perpetrated in the world.
(Believe it or not, I think I read that in an issue of Irv Baxter’s Endtime magazine.)
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March 25, 2010 at 12:46 am
“Wouldn’t you say that people are “not good” because God exists?”
Only in the sense of a comparable goodness and that God has declared that “there are none good”. Our righteousness (i.e. the litmus test of human goodness) is as filthy rags, afterall.
Otherwise, the vast majority, through faith in God, are striving, though sometimes failing, to live morally good lives.
Further, we should not assume that God’s mercy toward sinners and His willingness to forgive causes continued evil on behalf of the sinner. While that might be the case for some, as Jason pointed out, most people I know who become recipients of God’s mercy and forgiveness are so moved by the divine act of compassion, that it literally changes their perspective, up to and including changing their behavior. They cease from immorality, and adopt standards of morality that anyone, theist or atheist, should appreciate, such as honesty, integrity, dependability, hard work, faithfulness, peacefullness, etc. The bottle gets put down, the fist opens itself, the curse word is held back, and the lie is not offered as a substitute for truth.
It truly is a conversion of the mind, body, and soul that cannot easily be explained in any other way than to just accept the testimony of that person, or those people who have experienced it for themselves.
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March 25, 2010 at 8:00 am
Good article. When ever i get into these morality discussions with athiests, I always ask, “If God doesn’t exist, then why do good? Why are there laws in the land to punish evil if morality is relative/subjective?”.
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March 25, 2010 at 12:34 pm
Greetings! To all
If there was no God then nothing would exist. Plain and simple.
God bless you alway. in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Marquest Burton
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March 25, 2010 at 3:25 pm
Wow, Marquest! You’ve finally said something I can agree with.
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March 26, 2010 at 12:26 am
I’ll second that!
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March 26, 2010 at 12:32 am
aletheist,
You are exactly right. Thomas Merton said it best: “We might ask the atheist in the name of what he asks me to behave. Why should we go to the inconvenience of denying our personal desires and satisfactions for a standard that is merely invented in another person’s imagination, with no real existence? Why should we live out the fictions another imposes on me in the name of nothing?”
The dilemma of non-theist ethicists is how to get others to surrender their own self-interest for the common good of society. In the name of what should anyone do so? After all, the finality of the grave allows for no moral accountability of how one lived his/her life. Ultimately, there is no difference between the destiny of the good and the evil, so why be good when it is not in our self-interest to do so? God is the only rational foundation for objective moral values and moral obligations.
Jason
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April 3, 2010 at 2:16 pm
Of course I would because I know what is right and doing just that would keep me doing the right thing!
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April 3, 2010 at 7:23 pm
Kandie,
But what grounds would you have for considering such behavior morally “good.” Molecules do not come in “good” and “bad” varieties. If there is no God, and all there is to existence is molecules in motion, then “good” and “evil” are arbitrary constructs that have no basis in reality. There is no real difference between helping an elderly lady cross the street and mowing her down in your car. It’s all just the same. We may prefer to do one over the other, but it’s just a personal preference, no different than my liking vanilla ice-cream and you liking X flavor of ice-cream. If there is no God, there is no transcendent grounding for objective moral values.
Jason
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June 12, 2010 at 8:27 am
Jason,
Can’t most people’s desire to help the grandmother cross the street (as opposed to running her down) be explained without introducing God’s divine compassion and eternal goodness? Neither action has to be judged within the context of morality. If the majority of the members of a social species like homo sapiens acted on impulse to kill eachother at random, without provocation and without necessity for individual survival that species would soon become extinct. Natural Selection seems to be at work here; by not running down the grandmother we could just be following evolutionary impulses because it’s in the best interest of the continuation of our species not to commit random acts of murder.
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June 13, 2010 at 9:25 am
Chris,
The question is not one of motivations. One doesn’t necessarily need to believe in God to help an old lady cross the street. The question is one of ontology: if there is no grounding for moral values that makes them objective features of reality, then there is no such thing as morality. There are only socially acceptable behaviors, and socially unacceptable behaviors, and those can change over time. But in the end, no behavior is intrinsically moral or immoral.
Jason
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February 4, 2013 at 10:55 am
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