Articles
No Morality Without God
Without God, there is no ultimate justification for morality. In a godless universe, we descended from fish through unguided, unintelligent, purposeless biochemical reactions. In that worldview, morality is meaningless because morality doesn’t come from chemistry. We can’t get concepts like right, wrong, ought, and should from cells bumping into each other. Atheists watch a news report of mass murder and ball up their fists in anger, but in their worldview there’s no ultimate reason to be angry. Why get angry when one bag of chemicals puts holes in other bags of chemicals? Consider some feeble attempts to explain.
1) Survival instinct. Some argue our sense of moral “ought” comes from our evolutionary instinct to survive. But our sense of “ought” often goes against our instinct to survive. If I see someone getting beat up on the street, my survival instinct tells me to stay put and call the police. My sense of moral ought, however, works against my survival instinct and tells me to go intervene.
2) The greater good of society. Some argue morality is about doing the greatest amount of good for society. But without God, who gets to define “good”? Atheists use words like “good, better, and best,” but without an objective moral standard, those words are meaningless. For instance, if I asked people the answer to 5+5 and one person said “9,” another said “100,” and another said, “1,000,” the only way to know who’s right, wrong, better, and best is to know the standard is “10.” In a godless universe, there is no moral “10,” so the “greater good” argument is meaningless.
3) Personal preference. If so, we shouldn’t have police. Since criminals personally prefer to commit crimes, we have no business punishing them for it.
4) Whatever does no harm to others. Without God, what is the ultimate justification for saying it’s “wrong” to harm others? And how do we define “harm”?
5) Whatever culture decides. So if a culture decides it’s okay to make people slaves based on the color of their skin, that makes it right? And were the people who fought to end slavery in America morally wrong because they went against the cultural tide?
Do you see? The atheistic godless worldview is self-defeating because it removes any ultimate justification for morality. Without an objective standard, morality is arbitrary, subjective, and ultimately meaningless.
The Christian worldview, however, has an objective moral standard. Morally, there is an answer to 5+5. The answer is God. “You are good and do good. Teach me Your statutes.” (Psalm 119:68). Goodness is defined by the nature and character of God, and has been revealed to us in His Word. The Bible reveals the clear, objective difference between right and wrong, good and evil, better and best, and our sense of moral obligation comes from the moral law God hardwired into our consciences at creation (Romans 2:14-15). Atheists have a sense of morality, not because they’re descendants of fish, but because they were made in God’s image. (See the fuller version of this article on blog.psd.church)
