The existence of objective moral values provides further evidence for the existence of God. If there is no God, moral values have no absolute, objective basis. Without an external, objective set of standards, all we are left with are the shifting sands of personal or communal opinion.
VIDEO & AUDIO LINKS
VIDEO PRESENTATION: OBJECTIVE MORAL VALUES (Part 1)
AUDIO PODCAST: OBJECTIVE MORAL VALUES (Part 1)
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TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to Episode 13 of Evidence For Belief, a series which examines the evidence for the existence of God. In this episode, we are going to move on from the physical sciences and enter the realm of philosophy. Over these next two episodes, we are going to explore the argument that objective moral values provide strong evidence for the existence of God.
This is known as the Moral Argument for the existence of God. The central thesis of the argument is that objective moral values CANNOT exist without God, and that the obvious existence of objective moral values is therefore strong evidence that God exists. This argument is comprised of two premises and a conclusion:
PREMISE 1: If God doesn’t exist, objective moral values don’t exist.
PREMISE 2: Objective moral values DO exist.
CONCLUSION: Therefore, God exists.
In order to fully appreciate the logic of this argument, it is helpful to examine each of the premises separately. In this episode we will examine Premise 1 and in the next episode we will examine the second premise and conclusion.
PREMISE 1: IF GOD DOESN’T EXIST, OBJECTIVE MORAL VALUES DON’T EXIST.
This premise describes the concept that any moral standards which are absolute and objective are only possible if there exists some kind of ultimate, external standard against which all other standards are measured. If no such external standard exists, then human moral values are just one person’s opinion versus another’s.
Let me give you an illustration. Suppose you lived on an isolated island whose small community had never seen a tape measure or a ruler. The population had grown up with books that mentioned various units of measurement like inches and centimetres, but no one had ever seen anything to indicate the exact size of these units of measurement. People speculated as to how tall they all were, and often disagreed with each other about their relative heights, but without an objective means of accurately measuring height, they were only guessing.
Then, one day, a tape measure washes up on the shore. Now they have an objective means of assessing their height. It is no longer a matter of debate or opinion. It is no longer one person’s opinion versus another’s. There is now an external, authoritative, objective ruler against which all former measurements and guesses can be compared. Measurement is no longer a matter of subjective opinion; it is now a matter of objective truth.
The same applies to moral values. Objective moral values can logically only exist if there is some absolute set of standards that exist APART FROM the subjective opinions of mankind, against which our various opinions can be measured and compared.
In this sense, objective moral values are like a tape measure or, to use another analogy, a set of scales against which our varying subjective opinions are measured and weighed. Objective moral values are only possible if there is an external, transcendent set of absolute standards which can provide an inarguable, unchangeable measurement for assessing human behaviour and attitudes. Without such an external set of standards, morality becomes relative; a matter of personal opinion or, at best, group consensus.
The concept that moral standards are simply a matter of personal or group opinion is referred to as subjectivism or relativism. Indeed, subjectivism and relativism are the ultimate, logical extension of atheism. If God does not exist, then we can decide for ourselves what we will consider to be right and wrong. There is no one to tell us what to do, so we can make up our own rules and values. And the end result is that everyone has different values.
This, of course, is precisely the direction in which our society has been heading over this last century as we have gradually abandoned our previous Judeo-Christian roots and embraced secularism (a society increasingly divorced from religion). Individualism and relativism are now the predominant moral philosophies in our ‘sophisticated’ secular world: philosophies which proclaim that there are no absolutes, that all values are valid and no one has the right to judge or criticise another person’s values.
In removing God from our foundation, we have thrown away our objective scales and measuring tape and now, it appears, almost anything goes.
Some atheists will try to argue that it is still possible to have objective moral values without God. They will argue that things like murder and rape are objectively wrong and we don’t need God in order to perceive that. But they are missing the point! I agree that murder and rape are objectively wrong, but only because horrible actions such as that go against the commandments and the very nature of our Holy God. But if atheists deny the existence of God, there is no longer any solid basis for objective morality, there is only the shifting sands of personal and public opinion.
Atheists will persist in their argument, claiming that objective standards can be ascertained via majority opinion or public consensus. But this is not a solid basis for any moral values, because the majority of people can be wrong. The majority of Nazis in Germany in the 1940s decided it was a good idea to exterminate millions of Jews and other minority groups. If objective values are determined by majority vote, then we are in big trouble, because the majority often get it horribly wrong!
Not only is it possible for the majority of people to get it wrong, but establishing societal values via majority vote will inevitably result in constant moral backflips, because society keeps changing its mind.
Let me give you an example of a societal moral backflip, without making any value judgment of my own on the issue. Fifty years ago, the majority of people thought that homosexuality was indecent and a perversion, and homosexuals were even arrested – as recently as 1997 in fact, in Tasmania. (I am not commenting on whether or not this view was correct – simply that it WAS the view of society at that time). Today, society has changed its mind. The majority of people now believe that homosexuality is a beautiful expression of love, and we even allow homosexuals to marry. Where is the objective moral standard on this issue? Is our current view regarding homosexuality right, and the previous one wrong? Or vice versa? Both views were established via majority opinion, so which is the objective, absolute standard? They can’t both be right.
You see, absolute, objective moral standards cannot be established via popular vote or public opinion. Objective moral standards require an external, transcendent set of standards that do not change with changing opinion or swings in popularity.
But we haven’t plumbed the depths of this issue yet. Let me go even further down a very dark path. If there is no God, then even murder and rape cannot be said to be wrong in an absolute, objective sense. The murderer or rapist is certainly going against the majority opinion by his actions; he is breaking a moral code that the vast majority have agreed upon. But on what basis can we objectively say that, even in these cases, the majority is right? The murderer or rapist can simply say, “I disagree with your moral standards. You can’t force your standards upon me.” We can lock up the rapist or murderer and throw away the key, we can condemn him for breaking a popularly voted moral code, but without an absolute, external measuring tape there is really no logical basis for claiming that murder or rape are OBJECTIVELY wrong. It is just the murderer’s or rapist’s opinion against ours. Without a Holy, law-giving God, there is no ultimate accountability and no absolute moral code, and we are all left shuffling around in moral darkness.
Now, you might think I’m making an extreme argument here, so let me give you a shocking real life example. Jeffrey Dahmer was one of the world’s most infamous killers. He ate his victims and stored parts of them in his freezer. He was caught, convicted and imprisoned, where he was eventually murdered by another prisoner. Before his death, however, he was interviewed on the American TV program, NBC Dateline, and was asked why he did such terrible things.
He stated,
“If a person doesn’t think that there’s a God to be accountable to, then what’s the point of trying to modify your behaviour in order to keep within acceptable ranges. That’s how I thought anyway. I always believed in the theory of evolution – that we all just came from slime and when we die, you know, that was it, there’s nothing.” [1]
What is particularly striking about Dahmer’s confession is the correlation he made between his disbelief in God and the perceived absence of objective moral values. And in one sense, he was absolutely correct; if there is no God, there are no absolute, objective moral values. This is the ultimate extension of atheism, but very few atheists truly perceive this truth. The only way objective values can exist is if there is a God who has set in place standards which exist above and beyond mankind’s shifting opinions.
Some atheists DO finally reach this conclusion. Richard Dawkins, the outspoken atheist and evolutionist, once admitted, “Without God, there is no evil and no good: nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”
Similarly, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the Russian novelist and philosopher had one of his characters declare: “If there is no God, everything is permissible.”
The American philosopher and theologian, J. P. Moreland, states it more elegantly:
“If there is anything that naturalists [people without a theistic worldview]agree upon, it is that there is no such thing as teleology – a reason or purpose for anything. Matter is purely mechanistic; it only behaves according to chains of efficient causes.”[2]
These scholars have perceived a truth that few people fully grasp: without God, objective values simply cannot exist. A purely mechanistic universe cannot produce values. Good and evil are as meaningless in a universe without God as colour is to a person without sight.
Before we finish with this first premise, let’s be clear about something. I am not saying that atheists are incapable of living what we perceive to be comparatively good, moral lives. A person doesn’t need to believe in God in order to be kind to others or to be honest and trustworthy and generous and selfless.
It’s not BELIEF in God that is the foundation of objective moral values; it’s the EXISTENCE of a moral God that’s foundational to objective morality. If there is no God, then the values that people choose to live by, whether they be atheists or theists, have no objective basis; they are merely moral PREFERENCES rather than objective moral standards.
Some atheists argue that objective moral values arise from mankind’s need to perpetuate our species. Any actions or attitudes that inhibit the perpetuation of our species are bad, and any which enhance our perpetuation are clearly and absolutely good. For example, they argue that murder is absolutely wrong simply because, if it was allowed, it would diminish our gene pool. Murdering people does not assist the perpetuation of our species. Thus, it is argued that the prohibition against murder is an absolute moral value that is derived purely from self-centred natural considerations rather than from a supernatural being.
But there is an inconsistency in this argument. If the optimal perpetuation and enhancement of our species was the ultimate determinant of morality, then one could perceive of a society where all babies born with defects or abnormalities would be killed at birth so that they didn’t weaken our gene pool. One could even justify removing people from the gene pool whose IQ was below a certain level or whose physical attributes were less than ideal (similar to Hitler’s Arian race policy in the 1930s and 1940s). These kinds of brutal policies would certainly result in a healthier, more robust gene pool for humanity and would assist in the survival and enhancement of our species.
The fact that we are naturally repulsed by these suggestions, however, shows that we are being guided by a higher, more basic set of moral standards; ones which over-ride and restrain our desire for the perpetuation and enhancement of our species. Our desire to protect and preserve ALL human life, even those who are flawed and whose existence would create a drain on our collective resources, arises from a higher set of absolutes. These absolutes appear to exist above and beyond our situational ethics and, yet, we find that they are powerfully at work within us. These higher, absolute moral values appear to be stamped deeply into our souls. But where do they come from? Atheists cannot provide an adequate answer.
Some atheists argue that objective moral values exist as self-existent ‘entities’ within the universe – a kind of self-existent absolute standard which human beings can somehow sense. This concept is called atheistic moral Platonism, named after Plato who proposed something like this in the 4th century B.C. In his view, morals are not human products, but exist independently in the intangible realm within the cosmos. They are totally independent of humankind’s moral opinions. According to this view, mankind is simply apprehending the uncaused moral values that already exist in the cosmos.
But this just doesn’t make sense. For example, how can the moral value of justice exist independently of people? As the philosopher Dr William Lane Craig states;
“It’s hard to make sense of this. It’s easy to understand what it means to say that a person is just, but it’s bewildering when someone says that in the absence of any people justice itself exists.”[3]
Moral values are properties of conscious beings who interact with each other and the world, and they can’t simply exist in their own right. In particular, OBJECTIVE moral values require the existence of a SUPREME being whose absolute values sit above the changing preferences and opinions of humankind: a Being who has set in place immutable values and imprinted those into our souls.
In this sense, the first premise of the moral argument appears to be logically sound: if God doesn’t exist, objective moral values don’t exist.
In Our next Episode, Episode 14, we will go on to explore the second premise: that Objective moral values DO in fact exist and that this, therefore, leads to the conclusion that a moral law-giving God also exists.
For more information, you can check out my books, 7 Reasons to Believe and No More Monkey Business, along with a whole bunch of my other books, available from my website, smartfaith.net, where you can also subscribe to my weekly blog.
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FOOTNOTES
[1] Jeffrey Dahmer, interview on NBC Dateline, February, 1994
[2] J.P. Moreland, “The Argument From Consciousness”, on 123philosophy website.
[3] William Lane Craig, “On Guard”, David C. Cook, Colorado, 2010, p.137.