The Questions at Hand and the Short Answers

Can atheists have morals? Yes.

If an atheist has morals, doesn’t that mean an atheist doesn’t need God to be a moral person? Yes.

If an atheist has morals but doesn’t have God, doesn’t that God is not the moral lawgiver? No.

If an atheist has morals, doesn’t that mean he doesn’t need God, period? No.

The Long Answers

The Moral Argument for God

Atheists believe that science has debunked the cosmological argument for God by explaining how the beginning of the universe came from nothing. This is not true, the Big Bang does more to prove than disprove God, however this is not the subject of today’s article. I have already written about the cosmological argument here and here if you are interested

Today I wanted to look at the argument for God from morality. The moral argument for God is simple, it goes like this: in order for there to be law there has to be a lawgiver. There is moral law, therefore there is a moral lawgiver. That lawgiver is God. Atheists believe they have the answer to that argument as well, but do they?

Let’s start by first looking at the atheistic case against the moral argument for God.

The Case Against the Argument From Morality

When confronted with the moral argument for God atheists say that they are moral people just like Christians, so morals do not come from God. (Some of them even argue that they are morally superior to Christians because they don’t need the threat of eternal damnation to keep them on the straight and narrow.)

This is true to an extent, and most Christians would agree with the statement that many atheists are moral people. I will grant the atheists this point; most of them are moral people. However, this argument is a rebuttal only to the Christian position that God is the moral lawgiver.

This argument does nothing to disprove the existence of God, it simply means atheists do not recognize God as the source of the moral code, because they do not recognize God’s existence. It is a bit of a circular argument.

Having stated this, let’s move on to the Christian argument that morals come from God.

In Defense of the Argument From Morality

In order to differentiate between right and wrong there must be a standard to measure against, and that standard must come from a source which is higher than mankind.

If morality did not come from a higher power, there would be no objective morality, but only subjective morality. Who would determine what is right and what is wrong? Without God this is left up to man and we have seen throughout history that man cannot be the arbitrator of morality.

The Hitler example is overused, but it is an example everybody understands so I am going to use it. Atheists would say it doesn’t take a god for everybody to understand that Hitler was a bad person, and that everybody knows what Hitler did was wrong.

Yet Hitler had millions of supporters and he and his followers did not think he was a bad person, or that what he was doing was wrong. They truly thought eliminating the Jewish people would be in the best interest of the world. There are still people today, a vast minority, who will still come to Hitler’s defense. Does anybody want them to be the arbitrators of the moral law?

This is what happens when men try to play God, and without a god who would have the right to say Hitler was wrong? And Hitler is just one example throughout the ages. Without God morals become opinions, and everybody has one…

This means there has to be a moral lawgiver that stands above mankind that has handed the moral laws down to us.

Nature as the Lawgiver

What about the laws of nature? Humans are part of nature, so isn’t human morality governed by the laws of nature?

Nature itself cannot be the source of morals, we don’t see the same moral standard in the animal kingdom as we do in mankind. Two of the biggest laws of nature are survival of the fittest and kill or be killed. Why is this?

It is because nature is not self aware, nature has no sense of being, and no intelligence other than instinctive intelligence. Nature does not reason. But mankind is different, we stand in nature and we stand above nature because we have intelligence and we have reason.

We are aware of our own existence, and we are aware of the existence of others. We follow a moral code which is above both us and above the laws of nature. This is because, like us, nature is a created entity. Nature itself, the laws of nature, and the moral laws go back to the lawgiver, the Creator.

Conclusion

God is self aware, has a sense of being, and he has intelligence and reason. Man was made in the image of God. This is why we have self-awareness, this is why we have reason, and this is why we know the difference between right and wrong. The moral code was breathed into us when we were created.

We live in a broken world and Christians have done some horrible things in the name of God. Atheists have done some wonderful things for humanity. The opposite is also true. Sometimes Christians fail and sometimes atheists don’t, but the idea of what is right and what is wrong has been implanted in our DNA by God when we were created in his image.

The moral laws are written on the hearts of all people, believers and non-believers alike, and they are put there by a self-aware, reasoning, and intelligent agent, and that can only be God.

Atheists can deny God is the author of their morals, but they are still left to explain how most people throughout time have had, and do have, identical moral codes if the moral laws do not come from above.

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