The Moral Argument for God #13

Nearly everyone acts as though some moral claims are objectively true regardless of personal or cultural opinion — that, say, torturing children for entertainment is actually wrong, not just distasteful to most people. The moral argument asks what could ground that kind of objective, binding moral obligation, and contends theism offers a far more coherent answer than atheism does.

The Argument

The argument, in its classic form, runs: if objective moral values and duties exist, the best explanation for them is a transcendent, personal moral lawgiver whose own nature (described in Scripture as holy, Leviticus 19:2, and unchanging, James 1:17) is the standard of goodness itself. On a purely naturalistic account, morality is often explained as an evolutionary byproduct — useful for survival and cooperation — but critics of naturalism argue this explains why we believe certain things are wrong without explaining why they actually are wrong in any binding sense beyond social usefulness. Paul argues that even those without the Mosaic law demonstrate an internalized moral law “written on their hearts” (Romans 2:14-15), which the argument treats as evidence that moral knowledge is built into humanity generally, not merely a product of one religious tradition.

Common Objections

The classic philosophical challenge is the Euthyphro dilemma: is something good because God commands it (making goodness arbitrary), or does God command it because it is independently good (making goodness prior to and outside God)? The standard theistic response is a third option — goodness is neither arbitrary nor external to God but is grounded in God’s own unchanging nature, so his commands (like the summary in Micah 6:8, to “do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly”) flow from who he is rather than an arbitrary decree. A separate and serious objection is that atheists plainly do live moral lives and hold real moral convictions without believing in God — which the argument’s defenders concede, since the claim is about the metaphysical grounding of morality, not about whether belief in God is required to behave morally.