Moral Lives: Can We Be Moral Without God?
One could make an argument that to do as much good as someone like Mother Theresa, you do need to believe in God. But what about the rest of us? Can we live moral lives without God?
When discussing the Christian perspective on Moral Argument for God’s Existence, often the individual who doesn’t believe in God will immediately become indignant. They automatically assume that you are saying that Christians are the only ones who can live a moral life. I don’t know about you, but I know non-believers who beat 90% of the Christians I know in the ‘moral life’ department.
Moral Lives Without Belief
The problem with this question is with clarity and misunderstanding. Dr. William Craig clarifies the question of leading moral lives without God in his book ‘On Guard, Defending Your Faith With Reason and Precision, by breaking it down into three questions it is NOT:
- “Must we believe in God to live moral lives?”
- “Can we recognize objective moral values and duties without believing in God?”
- “Can we formulate a system of ethics and live moral lives without referring to God?”
First, no Christian with even a little bit of God-given common sense denies that leading a moral life does NOT require belief in God, whether the Christian God or any other. I have seen people that do not believe in God, Muslims, Buddhists with their views of nirvana, Hindus with their millions of gods, or zealous Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormon missionaries…who live moral lives that would put most Christians to shame. The argument for God from morality says nothing about requiring the belief in God to live moral lives.
Secondly, if objective moral duties and values exist, why would one have to believe in God to recognize them and lead a moral life? Even if they do stem from God, it doesn’t follow that one would have to believe that to know they exist and live a moral life. There is no good reason, for example, that one would need a belief in God to know that loving their family is good or right and hurting them is bad or wrong.
Thirdly, aside from any moral obligations we have toward God, formulating a system of ethics and morals to conduct a society and live moral lives in ways that Christian believers would largely agree with does not require a belief in God.
The Real Question is About Morality and God’s Existence
The real question about morality relating to God’s existence is: ” Do objective moral values and duties exist if God doesn’t exist?“ It is about God’s “existence” being necessary for objective moral values and duties to exist. The argument has nothing to do with needing ‘belief‘ in the existence of God in leading moral lives.
We need to make this clear. It is a knee-jerk reaction for a non-believer to assume “Here’s another one of those Christians who think they have a monopoly on living a moral life and think they are better than I am.” Unfortunately this stereotype is bound to surface when a belief system includes an exclusivity claim like Christianity does…whether that attitude is present in the Christian discussing the issue or not.
As an analogous example…John doesn’t believe in the current laws of physics. He thinks there are little faeries zooming around doing what he expects them to do instead. Since he was a kid he knew that when you drop something, the faeries make it fall to the ground. He knows that if there is less friction the faeries will help, so sliding furniture across the floor is much easier. He uses this information and a lot of other similar knowledge to predict how things will happen day to day. Whether he believes that gravity makes something fall to the floor or that faeries did it, he can still see that when you drop something it falls to the floor… and he can live his life taking that information into account when making decisions about how to live.
A moral non-believer is not a problem for the idea that God is necessary for moral values and duties…like we’ve been discussing over the last few weeks. On the Christian worldview, we’d expect non-believers to be generally moral beings. As a human being, everyone would be able to recognize the moral values and duties the Creator has designed for humanity…and this recognition, instilled in our God-given consciences, would help keep the majority of us living moral lives.
Arguments can be made that our morals are properly basic…like our senses of sight, hearing and touch…and our experience of morality shows us it’s real. Much like our experiences of the external world by our senses show us it’s real.
As we have shown over the past couple of weeks, without Him morality is just a human accident of survival and any objectivity to morality is an illusion. It’s not belief in God that is required for objective morality. It’s God Himself.
Happy Fathers day everyone! (It’s getting really close to being over here in NB) This one was my first and I’m grateful I was able to spend it with my wife and son.
Next time…Euthyphro’s Dilemma.
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