If there is no God, can anything be really wrong?
Everyone lives as though some things are wrong whether or not anyone agrees — torturing a child for fun, for a start. The question is what that fact is standing on. A preference cannot make anything binding, and a majority is just a larger preference. Christians say the standard is not a rule God invented but what God is like.
Start with a sentence almost nobody will dispute: torturing a child for entertainment is wrong.
Not unfashionable. Not illegal here. Wrong — and it would still have been wrong in a society that approved of it, which is exactly what we mean when we condemn things that were once legal and popular.
That instinct is the whole argument. The question is not whether you have it. It is what it could possibly be resting on.
Subjective and objective, in plain words
Subjective means it depends on the person. You like coffee; I do not. Neither of us is mistaken.
Objective means it is true whatever anyone thinks. The earth goes round the sun, and it did so while everyone believed otherwise.
Now put moral claims in one of those boxes. If “torturing children is wrong” is subjective, then a society that enjoys it is not making an error, it is disagreeing — the way people disagree about coffee. Almost nobody actually believes this, whatever they say in an argument.
Why the usual answers do not reach
Evolution. This can explain why we feel moral pressure. Groups that cooperate survive; the impulse gets passed on.
What it cannot do is get from is to ought. Evolution also explains our appetite for sugar and our fear of the dark, and nobody thinks those tell us what we are obliged to do. And note what follows if morality is only a surviving instinct: it has no authority over you. An instinct can be overruled the moment it stops paying.
Culture. Societies do teach us. But if the culture is the standard, then reformers are always wrong by definition, since they are the ones disagreeing with it. Wilberforce was wrong about slavery in 1790 and right in 1840, and nothing changed except the vote count. Nobody believes that either.
Human flourishing. This is the strongest secular answer, and it works well right up to the question of why anyone is obliged to care about anyone else’s flourishing. It smuggles in a duty it cannot account for.
The oldest objection, and the answer
Someone will now ask the question Socrates asked: is a thing good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good?
Both halves look bad for the Christian.
If it is good because God says so, morality is arbitrary — God could have commanded cruelty and cruelty would have been our duty.
If God commands it because it is good, then goodness is a standard above God, and he is only a very reliable reporter of it.
The answer is that the dilemma has a third option it never considered. God does not consult a standard, and he does not invent one. The standard is what he is like. Justice, faithfulness and love are not rules he chose; they are his character, and his commands express it.
So the commands cannot be arbitrary — they could not contradict what he is — and morality is not floating free above him either. The dilemma only bites if God is imagined as a being who makes decisions about goodness. He is proposed as its source.
What this argument does not claim
It does not say atheists cannot be good. They plainly can, and often put Christians to shame.
The claim is narrower and easy to lose: not that you need to believe in God to live morally, but that there has to be something for morality to be if it is more than a preference. You can use a language fluently without knowing where it came from.
Objections answered
Different cultures have completely different morals, so it's obviously relative.
They differ far less than the claim suggests. No society has honoured cowardice in battle or made betraying your friends a virtue. What varies is who counts as a friend, and the scope of duties rather than the duties themselves — which is a disagreement about facts, not about values.
I don't need God to know that cruelty is wrong.
Agreed, and the argument does not say otherwise. It is not about how you know it. It is about what makes it true. Those are different questions, and this one gets confused more than any other.
Doesn't the Old Testament show God commanding terrible things?
That is a fair challenge and it deserves its own answer rather than a sentence here. What can be said is that if it were a real contradiction it would count against the claim that God’s character is the standard — so Christians cannot shrug it off, and should not.
Shared ground, and where traditions differ
All Christians hold
All the traditions hold that God is good by nature rather than by conforming to an outside rule, and that human beings have a real moral knowledge — conscience — which is genuine but damaged.
Roman Catholic
Works with a developed natural law tradition, in which moral truths are built into created nature and are in principle knowable by reason alone.
Eastern Orthodox
Frames morality less as law and more as the healing of a nature bent out of shape, with goodness as what a person becomes rather than what they obey.
Protestant
Emphasises conscience and revealed command together, and tends to stress that sin has damaged moral judgement more severely than natural law accounts allow.
Related questions
Inspired by Convincing Proof — "Defusing the Euthyphro Dilemma". The argument is theirs; the words here are ours.
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