Why Morality Points to God

In the previous two articles in this series, I laid out the reasons why I think it’s reasonable to conclude that morality is objective – that is that actions have their own intrinsic moral value according to an external standard of good and bad that almost all people recognise – and that this objective morality could not have had a human origin.

"Morality" by Dietmut Teijgeman-Hansen / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I want to conclude the series by showing how God is the best explanation for the existence of objective morality, then take a moment to consider a common atheistic objection to this idea, before finishing up comparing the picture of morality we get in the scriptures with our everyday moral experiences.

So why believe that God is the best explanation for the existence of objective morality? Put simply, a transcendent moral law requires a transcendent moral lawgiver. Moral values exist, and they must come from somewhere – in fact they must come from someone. Given the highly personal nature of morality, an ethical code that requires me personally to do good and avoid evil can only come from a personal entity.

It makes no sense to claim that moral values such as Justice or Kindness exist independently in the universe as abstract objects, because abstract objects can’t be the cause of anything – they are causally impotent. Their existence would not be able to explain how I know and recognise what Justice and Kindness are, because as abstract objects, they would be unable to produce this effect in me.

So these values must be grounded in a person. Yet as we discussed previously, if the personal entity behind morality is a human, then morals immediately become subjective and arbitrary. So absolute, objective morals must have their root in a person beyond human status.

The person must pre-exist humanity, because intuitively we know that rape was still wrong even before there were humans to engage in it. The parallel is people who have not been born yet, but will end up raping someone. Even though they don’t exist yet, and therefore have not committed the action, we can know in advance that if they did engage in raping others, it would be wrong. If morality is objective, then rape is wrong in and of itself; the wrongness of the act is not dependent on the people who commit it. This morality had to be in place before the first people ever came along, and therefore the personal source of morality must pre-exist humanity.

This personal source of morality must also be good themselves, because the moral standard requires us to do good rather than evil. This is confirmed when we consider one of the classic arguments from history about the nature of morality that atheists regularly present to Christians today, which is known as the Euthyphro Dilemma. In this dilemma, the atheist asks: is something good because God says so, or does God say so because it is good?

This creates a problem for the Christian: If they answer that something is good because God says so, then goodness is an arbitrary quality. God could have decided that a completely different range of actions were morally good instead. He could also change his mind at any time and decide that it is good for us to inflict pain on one another. Anything could become good and anything could become bad, depending on God’s commands, which would essentially stop morality from being objective.

However if they answer that God commands moral behaviour because it is good, then goodness exists independently of God and he can’t be the basis or source of it. Accepting either option as true is an enormously problematic for the believer.

So how do we escape the horns of the dilemma? There is a simple answer. We believe that God commands moral behaviour because HE is good – it is his nature to be good and to love righteousness. So we are not stuck with either arbitrary or abstract morality. It turns out to be a false dilemma, because there is a third possible answer.

My hair is dark – this is an objective fact about my hair. Similarly God’s nature is good – and this is an objective fact about his nature.

God’s good nature is the perfect source of morality, if you think about it. It gives us an explanation of why we are able to recognise good and evil, which an abstract morality could not cause us to do, because unlike abstract objects, God has agency. God can cause things to happen, like making us personally aware of moral standards and implanting within us a conscience that reminds us that we have moral duties to uphold.

Meanwhile his nature also provides a source for moral values which is based in an objective property he has, namely goodness. He himself acts as the paradigm of goodness, the standard by which good things can be measured, and by which bad things can be immediately recognised.

I’d like to close by looking at a passage in the scriptures that fits very much with my own moral experiences, and perhaps it fits in with yours. If Christianity is true, it has to be able to describe reality, and this section explains two facets of morality that I think are universal to human beings. It comes from the apostle Paul, in the book of Romans (2:14-15).

When Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.

This is saying that when people, who didn’t know the Mosaic law that the Jews lived by, acted according to similar values, they proved that the moral law was written on their hearts – inwardly knowable and accessible. This explains why all people today can almost universally identify what is good and bad, because it is an internal feature given to us by our creator.

And the passage goes on to say that our consciences act in conjunction with this internal moral code, giving us accusing thoughts or sometimes forcing us to make mental justifications as we wrestle with our consciences. I would be mightily surprised if you have never had this experience yourself. Can your worldview explain it?

Morality is such a powerful evidence for the existence of God, because God is the only conceivable source of an objective, personally binding moral code that pre-exists humanity and is oriented exclusively towards doing and being good. All human explanations fall short of being able to describe this morality and fall short of our universal moral experience, and therefore must not be true.