Can we have an objective moral framework in the absence of God’s commandments? Yes, we seem to think so.
Must we believe in God in order to live in moral uprightness? No, our intuition seems to tell us.
We feel we know right from wrong, evil from good. We think we know kindness, compassion and love. We surely notice misplaced suffering, we resent undeserved, gratuitous evil. These intuitions could be true or misplaced, but that is a debate for a later time. At present though, going with the voice of our intuition, many of us, particularly the secular atheists, don’t need a God for morality.
Dr. William Lane Craig, the world’s foremost Christian apologist disagrees. He is an American analytic philosopher holding faculty positions at Biola University and the Houston Baptist University. According to him, God is indispensable for an objective moral standard. He argues thus:
If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
Objective moral values do exist.
Therefore, God exists.
Where does this logical connection between moral values and God come from? Yes, we intuitively seem to grasp goodness, compassion, justice, truth and such, but how are we to understand that they arise from God? Plato has famously said that God is the locus and source of moral value. As does Dr. Craig, who says this ‘conspicuous’ and ‘logical’ connection comes from the proposition that God is the epitome of the highest good. Goodness is defined by God’s nature, which is a distillation of every possible virtue, to its maximum. Thus God is maximally good, maximally compassionate, maximally just. The maximum one can imagine.
What if someone’s imagination was limited? What maximum?
This amorphous definition of maximum apart, we must urgently look into the famous logical contradiction posed by the ‘Euthpyro’s dilemma’. It is found in Plato’s dialogue Euthypro, in which Socrates asked Euthypro “Is the pious loved by the Gods because it is pious or is it pious because it is loved by the Gods?” .
In its essence, the statement that God is most morally upright has been split into two contradictory ideas. Is God good because he is on the right side of all the rules, i.e. He adheres perfectly? Or does goodness arise from God’s nature i.e. Whatever God does becomes good?
Which one?
If God is good because he adheres perfectly to what is established ‘goodness’, then this goodness is objective, established outside of him. This standard is independent of God in this case.
However if goodness is defined by God’s nature, anything at all done by God would qualify as good. Then this ‘goodness’ becomes relative. What if in another universe, or in another mood, God decided to act a different way? If he committed evil acts, will they be moral?
If logic is the way to make a case for objective moral values linked to God, it fails. It seems that religious apologists talk about believing in God in order to attribute a moral point of reference to something, but then, that something need not be God. It could be anything: a dictator, a football star, a beauty queen, a rock.
To fill the gap of a reference point they bring in God.
The grave problem of evil and suffering troubles everyone alike and rightfully so. It is the most poignant, perturbing aspect of the human condition. So distressing, that this issue alone has serious ‘belief’ consequences. Why this mindless suffering, why evil in the presence of a most compassionate, just God, we painfully enquire! The religious apologists’ reply to the problem of evil and suffering is marked by sheer circumlocution and digression. Maybe because they just do not have a clue.
One should hear Ravi Zacharias, the eloquent, poetic Christian apologist say – “Since evil is defined, good must be defined in its binary opposite, hence a moral code exists. Thereby a moral law giver exists”. One can concede to him this argument, but only till this point. The problem arises when he extends it further to say that the moral lawgiver must be God. How? What is the connection?
None. Again, God comes in only to fill a gap of a moral point of reference.
The divine command theory as explained by Dr. Craig tells us that we have been commanded by God to believe in him, it is our moral duty and our obligation. This queer proposition gets queerer if you consider its outrageous hidden assumption. To even obey God’s command, you would have to believe in God, right? However, if you don’t believe that God exists, how would you obey his command? This idea is strangely circular! Defending yet again, with his enviable conviction, the perspicacious Dr Craig comes up with a finer twist in logic. He argues that believing in the existence of God is separate from believing in God. What? So he is trying to say that one could believe that God exists, but not trust him or even hate him. What does that even mean?
Brain gymnastics. Crazy somersaults of logic. Effectively nonsensical.