The God Delusion author Richard Dawkins proclaimed to his audience at the Jaipur Literature Festival in India that we don’t need to get morals from our religions … We don’t want to find morals from the holy books. We can have our own enlightened secular values. His claim is that religion is not 
necessary to have secure, objective morality, but that evolution can provide the necessary grounding for it. Not a social contract, subjective and changed when the culture desires it, but non-changing and absolute. Many people who would consider themselves non-theists still assume morality can exist, but can there be an objective right and wrong without an objective moral standard to refer to? In this post I hope to pose this challenge to non-theists in a winsome, gracious, and engaging way. I invite you to join me in examining this question: Can non-theists hold onto morality without God?
Can non-theists hold onto morality without God? Can they even be good without God? Sure, it’s possible that they can be good without a belief in God. There are some non-theists who live virtuous lives, just as good of lives -or better- compared to some Christians, even though they don’t believe in God. But can you explain what morality is and where it comes from without God? Can non-theists live virtuous lives without something to logically ground and define what exactly virtue is? If there can be no shadow without a source of light, how can the holocaust be considered immoral, for example, without an absolute standard of morality to contrast it with?
Morality (objective moral truth) means to say there is an objective right and wrong. This entails obligation to obey the principle or principles in question. Though in the non-theist’s worldview there is no authority that supports these obligations. What is it that makes rape wrong? Who holds us responsible for not doing right? What obligation do we have, if in fact there is no God? Being Good or Bad requires a reference point, a standard from which to judge from. In truth, the concept of goodness couldn’t even be possible without an ultimate goodness. Craig Hazen, director of Biola University’s M.A. in Christian apologetics and M.A. in science and religion programs, explains in an article titled Can we be good without God? this way:
You see, it is not knowledge (epistemology) of the moral law that is a problem — after all, the Bible teaches that this law is written on every human heart. Rather, the daunting problem for the new atheist is the nature and source (ontology) of the moral law… Classic atheists from the mid-20th century were very reluctant to grant that there was an objective moral law because they saw that it was just too compelling for believers to take the easy step from the moral law to God who was the ‘moral law giver.’ Accepting a real objective moral law would be giving far, far too much ground to the Christians and other theists…
Here are some questions you can ask Richard Dawkins the next time you sit next to him on a bus:
If everything ultimately must be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry, help me understand what a moral value is (does it have mass, occupy space, hold a charge, have wavelength)?
How did matter, energy, time and chance result in a set of objective moral values? Did the big bang really spew forth “love your enemy?” If so, you have to help me understand that.
What makes your moral standard more than a subjective opinion or personal preference? What makes it truly binding or obligatory? Why can’t I just ignore it? Won’t our end be the same (death and the grave) either way?
The non-theist’s worldview necessitates Materialism which holds that all entities in the world are physical and physically determined. With this in mind, it’s important to note that evolution, or any natural process, cannot account for objective morality. Morality is immaterial. It’s not physical, so science can’t study it and natural processes can’t explain it. There’s actually no mechanism in nature or evolutionary theory to explain the nature or existence of morality. The only alternative for true materialists is moral relativism, but then morality carries no obligation because relativism gives up any universal claim on a right and wrong. Theism is the only worldview that has the explanatory resources for the basis of actual morality.
Relative or subjective morality is based on the subject rather than the object. Within moral relativism or subjectivism, something is wrong due to cultural conditions and social norms. Here we would refer to the subject, the person engaging in the activity, not the activity itself. For instance, abortion would be wrong to a specific person, but the action itself would have no inherent wrongness or rightness. It could be wrong for one person, but not wrong to another. Here there is no place for the concepts of Good and Evil, just peoples’ feelings and opinions.
In reality, we base what is moral or not on the object (the action itself) as having the quality of wrongness or rightness. No matter who is viewing it, it will still be wrong and just as wrong. For example, no matter who views a person engaging in something like pedophilia or rape, it’s still wrong because the wrongness is in the act, not in the person engaging in it or the person observing its’ personal feelings.
One of the most basic moral principles for humankind is the universal grounding for human worth. From this principle we understand the wrongness of things like murder and human slavery. But how does a materialist establish the grounding necessary to explain this worth? In the materialist’s world there is no soul, no immaterial consciousness, no mind, just a brain. Paul Copan, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University, asked the question this way:
Why think humans have rights and dignity if they’re products of valueless, physical processes in a cause-and-effect series from the big bang until now?
A materialist must find a way to ground human worth in something from the material world, but what physical attribute could you say all humans have that justifies treating them equally? Human beings come in all sorts of shapes and sizes: tall, short, introverted, extroverted, autistic, schizophrenic. What makes an Olympic gold medalist equal to a person with dwarfism (and some of the de-habilitating health problems that come with it), or a lawyer equal in human value to a person with down syndrome? Some people have more capable physical bodies or more capable mental faculties, so what is it that makes them equal? Their transcendent human value cannot possibly come from the concept of the survival of the fittest.
The Cappadocian Church Father Gregory of Nyssa who lived in the 4th century was an opponent of the human slavery of his day. He grounded human beings’ inherent value, in his fourth homily on the book of Ecclesiastes, like this:
(I) Only God has the right to enslave humans, and God does not choose to do so; indeed, it was God who gave human beings their free wills. (II) How dare a person take that precious entity–the only part of the created order to have been made in God’s image–and enslave it! (III) As humans who were created in the divine image, all people are radically equal; therefore, it is hubristic for some to arrogate to themselves absolute authority over others.
This, Gregory argues, is the true offense of slavery.
How could a materialist rationalize something like caring for endangered species, if the material universe is all there ever was, is, and ever will be? If the survival of the fittest is the only driving force in nature, why should I care for another species? Wouldn’t I simply be fulfilling my role as the best species from the perspective of survival? Why should I not be able to survive and rise as the fittest by eating other species from an ethical perspective, as a naturalist? If the survival of the fittest is the only driving force in nature, do you think it cares if a species is eliminated? That is how survival of the fittest works, by eliminating benign species. Why should we care from a naturalistic perspective? Maybe only if saving a species from extinction increases my odds of surviving, but that couldn’t account for creating a better way of behaving, for claiming there is an ethically superior way to live in caring for animals. On its own, ethics don’t exist in a naturalistic worldview. There are no moral choices there. A choice could be justified as increasing odds of your own survival, but there is no concept of human flourishing, which means increasing a certain quality of life. You’d be making a moral choice. This involves some better or worse quality of life. It seems to me to be stepping into and borrowing from the Christian worldview, from which we have a sense of duty toward creation.
In contrast, the Christian worldview sets mankind up as stewards. Adam is entrusted to name the animals; Noah is entrusted to protect them. Understanding that we are different than them because we’re created with the special image of God means that there are just aspects of our being that are different from other creatures that are not in the image of God. Through this we see we have a sense of duty related to the other species which those species do not have towards us. This is what separates us from other created things, and what gives us our innate value, regardless of our abilities. It is also with this understanding of the Christian view of reality that we can have a healthy respect for our environment.
Although it does not adhere to major tenets of Christianity, the Christian worldview is necessary for grounding the freedoms promised by the U.S. government. In fact, religious freedom and all other freedoms claimed by the founding fathers of the United States come from this understanding that all human beings are equal, and they grounded those claims accordingly. (Freedoms are just claims to something and therefore have to be justified by something.) The founding documents of the United States established that grounding in God-given rights and freedoms that government must respect, their authors producing a unanimous declaration which held certain truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights… Materialism, however, fails to logically establish a grounding for morality and moral principles like innate, transcendent human worth.
Morality must be grounded by some objective moral standard. If it’s not, what would being moral or immoral mean, if not to refer to that fixed point of perfect morality? Social contracts lead to culturally conditioned moral relativism or subjectivism, and natural processes cannot account for the moral principles we see in our world. Instead, this morality is grounded in something outside of ourselves, our culture and our material universe. Religion may not be necessary for grounding morality; however the existence of God is necessary if anyone is to claim the existence of any moral truth. Since non-theists cannot rationally hold to any objective moral truth, it seems to me they must abandon it for moral relativism, or reconsider the evidence for God.