Table of Contents
Chapter 12 – How the Nontheistic Worldview Lacks a Substantial Basis for Condemning Evil
Chapter 12 of Randy Alcorn’s book If God Is Good shows how the nontheistic worldviews for condemning evil lack a substantial basis for their views. You can find any of the previous chapters under the heading Bible Studies in the menu above. Unless otherwise noted, I will be using Scriptures from the NKJV.
Chapter 12, In A Nutshell
Randy Alcorn states:
Calling evil a problem assumes a standard of goodness; but if God doesn’t exist, then by what objective basis can we measure morality? Our feelings do not constitute a true moral framework for determining good and evil, right and wrong.
Moreover, without borrowing from a worldview that includes God, naturalists cannot successfully argue that either objective good or evil exists.
Likewise. atheists’ argument that goodness and moral standards can exist without God does not hold up.
However, belief in evil provides a persuasive argument for God’s existence. It’s difficult to argue the problem of evil when your worldview provides no basis for believing and evil. We find that atheism’s foundation for morality is built on cultures shifting sands. Therefore, a non-theistic worldview logically requires abandoning any moral foundation.
When God is removed from the equation no basis remains for the recognition of human rights. In contrast to non-theistic worldviews, the biblical worldview offers a foundation for determining both good and evil.
A Moral Framework Without A Foundation
1948 Debate on BBC Radio
Atheist Bertrand Russell and Father Frederick Copleston discussed the naturalistic versus the Christian basis for believing in good and evil in a 1948 debate on BBC Radio.
At one point Russell said, “I feel that some things are good and that other things are bad.”
Copleston asked him, “so you distinguished good and bad by what faculty?”
Russell responded, “by my feelings.”
Copleston then pointed out that Hitler did what felt good to him. He pressed Russell on whether he believed in any such thing as a moral obligation.
Although Russell gave his opinion about the sense of human moral obligation, he posed no objective basis for actual moral obligation. Russell ended the debate by saying,
“I cannot attribute a divine origin to the sense of moral obligation, which I think is quite easily accounted for in… other ways.
Bertrand Russell, Bertrand Russell on God and religion, Ed. AL SECKEL (New York: Prometheus books, 1986)
By My Feelings
Our feelings do not constitute a true moral framework for determining good and evil, right and wrong. It is one thing to account for a sense of moral obligation, and quite another to establish that anyone truly has a moral obligation. Therefore, we are left with Russell’s three-word answer to how he distinguished good from evil: “by my feelings.”
The author states “I have read a number of writers who argue, as Russell did, that one does not have to believe in God to have moral categories of good and evil.
Some argue from the position:
- Self-defense: we should condemn murderers because we don’t want to be murdered.
- Self-awareness: we should do something good for someone else because he or she will reciprocate (we hope). We should serve others because that will make us feel good about ourselves.
Randy Alcorn then asks the question “how do such pragmatic and subjective considerations constitute a true moral framework?”
Consider Atheist Sam Harris
In an article titled “The Myth Of Secular Moral Chaos,” Sam Harris writes:
“Clearly, we can think of objective sources of moral order that do not require the existence of a law giving God… Questions of morality are really questions about happiness and suffering. If there are objectively better and worse ways to live so as to maximize happiness in this world, these would be objective moral truths worth knowing… Everything about human experience suggests that love is better than hate for the purposes of living happily in this world. This is an objective claim.”
Sam Harris, “The Myth of Secular Moral Chaos,” Council for Secular Humanism
Harris argues that whatever makes people happy, presumably not at the expense of others’ happiness, is morally right. Whatever doesn’t make people happy is wrong.
Does this really qualify as a moral system? Isn’t happiness a perception? And as such is it not subjective rather than objective?
Alcorn agrees that love is indeed better than hate, but is that true simply because love usually creates more happiness? Some people enjoy hating. And sometimes people, out of love, choose great sacrifices leading to personal misery.
A Christian can argue that heaven will replace misery with happiness and that Hell will strip hate of all happiness. But since Harris believes, as Russell did, in no afterlife, the only happiness available, from either love or hate, exists here and now.
Harris’s marble framework is not nearly as objective as he claims. I think it necessarily draws on, without realizing it, a theistic worldview that values lasting happiness and sees love as good and hate as evil because of how those attitudes are viewed by God, whose image we were made.
Non-Theistic Worldviews
Non-theistic worldviews may not let God into the family room, but they habitually smuggle Him in through the back door. They try to put something in His place to give life meaning, but God remains the primary reference point behind the secondary ones that they recognize.
Without borrowing from a worldview that includes God, naturalists cannot successfully argue that good or evil exists. Supposing that humans could exist without a creator, from what source of goodness could we draw?
Why would anyone feel motivated to avoid “evil,” whatever that might mean when there’s no judge to whom they must answer? The fact that atheists believe in morality, even though their worldview supports no basis for it, provides evidence for the existence of the very God they deny.
Can Moral Standards Exist Without God?
The atheist’s argument that goodness and moral standards can exist without God does not hold up.
If there’s no God, people don’t live after death and aren’t held accountable for their actions, whether good or evil. That’s why Dostoevsky said,
“Destroy a man’s belief in immortality and… everything would be permitted, even cannibalism.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The BrothersKaramazov (New York: Random House, 1970), 88.
However, Alcorn reminds us that to say that an atheistic worldview provides no basis for the existence of good and evil does not mean that atheists have no sense of right and wrong. Because they do.
They live in a culture influenced by historic belief in God and the morality revealed in scripture. This provides them with a residual basis for believing that moral categories are important, while their own worldview doesn’t.
Consider the following, if the natural world is all there is, would mankind get its morals from animal instincts?
In an evolutionary worldview, why object to stronger human beings stealing from or killing weaker ones? Wouldn’t this simply be natural selection and survival of the fittest, not a question of right or wrong?
The naturalist may claim that their survival of the fittest is descriptive, not prescriptive; That it describes the world as it is, not as it should be. But on what does he base any sense of should? Why “should” he operate differently than the way the natural order operates since he’s part of the natural order himself? Any appeal to natural law seems baseless unless there is a Creator, a Lawgiver, who has built into us a sense of that natural law.
A Credible Moral Framework
Belief in evil provides a persuasive argument for God’s existence. Atheists believe that some things are right and others wrong and conclude that they’re doing so proves they can be good without God.
But the logic doesn’t hold. The question isn’t whether atheists have morals, but whether atheism is a credible moral framework.
The Christian worldview explains why the atheist, God’s image-bearer with a divinely created conscience, is a moral being. The atheist worldview, however, does not.
Naturalism teaches that the universe consists of observable phenomena open to scientific investigation; no such thing as an invisible realm exists.
Most naturalists, however, intuitively accept the reality of evil. They use the existence of evil as evidence for the nonexistence of God. “Since evil exists, there can’t be a God.” But that argument can be turned on its head. If evil exists, there must be a God, since evil could not exist without good, and good could not exist without God.
No Basis For Believing In Evil?
It’s difficult to argue the problem of evil when your worldview provides no basis for believing in evil. Randy Alcorn states that he has read many atheists’ views, however, and this is not typically what they argue. Instead, they present long lists of things that they call evil. But this poses a problem for them.
In calling these things evil, the non-theist tries to hold God accountable to moral standards that can exist only if there is a God.
This he says puts atheism in a no-win situation. If God does not exist, then there can be no ultimate right or wrong and no objective standards of goodness or evil beyond personal opinion or the majority votes of human cultures.
Therefore, when the atheist argues against God on the basis of the problem of evil, then he emphatically affirms there is such a thing as evil. Two results follow:
- If real evil does exist, then the atheist’s case collapses.
- If real evil does not exist, then the atheist case also collapses.
Dinesh D’Souza writes:
If we’re purely material beings, then we should no more object to mass murder than a river objects to drying up in a drought… Our ability to distinguish between good and evil, and to recognize these as real, means that there is a moral standard in the universe that provides the basis for this distinction. And what is the source of that moral standard if not God?
Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity (Washington, D.C.: Regnery 2007 ), 276.
The Christians’ worldviews shaping influence on the Western world, to which most atheists strenuously object, is exactly what creates the moral tension needed to reveal evil and suffering as a moral problem.
Foundations Built on Shifting Sands will Fail
Atheism’s foundation for morality is built on cultures shifting sands. Many years ago, the author took a sequence of college philosophy classes from a likable atheist. He found the ethics course most interesting. Every time it came to the question of why the professor believed something to be right or wrong, he would say only that it “seemed” to him to be best, it “seemed” to him to help the most people. In other words, it always boiled down to his personal preference. What was interesting is that there were thirty of us who sat in the ethics class, all with our own personal preferences, many flexing with the current popular culture.
Moral Behaviors Evolve
Alcorn goes on to say that he has talked with individuals whose ethics have evolved over time, who now believe that any consensual sex between adults is moral. Adultery is consensual sex. So, is it moral? Well, yes, some convince themselves, so long as they commit adultery with a person they genuinely love. But how moral is this same adultery in the eyes of the betrayed spouse?
Choosing moral behaviors because they make you feel happy can make sense, in a Bertrand Russell/Sam Harris sort of way, but what if it makes you feel happy to torture animals or kill Jews, or steal from your employer?
“You misunderstand,” someone says. “We atheists do not base our morality on personal preferences, but on the judgments of society as a whole, on what benefits the most people.”
But how does this help the argument? Consider if most of an entire nation thought it best to liquidate one portion of that population, would that be good? Or what if 51% of the world’s population decided to liberate the continent of North America? Would that be good?
Nor does it help to claim the authority of some group of “elites” who supposedly have a finer moral sense. History teaches us that elite groups tend to call good whatever it is they’re inclined to do.
If There Is No God
If there is no God who created us for an eternal purpose, and no God who will judge us; if there is no God who has revealed his standards and no God who informs our consciences, then surely any morality we forward on our own will optimally amount to a mirror image of our own subjective opinions that will change with the times.
To say that the Holocaust or child abuse is wrong is a moral judgment. But such a judgment has no meaning without a standard to measure it against.
Why are the Holocaust and child abuse wrong? Because they involve suffering? Because other people have said they are wrong? Feeling it or saying it doesn’t make it so.
We have only one basis for good moral judgments: the existence of objective standards based on unchanging reference points outside ourselves.
Personal opinions fall far short. After all, Nazis and rapists have their opinions too.
A Non-Theistic Worldview Logically Requires Abandoning Any Moral Foundation.
Atheist Richard Taylor, confesses,
“To say that something is wrong because…it is forbidden by God, is also perfectly understandable to anyone who believes in a law-giving God. But to say that something is wrong… even though no God exists to forbid it, is not understandable.”
Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith, and Reason, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,1985) 90.
Taylor recognizes that the “concept of moral obligation [is] unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain but their meaning is gone.” (Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith, and Reason, 84.)
University of Calgary ethicist Kai Nielsen is also an atheist. In a philosophy journal article, he candidly acknowledges that human reason offers no guidance in developing one’s true morality.
Speaking to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, Dr. L. D. Rue argued that people are better off if they deceive themselves into believing a “Noble Lie” which will make us think (even though it isn’t so) that humanity and the universe have value.
Loyal D. Rue, “The Saving Grace Of Noble Lies” (address to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, February 1991,) cited by Craig, Reasonable Faith, 85
The New Yorker called Princeton philosophy teacher Peter Singer “the most influential philosophy teacher alive.” The New England Journal of Medicine claims Singer has had “more success in effecting changes in acceptable behavior” than any philosopher since Bertrand Russell.
However, consider that Singer proposed:
“We shouldn’t declare children alive until the 28th day after their birth. This allows parents time to decide whether they wish to dispose of their children without legal consequences.”
Peter Singer, Rethinking Life And Death (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996), 217.
Singer also wrote:
“If we compare a severely defective human infant with a nonhuman animal, a dog or a pig, for example, we will often find the nonhuman to have superior capacities, both actual and potential, for rationality, self-consciousness, communication, and anything else that can possibly be considered morally significant.”
Peter Singer, “Sanctity of Life or Quality of Life,” Pediatrics 72, no. 1 (July 1983 ): 129.
Then Singer, like Sam Harris, builds his ethics on the notion of happiness. But notice where it takes him:
“When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of the happier life for the second. Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would… Be right to kill him.”
Peter Singer, “Taking Life: Humans,” www.petersingerlinks.com/taking.htm, excerpted from Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 186.
When Singer was appointed a Princeton professor, a disabilities rights group named Not Dead Yet protested his arrival. They objected to Singer’s books which promote the legalization of killing disabled infants as well as children and adults with severe cognitive disabilities.
Each of us should reflect seriously on this question: If everyone acted as if Singer’s worldview were true, then what would our culture look like? Would there be more good and less evil?
And more to the point: if YOU have a physical disability, cognitive impairment, or senior citizens discount, would YOU want to live in Singer’s world? (Even if the answer is yes, you wouldn’t be allowed to live there very long.)
When God Is Removed From The Equation
When God is removed from the equation, no basis remains for the recognition of human rights.
It’s no surprise that atheism was the centerpiece of Soviet and Chinese communism’s worldview that allowed its leaders to murder more than 100 million people. Richard Wurmbrand, tortured in communist prisons, wrote,
“The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe. When man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil, there is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man. The communist tortures often said, ‘there is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish.’”
Richard Wurmbrand, tortured for Christ (Bartlesville, OK: Living Sacrifice Book, 1990), 38.
The Biblical Worldview Offers A Foundation
In contrast to non-theistic worldviews, the biblical worldview offers a foundation for determining both good and evil.
If a subjective case of happiness or well-being constitutes a moral system, then Charles Manson, terrorists, and genocidal dictators have an equally authoritative moral ground when they appeal to their own personal preferences. Of course, we all know that they are wrong, but HOW do we know?
The Christian worldview affirms that God’s character provides the objective standard that determines good and evil.
“You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”- Lev 19:2
Question: But how can we know what God is like?
Answer: Because he has revealed in Scripture moral laws that reflect his character qualities.
Example:
For instance, the Bible offers an objective moral stance against adultery. Marital unfaithfulness violates God’s character and is specifically forbidden in his word. Therefore, we can know, without depending on our feelings, that it is evil.
A Christian’s subjective feelings, in light of his current temptations, may tell him adultery is right. But he can still hold on to the view that it is wrong because a credible authoritative source outside himself says so.
That God has planted in all his image-bearers an ability to recognize good and evil in their consciences accounts for why people who do not believe Scripture can nonetheless feel guilty when they do wrong and feel good when they do right.
“For when Gentiles, [unbelievers]who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the law… show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and between themselves, their thoughts accusing or else excusing them)” – Romans 2:14-15
In Closing
Even those who reject the claims of the Christian worldview should acknowledge that it does in fact offer a moral foundation upon which to discern good and evil. And they should ask themselves whether, without realizing it, they sometimes borrow from the Christian worldview because their own worldview cannot provide a foundation on which to judge good and evil.
Therefore, the most important question you need to answer is:
Maranatha! Until next time, I am Passionately Loving Jesus, the Anchor of my Soul.
Related Worldview Posts
- The Deceptive Worldview in the Church
- The Deception of American Christians – Part One
- The Deception of American Christians – Part Two
