Richard Dawkins once boldly announced that our universe, at bottom, is “pure, pitiless indifference,” possessed of no real good or evil, since everything (accordingly to his atheistic paradigm) is a haphazard assembly of fundamental particles, with no intention, direction, purpose, or aim. Dawkins is not alone in his nihilistic assessment. Many atheists have recognized that without God, our foundation for objective moral value is in complete collapse. But, this is clearly not how we perceive the world.
Nearly every human—aside from those diagnosed as sociopathic—recognize that some actions are truly better than others; that some thoughts and deeds are, in fact, really good, and others, really wrong. In other words, to live like Mother Teresa is objectively better (or so we assume) than to live like Adolf Hitler. The question then becomes, is our moral sense reliable, or not?
As C.S. Lewis once put it: you can’t make sense of a crooked line without first understanding the concept of a straight one. Similarly, without a perfect and transcendent source of “The Good,” it becomes incredibly difficult—if not outright impossible—to make sense of our moral language; of things being good or bad, right or wrong, better or worse. Because to what, ultimately, are we making these comparisons? What is that moral “straight line,” so to speak?
Traditionally speaking, it was God’s essentially all-good and loving nature that provided the perfect, objective, and transcendent reference point for moral value, whereas God’s will (which reflects God’s nature) offered a foundation for moral obligation. Please don’t misunderstand: Something is not good simply because God wills it, nor does God will something simply because it is good. Rather, God is goodness itself, and so whatever God wills is necessarily good, precisely because of who and what God is. The good, then, is neither arbitrary nor above God, but identical to God.
However, if atheism is true, then this foundation is lost, and all morality becomes relative to society and culture; specifically, a matter of preference and the conditioning of society. There is no longer any transcendent anchor-point to offer an objective moral assessment of human experience. No longer is anything truly good or bad, or right or wrong, but only a matter of opinion and taste. There are only acts of human will, but no way to distinguish them morally from what any one particular person—or society as a whole—happens to prefer.
The moral argument ultimately offers a clue, and then a choice. There seems to be no real reason to deny the general reliability of our moral experience—to affirm that some things, for example: slavery and the holocaust, are objectively evil; and to affirm other things, such as self-sacrifice and compassion, as being objectively good. In fact, the only reason a person would deny their moral experience is because they are assuming atheism. But are the arguments for atheism really more obvious than our moral experience? Honestly, I don’t think so.
But to overcome a potential objective, more needs to be said. Because science, and specifically evolutionary science, does not—and cannot—decide the moral question; since evolutionary science can’t tell us whether we evolved to discover, or to invent, our moral experience.
However, since we believe that evolution guided us to discover many real, objective aspects of our universe, why then should we arbitrarily deny that the same has occurred with respect to moral experience? The question of moral experience is ultimately philosophical, and can only be answered by considering the existence of God. Does our moral experience match up to something “really and already good?”
To put it simply, one conception of the world—call it, the religious conception—provides a sound foundation to moral experience, given the perfect and essential nature of God. The other conception of the world—the atheistic conception—is incompatible with moral experience and leads inevitably to nihilism, as many famous atheists have recognized.
So, the question is this: In which world do you think we live?
[Example of The Moral Argument in a conversation]
While the moral argument doesn’t offer the same argumentation force as, say, the contingency argument, it does tend to be more impactful in everyday conversation, perhaps, not only because the argument is less abstract, but also because it hits people right where they live. Everybody has a moral sense, and most people have strong moral opinions on world affairs. By affirming the reality and reliability of this moral sense—which almost every sincere person is eager to do—we are led irresistibly to the existence of God to support it.