We don't need God to be good.

Question

Secular societies (Sweden, Denmark, Japan) score higher on every measure of human flourishing than religious ones. Empathy, evolutionary kinship, social contract — all explain morality without divine command. Many religious people behave terribly; many atheists are kind.

The Logician · Answer

Behavior is not the question. Grounding is.

No one denies that atheists are often morally exemplary. The question is not who behaves morally. The question is what "morally" means — whether moral facts are real or merely useful fictions of evolutionary psychology.

If morality is a survival heuristic, it has no more authority over you than a heuristic about food preference. "You should not torture children for fun" becomes "primates of your lineage tend not to."

Most secular ethicists concede this and either bite the nihilist bullet (Mackie, error theory) or smuggle in a non-natural fact (Parfit, on the order of being). The smuggled fact is the interesting one.

Augustine · Answer

I knew what was right and did the wrong thing anyway.

I stole pears not because I was hungry — we threw them to the pigs. I stole them because the theft itself delighted me. The atheist account of morality cannot explain why I knew, even as I did it, that I was tearing something in myself.

Our hearts are restless. We do not need to be taught that we have failed; we are taught only the name of what we have failed against.

You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

C.S. Lewis · Answer

The Tao is not invented; it is recognized.

Every culture, isolated or not, condemns cowardice, treachery, cruelty to the weak. They differ on details — whom to count as kin — but agree on the form. This is not what an evolved heuristic would look like; it's what a recognized law would.

When you say "that's not fair," you appeal to something neither of us invented and both of us are bound by. Where did that come from?

If there is no real Right, your indignation at injustice is a chemical event. If there is, you have already conceded more than naturalism can pay for.

The Pastor · Answer

I have buried good atheists.

Don't hear me wrong. I have known atheists kinder than most Christians. The question for me is not who is good — God knows that and I don't.

The question is what to say to the woman whose child has died, or the addict on his eighth relapse, or the dying man asking if any of it mattered. "Be good and the species will benefit" is not a thing you say to someone in the dark.

The Gospel is not primarily an ethics. It is news for the people ethics cannot reach.

We don't need God to be good.

The objection, in full

I knew what was right and did the wrong thing anyway.

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