20 Answers- God by Trent Horn

Author:Trent Horn [Horn, Trent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catholic Answers Press
Published: 2016-06-20T05:00:00+00:00

11. Do I need to believe in God in order to be a good person?

There are many moral nonbelievers, and some of them even surpass Christians in their moral behavior. So, no, belief in God is not necessary in order to be a good person. But God must exist in order for the concept of a “good person” to be coherent, or for morals in general to be objective (for example, why the statement “It is always wrong to torture children for fun” is always true). Of course, many atheists say morality can be grounded in other things besides God, but these proposals have serious flaws.

For example, some atheists ground moral truths in our biology. They suggest that as our species evolved, human beings who acted in moral ways (for example, by cooperating with other humans rather than killing or stealing from them) lived longer than those who didn’t. After millions of years, we developed an instinct to be moral. Of course, even if evolution could explain why we act in certain ways, it doesn’t explain why we should or should not act in those ways.

If morals only exist to help us survive and pass on our genes, then they are not commandments we are bound to obey but merely helpful suggestions that can assist the survival of our “herd.” If our community decided, for example, to kill handicapped children after birth in order to weed out genetic abnormalities and improve herd health, it would be moral. But our moral intuition tells us that killing children is wrong, regardless of how it might help our species, so it follows that morality doesn’t come from evolution.

Another proposed way to ground morality apart from God would be to say that the consensus of a community decides what is moral or immoral. But if this were so, then we couldn’t say that any other society is more or less moral, only that they are all different. We couldn’t say that a society that agreed to permit child-killing was any less moral than a society that prohibited it. Even worse, what would we make of efforts to reform society? Martin Luther King Jr. thought racist laws in American society were wrong and had to change, and many atheists would agree with him. But if morality comes from society, then society—even when it makes racist laws—can never be immoral.

But couldn’t morality just be like the law of gravity, just something that exists in nature and transcends humans but is unrelated to God? No, because moral truths aren’t descriptive truths—like the law of gravity—which merely say what will happen. They are instead what philosophers call prescriptive truths, or truths that say what should happen or what moral beings should do in a given circumstance. The law of gravity says that, all things being equal, an object pushed over a cliff will fall and hit the ground below. But the law of morality says that one should not push grandma over the cliff in order to kill her.

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