What is the moral argument?

Question 60101.

The moral argument starts with something so ordinary that it is easy to walk past. Human beings make moral judgements and expect them to carry real weight. When we say that torturing a child for entertainment is wrong, we do not mean that we personally dislike it, or that our society happens to disapprove. We mean it is actually wrong, in a way that does not depend on anyone’s opinion.

That conviction is almost universal and remarkably difficult to account for, and Micah 6:8 assumes we already know it. The moral argument contends that objective moral obligations make sense if there is a God who is Himself good, and do not make much sense otherwise.

The Structure of the Moral Argument

Stated formally the moral argument runs like this. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist. Objective moral values and duties do exist. Therefore God exists. Both premises can be argued about, and both are worth arguing about carefully.

Notice what is not being claimed. Nobody is saying that atheists cannot behave well; many behave better than many Christians, and I have known several who put me to shame. Nor is anyone claiming that you need to believe in God in order to know that cruelty is wrong.

The claim is about grounding rather than knowing. It asks what has to be true about reality for moral obligations to be real rather than a set of preferences we have agreed to take seriously. That is a question about ontology, and it does not go away when someone points out that unbelievers are often decent people.

Lewis and the Law of Human Nature

C. S. Lewis opens Mere Christianity with the everyday version of this. Listen to two people quarrelling, he says. They do not simply say I want that; they say things like how would you like it if someone did that to you, or you promised. Each is appealing to a standard the other is expected to acknowledge.

That appeal is the interesting part. Arguments only work if there is some agreed rule of fair play behind them. And when the other person replies, they almost never say there is no such thing as fairness. They explain why the case is different, which is a tacit admission that the standard exists.

Lewis’s own route to faith ran through this. He had objected that the universe was cruel and unjust, and then noticed that the objection required a standard of justice from somewhere, which a purely material universe was in no position to supply.

The Biblical Framework

Scripture accounts for this straightforwardly. Human beings are made in the image of a God who is Himself the standard of goodness, and He has written the work of the law on the heart. Romans 2:14-15 says that Gentiles who do not have the law show that its work is written on their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness.

The Greek word for conscience is syneidesis, literally a knowing with, an internal witness that accuses or excuses. That is a precise description of what everyone actually experiences, including people who deny that any such faculty could be reliable.

On this account moral obligation is not an arbitrary set of divine commands, nor a human construction. It is the character of God expressed in the way He made us to live, which is why breaking it damages us rather than simply annoying Him. See what is the conscience.

The Euthyphro Dilemma

The standard objection is two and a half thousand years old and still gets produced as though it were fresh. Plato asks whether the good is good because the gods command it, or whether the gods command it because it is good. If the first, morality is arbitrary. If the second, there is a standard above God and He is not needed.

The Christian answer is that neither horn applies, because God’s commands flow from His own nature rather than from His will considered separately or from a standard outside Him. Goodness is not a rule God consults or a decree He issues. It is what He is.

Ask the same question about the metre. Is a metre a metre because the standard bar says so, or does the bar conform to some external metre? The question dissolves once you realise that the bar is not measuring; it is the measure. The moral argument holds that God stands in that relation to goodness.

Can Morality Be Grounded Without God?

Serious attempts have been made and they deserve serious treatment. Evolutionary accounts explain why we have moral feelings: cooperative groups survive better, and altruism towards kin propagates genes. That may well be true, and it does not touch the question. It explains why we believe cruelty is wrong; it does not establish that it is.

Social contract theories ground morality in agreement, but agreements can be renegotiated, and a majority that decides to persecute a minority has not broken any contract it did not write. Utilitarianism grounds it in wellbeing, but it has to assume that wellbeing matters, which is the very thing in question.

The most consistent atheist thinkers have often simply accepted the conclusion. If there is no God, said one, then there is no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. That is a coherent position. It is just extremely hard to live in, and almost nobody manages it for long.

The Argument from Moral Outrage

There is a version of the moral argument that works better in conversation than the formal one, and it starts from the objection rather than from agreement. When someone says they cannot believe in God because of the evil in the world, they are making a moral claim of enormous confidence.

So the question back is a gentle one: where does the standard come from by which this is judged to be evil rather than simply unpleasant? If the universe is indifferent, then a massacre is a rearrangement of matter and nothing more, and the outrage has nothing to stand on.

That is not a debating trick and I would never use it as one, particularly with someone who has suffered. It is an observation that the very depth of our moral seriousness is evidence for something the atheist account cannot easily supply. See what about the problem of evil.

Where the Argument Leads

The moral argument has a sting that the cosmological and teleological arguments lack. Those end with a cause or a designer. This one ends with a lawgiver, and a lawgiver implies accountability, which is a great deal more personal.

That is also why it is often resisted more strongly. Nobody minds much about a first cause. A moral law with a person behind it changes the conversation from cosmology to the state of your own life, and Scripture says that suppression of this knowledge is exactly what human beings do.

Which is where the gospel arrives. If the moral law is real, then all of us stand condemned by it, and the good news is not that the standard has been lowered but that the lawgiver came and bore the penalty Himself. See the cosmological argument and the gospel in its simplest form.

The Nuremberg Problem

There is a historical case that presses the moral argument better than any thought experiment. At Nuremberg the defence was, in substance, that the accused had acted lawfully according to the laws of their own state. They had followed orders that were legal where they were given.

The prosecution had to appeal to something above German law, a standard binding on nations regardless of their statutes. That appeal only makes sense if there is a moral law that is not made by any legislature and cannot be repealed by one.

Every human rights declaration since has assumed the same thing, usually without noticing. Rights that are inherent, inalienable and universal are not the sort of thing a committee can grant, and the moral argument simply asks where they come from if the universe is indifferent.

Conscience and Its Limits

An objection worth taking seriously is that consciences differ across cultures, which is offered as evidence that moral knowledge is constructed rather than given. The differences are real and I would not deny them.

But look at what actually varies. Cultures differ enormously about whom the rules apply to and about specific applications, and remarkably little about the underlying principles. No culture has ever admired cowardice in battle, treated gratuitous cruelty to one’s own children as virtuous, or held that betraying a friend for money is admirable. Lewis collected the parallels in an appendix to The Abolition of Man and the convergence is striking.

Scripture also accounts for the variation rather than being embarrassed by it. A conscience can be weak, or seared, or trained badly, which is exactly what you would expect of a real faculty in fallen people. The moral argument does not need every conscience to be accurate; it needs the moral law to be real.

So, now what?

Learn the moral argument as a question rather than a proof. When someone denounces an injustice, and they will, ask them what makes it actually wrong rather than simply unpopular. Ask it because you want to know, not because you want to win, and see where the conversation goes.

Then turn it on yourself, which is the harder half. A moral law that is real is a moral law you have broken, and the honest response to the moral argument is not intellectual satisfaction but the sort of prayer the tax collector prayed in the temple. Have you ever actually prayed it?

They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them.

Romans 2:15 (ESV)