Transcription
Is the purpose of life to be moral? Um, I don't know. That's uh, no, I wouldn't. Well, that's absolutely astounding. There you have it, undeniable proof that you can be good without believing in God. But wait, the question isn't can you be good without believing in God; the question is can you be good without God? Okay, so remember that distinction as we dive into this Q&A debate between Frank Turk and the student.
I want to, really quick, before we actually go to the Q&A, here, feature this moment from the YouTube channel Big Think. I'm going to play just like a 30-second moment of this, just to lay out the atheist perspective on morality, and then, with that in view, let's explain why it is wrong. Here we go.
My view is that morality, our human morality, is older than religion. So, instead of saying morality comes from God, or religion gave us morality, for me that's a big no-no. Our current religions are just two or 3,000 years old, which is very young, and our species is much older. And I cannot imagine that, for example, 100,000 years or 200,000 years, our ancestors did not have some type of morality. Of course, they had rules about how you should behave, um, what is fair, what is unfair, uh, caring for others—all of these tendencies were in place already, already. So they had a moral system, and then, at some point, we developed these present-day religions, which I think were sort of tacked onto the morality that we had, and maybe they serve to codify, codify them, or to enforce them, or to steer morality in a particular direction that we prefer. And so, so religion comes in for me secondarily.
Do you believe that um, atheists and agnostics, uh, once they like choose that path or their point of view, um, do you believe that they can't be as moral as Christians? Oh, no. Atheist, agnostics can be just as moral as anybody else. Um, the question isn't can you, do you need God to be moral? Do you have to believe in God to be moral? No. There's atheists that are very moral. Um, the question is can you justify morality without God, and that's the problem, right? It's not can you act morally—of course atheists can act morally—the question is can you justify what is moral without God, and I say no, it's just your opinion if there's no God. But how—I mean, if you're like, for me, I was raised in a family with—I, I would say not sound conceited—but with very high morals. Um, I respect points of view; I'm very open-minded. Um, so, uh, how would that, how would God influence me to be more moral, even if like I think of myself and people tell me that I'm a decent and moral person?
Well, let's back up for a second and ask the question: What is the purpose of life? Is the purpose of life to be moral? Um, I don't know. That's uh, no, I wouldn't. Well, that's—I guess I would say no, but but what is the purpose then? Um, to make the world a better place. That would be then being moral. Why? Well, yeah, I guess, yeah, in a sense it would be. Um, so that our children and grandchildren can—who cares? We're ultimately going to burn out one day. So what, what's the ultimate purpose? So that we can live longer, and humans can stay on the earth longer. So what? Ultimately, it's all going to—we're going to spin out; we're going to—going to heat death. Okay, so is there any ultimate purpose? There may be short-term purposes, but no ultimate purpose. Yeah, that's true. Okay, okay. So in the very long term, right, in the very long term, there's no purpose. So why even care about the short term then? Because I care about children and grandchildren, right? But so did Stalin, and then Stalin lived a great life for himself and his children and grandchildren by killing everybody around him and taking their stuff. Yeah, he's a bad person. So yeah, but what do you mean by bad? He's killing other people. Why is that wrong? Because it's—it's—I mean, it's not good to kill other people. Why not? Because that's the—I mean, that's what most people would say. Yeah, but who said—said it was good to kill other people? Stalin said it was good to kill. Why, why is that? Why are they wrong? Because they uh, they killed millions of people. I know, but why is killing millions of people wrong if there's no God? Because um, I yeah, I mean, I, I, I would just say because it's ruining the human race, and it's—right, but it presupposes that there's some value to human beings, right? M, that okay. Well, why are there values to human beings if we're here through a Darwin process which didn't have us in mind? There's no ultimate purpose to life. See, one of the problems when you're trying to discover morality is there can be no morality without purpose. Uh, just a practical example, uh, you can't say that uh your quarterback throwing a touchdown is better than your quarterback throwing an interception unless you know what the purpose of the game is. Mh. And you can't know whether a particular action that we take in the real world is good or bad unless you know what the purpose of life is. And so all this involves a purpose, and that involves God.
They showed that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts; their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them or at other times even defending them. So this student here is a classic examp—example of a person who has the law written on his heart. He doesn't accept the Bible as a moral authority, but he has the law written on his heart; he has a moral compass; he has a moral consciousness; he understands the difference between good and evil. The point is that morality does predate the law; it is written into our hearts; it is an essential component of being a human being, of being in His image. There has to be that, like Dr. Turk was saying, that more primary question of purpose. You have to understand purpose in order to understand morality. You have to assume, basically, that human life is valuable, that human flourishing is good, in order to be able to make these moral arguments. But the point is that we can all, whether atheist or believers, have conversations in agreement around what is moral, and that itself, not the belief in God, but that itself is the requirement to be able to even have the conversation that they're having.
I'm going to play a little bit more of this video that I teased at the start for you guys, just to unpack this idea, because I know in a video like this there's going to be people jumping to the comments to talk about the Euthyphro Dilemma, to talk about the fact that people could be moral apart from God, and different societies. So let me just play this video that was really well put together by uh, by William Lane Craig's ministry, for the atheist: Humans are just accidents of nature, highly evolved animals, but animals have no moral obligations to one another. When a cat kills a mouse, it hasn't done anything morally wrong; the cat's just being a cat. If God doesn't exist, we should view human behavior in the same way; no action should be considered morally right or wrong. But the problem is good and bad, right and wrong, do exist. Just as our sense experience convinces us that the physical world is objectively real, our moral experience convinces us that moral values are objectively real. Every time you say, "Hey, that's not fair, that's wrong, that's an injustice," you affirm your belief in the existence of objective morals. We're well aware that child abuse, racial discrimination, and terrorism are wrong for everybody, always. Is this just a personal preference or opinion? No. The man who says that it is morally acceptable to rape little children is just as mistaken as the man who says 2 + 2 = 5. What all this amounts to then is a moral argument for the existence of God. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist. But objective moral values and duties do exist; therefore, God exists. Atheism fails to provide, provide a foundation for the moral reality every one of us experiences every day. In fact, the existence of objective morality points us directly to the existence of God.