The Moral Argument

Moral laws are those principles that affect a person’s distinction between right and wrong. The fact that there are moral laws serves as evidence of God’s existence because someone greater than humanity must have commanded these moral laws. To use the words attributed to Dostoyevsky, “If there is no God, then everything is permissible.”

First, a person must be aware that there is a significant difference between facts and moral laws. Most facts are certainties about the way the world is; there are objects or places in the world which make these facts undeniably true. However, there is nothing in the physical world that can prove moral laws to be correct. Instead of describing the way the world is—as facts do—moral laws describe, in the form of commands, the way the world ought to be.

Obviously, commands cannot exist without something else also existing to command them. Therefore, the moral argument asks, “If moral facts are a kind of command, then who commanded morality?” To answer this question, one must first look at the importance and authority of morality. Morality over-rules any other consideration when people are faced with a choice. If people morally ought to do something, then that is what they should do—no questions asked—no matter what their other options are. In this way, morality has ultimate authority.

When looking at moral laws as commands, it must be understood that commands are only as authoritative as the one who commands them. For example, if a regular citizen tells everyone to pay extra tax; no one would have to obey him. On the other hand, if the government tells everyone to pay extra tax, people must obey because the government has the authority to make that ruling. Therefore, as morality has more control than any human person or institution, morality must have been commanded by someone who has ultimate authority over everything.

Moral laws are no longer compulsory if they lack a superior being to enforce such commands. There is no way of imposing moral imperatives upon another without believing there is an external being who holds people accountable to these moral laws. “This leaves the atheistic humanist with a difficult dilemma: that every possible moral statement he or she might make can be ultimately reduced to a personal preference for a certain type of behavior.”

A person must either accept that a superior being exists beyond the material world and that this being enforces a moral code or a person must accept the absence of any binding moral laws. Without God, people would be subject to their own judgment of right and wrong and no one could tell them otherwise. There could be no laws against murder, rape, or burglary; the world would be even more chaotic due to man’s lack of understanding of moral laws. Dostoyevsky was correct in his statement that right or wrong cannot exist unless God also exists to hold people accountable for their actions.