Think: Reason

How Do You Know God is Good?

It seems like a simple question for some, but I think it’s a good question that can’t be easily answered. Many people believe that atheists can’t be moral or are immoral. They say so because we do not have an objective moral standard. That is to say, we don’t have a source of “ultimate” good who says what is and what isn’t moral. As such, our morals are subjective. If one day we decide murder is moral, it can be moral.

At the face of it, it doesn’t sound all that crazy, but let’s look at the situation with God. How do you know that God is the moral one? How do you know that he is “good” and the devil is “evil”?

Think about it like this, are things good because God says they’re good? If this is the case, what method does God use to determine what is “good” and what is “evil”?

Let’s do a thought experiment. Suppose for a second that at the beginning of everything (assuming first for the sake of argument that God started everything) God took five acts. Let’s say: helping the poor, murder, theft, beating children, and feeding the hungry.

How did God know which ones are the good acts and which are the bad? Ask yourself this, if God had instead decided that “theft” was good, would stealing then be good? If that’s the case aren’t all of God’s morals subjective? If they are, how can we call God “good”, if anything he says is “good” is “good” then the terms of “good” and “evil” have no bearing on God.

If instead stealing is inherently bad, why the need for God? Couldn’t we just skip to what is inherently good?

So many people say, “you have to take the bible in context, during the time it was written”. In the bible it’s okay to stone your children, sell your daughter into slavery, and to kill people who worship different Gods. Does this mean that at one point in time they were moral acts but aren’t now?

How do we know? When did the switch over occur? Did we get a memo from God saying that something was okay then but not now? How does anything get more subjective than that?

If we should use the bible as our standard of morality, who are we going to use to interpret it? Should we take it literally and kill anyone who works on the sabbath? Who will determine what are outdated morals and what should be taken literally or metaphorically? James Dobson? Al Sharpton?

Many apologists will make the scarecrow argument that atheists “base their morals on nothing.” This is of course wrong. Here’s a quote from the awesome iron chariots wiki.

Although there is no such thing as unanimous agreement on complex philosophical issues, if we approach the question from a humanistic, scientific stand point, atheists ought to agree that there should be rational standards for arriving at moral conclusions. Like science and mathematics, useful systems of morality derive from some basic axioms, or recognize assumptions.

A few possible axioms in morality are:

1. Every person has their own feelings and desires, and they are more or less similar since they are based on the same brain chemistry.
2. When I look inward to my own desires, I fundamentally desire to pursue happiness and avoid pain and suffering.
3. Other people have these same basic desires, and these desires are valuable to them.
4. With all else being equal, it is better for people to be happy than not be happy.
5. Conflicts arise mainly because people’s desire to be happy and avoid suffering conflict with each other. The goal of secular morality is to resolve those conflicts in the best possible way for all concerned.

A few natural consequences of these axioms:

1. All else being equal, it is wrong to needlessly inflict suffering on people.
2. Except for the case of self-preservation, with all else being equal, it is best to avoid killing other people (on the assumption that they don’t want to be killed).

Actions such as slavery and rape are wrong because they excessively limit people’s happiness and freedom of action.

Bottom line, we are capable of being moral without any deity. In fact, people are moral in spite of most deities, not because of them.