The Handbook / MOR
Goodness, purpose and the human condition.
Yes, atheists can be good people, and the Bible explains why: God's moral law is written on every human heart. But that is a different question from whether goodness can be *real* without God. If there is no God, it is hard to see what makes moral duties objectively binding rather than just feelings or social conventions. Our deep conviction that some things are truly wrong is itself a clue that God exists.
The dilemma offers only two options, but there is a third. Goodness is neither an arbitrary decree of God nor a standard above him; it is grounded in God's own unchanging nature. God's commands flow from who he is: perfectly loving, just and true. So they are not arbitrary, and God could not command cruelty for its own sake, any more than he could lie. Every moral theory has to stop somewhere; the Christian stops at a supremely good person.
Christians must honestly admit that people have done terrible things in Christ's name. But historians find that most wars have been driven by land, power, wealth and ethnic or national rivalry, not religion. The 20th century's officially atheist regimes killed on a vast scale. Violence comes from the human heart, not from God. And when Christians use violence to spread the faith, they directly disobey Jesus, who told Peter to put away his sword.
Without God, people can still find life meaningful in a personal sense: love, beauty and good work are real joys. But if the universe is ultimately purposeless and everything ends in death and cosmic heat death, then nothing we do has lasting significance; we create meaning, we don't discover it. Many atheist thinkers have admitted this. Christianity says life has real, objective meaning: we were made by God, for God, and nothing done in love for him is wasted.
Evolution may help explain how humans came to have moral feelings, but it can't tell us whether those feelings are true. If our moral beliefs were shaped only for survival, not for truth, then we would have no reason to trust that cruelty is really wrong, and the same reasoning would also undermine our trust in reason itself. Christians can accept that God used natural processes to form us while holding that morality is grounded in his character, and that we were made able to recognize it.
