Can people be good without God? How can people be good, in the moral and ethical sense, without being grounded in some sort of belief in a being which is greater than they are? Where do concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, come from if not from religion?
Children often repeat ideas gained elsewhere as if they were their own profound insights. I remember in school “inventing” what I thought was a stunning new idea for propulsion only to be told that jet engines were, in fact, fairly common. Of course, a good idea is not less good because kids don’t recognize the source, though you can forget the patent!
In the same way, moral secularists depend on God for their morality, but don’t recognize it. Walking with God over the centuries, theists have learned a thing or two about ethics from divine revelation, the image of God within each human being, and reason. While not able to found much of anything, many Western secularists have appropriated much of this heritage and use it within their own ethical lives. This is infinitely preferable to attempts by secularists such as Mao and Stalin to reinvent ethics in the twentieth century, and thus religious humanists (such as Christians) welcome secular humanists to the fold.
Some of the most ethical people I know are atheists and agnostics. One can certainly be moral without believing in God, but this is because men can surely breathe without being aware of the existence of oxygen. God is the cause of moral goodness, but nobody has to recognize the cause in order to get the benefit.
Goodness is an idea that exists in the mind of God. It is built into the very fabric of His creation. When I look up on a starlit night, I see harmony and order. When I look at nature, I see a universe that reflects His glory. The light pollution of Los Angeles cannot obscure every star, and so even the poorest citizen of this crazy coast can still look beyond his petty problems and errors.
Concepts such as good and evil are built into the human soul. While each culture misses something and develops ethical blind spots that ultimately destroy it, one can look at humanity as a whole and get a good picture of what is right and wrong. Our own time has developed weird and wicked obsessions, but history is a good corrective to them. The image of God can been seen in looking at large numbers of men, even if it is obscured just in looking at me, because of where I fall short.
Finally, God is not silent. He speaks to each generation and each culture, wooing them to the Divine. All the great world religions contain a seed of that call, though Christianity contains that message in its fullness. God so loved His world that He came Himself in Jesus not just to show us the way to live, but to provide a means to do it.
This dependence on God, directly and indirectly, is obvious by looking at the creation of human cultures. In terms of global culture, theists create and secularists appropriate what theists create. There is no evidence that great world cultures can be created or sustained over the long haul without religion.
Education taught me right and wrong, good and evil. Much of that education came from nonbelievers who lived out the truths of what I believe better than I did. Plato was wrong about one thing: Just knowing something is good does not give a man the moral power to do it.
Knowing what is good and doing it are two different things. Many thoughtful people from Plato to Confucius have had keen ethical vision. Some like Socrates have been willing to die for the truth, but what of the rest of us? What of the ways in which we all fall short of what we know in our hearts is right?
We don’t just need a standard, but mercy. It is mercy and a clean soul that secularism cannot by nature provide and Christianity can. Those of us who have done things we regret, who have placed scars on our souls, are given hope in Christianity that we can be “born again” . . . start over. This hope is priceless and makes me love God.
If you love God, you want to become more like Him. You slowly turn from your own petty loves and begin to love what He loves. This change is gradual, but it is real. Often it forces me to confront things about myself that I would prefer not to see, but love pushes me to change. It is no wonder that Christianity has spread throughout the globe, because it offers goodness with mercy and hope.
Humans can try to “reinvent” morality, though cultural revolutions have usually not worked out well for culture. We can try to pretend that we have not fallen short, even of our standards, but we know the truth. We can even declare our vices to be virtues, but remain vexed by our private sense of guilt and shame. Jesus offers us the truth with mercy, and it is that combination humanity so badly needs.