Why All Morality is Arbitrary Without God
If you want to understand things, it’s always a good idea to go back to first principles. That is true of most things, including morality. That came to mind when I saw this tweet:
Do you know what secular morality is? Ultimately, it’s the child’s game of telephone with a heavy dose of self-interest involved. What do I mean by that? Well, where do secular moral beliefs come from? They are beliefs that are fed to people through the culture. Kids hear things from their parents, at school, and from their friends. They watch TV shows. They read comic books and fairy tales. They see who’s punished and who’s rewarded for doing things in society. Then, they start to formulate their own beliefs – and this is where the self-interest part comes in. They may adopt a moral framework, but in places where it’s difficult, inconvenient, or disadvantageous, they usually bend the rules to make things easier for themselves.
Now, if a culture is healthy enough, unified enough, and has strongly enforced rules, it can still produce a moral people – for a while at least. Long term? That’s a much more doubtful proposition. Unfortunately, in America, we don’t have a healthy culture or a unified culture. There is also no longer strong cultural pressure to conform. What does this inevitably create? Widespread degeneracy. That’s because a large percentage of the culture does whatever they want to do and then just calls it moral. After all, who can contradict them? Sure, I can. You can. But what moral authority do we have over them in their mind? None whatsoever.
This is how you end up with people who consider themselves to be moral cheerleading for Luigi Mangione’s murder of a random stranger, spewing hate online all day and putting kids in front of drag queens. It’s how we had people who morally justified riots, looting, and shoplifting. Just about every degeneracy you can imagine is championed by godless people who will tell you what they’re doing is moral and in their minds, they decide what’s moral and what’s not, so no one can contradict them.
However, as the late, great Rush Limbaugh said:
Why is that? Because there is no innate, natural structure to morality. Watch how your dogs behave. They will bully smaller dogs, chase cats and squirrels for the fun of it, and just walk up and mount other dogs if they’re in the mood and can get away with it.
Across different cultures, you can find all sorts of differing views of what’s morally permissible including mass rape, human sacrifice, cannibalism, infanticide, abortion, headhunting, slavery, and genocide. You name it and not only have human beings done it, but some people would have told you (or would still tell you in some cases) that those things are moral. If you and I disagree with them, does that make us right and them wrong? Says who? We have an opinion about morals, and they have an opinion about morals. What makes our opinion right and their opinion wrong?
If you believe in God, there’s a real answer to that question. God tells us to do certain things. We may not perfectly understand His will, but we believe the right thing to do is what He tells us to do.
What if you fall in love with a beautiful married woman whose husband is a real creep who cheats on her and beats her? What if she tells you about how poorly he treats her, she tells you she doesn’t love him and she wants to be with you? Would it be moral to pursue a relationship with her? If you don’t believe in God, there are all sorts of answers people would come up with. You’d hear every opinion under the sun about whether it was moral. If you’re a Christian, there is a definitive answer to that question. It’s morally wrong because “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Even if you go ahead and do it anyway, you still know in your heart what you did was morally wrong.
Let’s say you see a backpack fall out of Elon Musk’s car. You pick it up and there’s a million dollars in cash in it. Meanwhile, you heard on the news that he made 4 billion dollars, just today. In other words, the cash you just found represents just .025% of what he made in the last 24 hours. To him, that money would be nothing, but to you, it would be life-changing. Would it be moral to keep it? Once again, if you don’t believe in God, there are all sorts of answers people would come up with. You’d hear every opinion under the sun about whether it was okay to keep the money and although those answers might wildly conflict, those people would all tell you that their answer was moral. On the other hand, if you’re Christian, you KNOW it’s not moral to keep the money. Why? “Thou shalt not steal.” What if you keep the money anyway? Then you did something you knew was wrong.
This is why a religious nation is more likely to be moral than a non-religious nation. It’s also why you may find immoral Christians or moral atheists, but as a rule, Christians are going to be far more moral people than atheists or agnostics. It’s why your kid is much more likely to grow up to be a good person if you take them to church. It’s because only God has the authority to definitively say, “This is moral” and “This is not” to human beings.
