Why is God Necessary for Right and Wrong?
How Christianity is the ONLY Worldview that can Explain Morality
I want to tell you a story.
A shop owner from a small town decided he wanted to expand his business. His popularity exploded among friends and family, and they all agreed it would be a good idea to branch out. See if he could help others with his wares.
What he offered was so life-changing, it just had to be shared.
He read online about a neighborhood in a nearby big city with people he knew would love his product. But it was in a shady place. Gangs. Endless crime. You name it.
Seemed every other day there was a fresh tale of some poor soul ripped from this world too soon.
Still…he had to try. He knew his product would change hearts and minds. Revolutionize life itself.
So he set off in a rusty rental van, filled to the brim with his gift of life. Crossed hills and plains of green, gold, sapphire, and orange. Little traffic. Only beauty and fragrance for miles.
Until he arrived…
The towering monoliths of the city swallowed the horizon. Color and beauty sapped away at the first gray city block. Somehow all light hit the buildings and streets and eroded into shadow.
He made it only two intersections before an envoy of faded brown sedans circled and blocked his van. Eight big men with bitter glares and splintery bats circled like starved vultures.
He heard the rough roar of the trailer door right as scabby hands yanked him into the stale eve and threw him to the concrete.
They beat and kicked
He recoiled and fought
But they kept going until the fighting stopped.
He lay there. A still, blooded corpse.
It took all of ten minutes. The bandits peeled away with his wares, leaving the merchant to rot.
Why is what they did wrong?
You might think that a simple question.
“Because they killed a man”
“They stole and murdered”
“They preyed on a helpless, innocent guy”
Responses like that are probably flooding your mind. But those are just explanations of what happened.
Why is what they did wrong? What is wrong? What is right?
We all know what the men did is abhorrent, but few in this age can justify why. Because without God, there’s no standard.
In an atheist world…anything goes.
There MUST be an objective morality beyond us. And here’s why Christianity is the only worldview that can provide objective right and wrong…
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The Curious Case of Subjective Madness
If morality lacks an objective anchor, as atheism implies, then strong condemnations of others become nothing more than personal preferences.
Humans make up right and wrong. There’s no stable definition. No foundation. Only a never-ending slippery slope upon which we are driven and tossed by the wind.
As I’ve written elsewhere, atheists get one thing right: Value is in the eye of the beholder. The problem isn’t acknowledging subjectivity. It’s stopping there. If humans are the sole makers of morality, based on shifting value judgments, then ethics is built on ground no one controls. Anyone with enough power can redefine what is right to suit his own agenda.
The men who attacked the merchant were just dancing to their DNA. Living their true selves. Following their hearts. Carpe diem!
Without a transcendent standard, ethical claims reduce to expressions of emotion, cultural preference, raw power dynamics, or shifting social consensus. And cannot be challenged. Because rights are mere privileges granted or revoked by those who hold control, leaving the weak without protection.
You can appeal to justice or human dignity, but your appeals will have no force. Because competing opinions don’t equate to binding obligations. What one generation deems good, another deems evil, and there’s no end to the madness.
A secular world is a dog-eat-dog world. Where people become mere animals.
Atheists don’t see a problem with that because in their minds we’re just animals anyway. “Survival of the fittest!” they shout. But their view doesn’t lead to any good.
You see it everywhere online. They post memes about how Christianity is allegedly responsible for all evil while in the same breath cursing, spitting, foaming at the mouth, raging, and calling anyone with beliefs contrary to atheism idiots.
History shows that, given the opportunity, they’ll happily become the gangsters in the faded brown vans…
Take a Look at that Body Count
The worst outcomes of subjectivism have not played out in religious societies. They’ve played out in explicitly atheistic ones.
Because leaders and movements rejecting fixed moral norms have repeatedly justified widespread harm by redefining ethics according to ideological whims.
The death toll from communism and socialism stretching from the French Revolution through the end of the 20th century numbers in the tens of millions. Jack Prosobiec and Joshua Lisec summarize the death-toll estimates in their book Unhumans:
French Revolution: 100,000
Hatian Revolution: 345,000
Soviet Union: 20,000,000
Spanish Civil War: 500,000
Maoist China: 50,000,000
1960s U.S. Cultural Marxism: 1000+ deaths; 4.5 million ethnically cleansed
Soviet-Sponsored Wars: 4,000,000
Communist Africa: 50,000+ deaths; 1.5 million ethnically cleansed
Those figures don’t include the millions more who were tortured, abused, stripped of their homes, and robbed of their livelihoods. The atheist communists/socialists first went after Christians, and then everyone else, through executions, engineered famines, forced labor, purges, and systematic oppression. And the numbers are backed up by demographic studies, archival records, survivor accounts, and international comparative analysis.
Wars and vile atrocities driven by secular ideologies and totalitarian regimes produce far greater cumulative destruction than those tied to religious movements.
Religious conflicts have caused real suffering. No one denies that. But their scale is notably smaller when measured against the industrialized mass killings carried out under explicitly anti-religious political systems in the last century alone.
By a long shot!
Add to the above tallies the billions of babies slaughtered through the genocide of abortion since the 1960s Sexual Revolution, and the overall impact against human life from atheist regimes proves to be the most extensive in recorded history.
Because humans can’t figure out “don’t murder Dave” on their own…
Don’t Murder Dave
In a strict material universe, the idea “don’t murder Dave” is mere vapor. It can’t exist as truth or binding obligation. No “oughts” or “ought nots” can exist at all.
Prohibitions exist only as social agreements, and social agreements shift with changing majorities and systems of power. In a universe reduced to blind matter and chance, moral obligations become chemical reactions in brains carrying no binding authority beyond convention.
Arbitrary.
People agree on certain rules for practical reasons, but those agreements lack the force of genuine moral law. The moment the agreement dissolves, so does the prohibition.
Atheists understand this, even though they deny it. And they reveal their understanding when they engage in victimhood, oppressor-vs-oppressed narratives.
Victimhood paradigms are all we’re capable of developing if there’s no set universal standard of morality because they are the outward expression of “survival of the fittest,” strong-vs-weak.
Communists and socialists (who always go atheist or emerge from atheism) pretend they want the weak to win, but that’s always turned out to be a ploy. An engineered distraction devised so the “enlightened” few can gain control over the “idiot” many.
That secret knowledge (Gnosticism) should sound familiar. It’s exactly what atheists do: Pretend they are the only rational ones, and anyone who disagrees with them is stupid.
And in a world without universal right and wrong, who’s to condemn them?
The issue is exacerbated by misunderstanding the problem of evil…
The Nothing of Evil
Evil has no standalone existence. Evil is the absence of good. A corruption or lack within what is fundamentally right.
Darkness is the absence of light
Disease the privation of health
Sure, there may be additional causes (criminals, viruses, bacteria, etc.), but what is evil is the effects, the corruption of true and good.
Apologist Frank Turek uses the analogy of a rusty car. Rust can’t overcome nothing. You can have the car without the rust, but you can’t have rust without the car. Because rust (decay) is the slow dissolving of the creation (car).
In the cosmos, the same phenomenon is sometimes labeled “entropy.” Atheists want you to think it’s built into the system. But if entropy is built into the system, then it’s there as part of the program and not an error. A feature, not a bug. Which doesn’t make sense since, based on the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, entropy would have caused a heat death of the universe by now. Yet we’re still here.
What also makes little sense is for us to despise entropy. Yet we all do. We hate that everything decays in this world and eventually comes to an end, and we want to change it. Humans even think we can change it.
You do
I do
But if it’s part of the system, then it doesn’t need changing. It just is. No value judgment can coherently be ascribed to the entropy we face…unless it is the corruption of the very-good design by an ultimate Designer. In which case it is absolute evil.
Evil only makes sense if it represents the twisting or negation of the order, purpose, and goodness built into creation.
The Bible provides the best explanation. Adam and Eve rejected the perfect Maker, ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil before the appropriate time, and their rebellion destroyed the barrier against chaos and disorder (nothingness). They tried to take a shortcut and ruined everything.
Their turning away from good allowed the absence of good to spread into what God had made (the nothing to consume the something). Sin and death. Entropy.
What the atheist calls evidence against God, the presence of suffering and disorder, is precisely what the Bible predicts follows from human rebellion. The symptoms and the diagnosis match.
We can debate how the presence of evil relates to the character of God. But without a transcendent God, without an ultimate good, the entirety of truth, existence, and morality collapses…
Laws and the Lawmaker
Objective values require a source beyond human opinion. Philosophers across traditions have long recognized this.
Laws defining right and wrong require a Lawgiver whose character defines goodness itself.
God’s transcendent (“above all else”) perfect nature is what makes the cosmos and morality possible. The eternal, personal source of right and wrong derives from the source of reality itself.
Without a transcendent Lawmaker, ethics collapse into preference and coercion. Narrow opinions. Either morality is grounded in something or Someone beyond everything else, or the strongest in the room wins. Might makes right.
Some have tried to argue that since God is the most powerful Being, he too makes morality via “might makes right,” but if his perfect character is what defines reality, then he’s not making up right and wrong from arbitrary opinion. Truth is solidified (objective) in his necessary Being.
“Might makes right” is only a problem if the mighty is part of the creation, not the Creator. Because then the imperfect and unnecessary tries to enslave what doesn’t belong to him with co-opted, pseudo-authority. Stealing from the Almighty.
Christianity offers the only coherent worldview. Morality is real and grounded, not merely a cultural artifact, because the everlasting Beholder who designed the universe established the moral order within the cosmos based upon his holy character.
The man who insists he is good without God deceives himself.
God made us in his image, gave us free will so we could relate to and commune with him, and we rebelled. Broke the very-good creation.
The universal human intuition pointing toward certain acts as wrong (not inconvenient or unpopular) and the persistent failure of pure human systems to uphold justice consistently across time find their place inside a biblical world alone.
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