“Can We Be Good without God?”
William Lane Craig from the Reasonable Faith website
Here in my view he takes the necessity for an existing God too far. God is clearly necessary if you want to achieve immortality. Or if you want to pursue it in Paradise. Or if you want a transcending font on this side of the grave to establish Sinful behavior. Or if you want Divine Justice.
But given how the capacity to embody empathy and then to choose altruistic behavior is built right into the human species biologically, there are any number contexts in which self-sacrifice might make sense.
Thus this sort of thinking…
…fails to acknowledge the fact that God may well not exist, yet the evolution of life on earth [given some measure of autonomy] has resulted in precisely the sort of behaviors that he claims make no sense without God.
We’re still back to the same two starting points:
1] demonstrating the actual existence of God
2] demonstrating how in a No God world we can, given the evolution of life on Earth, account for such things as empathy and altruism and self-sacrifice
Exactly!
That is precisely the predicament that those of our own species confront.
And, in my view, the only way to grapple with any particular individual’s choice here is embedded in dasein. Some have God, some don’t. Some are ensconced in relationships that make self-sacrifice less problematic than others. Some are embedded in sets of circumstance that prompt them to choose behaviors that others couldn’t even imagine.
But none of this demonstrates that God must exist in order to choose self-sacrifice. Only that with God certain things can be counted on that those in a No God world don’t have access to.