“Can We Be Good without God?”
William Lane Craig from the Reasonable Faith website
In other words, it’s not just a coincidence that great philosophers of the past – from Plato to Descartes to Kant – spoke of moral obligations on this side of the grave only by invoking a transcendent font on the other side of it.
How, in the absence of an all seeing, all knowing all powerful God, can it be demonstrated that mere mortals are obligated to do one thing rather than another?
Sure, there may be a philosophical argument out there that demonstrates this to be so. But, if so, it has not come to my attention. Or, sure, it has come to my attention but I am not sophisticated enough to grasp it.
Here I can only speculate that if this argument does in fact exist, it would have surfaced such that everyone would be talking about it. After all, what could be more important to a world bursting at the seams with the terrible consequences of conflicting goods, then to know that there is in fact a frame of mind that all rational and virtuous men and women are obligated to embody?
Humanists can then line up to clamor for a secular narrative – their own – said to bring all rational men and women together around one or another set of virtuous behaviors.
But, then, as they say, the rest is history.
On the other hand, Taylor’s own set of assumptions doesn’t bring us any closer to an actual existing God. And, of course, the irony embedded in the fact that historically [to date] conflicting beliefs in God have brought about all manner of ghastly human pain and suffering in and of itself. Continuing on into the future as we all know.