“Can We Be Good without God?”
William Lane Craig from the Reasonable Faith website
This makes little practical sense to me. How would one ever be able to demonstrate that, in the absence of God, there can be no moral accountability? And, thus, that those who choose not to believe in God would be literally demoralized?
And while value judgments concocted by mere mortals in order to facilitate human interaction from the cradle to the grave may well be construed as ultimately [essentially] insignificant, that doesn’t alter the fact that their significance is very, very real within particular existing communities given that any aggregation of human beings must establish rules of behavior.
You may as well say that listening to music, or following sports, or attending the theater, is not worth pursuing because in doing so it doesn’t change the universe one way or the other. In fact, why do anything at all if, in fact, everything may well be ultimately insignificant.
Does this sort of belief make food tastes less delicious, or sexual orgasms less intense, or feelings of love less fulfilling?
Yes, in particular contexts, construed from particular points of view, this can seem entirely reasonable. But actual flesh and blood human beings who do not believe in God are often able to construct frames of mind that allow them to sustain lives bursting at the seams with satisfaction and fulfillment.
This is basically to argue that he feels these things in contemplating a world without God, and, so, if others do not feel them, they are out of sync with the one and the only way in which one is obligated to think about moral narratives out in the world with others.
And, indeed, the components of my own moral philosophy have spawned any number of instances that can only be described as deeply cynical. There’s no getting around that for me in a No Good world.
But this sort of argument stands everything on its head for me. It starts by pointing out that no one would want their life to be the embodiment of a caustic cynicism, so there needs to be a God to make that go away.
You believe in God here because, well, what else is there?