Justified True Belief

(P1) If God did not exist, then objective moral values would not exist. + This premise is the heart of the moral argument for God's existence. It is widely accepted by many theists and non-theists alike, since it captures the philosophical insight that without a transcendent moral lawgiver, moral truths would lack any ultimate grounding. The premise will be defended here as it functions in the present argument; the full case for it appears in the parallel arguments on the moral argument for God's existence. (1) Objective moral values are values that hold independently of human opinion. To call a value "objective" is to claim that its status as good or evil does not depend on whether anyone happens to believe it is or feel that it is. For example, "the torture of children for fun is wrong" is offered as an objective moral claim: it is wrong even if a culture approves of it, even if no one objected to it, even if everyone in the universe disappeared and only the act remained. This is not the same as saying that the claim is widely held or socially useful; it is the stronger claim that the moral fact obtains apart from any human attitude toward it. (2) On naturalism, the world consists only of physical particles and the forces governing them. Naturalism is the worldview that holds that nothing exists beyond the natural order: no minds without brains, no purposes apart from biological function, no values apart from preferences. On such a worldview, the universe is what physicist Carl Sagan called all that is, or ever was, or ever will be. Moral judgments, on this view, are categorized as the outputs of evolved neural processes, the social conventions of particular communities, or expressions of personal preference. None of these grounds moral facts that obtain independently of human attitudes. (3) Without God, moral values lack a transcendent grounding. The Christian theistic tradition holds that God is the source of objective moral law because God's own perfect nature is the standard of goodness. Moral commands are not arbitrary fiats; they are expressions of the unchanging moral character of God. Bishop Augustine of Hippo argued that all created things participate in goodness only insofar as they participate in God, who is goodness itself. Without God, the question "why is cruelty wrong?" has no ultimate answer beyond "I find it disagreeable" or "we have evolved to dislike it"; neither of these establishes the objective status of the wrongness. (4) Atheist philosophers themselves frequently concede this point. The premise is not a tendentious theistic invention; it has been affirmed by many influential non-theistic philosophers. Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre took as existentialism's starting point Dostoevsky's claim that if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. Friedrich Nietzsche saw the death of God as carrying with it the death of all transcendent values. Contemporary atheist philosopher Michael Ruse has argued that on naturalism, morality is "an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes." When non-theists honestly examine the consequences of denying God, many conclude that objective moral values go with him. (5) The premise is the conditional, not the assertion that atheists are immoral. The premise does not claim that atheists cannot live moral lives, that they have no moral views, or that they are less reliable as ethical agents than theists. The premise is a conditional about what would be the case if God did not exist; it concerns the grounding of moral facts, not the behavior of moral agents. Many atheists do hold to objective moral views and act on them admirably; the question is whether those moral views, on the atheist's worldview, have any objective basis. Therefore, the first premise stands: if God does not exist, then there is no transcendent foundation for the kind of objective moral values that we recognize as binding on all persons regardless of opinion.

(P2) Evil exists. + (1) The premise is granted by the atheist who raises the problem of evil. The problem of evil itself depends on the existence of evil. The atheist who points to the Holocaust, the brutal abuse of innocent children, the systematic injustice of slavery, and the suffering of the dying, in order to argue against God's existence, is committed to the proposition that these things are genuinely evil. The argument from evil is not "some things merely appear evil to us" but "such things are objectively wrong and should not happen." Without that strong commitment, the argument from evil has no force. (2) The atheist's premise is therefore not optional but central. Some atheists, when pressed, will retreat to claiming that "evil" is merely a subjective label, that what we call evil is just what we don't like. But this retreat collapses the original argument from evil. If evil is merely subjective, then the existence of "evil" is no evidence against God; it is only evidence about human attitudes. The atheist cannot have it both ways: deploying evil as an objective fact against God and then redefining evil as subjective when challenged on its objectivity. (3) Common moral intuition confirms the objectivity of evil. Across cultures and centuries, certain acts have been universally recognized as evil: cruelty to the innocent, betrayal of trust, oppression of the weak. The variations between cultures are real but operate at the periphery of moral judgment, not at its core. When we say that the Nazi extermination of six million Jews was evil, we do not mean that it was disliked by post-war society; we mean it was monstrous in itself. Moral relativists who deny this typically make exceptions for cases that affect them personally, betraying the surface character of their relativism. (4) Christian theism agrees with the atheist on the reality of evil. Unlike some forms of Hinduism or pantheism that treat evil as illusion (maya), Christian theism affirms the genuine reality of moral evil. The doctrine of the fall, the necessity of Christ's atoning death, and the eschatological promise of final judgment all presuppose that evil is real, not merely apparent. The atheist who insists on the reality of evil is, in this respect, agreeing with the Christian. The disagreement lies elsewhere: not whether evil exists but what its existence implies about God. Therefore, the second premise stands. The existence of evil is conceded by all parties to the debate, including the atheist who deploys it in argument and the Christian who affirms it as a feature of the fallen world.

(IC) Therefore, objective moral values exist. + (1) The intermediate conclusion follows by definition from the second premise. To call something evil is to make an objective moral claim about it. Evil is not a value-neutral natural property like redness or heaviness; it is an inherently moral category. Saying "the Holocaust was evil" is not equivalent to saying "the Holocaust was widely opposed" or "the Holocaust involved much suffering." It is to say that the Holocaust ought not to have happened, that its perpetrators were morally guilty, and that something of objective moral significance was violated. Once it is granted that some things are truly evil rather than merely harmful or unpleasant, the objectivity of moral values follows immediately. (2) The shift from "harmful" to "evil" is the shift from natural to moral category. Natural facts (suffering, harm, loss of life) can be described in entirely non-moral terms. An earthquake causes harm; the death of a fawn involves loss of life; a wildfire produces suffering. None of these descriptions, by themselves, imply moral evaluation. But when we say that a deliberate act of cruelty toward an innocent is "evil," we are doing more than reporting natural facts. We are asserting that something morally wrong has occurred, that a moral norm has been violated. The category of evil is irreducibly moral. (3) The objectivity of evil is not a separate claim from its existence. Once we grant that real evil exists (not merely apparent evil, not merely conventionally-disapproved evil), we have already committed to the objectivity of moral values. There is no third option whereby evil could exist without objective moral values existing. Whatever account of moral values one prefers (theistic, Platonic, naturalistic, or other), the fact that there are real moral evils requires that there be real moral values, since one cannot violate what does not exist. (4) This is why the atheist's argument from evil presupposes what it tries to defeat. The argument from evil typically tries to show that the existence of evil is incompatible with God. But that very argument requires that evil really exist as a moral category. And the existence of evil as a moral category entails the existence of objective moral values. So the atheist who deploys evil against God is committed, by the very form of the argument, to the objective reality of moral values that, on naturalism, cannot be accounted for. Therefore, the intermediate conclusion is secure: from the existence of evil follows the existence of objective moral values.

(C) Therefore, God exists. + (1) The final conclusion follows by modus tollens from the first premise. The first premise states that if God did not exist, then objective moral values would not exist. The intermediate conclusion establishes that objective moral values do exist. By the rule of inference called modus tollens (denying the consequent), the antecedent must also be denied: God exists. The argument's logical form is therefore valid, and if the premises are true, the conclusion is established. (2) The atheist's own premise becomes a theistic proof. The remarkable feature of this argument is that it uses the atheist's own deployment of evil to establish God's existence. The atheist who urges that evil is a fact about the world has not undermined theism but supplied a premise that, when combined with the moral argument's first premise, entails God's existence. As philosopher William Lane Craig observes, the argument from evil thus turns out to be a sword that cuts the atheist's hand. The very fact pressed against God turns out to require him. (3) The argument does not explain why evil exists; it shows that evil entails God. This argument does not attempt to answer the difficult question of why God permits the evils we observe. That question is addressed in the parallel arguments on the logical, probabilistic, and external problems of evil. What this argument does is establish the co-existence of God and evil without offering any explanation at all for why evil exists. We may, like the biblical figure Job, be entirely ignorant of God's reasons; this argument shows that the existence of evil nonetheless implies, rather than refutes, God's existence. (4) The conclusion vindicates the place of God in the moral order. The conclusion of the argument is not a thin philosophical abstraction but a substantial theistic claim: there is a personal, morally perfect being whose nature is the source and ground of the objective moral values that we recognize and that the atheist invokes. The God whose existence is established by this argument is not a mere abstract first cause but the foundation of moral reality. The very moral seriousness with which the atheist denounces evil testifies to the reality of the God who underwrites that seriousness. Therefore, far from refuting God's existence, the existence of evil proves it.