Christians sometimes feel they have a natural right to the moral high ground. One of the most common arguments heard by an atheist is that if you don't believe in God, you are a less moral person, and that you cannot have morality without a God.
The argument is called the Divine Command Theory of Ethics, and asserts that morality cannot be evaluated apart from God, and that "good" is by definition what God says is good, and "evil" is by definition whatever God says is evil. Many Christians will agree with this at first, but I will demonstrate that most Christians, and the Bible itself, have implicitly rejected this argument already.
Let’s look at the Divine Command theory of ethics. It holds that "morally good" means "commanded by God" and that "morally wrong" means "forbidden by God." It’s that simple. There are many objections to this theory, and this is the reason Christians generally don’t really accept it. Some appeal to it when they are faced with tough questions, but that’s just a convenient ad hoc position.
If this theory is true, it follows that God’s moral choices are arbitrary. By that I mean that there is no outside definition or judgment of good or evil that can be used to evaluate God’s decision. So, if God had decided that murder, rape and torture was morally good, then it was good. Theists cannot possibly deny the possibility that God could have so ordained, because then they would have to admit that their moral judgments are really independent of God’s. At this point, practically everyone understands that the Divine Command theory of ethics is absurd.
Christians generally hold that God commands certain things because these are good. But under this theory, it’s the other way around. Before God commands that helping old ladies over a street is good, it is not good. Before God says that raping young girls is wrong, it is not wrong. Further, it follows from this theory that God cannot justify his moral decisions. If God gives a reason for moral decisions, then there are objective reasons beyond God’s arbitrary decisions (ie. they are not arbitrary at all), and there are standards beyond God’s command on which His moral decisions are founded.
A refutation of this argument can be found in Plato's Euthyphro, where Socrates asks a question that is an effective refutation of the Divine Command theory. Expressed in monotheistic terms, it could be summarized: "Are certain actions good because God commands them, or does God command them because they are good?" Michael S. Valle, in the essay "A Critique of the Divine Command Theory of Ethics," (this document is unfortunately not to be found online anymore) and referring to Baruch Bordy, lists the argument like this:
Let us suppose that it is the case that there is some action A that is right (wrong) only because God wants us to do (refrain from doing) it.
There must be some reason for God's wanting us to do (refrain from doing) A, some reason that does not involve God's wanting us to do (refrain from doing) it.
Therefore, that reason must also be a reason why A is right (wrong).
So we have a contradiction, (1) is false, and either there are no actions that are right (wrong) because God wants us to do (refrain from doing) them or, if there are such actions, that is not the only reason why those actions are right (wrong)
The attempts made by Christians to refute this argument have not, to put it mildly, been very convincing.
The Bible itself also clearly refutes the Divine Command theory. When God explained his punishment over Sodom, Abraham demonstrated that he believed that right and wrong existed apart from God:
Ge 18:23,25 "Then Abraham approached him and said: "Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? ...Far be it from you to do such a thing-to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?""
Should he not indeed?
It thus follows that theists who are looking for the ultimate answers on ethics are not really helped by bringing God into the picture. Theists and atheists alike face the same challenges in establishing the basis for moral choices rationally. So the question remains: how do we know what is good and what is bad? And, even assuming we have agreed that some actions are bad and others good, how can we rationally deduce that we should do good, and not bad?
