Can We Be Good Without God?

For a number of years now, I have been receiving Chuck Colson's Breakpoint commentary, in which he editorializes on important current topics, or on new ways of looking at old topics. I found the following one (from 25 Nov. 2008) to be particularly helpful. Incidentally, a search of the above title will produce several insightful articles on the Breakpoint site. 

It’s the time of year when spoilsports come out in full force. You know who I mean—the kind of people who insist that people say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” or who go around suing city halls that dare to have a Nativity scene on public property. But this year, the Christmas cranks have actually launched an ad campaign to convince us that God doesn’t exist.

The Humanist Association is placing posters on buses in Washington, D.C., featuring a skinny Santa in dreadlocks and the words, “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake.”

Fred Edwords, communications director of the Humanist Association, says that partly they’re trying to cheer up agnostics and atheists, who tend to get lonely this time of year when most of their neighbors are celebrating holy days. Pity. But he says they’re also “trying to plant a seed of rational thought and critical thinking and questioning in people’s minds.”

They never give up, do they? Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and now the Humanists—all spreading and making money trying to convince us that God doesn’t exist and that His followers are a bunch of irrational dopes.

Maybe these folks ought to take a break from decorating buses and read a book by my friend Professor J. Budziszewski. In his book—a classic—What We Can’t Not Know, Budziszewski explains why we cannot be good without God and why godless morality always fails.

You see, without God, morality itself loses meaning. Christians know we can learn about how to live from the way God designed us. But without God, we can’t think of ourselves as designed at all. In fact, the evolutionist says that “man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have us in mind.” If that’s so, then morality and human nature are mere accidents of evolution.

So instead of caring for our children, we might choose to eat them, the way guppies do. Why not? If morality is an accident of evolution, who can say that this would be wrong?

Apart from God, we have no reason to take morality seriously. Sure, we can do a few good things here and there without God. In fact, it would be great if atheists this Christmas were to give gifts to poor children or the children of prisoners like we do with Angel Tree.

But to think we can be good, that we can build a good and humane society without God, is pure folly. And it’s a folly with catastrophic consequences, as the untold millions of victims of the atheistic utopianisms of the 20th century bear witness. Or as we see today in our depleted savings accounts—the result of a subprime crisis caused by immoral actions on the part of mortgage lenders.

So if those ads make news in your town, or if you happen to see one plastered on a local bus, why not start a conversation with an unsaved friend about the impossibility of being “good for goodness’ sake”—that is, without God. And then offer your friend rational arguments for the existence of our Heavenly Father—the kind offered by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity. You might even send a copy to your local humanist society as a Christmas present.

Who knows? They might develop rational doubts about why they are so obsessed with a God they believe doesn’t exist.

As Lewis—a lapsed atheist himself—put it, “An atheist cannot guard his faith too closely.”