What Athiests Always Seem to Forget

It seems that a growing number of today's atheists, while denying the existence of God, still want to hold on to their moral values. They will make arguments for the immorality of the Holocaust or the corruption in the genocide in Darfur. They will tell you that it is wrong to take something that isn't yours or to take advantage of someone weaker than yourself. However, what becomes painfully obvious is that they are not living out their worldview to the fullest. They do not consider the full implications of their assumption that there is no God. If they had, they would come to the conclusion that such moral judgments are nonsensical, and further that there can be no such thing as objective morality without God. Only with God can you have objective morality where what is wrong for one is wrong for all.

The reason for this is that if you deny the existence of God, you have no basis on which to say something is morally right or wrong. You cut the legs out from under yourself. For something to be objectively either good or bad, you must first have a common denominator that is valid in all situations. God is the only valid common denominator as he is wholly transcendent from the world and valid throughout it. His universality allows for his status as a basis on which objective moral values can be made. Therefore, God is the only foundation on which something can be truly deemed right or wrong.

In contrast, everything an atheist might call right or wrong must be based merely subjectively on cultural or personal construct. In this case, what is morally right or wrong is based on what one believes is right or wrong or what one's culture has deemed right or wrong. While this might not seem so bad at first glance, there can be devastating consequences for this. The Nazis during WWII decided that it was not morally wrong to slaughter millions of Jews, and yet almost everyone, atheists included, would not deny the moral corruption of the Holocaust. But such a judgment can only be made on the ground of objectivity. An atheist, in keeping with his worldview, does not have the grounds on which to say that something like the Holocaust was wrong, or should be considered wrong by everyone. His judgment does not, and cannot, apply to all situations.

That judgment can only be left up to the objective God. In atheism, there is no such objective. There can be no true morality in atheism and therefore a true atheist cannot say murder or theft or genocide is wrong for everyone everywhere. That is what atheists always forget.