Georgia Tech University - Atlanta
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
By: William Lane Craig

Lecture on "Can we be good without God?" at Veritas Forum

After a week of recuperation from this exhausting trip, I spoke the next week at a Veritas Forum held February 21 at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.  One of the student organizers told me that last year a famous scientist spoke to the Christian groups on campus on the harmony of science and religion, and the main response from students was, “We’ve already heard enough on this topic.  We want to hear about morality.”  So the Veritas organizers asked me to address the question, “Can We Be Good without God?”  Despite a cold, rainy night several hundred people came out to hear the talk.  I argued that if God exists, then objective moral values, duties, and accountability exists, but that if atheism is true, moral values and duties are subjective and relative and there is no moral accountability.  Accordingly, if we do think that objective good and bad, right and wrong, exist, we have moral grounds for concluding that God exists. 

We then opened the floor for questions from the audience and for the better part of an hour had an engrossing and wonderful dialogue with students, especially with many unbelievers, including members of the Ayn Rand Objectivist club on campus, who tout their morality of self-fulfillment.  During the discussion one girl asked, “Why does this all matter?  What difference does it make whether moral values are grounded in God or are just subjective feelings?”  That gave me a chance, not only to reiterate the horror of an objectively amoral world, but to point out that if moral values and duties are grounded in God, then the paramount question becomes, “How am I to be rightly related to this Being who is absolutely holy and just?”  What we find is that we fall desperately short of His moral laws and so find ourselves morally guilty before Him.  This, in turn, raises the question, “What must I do to be saved?”  How can we find forgiveness and moral cleansing?  It was the perfect tie-in with the Gospel.  So it was a wonderful evening with open, honest questions and great dialogue with students.  One enthusiastic co-ed remarked to me after the close, “I’ve been at Georgia Tech for six years, and I’ve never been to an event like this!”