#-990 A Moral but Unbelieving Son
March 25, 2018Dr. Craig,
I have listened to your podcast since you started it years ago. Thank you. My question comes from reading Faith and Doubt by John Ortberg (Zondervan, 2008). In the chapter Why Bother he writes, "If God does not exist, we lose a life devoted to seeking to love, to live generously, to speak truth, and to do justice."
I have a pragmatic question as a firm follower of Christ for 40 years. I raised my two sons in the evangelical Christian church, and my youngest actually believes in the historical Jesus, but rejects his divinity and is more of a naturalist today. Is there a commonsense biblically/philosophically sound answer to his point of view that he can: 1- live a life of love (he is very compassionate and loving, 2- live generously (he donates faithfully to various secular charities), 3- speak truth (he is stickler at least for "scientific" truths), and 4- can do justice (lives right and is well balanced in his views on human or social justice) WITHOUT believing God exists?
Chris
United States
Dr. craig’s response
A
I’m sorry to hear about your agonizing situation, Chris. I had expected at first that you were going to ask about your son’s chances of salvation, but then your question turned in quite a different direction.
I think your question evinces a couple of important confusions that are worth addressing. Of course, your son can do all four of the things you mentioned without believing that God exists! The claim has never been that belief in God is necessary for living a moral life. Those of us who come from wonderful non-Christian families are familiar with family members who are good, decent people, but do not believe in God or Christ.
The claim, rather, is that God himself is necessary as the foundation of the moral values and duties that we all sense, if they are not to be merely subjective illusions of human beings. If there is no God to ground objective moral values and duties, then your son’s decision to live lovingly and generously and to speak truth and do justice is no better than Jeffrey Epstein’s decision to exploit young girls for his own profit.
I’m sure that your son would be repelled at this prospect. But then he needs to ask himself what grounds the moral values and duties that he apprehends and chooses to live by. Science, being amoral, cannot do this. Indeed, on a naturalistic view, why would moral values and duties be anything more than the subjective byproducts of sociobiological evolution?
As for Ortberg’s statement, its truth depends on what he means by “we lose a life.” Your son interprets him to mean that if God does not exist, then we cannot adopt the lifestyle he describes. But that would be obviously false, since even if God does not exist, but one (erroneously) believes that God exists, then he can adopt the lifestyle mentioned. On your son’s interpretation, Ortberg would have to be saying something about the necessity of belief in God for the moral lifestyle.
Maybe that’s what he meant, but I interpreted his statement quite differently. I think that what Ortberg meant is that if God does not exist, then we have lost any basis for the objectivity of the moral values he mentions and so in that sense we lose a life that is objectively rooted in these values. Now, I don’t know for sure what Ortberg meant, but the principle of charity demands that we interpret people in the best possible light, in which case we should not think that he is asserting the falsehood that atheists cannot live good and decent lives.
- William Lane Craig