"Can we be good without God?": On Guard Class 6 Recap

Answer (to the subject): No because without God there is no "good". On Monday November 17th we met for our sixth class to discuss "Can we be good without God?" from the sixth chapter of On Guard. The argument in this chapter formed the fourth and final of our four-part case for the existence of God. The argument goes like this: If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist. Objective moral values and duties do exist. Therefore God exists. We started off be recognizing the trickiness in the chapter question, "can we be good without God?". It's extremely important that we be sure that we are talking about the existence of God, not belief in God because people can be good without believing in God. We had a lot of really good discussion on this chapter so I appreciate everyone participating. This argument is certainly much more relateable and conversational than the other three arguments about the universe and cosmology. When discussing this argument we want to be sure we are emphasizing consistency in one's philosophy and life. Atheism implies that there is no objective morality and yet those who do not believe in God often live as if there is objective morality. Pointing out that inconsistency is key to this argument. The most common objection to grounding objective morality in God is the Euthyphro Dilemma. The dilemma asks: "does God will something because it is good or is something good because God wills it?" In other words, the good exists outside of God or God could will evil things and call them good. To escape this dilemma we simply present a third option: God is the good and so what He wills flows from that nature. We criticized attempts to ground objective morality in an atheistic worldview such as Atheistic Moral Platonism and Atheistic Humanism. The first is intelligible and the second is an arbitrary ground for morality. On atheism, why say human flourishing is the objective ground for morality? Why not ants or bees or zebras? So this concluded our four-part case for the existence of God. I'd ask that you study these four arguments, memorize the premises, and practice them.