Without God, Evil Is Just an Opinion
Most people reject God more readily than they reject evil. But if evil is real, where does our standard of good and evil come from?
People will often say, “I don’t believe in God,” but it’s rare to hear someone say, “I don’t believe in evil.”
That is a hard conclusion to come to, especially when the horrors and atrocities of the world are live-streamed directly to our phones through social media. Evil is hard to miss—so hard, in fact, that even those who reject God do not hesitate to condemn genocide, rape, slavery, child abuse, and torture as “evil.”
They don’t merely dislike these things. They don’t speak of them as a matter of personal preference. They talk as though they are objectively wrong.
We all instinctively appeal to a moral standard that stands above the beliefs of the individual, cultural norms, and government dictates. It’s why anyone can pronounce moral judgements against other individuals, differing cultural practices, and the actions of foreign governments.
Whether we are aware of it or not, in doing so, we are actually appealing to a moral measure outside of ourselves—an above standard to which the individual and collective ought to conform.
But where does that assumed standard come from?
If the universe is nothing more than matter in motion, then concepts like good and evil are ultimately products of human opinion, biology, chemical reactions in the brain, or social convention. One society’s values might differ from another’s, but there’s no higher court to appeal to. We can only describe actions as popular or unpopular, but calling them objectively evil is impossible to justify if one does not believe in God.
Yet our moral instincts resist that conclusion. We don’t believe the horrors of history were merely unfortunate cultural preferences, or that child abuse is only wrong because most people dislike it. Most people believe these things would remain morally wrong, even if everyone approved of them.
That conviction points beyond ourselves. It suggests that morality is discovered without, rather than invented from within, that good and evil are realities, not just personal opinions.
But if evil is real in an objective sense, then it raises another important question: Is there an objective good? Evil is not something that exists independently. It is the corruption or absence of what ought to be. Just as darkness is the absence of light, evil presupposes a standard of good from which it deviates or departs.
So, the question is not simply whether God exists, but whether our belief in objective evil already assumes the kind of moral universe that only a belief in God can justify.