Atheists can too be moral!

We're not saying that Atheists cannot BE moral, we're saying they cannot tell us WHY they are moral, or why other people are not moral.

What does that mean?

It means that you can say "X is moral, and Y is immoral." But you cannot say WHY those things are so. You can say "Society has dictated that X is moral, and Y is not," but that is a flimsy argument. Based on that argument, we must conclude that the practice of Bride Burning in India was a moral thing, because it was the societal norm. (When a man would die, his widow would be thrown onto his funeral pyre to die, most often against her will.)

Was it ever moral to burn the widow? For the Atheist who demands that society determines morality, we must say yes, it was a moral thing to do.

Other atheists will say "I determine my own morality." This is an even worse argument. Why? Because you and Jeffry Dahmer are both autonomous beings. If you think it's immoral to kill and eat people, but Jeffy disagrees, to what standard will you direct him to show that he is wrong and you are right? To society? We've dealt with that. To your own sense of morality? Why is yours better than his?

Someone once asked the great Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias why he was so afraid of moral relativism. Ravi responded brilliantly: "Do you lock your doors at night?"

We're all fine with our own morality, but we want other people to behave as we do. For instance, one person might say that X is perfectly moral when he does it, but be outraged when someone else does X to him. As C.S. Lewis writes:

"But the most remarkable thing is this. whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking on to him he will be complaining 'It's not fair' before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties do not matter, but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong--in other words, if there is no Law of Nature--what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like anyone else?"

Another common answer from the Atheist is that morality comes from nature. But what we find in Nature is far different from our understanding of morality. For instance, only a few species mate for life. Most species will engage in reproductive acts with several others, often in the same mating season. While this sounds good on the surface, why do people then get upset when their spouse or significant other cheats on them? Isn't that just nature?

One more brief example for morality from nature: After copulation, the female praying mantis kills and consumes her partner. Nature is not the source of our morality.

Allow me to end with another C.S. Lewis quote, and I'll thank you for having read this far:

"My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying that it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist--in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless--I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality--namely my idea of justice--was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning."