Can we have morality without God?

Philosophers have long tried to insist that man can be a moral creature without a belief in the existence of God. As our society grows more secular today this claim is heard even more frequently. Many would point to the work of Immanuel Kant as the godfather of this worldview. Kant taught that the rules of morality were rational  and evident to people apart from any belief in God. He further believed that people not only had the ability to know right from wrong but also had the ability within themselves to choose to do what is right. Obviously, there are some problems with this philosophy.

One, watch any news program and you will readily see that many people do not appear to have the ability to know right from wrong nor the ability to choose to do what is right. Our world is overwhelmed with violence, chaos, greed, hatred, abuse, addictions, and far more problems than can be listed here. Without a Moral Lawgiver there is no universal standard of right and wrong, and without such a standard there is bound to be everything described above as each person does what seems right in his or her own eyes.

A second problem arises when the person who insists there is no moral standard given to us by God but then complains when someone does something they believe is wrong. If God does not exist, and there is no objective moral standard, then who is to say that anything is right or wrong? What is the basis for such judgment? Without such a standard then there is no compelling reason why a person cannot do anything he or she pleases. 

What we often find is that nearly every person will eventually admit to certain behaviors as immoral, but then they struggle to explain why those actions are immoral. The reason they struggle with their explanations is they are using biblical standards of right and wrong and doing so while still trying to deny the existence of God. It is here that the hypocrisy exists.

The late apologist Ravi Zacharias frequently wrote about this dilemma faced by those who claim that man can be moral without God. In his book Can Man Live Without God he wrote, "Let me say forthrightly that what we have actually done is to smuggle in foundational strengths of Christian thought, buried far below the surface to maintain some stability, while above the ground we see humanism's bizarre experiments growing unchecked. If we truly put into place the same principles below the ground that we flaunt above the ground, we would completely self-destruct."

Our culture wants to deny the existence of God, claim that mankind is free to create its moral code of conduct without an objective moral standard, free people to live according to their conscience, but then revert back to a biblical foundation of morality when needed. They cannot have it both ways.