Why Can There Be No Moral Values If God Does Not Exist?

I very often find myself defending the Moral Argument for God's existence. I don't know why either, because it's far from my favourite.  My reason being that I find Premise 1 to be very easy to explain, while Premise 2 is very difficult, if not impossible, to support using empirical data. More on that later.

P1: If God does not exist, Objective Moral Values do not exist.
P2: Objective Moral Values do exist.
C: Therefore God exists.

Anyway, the strange thing I find when discussing this argument, is that many atheists think that P2 is actually obviously true and needs little defence, while P1 has no support whatsoever. So having been given P2 as a freebie, I generally find myself in a situation where all I need do is explain why P1 is so very clear, and that should be the end of it, and the atheist should embrace theism (or give up P2).

What actually happens, is that I will explain why P1 is obviously the case, but will be given various responses that are supposed to undermine what I have said. Each one of them misses the mark. It seems to me that a lot of these responses that try to show that atheism can account for objective morality, are actually examples of when people think that 'any response is a sufficient response'. What I mean by that is, that you might explain something with absolute clarity, and leave no gaps or details unchecked, but the person you are speaking to gives an objection and no matter the content of the objection, they feel as though simply being able to say something in reply means that they have destroyed the argument. Often the objection will be something that was already covered in the original explanation.

In this article, I will be explaining my take on the Moral Argument for God's Existence, and particularly why I find Premise 1 to be so conclusive.

So why do I agree with Jean-Paul Sartre,:

Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself.

C.S.Lewis,:

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? - Mere Christianity 

And even the atheist Friedrich Nietzche who led the way in trying to find alternatives for God's objective moral system when he explains that the only other option to a world of meaning with God, is a world of nihilism, whether that be complete meaninglessness, or moral systems based on human desires:

The man of the future who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and anti-nihilist; this victor over God and nothingness - he must come one day. -- “Basic Writings of Nietzsche”, p.532, Modern Library

Although C.S. Lewis might have something else to say to Nietzche's man of the future: Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that. 

Why is it that many great minds, as well myself, are convinced by the obvious truth of Premise 1?

P1: If God does not exist, Objective Moral Values do not exist.

There are a few ways to reach this conclusion. I think you would expect that seeing as it is true. What premise one is saying is that God and Objective Moral Values (OMVs) are linked. You can't separate them. If one does not exist, neither does the other. This makes even more sense on a Christian view, because God himself is the embodiment of objective goodness. He doesn't answer to or respond to some other abstract object of goodness, and he does not create goodness or decide which things are good or bad. He is goodness existing, and anything that is good, is that which is similar to him, flows from him, and is a natural expression of his nature, while anything that is bad or evil, is that which is a corruption of his good creation.
From this description  we could say that God is 100% good. We discover whether other beings, things, or actions are good by comparing them to him. If we find something to be 97% good, then we know it is something we should encourage. If we find something to be more like 24% good, then it is probably something to be avoided. So we call God our moral standard, by which we can measure the goodness of everything else. Of course we don't ever actually put these types of specific numbers on things, but the principle is the same.

Jesus replied, “No one is good except God alone" -- Mark 10.18

I would even go so far as to say that Christianity is the only form of theism that teaches this being of pure goodness as God. '1 John 4.8' tells us that "God is love". I think we can all agree that 'love' is good. While other faiths may tell us that their description of God is that he is the maximally greatest being, the best, the most holy, and so on, and that those descriptions might imply that their idea of God is the same as described in 1 John, only Christianity has a doctrine that makes sense of that. The doctrine of the Trinity is unique to Christianity, and tells us that God is three persons in one being. If God was one being and one person alone, as every other faith teaches, he could not be love and he could not be self-sufficient. He would need someone else before he could express his love or receive it. Only the Trinity allows for God to share love freely between three persons, in a self-sufficient existence that requires no other person or being to exist.  So if the Moral Argument is true, it is not only proof of theism, it is proof of Christianity specifically.

So in order to disprove this premise, atheists attempt to find ways of showing that OMVs can exist without God. They need to show that they are not linked in any way.

As we have seen, from the Christian perspective, God is one and the same as goodness embodied. He is love. He is the absolute ideal of what goodness is. He is the moral standard, the moral yardstick, the moral barometer, whatever you want to call him, that we use to measure by or discover what else is moral.
The first problem that atheism has, is that it has nothing that even begins to compare to that.
No object or person that exists in an atheistic worldview has the characteristics that can be described a perfect goodness. There is no object that "is love". Love is just a feeling produced by chemical reactions and stimuli.

So in these discussions, many of us face the frustration of having to repeatedly ask the atheist questions like "What is your moral standard?", "How do you know what is good?", "Why should we care about XYZ?". What we are driving at, is "What do you use to replace God as the 100% goodness in this system of trying to figure out what is moral?"
I will quite often be accused of moving goalposts or confusing metaphysics with epistemology. Epistemology is 'how we come to know things', as in, the methods we use to discover what is true. So I understand that the question "How do you know what is good?" might sound like an epistemological question, but in context it is always meant as an ontological question, i.e. a question about the properties of existence.

Understandably atheists struggle to answer the ontological question, but have many answers to the epistemological question. The Moral Argument says nothing about how we can discover moral truths, and we definitely agree that atheists are moral beings who are able to do good things. The thrust of the argument is entirely about ontology, and the fact that atheism, not atheists particularly, can not account for OMVs.

How do we know that atheism has no 100% good object? Atheism generally holds hands with materialism or naturalism, which states that only the physical universe exists. Given that, we can look at the properties of the universe and see that they do not match our knowledge of what goodness is.
A simple comparison of the amoral indifference of the forces of nature when compared to the trinitarian self-sufficient love of God should be enough to highlight the point. Goodness, if it was an object of some kind, would not be indifferent or amoral. It would be concerned for well-being, but then to be concerned and thoughtful about something, requires that there be a mind to think and be conscious of existence. An inanimate object with no mind - such as the universe - could not be the 100% goodness.
We could also compare the finite space and time that the universe has existed and will exist in as opposed to God's infinite and eternal nature. Death and decay plague the universe and everything in it, while God has life in himself and provides it to all other things. The universe is not a life giver in that way. Assuming that atheism is true, the universe may allow for life to come into existence, but it is not able to preserve or prolong it eternally. The universe itself will one day die, and has no power to stop even that.
Seeing as the universe itself as a whole is clearly not the basis for goodness, it is difficult to comprehend of anything inside it that could fit the profile instead. All things are destined to decay and die, and so all things are short of that 100%.

That doesn't mean that atheists have given up trying to find an alternative. Human well-being is the most popular option. Atheists will say that human happiness is intrinsically good i.e. good in-and-of itself. The picture we have painted so far shows that only God is good in-and-of himself. Everything else is at best 99% good, but that is not enough. If something is 99% good, that makes it 1% bad or corrupt. Any amount of corruption means we can not use it as our moral standard. When we know something has some amount of corruption, we know it is at best 99% good, but we have no possible way of knowing the actual percentage unless we know what 100% is to compare it to.
So why is human happiness not 100% good in-and-of itself? Well, why is it? Why should we be concerned about human happiness? Because we are human and we like to be happy? Well that doesn't make it good. What are humans worth that their happiness has intrinsic value? We already know that the human race will eventually die out, and that they are doomed to decay in the meantime. They are not 100% good. When humans go extinct what will they have done to have improved the amount of good in the universe? Nothing. The universe is amoral and indifferent and will carry on as it is no matter what they do.
The only possible value that can be found in human happiness, or intelligence, or longevity, or flourishing, is a human-centred subjective value. We can't find objective value in humans on atheism, because they are ultimately worthless to all but themselves. We have no reason to prefer human flourishing over the flourishing of ants except for our own specie-ism.
Once again Nietszche puts it well:

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of ‘world history’―yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die. One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it. But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that it floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world. -- Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense

The closest thing to an objective moral system atheists can come up with are the objectively best facts and laws that guide us to a subjectively chosen goal of human flourishing.

If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it’s not so bad.
 -- C.S. Lewis "God in the Dock", page 52.

Some may object by saying that we know which things are OMVs by using rationality or thought experiments such as impartial observers with the best intellects devising the ultimate social contract. But these miss the point again.
These social contracts and super rational methods can only find the best moral systems after they have been provided with a moral goal, duty, or purpose.
Once again, Christianity is all about what our duty, purpose, and goals are, which dictate what actions and things are morally praiseworthy. But atheism with its ultimate meaninglessness can not provide duties that we obligated to keep.
Once something like human well-being has been chosen as the goal, yes, atheists have the same tools as theists to figure out what is the objectively best way of achieving it, but atheism can not tell us why human well-being is good in-and-of itself to begin with.

While we are actually subjected to them, the 'moods' and 'spirits' of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, 'Look. Listen. Attend.' -- C. S. Lewis “The Four Loves”, p.31,

This can be a difficult subject to discuss because of how certain every day words are understood and used.
On the Christian worldview, the words 'good', 'bad', 'better', 'worse', 'improve' and so on, all relate to being more like or less like God. On atheism, these words seem to lose any actual meaning.
When God is the 100% goodness, we make something 'better' by changing it in a way that it has a higher number percentage.
If there is no such thing as God, and no such thing as 100% goodness, and no moral barometer that measures goodness, then the word 'better' does not refer to anything. It can only really be a synonym for 'I prefer this'. There can be no such thing as moral 'improvement'. There can only be moral 'change' that lines up to the social fashion of the day.

So unless atheism can discover that 100% ideal goodness object, they can not say that anything else is objectively good, or valuable, or better or worse, or morally improved and so on. The moment an atheist claims that something is actually better than something else, they are appealing to an objective standard. But there is no such thing as an objective standard on atheism.
In the meantime, they can of course use the words 'better', 'worse' etc to refer to their subjective human standards, but that has no bearing on Premise 1 of the Moral Argument and actually should commit them to deny Premise 2 if they want to maintain their atheism and be consistent.

I have touched on why atheism can not account for an objective moral standard in a couple of ways, but I will briefly rephrase and expand on that.
Whenever we say that something is better than something else, or object X is better than object Y, we are saying that X is closer to an ideal than Y. X might be 67% good, while Y is 34% good. The ideal would be 100% good.
Christianity teaches that God is that 100% ideal, and theoretically and hypothetically is the only option we know of. But that, to some, seems to simply define God into existence.
We should take time to logically think about what the 100% ideal would actually be. It would be the source and grounding of all good things. Those good things would be at their maximum greatness. If something was better, then that would be the ideal.
Some basic uncontroversial things that we know are good can help us figure it out what the ideal or the ultimate good is:

• Existence is better than non-existence for example. Nothing could possibly be worthwhile if it did not at least exist. So the ultimate good, would be the ground and source of existence. It would exist self sufficiently and require no other things to sustain it. 
• Death is in direct opposition to existence, so we can judge that death is a bad thing or a corruption. Decay is connected to and leads to death, so that too can be judged as bad. The ultimate good then would be something that does not decay, or die, and so exists eternally.
• Morality is not something that inanimate objects are capable of. So in order to be a moral agent, the ideal would have to be a personal being, that had a mind capable of thought.
• We have already seen that existence is better than non-existence, so it perhaps follows that the ability to create is a good thing, and so the ultimate good would be a force that creates more good things.
• Destruction is in opposition to creation, so the ultimate good would not destroy things that are good. However, the ultimate good would wish to destroy things that are bad in order to protect and preserve the good. 

It seems obvious to me that simply by teasing out some of the uncontroversial logical implications of what goodness must be, we begin to see that the Christian God fits the bill. More than fits the bill - the maximally great being that is necessarily being described as the only option for the 100% ideal good, is who we know as God. That is even before bringing us back to the already mentioned verse "God is love".

One final point about Premise 1 of the Moral Argument, which again has been briefly touched on. This premise refers exclusively to the ontology of Objective Moral Values. It says nothing about how we discover what the values are. There is an important distinction to make between God himself and God's commands to us. God himself is the source of OMVs and duties. It is his nature that prescribes them. His commands are merely a way of communicating to us what the OMVs are. They are not OMVs in themselves. OMVs inform us that in any situation where a moral choice is required, there is a correct answer that can be made, whether or not we know about it. God's commands are sometimes directed at specific times or events and are not to be taken as the ideal for all people in all times e.g. many of the Mosaic laws regarding ritual cleanliness. Often a command from God will be perfectly in line with OMVs e.g. his two most important: "Love God", and "Love your neighbour", but the simplistic view that "God said it once, that means it is true forever" leaves little room for the nuances that OMVs deliver.

P2: Objective Moral Values Do Exist

I said previously that atheists, if they wish to remain consistent, should abandon this premise. They have to, otherwise Premise 1 in turn proves the existence of God, and they can not be atheists any more.

However, I also said that many atheists see this premise as obviously true, and I only see value in defending Premise 1 if they provide Premise 2 for free.
Taking this premise alone, I can see no convincing reason to accept it as true. Not enough to base an argument on it. There are no tests that can be done to reach the conclusion that OMVs exist.
Most people when defending this premise will treat it as something that we are all intuitively aware of, and take for granted. P2 is what is called a properly basic belief. We believe it without further justification. It makes sense, because we all live our lives as though P2 is true. We all want the world to be morally better than it is. As mentioned, we can't have 'better' without OMVs.
For many, that intuition is enough. I agree that OMVs do exist, however I would not accept it based on this argument.

I actually prefer the Moral Argument backwards.
P1: If God exists, then OMVs exist.
P2: God exists.
C: Therefore OMVs exist.

That to me seems a whole lot easier to defend that the usual Moral Argument. It does however require you to prove God exists, and the purpose of the Moral Argument is to do that, so then the Moral Argument becomes fairly pointless, which is why I originally said that I'm not a huge fan of it.

But this premise does speak to our basic instincts. It's an easy target to pick on the Nazis, but when we say that our society is morally better than theirs, we are asserting that there really is a 'better'. To deny Premise 2, is to say that the Nazis were just different, and really there is no actual objective reason not to say "To each his own". By highlighting the extreme case of the Nazis, just shows that we are all on the same page in agreeing that OMVs exist, or at the very least, we all have this basic belief that they do. There's more difficulty in figuring out where the less obvious lines are of course, but we can't deny that we all live as though the line is out there somewhere.

If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.
-- C. S. Lewis (2009). “Mere Christianity”, p.13