God's Love and Power, a Necessity for Morality and Moral Society
In modern Western society, there are two domineering worldviews. One of them is Christianity, which teaches that Christ is God, the law-setter of the universe, and the giver and creator of all creation. The other is modern secularism, which often garners a reputation of being relativist or even nihilist, but in reality, most people who would be classified as secularists claim to at least believe in some morality. In fact, almost all of them do. About 98% of atheists and 97% of agnostics report it is possible to be moral or have good values without religion.¹ Yet, a common objection yielded by the Christian or theist against this secular morality is to assert that morality cannot possibly exist in any true sense without God. They usually mean this in both a practical and philosophical sense, for the power of God is essential for the practical existence of any enduring moral system, and the love of God is required for philosophical existence; the secularist comes up empty at both ends.
The English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke wrote in his Letter Concerning Toleration, an influential treatise on the notion of religious freedom, that one of the few religious beliefs that ought not be tolerated is atheism because the "[p]romises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist," for the "taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all."² Locke said this even while himself proclaiming that morality could be deduced from reason alone without the need to invoke God Himself, but he remained convinced that it was "too hard a task for unassisted Reason, to establish Morality in all its parts upon its true foundations; with clear and convincing light." According to Locke, the "surer and shorter way" to make a functional moral system is to say it is "one manifestly sent from God, and coming with visible Authority from him," because this grounding is clear to the "Apprehensions of the vulgar, and mass of Mankind" by not requiring "the long, and sometimes intricate deductions of Reason, to be made out to them."³ It is impossible to know empirically whether this is true at this time, in part, because a large majority of modern secularists were raised Christian anyway, and they likely retain behaviors and beliefs from a Christian upbringing and a broadly Christian community. However, Locke's point is highlighted in some social science research. One study showed that believers of a moralizing God were less likely to cheat someone out of their money and more likely to be impartial. However, in societies with strong law and order regimes, the discrepancy decreases.⁴ This suggests that people behave better when they believe they are subjected to an external divine enforcer of justice. Thus, Locke's practical arguments in favor of a God-dependent moral society must lie in the power of God. Practically speaking, society's perpetuation of morality is directly related to God's omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence. So, even if morality can exist without God, a secularist must provide a power structure to enforce morality for the masses who, without God, are more likely to cheat the system; so, they turn to the government.
Historically, powerful atheistic states have been far from ideal and, many, downright tyrannical. For example, the leaders of Nazi Germany were extremely moralistic and attempted through government force to replace the Christian ethical tradition with a home-grown one that served the ideologies of the regime.⁵ The terrifying part is that this worked. Their new "morality" was adhered to by enough to commit atrocities at a scale never seen before or since. The citizenry found their moral standard in the power of the government. This is markedly different from Christianity, where the Christian views governments to be reliant on the power of God and morality to be fixed. This fixed morality established by Christianity has built the West for the past centuries, but a widespread adoption of atheism would likely change this, and leave a moral vacuum that would be filled with something quite different, and if history says anything, it would be something much worse.
Many secularists are willing to concede that a belief in a powerful God amongst the masses is at least somewhat important or even essential for a moral society. However, this does not answer if God is really needed for morality to be true. All this proves is that people are not very moral without fear of retribution and that regimes make dreadful moral systems, but it is still to be contended that God is required for morality at a philosophical level as well.
The answer lies in the love of God. For God created man, and He "created mankind in His own image," and He made man and the rest of creation in a state of perfection.⁶ Creation would remain in perfection until man exercised his freedom of the will to corrupt it, and this dynamic is where morality exists. Basing morality in perfection sets it in the essence of everything in the universe because it connects morality to wider creation. This principle explains why morality has logical properties like physics and other natural forces, and also why it can be said to be objective, just like arithmetic or the existence of matter. This is so because morality—and its parts, the good and bad—are connected to an objective and measurable deviation from the original state of perfection. But, perfection could only have existed if the Creator had enough love and care to make such principles. Thus, it was God having a genuine love for man, for him and the rest of creation to be in a state of perfection, that created the pillar for the good to exist on. An uncaring or unloving deistic creator would not have bothered to have such a notion of perfection. It follows from these principles that morality is also not an arbitrary edict from God or merely a byproduct of his power. Hence, the Christian conception of morality is not prone to allowing clearly immoral things to be merely decreed as good by God because such things are intrinsically against the perfect state that God created in the garden. If God did not have this transcendental love for man to desire him remaining in the perfect state, morality could not exist at any objective level because there would be no transcendental notion of perfection that ought to be preserved, the good, and an imperfection that ought to be avoided, the bad.
If God's love is removed from the equation, there is no aim to creation and no measuring stick of its faults and excellencies, as such things can only exist when created with an ideal in mind. Since secularism cannot appeal to an ideal state of creation, any secular morality will always fail to build a framework wherein it could be considered objectively true. Hence, secular systems can lead to a wide variance of beliefs regarding morality. For that reason, divorcing morality from God can lead to potentially horrific moral systems forming, as seen in Nazi Germany. Unfortunately, none of this discussion of secular ethics is hypothetical, as atheism and secularism continue to grow in influence. Thus, there is a battle in the West today: a battle between an ever-encroaching worldview that creates no stable, consistent basis for morality and one that manifests morality to all through the love and power of God.
¹ Gregory A. Smith et al., "Religious 'Nones' in America: Who They Are and What They Believe," Pew Research Center, 2024. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/01/24/religious-nones-in-america-who-they-are-and-what-they-believe
² John Locke, Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 246.
³ John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity (London: Rivington, 1824), 139. https://archive.org/details/thereasonablenes00lockuoft/page/138/mode/2up
⁴ Dimitris Xygalatas, "Are Religious People More Moral?" Sapiens, December 6, 2017. https://www.sapiens.org/culture/religious-people-moral/
⁵ Thomas Kühne, "Nazi Morality," in A Companion to Nazi Germany, edited by S. Baranowski et al. (2018), https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118936894.ch13.
⁶ Genesis 1:27, NIV.