Two people are arguing. One says, “That’s my seat, I was here first.” The other shoots back, “There’s no rule about that.”

Listen closely to an everyday disagreement and something strange surfaces: both sides are appealing to a standard neither of them invented. CS Lewis built an entire case for the supernatural on that single, small observation. The moment we quarrel about fairness, we assume a real measure of right and wrong sitting above us—and a measure like that has to come from somewhere.

That “somewhere” is the heart of what philosophers call the moral argument for God’s existence. In the hands of William Lane Craig, its most influential modern defender, the argument runs in three plain steps:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Notice what the argument isn’t saying. It isn’t claiming atheists can’t be good people—they plainly can. And many are. The question isn’t about moral behaviour but about moral grounding: what makes anything right or wrong in the first place, binding on everyone, rather than a matter of personal taste or local custom?

What Does “Objective Morality” Mean?

Everything turns on a single distinction. Something is objective if it’s true regardless of what anyone thinks: the Earth orbits the Sun whether we believe it or not. Something is subjective if it depends on the subject—you like coriander, I think it tastes like soap, and neither of us is mistaken. The moral argument claims at least some moral facts belong in the first category, not the second.

Take the hardest possible test case: Was the Holocaust evil?

Not just “did most people dislike it,” or “was it bad for German society,” but genuinely, actually wrong—even if the perpetrators had successfully brainwashed the entire world into thinking it was right? Almost everyone, religious or otherwise, answers yes without hesitation.

In saying yes, we affirm Premise 2. We declare at least one thing is wrong full stop, regardless of human opinion.

Why Naturalism Struggles to Ground Morality

Here’s the difficulty for a purely naturalistic picture of the world. If all that ultimately exists is matter, energy, and the blind play of physical forces, where do binding moral obligations come from?

Atheist biologist Richard Dawkins followed this logic to its logical end, describing a universe with “no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” On a strictly materialist view, the statement “the Holocaust was wrong” and “I prefer tea to coffee” are fundamentally the same kind of statement—a report of subjective preference, whether personal or evolved across a species. Neither carries an obligation reaching beyond the one who feels it.

 The Is-Ought Gap: Science is spectacular at telling us what is. It can describe how a virus behaves. But science cannot tell us what we ought to do. We cannot derive a moral duty from a physical fact.

Most people find a purely subjective conclusion impossible to live by. We don’t treat cruelty to a child as a matter of mere distaste; we treat it as a violation of something objectively real. A naturalist can, of course, be horrified by cruelty. What’s harder to explain on naturalistic terms is why that horror tracks an actual fact about reality.

How God Grounds Moral Facts

Theism offers a direct answer. Moral facts are grounded in the unchanging character of God—who is perfectly good, just, loving, and holy. He isn’t measured against some external yardstick of goodness; He is the yardstick. Our moral duties, on this view, flow naturally from the commands of a God whose commands reflect His nature.

This matters because it heads off the obvious worry that divine commands might be arbitrary. God cannot command cruelty for its own sake, because cruelty contradicts His very essence.

This position is a refined form of Divine Command Theory, sharpened by contemporary Christian philosophers like Robert Adams. It suggests goodness isn’t a product of God’s whim; it’s an expression of God’s nature.

The Euthyphro Dilemma: The Hardest Objection

No objection is raised more often, so it deserves a careful hearing. In one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates poses a deceptively simple question: Is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it’s good?

Both answers look fatal to theism:

• If things are good simply because God says so, goodness is arbitrary—God could have declared torture a virtue tomorrow.
• But if God commands things because they’re already good, then goodness stands above God, and He becomes a divine middleman we could quietly cut out.

The Answer: The Third Option: The dilemma offers a false choice. There’s a third option the question slips past: God’s own nature is the standard.

God neither invents goodness by arbitrary decree nor bows to a standard above Him. Goodness isn’t a rulebook God consults, and it isn’t a coin God mints on a whim—it’s what He is. Ask “Why is love good?” and the answer is neither “because God happened to favour it” nor “because love outranks God,” but “because God, the source of all reality, is Himself love.” Once that middle possibility is on the table, the dilemma dissolves.

Four More Objections Answered

1. Evolutionary Ethics

• The Objection: Morality is simply an evolutionary mechanism that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce. No God required.
• The Answer: This explains why we have moral feelings, but not why a moral claim is true. That a behavior aided survival tells us it was useful, not that it was right. “We evolved to feel that betrayal is wrong” and “betrayal really is wrong” are completely different claims. Evolution accounts for the description, but it leaves the prescription unexplained.

2. Moral Relativism

• The Objection: Cultures disagree across time and geography, so morality must be invented rather than discovered.
• The Answer: Disagreement proves only that people hold different views, not that no objective truth exists. People once disagreed about whether the Earth was flat, but that didn’t make geography a matter of opinion. Furthermore, this disagreement is easy to overstate. Beneath the surface, diverse cultures overwhelmingly converge on core values: treachery is shameful, courage is admirable, and cruelty to the innocent is wrong. CS Lewis famously catalogued this cross-cultural convergence in the appendix to The Abolition of Man.

3. Secular Moral Realism

• The Objection: Objective moral facts simply exist on their own as brute, independent features of reality, with no God needed to anchor them (a view defended by philosophers like Derek Parfit).
• The Answer: This raises far more questions than it answers. Where do these free-floating, non-physical moral facts reside? Why should abstract, uncreated concepts hold any cosmic authority over human behavior? How would physical creatures ever evolve to recognize them? Grounding morality in a personal God—one who created us and intends our good—answers these questions in a way that ownerless, abstract facts cannot.

4. The Problem of Evil

• The Objection: If God grounds morality, why is the world so full of horrific suffering and evil?
• The Answer: While this is a weighty emotional and philosophical issue, notice what happens when it is raised: to press it as an objection, you must assume real, objective evil exists. If evil is real, then objective morality is real. But if objective morality is real, you are standing on the very ground the moral argument uses to point toward God. The Problem of Evil doesn’t disprove the moral argument; it accidentally reinforces its second premise.

From Lawgiver to Redeemer

On its own, the moral argument doesn’t deliver the entirety of the Christian faith. It establishes that objective moral facts exist and require a morally perfect, personal foundation—a conclusion compatible with several monotheistic traditions.

Christianity then makes a bolder, more historical claim: this universal Lawgiver is the God revealed in Jesus Christ. He doesn’t stand at a cold distance from the law He authored; He entered our history and bore the weight of our moral failures Himself.

The moral argument opens a door; the Gospel walks through it. Read alongside the Kalam Cosmological Argument and the Fine-Tuning of the Universe, it forms a robust, cumulative case—independent lines of evidence all converging on the exact same conclusion.

Related Reads:

• The Ontological Argument: Can We ‘Logic’ Our Way to God?
• Aquinas’ Quinque Viae: Timeless Arguments for the Existence of God
• The Kalam Cosmological Argument: Does the Universe Need a Creator?
• The Teleological Argument: Does Nature Point to a Designer?
• The Fine-Tuning Argument: Why the Universe Looks Designed for Life
• The BGV Theorem: How Physics Points to a Spaceless, Timeless Creator