I had a brief discussion with an atheist on the question of morality (which began with him trying to understand when, according to the Bible, killing is immoral and when it isn’t, for he thought it was a very gray issue). If anyone wants to know how I answered the "killing" question, let me know and I shall post it. Otherwise, I want to share my response to him on the morality question itself.

I do not understand how someone can say, "You cannot have morals without religion." Don’t we have a conventional morality apart from God that adequately guides our moral choices?

Conventional morality is unreliable because it is man trying to interpret and understand his moral compass without acknowledging the source thereof. We have an innate sense of right and wrong because all mankind is created in the image of God, the ground of moral order. But if we ignore his Word and try to understand morality by our own sin-laden wisdom, we wander across very shaky terrain with inherently unreliable results.

But the situation is actually more desperate, for by dismissing God from the equation we actually end up with no intelligible morality at all. In a godless framework, man is just a biochemical collection of molecules and atoms operating according to the physical laws of the universe; things like morality, consciousness, knowledge, etc., are accidental illusions, i.e., not real. The logical conclusion of a godless framework is Nihilism.

You’re staking quite a large claim, that morality outside of Christianity cannot exist.

It seems you misunderstood my position. I certainly think morality can, and does, exist outside Christian theism. Remember, I said we all have "an innate sense of right and wrong because all mankind is created in the image of God, the ground of moral order." Christians are not by any means the only people who recognize right and wrong. Non-believers do too, quite obviously.

Christians are, however, the only ones who can account for morality qua morality. Non-believers are not able to do this, because "by dismissing God from the equation [they] actually end up with no intelligible morality at all." Non-believers have the capacity to recognize right and wrong (ethics), but they are incapable of accounting for this feature (meta-ethics) because the assumptions they bring to the task prevent them from transcending the descriptive to the prescriptive. In other words, at best they can achieve only biographical or sociological ‘is’ statements (descriptive); they cannot achieve moral ‘should’ statements (prescriptive).

Therein lies the rub. Most non-believers innately believe that certain things are properly immoral and objectively so, such as murdering children. But at the same time they seem unaware that such beliefs are not produced by their worldview, a cognitive deficit brought into sharp focus when they attempt to defend their moral stance by reaching into their worldview for the necessary currency and finding none. This is why I characterized it as "no intelligible morality." The view they express on a specific immoral act (such as murdering children) is often wildly inconsistent with the moral theory described by their worldview.

Incidentally, this is one reason why every Problem of Evil argument inescapably fails.

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