What is the moral argument for God?

The moral argument, in the form William Lane Craig made famous, is a tight syllogism: if God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist; they do exist; therefore, God exists. Notice what it does not claim. It never says atheists cannot be good — they can be morally excellent and sincere, often putting believers to shame. The question is not who can be good, but what grounds moral facts at the deepest level.

Premise two is nearly common ground. Most people are far more certain that torturing a child for fun is really wrong than of any theory marshaled to deny it. Even secular moral realists like Erik Wielenberg, Russ Shafer-Landau, and David Enoch grant that some acts are objectively evil. The real fight is over premise one: what grounds the moral law? The theist's answer, developed by Robert Adams in Finite and Infinite Goods (1999), is that goodness is anchored in God's own necessary nature, and our duties arise from the commands that flow from it.

The sharpest objection is the Euthyphro dilemma: is something good because God commands it, or commanded because it is good? The reply locates a third option — God neither invents good by fiat nor consults a standard above himself; his nature simply is the Good, so his commands are neither arbitrary nor answerable to anything higher. Wielenberg counters that moral facts might just be brute, needing no ground; but a causally inert fact seems unable to generate an obligation owed to anyone.

That the murder of innocents is wrong regardless of opinion, culture, or power fits a universe that is, at its root, personal and good.