Where do morality and human rights come from without God?
✓Fact-checked & reviewed for Nicene orthodoxyHow we review →Most of us know that some things - torturing a child for fun, for example - are not merely distasteful but genuinely wrong. The question is what could make them really wrong.
The challenge is not that atheists can't be good - they clearly can be, and often are - but grounding: without a moral lawgiver it is very hard to say what makes cruelty objectively wrong rather than merely something we dislike. Some atheists reply that moral facts simply exist on their own, though it is far from clear what such facts are or why they would bind us. And we really do believe such acts would be wrong even if everyone approved of them. A moral law that binds everyone, everywhere, points beyond human preference to a moral lawgiver. Your deepest moral instinct is pointing at something - and Someone - real. "He has shown you... what is good" (Micah 6:8).