Is It Possible For People To Be Good Without God?

More and more the culture in America is becoming increasingly secular. This is largely due to the influx of atheists and secularists who are hell bent on removing anything that represents God – whether it’s the Ten Commandments and prayer in public schools or ousting churches from using public school facilities.

Atheists and secularists will not stop until every aspect of Christian morality is supplanted by the new morality of the postmodern philosophers–a morality with no absolutes, and without God.

To give you a taste of the kind of thinking that is permeating our culture, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, an influential liberal partisan in the Culture Wars, believes that it is wrong to have faith in God as necessary for moral goodness. In Letters to a Young Lawyer, Dershowitz argues that obedience to the God of the Bible can often be immoral. We should not be good because we fear divine punishment, Dershowitz argues, but because we aspire to good character. “In deciding what course of action is moral,” he instructs, “you should act as if there were no God. You should also act as if there were no threat of earthly punishment or reward. You should be a person of good character because it is right to be such a person.”

But how does one know what is good unless there is an objective reference to go by?  If human beings are left to our own devices and limited to our own wisdom, we will invent whatever model of good character seems right at the time. Without God there are no moral absolutes. Without moral absolutes, there is no authentic knowledge of right and wrong.

So then, here is the point I wish to make. Since it is impossible to know right from wrong apart from God or some objective divine source, we should not be surprised when an atheists acts amoral. But what ought to bring to us a measure of disbelief is when Christians act in similar fashion.

I know that God is allowing one man – Mitch Kahle, to motivate the church toward greater advantages through persecution.  We must remember, however, to keep a proper perspective. Mr. Kahle is doing the church a great favor. He is getting us out of our comfort zone and complacency which is something we Christians often tend to gravitate toward.

Here in America, we know nothing or very little on what it means to be persecuted for our faith in God. About the only persecution we know is when people at work either laugh at us for standing up for something that is moral, or make sly remarks when we pray before we eat our lunch.

So when God allows someone like Mitch Kahle to give the church some challenges, we react by saying, “How dare he do that! I hope he gets what is coming to him. Who does he think he is?”

Mitch Kahle is acting normal. How can someone who is an atheist act morally right when he has no belief in God? If Mitch did act morally sound, then that would be for us a problem of epic proportion. How would we explain the moral behavior of an atheist?  We would have to then admit that it is possible to know right from wrong apart from God, and if that is so, then we got a lot of explaining to do.

Mitch is a blessing to the church.  He is acting exactly the way we want him to and expect him to. His behavior can booster our witness for Jesus Christ.

But what limits our witness and makes it hard to explain, is when Christians who have Jesus and therefore know what is right from wrong, choose to behave as if there is no God. We do not expect this to happen, but when it does, we just say, “Oh well, we’re not perfect only forgiven.” But when Mitch Kahle acts normal as a result of his beliefs, we look at him and think of a monster.

We need people like Mitch Kahle to wake up us Christians and hopefully as a result of being brought out of our slumber, to repent of our abnormal behavior and stop judging others for acting normal according to their beliefs.