Killing innocent children is wrong. Not just "wrong for you" - wrong for everyone, everywhere, always. But if that's truly true, what does it tell us about the universe?
Before you read another word, answer this in your head: Was the Holocaust wrong?
You didn't need to think very long, did you? You didn't need to look it up in a rulebook. You didn't need to ask your parents. You just know it was wrong - deeply, obviously, certainly wrong.
Now here's the question philosophers ask: How do you know?
Where does that certainty come from? You didn't invent it. Your country didn't vote on it. Even if every government on earth said the Holocaust was fine - it still wouldn't be fine. That sense of wrongness feels like it comes from somewhere outside of us.
C.S. Lewis - one of the most brilliant Christian thinkers of the 20th century - noticed that when people argue, they say things like "That's not fair!" or "You had no right to do that!" Without realizing it, they're appealing to a standard of right and wrong that both people are supposed to already know. Where does that shared standard come from?
There's a really important difference that philosophers make:
Here's the key question: Which one is true?
Think about it carefully. If morality is just relative - if there is no real right or wrong - then we can't say the Holocaust was truly wrong. We can only say, "We don't prefer it." Most people find that deeply unsatisfying, because in their gut they know it was genuinely wrong, not just unpopular.
The Moral Argument for God's existence goes like this:
"We don't need God to know right from wrong. Evolution gave us morality."
Evolution might explain why we feel certain things are wrong - but it can't explain why they actually are wrong. Evolution is about survival, not truth. If evolution shaped us to think murder is wrong, that only tells us it helped us survive, not that murder is genuinely, really wrong. The moral argument isn't about where our feelings come from - it's about why objective moral facts exist at all.
"Different cultures have different morals. There's no one moral truth."
Cultures do disagree on many things - but they agree on the big ones. No culture celebrates killing innocent children for fun. No culture thinks cowardice is better than courage. And even when cultures disagree, they're arguing about what's truly right - which means they all assume there is a true answer to find. When a culture does something monstrous (like slavery), we don't say "well, it was right for them." We say they were wrong. That means we believe in an objective standard.
"If God made morality, couldn't He make killing innocent children good if He wanted to?"
No - because God's nature is goodness itself. He doesn't decide what's good like choosing a menu item. His very character is the standard of goodness. "Could God make killing innocent children good?" is like asking "Could a circle be square?" The question contradicts what we mean by God. A perfectly good being cannot want evil - it's not a limitation, it's a definition.
What is "objective morality"?
Someone says, "Different cultures have different morals, so there's no absolute right and wrong." What's the best response?
The Moral Argument shows that the existence of real, objective right and wrong points to a morally perfect God as their source. This argument was made by philosophers like Immanuel Kant and C.S. Lewis, and it starts not with the Bible - but with something you already know deep in your conscience.