Presumably, the intent of the question is to inquire whether one can be good without believing in God. The answer to that, of course, is a qualified, "of course," but that's neither a particularly interesting nor a particularly controversial question. The interesting question is not whether belief in God is necessary for people to act this way or that but rather whether God's existence is necessary for there to be moral good and bad, right and wrong, in the first place. Michael Egnor, commenting on the Daily Beast article, puts it like this:
If God does not exist, you cannot be good. You cannot be evil. You can’t conform or fail to conform to any transcendental standard, because if there is no God, there are no transcendental standards. There is no Moral Law if there is no Moral Lawgiver.But even this doesn't say quite enough. The heart of the matter is this: If God does not exist anyone can adopt whatever values please or satisfy them. If they wish to live kind, honest, peaceful lives they certainly can, but the crucial point is that had they chosen to live by the opposite values - to be selfish, cruel, deceitful, and violent - they wouldn't be wrong. They'd just be different than they are.
If there is no God, there are merely opinions and consequences of acting on opinions. We may label certain opinions “good,” but that’s just our opinion. What we really mean by calling something “good” is that we like it. Which is fine, as long as we understand that “good without God” is just a metaphor for “something I (or we) like.” If there is no God, all of our “moral” decisions are just opinions — perhaps opinions we like, or opinions we don’t like — but neither good nor bad.
If God does exist, but you don’t believe in Him, then of course you can be “good without God”, in the sense that you can be good without believing in God. It is central to the moral theology of all the great faiths that non-believers may act in accordance with Moral Law without belief in God and even without knowing Moral Law in any formal sense. The Moral Law is written in our hearts, theists universally agree, and we feel the weight of morality whether we believe in God or not.
As I discuss with my students, without an objective standard or reference point of moral right and wrong we're like astronauts floating in outer space trying to ascertain which direction is up. With no objective referent there simply is no up or down and likewise, without an objective standard there's no moral good or evil. This is what needs to be stressed in columns like Withrow's at The Daily Beast, but unfortunately in such columns it's distinction that's usually missed entirely.
Instead the focus is on questions like whether serial killers are more likely to be theists or atheists, but this is a question of relatively minor importance. After all, just because one is a theist doesn't mean he/she will know what's right. Nor does it mean that even if they know what's right that they'll do it.
What's important is that if their belief about God is correct then there is something that is right, but if their belief is incorrect then right and wrong have no objective significance. To say something is wrong is to say nothing more than that the individual doesn't like it. Murder is no different for human beings than it is for a cat that kills a mouse. It's neither moral nor immoral. It's just the way things are.
In the absence of God morality is simply an expression of personal preference or taste. It matters not whether the act is something like rape, racism, child abuse, or whether it is an act of self-sacrificial kindness, the act itself has no objective moral content unless there really is an objective moral authority which has the power not only to promulgate moral laws but also the power to enforce them.
