On July 22nd, 2007 two thugs broke into the home of Dr. and Mrs. William Petit and their two daughters in Cheshire, Connecticut. They held the Petits hostage for seven terrifying hours. The doctor was beaten, his wife was raped, his youngest daughter was sexually assaulted and their house set afire. The mother and daughters, having been tied up and doused with gasoline, burned to death. Only the father managed to escape. The crime was unimaginably evil.
It's not uncommon after a horrific event like this has occured to hear someone claim that they can't believe in the Christian God because no God who was good would've allowed such senseless depravity to happen. A good being of any sort would have a moral obligation to prevent such wickedness if he could, and the failure to do so is a strong argument for the conclusion that God, if He exists at all, is either impotent in the face of evil or not willing to prevent it and thus not good.
In the aftermath of the horror that the Petit's suffered it's easy to feel the emotional power of this argument, and people who are grieving and in shock don't want or need to have their reasoning analyzed. They need to be loved.
Nevertheless, for those not immediately in the throes of emotional devastation it might be noted that this is actually a very odd argument. As has been asserted here at VP on many occasions, in order to speak of moral evil one has to assume that God exists. In a Godless universe there are no moral rights and wrongs and thus there are no moral duties and thus nothing is evil.
So the skeptic who pleads the existence of horrible moral wrongs as a basis for denying that God exists can use that argument only if God does, in fact, exist.
As I say, this is a very odd argument.
The conviction that the world contains terrible moral evils - deeds that are profoundly wrong to do - assumes that there is an objective moral law that transcends human subjectivity, but an objective moral law can only exist if there really is a God who grounds it, who insists that we conform to it, and who holds us accountable to it.
As philosopher Alvin Plantinga writes, a secular view of the world "has no place for genuine moral obligation of any sort...and thus no way to say there's such a thing as genuine and appalling wickedness. Accordingly, if you think there is such a thing as horrifying wickedness, then you have a powerful argument" for the existence of God.
The belief that what happened to the Petits, or to Israeli families on October 7th, or untold millions of others, is morally evil must presuppose that an objective moral law has been violated and that must itself presuppose the existence of an objective moral lawgiver.
Someone might retort that it's a mistake to say that morality is based upon some objective standard and that, on the contrary, morality is merely rooted in the strong feelings of individuals and societies. Therefore, we don't need to posit a God in order to have morality, the argument goes, all we need is a consensus of feeling.
This is a commonly held view but if it's a sound argument those who embrace it cannot say that any human action at all is evil. It may be that they are personally revulsed by the thought of people being deliberately burned alive, but if the perpetrators of Oct.7th, for example, strongly feel that what they did is right then whose feelings are the correct ones? Some are revulsed by the deed and some rejoice in it, so how can anyone judge what they did to be objectively wrong?
If God does not exist then what those two men inflicted upon the Petits is neither wrong nor right, it's just a fact about what happened. We may not like it, it may outrage us, but our outrage doesn't make anything wrong. It can only be wrong if it violates some objective standard of behavior and if the men who perpetrated the deed will ultimately be held accountable for it by God.
And neither of those conditions exists, of course, unless God does.
