1. If ethics is objective, then God must exist.

2. God does not exist

3. Therefore ethics is not objective.

There is an intuitive, widely shared view that underlies the first premise. The thought is that laws require lawgivers. There are laws against assault, forgery and perjury only because lawmakers have enacted them. No legislators, no laws. By analogy, if there are moral laws, these require some lawmaker to validate them. If moral laws are objective, this lawmaker cannot be any one of us. (Remember: objective moral rules are those whose truth does not depend on human endorsement.) If not one of us, then who? Enter God.

There are two reasons to doubt premise (1). This premise seems to derive its strongest support from the common thought mentioned earlier (viz., that rules require rule-givers). But this principle is suspect. Many think that the rules of logic and the axioms of mathematics are true quite independently of whether anyone has ordained them. If that is so (an issue too complex to tackle here), then moral rules too might be true or justified even in the absence of a moral lawgiver.

Further, there is reason to think that even if God exists, God cannot be the ultimate source of ethical principles, and so cannot be the missing link that supplies objectivity in ethics.

Suppose God exists. Suppose God issues commands to us. And further suppose that our moral law comprises these commands. Ethics is objective because the law comes from God, not from us. If it didn’t come from God, it couldn’t be objective.

This familiar line of thought, often used to support premise (1), is beset by a troubling dilemma: God either does or does not have reasons to support his (or her or its) commands. If God lacks justifying reasons, then God’s commands are arbitrary, and so supply no authoritative basis for ethics. Alternatively, if God’s commands are backed up by reasons, then divine commands are no longer arbitrary. They may be authoritative. We can envision a God who is omniscient, and so knows all facts, including moral facts. This God may also be omnibenevolent, and in his goodness may want to impart the moral facts (or rules) to us, in the form of divine commands. This traditional picture preserves the goodness and omniscience of God, precisely by envisioning divine commands as being well-supported by reasons.

The problem, however, is that these reasons, whatever they are, are what really justify the divine commands. If God commands us not to kill, extort or perjure, he does so because such actions are wrong; they are not wrong because God forbids them. But this means that even theists, if they are to retain a picture of an all-good and all-knowing God, must acknowledge a source of ethical truth that exists independently of God’s commands. This means that the objectivity of ethics does not hinge on God’s commands. And that directly challenges premise (1). (Qtd. in That Which Is and the Negation of Nature—emphasis in original.)

The underlying assumption here is in regard to where the basis from which these divine commands originate. The problem is that it fails to take into consideration the metaphysical question: how did we get here? how did anything get here? This all-good and all-knowing god to whom Shafer-Landau and Feinberg refer suffers from the limitation that he is not “that which nothing is greater than.” This god is not the same God we were talking about earlier, because if he were, he would have been able to declare such actions wrong based on his own character and creation. This god to which Shafer-Landau and Feinberg refer obviously was never self-existent, never was that which alone always existed. The God we were talking about earlier, however, alone existed—and besides Him there was nothing, which is not a “thing,” but the negation we use to describe the absence of matter. We again have a choice: God or nothing, the latter obviously no choice at all. So if something does in fact exist, it does so only because God exists, does so only because God brought it into being and sustains it even as we speak. However, immorality, like sin and evil, does not exist as a “thing,” but rather as the concept we use to express the absence of a thing. That is why, in my article Is Morality Relative to Culture?, I write that it is immorality that is relative to culture, not the other way ’round.

Thus, ethical truth does indeed exist independently of God’s commands for the primary reason that God Himself exists independently of His own commands. He does not require His own stamp of approval to exist; His commandments are merely the expression of what He has ordained and created, all part of His revelation of Himself and His perfect character. When God issues His moral decrees, He is issuing decrees based on His own being and character. Far from being arbitrary, this is the choice between that which does exist and the absence of existence. We either acknowledge reality or a lie. In fact, our eternal destiny is not based on two things that exist: it is based primarily on one thing that exists or its negation. Either we acknowledge the truth or we live a lie. The reason we are damned to hell if we refuse to acknowledge the truth is not because God is cruel or mean: it is because there is no other source of sustenance in the universe apart from God Himself. There aren’t any other options: no other choices our Creator can offer us. We effectively put ourselves there of our own volition, in the place Lewis writes he can easily imagine in which the doors are all locked from the inside. God, the perfect, omnibenevolent Gentleman simply steps aside and lets us have our way. Anything less would be to produce a race of robots. (That Which Is and the Negation of Nature)