You know that feeling. The 3 a.m. replay of a conversation where you said the wrong thing. The weight that settles in your chest when you’ve broken a promise. The flash of indignation when someone cuts in line or takes credit for your work. We spend enormous energy trying to explain away these sensations—cultural conditioning, evolutionary residue, the superego’s heavy hand—but they persist. The voice that says you ought and you shouldn’t have refuses to be silenced.
This is where the moral argument for God begins. Not in abstract philosophy, but in the court that convenes inside every human soul.
The Question We Must Face Honestly
Can the universal human experience of moral obligation be adequately explained without God? And if morality is real, what does that require of the universe?
This is not merely an academic puzzle. The stakes are existential. If morality is illusion—mere electrochemical impulses dressed up in the language of duty—then Hitler and Mother Teresa differ only in preference, not in kind. If morality is real, then something about the structure of reality grounds it. The moral argument contends that this “something” is Someone: the God revealed in Scripture.
Where We Stand
Before proceeding, we should be transparent about our commitments. We approach this question as those who confess:
- Scripture as final authority. Human reason is genuine but fallen; we cannot construct an adequate moral framework apart from divine revelation.
- God’s sovereignty over all reality. Nothing exists or occurs outside His decree and providence.
- Human beings as morally responsible creatures. We are not puppets, but neither are we autonomous—we are covenant creatures accountable to our Creator.
These commitments do not prejudice our inquiry; they frame it honestly. Everyone reasons from somewhere. We prefer to name our location rather than pretend neutrality.
The Objection at Its Strongest
The moral argument cuts both ways. If God exists and is the source of morality, then we should expect a moral universe. But we look around and see:
- The wicked prospering while the righteous suffer
- Children dying of bone cancer
- Genocides perpetrated in God’s name
- The strong trampling the weak with impunity
The skeptic argues: If morality requires God, and God is supposedly all-powerful and perfectly good, why does evil so thoroughly pervade His creation? Either God cannot prevent evil (and is thus not omnipotent), or God will not prevent evil (and is thus not good), or evil doesn’t actually exist (which no one seriously believes).
This is no straw man. It is the formulation that has troubled philosophers from Epicurus to Mackie. And it deserves a serious response—not deflection, but engagement.
Why This Objection Resonates
We should acknowledge why this challenge persuades so many thoughtful people.
Emotional weight. The problem of evil is not primarily intellectual; it is visceral. When you hold a dying child or witness injustice go unpunished, the philosophical formulations feel almost insulting. The heart cries out for vindication before the mind asks for explanation.
Cultural plausibility. We swim in narratives that prize human autonomy and assume that suffering is always meaningless, never pedagogical or purgative. The default modern assumption is that a good God would construct a world maximizing creature comfort—a celestial amusement park, not a vale of soul-making.
Real failures. The Church has provided ample ammunition for skeptics: crusades, inquisitions, abuse scandals, prosperity gospel charlatans. When those who claim to represent God behave monstrously, the cognitive dissonance naturally extends to God Himself.
The noetic effects of sin. Scripture teaches that fallen humans actively suppress truth in unrighteousness (Romans 1:18). This is not mere intellectual error but moral rebellion. The objection gains traction partly because our hearts want it to succeed—we prefer a universe without a Judge.
Clarifying Our Categories
Before mounting a defense, we must clarify what we mean by “evil” and “good.” Much confusion arises from treating these as self-explanatory terms.
Evil is not a substance. Following Augustine and Aquinas, we understand evil as privatio boni—a privation or absence of good. Evil has no independent existence; it is parasitic. Darkness is not a “thing” that invades light; darkness is simply what remains when light is absent. A hole in a sock is not made of “hole-stuff”; it is the absence of wool where wool ought to be.
This matters because evil cannot be a rival power to God. It is not as though God created light and some anti-God created darkness. Evil exists only as a corruption of what God made good.
But evil is not an illusion. To say evil is “nothing” (no substance) is not to say it is unreal. The Reformed tradition uses the term privatio actuosa—active privation. The hole in the sock is real; it will let water in. The corruption of human nature is real; it produces actual misery. We are not Christian Scientists denying the reality of suffering. We are metaphysicians being precise about what kind of reality evil possesses.
Evil presupposes good. Here is the crucial turn: you cannot identify something as “evil” unless you already possess a standard of “good.” You cannot recognize injustice without first knowing justice. You cannot call something “broken” unless you know what it was supposed to be. The very existence of the category “evil” points back to a prior standard—and that standard requires grounding.
The Logic of Moral Obligation
Let us now construct the positive case. Following Immanuel Kant (whom R.C. Sproul often employed for this purpose), we can trace the implications of moral experience.
The Categorical Imperative
Every human being possesses an internal sense of oughtness—what Kant called the categorical imperative. This is not merely preference (“I’d like you not to steal from me”) but absolute demand (“You ought not steal—period”). It crosses cultures, appears in children before explicit moral instruction, and persists even when we wish it wouldn’t.
Attempts to explain this away as social conditioning or evolutionary advantage inevitably undercut themselves. If moral sense is merely brain chemistry favored by natural selection, then “You ought not murder” reduces to “Murdering reduced reproductive success in ancestral environments.” But that is not what we mean when we make moral claims. We mean something actually binding—not just statistically disadvantageous.
The Reality of Guilt
Here is where abstraction becomes personal. As Sproul frequently observed: while people may argue about metaethics over coffee, no one honestly claims they have zero guilt. Guilt is the objective symptom of failing one’s duty. It is the internal verdict that says, “You knew what you ought to do, and you did not do it.”
You can try to dismiss guilt as neurosis, as Freud did. You can medicate it, distract from it, rationalize it away. But it persists. Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth scrubs and scrubs, but the blood won’t come off. The conscience functions as an internal court—what John Owen called a “court of judicature” within the soul—and we are constantly being tried.
Justice Demands a Reckoning
If morality is real—if there truly is an ought—then it must matter whether we obey or disobey. But look around: crime often pays. The ruthless executive retires wealthy; the honest whistleblower loses everything. The tyrant dies peacefully in bed; the dissident rots in prison.
If this life is all there is, then morality is ultimately impotent. The universe doesn’t care. “Might makes right” becomes not a cynical slogan but a metaphysical truth.
For ethics to be meaningful, there must be a reckoning. Justice must eventually prevail. This requires:
- Life after death. We must survive the grave to face judgment.
- A perfect Judge. This Judge must be morally flawless (incorruptible) and omniscient (knowing all facts and mitigating circumstances to render a perfectly just verdict).
- Omnipotence. The Judge must possess the power to enforce the verdict against any resistance.
When you add these requirements together, you have described the God of Scripture: an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly righteous Judge. Kant, though no orthodox Christian, recognized that practical reason demanded what only the biblical God could supply.
The Euthyphro Dilemma—Resolved
At this point, a sophisticated objector raises Plato’s ancient challenge: “Is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good?”
If the former (voluntarism), then morality seems arbitrary—God could have commanded cruelty, and cruelty would be “good.” If the latter (intellectualism), then there exists a moral standard above God to which He must conform—and God is not ultimate.
The Reformed answer transcends this false dilemma through the doctrine of divine simplicity. God does not conform to an external standard, nor does He arbitrarily invent morality. Rather, morality is an emanation of God’s nature.
Lying is wrong not merely because God said so but because God is Truth. Cruelty is wrong because God is Love. Murder is wrong because God is Life. The moral law is not above God or beneath God; it flows from who God essentially is. God cannot command cruelty any more than He can deny Himself (2 Timothy 2:13).
Sovereignty and Evil: The Hardest Question
Now we must face the deepest difficulty. If God is sovereign—if nothing occurs outside His decree—then how do we account for evil without making God its author?
Rejecting the “Free Will Defense”
Many Christian apologists appeal to libertarian free will: God wanted creatures who could genuinely choose Him, and genuine choice requires the possibility of choosing wrongly. Therefore, God “permits” evil as a necessary cost of freedom.
This defense, while emotionally attractive, is theologically inadequate. It effectively limits God’s sovereignty: He wanted a good world but couldn’t guarantee it because He had to preserve creaturely autonomy. It also doesn’t explain the origin of the evil inclination. If Adam was created good, where did the desire to rebel come from? A truly neutral will choosing evil ex nihilo is incoherent.
The “Greater Good” Theodicy
Scripture offers a different paradigm. God does not merely “permit” evil as an unfortunate necessity; He ordains it for redemptive purposes—while remaining utterly holy in doing so.
The key distinction is between remote and proximate causation. When Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery, they acted according to their own wicked intentions (proximate cause, efficient cause). But God was simultaneously at work through their evil for a purpose they could not fathom. Joseph’s verdict: “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good, to bring about that many people should be kept alive” (Genesis 50:20).
This is not moral equivalence. The brothers sinned; God did not. The brothers intended harm; God intended salvation. The same event, two different intentionalities—what theologians call “double intentionality” or “concurrence.”
The Cross as Proof
The crucifixion of Jesus Christ is the ultimate demonstration of this principle. It was, objectively, the most heinous act in human history: the murder of the innocent Son of God by wicked hands. Yet Acts 4:27-28 declares that Herod, Pilate, the Gentiles, and the people of Israel did “whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.”
God ordained the Cross. It pleased the Lord to crush Him (Isaiah 53:10). Yet the human actors were fully culpable for their sin. And through this supreme evil came the supreme good: the redemption of God’s people.
If God can bring the salvation of the world out of deicide, then no evil lies beyond His redemptive sovereignty. This does not make evil “good”—the act remains heinous. But it is “good that there is evil” in the sense that God incorporates it into a story ending in glory.
Epistemic Humility
We must be honest: we cannot always trace the specific purpose behind specific evils. When a fawn dies alone in a forest fire, we do not have a ready explanation. The philosopher William Rowe pressed this as evidence against God.
But this commits what philosophers call the “noseeum inference”—assuming that because we cannot see a reason, no reason exists. A toddler cannot understand why her father permits the pain of a vaccination. Her inability to see the purpose does not mean the purpose doesn’t exist.
We are finite; God is infinite. We see one frame; He sees the entire film. Skeptical theism is not intellectual surrender; it is appropriate humility about the limits of creaturely knowledge.
Turning the Tables
Here is the deepest irony of the moral argument: the existence of evil actually proves God exists.
Think carefully. The atheist says, “There is so much evil in the world; therefore, no good God exists.” But how do you identify something as “evil”? Only by reference to a standard of good. And where does that standard come from?
If atheism is true, then there is no cosmic standard—only particles in motion, neurons firing, survival strategies. “Evil” becomes a meaningless category, a mere expression of personal distaste. You might as well complain that the universe is “rude” or “unfashionable.”
The moment you say “that is truly evil,” you affirm an objective moral order. And an objective moral order requires grounding in something beyond shifting human opinion. It requires, as we have seen, a morally perfect, omniscient, omnipotent Judge.
The atheist borrows capital from the Christian worldview to lodge complaints against it. He stands on the roof of the building while sawing off its foundation.
Common Rejoinders
“Morality evolved for survival; it needs no God.” Evolution might explain why we have moral intuitions, but it cannot justify them as true. If morality is just a survival mechanism, then it binds no one. The sociopath who ignores it is simply a genetic variant, not a sinner.
“Secular ethics like utilitarianism work fine.” Utilitarianism (maximize overall happiness) cannot explain why happiness ought to be maximized. It cannot account for why the individual shouldn’t be sacrificed for the collective. It smuggles in moral premises it cannot ground.
“The God of the Bible commands genocide in the Old Testament.” This requires careful handling elsewhere, but briefly: God as Creator and Judge has rights over life that creatures do not. The Canaanite conquest was a singular judicial act against nations whose iniquity was “complete” (Genesis 15:16), not a general license for human violence. The argument “God has no right to take life” assumes a moral standard above God—the very thing under dispute.
The Beauty of Holiness
The moral argument is not merely about escaping punishment or winning debates. At its deepest level, it is about perceiving reality rightly.
Jonathan Edwards spoke of “true virtue” as “benevolence to Being in general”—a disposition of heart that delights in existence itself because existence flows from God, who is supremely beautiful. The moral law is not an arbitrary set of restrictions but an invitation into the dance of reality, an alignment with how things actually are.
When we see holiness clearly, we do not grudgingly comply; we worship. The moral argument leads not just to a Judge but to a Father, not just to Law but to Love. The conscience that condemns is the same conscience that, when healed by grace, delights in righteousness.
The Hope of Judgment
Strangely, the moral argument offers profound hope. The universe is not chaos. Justice will prevail. Every wrong will be righted, every tear remembered, every hidden act brought to light.
This is terrifying for those who have built their lives on injustice. But for the oppressed, the abused, the forgotten—it is gospel. God will judge. The scales will balance. Not because humans demand it, but because God is who He is.
And for those who know their own guilt—who have sat in that internal courtroom and heard the verdict “guilty”—the gospel offers something beyond judgment: substitution. Christ bore the penalty. The Judge became the defendant. Justice and mercy kissed at Calvary.
An Invitation
The moral argument does not compel belief; no argument does. But it removes the excuse that faith is irrational. It shows that the very categories we use to critique Christianity—“evil,” “injustice,” “wrong”—are themselves evidence for the God we claim to doubt.
Where does your sense of ought come from? What do you do with your guilt? If there is no God, why does anything matter?
These are not rhetorical traps. They are genuine questions that deserve honest engagement. We invite you to sit with them, to test Christianity not against a caricature but against the deepest longings of your own soul.
For further reading, we recommend R.C. Sproul’s lectures on the moral argument, particularly his engagement with Kant, as well as his treatment of the problem of evil in Defending Your Faith. For the philosophical underpinnings, see Alvin Plantinga’s work on the logical problem of evil and William Lane Craig’s presentations of the moral argument.
But more than any book, we commend to you the Scriptures themselves—where the Holy God reveals Himself as both perfectly just and infinitely merciful, and where the deepest questions of the human heart find their ultimate answer in Christ.