The Moral Argument and the Defeat of Evil

The Moral Argument posits a deity as the foundation of morality, in light of tenets of morality being undesirable in certain cases (sexual mores, the acceptance of pedophilia, rape, abortion).  Acknowledging the necessity of moral character, the atheist counters along two lines 1) the unscrupulous character of God, particularly in the Old Testament, and 2) the problem of evil.  Evil occurs, and God, who as omnipotent and loving, should be capable of containing and eliminating evil.  God's failure to do this means His non-existence.  Morality is thus a human construct, viable to variation in light of cultural change.

However, a divine foundation of ethics is still desirable.  If not, no moral dictum has staying power beyond a rational (or even rationalizing) basis.  And reason has its means to enact genocide, if reason is found.  Thus there is a friction, a working morality sans God.  If morality fails, man is capable of plenty of travesty in the realm of naturalism.  The very fact that in some species the female devours the male has no moral impact.  But it could be the structure of immorality.

The original title of this post would have been "The Moral Argument and the Problem Defeat of Evil."  If evil is merely cited to disavow God, then have no basis for reality thereafter, we have the basic inconsistency.  The belief in God instills a component of evil, hence the "love God/good and hate evil" expressions in Scripture (Ps. 97: 10; Prov. 8: 13; Amos 5: 15).  Evil then must be seen as not as the failure of God, but the failure of men.  Our skewed ideas of the makeup of evil runs counter to the Lord's views on the nature of evil.  We despise the fact that God has us well pegged as "evil," and that some of our favorite pastimes are at core unsavory.

Evil is not to be card to wave to make anti-God claims.  It must be faced and fought.  We have passed from an era of poetic justice (good shall always overcome evil) to an embrace of evil (how many times the villainous are the heroic in Hollywood renderings of motion pictures).  We both embrace violence (in depiction in R and TVMA ratings) and eschew it.  In using the problem of evil as a cause of dispelling God, we are left with the problem called evil, and no foreseeable means of dispelling that.

Evil remains something to defeat, not to flout.