Can Morality Exist Without God?

Can Morality Exist Without God?

Should we credit religion for good human behavior?

I’ve heard this argument from Christians more times than I can count, and you likely have too. The argument is that without religion we wouldn’t have a moral society, or sense of morals at all, “no better than the animals”.

This is basically an expansion of the argument that Christians use against atheists. They perceive atheists as being devoid of any morals and see them as only restricted from acting out the worst of human potential behaviors due to laws and punishments being in place.

To counter this we can even look back through history at various cultures that weren’t Christian but were still were objectively moral by and large, the Chinese for example who have never been predominantly Christian throughout history(currently under 3%), and use them as an example of a society that evolved without Christianity or Abrahamic religions governing their morals. However, Christians will argue that the “laws of God” have been in place since the “beginning”, citing the events of the book of Genesis like it’s an objectively factual history book.

It helps their case when they reduce the human timeline down to only an estimated 6,000 years, they do of course have a tendency to move the goalposts every chance they get.

It also helps if you try to imagine that the Abrahamic religions are the oldest in existence, which is inherently false.