Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig, today an excurses on natural theology, part 19.

For more resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

Today we want to continue our discussion of the moral argument for God's existence.

Last time we looked at the defense of the first premise that if God does not exist, then

objective moral values and duties do not exist.

And I finished up last time by emphasizing that we have to correctly understand the question.

The question is not, must we believe in God in order to live a good moral life?

No, I think we all know unbelievers, many of them family members perhaps, who live good

in decent lives.

Similarly, the question is not, can we recognize objective moral values and duties without

believing in God?

Yes, we can.

In fact, the Bible teaches this.

The Bible teaches the demands of God's moral

law are written on the heart of every human being, so that even people who have no special

revelation from God at all, nevertheless, have a kind of instinctual grasp of the moral law

and its requirements. So you needn't believe in God in order to know your moral duties or recognize them.

And again, the question is not, can we formulate a system of ethics without reference to God?

If the atheist is willing to concede the intrinsic moral value of human beings, then he can

probably work out an ethical code of conduct with which the Christian or theist will

largely agree.

Rather, the question before us is, if God does not exist, are there objective moral values

...