Morality is something we need to use before we need to explain or ground.
Do the hypothetical test.
1 I want a world where people only help the innocent without knowing why it is right.
2 I want a world where people only help the innocent while knowing why it is right.
2 is the answer. Why is that so controversial and so resisted?
The reason is that people mix ideology into the issue. They may say that morality and God somehow amount to the same thing. They say God comes first and is the ground and source of morality and all that is good.
The issue is that a seed is planted. It is telling people that what is good for them is not good enough. Treating a person as good does not mean treating them the best.
Some answer that God gives us ultimate meaning. But they are notoriously vague on what this ultimate meaning would look like or means. God belief in fact gives you a cover for creating a good feeling and dressing it up as some mysterious or ultimate value.
Another assumption is rife. "God is connected to objective morality, He makes only good. Evil is nothing in itself. It is a lack of good or a distortion of good." That is their opinion - and they should affirm those who opine that he is responsible for the lack. The lack claim is huge - you need solid evidence for it and for God's innocence. It is unjust how none is offered - just mere claims. The privation theory makes evil vague, un-measurable, and psychologically dangerous. It collapses into subjectivism: “I dislike this lack; therefore it is evil.” Human evil is seen as a lack of good and using our good powers, our intelligence and our agency in twisted ways - so it is a distortion as well. The distortion would be the biggest issue here - more than the lack. But that calls our sins or immoralities good that is simply shoved into the wrong place and time.
Those assumptions make the issue worse. They are related for why care about good or evil unless one is pro-meaning and evil attacks meaning?
Suppose you say you have to make do with a morality that makes sense - that is not random rules.
But God's alleged will is delivered by man and filtered - you would need God to tell you face to face. If morality is grounded objectively in God, that does not fit the bad fruit of how we are running to man to give us light. You would expect a good tree to give good fruit.
DIVERSION - WHO SAYS THAT IF GOOD IS GROUNDED IN GOD'S NATURE IT IS NECESSARILY GOOD?
The answer is that man does and it explains nothing anyway. God cannot explain it to us and has not clearly said it beyond reasonable doubt.
Anyway look at this syllogism.
If morality is grounded in God’s nature, then God’s nature contains the fundamental moral properties.
By definition, this view treats God’s nature—not God’s commands—as the ultimate standard of goodness.
God, on classical theism, does not create His own nature.
God’s nature is taken to be eternal, necessary, and uncaused.
If God did not create His nature, then the moral properties contained in that nature are also uncreated.
They exist with God, but not because of any further explanation.
If moral properties are uncreated and have no deeper explanation, then they are brute moral facts.
A brute fact is a fundamental feature of reality that has no cause or grounding beyond itself.
Therefore, grounding morality in God’s nature results in morality being a set of brute moral facts.
These facts happen to be housed in God’s nature, but they are not explained by God in any deeper sense.
Thus, appealing to God’s nature does not avoid brute moral facts—it simply locates those brute facts within God.
The view does not reduce the number of unexplained moral truths; it merely associates them with a divine being.
Conclusion
If morality is grounded in God’s uncreated nature, then morality ultimately rests on brute facts. The moral standard is still unexplained; it just coincides with what God happens to be.
This is not a refutation of the view—many theists accept brute facts—but it shows that invoking God’s nature does not remove the need for unexplained moral fundamentals.
FINALLY
Philosophers often distinguish between practical ethics—what we ought to do—and metaethics, which asks what makes actions right or wrong in the first place. While debates about the foundations of morality are important, practical ethical questions tend to matter more for everyday life. This raises challenges for views that place God at the center of morality, since doing so often shifts the focus away from human moral reasoning and toward metaphysical claims that are difficult to verify.
Several problems appear when morality is said to depend on God. The Euthyphro dilemma questions whether moral truths exist independently of God or whether they are created by God’s will. If morality is wholly dependent on divine commands, then it risks becoming arbitrary, and moral autonomy collapses into obedience. These concerns become especially sharp within Divine Command Theory, where actions are right solely because God commands them. This approach faces additional issues: different religions attribute different commands to God, and the theory offers no reason for why certain actions are good beyond divine authority.
Attempts to ground morality in God’s nature instead of God’s commands encounter their own difficulties. If goodness is simply identical with God’s nature, then the claim that “God is good” becomes uninformative. If God’s nature aligns with an independent moral standard, then morality does not ultimately depend on God at all. Moreover, scriptural portrayals of God often conflict with the idea of a perfectly good divine nature.
For theists who accept that morality is independent of God, another problem arises: if moral truths stand on their own, God becomes unnecessary as a moral foundation. This weakens common arguments that rely on morality requiring a theistic grounding.
The concept of “ultimate meaning” is sometimes invoked to defend the link between God and morality, but the term is used in multiple, inconsistent ways. If morality already has significance within human life, appealing to “ultimate meaning” adds little clarity.
Some philosophical traditions, like Aristotelian ethics, connect morality to human flourishing. Yet even this view faces questions about why flourishing should be morally binding, suggesting that our sense of its importance may stem more from human psychology than from any deeper metaphysical truth.
Overall, the connection between God and morality is far from straightforward, and morality may not require divine grounding to remain meaningful or authoritative in human life.