INTRODUCTION
Many people believe that morality needs a divine source to be truly valid, binding, or meaningful. Among them, Christians often claim that God is not just the giver of moral laws but the very definition of righteousness itself — that his character is the foundation of all moral truth. But does appealing to God actually help us understand morality better? Or does it create more problems than it solves? This piece explores the idea that using God to ground or promote morality is not only unnecessary but ultimately harmful. It examines how religious claims about God's moral nature can lead to confusion, contradiction, and dangerous hypotheticals. In the end, the attempt to secure morality through God may do more to undermine it than to protect it.
ARGUMENT
Jesus Christ said you must love God for His own sake and be willing to give up everything for Him. This suggests a call to be completely altruistic toward God. Imagine you had to choose between being altruistic to God or to other people, with no option to do both. If that were the case, Jesus’ teaching would require choosing God.
Under this view, when you help others, it would not be primarily about helping them, but about pleasing God. This interpretation raises concerns that such a focus could lead to an extreme form of belief, where loyalty to God takes precedence over direct care for people.
Extremism often leads to further extremes, and it is important to consider how certain interpretations of religious devotion might contribute to this pattern.
Some argue that belief in God, at best, might be seen as a necessary evil—a framework that people rely on despite its potential harms. However, necessary evils are not meant to be celebrated, and it can be difficult to prove whether they are truly unavoidable.
Offering the good you do for others as an act of altruism directed to such a God can feel troubling, especially since God, by definition, has no needs.
Regardless, Christians hold that God tells us what is righteous.
They say that he does more than that — righteousness is him. It is his character. So Christians argue that God’s rules are not just rules but show us what God is like. For example, "Feed the poor" shows that he is kind. His qualities will always be more important than the rules, for there can be no rules without them.
God is innately fair, good, and kind. These qualities exist because God exists. God did not invent them or create them. They are not rules but qualities. God does not have rules for himself. He can make rules for us so that we can see what he is like through the rules. For example, he commands us to love, for he is love.
Being righteous does not require you to make rules. You reveal righteousness to attract people to it. Religion is just trying to turn rules into God and hide it.
The religious say that God cannot command just whatever he likes — he cannot tell you to feed your baby to the dog just for fun. God is innately righteous and moral and sensible.
Is it a necessary evil that God cannot command what he likes? Is it a pity that he cannot command us to do that to the baby? Yes and no. It is evil that one cannot and should not command what one likes. That bit is bad. But it is good that one must not cross that line. That bit is good.
Hypothetically, what if God could be right to want you to harm your baby? Then, if God wants to command you to do that to the baby, he should. Hypothetically, if it is right to kill the baby for fun, you should — and he should joyously command. Every real statement goes along with a pile of hypothetical ones. It invites them. It does not change the fact that in your heart you would do evil if it were hypothetically good. It still says something about you. The hypothetical makes everything you do and think and say a necessary evil.
We all think that if we use evil to get some benefit, that the evil is really a problem for others, not us. If you shoot Jane to get her gold, you get the gold and she bleeds to death. What if, hypothetically, the risk of the evil working out was worth it? Religion will weakly argue that evil is useless in the end. This does nothing to put you off shooting Jane when you know she will suffer and lose, not you. Plus, many have great lives that cost others dearly. We have caught religion out here. It is asserting that the problem with evil is not that it is bad, but that it is useless. So evil is fine if it would be more practical. Religious people keep going around in circles with evil. They cannot really get it out of anything. They can only keep it small or less obvious.
We conclude that morality being seen as good is incoherent — and bringing God in makes it more risky than it is.