Conscience and the Moral Argument as Evidence for the Goodness of God.

[Nishant Xavier]

During an investigative case, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective Sherlock Holmes famously quipped: "There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the Goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only a Goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope for from the flowers.”

This thread is to examine and investigate the Goodness of God. Agnostics and some Deists typically argue that God, even if He exists, is evil and thus not to be worshipped. So, for e.g. if the Principle of Contingent Causation could prove the existence of God or a First Cause, it might still be objected that it says nothing about whether that Being is Good or evil. Is there some specific argument for the goodness of God? Yes, from Conscience.

A typical argument would go something like this:

1. If objective moral values exist, then God exists. (because there would be objective and universal moral laws in a godless Universe without a divine Law-Giver.)
2. But we know from our Conscience that objective moral values do in fact exist, and this is a properly basic belief for virtually everybody, including atheists (e.g. that certain acts are intrinsically and objectively evil, like e.g. murder, rape etc, irrespective of the subjective beliefs of murderers and rapists etc).
3. Therefore, granted the fact of the existence of objective moral values known through our Conscience, we can reasonably conclude that our awareness of this Eternal Moral Law came from the Divine Law-Giver Who made us. 

[Even some Atheist/Agnostic Moral Philosophers do concede that Objective Moral Values entail and are entailed by Theism, i.e. Objective Moral Values exist if and only if Theism is the Truth. To maintain their Atheism, they deny then that moral values are objective.]

Thus, since the objective moral law exhorts us to choose good and avoid evil - even if evil may be in our self-advantage - it is clear that that impulse within us could only have originated from an Essentially Good Being, thus refuting the opinion that God might be evil. 

Thoughts? 

God Bless.