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Can You Be Good Without God?

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Can a person be good without God?

Dr. Braxton Hunter addresses this question from both a theological and practical perspective in the short video below.

If you would like to be better prepared to answer questions like this, consider taking an apologetics course online or earning an online apologetics degree with Trinity at a bachelors, masters, or doctorate level.  For more information,  complete the “Request more information” form on the right side of this page.

 

Video Transcript

Welcome to Trinity Insight, the home of the thinking Christian. And today we’re asking the question, can you be morally good without God?

So, can you be good without God?

Well, yes and no. Just hear me out…

One of the favorite proclamations of the new atheist movement is to say we can be good and moral people without God. Now untrained Christians will often jump at this and demand that we need God’s presence in our lives to ever do anything good at all, but this just a nice reality. Non-Christians often give to good charities, get involved with medical missions, and even help little old ladies across the street.

So, in one sense yes you can be good without God, but on the other hand, no you can’t be good with without God for two serious reasons.

First, if God does not exist then nothing really is good or bad it becomes merely a matter of opinion, whether it is wrong to torture children for fun or good to build wells for thirsty people. If someone declares that those things are good or bad, one could always just ask, “But says who?” For more on that check out chapter 3 of my book, Core Facts.

The second reason you can’t be good without god from a Christian perspective is that if Christianity is true, including what Isaiah 64:5-7 says, “all our righteous acts are like filthy rags,” then mankind is so wicked that even our good acts seem sinful, although I think this passage is often distorted and misused by Christians to the point of saying that no acts are good at all. But it does still point out the conditions of our human hearts.

So, can man be good without God? Well he can do some good things, but it can’t even call them good without borrowing from theistic world views to do it.

Check out the blog at Trinity Insight at TrinitySem.edu for more on this, and please share and comment and link these videos. Thank you so much.

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