📘 This post is part of a continuing response series to The Problem of God by Mark Clark. Each day, we examine one section of the book and critically respond using reason, clarity, and The God Question’s core philosophy: what’s true doesn’t fear investigation. Today’s entry addresses Chapter 2 (pp. 41–45), including the introductory setup and the first major argument: The Evidence of Morality.
🚲 The Setup: Personal Injury as Proof?
Clark begins with a story from childhood—being pulled on Rollerblades behind a bike, ignoring his mother’s warnings, and eventually getting injured. The lesson he draws? He didn’t believe her until he had evidence. He concludes this shows why he’s “always been that way.” A skeptic until shown otherwise.
But the story ironically undercuts the point he’s building toward.
He claims to be persuaded by evidence—yet the book itself isn’t offering scientific evidence for God. It offers apologetics. And as we’ll see below, his moral argument is built not on data or empirical support, but on intuition, anecdote, and assertion.
⚖️ The Moral Argument: C.S. Lewis in the Waiting Room
Clark’s first major claim in Chapter 2 is familiar: moral values prove God. He leans on C.S. Lewis (as many apologists do), citing Mere Christianity and the universal experience of people saying “That’s not fair!” as evidence that humans recognize some kind of absolute moral law.
He then adds layers:
- Observations of his kids arguing about fairness.
- A zoo encounter where strangers cut in line.
- The idea that morality must come from a transcendent source—i.e., God.
- Rejection of moral relativism as “logically bankrupt.”
But let’s examine this claim more closely.
❌ What Clark Gets Wrong About Morality
1. A shared sense of morality doesn’t require a supernatural source.
Clark assumes that because people share common moral instincts, they must be wired by a moral lawgiver. But that conclusion doesn’t follow. Evolutionary psychology explains these instincts well: empathy, fairness, loyalty, and justice evolved in social species to increase cooperation and survival. These adaptive behaviors became deeply embedded in our biology—not because a god wrote them into us, but because they worked.
2. He ignores the cross-cultural diversity of moral frameworks.
Clark cherry-picks examples where most modern people agree (“don’t cut in line”) but ignores where morality diverges—gender roles, caste systems, slavery, honor killings, child discipline, dietary laws, sexual taboos. These aren’t random differences—they reflect culture, geography, historical context, and social structures. If morality were truly “absolute” and God-given, wouldn’t we expect far more consistency?
3. He falsely equates moral feeling with moral fact.
Clark writes: “We feel like we should care… We know it’s wrong to drop napalm on babies…” But this is emotion—not evidence. Moral intuition is not moral ontology. Feeling that something is wrong doesn’t make it objectively so in a metaphysical sense. And if you define “objectivity” that broadly, you can make anything a pointer to God—from hunger to gravity.
4. He never addresses the Euthyphro dilemma.
This ancient critique—Is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good?—goes unmentioned. It exposes the fatal circularity of grounding morality in God. If God is the source of morality, then “good” becomes whatever God says—even if it includes genocide, slavery, or eternal torture. But if morality is separate from God, then God is not its source—he merely affirms it.
🧠 The God Question Rebuttal
We don’t need to believe in an invisible being to explain why we say “that’s not fair.” We need only understand:
- Our evolutionary past
- Our social conditioning
- Our empathy and tribal psychology
- Our need for cooperation and group cohesion
Morality is a human construct rooted in our biology, shaped by our culture, and evolving alongside our societies. It’s not flawless, fixed, or universal—but it’s real. And it doesn’t require a moral lawgiver any more than language requires a divine linguist.
The question isn’t “How do we know right from wrong?”
It’s “What happens when we stop pretending that morality proves anything about God?”
A 5-minute animated video that explains the secular foundations of morality—and why goodness doesn’t need a god.
📚 Next Up: “What If They Ate Your Sister?”
Yes, that’s the actual title of the next section in The Problem of God, and yes—we’ll be responding to it next.
God or Delusion? 