Tag: Morality and God

Do We Need God to Know That Eating Your Sister Is Wrong?

📘 About This Series

This post is part of a daily response series to The Problem of God: Answering a Skeptic’s Challenges to Christianity by Mark Clark. The series critically engages with each chapter and section of the book, examining Clark’s arguments through the lens of reason, historical evidence, and The God Question’s core philosophy: what’s true doesn’t fear investigation.

Today’s post responds to content found in pages 45-47 of the book — the section titled “What If They Ate Your Sister?”

If you’re just joining us, you can view all prior entries in this series on The God Question blog at https://godordelusion.com/the-god-question/. The God Question is a blog that investigates Christian claims with clarity, courage, and calm. We believe truth can withstand scrutiny—and that real meaning doesn’t require pretending to know what we don’t.

Can we know that something is morally wrong—even if we don’t believe in God?

Mark Clark doesn’t think so.

In Chapter 2 of The Problem of God, Clark tells a story from his time at Michaels craft store. An atheist co-worker claimed that morality is culturally constructed. To test him, Clark asks: “What if a jungle tribe tortured and ate your sister? Could you really say that’s wrong?” The implication is clear: If you don’t believe in objective morality, you must accept that cannibalism is just a matter of taste.

But this argument falls apart under scrutiny.

It relies on shock—not reason. Clark knows we’ll recoil in horror at the idea of someone eating a loved one. That horror, he argues, proves the existence of a moral law, which in turn proves the existence of a lawgiver—God.

But this is emotional sleight of hand. Just because something feels deeply wrong doesn’t mean it requires a supernatural explanation. Our moral instincts are real—but they’re also explainable through biology, psychology, and culture. Evolution favors cooperation and empathy. We’ve learned, over centuries, that causing harm leads to chaos.

Clark’s argument also creates a false choice: Either you believe in God, or you believe nothing is really wrong. That’s simply not true. Secular ethics offers a rich tradition of moral reasoning based on harm reduction, shared values, and reason—not divine command.

And ironically, history shows that religious people—including Christians—have often used “God’s law” to justify moral atrocities: slavery, holy war, racism, subjugation of women. These weren’t moral advances—they were cultural norms disguised as divine mandates.

So the real question is this: Do we need God to explain why torturing people is wrong?

No.

We need empathy, intelligence, and a commitment to human dignity. And those are available to believers and non-believers alike.

A clear, clever breakdown of moral development from a secular point of view.

The Problem of God’s Existence–(Chapter 2, Part 1): The Evidence of Morality?

📘 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.