Can There Be Good Without God?

 I watched and took notes on a three-minute, Dennis Prager YouTube video, about a year old. Its Title: "Can There Be Good Without God? Dennis Prager talks about life, morality and why we need God."

Dennis: "Ultimately it is the most important question a human being has to face: whether or not there is a God, because of two huge reasons."

My response: there is no civilization possible, no civil society and no future in the world or in the next without a moral and religious population fearing, loving, obeying, enjoying, and praying to God.

Dennis: "One: If there is no God, there is no ultimate meaning to life--all of life is just random chance. It is a fluke. I have no more meaning than a pebble on Jupiter. People really don't wrap their minds around that reality. Life is ultimately, utterly meaningless if there is no God. If there is no Designer, no Creator." 

My response: I agree completely.

Dennis: That is not to be taken that people cannot make up a meaning, so they do not go crazy--they do: it is caused existentialism. You can't look in the mirror in the morning and say, 'Hi, Meaningless. How are you doing? You bunch of molecules.' We can't do that. We would go nuts. The human being aches for meaning. "

My response: Look at the postmodernists rejecting any grand narratives whatsoever. Then, surprise, surprise, despite their grandstanding with their anti-realist metaphysics, and their subjective epistemology, lo and behold, they are Marxist ideologues, worshipers and true believers in a radical, secular faith, and big government is their god, and Marx is their prophet.

Where religion is deconstructed, impugned and deplatformed, the opponents of God, morality, truth and faith, still ache for meaning, so they reject a healthy, temperate relationship with their ultimate source of meaning, and settle for the fervent zealotry shared with cult followers of any ism, an excessive, obsessive worshiping of the accepted cause, dangerous, perverted, rotten. These deniers of God end up worshiping their secular ism, a front for direct satanic worship, their actual divinity of choice, whether they and their followers know or recognize who is pulling the strings behind the scene.

People need a balanced, moderate, tolerate worship of God directly, or at least some belief in secular humanism that is no overblown ideology, now bourgeoning as a mass movement to overtake the West and then to engulf the whole world.

 

Dennis: "The human being aches for meaning. That is one of the reasons that I have for arguing that there is a God. God is a meaning-giver and that we need meaning."

My response: "Animals have their rationally regulating laws of nature to rule them via instincts to be acted on. Humans, especially at the higher orders of thinking and awareness, cannot rely on their weakened instincts to find fulfillment, and a reason to live. God or Logos, the principle creating and administrating natural law, gave us logic, concepts, rational intuition, prophets, divine revelation, and language to articulate discovered values and religious practices so that we may find meaning in the supernatural Mother and Father to help us make sense of the bewildering, contradictory world in which we live and die.

Dennis: "So the atheist has to be intellectually honest--just as we religious people have to be intellectually honest. It is about the problem of suffering and so on. We have problems and they have problems. They have to be honest, and many are. If there is no God, life ultimately has no purpose. Again, we can make them up. I want to be a good father, a good worker. I want to be a good person. But, they are all made up. They don't inherently exist."

My response: God exists to provide our lives with love, joy, comfort, and purpose. God provides us with a rationale for going on, for living despite our suffering and setbacks. This rationale, this metanarrative is true and appealing. It is psychologically satisfying to be able to impose metaphysical theory of existing upon all the disordered, conflicting, puzzling, absurd chunks of reality banging against our perceiving consciousness, like so many hurled meteors or shooting starts.

Dennis: "The second reason is morality. If there is no God, there is no ultimate meaning. If there is no God, there is no ultimate good and evil."

My response: Dennis is arguing that God exists, and that only God can provide us with the meaning, values, and sense of purpose to make staying alive on this rock, hurling through space, tolerable and even enjoyable. God is Absolute, and is Objective spiritual reality as rational, cosmic force, and is Absolute or Objective physical body and reality. From these two Objective origins, we can ascertain objective moral values that guide us into what moral dos and don'ts to undertake or not. I do not know if there is Absolute reality out there for sure or not, but I accept that there is, and that entails being willing to live by putative objective moral code that we only know with fallible confidence. It is obvious that I disagree slightly with Prager and Mark Levin here, but the disagreement is not a major impediment.

 

Dennis: "So let me explain for the 50,000th time--I may not be exaggerating--that does not mean an atheist cannot be a good person (Ed Here: Even if the good person is an atheist, it could be that the divine spark in us, the divine portal from heaven to earth, through spiritual blessings and love are transmuted in human consciousness as benevolent impulses or whole rational intuitions that the agent of good will shall then put into effect. This divine, loving influence is working its way through the consciousness of even the atheists that would deny its existence, let alone its presence in their souls,)"

Dennis: "Of course there are good atheists. There were good people who believed in Zeus, good Incans, good Mayans. There are good Buddhists, good atheists, of course."

My response: I agree.

Dennis: " But if there is no God, in the final analysis, if there isn't a moral God, then murder isn't wrong. If there isn't a God that says murder is wrong, whose is there to say that murder is wrong? My society? Well, many societies said murder is right. So, it can't be society. Is it my conscience? Obviously, a lot of bad people have done great evil, but have lived very well with their conscience. So, conscience is not enough. society is not enough. Only if there is a God that says Thou shalt not murder, then murder is wrong, Only, if there is a God, is Auschwitz wrong, is Gulag wrong, is rape wrong. People don't want to wrap their arms around that. They just say, 'Hey, I could be good without God.'"

 

My response: Well said.

Dennis: "Yes, there are people that can be good without a God. I acknowledge that. There are bad religious people. I acknowledge that too. Those are separate questions from, ‘Is there an objective good and evil if there is not God,’ and the answer is no."

 

My response: I would say not to that question too.