Someone recently asked me the following: “For the people who deny or are ignorant about God, how do they define the difference between good and evil? I don’t see how you can. Isn’t that proof enough that there is something out there ? Whether they call it God or not?”

This is an extremely pertinent question, especially in these days when things that were earlier considered to be evil are now masqueraded as good and vice versa. How do we address this question? Where does our sense of morality come from? Most of us have it, even though we may differ on the details. Most of us are moral beings and attempt to conceal what we consider our moral failings.

I enjoy fantasy novels. Such novels require a battle between good and evil. Those of us who have read such novels or seen movies in the same genre will easily remember the faces donned by evil in each of the fantasy worlds. We can think of Emperor Palpatine from the Star Wars universe created by George Lucas or Sauron from Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien or Voldemort from the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling.

In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Voldemort tells Harry, “There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it.” This classical Nietzschean take on the role of power in adjudicating between good and evil is something we are quite familiar with. Those who have power – be it through their public offices or their wealth – seem to be able to get away with pretty much anything while those who are powerless seem to be punished for mild infractions.

It has become common these days for people to reject external authority on matters of morality. These deontological imperatives are looked at with suspicion and as an example of the kind of power play that Voldemort refers to. In other words, the rejection of such external moral imperatives would seem, on the surface, to be the fruit of a Nietzschean critique of Kantian duty ethics. So let us look more closely into the matter.

The rejection of external moral imperatives should not be construed as an embrace of some sort of consequentialist ethics and certainly not as a form of utilitarianism. Rather, it is a timid form of relativism because, for the most part and in most occasions, people reject the external moral imperative not out of a concern for the greater good but as a result of the principle “it is good for me.”

Yet the very same people who would use the “it is good for me” claim to justify their actions would have no qualms saying that certain things are actually evil – such as human trafficking – while saying that other things are actually good – such as liberating someone from human trafficking. Suddenly, without rejecting their “it is good for me” claim the same people would claim that some things are universally evil or universally good.

The problem is that most people who justify their actions based on relativistic arguments are not consistent with their relativism. They will, in some cases, insist on universal principles. And therein lies the problem.

Nietzsche understood the devastating conclusions of his relativism when he wrote:

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

Perhaps his wording is too dense for us today. So here are the words of someone closer to our time.

“[If] the rationality of one value judgment was zero, multiplying it by millions would not make it one whit more rational. Nor is there any ‘reason’ to obey the law for anyone, like myself, who has the boldness and daring — the strength of character — to throw off its shackles. I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable ‘value judgment’ that I was bound to respect the rights of others.”

The above words are those of Ted Bundy, who used the relativist argument in its full force to justify his heinous acts. While this is certainly an extreme case, Bundy did at least reach the logical conclusion of the relativist position – no one is “bound to respect the rights of others.”

When someone says that good or evil are simply matters of differing perspectives, they will rarely do so in defence of actions like those of Ted Bundy. Rather, it will most often be to defend their own decisions when questioned by others. In other words, this defence is almost always employed when people are unwilling to really engage with the morality of their actions. It is simply “shut up” said in a seemingly polite manner, using quasi-ethical terminology.

I have yet to come across anyone who would say that the actions of Bundy or Hitler were not evil. While I certainly have not encountered a lot of people, the almost ubiquitous use of people like Bundy and Hitler as examples of evil seems to point toward a somewhat universal standard. That is, it seems that there is a line beyond which almost everyone says is evil.

But if we are simply accidents of nature, then how can we account for this universal position? After all, if we are accidents of nature then our thoughts and decisions and yes our morality are all simply accidents. Then how can we account for the observation that millions upon millions of people have ‘accidentally’ stumbled upon the same position?

And if humans are simply animals, why do we accuse people of ‘behaving like animals’? When someone commits a heinous crime, we often liken it to bestial behavior. But if we are simply animals shouldn’t we expect bestial behavior from humans? The fact that we accuse people who commit heinous crimes of being bestial indicates that we think humans are somehow different from other animals. Where does this notion come from?

The ‘accidental’ explanation is highly improbable. And the position that humans are just animals contradicts the expectation that humans should behave differently. In other words, both these wholly ‘naturalistic’ explanations of the universal condemnation of some acts as evil fail miserably on the very foundations upon which they are based.

The only logical position that accounts for this universality is that it must be something that has come to us from outside ourselves. There must be more than the material world if we are to adequately account for the existence of moral universals.

But this cannot be some sort of impersonal aspect like the Force of the Star Wars universe, which is inclined neither toward good nor toward evil. If that were the case there is no explaining why we approve of good actions while frowning on bad ones.

Hence, the most probable scenario is that, while we are material and physical beings and are a part of the animal kingdom, there is more to us than meets the eye. And this more is the result of a good external and personal factor. Some would call it God.