And yet, many of us do, specifically because the Lord commands us to love others as he loved us.
Which brings me to a point about metaphysics.
Specifically, as mentioned in Part 1, we often fight about who is better or worse, morally speaking. Are atheists better than Christians? Are believers better than non-believers? In these debates we often compile and compare the moral portfolios of Christians and non-Christians. If the non-Christian moral portfolio is as good as or better than the Christian moral portfolio we judge Christianity as a failed project. Again, this "dueling moral portfolios" is a symptom of what I described as the moralization of faith in the modern world, the notion that if you can be good without God then God is irrelevant.
The "moral portfolio" debate is a debate about moral performance. But the question of moral performance is different from the metaphysical question about the ground of goodness itself. Can you be good without God? Of course. But that's a different question from whether or not goodness can exist without God. In a wholly material cosmos can any judgment of "good" or "evil" be anything but a local, arbitrary, and subjective preference?
Now, to lay some cards on the table, I do think we can cobble together a wholly naturalistic ethics that promotes the common good. Given our shared evolutionary heritage and mutual vulnerabilities as biological creatures, humans generally want the same things and we're self-interested enough to know that things will go better for us if we work together. Such insights are also aided by the fact that we, as primates, are social creatures who bond though emotional attachments of empathy, sympathy, and fellow felling. Our affections support our self-interested moral calculations to work together. Codify all this into a social contract of norms and laws and you have yourself a broadly shared moral compass.
But is compliance with this social contract what we mean by "a good person"? Likely not. The moral ethic of the Enlightenment is basically John Stewart Mill's harm principle. Do no harm and you're an upstanding member of the moral community. But this view of virtue is wholly negative, an absence. "Do no harm" is not a positive vision of the good.
So what pulls us out and beyond the "do no harm" ethical minimum? What calls us, even demands of us, a positive, sustained, and costly moral exertion to do active good in the world? It's here where metaphysics starts showing up, transcendent and sacred values that create for us moral obligations, duties and responsibilities. And it's right here where materialism starts to struggle in the face of Hume's dictum, that you can't get an ought from an is. No material arrangement of the cosmos can create a moral obligation or duty. Only a metaphysical commitment can create that.
Phrased simply, there is a relationship between the good and the real. Goodness, to be goodness, needs to be real. The good requires God, or at least some universal and inviolate metaphysical givenness.
Which brings us back to the issue of moral performance. Anyone can be good, believer or non-believer. But the good itself, whether we hit the mark or miserably fail, has to be real. That the moral portfolios of Christians and non-Christians even exist points to the existence of God. Good people need Jesus because without God good people cannot exist.
