Dennis Prager: If There Is No God, There Is No Such Thing As Good And Evil
“If There Is No God” author Dennis Prager discusses the belief in the creator on FOX News Channel’s “Life, Liberty and Levin.”
MARK LEVIN: Dennis, you have a number of issues in this book that are raised with you by these young people. For instance, without God, what are values about? Aren’t values relative? How do you answer that? DENNIS PRAGER: Right. Well, the definition of a value is something that is permanent and is above my feelings. If there is no God, and virtually every atheist philosopher acknowledges this, if there is no God, then morality is simply opinion. What you think is good is good for you. What I think is good is good for me. I mean, that’s the honest approach. Only if there is a God is there an absolute in the moral universe. And that’s not an argument that there is a God. I’m not making that argument. I’m making the argument that if there is no God, there is no such thing as good and evil. There’s just opinion. The way I came to this is 50 years ago, when I asked students, and I have been asking high school and college students, this question for half a century. If you’re a dog that you love, and a stranger, we’re both drowning, who would you save first? And for 50 years, virtually anywhere I’ve asked it, the same exact response. One third said the stranger, one third said their dog, and one third found the question too difficult. Two thirds of Americans for 50 years would not save a human being whom they didn’t know before the dog they loved, meaning that emotion, not value, determined whom they would save. I would save and I love my dogs. I would save a stranger because there is a value there. The human being is created in God’s image and dogs are not. And that’s it.
