Last Sept. 25, President Duterte asked critics of the death penalty this rhetorical question: “What if there’s no God?”
Some philosophers of religion, such as William Lane Craig, would argue that God grounds morality. So if God does not exist, there really is no foundation for objective moral values and duties. Nothing would really be objectively good or bad, or right or wrong, if God does not exist. All our actions would lack objective moral meaning; every act would be morally neutral.
So if there is no God, no one can really condemn the rape and murder of women and children as objectively wrong. Rape and murder would only be “wrong” subjectively or relatively, which is the same as saying that “it is not really wrong.”
Rather than supporting the case for the death penalty, God’s nonexistence would only undermine it. When a convict is meted the penalty of death, he or she is not being punished for an objective wrong he or she has done. He or she is being punished because the people in power merely do not like what he or she has done. That’s comparable to condemning to death someone who does not agree with you that a blueberry-flavored ice cream is better than any other flavor of ice cream. If God does not exist, that’s all what morality is—not an objective reality, but a matter of personal taste and preference—an illusion.
God does exist, and we know this because we know that rape and murder are objectively wrong. They are objectively wrong because they are grounded on an objective and transcendent standard, namely God.
DANTE O. CUALES, JR., Springwoods, Minglanilla, Cebu