“What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe … And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried over much that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.”  David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions. They had no moral compass!

Many years ago, I lived in Wollongong, and I can still remember the story of a pretty 13-year-old girl from Bargo who was taken on her way home from school. The abductor eventually tied her hands behind her back and threw her face up in a pond as she begged for life, while he watched her drown. As the story unfolded in the media I can still remember, not just how I cried, but how I bawled my eyes out in the shower. I still cannot drive down the Hume highway past Bargo without thinking how that family’s life has been ruined forever. If I cannot forget (I’m recounting now from memory), then how must they be coping 35 years on. This man was reared without a moral compass.

Every Christmas Eve my thoughts go out to a friend of mine, Peter Brewin, whose daughter died in a car accident the night before Christmas. How different Christmas Eve became for his family as every year that memory would roll over what should be a joyous occasion. Where does evil and tragedy come from? We will take up that subject in detail later when we discuss whether God created evil or not. However, we should note at this point that the absence of God takes away the moral compass that should make our world a safe place to live. Unfortunately, we need locks on our doors, and we have to constantly watch the security of our families, and things are getting worse not better, as evolution would like to have us believe.

We could argue the same about human rights. Professor Arthur Allen Leff, from Yale University wrote, “I want to believe and so do you – in a complete, transcendent, and immanent set of propositions about right and wrong, findable rules that authoritatively and unambiguously direct us how to live righteously. I also want to believe — and so do you, in no such thing, but rather that we are wholly free, not only to choose for ourselves what we ought to do, but to decide for ourselves what we ought, individually and as a species, what we ought to be. What we want, Heaven 
help us, is simultaneously to be perfectly ruled and perfectly free, that is, at the same time to discover the right and good and to create it… Allister McGrath, who wrote The Dawkins Delusion said, “Although I was passionately and totally persuaded of the truth of atheism as a young man, I subsequently found myself persuaded that Christianity was a much more interesting and intellectually exciting worldview than atheism.”