God our Legislator
We are all aware that we should choose well, indeed that our whole life should be a doing well.
The only plausible explanation for this is that God is:
not only our maker but also our legislator;
not only the source of what is but the authority on what should be;
not only the giver of our power to choose but also the judge of whether we choose well.
Objections
(Moral Relativism) "Right and wrong, in an absolute sense, have no meaning, so God should not try to tell me what to do."
See Moral Relativism.
"The fact that we recognise obligations has arisen by chance."
To explore the consequences of this, here is a dialogue.
When you commend someone, what do you mean?
I mean that they have done well.
"Done well" by what standards?
By their own standards.
So you commend mass-murderers if they are successful?
Not his then; my standards.
So you just mean that you personally would do likewise; you are not making any judgment.
My standards are decent ones. I only commend them if I judge that what they do is good.
"Good" by what standard?
The standard of humanity as a whole.
So whatever you think at the moment, if in future humanity as a whole approves something, you will approve it too.
But that will not arise because there are some things humanity will never approve.
How do you know that?
Because humanity as a whole is good.
"Good" by what standard?
The above dialogue can be continued indefinitely, and is constantly being repeated in various forms. l hope the absurdity and circularity of the Humanist view, trying desperately to hold on to a sense of real obligation while denying its obvious source, is clear enough.
To regard the human mind as the source of the distinction between right and wrong would be absurd. The only plausible explanation I can think of is that obligation has been imposed on us. And where there is imposition there is an imposer, in this case a legislator.
(Plato, Whitehead) "The Creator is subject to the Standard, and complies with it. Maybe, as in Plato, the Architect is inspired by his vision of the Idea of Goodness. Or maybe, as in Whitehead, God acts in accord with the Ultimate which is Creativity."
(Promethianism or Titanism) "The Creator is subject to the Standard but has deviated from it." (The myth of Prometheus, who defied Zeus by teaching forbidden skills to men, can be interpreted as expressing this thought.)
Either way, the supreme is not the Creator but an Idea, or "creativity", or whatever inspires Prometheus, and we are back to the old dilemma: is the supreme more than personal, or less? So this is not a genuine objection.
(Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism) "The Creator is alien to the Standard, neither creating it nor subject to it. If his creative acts relate to any standard, we know nothing about it."
If the Creator is alien to the Standard that binds us, the Creator is potentially antagonistic to it and to us. This approach introduces a dualism which violates our sense of the unity of things, and logically leads to contempt for the world. As far as I know this view always goes with a belief that the Standard is given us by a good being who is the enemy of the Creator.
"If God were good, history would not be such a series of disasters."
The disasters arise from what man has done, not from what God has done.
"Our creator is real and morality is real but our creator is not the source of our morality."
To deny creator or legislator is common enough, but to regard them as two different realities is extremely rare. Even thinkers who reject the Psalmist's premise usually endorse his terse logic:
It is he that has made us, and we are his.
Psalm 100
Linking the two facts makes sense of both. To regard any ordinary will as the source of the distinction between right and wrong would be absurd, but the creator is not just a will; God is more than a will but not less, and any useful description must remember that.
God wants us to do right. Does God want this because it is right, or is it right because God wants it? Not exactly either, rather that God's wanting it, and its being right, are different ways to say the same thing. With a created being this would be absurd, but God is not a being but the source of being; not a moral agent, but the source of moral agency.
We cannot know why we recognise obligations.
William James has answered this.
"There is no more ludicrous incongruity than for agnostics to proclaim with one breath that the substance of things is unknowable, and with the next that the thought of it should inspire us with admiration of its glory, reverence, and a willingness to add our cooperative push in the direction towards which its manifestations seem to be drifting. The unknowable may be unfathomed, but if it make such distinct demands upon our activity, we surely are not ignorant of its essential quality."
William James, Rationality, Activity, and Faith (Princeton Review, July 1882), quoted in his Principles of Psychology (1990), chapter 21.