If a Million Survivors Voted Genocide "Good," Would It Be?

The Thought Experiment

Many atheists readily condemn great historical atrocities — the Holocaust, the transatlantic slave trade, colonial massacres, the systematic rape of Korean women by the Japanese military. These condemnations feel obviously right.

But the moral argument for God's existence begins with a simple, unsettling question: in a universe without a transcendent moral authority, on what basis are they right?

Consider two scenarios designed to expose the problem.

Your instinct says no. Emphatically, viscerally no. But that instinct needs a foundation. And in a purely atheistic worldview, that foundation does not exist.

The Evolutionary Dilemma

Evolutionary theory offers one answer: morality is a social technology. Cooperation and restraint improve a group's chances of survival, so natural selection rewards them. Over millennia, these cooperative instincts solidify into what we call moral intuitions.

This is a plausible explanation for why moral feelings exist. But it entirely fails to explain why any particular moral feeling should be considered objectively binding.

Survival advantage and moral truth are not the same thing. A belief can be evolutionarily useful and completely false. (Optimism about one's own odds of survival is adaptive; it is not therefore accurate.) By the same logic, a moral instinct can be deeply felt and biologically advantageous without being actually right.

Evolutionary ethics can explain the origin of moral feelings. It cannot ground their authority. And it is authority — not origin — that moral condemnation requires.

The Nature Comparison

Look at the animal world. We observe behaviors there that, if performed by humans, would be condemned universally. But we do not condemn the animals. We recognize that they operate outside the domain of moral obligation — because there is no standard that transcends their instincts.

The evolutionary answer — "because humans have higher cognitive capacity" — simply relocates the problem. Higher intelligence is a description, not a moral standard. The question remains: why should cognitive capacity generate moral obligation?

Darwin and Dawkins: The Honest Conclusion

To their credit, the most serious evolutionary thinkers have acknowledged the problem.

In The Descent of Man, Darwin performed a thought experiment that cuts to the core of the issue. He asked what human morality would look like if humans had evolved under the same conditions as honeybees — where the survival of the colony requires workers to kill unproductive members:

If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering.

Charles Darwin — The Descent of Man, Chapter IV

Darwin's point is precisely the one the moral argument makes: if morality is a product of evolutionary conditions, then it varies with those conditions. There is no stable, universal moral truth — only the moral instincts that a particular evolutionary history happened to produce. Change the history, change the morality.

Richard Dawkins is even more direct. In River Out of Eden, he writes:

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

Richard Dawkins — River Out of Eden (1995)

This is intellectual honesty. If evolutionary naturalism is true, moral condemnations are not statements about reality. They are expressions of evolved preferences — no more objectively binding than a preference for sweetness over bitterness.

The problem is that almost no one actually lives this way. Even committed atheists speak of injustice as though it were a real feature of the world, not merely a personal distaste. That gap between stated worldview and lived moral reality is precisely what the moral argument exposes.

The Historical Test

The moral argument is not merely abstract. Apply it to history.

Many atheists are among the most vocal condemners of Japan's wartime atrocities — in particular, the systematic abduction and sexual enslavement of Korean women (the so-called "comfort women" system). The moral outrage is correct. But consider what the evolutionary worldview implies about it.

Japan was a militarily superior force exploiting populations it had subjugated — the strong consuming the weak, exactly as natural selection operates. The Korean collaborators who aided Japan to secure personal advantage were optimizing for survival — the most fundamental evolutionary imperative. The patriots who died resisting were, from a purely Darwinian standpoint, organisms that failed to adapt to their environment.

The atrocities of the Second World War — the Holocaust, the Nanjing Massacre, the comfort women system — came to be condemned in part because the perpetrators lost and the facts came to light. But if Japan had won, and if the full history had remained suppressed, there would have been no tribunal, no condemnation. Under a purely consensus-based moral framework, the judgment of history is just the judgment of whoever is left to write it.

That cannot be right. The torture of an innocent person does not become acceptable because the victor suppressed the record. Something about those acts is wrong independent of whether anyone ever knows or cares. That independence is what philosophers call moral objectivity — and it is precisely what evolutionary ethics cannot provide.

The Formal Moral Argument

Philosophers have stated this case precisely. The moral argument, in its standard form, runs as follows:

The argument is logically valid. If both premises are true, the conclusion must follow. The debate, therefore, centers on the premises.

Defending Premise 1

If there is no transcendent moral authority — no mind that is itself the standard of goodness — then what remains? Moral claims become either expressions of personal feeling (subjectivism), expressions of cultural consensus (relativism), or products of evolutionary conditioning (naturalism). None of these can generate objective moral duties — obligations that bind regardless of what anyone feels, believes, or has been conditioned to prefer.

As philosopher William Lane Craig puts it: without God, moral values are like the rules of chess — useful within a system, but with no authority beyond the system that invented them.

Defending Premise 2

This is where the thought experiments become decisive. When you consider Scenario A — the unanimous declaration that genocide is good — and find yourself insisting that it is still wrong, you are affirming Premise 2. You are asserting that there is a moral fact here that no vote can alter.

The philosophical term for this is a moral intuition. Not a mere feeling — moral intuitions are treated by ethicists as prima facie evidence about moral reality, in the same way that perceptual experiences are treated as prima facie evidence about physical reality. They can be overridden, but the burden of proof lies with those who would override them.

The intuition that torturing innocent children for pleasure is wrong, regardless of social consensus, is among the strongest and most widely shared moral intuitions in human history. To deny it in order to maintain a philosophical system is to let theory override evidence — exactly what good reasoning should not do.

Common Objections

The Biblical Perspective

Scripture does not merely assert that God commands moral behavior. It offers a deeper account: human beings were created in the image of God (imago Dei), and because of this, they carry within them an intrinsic awareness of moral reality.

The apostle Paul writes in Romans 2:14–15 that even those without the written law "show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness." This is not merely a claim about religious people. It is a claim about human nature as such — that moral awareness is built into the design.

The biblical account also explains the anomaly that the moral argument exposes: why do people who deny God still behave — and reason — as though objective morality exists? The Genesis narrative explains that after the fall, human beings acquired the capacity to make independent moral judgments ("knowing good and evil") — but severed from their proper foundation in God, those judgments become inconsistent, self-serving, and ultimately unable to sustain themselves.

The result is what we observe: a world in which almost everyone believes in human rights, condemns cruelty, and speaks of justice as real — while simultaneously holding worldviews that provide no basis for any of it.

That contradiction is not an embarrassment for the theist. It is evidence that the theist's account is correct.