Here is a claim most people would accept immediately: torturing children for entertainment is wrong. Not merely unpopular. Not merely something that the majority of humans happen to dislike. Actually, objectively, morally wrong — wrong in a way that would remain wrong even if every human being on earth decided it was acceptable.
Most people, asked to reflect carefully, will affirm some version of moral realism — the view that there are genuine moral facts, that some things really are right and others really are wrong, and that this is not merely a matter of preference or cultural convention. The Holocaust was wrong. Slavery was wrong. These are not statements about how people felt. They are statements about moral reality.
The question is: where do these facts live?
The problem for naturalism
On a purely physical picture of the universe, there are particles, fields, forces, and the structures they produce. There are states of affairs and causal relationships. There are descriptions of how things are. But nowhere in this picture is there an obvious place for moral facts — for the claim that some states of affairs not merely are, but ought to be, or ought not to be.
Naturalistic accounts of morality try to close this gap in various ways. Some equate moral facts with facts about wellbeing or flourishing. Some reduce them to social contracts or evolutionary pressures. Some bite the bullet and deny that there are objective moral facts at all — that our moral discourse is systematically mistaken, that when we say “torturing children is wrong” we are expressing an emotion or a preference, not describing a fact.
Each of these approaches has serious problems. Reducing morality to wellbeing still faces the question of why wellbeing matters — why one ought to promote it rather than ignore it. Social contract theories ground morality in agreement, but agreements can be unjust, and we judge them so. Evolutionary accounts explain why we have the moral beliefs we do but give us no reason to think those beliefs are true — evolution selects for adaptive behaviour, not moral accuracy. And moral error theory — the view that all our moral judgements are false — is very difficult to maintain in practice: virtually no one who holds it actually treats their moral convictions as mere errors.
Objective morality requires an objective ground
If moral facts are real — if they are not merely expressions of preference or evolutionary residue — they need a ground. They need to live somewhere. Numbers live in abstract mathematical reality. Physical facts live in the physical world. Moral facts, if they are real, must live in a reality that can sustain them — a reality that is itself normative, that has the character of ought built into its nature.
The classical theistic claim is that moral facts are grounded in the nature of God — not in God’s commands, but in God’s nature. God is the standard of goodness, not because God arbitrarily declares things good, but because God’s own nature just is the model of what goodness means. On this view, moral facts are necessary truths about value, grounded in the nature of a being who is necessarily good.
This is not the only way to ground objective morality. But it is a coherent way — arguably more coherent than the alternatives. And the failure of naturalistic accounts to ground moral realism without residue is itself evidence that something beyond the physical is required.
The practical point
Notice how you actually live. You treat some things as genuinely wrong, not merely distasteful. When someone harms an innocent person, your response is not “I dislike this” but “this should not have happened” — a claim about moral reality, not about your emotional state. When you argue for justice, you appeal to something you believe is real, not merely conventional.
That intuition — the felt reality of the moral order — is data. It may not be conclusive proof of anything. But it is one of the most persistent and universal features of human experience, and any account of reality that dismisses it entirely is answering fewer questions than it is ignoring.