Here is a claim most people would accept immediately: torturing children for entertainment is wrong. Wrong as a matter of moral fact, 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 the truth of these facts does not depend on cultural convention or personal preference. The Holocaust was wrong. Slavery was wrong. These statements describe moral reality. They report something. 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. Nowhere in this picture is there an obvious place for moral facts: for the claim that some states of affairs 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, treating moral discourse as systematically mistaken: when we say “torturing children is wrong” we are expressing an emotion or a preference, on this view, and 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 flexible behaviour, not moral accuracy. 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, 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. The grounding is in God’s nature, not in arbitrary divine commands. God is the standard of goodness because God’s own nature 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.
The Islamic articulation of this claim is direct in the Quran:
The verse names a structure: God commands what accords with His nature (justice, excellence, generosity) and forbids what violates it (immorality, oppression, wrongdoing). The commands are not arbitrary impositions. They are the disclosure of a moral architecture that is real because the being whose nature it expresses is real. The grounding question (in virtue of what are these moral facts facts?) finds its answer in God’s nature, not in human convention.
The fitrah and the moral sense
Islamic theology adds a second strand to the account. Human beings come into the world equipped with a moral sensibility that recognises right and wrong before any cultural training is applied. The Quran calls this innate disposition al-fiṭrah:
The verse describes God as having installed in every human soul the recognition of right and wrong. The recognition can be developed through reflection or corrupted through neglect, but the basic capacity is universal. This is why the moral intuition that “torturing children for entertainment is wrong” arises across every human culture without instruction. The capacity is built into the human creature and surfaces in every reasonably functioning conscience.
The hadith literature reinforces the same point at the level of practical conscience:
The hadith identifies the inner discomfort that attends wrongdoing as itself a moral signal: the conscience’s recognition of having departed from what is right. The signal does not require religious training to function. It functions in everyone, recognised by Muslims and non-Muslims, atheists and believers. The Islamic claim is that the universal functioning of conscience is itself evidence for the universal grounding the moral argument identifies.
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.
The intuition (the felt reality of the moral order) is data. It may not be conclusive proof of anything. 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.
The structure of the problem
The structure of the problem is cleanest when both sides of it are held together. If moral facts are not real (if “the Holocaust was wrong” is merely an expression of preference), then there is no problem of evil, because the problem of evil requires a standard of genuine wrongness, and on the no-real-facts view there is none. If moral facts are real, they need grounding, and a physical universe of particles and forces provides no natural location for them.
The atheist cannot simultaneously use the problem of evil (which requires that suffering is objectively bad) and deny that moral facts are real. The two positions are in tension. Choose one, and you either lose the problem of evil as an objection or you accept the premise that makes the moral argument for God its strongest.
Seen as a whole, the case here does not end with vague spirituality. It points toward a Creator whose unity makes sense of the order of the world, the reliability of reason, and the moral seriousness of human life. Islam takes that line of thought and sharpens it: a single God whose nature is the standard of goodness, who has installed in every soul the recognition of right and wrong, and who calls every conscious being to develop that recognition into a worked-out moral life. The moral facts the atheist relies on, on this account, are real because they are grounded in God’s nature. The atheist’s confident moral judgements are therefore borrowing the framework theism supplies, while officially rejecting its source.