If I’m Good, Why Do I Need God? 

It’s a question that resurfaces in every generation. Steven Bartlett recently put it to John Lennox in their Diary Of A CEO podcast conversation: “If I live a good life, I’m kind to people, I try my best—why do I need God?” It’s a sincere question, and a revealing one. It shows how central ‘being good’ is to how we understand ourselves and how we want to be seen. 

From childhood we’re encouraged to be a ‘good boy’ or ‘good girl’. Later, we chase good grades, a good job, a good reputation. We want to be good friends, good spouses, good parents. Even online, we curate a digital self that appears good—thoughtful, compassionate, admirable. Goodness is signalled everywhere, but where is it found? Have we ever stopped to ask what good actually is? Or where it comes from? 

Behind Bartlett’s question lies two deeper ones: What is goodness? And who gets to decide?

Human standards: The pressure to perform 

We all know the pressure of trying to be good enough. Social circles, workplaces, and cultural expectations create their own standards—often arbitrary, elitist, or shifting with trends. We’ve all felt the sting of not being ‘good enough’ for a particular group, or the subtle judgement of those who seem to think they always are. 

But when we call someone ‘a good person’, we don’t mean they simply fit in or meet the norms of their social tribe. We mean something deeper, something real, something true. We want goodness to be more than opinion. 

This raises a crucial question: Which worldview can actually make sense of goodness?

Worldviews: Grounding the good? 

Let’s take the ‘good’ part of ‘good enough’.

If the universe is nothing more than electrons, genes, and blind evolutionary processes, then—according to Richard Dawkins—there is “no good and no evil… only pitiless indifference.”[1] On this view, goodness isn’t real; it’s a useful illusion. Evolution selects for survival, not moral truth. Reproduction, not righteousness. 

But this sits uneasily with our foundational intuitions. We feel the reality of justice. We know that cruelty is wrong. We sense that human dignity matters. Even if the bottom of the physical universe is indifferent, the bottom of our hearts is not. 

This is why atheistic attempts to defend objective morality, struggle. American author and professor of philosophy, Erik Wielenberg, for example, argues for moral realism without God—but cannot explain why moral truths should be binding, or how we could reliably know them.[2] If evolution shapes our moral beliefs, we have no reason to trust those beliefs as true- only as advantageous. If there is a realm of ‘goods’ out there then why should they be binding on us? 

Philosophers David Baggett and Jerry Walls argue in God and Cosmos that moral values, duties, knowledge, motivation, and transformation are best explained if God exists.[3] Without God, it’s hard to get meaning from matter, right and wrong from a rock, duties from dust. 

C.S. Lewis put it simply in Mere Christianity: “Human beings all over the earth have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way.”[4] But where does this “oughtness” come from? Why does it bind us? Why does it matter? 

Without God, goodness loses its ground. Duty dies. 

Goodness is real, God is good 

Christianity affirms that goodness is real, evil is real, and our longing for justice is not an evolutionary glitch but a reflection of God’s character. Christianity commands goodness in its followers: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good,” writes Paul (Romans 12:21). Goodness, however is not arbitrary and is not invented; God is good. 

My own journey toward Christian faith began while studying the Holocaust and National Socialist ideology. I encountered an evil so profound, so objective, so undeniable, that it shattered any idea that morality is merely subjective or socially constructed. I didn’t just want to know what good was I wanted to be a ‘good person’, and I hoped that understanding the past would help me avoid such evil. 

But that desire led me somewhere unexpected. 

Good enough? 

But what about the second part of the question? Am I good enough?

There are a few ways to cash out ‘enough’. We could say enough means I’ve done more good than bad (a balancing equation). It could mean I’ve done more good than others (a comparison equation). It could mean I’ve met the standard of goodness needed. 

Whether it’s balancing or comparing, we still have to ask – who decides if it’s balanced, or good in comparison?  

In the age of the quantified self, where we measure steps, calories, income and CO₂ footprint it seems tempting to say I can judge myself as good enough. If I’ve put in the miles don’t I deserve the moniker ‘good man, good father, good husband’? But the tally approach assumes that good outweighs the bad. As if community service could pay for any crime! The comparison approach gives you no objectivity.

In a world of Hitler’s the serial killer becomes good. The comparison approach fails. 

The balance approach needs a metric – how much good do you have to do to outweigh ever hating someone, ever hurting someone, ever lying or letting someone down? 

Someone might say, ‘ah but my good can outweigh my bad because I haven’t been that bad.’ This is the crux of the issue. We often think about morality as an identity marker or a ladder to climb. There are people who are ‘moral’ and those who are ‘immoral’. I might not be top rung but I’m not down there with ‘those people’. The reality is that there is a vertical line that cuts through the centre of every person on every rung. I was not ready to admit it.  

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, reflecting on the horrors of the Gulag, wrote: 

If only it were so simple. If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were only necessary to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart.[5]

If Solzhenitsyn was right, then there is no-one who is good enough. But wait, isn’t that judgmental? Isn’t that negative and moralistic? That’s not very Jesus! 

Very Jesus 

Turns out it is very Jesus. When someone calls him “good teacher,” Jesus replies: 

“Why do you call me good? No one is good—except God alone.” (Mark 10:18) 

He isn’t denying his own goodness; he’s probing the man’s assumptions and claiming to be God. The man speaking to Jesus believed he had kept every moral law since childhood—never lied, cheated, stole, dishonoured his parents. He thought he was good enough. 

Jesus gently exposes the truth: the man’s wealth had become his idol. He wasn’t as good as he thought. He walked away sad—not because Jesus condemned him, but because Jesus revealed something he didn’t want to face. 

Good news and bad news 

Christianity offers both good news and bad news. 

The good news at the core of the Christian message is both that we are not good enough but that God in Christ accepts Christ’s payment for wrongdoing on our behalf when we accept it. The good thing about Christianity is that it offers forgiveness, not demands perfection.  

The heart of the Christian message is not moral perfection achieved, but divine forgiveness received and lived out. “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). God offers a new identity, one that is not earned, but given. 

We don’t become good by believing in God. We receive God’s goodness as a gift through believing in Jesus. Believing doesn’t mean just agreeing with, it means giving yourself to Jesus fully based on what he has already done.  

The freedom of God’s gift 

This transforms how we understand goodness. We no longer strive to be good to earn approval, to compare ourselves, or to climb a moral ladder. We act for good because God is good, and because his goodness is working in us. 

It frees us from moral competition, from comparison, from the crushing pressure of self‑justification. It frees us from guilt and from the fear of judgement. It frees us to love, to serve, to forgive, to pursue justice—not to prove ourselves, but to reflect the God who has already accepted us in Christ. 

That is why belief in God matters. Not because it makes us good, but because it grounds goodness, reveals our need, and offers the grace that truly makes us free. 

And that, is good. 

References

1. Richard Dawkins, Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, Phoenix, 2001

2. Erik J. Wielenberg, Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism, Oxford University Press 2014

3. David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning, OUP, 2016

4. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Collins, 2012

5. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Harvill, 1995