1 John 4:8
God is LOVE
8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
John 13:31-35
Love One Another
31 When he was gone, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man is glorified and God is glorified in him. 32 If God is glorified in him, God will glorify the Son in himself, and will glorify him at once.
33 “My children, I will be with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now: Where I am going, you cannot come.
34 “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
Matthew 22:34-40
The Greatest Commandment
34 Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. 35 One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:
36 "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" 37 Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."
Romans 8:28
God Works to Find Good in All Things for the Good of Those Who Love Him
28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
Mark 10:17-18
Only God is Good
17 As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. "Good teacher," he asked, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?"
18"Why do you call me good?" Jesus answered. "No one is good—except God alone.
Let us ask the question "Why not evil?"...Why isn't the world all evil, and why doesn't the world want evil?...Why isn't every man and woman out trying to take advantage of each and everyone on earth, or trying to hurt them to take their material things they have?...Or why aren't we harming all those around us?...Couldn't the evolutionist and atheist easily say, or at least more easily say that evil could exist everywhere, and mankind could just get used to an evil world?...Why did evolution take this route, instead of the one that was taken?...
So the question is can we be good without God?...That is an interesting question and many non-believers believe that we can and are good without God...But where does this goodness and this morality come from?...Doesn't is need a Source?...The believer says it comes from God...While the atheist says it is here by random chance or by our evolutionary ways and patterns that bring all things together...And right here we might ask the original question, why not evil, why does man not invite evil into his entire life and want to be evil and to be around evil all the time?...Why doesn't man want continuous negative thoughts to fill his head and for evil to surround him?...If morality is random, wouldn't be okay to be and want evil and always think negative thoughts?...And if it is evolution that brings everything together, why does mankind want goodness to win out over evil and fix our world and make it a better place to live, with positive, glowingly-good headlines each and everyday?...Why do most of us want our thoughts to be positive toward all others, and our thoughts to be positive most, if not all the time?...
Can these above question be answered without God?...And if you believe this - that God is the reason for our morality and wanting the positive and good, then you might see better see and believe the existence of God...If God is really LOVE, and since we are created in His Image, we should lean, trend toward love and loving others...
If evolutionary believers believe in the ways we evolved and they believe everything and all creatures and living things are tied together through the evolution tree, isn't this randomness, in a specific sense, since it was actually done without feeling or LOVE...So what is the alternative to how we all brought together?...Doesn't Something or Some Source have to bring us together?...Could one not believe that God has and wants us to be together...When Jesus tells us that the Greatest Commandments are really two commandments and they are to love God and to love neighbor, Jesus has forever tied man and neighbor together...Jesus in this statement not only gives man a special place in the universe, it distinguishes us from other creations and creatures...Jesus did not say to love God and to love his dog or horse...So in this teaching of Jesus, if man and God are tied together we have a desire or a requirement or however you want to put it to be good, because only God is Good, and only God is Perfect...And giving this love connection to God and neighbor, we are to be morally good...
So, for me, God is the Divine Lawgiver...He is the One who has giving us the Ten Commandments, Mosaic Law for seeing how His people struggled to follow the Law and sinned when they could not...God gives us rules to live by...Then God gave us Jesus and He puts the Bible in context, and how we are to be morally good and how we are to put God first, to follow His Father...And we see this done by how He dwelt on earth and the Great Deeds and Miracles that He did among us...If we could follow Jesus' life and do what He did, we can see how the world would be a better place...Most people love our Leader, but they see how us followers fall short of the glory of God...
Author Robert Taylor writes this about morality and religion, "The modern age, more or less repudiating the idea of a divine lawgiver, has nevertheless tried to retain the ideas of moral right and wrong, not noticing that, in casting God aside, they have also abolished the conditions of meaningfulness for moral right and wrong as well...Thus, even educated persons sometimes declare that such things are war, or abortion, or the violation of certain human rights, are ‘morally wrong,’ and they imagine that they have said something true and significant...Educated people do not need to be told, however, that questions such as these have never been answered outside of religion."...
William James Craig says this, "(T)heological meta-ethical foundations do seem to be necessary for morality...If God does not exist, then it is plausible to think that there are no objective moral values, that we have no moral duties, and that there is no moral accountability for how we live and act...The horror of such a morally neutral world is obvious... If, on the other hand, we hold, as it seems rational to do, that objective moral values and duties do exist, then we have good grounds for believing in the existence of God...In addition, we have powerful practical reasons for embracing theism in view of the morally bracing effects which belief in moral accountability produces...We cannot, then, truly be good without God; but if we can in some measure be good, then it follows that God exists."...