God and Absolute Law

One of Christianity's most over-used arguments for the validity of their belief in God is as follows: If there is no God, you have no basis for judging between right and wrong. You can never deem anyone's actions, no matter how detrimental to you, to be wrong.

The question is then posed: How can a court judge a recreational murderer to be guilty of a crime if he or she is simply acting in accordance with his or her own standards of morality?

First, as a society we have every right to enact and enforce laws that protect us from harm. People who enjoy killing strangers for fun put us all in danger. We don't have to put up with that. Whatever we think about the killer's ability to control his actions, he must be stopped. So we do what we can to stop him. Consider the pride of lions that drives out the animal that has a mental screw loose and likes to kill the cubs. They don't need an absolute moral code. All they need to do is instinctively recognize that the mentally ill lioness poses a threat to the rest of the pride and cannot be allowed to mix with them.

Second, whether or not an absolute standard of morality is good for mankind is irrelevant to the question of God's existence or non-existence. Even if I were to concede that, yes, I really can't logically call anything "wrong" without accepting that there must be an ultimate law-giver (an argument I do not concede, as argued above), this would not make belief in God correct. Such a belief may allow moral judgments to make more sense to some, but that belief is then no more than a convenience, not an accurate description of reality.