It’s an objection we often hear: God is a cruel God to have wiped out potentially millions of people with a catastrophic global Flood. Some people will even claim God was committing mass genocide against the pre-Flood world, so He must be an immoral deity. Now what’s the foundational problem with this argument?

Well, here’s the big problem: Why is wiping out millions of people wrong? The answer I usually get to that question is “because of course it is!” And yes, nearly everyone would agree that you or I wiping out millions of people would be wrong, but that doesn’t explain why it’s wrong. Just saying something is wrong doesn’t make it wrong; what if I have a different opinion? Who gets to be right? You need an absolute authority to appeal to, but an atheist doesn’t have one.