God and Morality

[LBJer]

One of the main charges against atheists is: "How can an atheist be moral"?  The argument is that morality comes from God, and that without a set of rules from a creator, there is no basis for saying something is right or wrong.  Atheists usually respond to this rather defensively, saying that one can make personal value judgments to develop a sense of right and wrong, God is not necessary for this.  While this is definitely true, I don't think it's the only or even the strongest counterargument one can make.  Suppose there is an all powerful God.  How does it follow that God is necessarily good?  As Alan Dershowitz once pointed out, power has certainly not equaled goodness where humans are concerned.  Why then should it necessarily be a feature of a deity that has unlimited power over the universe?  If God is not necessarily good, it follows that even if religious rules and commandments do indeed come from God, obeying them is not necessarily morally right.