"DEAR GOD, YOU SURE DON'T ACT LIKE YOU'RE ALIVE" - Day 18

Day 18 – answering some objections

Are our moral values merely sociological conventions similar to driving on the left versus the right side of the road or like subjective utterances that we produce when we order our meals in a restaurant?   –STEVE KUMAR

Yesterday we declared that God is the Author of the Moral Law, that sense of right and wrong that exists within the heart of every human. Inevitably, this will call forth from atheists a series of objections.

Their most common retort is to deny that moral absolutes exist. Right and wrong, they claim, is subjective and ethics situational, so all this talk of a universal Moral Law should be dismissed as utter nonsense. “Just take a random poll,” they challenge us. “Individuals will be found who disagree on every moral issue. Pro-lifers will seek to prohibit abortion; pro-choice advocates will lobby for it. Social drinking will be acceptable to one group and sinful to another. What is more telling,” they continue, “is that this diversity is present even among you religious folk—the very people who insist that morality is absolute. Christians quibble over the right or wrong of divorce, accumulation of wealth, killing of wildlife for sport, euthanasia, watching R-rated movies, wearing jewelry and make-up, listening to hard rock music, and a host of other subjects. If you absolutists can’t agree on right and wrong, how can you claim that a universal Moral Law is written on the human heart? Even the few moral issues about which you agree turn out to be relative, not absolute. Take sexual intercourse outside of marriage. It may be unacceptable to you 99.9% of the time, but couldn’t you imagine a scenario where it would be? Consider, for example, a mother kidnapped with her children who is given by her captor the chance to win their release by sexual intercourse or to refuse and witness their execution. Isn’t this evidence that morality is relative?”

 Having thus made their case for moral relativism, the atheists next interject a second and third counter-argument: “Even if there were a Moral Law inside of us, could it not just be a product of our natural instincts instead of the supernatural? And what assurance do we have, if God has given us a sense of right and wrong, that He is on the side of right? Couldn’t God just as well be wrong’s advocate—a morally evil being, the antithesis of righteousness?”

I would first answer these criticisms by dispelling the claim that all of morality is subjective and situational. Consider for a moment the following acts: torturing a small child, raping a ten-year-old girl, knowingly transmitting the AIDS virus to the innocent, and murdering a friend because he cheered for the opposing team. I cannot imagine any circumstance that would make these actions acceptable. I ask you to picture in your mind Susan Smith as she drowns her children to preserve an extramarital affair, the young college coed alluded to earlier as she fabricates her kidnapping, the white supremacists as they tie a young Hispanic to a truck and drag him to his death, the registered nurse as he places a lethal dose of potassium in the IV of a young mother undergoing elective surgery, and the Catholic priest as he entices a prepubescent boy to perform for him sexual favors. I do not believe that there is any room for subjectivity here, no possible explanation that would change these from wrong to right. You and I automatically know that this is the case. We know that a moral code has been violated and that a wrong, an absolute wrong, has been committed. Granted that some aspects of ethics are situation-dependent, the examples just given underscore the fact that morality also has a firm, unyielding, uncompromising, objective side to it.

I, therefore, contend that there is such a thing as absolute morality. There is a Moral Law within us. We may disagree on matters peripheral to it, but we stand on common ground at its center. I am aware that people exist who ignore this Moral Law, and I am not blind to the misery unleashed by them. They do not, however, make me doubt its existence any more than I doubt the existence of the multiplication tables when people multiply wrongly, whether they do so intentionally or out of ignorance.¹ I further contend that this Moral Law could not have come to us via natural instincts or human invention, because rules must always transcend the playing field (nature) and the players (humans). And regarding the claim that God could be on the side of wrong, I would ask you to try to think of any rules that have ever been devised to promote their violation. You will not be able to do so, because rules always are given to be obeyed, not disobeyed. God’s Moral Law is no different. He gave it to us to follow. He wrote it on our hearts so that we would abide by it. It is ludicrous to think otherwise. God, the giver of the Moral Law, is on the side of right.

¹C. S. Lewis makes this point in Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1943) as part of his moralistic argument for God.

Daily Quotation

Steve Kumar, Christianity for Skeptics, 26.