TRFG - Reason 2 - The knowledge of God

In this post, we discuss how, regardless of what people say, everyone knows that there is a God and that this belief is revealed in a way that is profound and inescapable.

The problem of morality

In contrast to the narrative that people are becoming increasingly amoral, many young people today have a deep sense of what is right and wrong. They speak out passionately about topics such as women’s rights and injustice against minorities. There is however a significant problem with these moral convictions if we make the presupposition that there is no God. If God does not exist, where does our sense of moral obligation come from?

It’s not enough to say that we invent morality, because when we see rights being violated somewhere, we know it is wrong. I think we would all agree that right now in the world, someone is doing something that they should stop regardless of whether they feel it is right or not. The person being harmed doesn’t even have to be someone from our own family or culture. We just know that humans have rights that should not be violated.

It’s also insufficient to argue that whatever the majority believes to be right is moral. What if the majority thinks that it is right to eliminate the weaker classes? This is what the Nazis argued about killing off the Jews. Did they have the right to do so? Of course not! In a previous lesson, we talked about how the views of one culture cannot be deemed superior to that of another without some external measuring rod. If a different culture has practices that infringe on human rights, how are we allowed to say that they are wrong?

Further, the animal kingdom is built on the strong killing the weak. If we randomly evolved due to natural processes, we must admit that humans, and their views of human rights, are anomalous among animals. Annie Dillard made this point after living for a year by a creek in the mountains of Virginia. She had hoped to be refreshed by returning to nature, however she observed

There is not a person in the world that behaves as badly as praying mantises. But wait, you say, there is no right or wrong in nature; right and wrong is a human concept! Precisely! We are moral creatures in an amoral world…. Or consider the alternative… it is only human feeling that is freakishly amiss…. All right then-it is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let s all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave…lobotomized, go back to the creek, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first.

Philosophers and other scholars have realized this problem for some time now. However, they have no real answer to the dilemma. Instead, they are left living in a contradiction of not admitting that there is an ultimate Rule Giver yet there are practices that are morally reprehensible regardless of an individual’s beliefs. The late Yale law professor Arthur Leff said in an essay

In the absence of God …each… ethical and legal system…will be differentiated by the answer it chooses to give to one key question: who among us… ought to be able to declare “law” that ought to be obeyed? Stated that baldly, the question is so intellectually unsettling that one would expect to find a noticeable number of legal and ethical thinkers trying not to come to grips with it…. Either God exists or He does not, but if He does not, nothing and no one else can take His place….

Leff ends his scholarly essay in an interesting way

As things are now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless: napalming babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked. Buying and selling each other is depraved…. There is such a thing as evil. All together know: Sez Who? God help us.

Moral obligation points to God

Where do we go from here? Are we content to live with so much tension between what our minds tell us about the existence of God (if we claim there is no God) and what our hearts know to be right? Are we willing to admit that burning babies alive and selling people is perfectly fine in some cultures? I certainly hope not!

If the premise that there is no God leads to such a difficult contradiction, what about the alternative? Is it possible that belief in God requires less faith than to proceed as if there was no God? I think the answer is self-evident.

If God existed before anything in this universe was created and even before time itself. It is not merely God’s knowledge of morality or his authority or power that define right and wrong. Rather, God himself, his character, is the standard of morality. Christianity explains how he has written that standard on our hearts by making us in his image. This explains that inescapable sense of right and wrong that we all have. This sense has been corrupted by the world falling into sin, which explains the violence and oppression we observe in the world today.

Questions

Question 1 Kevin argues that unselfish and cooperative people survived in greater numbers than those who were selfish and cruel. Therefore, these selfless genes were passed down to us and now the great majority of us feel that unselfish behavior is “right”. What would you say to Kevin?

Question 2 In your own words, summarize the main point of this lesson in one or two sentences.

Question 3 This week, find one person who is not a Christian and ask them where their sense of right and wrong comes from. Summarize your conversation below.