Is God The Moral Lawgiver, Or Is Man The Moral Lawmaker?

“Nature is only a part of what we can imagine; everything, real or imagined, can be appraised by us, and there is no outside standard to show that our valuation is wrong…It is we who create value and our desires which confer value…It is for us to determine the good life, not for nature–not even for nature personified as God.”

-Bertrand Russell, from the essay “What I Believe”

Though we would like to find the experience of doing something we know we shouldn’t be doing, whether it is speeding in our car or insulting someone behind their back–as guilt free, we are constantly looking over our shoulder hoping not to see the person we are insulting and we constantly check in the rear view mirror for flashing blue lights and begin to slow down for every car whose headlights resemble cops. Wouldn’t it be a lot nicer to believe that there aren’t any cops to pull you over or the person you’re insulting left town? Though it would be a lot nicer to believe that we don’t have to worry about negative consequences, it does not rationally follow that therefore the cops do not exist or that your insulted acquaintance left town.

Are There Atheistic Foundations for Objective Morality?

The problem that atheists and materialists have in the realm of morality is the lack of a foundation. Notice that I am not saying that atheists cannot behave morally, I am merely asserting that they have no solid basis to judge that which is objectively “right” or “wrong.” In the absence of such a basis, moral relativism must be the accepted truth, as Bertrand Russell necessarily agreed with and asserted. We must create our own values and morals and persuade enough people to agree with us so that there can be something resembling order in our society.

Atheists who believe that there objective morals exist apart from God try to establish a foundation for morality through the concept of reciprocal altruism(“scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours”) that evolved as means to the survival of our species. Humans evolved in small tribes where their survival depended upon helping each other out. This concept is also sometimes referred to as the herd instinct. Since the tribe shared the same immediate genes, this instinct inspired an attitude of trying to help each other survive for the sake of their progeny. Though this concept seems to be intuitively true since we do tend to care about our immediate family a little more than someone we do not know; this accounts for only a minuscule fraction of morality. For example, why do so many Americans feel that sending food and money to a third world country in Africa is the “right” thing to do? From an evolutionary point of view, why should we deplete our resources and send them to people who almost surely will not be sending food and money back to us? It almost sounds idiotic. We should only be caring about our survival. If they can’t survive of their own accord, well then, natural selection will weed them out and maybe we can go there and take over what resources they have to help out our own country. This simple illustration is what leads atheists like Richard Dawkins to say that they agree with the truthfulness of Darwinism and natural selection, but reject the moral implications of such truths. In essence, they want to ascribe truth to Darwinism, but would rather live in a fantasy-land where we can transcend our environment and genes. For someone who holds that the Christians who lead moral lives, do so in spite of the Bible, I find his views pretty hilarious.

Since morality is merely a tool for survival that we can’t help but follow or else we wouldn’t exist, it is supposed to be objective. This conclusion leaves room for a couple of crippling observations however. First of all, we find our natural desire for survival oftentimes in conflict with our morals. For example you may see someone in a dark alley being mugged. When you encounter a situation like this, C.S. Lewis observes:

“You will probably feel two desires–one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct of self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them.”

If we are merely machines designed by evolution to propagate DNA, I see no reason as to why we would possess the capacity to threaten our own existence for the sake of someone else we don’t even know. It seems that from a Darwinistic point of view, we would have to be dumb to sacrifice ourselves for fellow humans. If we get killed, then we deserved it and our stupidity gets weeded out because of natural selection. However, do we not always find it noble when someone lays down their life for another? I have never heard of anyone ridiculing an act of self-sacrifice of a person; instead it is usually appreciated and applauded. It therefore seems implausible that evolution fashioned morals merely for our survival. If that was the case, I see no reason as to why evolution would even leave room for us to make the decision to risk our life for the sake of someone else. According to natural selection, we wouldn’t even expect a behavior such as self-sacrifice to survive to the next generation since it would be counter-productive to the replication of one’s genes, but would only hasten the demise of them.

Secondly, most atheists assert that our morals are continuing to evolve to fit within our changing cultures and societies. On the same hand, they are so quick to look in the past and decry acts of barbarism and inhumanity perpetrated by religion. However, what basis do they have for moral outrage at the Spanish Inquisition or Salem Witch Trials? If religion was a way of asserting domination over weaker people to ensure the replication of pious individuals’ genes, so what? Maybe the consensus of people’s morality affirmed those ideas and thus it was seen as “right” or “good.” If morality is continually evolving, then what right does a 21st century biologist or philosopher have to condemn acts from three hundred years ago as morally wrong? Given their own world view, the most they can say is that, “Well, I don’t like those past actions by Christians,” or “The Inquisition does not please me personally.” The effect of this is that without an immutable compass for morality, why would anyone want to change their morals to begin with? Atheists have to ignore their own presumptions if they want to make moral “progress.” How do we know if we are indeed making progress? Could we not just as easily be making a regress? Moral progress or regress become useless terms and are the equivalent as saying “We ought to ban murder if we are to make real moral spling splang dah dah dah.”

Does Moral Relativism Accurately Reflect Reality?

Without objective morals, there is no reason to say that Hitler was wrong to decimate the Jewish population. If however, objective morals do exist, then popular opinion will never dictate morality. It wouldn’t have mattered if Hitler and the Nazis would have killed everyone who opposed them and convinced everyone else to think that the Jews deserved to die. In the face of such brutality, a set of objective morals will stand firm and emphatically state that murdering innocent people is, and will always be wrong.

Those who share the same morally relativistic sentiments as Bertrand Russell, have no basis to feel outraged at anything unless it threatens their existence. Even then, they still cannot say that it is actually objectively wrong; they could only say, “That displeases me!” If someone who lost their job needed money for his family or they were going to starve, decided to murder Richard Dawkins and take his money; apart from being dead, could Dawkins objectively say that it was wrong(especially if Dawkins didn’t have any progeny)? I can’t find any reason to think so, based purely on a Darwinistic explanation of morality.

As it may be seen, moral relativism is quite vacuous and self refuting. In a morally relativistic world view, any “oughts” may be questioned. The moment that someone says that you “ought” to do this or that is making a moral demand based on a certain standard that is established. If, however that there is no standard objective, any moral prescription becomes a taste, much like preferring apples to oranges or blue jeans to khakis. The words, “You ought…” basically means, “This pleases me, so hopefully it will please you as well.” However, just as C.S. Lewis said, when a person makes moral prescriptions “He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about.” This is self evident at once. Just turn on the television, listen to the radio, or read a newspaper–everyone is accusing everyone else of doing something wrong. “You should vote for this person,” or “Iran should give up its nuclear pursuits,” or “We shouldn’t have to war with Iraq.” We all feel as though everyone else should agree with our standard of right and wrong. When we meet someone who thinks that Stalin was a good man, we will be quite surprised and automatically try to persuade him that Stalin was wicked.

I think that if there is no solid foundation in which we can find objective “right” and “wrong,” then all of us should be moral relativists. The only way that morals can be outside of us objectively and still make demands on us, then I believe the source would have to be personal and immutable, such as God. I agree with any atheist such as Jean-Paul Sartre who says, “Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to.” Without the existence of God, then the only demands that we answer to ultimately come from ourselves. If we are nothing but insignificant specks of cosmic dust that reside on a minuscule pebble in an insignificant solar system, in one out of countless billions of galaxies, in an ever expanding universe that will surely dissipate into a cold death of nothingness–why not just pursue as much pleasure as we can get here on earth until our blink of an existence comes to an end? Why bother ourselves with so many hindering and illusory morals and values that block our bold march to fulfilling our selfish desires?…Unless…

…We have a loving Father in heaven, also known as “God” who wrote the moral law on our hearts to protect us from our own destruction and to lead us to Himself, the moral lawgiver.

Brief Summary

To sum up, this following syllogism is one that Dr. William Lane Craig typically uses in his debates:

1. If God doesn’t exist, then objective moral values do not exist.
2. Objective moral values do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

I’ve argued that (1) is true, since we cannot find any solid basis for objective moral values apart from God.  I’ve also argued that (2) is true, since we all intuitively perceive an objective moral law written on our hearts and consciences.  Therefore, if (1) and (2) are true, then it follows logically that (3) is also true.  If you are an atheist, you must come to terms with the lack of a foundation for morals.  You must decide to follow your temptation to either acknowledge the existence of God or acknowledge that you cannot define objectively how other people should be living their lives.

Faith: Blind or Necessary?

If I was in my backyard raking up leaves and I suddenly see a bush in the very back of my yard rustle a little bit and coming from it was a muffled bark and yelp; is it rational to walk up to the bush and expect to find my dog that ran away? If you answer “yes,” then you think that it is perfectly rational to act according to the evidence you witness and analyze. However, if in the same scenario of raking leaves, I decide to walk over to the same bush expecting to find my dog based on a feeling or a hunch without any reason to believe it, one would think I was paranoid, bored, or irrationally engaging in wishful thinking.

Erected as a straw man by the “new atheists,” faith is being defined as the latter situation. Richard Dawkins believes that faith is the same as expecting to find a dog behind the bush with no evidence or reason to believe it. He says this of faith in his polemical bestseller The God Delusion: “It is in the nature of faith that one is capable…of holding belief without adequate reason to do so…” He doesn’t view the concept of faith as a posture founded in evidence or rationality, but rather a creed of ignorance and unreasonable stubbornness. In his debate with Oxford mathematician John Lennox, Dawkins made it clear that he views faith as an opponent to evidence. This clearly is misunderstanding what faith means, and it allows him to extrapolate further implications of people having faith in God as a commitment to a deity with no evidence.

Furthermore, Dawkins believes that “Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.” Rather than merely critiquing the concept of faith, he makes a moral pronouncement about it. Coincidentally, Dawkins sees science as man’s banner to intelligence which completely contradicts the idea of religious faith. He thinks that the arena of faith is confined specifically to religion, while science is founded upon and crowned by pure evidence, without any “faith” in metaphysical presumptions. This is interesting considering the fact that he gives no reason as to why we should presume a rational universe instead one of complete randomness and chaos. Also, Dawkins does not give us any reason why we should presume that our mental faculties should correlate accurately to reality. I should like to ask him how his materialistic metaphysical presumptions are in any way different from faith.

Dawkins also takes the liberty to redefine the concept of the traditional theistic God. His definition of God resembles the man-made superstitions and gods such as fairies at the end of the garden, The Flying Spaghetti Monster, The Easter Bunny, Thor, or Zeus. God, as described in the Bible is simply another mythical figure which people created in order to explain the world around them and to bring consolation to human mortality. He claims that while the God of the Bible is not the same as the said gods or superstitions, He is still just as probable to exist (and apparently it is indeed a minuscule probability). Unfortunately for him and his colleagues who hold strongly to this view, this analysis is quite weak at its best and intellectually dishonest or ignorant at its worst. Surely, no one really believes in the Flying Spaghetti Monster because it was clearly a man-made deity without any good reason to suppose that it exists. Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris both think that the idea that since there is no way of disproving God, it is the same as saying you can’t disprove the existence of Thor, Zeus, and Wotan. In a sense they are correct, but their underlying assumption which is clearly sensed is that there is no positive evidence to make God any more probable than the other man-made deities. Well, this tactic is very useful if the audience they are writing and speaking to have never seen any historical, philosophical, or scientific evidence to suggest the existence of the theistic God is reasonable and rational. I even concede that if you believe in something for which there is no evidence, it typically is a form of wishful thinking. For the sake of the topic of this post, I will insist that such evidence of the theistic God will be reserved to later posts and I will continue to build the foundation for the reasonableness of faith.

In his classic work, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis defines faith in one sense as “…the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” Lewis explains that we all have faith in certain facts, but our emotions and imagination have a tendency to call into question our faith. For example, we all (for the most part) have faith that when we get into our cars to drive to the grocery store, it will get us there safely. However, if we hear of a close friend getting into a wreck or his/her car breaking down, we have a tendency to call into question the reliability of our vehicles or the possibility of a tragedy happening; not because it is very probable, but because our imagination runs away with the faint possibility and in turn creates doubt. Faith allows us to continue to get into the car, and challenges us if we have legitimate doubts to investigate and analyze the evidence. We can look under the hood to check the oil, transmission fluid, water coolant, as well as the pressure in the tires, in order to have a good reason to believe that our car will not break down. We can investigate the environment to see if it is snowing or raining outside and could possibly increase the risk of getting into an accident. Doubts about our faith (religious or otherwise) should spur us towards more investigation and analysis of available information.

Science, which Dawkins and other naturalistic atheists view as their savior, really turns out in their case to be a totalitarian dictator of comprehensive explanation without question. Hardcore atheists seem comfortable and at home with a pervading skepticism, except for skepticism in their own skepticism. Science as a system is never questioned by Dawkins as the ultimate source of meaning and understanding. He may applaud the findings of science and remain open minded towards neutral scientific findings that contradict hundreds of years of work prior, but he certainly doesn’t welcome criticism of two things: Darwinism or science as a whole.

David Hume, an atheistic eighteenth century philosopher, pointed out long ago that scientific laws are not verifiable. What he means by this is that by the means of science, we contrive experiments in numerous repetition to confirm an outcome. He argues that through repetition, we derive and solidify the effect from the cause based solely on repetition and experience. Let’s say that I roll a pair of dice five times and I get double twos each time. I find it odd, but roll it a hundred more times nonetheless and each time I roll double twos. Someone else comes along and rolls the dice a thousand more times and each time he rolls them, he gets double twos. Based on the thousands of rolls, I declare that if anyone rolls two dice, they will roll double twos.

What happens the first time someone rolls snake eyes? To the flames goes that scientific law.

If Richard Dawkins believes slightly that Darwinism or science may have potential problems or limits in explanation on any level, yet continues to endorse them, is that not faith? If so, shouldn’t he be under the same scrutiny and ridicule as someone who doesn’t know for a fact that Christ rose from the dead, but accepts on faith (based on the evidence) and believes that He did?

Without implementing faith in your life in all sorts of practical manners, it would be impossible to live. Imagine always wondering whether or not your parents are your real parents, or that your husband or wife really doesn’t love you. Imagine always checking the wiring to the microwave every time you pop popcorn to make sure it doesn’t short a circuit or blow up your house. Imagine checking every inch of your house, under couches and behind refrigerators, every night before you go to bed to make sure there aren’t any black widow spiders that could bite you while you are sleeping. If we knew anyone who lived like this, I would think we would be inclined to think they are a little weird and irrational to say the least.

Faith is not blindly believing in something because it makes us feel better regardless of truth. It is not the same as observing a flat tire, smoke coming from under the hood, and loud rattling noises coming from the axles; and yet still driving your car confidently because you cannot live without a gallon of milk or a stick of deodorant. It is based on evidence and continually spurs us to find more and more reasons to believe in what we are convinced of even in the face of strong emotions or our sometimes irrational imagination. I have no desire to tell anyone to believe in Christianity and throw out their brain. It is mentioned nowhere in the Bible and I think it is a shame when Christians have no idea why they believe in God and the scriptures besides being raised to believe it or because they had a strong emotional experience one time at a youth camp or revival service.