As most of you remember the last bit of part 3 in Is There A God?, I talked about why there is chaos when we would think that if there is such a thing as design we would think that order would be seen throughout the universe. With the help of Mark Galli, I made the claim that God created a universe of chaos first, and through his Spirit and voice brought order out of chaos. But why this chaos that we see now? I claimed in my last post that it was do to mankind’s rebellion and disobedience towards God. But this leads us to another question, Is there such a thing as objective moral duties and values? In other words, if we were to take a person, is there a standard of moral perfection that we can use to judge as to whether a person is morally perfect or not? Is there a moral standard that goes beyond our own views of what is right and wrong?
In the philosophical realm there is an argument for the existence of moral lawgiver, that uses morality as evidence of a moral lawgiver. In the book, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, Norman Geisler and Frank Turek, give the moral argument like this:
“1. Every law has a lawgiver.
2. There is a Moral Law.
3. Therefore, there is a Moral Law Giver”
Now if the first and second premises are true the third follows necessarily. No one I know would deny the first, that every law has a lawgiver. We just have to look at the fact that legislation is impossible unless there is a legislator who is apart of a legislative body of a country. Furthermore, if there are moral obligations then there has to be someone that we are obligated to.
But is it really true that there is a Moral Law? Thomas Jefferson certainly thought so, when he wrote in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Our Founding Fathers called this Moral Law, “Nature’s Law.” Which is to say that you don’t need to use reason to discover it, you just know it. For Thomas Jefferson, Nature’s Law” is “self-evident”. You see everyone knows there are absolute moral obligations. An absolute moral obligation is something that is binding on all people, at all times, in all places, and an absolute Moral Law implies an absolute Moral Law Giver.
In order to actually get to our conclusion, we must give reasons of how do we know that the Moral Law exists. There are more then just the 3 that I will look at but I believe that 3 will be sufficient for our argument.
First, the moral law is undeniable. Relativists give out t2o primary statements: 1) There is no absolute truth, and 2) There are no absolute moral values. However they absolutely believe that these two statements are in fact true, so to say that, there is no absolute truth, is just to make a self-defeating statement. For the person who denies all values, values his right to deny them. So for the one who believes that there is are no moral absolute moral values, believes that he is in the morally good when he denies that there is no absolute moral values. That is to say he values his own right to deny absolute moral values. Further, he wants everyone to value him as a person, while he denies there are values for all persons. Norman Geisler writes a story to illustrate this point:
This was illustrated clearly a number of years ago when I (Norm) was speaking to a group of affluent, well-educated Chicago suburbanites. After I suggested there are such things as objective moral values to which we all have an obligation, one lady stood and protested loudly, “There are no real values. It’s all a mater of taste or opinion!” I resisted the temptation to my my point by shouting, “Sit down and shut up, you egghead. Who wants to hear your opinion?!” Of course, if I had been so rude and discourteous, she would have rightly complained that I had violated her right to her opinion and her right to express it. To which I could have replied, “You have no such right–you just told me such rights don’t exist!”
Her Complaint would have proved that she actually did believe in a real absolute value–she valued her right to say that there are no absolute values. In other words, even those who deny all values nevertheless value their right to make that denial. And therein lies the inconsistency. Moral values are practically undeniable.
Secondly, our reactions help us discover the Moral Law (Right from Wrong). Think about the scenario above, the lady’s reaction would have reminded her that there are absolute moral values. Let me share with you a situation that illustrates why this is the case. Lets say I was your professor of ethics at your university, and at the end of the quarter I asked you to write an essay of any kind that had to do with ethics, and you as an atheist decided write a paper on how you believe that there are no absolute moral values and you turned in your essay in a red folder. I despise the color red and for that reason I gave you an F even if the essay was really, really good. But because I wanted to give you a learning opportunity I gave you an F.
You come in yelling at me saying: “Why did you give me an F? That’s not fair! That’s not right! That’s not just! You shouldn’t have done that! You didn’t grade the paper on its merits!”
I would calmly reply, “Wait a minute. Hold on. I read a lot of papers. Let me see . . . wasn’t your paper the one that said there is no such thing as fairness, rightness, and justice?”
You answered, “Yes, that is it.”
“What’s this that you say about me not being fair, right and just? Didn’t your pare per argue that it’s all a matter of taste? You like chocolate I like vanilla?” I asked.
You replied by saying, “Yes that is my view
I responded by saying, “Fine, then, I don’t like the color red. You get an F!”
Suddenly the lightbulb in your head came on and you came to realized that you in fact really did believe in moral absolutes. You at least believe in justice. This recognition simply defeated your entire case for relativism. As you can see our actions can lead us to understand that there are moral absolutes.
Without the Moral Law, there would be no way to measure whether Adolf Hitler was wicked and Mother Teresa was good. The reality is that most people believe that the deeds that Adolf Hitler did was terribly wicked, doesn’t matter who or what he believed or the excuses he made, what he did was just plain wrong. But if there are no moral absolutes there’s no moral differences between Adolf Hitler and Mother Teresa. To say that, “Murder is evil,” Racism is wrong,”or “You shouldn’t abuse children” have no objective meaning. They’re just someone’s opinion. I remember having a conversation with a group of gals at an apartment in Bellingham. One of the gals asked this question, “If God is real, why is there so much suffering and wickedness in this world?” I paraphrased the question but it was very similar to the question actually asked. The ironic thing is that this gal is a staunch Atheist, just as I am a staunch disciple of Jesus Christ, understands that this world is full of wickedness full of terrible acts that mankind have done to each other. Having the time to think about this conversation, I wished I had Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis, for he just nails it when he writes,
And, of course, that raises a very big question If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong? And for many years I simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling ‘whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn’t it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren’t all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?’ But then that threw me back into another difficulty.
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too–for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist–in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless -I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality–namely my idea of justice–was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.
This concludes my last reason for a Moral Law to actually exist. I find that C. S. Lewis just wraps my third reason very nicely. So I will go back to the argument. If you are someone who does not believe in God or a higher power, but have been convinced that there are absolute moral obligations, it follows necessarily that there has to be someone that we are absolutely obligated to. Regardless of whether we believe that this someone exists or not, we are obligated to him morally for this someone has given us an absolute moral law for us to either follow or break.
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