Solid Ground – Building My Life On The Chief Cornerstone

Look and Live

As Blaise Pascal very aptly put, “Man’s sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things are marks of a strange disorder.” We all suffer from this strange disorder, especially me. But God has done a miraculous work in my life. My aim now is to make my life one unflinching gaze upon the glory of Christ.

Mine is the story of narcissistic rebellion, self-absorption, and criminal conceit to supplant the rightful ruler of my heart, without regard for my created purpose. This I did and do with the clothes I wear, the weights I lift, the knowledge I acquire, the people I gather around, the entertainment I flock to, in order to hide my ugliness, to conceal my weakness, to forget my fallibility, to distract my lonely heart, to drown out the piercing silence of my strange disorder. But though my scars are numerous, my flesh is powerless, my enemy is dangerous; my God is glorious and His grace is totally sufficient.

As I reflect on what I am thankful for and what my life has come to thus far, I can’t help but despair over the strange disorder which plagues all of us. But there also exists in all of us a throbbing obsession, an aching addiction, to see glory. It is something felt deep in the soul. In his book “Look & Live”, Matt Papa sums it up beautifully:

“I was still sick, still dissatisfied, still looking.

The change came, but it was only by experiencing a greater Thrill. It was by beholding a greater Beauty. God.

…I began to set my own gaze on His glory, before I even knew what Glory was.

I began to look deeply into the gospel. Deeply into God’s Word. Deeply into the cross.

I began to just sit with God. – to seek Him in His temple (Psalm 27:4). And as I did this, slowly, something started happening. Beauty began coming into view. A light. A brightness… which was there all along. I just had to let my eyes adjust. Now, an eclipse was occurring in my soul – a displacing of all counterfeit beauty and lesser thrills.

I began to taste the sweetness of the Honey.

I began to tremble, to smile, in the most self-forgetful way.

My whole being leaned toward this Eternal Weight. Everything inside of me was screaming ‘I was made for this!’ There was Substance.

I was seeing God, the Glory I was created for. And I knew in that moment, in my bones, what it would mean for me to choose to fix my soul-gaze upon this Beauty. It was clear what the result would be.

Life.

Transversely, I understood in that moment the consequence of choosing to look away. I knew the result of going back, back to the numbness, back to the short-lived, candy-coated, one-night-stand idols I had once adored.

Back to gulping from the empty, ever-deepening wells of wealth and pornography.

I knew the consequence of throwing the full weight of my inconsolable soul onto the shadows of this creation.

Disillusionment. Disappointment. Despair.

I knew in that moment the consequence of turning away from this matchless Glory… of looking back.

Pilar of salt.

Death.

The change didn’t happen overnight. It occurred over about a three-year period of regularly setting my eyes toward God. But as Beauty began coming into view, I began to feel something I had never before. A satisfaction, an incomparable thrill, and a displacing of all lesser ones.

Suddenly, sin wasn’t as sweet anymore. Like being offered a McRib sandwich after I enjoyed a filet mignon.

I got a glimpse of Glory, and I was changed. Forever set on a trajectory of seeking more of these Glory-glimpses.

I looked, and I lived.”

Meaning In A Meaningless World

In Lev Tolstoy’s seminal work, A Confession, published in 1882, he begins his exploration of the biggest dilemma of human existence with a story. It starts with a traveler who is on a long journey venturing through forests and farmlands. On this journey, the traveler attracts the attention of a terrible beast. Tired and afraid, he jumps into a dried-up well only to discover another beast – a dragon – at the bottom of the well with its jaws wide open, waiting to devour him. The unhappy man faces a dilemma, he can move neither up nor down; if he climbed out of the well the wild beast would kill him, but if he jumps to the bottom of the well, he would be devoured by the dragon.

Cadmus avenging his fallen companions, Hendrick Goltzius portrayal.

Cadmus, the first Greek hero, fights a dragon.

His life dangles hopelessly between two negative forces. To survive, he desperately grabs hold of a branch growing through the cracks in the stone of the well. His arms grow weak, and he feels soon he must fall prey to the death that awaits him. Yet still he holds on, and while he is clinging to the branch two mice emerge – one black and one white – and begin gnawing on the branch. It seems just a matter of time before the branch will give way, and him fall into the jaws of the dragon. The traveler sees this and knows he will surely die. With death a likely outcome of this adventure, the traveler begins to wonder, “What will become of my life? Why are we here?”

While he is still hanging on, he sees drips of honey on the leaves of the branch, and he stretches out his tongue and tastes it. But what he finds is that honey is no longer sweet, he now felt nothing from what had once filled him with joy. The threat of the dragon below had robbed him of any chance of joy. Realizing his former ignorance, he says,

…the former delusion of the happiness of life that had concealed from me the horror of the dragon no longer deceives me. No matter how much I tell myself that I cannot understand the meaning of life, that I should live without thinking about it, I cannot…

In the story, the traveler on the journey represents Tolstoy on the journey of life. The terrible beast and the dragon waiting to devour the traveler represent inevitable death. The black and white mice gnawing away the branch he is desperately clinging to represent night and day and the relentless march of time. The drops of honey the traveler is able to taste, while he clings to the branch, represent Tolstoy’s two loves: his family and his writing. Because death is inevitable, these are no longer adequate grounds for ultimate life meaning. Tolstoy tells this story because it represents a dilemma he faced later in life. Despite a successful writing career and having fourteen children, the inevitability of death made life seem futile. Life would come to a halt and he would not know how to live or what to do. Over time, the questions began to come up more and more often, and their demand to be answered more and more urgent. Eventually he realized that these were not accidental ailments pestering him, but something very serious, and that he would eventually have to answer them. They weren’t childish, foolish, simple questions as he had earlier dismissed them as. They were the most vital, profound questions in life. Before he could resolve family affairs or continue writing books, he needed to know why he was doing those things.

Like the traveler hanging by a crumbling branch between two beasts and inevitable end, Tolstoy had an overwhelming realization that what he had been standing on his whole life had collapsed, nothing was left under his feet. What he had built his life on no longer existed. He came to this great dilemma, the “simplest question, lying in the soul of every man from the foolish child to the wisest elder”. A question, without an answer to which one cannot live. “What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my life? Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything? Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?”

In his attempts to answer this profound question of meaning and purpose, Tolstoy turned to science. In science, rather than identifying and answering the question, science avoided it and instead asked its own questions.

One who sincerely inquires how he is to live cannot be satisfied with the reply — ‘Study in endless space the mutations, infinite in time and in complexity, of innumerable atoms, and then you will understand your life’ — so also a sincere man cannot be satisfied with the reply: ‘Study the whole life of humanity of which we cannot know either the beginning or the end, of which we do not even know a small part, and then you will understand your own life.’

In philosophy too, he was equally disillusioned, unable to derive the answer.

Philosophy not merely does not reply, but is itself only asking that question. And if it is real philosophy all its labor lies merely in trying to put that question clearly.

But in this quest for meaning, can’t we just make up our own meaning? If our lives have lasting meaning, that meaning has to be grounded in something transcendent. If our lives are meaningless to begin with, how could any of our choices be meaningful? How could meaningful choices arise out of a meaningless life? We can’t insert transcendent meaning by simply choosing that our choices are significant. What can be more futile?

For many people, this question of meaning remains unanswered. Tolstoy called it a question that without an answer to which one cannot live, many have come to the conclusion that there isn’t any true purpose or significance in life.

Richard Dawkins expressed this view: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference” (River Out of Eden).

William Provine summarized his views this way: “There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind… There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either” (“Darwinism: Science or Naturalistic Philosophy?” Origins Research 16:1).

Alex Rosenberg expressed similar views: “What is the purpose of the universe? There is none. What is the meaning of life? Ditto. Does history have any meaning or purpose? It’s full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (The Atheist’s Guide to Reality).

Bertrand Russell wrote that the universe as he understood it is “purposeless”, “void of meaning”, and the whole sum of human endeavors is “destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system” (A Free Man’s Worship).

As it happens, he is right that we are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system. The further you look down the timeline of the universe, the less happy it becomes. Our world is in decline. Our race faces overpopulation, worldwide oppression, poverty, injustice, pollution, disease, and an unsustainable rate of consumption of natural resources. Humanity is lost in darkness, estranged from itself, depraved and hubristic. Even if it was possible for us to solve the problems we face, according to the second law of thermodynamics, even the universe faces inevitable extinction. Given enough time, all the energy in the universe will run out and the universe will essentially come into a state of equilibrium. Nothing but darkness and silence.

If this is all true, and there isn’t anything else, then basically life is hard and then you die, and that’s it… period. Nothing you do ultimately matters. “Man is like a breath; his days are like a passing shadow” as the Psalmist said (Ps. 144:4). Our lives are like a mist that vanishes after a short time (James 4:14).

In the book of Ecclesiastes, there are a couple main things that the author says renders life meaningless. The first is death. You grow old and then you die. “The dust returned to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God, who gave it” (Ecc. 12:7). Wisdom and knowledge may have value for a short time, but death makes even that meaningless. Both the foolish and the wise die. Both are forgotten. The second thing in Ecclesiastes that makes life meaningless is evil. Even if you are a good person, if you live a virtuous life, there isn’t always a reward for that in this world. The author of Ecclesiastes says he’s seen a “righteous person perishing in his righteousness, and… a wicked person living long in his evil” (Ecc. 7:15).

When Tolstoy saw the meaninglessness of human life, he felt that what he had been standing on had collapsed, that he had nothing left under his feet. What he had lived on no longer existed, and what he had lived for actually didn’t matter. Suddenly he saw life as nothing more than a sick joke.

Involuntarily it appeared to me that there, somewhere, was someone who amused himself by watching how I lived for thirty or forty years: learning, developing, maturing in body and mind, and how, having with matured mental powers reached the summit of life from which it all lay before me, I stood on that summit — like an arch-fool — seeing clearly that there is nothing in life, and that there has been and will be nothing. And he was amused… But whether that “someone” laughing at me existed or not, I was none the better off. I could give no reasonable meaning to any single action or to my whole life. I was only surprised that I could have avoided understanding this from the very beginning — it has been so long known to all. Today or tomorrow sickness and death will come (they had come already) to those I love or to me; nothing will remain but stench and worms. Sooner or later my affairs, whatever they may be, will be forgotten, and I shall not exist. Then why go on making any effort?… How can man fail to see this? And how go on living? That is what is surprising! One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid.

He felt that seeing things clearly revealed life is just pointless, cruel and absurd. When people experience this, there’s a kind of existential despair that takes root. This happened to Tolstoy. In his despair, he saw four responses for managing this dilemma.

The first one is ignorance. It consists in not knowing, not understanding that life is an evil and an absurdity. From these sort of people, he says “I had nothing to learn”. They just continue living their lives in existential ignorance.

The second way out is epicureanism, or hedonism. While knowing the hopelessness of life, they make use of the pleasures of life one has in the meantime. It consists of disregarding the dragon at the bottom of the well and the mice chewing at the branch holding you, and licking the honey on the branches the best you can. This is the way the majority of people make life possible. Of these people, Tolstoy says:

Their circumstances furnish them with more of welfare than of hardship, and their moral dullness makes it possible for them to forget that the advantage of their position is accidental… The dullness of these people’s imagination enables them to forget the things that gave Buddha no peace — the inevitability of sickness, old age, and death, which today or tomorrow will destroy all these [their] pleasures.

The third escape is that of strength. This is for the few who are exceptionally strong and consistent. It consists in destroying life once one has understood that life is an evil and an absurdity. They understand the stupidity of life, the joke that has been played on them, and they understand that it’s better to be dead than to be alive, that it’s best not to exist at all. So they act appropriately and swiftly to end this stupid joke.

…having understood that it is better to be dead than to be alive, and that it is best of all not to exist, they act accordingly and promptly end this stupid joke, since there are means: a rope round one’s neck, water, a knife to stick into one’s heart, or the trains on the railways; and the number of those of our circle who act in this way becomes greater and greater…

The fourth way out is that of weakness. It consists in seeing the truth of the situation and yet clinging to life anyway, even though they know in advance that nothing will ultimately come of their life. These people know death is better than life, but they lack the strength to act rationally, which would be to end the deception quickly and simply kill themselves. This is the escape of weakness because they know what is best, it’s within their power, but they lack the strength to carry it out. Knowing that life is a stupid joke, they go on living. Tolstoy found this escape repulsive and tormenting, but ironically also found himself living this way.

Here is where I’d like to suggest a fifth option, an alternative to Tolstoy’s four. When grappling with death, evil, and the fleeting nature of life – I’d like to offer an alternative narrative.

The universe exists, and is contingent on an outside force for its existence. That uncaused causal agent is God (see more on cosmology and contingency). Us humans have ideas that certain things are objectively right and wrong, we have concepts that people are objectively valuable, and notions that our lives are meant to have meaning (see more on morality). This is actually because certain things are objectively right and wrong, people are objectively valuable, and we as human beings do exist for a purpose.

If there was no transcendent personal Creator to ground meaning to our existence, there would be no transcendent meaning for our lives. But a transcendent personal Creator exists, he made us – and the universe we live in – for the most spectacular purpose: his glory and the joy of his people.

The Westminster Assembly summed it up well, that “man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” Our lives have significance being a part of God’s sovereign plan for his creation. We are creatures made in the image of God, designed to live in community with God and with each other. If we live this way, our lives have tremendous value.

My concern isn’t just that you’re mistaken if you think you have a meaningless life, or that you’re mistaken if you think that you have a meaningful life. But that you don’t realize just how meaningful of a life you have. My concern is that you may be squandering it for things that pale in comparison to your ultimate purpose, and until your soul awakens to that purpose, to glorify God and enjoy him forever, you will never be happy. You will be forever restless, and at the end of the road you will find only despair. Not all the wealth of men, not the tallest ivory tower, nor indulging in your darkest desires, will ever make you whole. Not the respect and approval of people you value, not the intimacy of a spouse, nor the contentment of raising a happy family, will ever satisfy your soul. Not even living a life devoted to helping others, or a life spent fighting injustice, will ever be enough. Nothing under the sun is enough, it will never be enough.

God is the One who formed and made you, the One from whom and for whom all things exist, the source of abundant life and complete joy, who freely offers life to you in all its fullness. Augustine once said, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” I hope you are wrestling with life’s big question. And if you are, if you are restless, see the God who formed and made you, who created you for a purpose, and find rest from the despair of living a meaningless life.

Has Religion Been a Chief Cause of Wars Throughout History?

The St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572 saw a series of assassinations and waves of violence against the Huguenots (French Calvinist Protestants), during the French Wars of Religion.

A common complaint by secular humanists, usually directed at Christianity, has been that religion has been the primary cause of war and oppression throughout history. Sam Harris, in his book The End of Faith, says that faith and religion are the most prolific source of violence in our history. Religion, however, isn’t going anywhere; the World Religion Database expects there to be a net gain of over a billion Christians, and a net loss of almost 2 million Agnostics and more than 4 million Atheists from 2010 to 2050. Has religion, in fact, been the cause of much of the oppression and war throughout history? This is a basic assumption of many who incorporate it into their justification for disbelief; so does it, on its own, disprove religion? I invite you to join me in examining this question: How much has Religion contributed to wars throughout history, and in discussing what can we and what can we not logically conclude from that?

In any case, let’s assume for a couple paragraphs that Sam Harris and others like him are correct and religion is the cause of most oppression and war of mankind’s history. There’s no question in my mind that war is a sad reality of our world, but what conclusion can we come to if most wars have been religious? If this is in fact true, and the tragedies of war and oppression can all be shown to be caused by religion, at least half or even three fourths of the time, what then? Therefore what? What effect does that have on whether a view is consistent or inconsistent with reality? A view is regarded incorrect based on the reasons, or lack thereof, for the view, not by how kind or cruel the behavior is of the person who holds to the view. Perhaps if I was kind, people would be more apt to listen to the reasons for my view, but whether I am Buddhist and kind to those around me or if I am Muslim and cruel to those around me, what does that have to do with whether my beliefs are correct or incorrect? It appears that those who are raising this issue have a problem with the believer, not the actual belief. It does not logically follow to claim a religious view is correct or not based on a believer’s moral or immoral acts.

Maybe one could claim a religion is wrong in virtue that it promotes violence and oppression, but by doing so they are claiming something about oppression is objectively inconsistent with the way things should be, to which I would ask Why? It seems some intuitive sense would be telling them it is wrong, therefore whatever view they hold to must not make oppression acceptable. They have, then, made some claim to an objective moral standard which requires a worldview capable of explaining it, and I discussed in my last blog post how naturalism fails to provide such a thing.

Additionally, I would bargain that many religious conflicts were not actually fueled by theological disagreements, although I’m not at all claiming this was always the case, but instead were implicitly fueled by politics where political and religious lines matched. The Seventh War of Religion of 1580, for instance, also known as the Lovers’ War, had little to do with aggression between Catholics and Protestants. Instead, the hostilities were set off by the promiscuous wife of Henry IV of Navarre. Greg Koukl offered it this way, that

Many conflicts that appear at first glance to be religious in nature are actually political or cultural wars that divide along religious lines. The strife in Northern Ireland is not a theological dispute about Catholicism vs. Protestantism per se, but rather a cultural power struggle between two groups of people. In like manner, much of the conflict in Eastern Europe and the Middle East is the result of ethnic hostilities, not genuine religious differences. The Crusades, the Inquisition, some of the religious wars of the Reformation, and the Salem witch trials, on the other hand, were more theological.

Furthermore, why should we hold Christianity accountable for the actions of so-called followers whom disobey the explicit instructions? Is oppression or bloodshed either a religious duty of Christianity or a logical application of its teachings? If the answer is no, then the violence done in His name cannot be blamed on Christ. The blame would not be with Christ, but with the people who disobey Him. Clearly, He says If you love Me, you will keep My Commandments (John14v15), including his command to show love even to one’s enemy (Luke10v29-37). The Apostle John communicates the same view: By this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious: Anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother (1John3v10). In truth, any acts of cruelty or oppression would not have been due to an individual’s Christian worldview, but a lack thereof. When Martin Luther King Jr. confronted injustice in the white church in the South, for example, he called on those churches not to become more secular, but more Christian. He knew that the answer to oppression and violence was not less Christianity, but a deeper and truer Christianity. A Christianity that transcended their cultural and political associations. Greg Koukl points out that

Nothing in Christian teaching itself mandates forcible conversion to the faith or coerced adherence to Biblical doctrines. The teachings of Christ do not lead logically to wanton bloodshed. Jesus Himself warned of interlopers, wolves in sheep’s clothing. His assessment of them is unmistakable: “I never knew you. Depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness” (Matthew7v23) The actual track record for genuine disciples of Jesus Christ, those who follow the written instructions, is much different…Christian morality is informed by the notion that… God reigns over a moral universe He created. He requires virtuous behavior from His subjects and will one day judge each person’s conduct with perfect justice…. [and] human beings are made in the image of God and therefore have transcendent value. This has been the foundation for Christian ethics for 2,000 years.

In regards to the claim that religion has been the biggest source of oppression and war in human history, the facts may surprise you. The three volume Encyclopedia of Wars, which records some 1,763 wars that have been waged over the course of human history categorize only 123 as being religious in nature. This is only 6.98% of all wars. The percentage is less than half that, at 3.23%, if you subtract those waged in the name of Islam (66). The relationship between religion and war, which skeptics have depicted, is in stark contrast to the facts. Despite this reality, people like Richard Dawkins, who in his book The God Delusion, claim that without religion there would be no labels by which to decide whom to oppress and whom to avenge. Critics of religion continue to make such claims which allude to religion as the ultimate factor responsible for world oppression and violence, and in doing so seem to insinuate that it in some way has anything to do with the coherence of the religious view. Still, it is clear that religion has not played a significant role in most of the world’s wars, though even if it had, that fact would be irrelevant in trying to prove a religious viewpoint false.

Religion then, exonerated from the charge, is not a major contributor to humanity’s wars in proportion to all wars fought. This, however, begs the question of what the cause actually is. I don’t see any way to get around the obvious fact that secular reasoning and naturalistic philosophies have actually been involved in the most bloodshed. The number of people who perished in religious conflicts pales in comparison to the slaughter and butchery which has taken place under non-religious leaders. Ideas have consequences, and in the 20^th century they contributed to the democide of an unprecedented number of people. Russia’s communist USSR gave rise to both Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Illich Lenin whom murdered 42,672,000 and 4,017,000, China’s communist Mao Tse-tung and militarist/fascist Chiang Kai-sheck whom murdered 37,828,000 and 10,214,000, communist Cambodia’s Pol Pot whom murdered 2,397,000, Germany’s fascist Adolf Hitler whom murdered 20,946,000, and Imperial Japan’s militarist/fascist Tojo Hideki whom murdered 3,990,000. From 1917 to 1987, in a span of under 70 years, roughly 121,332,000 human beings were murdered by these government regimes. In R. J. Rummel’s work Lethal Politics and Death by Government, he writes

Almost 170 million men, women and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed or killed in any other of a myriad of ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners. The dead could conceivably be nearly 360 million people. It is though our species has been devastated by a modern Black Plague. And indeed it has, but a plague of Power, not germs.

The cause, of course, goes deeper than political dogma or philosophical ideology. No single worldview can bear full responsibility, it has occurred under such a wide spectrum of philosophical positions. The common denominator of all this conflict, suffering and oppression, as understood in the Christian worldview, is humankind and the sin problem that plagues it. Very clearly Paul the Apostle and Jesus write that it is due to their hardness of heart, that in the futility of their minds… They are darkened in their understanding (Ephesians4v17,18). That it is because of the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth (Romans1v18), from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness (Mark7v21-23). This, we see, is why their feet are swift to shed blood; in their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they have not known (Romans3v15-17). James asks (and answers his own question) what causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel (James4v1,2). It is the great tragedy of the human condition, but a reality we must accept if we are to accurately understand and identify why there has been so much war, oppression and suffering.

Many have, claiming religion has been the primary cause of so much war and oppression, seen this as a devastating argument against Christianity or religion in general. It turns out to be a misinformed view of history, though even if it were true, doesn’t address the reasons for the religious view in question and is therefore irrelevant in determining if it is false. It also tells us nothing about the validity or coherency of the claims a religious view makes if so-called followers are disobeying its instructions. Still, less than 7% of all wars have been over theological differences, less than 4% if you do not include Islamic wars, and religious wars account for only 2% of all people killed by warfare. Religion is not to blame; indeed secular ideologies and philosophies have contributed far more to human bloodshed. Despite this, they are not the problem per se, the problem is deeper, diagnosed by many, though cured only by one.

Can anyone be Good without God?

The God Delusion author Richard Dawkins proclaimed to his audience at the Jaipur Literature Festival in India that we don’t need to get morals from our religions … We don’t want to find morals from the holy books. We can have our own enlightened secular values. His claim is that religion is not necessary to have secure, objective morality, but that evolution can provide the necessary grounding for it. Not a social contract, subjective and changed when the culture desires it, but non-changing and absolute. Many people who would consider themselves non-theists still assume morality can exist, but can there be an objective right and wrong without an objective moral standard to refer to? In this post I hope to pose this challenge to non-theists in a winsome, gracious, and engaging way. I invite you to join me in examining this question: Can non-theists hold onto morality without God?

Can non-theists hold onto morality without God? Can they even be good without God? Sure, it’s possible that they can be good without a belief in God. There are some non-theists who live virtuous lives, just as good of lives -or better- compared to some Christians, even though they don’t believe in God. But can you explain what morality is and where it comes from without God? Can non-theists live virtuous lives without something to logically ground and define what exactly virtue is? If there can be no shadow without a source of light, how can the holocaust be considered immoral, for example, without an absolute standard of morality to contrast it with?

Morality (objective moral truth) means to say there is an objective right and wrong. This entails obligation to obey the principle or principles in question. Though in the non-theist’s worldview there is no authority that supports these obligations. What is it that makes rape wrong? Who holds us responsible for not doing right? What obligation do we have, if in fact there is no God? Being Good or Bad requires a reference point, a standard from which to judge from. In truth, the concept of goodness couldn’t even be possible without an ultimate goodness. Craig Hazen, director of Biola University’s M.A. in Christian apologetics and M.A. in science and religion programs, explains in an article titled Can we be good without God? this way:

You see, it is not knowledge (epistemology) of the moral law that is a problem — after all, the Bible teaches that this law is written on every human heart. Rather, the daunting problem for the new atheist is the nature and source (ontology) of the moral law… Classic atheists from the mid-20th century were very reluctant to grant that there was an objective moral law because they saw that it was just too compelling for believers to take the easy step from the moral law to God who was the ‘moral law giver.’ Accepting a real objective moral law would be giving far, far too much ground to the Christians and other theists…

Here are some questions you can ask Richard Dawkins the next time you sit next to him on a bus:

If everything ultimately must be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry, help me understand what a moral value is (does it have mass, occupy space, hold a charge, have wavelength)?

How did matter, energy, time and chance result in a set of objective moral values? Did the big bang really spew forth “love your enemy?” If so, you have to help me understand that.

What makes your moral standard more than a subjective opinion or personal preference? What makes it truly binding or obligatory? Why can’t I just ignore it? Won’t our end be the same (death and the grave) either way?

The non-theist’s worldview necessitates Materialism which holds that all entities in the world are physical and physically determined. With this in mind, it’s important to note that evolution, or any natural process, cannot account for objective morality. Morality is immaterial. It’s not physical, so science can’t study it and natural processes can’t explain it. There’s actually no mechanism in nature or evolutionary theory to explain the nature or existence of morality. The only alternative for true materialists is moral relativism, but then morality carries no obligation because relativism gives up any universal claim on a right and wrong. Theism is the only worldview that has the explanatory resources for the basis of actual morality.

Relative or subjective morality is based on the subject rather than the object. Within moral relativism or subjectivism, something is wrong due to cultural conditions and social norms. Here we would refer to the subject, the person engaging in the activity, not the activity itself. For instance, abortion would be wrong to a specific person, but the action itself would have no inherent wrongness or rightness. It could be wrong for one person, but not wrong to another. Here there is no place for the concepts of Good and Evil, just peoples’ feelings and opinions.

In reality, we base what is moral or not on the object (the action itself) as having the quality of wrongness or rightness. No matter who is viewing it, it will still be wrong and just as wrong. For example, no matter who views a person engaging in something like pedophilia or rape, it’s still wrong because the wrongness is in the act, not in the person engaging in it or the person observing its’ personal feelings.

One of the most basic moral principles for humankind is the universal grounding for human worth. From this principle we understand the wrongness of things like murder and human slavery. But how does a materialist establish the grounding necessary to explain this worth? In the materialist’s world there is no soul, no immaterial consciousness, no mind, just a brain. Paul Copan, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University, asked the question this way:

Why think humans have rights and dignity if they’re products of valueless, physical processes in a cause-and-effect series from the big bang until now?

A materialist must find a way to ground human worth in something from the material world, but what physical attribute could you say all humans have that justifies treating them equally? Human beings come in all sorts of shapes and sizes: tall, short, introverted, extroverted, autistic, schizophrenic. What makes an Olympic gold medalist equal to a person with dwarfism (and some of the de-habilitating health problems that come with it), or a lawyer equal in human value to a person with down syndrome? Some people have more capable physical bodies or more capable mental faculties, so what is it that makes them equal? Their transcendent human value cannot possibly come from the concept of the survival of the fittest.

Gregory_of_Nyssa The Cappadocian Church Father Gregory of Nyssa who lived in the 4th century was an opponent of the human slavery of his day. He grounded human beings’ inherent value, in his fourth homily on the book of Ecclesiastes, like this:

(I) Only God has the right to enslave humans, and God does not choose to do so; indeed, it was God who gave human beings their free wills. (II) How dare a person take that precious entity–the only part of the created order to have been made in God’s image–and enslave it! (III) As humans who were created in the divine image, all people are radically equal; therefore, it is hubristic for some to arrogate to themselves absolute authority over others.

This, Gregory argues, is the true offense of slavery.

How could a materialist rationalize something like caring for endangered species, if the material universe is all there ever was, is, and ever will be? If the survival of the fittest is the only driving force in nature, why should I care for another species? Wouldn’t I simply be fulfilling my role as the best species from the perspective of survival? Why should I not be able to survive and rise as the fittest by eating other species from an ethical perspective, as a naturalist? If the survival of the fittest is the only driving force in nature, do you think it cares if a species is eliminated? That is how survival of the fittest works, by eliminating benign species. Why should we care from a naturalistic perspective? Maybe only if saving a species from extinction increases my odds of surviving, but that couldn’t account for creating a better way of behaving, for claiming there is an ethically superior way to live in caring for animals. On its own, ethics don’t exist in a naturalistic worldview. There are no moral choices there. A choice could be justified as increasing odds of your own survival, but there is no concept of human flourishing, which means increasing a certain quality of life. You’d be making a moral choice. This involves some better or worse quality of life. It seems to me to be stepping into and borrowing from the Christian worldview, from which we have a sense of duty toward creation.

In contrast, the Christian worldview sets mankind up as stewards. Adam is entrusted to name the animals; Noah is entrusted to protect them. Understanding that we are different than them because we’re created with the special image of God means that there are just aspects of our being that are different from other creatures that are not in the image of God. Through this we see we have a sense of duty related to the other species which those species do not have towards us. This is what separates us from other created things, and what gives us our innate value, regardless of our abilities. It is also with this understanding of the Christian view of reality that we can have a healthy respect for our environment.

Although it does not adhere to major tenets of Christianity, the Christian worldview is necessary for grounding the freedoms promised by the U.S. government. In fact, religious freedom and all other freedoms claimed by the founding fathers of the United States come from this understanding that all human beings are equal, and they grounded those claims accordingly. (Freedoms are just claims to something and therefore have to be justified by something.) The founding documents of the United States established that grounding in God-given rights and freedoms that government must respect, their authors producing a unanimous declaration which held certain truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights… Materialism, however, fails to logically establish a grounding for morality and moral principles like innate, transcendent human worth.

Morality must be grounded by some objective moral standard. If it’s not, what would being moral or immoral mean, if not to refer to that fixed point of perfect morality? Social contracts lead to culturally conditioned moral relativism or subjectivism, and natural processes cannot account for the moral principles we see in our world. Instead, this morality is grounded in something outside of ourselves, our culture and our material universe. Religion may not be necessary for grounding morality; however the existence of God is necessary if anyone is to claim the existence of any moral truth. Since non-theists cannot rationally hold to any objective moral truth, it seems to me they must abandon it for moral relativism, or reconsider the evidence for God.