MORAL LAW REQUIRES A MORAL LAW-GIVER

Most atheists and agnostics believe in moral relativism: Morality is created or invented relative to our desires, upbringing, feelings, and the dictates of our society. And because it is created, rather than discovered (existing objectively apart from ourselves), it changes as we and our society change. This means that torturing babies might be “wrong” for one society but not for another.

However, some atheists and agnostics are objective moral realists. They believe in an unchanging objective set of moral laws, which exist apart from ourselves and are therefore discovered rather than created. Consequently, they believe that torturing babies is wrong no matter what time or in what culture you might live.

As a Christian, I also believe that there are immutable and universal objective moral laws. Therefore, I applaud others who believe in moral laws and regard them as real and immutable as the law of gravity. However, I must point out the problems in believing in moral law without a moral law-Giver.

The atheist cannot adequately account for such laws in his exclusively materialistic worldview. While the atheist might insist that the moral laws are merely a part of the material universe, this seems unlikely:

MATERIALS ARE MOLECULES-IN-MOTION. Meanwhile, moral law, as are the physical laws, is immutable.

MATERIAL REALITY DIFFERS GREATLY FROM PLACE-TO-PLACE. The Goby Desert is greatly different from the bottom of the Indian Ocean or Mars. Moral absolutes could not be objective or absolute if they differed in Alaska and the Congo. So too, the law of gravity! What then would explain the fact that moral law is universal? Consequently, the moral laws must rest upon something that transcends this varied material universe.

MATERIAL REALITY CANNOT EXPLAIN OR ACCOUNT FOR OUR ELEGANT AND THEREFORE KNOWABLE LAWS OF PHYSICS AND MORALITY. Even the chemical table exhibits profound elegance and design. What can explain such elegance in the material world apart from an intelligent Designer? Besides, a changing material world cannot begin to explain the existence of unchanging laws.

There is also elegance in the operation of the moral laws. Following the moral laws bring harmony, order, and peace. We do wrong, and we feel guilty. We confess our sin (and perhaps make necessary reparations), and we feel better. Relationships are restored. Or instead, we attempt to justify ourselves and must harden our conscience accordingly, as we obsessively wage an inner war to prove ourselves right and, in the process, weaken relationships.

MORAL LAW ALSO MUST BE AUTHORITATIVE. It must carry the authority to tell us that we have done either wrongly and to require a price for wrongdoing. It communicates through the compelling feelings of guilt and shame. Consequently, we are coerced to make excuses and justify ourselves. However, there is nothing in the merely physical world that can communicate our guilt with any authority.

For one thing, the physical world reveals what is, not what ought to be (morality). My computer might flash a screen at me reading, “You have not treated me properly.” However, these words carry no authority. Although it might shut itself down if I didn’t follow the proper procedures, it cannot censure me morally. I can simply have it repaired without any damage to my conscience.

Besides, what is impersonal (the physical world) cannot be morally offended like what is personal. If the physical universe is the source of moral law, I cannot offend it by yelling at it. I can curse at my computer without breaking a moral law. However, if I scream at my wife or my subordinate, this is entirely a different matter.

Buddhists and Hindus also believe in a moral law – karma. However, without a law-Giver, how can karma be justly administered? Without Intelligence, how is karmic justice to be administered in light of the many moral nuances that must be considered?

Besides, we can defy physical laws like gravity, without consequence, by flying on a plane. However, we cannot take a pill to cleanse a guilty conscience, not for long, at least. Morality cannot be successfully side-stepped.

Moral problems must be addressed with moral answers. However, a material world can offer no explanation or remedy (just palliatives) for moral problems. We can take an antibiotic to cure giardia, but there does not exist an antibiotic for guilt.

In his essay “Fact and Value,” Leonard Peikoff argued that there are objective moral principles or laws embedded in the physical reality – the “is” -  of this cosmos:

•                  As Ayn Rand states the point in “The Objectivist Ethics”: “Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every ‘is‘ implies an ‘ought.’” (http://www.peikoff.com/essays_and_articles/fact-and-value/)

But how it is that “every ‘is‘ implies an ‘ought?’” A car can place no demand on us that it “ought” to be driven. Nor can an apple demand that it “ought” to be eaten. Instead, it seems that the “is” and the “ought” occupy separate worlds.

Ordinarily, they do, but Peikoff unites them by quietly introducing his own “ought” to connect the  non-moral “is” to the “ought”:

•                  Every fact of reality which we discover has, directly or indirectly, an implication for man’s self-preservation and thus for his proper course of action. In relation to the goal of staying alive, the fact demands specific kinds of actions and prohibits others; i.e., it entails a definite set of evaluations. For instance, sunlight is a fact of metaphysical reality; but once its effects are discovered by man and integrated to his goals, a long series of evaluations follows: the sun is a good thing.

“The fact demands specific kinds of actions and prohibits others” only because Peikoff’s

“ought” requires the facts to do so. The facts are to serve his “ought” – “man’s self-preservation.” Consequently, “the sun is a good thing.” Why? Because it serves our “ought” of “self-preservation!”

But from where did this “ought” of “self-preservation” come? Not from the facts! The facts of existence are silent about human priority or exceptionalism. They say nothing of a human value or importance that exceeds the value of termites, mosquitos, bacteria, or hogs. (The concept of value requires us to question – “Valuable to whom?” Certainly to humans, but this is just a subjective assessment.)  Instead, in order to salvage “The Objectivist Ethics,” Peikoff was forced to inject his own subjective value of “man’s self-preservation.” (If the hog could speak, he’d speak of “hogs’ preservation.) However, this makes his entire moral system subjective. All of the facts are subjectively coerced into serving his own value of “man’s self-preservation.”

Yet, I appreciate Peikoff’s attempt at trying to formulate an objective system of morality. However, moral law requires a moral law-Giver. There is only one objective basis for morality, the “ought” – the One immutable, omniscient, and universal God, who demands the very morality He has written on our conscience.

A world without God is a world where anything goes, and the worst deeds are met with silence. The humanist Max Hocutt had aptly written:

·       “To me [the non-existence of God] means that there is no absolute morality, that moralities are sets of social conventions devised by humans to satisfy their needs…If there were a morality written up in the sky somewhere but no God to enforce it, I see no good reason why anyone should pay it any heed.” (David Noebel, Understanding the Times)

THE DEATH OF GOD AND HOW IT HAS CHANGED THE WORLD

 The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, had argued that once we reject the Christian God, we have also rejected Christian values – equality, human exceptionalism, and an entire array of values that go along with them. However, the West naively thought that they could retain Christian values after “killing” the Christian God. Os Guinness wrote of Nietzsche’s disdain for such blindness:

• Nietzsche was a self-proclaimed “anti-Christ,” yet he had no time complacent middle-class thinking that could say, “God is dead” and go on living as before. If God was “dead” for Western culture, then nothing was the same. It was time to face the consequences. (The Journey, 136)

What were the consequences? Anything would now be permissible! With God in the grave, our only moral rudder would be our desires and fears.

However, as in Nietzsche’s day, so too in ours! Few can perceive the consequences of their rejection of God. Atheists confidently explain:

• We need not sink into a morally relativistic quagmire once we reject God. We still have absolute moral principles to guide us. For example, drinking water is absolutely good because it promotes survival and survival is absolutely good.

However, what makes survival absolutely good? There no longer exists an absolute principle that makes human survival more important than the malaria-bearing mosquito. Besides, is there anything that establishes that survival-is-good apart from our own subjective judgment? If the mosquito could talk, he might say that his survival is just as important to him as ours is to us, and who can mediate between those two opinions with any authority if God is dead! But should we have laws that equally protect the survival of the mosquito? A growing number would now argue, “Yes!”

This brings us back to moral relativism where morality is entirely relative to how I think and feel on any given morning. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche wrote:

• They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to the Christian morality… When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.

Truly, Christian morality rests upon an absolutely immutable and universal standard – God - but does it really matter? Yes! Our beliefs have consequences. The German Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine noted these consequences back in 1832:

• It is to the great merit of Christianity that it has somewhat attenuated the brutal German lust for battle. But it could not destroy it entirely. And should that taming talisman break – the Cross - then will come roaring back the wild madness of the ancient warriors.

What would happen once the Cross was broken? Heine continued:

• And laugh not at my forebodings, the advice of a dreamer who warns you away from the Kants and Fichtes of the world, and from our philosophers of nature. No, laugh not at the visionary who knows that in the realm of phenomena comes soon the revolution that has already taken place in the realm of spirit. For thought goes before deed as lightening before thunder. There will be played in Germany a play compared to which the French revolution was but an innocent idyll.

It is inevitable that, without God, there will be little to restrain the madness. The late psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, Victor Frankl, reasoned:

• I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek, were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers. (The Doctor of the Soul)

Thoughts and philosophies precede plans and actions. Historian Richard Weikart, California State University, wrote in From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany about how the anti-God worldview of Darwinism impacted thought and action:

• By reducing humans to mere animals, by stressing human inequality, and by viewing the death of many "unfit" organisms as a necessary—and even progressive—natural phenomenon, Darwinism made the death of the "inferior" seem inevitable and even beneficent. Some Darwinists concluded that helping the "unfit" die—which had for millennia been called murder—was not morally reprehensible, but was rather morally good. 

Darwinist thinking brought about policy and behavioral change:

• Those skeptical about the role Darwinism played in the rise of advocacy for involuntary euthanasia, infanticide, and abortion should consider several points. First, before the rise of Darwinism, there was no debate on these issues, as there was almost universal agreement in Europe that human life is sacred and that all innocent human lives should be protected. Second, the earliest advocates of involuntary euthanasia, infanticide, and abortion in Germany were devoted to a Darwinian worldview. Third, Haeckel, the most famous Darwinist in Germany, promoted these ideas in some of his best-selling books, so these ideas reached a wide audience, especially among those receptive to Darwinism. Finally, Haeckel and other Darwinists and eugenicists grounded their views on death and killing on their naturalistic interpretation of Darwinism.

Heine was clearly right. In the same way that lightening precedes thunder, thought precedes deed. In Markings, the later Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold, wrote:

• God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our loves cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.

Perhaps not beyond all reason! In his Epistle to the Romans, the Apostle Paul had written that humanity is without rational excuse for rejecting God:

• For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. (Romans 1:18-20)

Consequently, rejecting God is not a morally neutral choice.

THE PROFUNDITY OF GOD’S MORAL LAW

My response to a stoic atheist who believes in moral law:

We can both applaud the existence of a moral law and the words of M. Aurelius:

·       “He who does wrong does wrong against himself. He who acts unjustly acts unjustly to himself, because he makes himself bad.”

However, digging deeper, we ask “Why does the violation of moral law degrade us!” We “violate” physical laws all the time without consequence. We get on airplanes and bungy-jump, usually without consequence. What makes the moral law so different?

When we violate moral law, we not only feel bad, but it also does bad. This is true not only in Moscow and NYC but also among ISIS and the Islamic countries. It is true today and will be true tomorrow. We can’t escape it by going to Siberia or Alaska. Nor can we avoid it through technological advances.

We not only experience moral law, but it even communicates its displeasure to us. Nevertheless, it also suggests a partial remedy – admitting our violation. In fact, it can also be argued that this law has its own elegance.

IT IS RATIONAL TO BELIEVE IN GOD: THE CASE OF MORALITY

If the virtuous life and morality are not based on God, they must be based on something else. Here are the only other conceivable choices:

MORALITY BASED UPON OBJECTIVE MORAL LAW. In the same way that we have to conform to gravity and not jump off buildings, we have to also conform to moral law so that we do not injure ourselves or others. However, it does not seem that the concept of an objective moral law is sustainable without the concept of God:

1. The analogy doesn’t hold up. We can easily bypass the effects of gravity by boarding a plane or even by bungee jumping. Why then shouldn’t we also do an end-run around the moral laws? In contrast to gravity, moral law would require an Enforcer.

2. There are no sufficient reasons to adhere to an impersonal moral law. If our conscience bothers us, we can simply take a drug or go live in a culture where our aberrant behavior is acceptable.

3. Even if an impersonal moral law is adequate, we would then have to explain where this intricately fine-tuned law came from and why it is universal and immutable in this universe of molecules-in-motion. We would also have to explain why we experience it in the way we do with guilt and shame, as if we had violated more than an impersonal law. 

MORALITY BASED ON PRAGMATISM – THE BENEFITS. If morality is not justified by higher principles, then it can only be justified by lower ones – how living the virtuous life beneficially impacts us. We live virtuously because of the psychological and physical payoffs. However, this rationale is clearly inadequate. If pragmatism is the bottom line – the ultimate reason for our choices – then pragmatism can also justify all forms of non-virtuous behavior. Lying to get a promotion will yield positive results for years.

Many believe in God for strictly personal reasons. However, it is also rational to believe in God. Even some atheists will admit morality fails without God:

Arthur Leff, atheist, Duke School of Law, admitted:

• “The so-called death of God wasn’t just His funeral, but was the elimination of any coherent ethical or legal system…As it stands now, everything is up for grabs…Napalming babies is bad, starving the poor wicked, buying and selling people is depraved—but, ‘Sez who?’ God help us.”

The atheist Max Hocutt similarly acknowledged:

• “To me (the non-existence of God) means that there is no absolute morality, that moralities are sets of social conventions devised by humans to satisfy their needs…If there were a morality written up in the sky somewhere but no God to enforce it, I see no good reason why anyone should pay it any heed.” (Understanding the Times)

And eventually, they won’t!