FROM WHERE DID OUR MORAL WIRING COME?

Virtually everyone now agrees that we are wired to know and to respond to moral truth. But from where did this wiring come? Many believe that it is merely the product of a mindless process – evolution. Others claim that this wiring must come from God, as the Bible asserts (Romans 2:14-16).

An atheist therefore asked:

·       "But what convinces you that morality has a supernatural origin?"

I listed some reasons that I thought might appeal to him:

1. Even when we deny that our moral wiring comes from God, we cannot act as if it's just the product of a mindless process. When someone cuts in line in front of us, we protest, “You have no RIGHT to do this.” This reflects the fact that we take this common moral law very seriously – more than just a biochemical reaction.

2. It contains beautiful design and harmony (ID). When I do something wrong, I feel badly. When I apologize, I feel relieved. When forgiven, I feel restored.

3. I now have a confidence that I had never before experience, knowing that even God forgives my sins.

4. Humanity uses the same avoidance techniques they use to avoid God as they do their troubling conscience. This suggests that there is a strong tie between God and conscience.

5. Conscience is so hard-wired into us that all of our attempts to silence it -- drugs, denying freewill, denial, moral relativism, evolution, masochism, good deeds -- have utterly failed. It would seem that a God does not want to let us out of His grasp or to give us an easy excuse for our misconduct.

6. When we live in accordance with our conscience, we live the fullest life, as the ancient philosophers have asserted.

When we deny that our conscience is God-given, we give room for moral horrors. Before his execution, serial killer, Ted Bundy, confessed how the rejection of God had affected his life:

·       “Then I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective [it just depends on how you think about them], and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’…I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable “value judgment that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these ‘others?’ Other human beings with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as ‘moral’ or ‘good’ and others as ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me – after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.” (“Christian Research Journal,” Vol 33, No 2, 2010, 32)