Do you remember, back when you were a kid, and you used to play those playground games, like “it”. Someone would be “it”, and everyone else would have to run away and try not to get touched? Anyone playing the game had to obey the rules and act like they were actually genuine, and if you didn’t, the game simply didn’t work.
Now, let’s think bigger.
Is life governed by some set of rules, that we’re all pretending are true? Is it all just a big playground game, and we’re all pretending that the rules are there?
The title of this post is a pretty simple, but it’s actually a fair question so I’m going to try to convince you that a God with the characteristics of the Christian God is necessary from a moral standpoint.
1. Reduction ad Absurdum
I’m going to start off with some pretty morbid, but true statements.
You’re going to die one day.
In a godless universe, nothing is owed to you by the universe, not even life.
Though some may find comfort in nothingness after death, I think most would agree that there being an objective meaning to the universe would be a much more satisfiable option than the alternative, though, obviously, this desire doesn’t create it’s necessity.
Without God, I think there’s no broader framework within which man’s life can be seen to subjectively or objectively matter. Further, without immortality, your only destination is extinction in death, and there was no purpose for which you, or I, or anyone else came into this world. I think that it’s for this reason that many of the great philosophers of the past, like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer were so invested in nihilism, and I think, that if I wasn’t a Christian, I’d probably be a nihilist myself.
I’ll push even further and propose that true Atheism is practically impossible to live out, when its naturalistic presuppositions are carried to their logical conclusion.
Francis Schaeffer proposed a model in which man lives in a two-story universe. The upper story is a story with God, meaning, value, and purpose, and the lower story is a finite, physical world. In the lower story, everything is physical and objectively purposeless. Life here is absurd, both probabilistically and semantically, and given that man cannot live here consistently and happily, he repeatedly makes jumps to the upper story to affirm meaning, value, and purpose, although he has no right to, because otherwise, they’d simply be an illusion. But is there objective meaning at all? I think C.S Lewis puts forward a pretty strong argument for it in this statement:
“Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should have never found out it has no meaning, just as if there were no light in the universe, and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never have known that it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.”
In a world without immortality or a “convictor”, there is no objective reason to do good or evil, as there is no ultimate accountability for your actions. Anyone who punishes you for doing wrong has no true or authoritative basis upon which they do so.
In fact, I would argue that the infinite reference point, and therefore the judge between distinguishing good and evil can only be found in God, for only he can exhaust the definition of “absolutely good”. Without God, moral values are just delusions ingrained into us by evolution and social conditioning. After all, it was Darwin that said:
“But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy”.
2. A ‘Moral Argument’
Now, based on what I’ve just said, I’ll propose a ‘moral argument’ for the existence of God, who is the infinite reference point that is absolutely good, and therefore the moral absolute by which we can judge good and evil.
Before I get into the actual argument though, I’d like to further explain the need for an objective moral foundation for values and duties.
It would be “speciesist” to consider our social “objective” morality to be inherently “correct” just because we are human (presupposing naturalism). Different animals act differently, and I’d rather not talk about the things Hive bees get up to, but if you’d like, go and have a look.
I’d also like to assert the necessity the existence of a creator, not just a belief in one, because belief without true existence would also create delusion.
Back to the argument. It has three premises.
*Argument tweaked from Craig’s standard version on Jan 14th ’24.
- Without using God as the foundation, objective moral absolutes and duties cannot be plausibly grounded.1
- Objective moral values really exist, and can be plausibly grounded.
- Therefore, God exists.
Some critics may object and propose a humanist or relativist mindset, but these are extremely fragile.
Humanism: generally, says that whatever contributes to human flourishing is good.
- Seems good, but it’s pretty arbitrary, and it has no foundation.
- Further, on what grounds can you say that human beings have any intrinsic moral value? Mankind has many times proven itself to be a harbinger of destruction to nature and to us under the guise that we are doing some sort of ‘greater good’ for the flourishing of mankind but have proven to be false in due course. Need I mention Nazi Germany?
Relativism: knowledge, truth, and morality exist in relation to culture, society, or historical context, and are not absolute.
- This is a self-refuting position, because you can’t even found your own beliefs. I mean, what happens when someone has contradicting beliefs to you? Funnily enough, the only model in which it works is one in which all follow and maintain the same ethical standard.
- There are many sociobiological objections to this standard – some of which are moral dispositions and genetic influences, and the “evolutionary” origins of morality. You could say that morality is derived through pure naturalistic evolution, but the issue with this is that moral choices are exactly that. Choices, and choices are made by free creatures. If there is no soul capable of exerting will upon the human body frame (and therefore no free will) then morality doesn’t, and can’t, exist. Humans would therefore not at all be free creatures, as all our actions are, in a sense, predetermined by the randomness of molecules swimming in our bodies and electrical impulses firing in our brains. I could go deeper into the philosophy of free will, but I think I’ll save that for another time.
- This is guilty of the genetic fallacy.
An emotional objection to this might be that “If religious people need God to be moral, then what does that say about them?”
Well, yeah, that’s exactly our point. This statement doesn’t actually refute anything, but it actually bolsters the Christian viewpoint of our need of a saviour because of our fallen nature. Also, I think that it’s been made clear throughout this post that anyone who makes this statement doesn’t actually have any authoritative source upon which they can actually call something “moral” at all.
I hope you now see how vapid and confusing a truly naturalistic world is.
3. Abraham and Isaac
In reading up on this argument, I came up against a dilemma. It’s called Euthyphro’s dilemma. It states:
“Is something good because God wills it, or does God will something because it is good?”
Take some time to think about it.
If something is good just because God wills it, then theoretically, if God willed murder, then that would make it good. An example of this could be Abraham and Isaac.
For those who don’t know, in Genesis 22, God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, for no reason. So, judging from this. That would make murder or child sacrifice good.
However, if God wills something because it is good, then how do you even judge good. It’s like a separate entity altogether. If this is the case, it doesn’t result in any moral obligations for me, and it’s thoroughly improbable given naturalistic evolution.
What even would ‘good’ be?
God.
God wills something because He is good. God himself is an entity of complete good and therefore it is He who decides what is good and what is evil. His will necessarily expresses his nature.
This also allows us to answer the Abraham “contradiction”. We can all agree that child sacrifice is inherently immoral, but according to Christianity, God is good. If God is omnipotent then he has complete ability to let his active or permissive will come to pass, so surely Isaac should have died?
Since God is inherently good and cannot desire evil, then it would make sense that, although God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, it was not his intention for Isaac to actually be sacrificed, and he should either have: all power to prevent it since it is a command he gave (since forcing it to be done would be a breach of free will), or he shouldn’t have asked it to be done in the first place.
The next logical question to be asked is, couldn’t that make God a liar, since he wanted Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, but he apparently doesn’t? How can God be good but be a liar?
Another dilemma has arrived!
Slow down a bit.
If you read Genesis 22, you realise that nowhere does it state that God wanted Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.
God just told Abraham to do it.
So, we have a dilemma, God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, but he didn’t actually want him to do it, but God commanded child sacrifice, but God is good, so he didn’t actually want Isaac to be sacrificed?
Confusing, huh.
There’s a solution to this, and it’s quite simple.
God’s desire wasn’t for Abraham to kill Isaac, but for Abraham to be tested so that all of us may see the kind of faith he desires from us.
Think about it. If God is truly omniscient, he knew the outcome from the beginning, and therefore there would be no reason for him to test Abraham for his own reasons. The only other logical conclusion was that Abraham was being tested for us. God already knew that Abraham would do it. We didn’t, it was a display.
This solution ticks all the boxes. God didn’t want Abraham to sacrifice his child, and so he prevented it, but the whole fiasco was a display of what God wants from us. There’s a little foreshadowing in there too, but I think you guys are smart enough to figure out how, yourselves.
So, in conclusion, what do you think?
Are we all just faking it?
Pretending?
Sources:
- On Guard, William Lane Craig
And btw Abraham was compensated for his troubles.
1 – Jan 14th 2024 – Craig asserts way too much in his first premise that these objective absolutes cannot exist outside of theism. Whether it was true or not, he would need to systematically refute each and every proposition to the contrary and even then it might not necessarily be proven true. That’s why I tweaked the argument to be more modest. Poetically, the effectiveness of the argument is now dependent on subjective criteria (plausibility), but I welcome attempts to ground moral absolutes outside of the being of God since, even with the reformed argument, I’d still need to show that rebuttals are implausible. To better defend this point, I might appeal to something like a Rob Koons-esque contingency argument (i.e., divine simplicity) and argue that non theistic arguments are arbitary/scientifically non-justified/lead to morally absurd conclusions but these are just thoughts swimming around in my head. I think i’ll narrow in on sharpening this argument in a later post 🙂
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