Why I am a Christian (6)

The Innate Sense of Right and Wrong in Human Beings Points to a Moral Universe Governed by a Good God

In 2012, I jotted down all the reasons I could think of why I am a Christian and found there are 26 so I decided to serialise them in a fortnightly blog over a year.

The first four reasons are to do with science and they are foundational to my understanding as to why I think that my belief in a creator is plausible and not irrational. 

The next two are more to do with metaphysics than physics. They are rooted in the mysteries of the human condition. 

Firstly, why are we obsessed with meaning? That seems most unlikely if we live in a meaningless universe randomly created by blind forces.

And secondly, why do human beings have an innate sense of right and wrong? That would be out of place in a universe that had no truth, no ultimate good, no such thing as evil, and where everything was relative. 

The fact that we have a conscience at all points to the existence of a moral universe governed by a good God.

So why do we, unlike all other beasts, have an inbuilt sense of right and wrong? Where does this come from? Mark Twain once said “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.”

An inbuilt moral compass seems unique to human beings, and forms part of the Judaeo-Christian understanding of being made in the image of God. 

We are morally responsible creatures with our eyes opened to knowing right and wrong. We celebrate virtue and we deplore foul play.

Animals, by contrast, instinctively know only of what is favourable to their survival. For example, it is not a lion’s fault if it attacks and devours the cubs of a male rival. He does what comes naturally to him and there is no question of “guilt” or “vice” or “sin.” (I'll build on this in my next post, Reason 7).

But if a man wanders next door with an axe and kills all the children in the house there is justifiable outrage, whatever the motive. It is wrong, full-stop.

Part of the humanist response to claims that we live in a moral universe is to object to the use of words like “evil”. But the kind of horrors human beings seem uniquely capable of (for example, the incarceration of a young woman by her father as a sex slave in Austria, the summary execution of men and boys in Srebrenica, the abduction, torture and murder by 10 year-old boys of a toddler in Liverpool and the flying of hijacked airplanes into skyscrapers in New York) are not just “inappropriate” or “unacceptable.” These words are patently inadequate to describe acts that are just morally wrong and evil.

Some people who are disinclined to believe in God say that what we call 'right' and 'wrong' is simply learned values picked up from the ambient culture. We are informed by our environment, so the argument goes, that certain things are O.K. and that certain things are not.

But from about the time children learn to talk, parents are given regular updates from their offspring about what they judge to be morally right. “It’s" "not" and "fair” are often the first three words children learn to put together! Our sense of justice seems hard-wired from birth.

Isn't this surely just the way things are? Imagine living in a land where an individual took pride in stealing from the nurses who had cared for his or her dying mother. Imagine a world where parents eating their undernourished children's dinner was admired by all.

We know instinctively that such behaviour is beyond the pale.

Yes Homer, selling Flanders' ride-on lawnmower on e-Bay to buy a year's supply of beer and donuts is not really on either.

C.S. Lewis has shown in The Abolition of Man that the basic standards of morality, of what people know to be right and wrong, are more or less the same in all cultures and at all times. This gives real weight to the argument that objective good and evil are self-evident.

Nevertheless, some argue that our sense of morality derives from an evolved desire for the common good (which gives our species a better chance of survival). So according to this view, racial prejudice, jealousy, cruelty to animals, bullying, adultery, theft and computer hacking are not objectively wrong. They are just what we have collectively decided at the present time to say is against our interests. 

But in fact, not only is this view morally repugnant, it doesn’t even conveniently solve the atheist's problem of living in a moral universe. It just kicks the can further down the road. It still comes back in the end to a need for objective standards of right and wrong.

C.S. Lewis again, this time in Mere Christianity puts it best: “If we ask: ‘Why ought I to be unselfish?’ and you reply ‘Because it is good for society,’ we may then ask, ‘Why should I care what’s good for society except when it happens to pay me personally?’ and you then have to say, ‘Because you ought to be unselfish’ - which simply brings us back to where we started. You are saying what is true but you are not getting any further.”

No, ethical standards are etched onto the human soul. Our conscience marks us out from all other beasts as morally responsible beings. Right and wrong are real concepts in a moral universe because God, who is wholly good and just in all he does, has created us in his image.

If there is no God, there can be no absolute standard of good and evil. (This is not to say that atheists cannot be good people. Of course they can and often are. It means rather that they have no objective foundation for their moral code. They have to borrow one - and they do so mostly from the Judeo-Christian tradition). 

Even Richard Dawkins has had to admit that the quest for absolute standards of right and wrong - which exclude the existence of God - is doomed to failure: “It is pretty hard to defend absolute morals on anything other than religious grounds” he writes.

It’s rare I can say this, but I am glad to agree with Professor Dawkins this time.

Make no mistake, if there is no God it’s your morality against mine - and there are no measures, no standards, no criteria to determine which of us is right. 

One of us might think that killing old people is fine because they are a burden on society. And one of us might say that it is wrong because it is wrong (ultimately because all people are created in the image of God and therefore should be treated with respect and dignity from the beginning of life to its end). 

I just hope that if and when my loved ones become acutely disabled, the good guys are still making the rules.

To sum up, if a good God who opposes evil exists, then whether we believe in him or not, we should expect that all human beings would have a hard-wired sense of morality – which is, in fact, exactly what we observe.

As the Apostle Paul put it:

When outsiders who have never heard of God’s law follow it more or less by instinct, they confirm its truth by their obedience. They show that God’s law is not something alien, imposed on us from without, but woven into the very fabric of our creation. There is something deep within them that echoes God’s yes and no, right and wrong. 

(Romans 2.14-15, the Message Version) 

This is another area incidentally, where science – for all its worth – cannot help us. Science is inadequate as a giver or measure of moral values.

As Oxford Professor of Mathematics John Lennox has succinctly put it; “Science can tell you that if you put strychnine in your grandmother’s tea it will kill her. Science cannot tell you whether you ought or ought not to do so in order to get your hands on her property.”

Bottom line: the issue of right and wrong is only discernible by the human soul made in the image of a just and holy God to whom everyone will one day be required to give an account. 

That's the sixth of the 26 reasons why I am a Christian.