Morality

Note: Last Updated 7/29/2024.

Christian Smith:

…if we are intellectually honest we will see that a belief in universal benevolence and human rights as moral fact and obligation does not make particular sense, fit well with, or naturally flow from the realities of a naturalistic universe. One who believes in a naturalistic cosmos is, it seems to me, perfectly entitled to believe in and act to promote universal benevolence and human rights, but only as an arbitrary, subjective, personal preference—not as a rational, compelling, universally binding fact and obligation. The person who lives in a naturalistic universe may certainly choose to affirm universal benevolence and human rights. But they might equally reasonably choose some other, quite or even radically different moral position. At bottom, they do not occupy moral grounds for making compelling and binding claims on others on behalf of universal benevolence and human rights.

(Christian Smith, “Does Naturalism Warrant a Moral Belief in Universal Benevolence and Human Rights?” In: The Believing Primate: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Reflections on the Origin of Religion, eds., Jeffrey Schloss, Michael J. Murray, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], p. 294.)

Luc Ferry (Atheist Philosopher):

…the Logos, which as we as have seen for the Stoics merged with the impersonal, harmonious and divine structure of the cosmos as a whole, came to be identified for Christians with a single and unique personality, that of Christ. To the horror of the Greeks, the new believers maintained that the Logos – in other words the divine principle – was in no sense identical with the harmonious order of the world, but was incarnated in one outstanding individual, namely Christ.

     Perhaps this distinction leaves you stone cold. After all, what does it matter – for us, today – that the Logos (for the Stoics a ‘logical’ ordering of the world) came to mean Christ as far as Christians were concerned? I might reply that today there exist more than a thousand million Christians – and that for this reason alone, to understand what drives them, their motives, the content and meaning of their faith, is not absurd for anyone with a modicum of interest in their fellow men. But this answer would be inadequate. For what is at stake in this seemingly abstract debate as to where the divine principle resides – whether in the structure of the universe or in the personality of one exceptional man – is no less than the transition from an anonymous and blind doctrine of salvation to one that promises not only that we shall be saved by one person, Christ, but that we shall be saved as individuals in our own right: for what we are, and as we are.

     This ‘personalising’ of salvation allows us firstly to comprehend – by means of a concrete example – how mankind can pass from one vision of the world to another: how a new response to reality comes to prevail over an older response because it ‘adds’ something: a greater power of conviction, but also considerable advantages over what had preceded it. But there is more: by resting its case upon a definition of the human person and an unprecedented idea of love, Christianity was to have an incalculable effect upon the history of ideas. To give one example, it is quite clear that, in this Christian re-evaluation of the human person, of the individual as such, the philosophy of human rights to which we subscribe today would never have established itself.

(Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living, trans. Theo Cuffe, [New York: Harper Perennial, 2011], pp. 59-60.)

Cf. Timothy Keller:

     By resting its case upon a unique definition of the human person (as image-bearer of God) and an unprecedented idea of love (as the origin, purpose, and destiny of the world), Christianity was to have an incalculable effect upon the history of ideas and the development of culture. If not for the Christian view of the individual, for example, the philosophy of human rights to which we subscribe today would never have emerged. Christianity held that all human beings are made in the image of God and therefore have an inviolable right to be treated with honor and love, regardless of whether they culturally, morally, and personally appeal to or offend us. The sweeping nature of this ethical principle is startling, and nothing of its kind was produced in pre-Christian cultures. …this understanding of human rights grew out of the soil of the Christian belief in the image of God.

(Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work, [New York: Dutton, 2012], p. 208.)

Cf. Luc Ferry (Atheist Philosopher):

The Greek world was fundamentally an aristocratic world, a universe organised as a hierarchy in which those most endowed by nature should in principle be ‘at the top’, while the less endowed saw themselves occupying inferior ranks. And we should not forget that the Greek city-state was founded on slavery.

     In direct contradiction, Christianity was to introduce the notion that humanity was fundamentally identical, that men were equal in dignity – an unprecedented idea at the time, and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance. …This may seem self-evident, but it was literally unheard-of at the time, and it turned an entire world order upside down. 

…Although at times hostile to the Church, the French Revolution – and, to some extent, the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man – owes to Christianity an essential part of its egalitarian message. We see today how civilisations that have not experienced Christianity have great difficulties in fostering democratic regimes, because the notion of equality is not so deep-rooted.

(Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living, trans. Theo Cuffe, [New York: Harper Perennial, 2011], pp. 72, 73, 74-75.)

Cf. Os Guinness:

Human rights can no more be taken for granted today than belief in God in a senior common room in a modern university. Take the three core notions that many modern people still consider self-evident and unassailable: human dignity, liberty and equality. Along with a whole range of beliefs in the modern world, there is confusion as to how they are to be understood and a yawning chasm as to how they are to be grounded. Originally pioneered in the West and grounded in Jewish and Christian beliefs, human dignity, liberty and equality are now often left hanging without agreement over their definition and their foundation. …If the original Jewish and Christian foundations of human dignity, liberty and equality are to be rejected, the ideas themselves need to be transposed to a new key or eventually they will wither. The Western world now stands as a cut-flower civilization, and such once-vital convictions have a seriously shortened life.

(Os Guinness, The Global Public Square: Religious Freedom and the Making of a World Safe for Diversity, [Downers Grove: IVP Books, 2013], p. 65.)

Jean-Paul Sartre (Atheist Philosopher):

     If one considers an article of manufacture—as, for example, a book or a paper-knife—one sees that it has been made by an artisan who had a conception of it; and he has paid attention, equally, to the conception of a paper-knife and to the pre-existent technique of production which is a part of that conception and is, at bottom, a formula. Thus the paper-knife is at the same time an article producible in a certain manner and one which, on the other hand, serves a definite purpose, for one cannot suppose that a man would produce a paper-knife without knowing what it was for. Let us say, then, of the paper-knife that its essence—that is to say the sum of the formulae and the qualities which made its production and its definition possible—precedes its existence. The presence of such-and-such a paper-knife or book is thus determined before my eyes. Here, then, we are viewing the world from a technical standpoint, and we can say that production precedes existence.

     When we think of God as the creator, we are thinking of him, most of the time, as a supernal artisan. Whatever doctrine we may be considering, whether it be a doctrine like that of Descartes, or of Leibnitz himself, we always imply that the will follows, more or less, from the understanding or at least accompanies it, so that when God creates he knows precisely what he is creating. Thus, the conception of man in the mind of God is comparable to that of the paper-knife in the mind of the artisan: God makes man according to a procedure and a conception, exactly as the artisan manufactures a paper-knife, following a definition and a formula. Thus each individual man is the realization of a certain conception which dwells in the divine understanding. In the philosophic atheism of the eighteenth century, the notion of God is suppressed, but not, for all that, the idea that essence is prior to existence; something of that idea we still find everywhere, in Diderot, in Voltaire and even in Kant. Man possess a human nature; that “human nature,” which is the conception of human being, is found in every man; which means that each man is a particular example of a universal conception, the conception of Man. In Kant, this universality goes so far that the wild man of the woods, man in the state of nature and the bourgeois are all contained in the same definition and have the same fundamental qualities. Here again, the essence of man precedes that historic existence which we confront in experience.

     Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man or, as Heidegger has it, the human reality. What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing—as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. 

…The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good à priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse. For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one’s action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism—man is free, man is freedom. Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimize our behavior. Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free.

(Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism;” In: Perspectives on Reality: Readings in Metaphysics from Classical Philosophy to Existentialism, gen. eds. Jesse A. Mann, Gerald F. Kreyche, [New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc, 1966], pp. 597-598, 601. Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet, [London: Methuen, 1973], pp. 26-28, 33-34.)

C. S. Lewis:

But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbors or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.

(C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, [New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1984], p. 26.)

Josh D. McDowell, Sean McDowell: 

The New Atheists enthusiastically denounce religion as evil while praising science as good. But this raises an awkward dilemma for the atheist: If there is no God, where do moral obligations come from in the first place? If “there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world,” as Dawkins proclaims, then what does it mean to say that evil exists? Since moral values do not have physical properties such as height, width, and weight, how can we say they are real?

     The awkwardness for atheism is that it is notoriously difficult to define evil without some transcendent moral standard of good. Evil has traditionally been understood as the perversion of good. Just as crookedness implies a standard of straight, evil implies a standard of good. C. S. Lewis famously said that a bent stick only makes sense in light of the concept of straight. Similarly, there can only be evil if there is first good. But if there is no God (as the New Atheists proclaim), then what is good? Even the late atheist J. L. Mackie recognized that objective morals were unlikely to arise apart from an all-powerful God.

     …In his public debates, Christopher Hitchens regularly challenged his opponents to give a single example of a moral action that atheists cannot do. Of course, there are none. Many atheists are kind, charitable, and hardworking people. But Hitchens’s challenge misses the larger point: How can atheism itself make sense of moral obligations in the first place? If there is no God, how do we ground good and evil? Atheism is silent on this issue. Thus, ironically, one of the most common objections to God ends up being one of the best reasons to believe in him.

(Josh D. McDowell, Sean McDowell, More Than a Carpenter, [Crownhill: Authentic, 2011], pp. 57-58.)

Richard G. Howe:

     A Classical Moral Argument. How does this give us a classical moral argument for God’s existence? Notice what the classical approach does not argue. The popular, contemporary moral argument says that God is necessary for morality’s objectivity. But in the classical tradition, morality’s objectivity good for a human being is to be the kind of being a human ought to be by virtue of human nature. The good of any being is to gain the perfections (i.e., to progress toward its end or telos) it ought to have by virtue of its nature. A human ought to have certain perfections because of what it means to be a human. Thus, it is not the objectivity of morality that is in question. What is in question is how the elements constituting human morality point to God as the ultimate explanation for human morality.

     …The classical moral argument, then, can take that which is known about morality and demonstrate what must be true about reality to account for morality. Having identified this, those same aspects can be “rearranged” to formulate a classical cosmological argument like the one laid out above. Human morality concerns itself with human teleology, which is to say, human good. But what is good for a human arises from the fact that human beings have natures or essences. This also points to final causality and efficient causality. Human nature (or essence) can be distinguished from a given human’s existence. But anything that has existence, yet whose existence is not because of its nature or essence, can only have existence because it is being given existence (i.e., caused) by something whose essence is existence itself. And all people know this to be God.

(Richard G. Howe, “What are the Classical Proofs for God’s Existence?” In: The Comprehensive Guide to Apologetics, ed. Joseph M. Holden, [Eugene: Harvest House Publishers, 2022], pp. 86-87, 87.) Preview.

C. S. Lewis:

The laws of nature, as applied to stones or trees, may only mean “what Nature, in fact, does.” But if you turn to the Law of Human Nature, the Law of Decent Behaviour, it is a different matter. That law certainly does not mean “what human beings, in fact, do”; for as I said before, many of them do not obey this law at all, and none of them obey it completely. The law of gravity tells you what stones do if you drop them; but the Law of Human Nature tells you what human beings ought to do and do not. In other words, when you are dealing with humans, something else comes in above and beyond the actual facts. You have the facts (how men do behave) and you also have something else (how they ought to behave). In the rest of the universe there need not be anything but the facts. Electrons and molecules behave in a certain way, and certain results follow, and that may be the whole story. But men behave in a certain way and that is not the whole story, for all the time you know that they ought to behave differently.

(C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, [New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1984], pp. 27-28.)

Stephen Weinberg (Theoretical Physicist and 1979 Nobel Laureate):

…science can never explain any moral principle. There seems to be an unbridgeable gulf between “is” questions and “ought” questions.

(Steven Weinberg, Lake Views: This World and the Universe, [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009], p. 21.)

Friedrich Nietzsche (Atheist Philosopher):

They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic females à la Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there. 

     We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him, what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth—it stands and falls with faith in God.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols;” In: The Portable Nietzsche, ed. & trans. Walter Kaufmann, [New York: Penguin Books, 1976], pp. 515-516.) Preview. 

Rebecca Manley Pippert:

If a God who is interested in matters of ethics does not exist, then there is no basis outside ourselves for determining what is right and wrong. I know many people who think in exactly that way, and they claim to be able to live consistently with that notion.

     They advocate ‘tolerance’ in sexual matters, for example, saying that since there is no absolute standard of morality, sexual ethics is reduced to a question of taste and preference. Nevertheless – and this is the point – those same people are rigid moralists in opposing racial prejudice, child brutality, war and so forth. And why are they against such things? ‘Because they are wrong, categorically and universally!’ they retort.

     But we cannot have it both ways. We must play by the same rules on different issues. We can legitimately and forcefully challenge them, ‘If you say there is no such thing as morality in absolute terms, then you cannot say that child abuse is always evil; it just may not happen to be your thing. And if you find you are not able to practise your premisses with much consistency, then you need to re-examine your premises.’

     Most people’s response to evil is one of horror. When we read of the Holocaust or of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans or of terrorist bombings, our immediate response is, ‘That is wrong! It is evil!’ Or when we hear of abject poverty or senseless torture, we say, ‘That is unfair, unjust!’ Or conversely, when we see a masterpiece, we say, ‘It is beautiful.’ In all this we are seeing people responding to the fact that they are made in the image of God – a good God, a God of beauty.

     Our feelings of justice, of goodness and of beauty stem from the God who enshrines these very qualities and who made us like himself. As C. S. Lewis says, to call a line crooked still implies we know what a straight line is. Whenever people protest against evil, it tells us they have a strong sense of what is right and are angry to see it violated. So we must ask: where do our feelings of right and wrong, evil and good, come from? What is the origin of these qualities? Where did our culture derive these strong beliefs? Is it perhaps that we are made in the image of a God whose character is good, or is it that we developed such notions under an impetus toward cultural and physical survival?

(Rebecca Manley Pippert, Out of the Saltshaker and Into the World, [Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 2003], p. 200.)

C. S. Lewis:

     My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too—for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.

(C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, [New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1984], 2.1, pp. 45-46.)

Richard Wurmbrand:

     The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe when man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil. There is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man. The Communist torturers often said, “There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish.” I have heard one torturer even say, “I thank God, in whom I don’t believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.” He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners.

(Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ, [Westchester: Crossway Books, 1987], pp. 36-37.)

William Lane Craig:

     Rather the question is: “If God does not exist, do objective moral values exist?” Like Russell and Ruse, I don’t see any reason to think that in the absence of God, the herd morality evolved by homo sapiens is objective. After all, if there is no God, then what’s so special about human beings? They’re just accidental by-products of nature that have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust lost somewhere in a hostile and mindless universe and that are doomed to perish individually and collectively in a relatively short time. On the atheistic view, some action, say, rape, may not be socially advantageous, and so in the course of human development has become taboo; but that does absolutely nothing to prove that rape is really wrong. On the atheistic view, there’s nothing really wrong with your raping someone. Thus, without God there is no absolute right and wrong that imposes itself on our conscience.

(William Lane Craig, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, God? A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist, [New York: Oxford University Press, 2004], p. 18.) Preview. 

William Lane Craig:

…just assume gratuitously that on a naturalistic view of man, some feature of human existence, say, pleasure, is an intrinsic good, and they proceed from there. But the advocates of such theories are typically at a loss to justify their starting point. If their approach to meta-ethical theory is to be what Frank Jackson has called ‘serious metaphysics’ rather than just ‘a shopping list’ approach, whereby one simply helps oneself to the supervenient moral properties needed to do the job, then some sort of explanation is required for why moral properties supervene on certain natural states. 

(William Lane Craig; In: Does God Exist? The Craig-Flew Debate, ed. Stan W. Wallace, [Burlington: Ashgate, 2003], p. 171.)

David C. Downing:

     In his essay “De Futilitate” (1940), Lewis confesses that in his youth he wrote reams of poetry amplifying on a line he found in A. E. Housman about “whatever brute and blackguard made the world.” But eventually he realized there was a catch in his stance of heroic pessimism: “If a Brute and Blackguard made the world, then he also made our minds. If he made our minds, he also made that very standard whereby we judge him to be a Brute and Blackguard. And how can we trust a standard which comes from such a brutal and blackguardly source?” In other words, if you reject God because there is so much evil in the universe, you are obliged to explain from whence you obtained your standard for discerning good and evil.

(David C. Downing, The Most Reluctant Convert: C. S. Lewis’s Journey to Faith, [Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004], p. 54.) Preview. 

Leo Tolstoy: (Ivan Ilyich)

     ‘But what is this? What for? It cannot be! It cannot be that life has been so senseless, so loathsome? And if it really was so loathsome and senseless, then why die, and die in agony? There’s something wrong.’

     ‘Can it be I have not lived as one ought?’ suddenly came into his head. ‘But how not so, when I’ve done everything as it should be done?’ he said, and at once dismissed this only solution of all the enigma of life and death as something utterly out of the question.

     ‘What do you want now? To live? Live how? Live as you live at the courts when the usher booms out: “The judge is coming!” . . . The judge is coming, the judge is coming,’ he repeated to himself. ‘Here he is, the judge! But I’m not to blame!’ he shrieked in fury. ‘What’s it for?’ And he left off crying, and turning with his face to the wall, fell to pondering always on the same question, ‘What for, why all this horror?’

     But however much he pondered, he could not find an answer. And whenever the idea struck him, as it often did, that it all came of his never having lived as he ought, he thought of all the correctness of his life and dismissed this strange idea.

(Leo Tolstoy, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich;” In: Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich: And Other Short Stories, trans. Constance Garnett, [London: William Heinemann, 1902], pp. 61-62.)

Jean-Paul Sartre (Atheist Philosopher):

Dostoyevsky wrote: “If God did not exist; everything would be permitted”; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point.

(Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism;” In: Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet, [London: Methuen, 1973], p. 33.)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky:

Without God and the future life . . . everything is permitted…

(Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky, [San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990], Part 4, Book 11, Chapter 4, p. 589.)

Alvin Plantinga:

     But could there really be any such thing as horrifying wickedness if naturalism were true? I don’t see how. A naturalistic way of looking at the world, so it seems to me, has no place for genuine moral obligation of any sort; a fortiori, then, it has no place for such a category as horrifying wickedness. It is hard enough, from a naturalistic perspective, to see how it could be that we human beings can be so related to propositions (contents) that we believe them; and harder yet, as I said above, to explain how that content could enter into a causal explanation of someone’s actions. But these difficulties are as nothing compared with seeing how, in a naturalistic universe, there could be such a thing as genuine and appalling wickedness. There can be such a thing only if there is a way rational creatures are supposed to live, obliged to live; and the force of that normativity—its strength, so to speak—is such that the appalling and horrifying nature of genuine wickedness is its inverse. But naturalism cannot make room for that kind of normativity; that requires a divine lawgiver, one whose very nature it is to abhor wickedness. Naturalism can perhaps accommodate foolishness and irrationality, acting contrary to what are or what you take to be your own interests; it can’t accommodate appalling wickedness. Accordingly, if you think there really is such a thing as horrifying wickedness (that our sense that there is, is not a mere illusion of some sort), and if you also think the main options are theism and naturalism, then you have a powerful theistic argument from evil.

(Alvin Plantinga, “A Christian Life Partly Lived;” In: 

Philosophers Who Believe: The Spiritual Journeys of 11 Leading Thinkers, ed. Kelly James Clark, [Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1993], p. 73.)

Timothy Keller:

…if you get rid of the idea of sin, Satan, and cosmic evil, then every bad deed has solely psychological or sociological roots. And that trivializes the suffering of the victims and the magnitude of what’s happened.

(Timothy Keller, Encounters With Jesus: Unexpected Answers to Life’s Biggest Questions, [New York: Dutton, 2013], p. 114.)

John Stott:

     Here is a basic difference between the Christian mind and the secular mind. Many secular humanists are dedicated to the service of human beings, and sometimes their compassion puts us to shame. However, if you ask them why they want to save human beings, they usually cannot answer except to mutter something about the future of the human race. But there is no basis for caring for the imbecile or the handicapped or the senile if evolutionary potential were the criterion. The logical thing to do then would be to kill people like that lest they hinder the progress of evolution. Secular humanists do not usually reach that conclusion, though, because their hearts are better than their heads and their philanthropy is better than their philosophy.

     But Christians have a better basis for serving human beings. It is not because of what they may become in millions of years in the future, but because of what they already are…

(John Stott, Problems of Christian Leadership, [Downers Grove: IVP Books, 2014], pp. 46-47.)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky:

For those who renounce Christianity and rebel against it are in their essence of the same image of the same Christ, and such they remain, for until now neither their wisdom nor the ardor of their hearts has been able to create another, higher image of man and his dignity than the image shown of old by Christ.

(Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky, [San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990], Part 2, Book 4, Chapter 1, p. 171.)

Alt. Trans. Fyodor Dostoyevsky:

For even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardour of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ of old.

(Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett, [London: Heinemann & Zsolnay Ltd, 1912], Part 2, Book 4, Chapter 1, p. 173.)

Cultural Relativism (Morality).

James W. Sire:

The problem is not that moral values are not recognized but that they have no basis. Summing up the position reached by Nietzsche and Max Weber, Allan Bloom remarks, “Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.”

     Remember that for a naturalist the world is merely there. It does not provide humanity with a sense of oughtness. It only is. Ethics, however, is about what ought to be, whether it is or not. Where, then, does one go for a basis for morality? Where is oughtness found?

     As I have noted, every person has moral values. There is no tribe without taboos. But these are merely facts of a social nature, and the specific values vary widely. In fact, many of these values conflict with each other. Thus we are forced to ask, Which values are the true values, or the higher values?

     Cultural anthropologists, recognizing that this situation prevails, answer clearly: Moral values are relative to one’s culture. What the tribe, nation, social unit says is valuable is valuable. But there is a serious flaw here. It is only another way of saying that is (the fact of a specific value) equals ought (what should be so). Moreover, it does not account for the situation of cultural rebels whose moral values are not those of their neighbors. The cultural rebel’s is is not considered ought. Why? The answer of cultural relativism is that the rebel’s moral values cannot be allowed if they upset social cohesiveness and jeopardize cultural survival. So we discover that is is not ought after all. The cultural relativist has affirmed a value—the preservation of a culture in its current state—as more valuable than its destruction or transformation by one or more rebels within it. Once more, we are forced to ask why.

     Cultural relativism, it turns out, is not forever relative. It rests on a primary value affirmed by cultural relativists themselves: that cultures should be preserved. So cultural relativism does not rely only on is but on what its adherents think ought to be the case. The trouble here is that some anthropologists are not cultural relativists. Some think certain values are so important that cultures that do not recognize them should recognize them. So cultural relativists must, if they are to convince their colleagues, show why their values are the true values. Again we approach the infinite corridor down which we chase our arguments.

     But let’s look again. We must be sure we see what is implied by the fact that values do really vary widely. Between neighboring tribes values conflict. One tribe may conduct “religious wars” to spread its values. Such wars are. Ought they to be? Perhaps, but only if there is indeed a nonrelative standard by which to measure the values in conflict. But a naturalist has no way of determining which values among the ones in existence are the basic ones that give meaning to the specific tribal variations. A naturalist can point only to the fact of value, never to an absolute standard.

     This situation is not so critical as long as sufficient space separates peoples of radically differing values. But in the global community of the twenty-first century this luxury is no longer ours. We are forced to deal with values in conflict, and naturalists have no standard, no way of knowing when peace is more important than preserving another value. We may give up our property to avoid doing violence to a robber. But what shall we say to white racists who own rental property in the city? Whose values are to govern their actions when a black person attempts to rent their property? Who shall say? How shall we decide?

     The argument can again be summarized like that above: Naturalism places us as human beings in an ethically relative box. For us to know what values within that box are true values, we need a measure imposed on us from outside the box; we need a moral plumb line by which we can evaluate the conflicting moral values we observe in ourselves and others. But there is nothing outside the box; there is no moral plumb line, no ultimate, nonchanging standard of value. Ergo: ethical nihilism.

(James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog: Fifth Edition, [Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2009], pp. 108-109.)

Franz Kafka (Atheist Philosopher):

I Ran past the first watchman. Then I was horrified, ran back again and said to the watchman: ‘I ran through here while you were looking the other way.’ The watchman gazed ahead of him and said nothing. ‘I suppose I really oughtn’t to have done it,’ I said. The watchman still said nothing. ‘Does your silence indicate permission to pass?’

(Franz Kafka, “The Watchman;” In: Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes: In German and English, [New York: Schocken Books, 1966], p. 81.)

C. S. Lewis:

     I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities.

     But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another book called The Abolition of Man; but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of doublecrossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to—whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.

     But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining “It’s not fair” before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties do not matter; but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong—in other words, if there is no Law of Nature—what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like anyone else?

(C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, [New York: Collier Books, 1984], Book 1, Chapter 1, pp. 19-20.)

Secularism (Morality).

David Berlinski:

     In the early days of the German advance into Eastern Europe, before the possibility of Soviet retribution even entered their untroubled imagination, Nazi extermination squads would sweep into villages, and after forcing the villagers to dig their own graves, murder their victims with machine guns. On one such occasion somewhere in eastern Europe , an SS officer watched languidly, his machine gun cradled, as an elderly and bearded Hasidic Jew laboriously dug what he knew to be his grave.

     Standing up straight, he addressed his executioner. “God is watching what you are doing,” he said.

     And then he was shot dead.

     What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown shirts, Black shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing.

     And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either.

     That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.

(David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, [New York: Basic Books, 2009], pp. 26-27.)

Victor Frankel:

     If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity, and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone. 

     I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment—or, as the Nazi liked to say, “of Blood and Soil.” 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 in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.

(Viktor E. Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972], p. xxi.)

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn:

Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

(Edward E. Ericson, Jr., “Solzhenitsyn – Voice from the Gulag,” Eternity, October 1985, pp. 23, 24; Cited in: John W. Whitehead, True Christianity, [Westchester: Crossway Books, 1989], p. 15.)

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria