If you've ever paid close attention to two people in an argument, you will likely hear blatant objectivity brought to the forefront of the squabble. I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: ‘How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?’—‘That’s my seat, I was there first’—‘Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm’—‘Why should you shove in first?’—‘Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine’—‘Come on, you promised.’ People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.[1]
One may not realize that in arguments like these, there is often an appeal to a higher authority in which morality is rooted. For Christian believers, our morality is founded in God given principles, ethics, and values.
However, one does not have to be a Christian in order to appeal to a moral authority outside of themselves.
Nevertheless when this happens, they are appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed.[2] This "law" or "rule" was often called the Law of Nature, and it includes things like gravity, or even heredity. In all objective truth, these things can not be disobeyed. Everytime you jump from the peak of a cliff to the cool water that lies below, the Law of Gravity will be honored. As much as you disagree with it, it cannot be disobeyed. However, the clarification of what is considered the Laws of Human Nature accepts the likelihood that could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.[3] Each man is at every moment subjected to several different sets of law but there is only one of these which he is free to disobey. but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses. This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.[4]
If morality is relative, can we truly blame the Nazis for their agregious acts against Jews?
French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain helped draft the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948), which recognizes “the inherent dignity” and “the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.” Further, it affirms: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” What is missing, though, is any foundation or basis for human dignity and rights. In light of the philosophical discussion behind the drafting of the Declaration, Maritain wrote: “We agree on these rights, providing we are not asked why. With the ‘why,’ the dispute begins. The dispute about morality involves a host of questions about whether objective/universal moral values exist and whether humans have dignity and rights—and if so, what their source is. Are moral values emergent properties, supervening upon natural processes and social configurations, or are beliefs about moral values an adaptation hard-wired into human beings who, like other organisms, fight, reed, flee, and reproduce? Does God offer any metaphysical foundation for moral values and human dignity, or can a Platonic, Aristotelian, categorical imperative (Kantian), or Ideal Observer ethic adequately account for them?[5] John Rist has observed that there is “widely admitted to be a crisis in contemporary Western debate about ethical foundations.” It seems that taking seriously a personal God and Creator, who is the infinite Good and source of all finite goods—including human dignity—would go a long way in providing the needed metaphysical foundation for human rights and objective moral values. Apart from such a move, it seems that the crisis may become only more pronounced.
If objective moral values exist, we have good reason for believing in God. Of course, a successful moral argument does not reveal that the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus exists—a full-blown and robust theism. The moral argument, however, can be supplemented with other successful theistic arguments and with God’s specific revelation in Jesus of Nazareth.[6]
The moral argument is one of the most compelling ways to reach others when discussing the existence of God. This is just one of many useful tools in our arsenal, when defending the existence of God! Be sure to keep up with our latest in this 5 part series by signing up the Tradition First Newsletter!
C. S. Lewis, “God and the Moral Law,” in Christian Apologetics: An Anthology of Primary Sources, ed. Khaldoun A. Sweis and Chad V. Meister (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012), 171.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 172
Ibid., 174
Ibid., 190
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