Do Moral Facts Point to God?

Philosopher Immanuel Kant once remarked, “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”[1] The metaphysical question of what ultimate reality is and how it is best explained has been the topic of thought of some of the greatest minds throughout history. For some, the deeper questions of life are too terrifying to even think about. But for those who take reality seriously, thinking critically about the observations Kant observed are not an option. Because the human mind is finite and the knowledge one can possess is limited, approaching these grand questions should be done humbly and judiciously. However, it does not follow that because the finite human mind cannot comprehend all things that it cannot apprehend anything.

As it pertains to the metaphysical question of ultimate reality, or what kind of world this is, there are only two options: theism or atheism. Either God exists or he does not, there is no in between. Due to the numerous and extensive arguments for God's existence, the most persuasive evidence comes from a cumulative-case approach. The strongest argument for God's existence seems to be the impossibility of the contrary. The most convincing explanation for the universe's intelligibility, the laws of logic, and the "moral law within" is the Christian God as depicted in the Bible. Apologist Greg Koukl calls this the “superior explanatory power of Christian theism.”[2] This is also what is called an abductive logical argument, and it is this type of argumentation that the case for theistic objective morality can be demonstrated. As long as one does not allow a priori presuppositions such as metaphysical naturalism or methodological naturalism to limit their conclusions, then the Christian worldview is the best metaethical explanation of reality as it pertains to moral facts, epistemology, transformation, and rationality.

Moral Facts

            In his contribution to Robert Garcia’s work entitled Is Goodness Without God Good Enough? Richard Swinburne raises a thought-provoking question, “What difference does God make to morality?”^[3] For many, the question of morality is rarely given much attention, but rather assumed in thought, speech, and behavior. For others, the proposition that God is necessary for morality is offensive and absurd, for it is quite obvious that one does not need to believe in some “fairy in the sky” to be a good person. However, the question Swinburn raises has to do with ontology, not epistemology, and therefore has serious, and potentially eternal, implications.

The distinction of moral ontology and moral epistemology is one that must be made in any consideration or discussion of ethics. While moral epistemology refers to how one might come to know what is right and what is wrong, moral ontology, from the Greek ontos meaning being, is concerned with the mere existence of good and bad/right and wrong. The issue of moral ontology has often been referred to as the “grounding” or “authority” problem of morality. Every worldview, for it to be coherent, must provide an explanation for the existence of moral values and obligations. Concerning obligations, C. Stephen Evans writes, “The concept of an obligation is one of a “deontic” family of concepts, which include “being forbidden,” and “being permitted,” as well as “being obligatory.”^[4] The question then is not how one knows morality, but why something is really bad or really good in the first place, and why one ought to do the good and refrain from the bad.

In the opening chapter of Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis observes what he calls the “two facts (that) are the foundation to all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.”[5] These two facts are that all human beings have an idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and that they fail to behave in this way, sometimes referred to as the “moral gap”. At this point, the focus is on Lewis’ first observation that all humans everywhere, in their language, thoughts, and behavior, assume as a sort of first principle that there is a way people ought and ought not behave. Nowhere is this more evident than in the “problem of evil.”

In the chapter entitled “Evil: Atheism’s Fatal Flaw” his book Street Smarts, Greg Koukl makes the argument that genuine evil is actually evidence for the existence of a good God and against atheism, not the other way around.[6] What Koukl is getting at is that there must be a transcendent and objective standard of morality if there is a “problem of evil” in the first place. This standard cannot be a construct of society, for societies are comprised of individuals, and not only would that make morality a matter of mere opinion, but there would be no room for judging other societies as good or bad, right or wrong. No, the very fact that people recognize evil as a genuine moral atrocity “suggests a moral compass” and that “there is a way things ought to be, and evil is a departure from that.”[7] George Mavrodes referred to this as the “queerness of morality in a Russellian world.” By Russellian he meant reality as observed by atheist Bertrand Russell who commented that “man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms.”[8]

It would seem then that there must be a better explanation for the moral values and obligations that human beings not only recognize but live in such a way as if they objectively exist. This better explanation has been called the Divine Command Theory, an attempt to ground moral facts in the commands issued by a divine being. While there have been several variations of DCT throughout philosophical historical thought dating back to Plato and his “Euthyphro Dilemma”, a divine command theory in which the good is grounded in the character of God himself and the right grounded in the commands issued by this good God make the most sense of the moral facts that humans observe and ought to obey. Francis Beckwith makes a profound observation in his work Relativism that “when we abandon the idea that one set of laws applies to every human being, all that remains is subjective, personal opinion.”[9]

____________

Citations

[1]  Immanuel Kant and Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, The Critique of Practical Reason: 1788 (South Bend, IN, Blacksburg, VA: Infomotions, Inc.; Virginia Tech, 2001).

[2] Gregory Koukl, Street Smarts: Using Questions to Answer Christianity’s Toughest Challenges (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Reflective, 2023), 88.

^[3] Richard Swinburne, “What Difference Does God Make to Morality?,” in Is Goodness Without God Good Enough? A Debate on Faith, Secularism, and Ethics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 151.

^[4] C. Stephen Evans, God and Moral Obligation (Oxford University Press, 2014), 3.

[5] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, in The Complete Signature Classics (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 18.

[6] Gregory Koukl, Street Smarts: Using Questions to Answer Christianity’s Toughest Challenges (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Reflective, 2023), 107.

[7] Paul Copan and Kenneth Duncan Litwak, The Gospel in the Marketplace of Ideas: Paul’s Mars Hill Experience for Our Pluralistic World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 147.

[8] George Mavrodes, “Religion and the Queerness of Morality,” in Rationality, Religious Belief and Moral Commitment: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Robert Audi and William J. Wainwright (Ithica: Cornell Press, 1986), 579.

[9] Francis Beckwith and Gregory Koukl, Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air (Grand Rapids, Mich: Baker Books, 2000), 20.