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A moral argument for the existence of God

A moral argument for the existence of God

Last updated on: November 11, 2020 at 10:11 pm by Dan Peterson

A moral argument for the existence of God 2020-11-11T22:11:34-07:00 Dan Peterson

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Please note that “The Temple on Mount Zion,” the Fifth Interpreter Matthew B. Brown Memorial Conference — jointly sponsored by the Interpreter Foundation and the Brigham Young University College of Humanities — will be held this coming Saturday, 7 November 2020, and will be streamed online, accessible at no charge:

2020 Temple on Mount Zion Conference

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Also now available from the Interpreter Foundation:

Interpreter Radio Show — October 18, 2020

The 18 October 2020 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show featured Bruce Webster and Kris Frederickson. The first portion of the show was a roundtable discussing the upcoming Come Follow Me lesson #46 (Ether 12-15). Then, in the second hour, they discussed the Church’s return to open attendance during the COVID-19 pandemic.

And, from Jonn Claybaugh:

Come, Follow Me — Study and Teaching Helps: Lesson 44, November 9-15: Ether 1-5 — “Rend That Veil of Unbelief”

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This entry is inspired by, and to an extent dependent upon, Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith (Downers Grove: IVP and Nottingham: Apollos, 2011), 330-338:

A basic, barebones “moral argument” for the existence of God might run along the following lines:

Objective moral truths exist.
A moral and personal God offers the best explanation for the existence of such objective moral truths.
Therefore, it is likely that a moral and personal God exists.

Such an argument should never deny the easily demonstrated fact that non-Christians, including atheists, can both possess and act in accordance with true moral principles. Moreover, a person may realize — may know — that stealing is morally wrong without knowing or being able to articulate the ultimate reason why stealing is morally wrong.

But are there objective moral truths? Is there an actually existing reality to which our moral views aspire to point and in accordance with which good people seek to live?

Biblical authors seem to have thought so. For example, at Romans 2:14-15 Paul claims that all peoples have “the work of the law written on their hearts” simply by virtue of being God’s creatures. And the prophets of the Hebrew Bible believed that the nations around them were accountable to God for their actions because, even though they had not been given the law of Moses, they had sufficient moral knowledge to know good from evil (see, e.g., Jonah and Amos 1-2).

However, different societies have made demonstrably different moral judgments, which seems to suggest that such moral judgments inextricably depend upon contingent cultures. But if this is so, then there are, it seems, no moral truths that transcend human culture or apply to all societies, cross-culturally. On this understanding, what is “moral” is simply what is regarded or defined as “normal.” Morality would be, in this case, no more universal than tastes in food, fashions in clothing, and preferences in hair styles. We don’t seriously say that tacos are “right” while Wienerschnitzel is “wrong.” Narrow ties and wide ties are fashion questions, not questions of objective rightness or wrongness. (Bow ties, of course, are another matter: They’re an offense against all that is good and decent.)

Moreover, if what is moral is simply what is “normal” in a society, what about those who, for whatever reason, are alienated from their society? Are they — to either their delight or their distress — morally homeless, without a moral system in which to live?

Worse, what about what has been called “the reformer’s dilemma”? If what is socially “normal” is, by definition, what is right and moral, on what grounds can a would-be reformer object or seek change? Discrimination against women, for instance, has been codified in many cultures and societies for centuries. How can a believer in women’s suffrage or in equal pay or equal treatment under the law justify deviation from the norm? If the Third Reich advocates the extermination of the Jews, that is the “normal” for Germany and its dominions. Is it immoral to resist or to object? Did William Wilberforce, John Newton, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Harriet Beecher-Stowe violate morality in advocating the abolition of slavery? Should they be condemned as deviants? Does the reformer’s moral authority come down, really, just to a matter of naked force or to a mere popularity contest?

Here is.a passage from Martin Luther King’s famous 16 April 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail”:

A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.

Clearly, Martin Luther King believed that there exists a higher standard than merely what is regarded as “normal” in a given society.

Actually, though, it doesn’t logically follow from the fact that cultures differ on matters of morality that all moral judgments are equally good, acceptable, or “true.” That there is disagreement about a matter doesn’t necessarily indicate that all opinions on the matter are equally valid. The Aztecs regarded it as a moral imperative to capture non-Aztec warriors and sacrifice them by ripping their still-beating hearts from their chests. Some in India thought it very important to burn widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Some Muslims insist on female genital mutilation. Many cultures have believed slavery to be both natural and good. And the list is long. But we don’t simply shrug these things off as examples of “different strokes for different folks” or of the principle de gustibus non est disputandum. Martin Luther King’s famous paraphrase of Theodore Parker — “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” — says essentially nothing if there is no “objective” meaning for the word justice. At most, it would simply indicate that things change.

Moreover, there is arguably less diversity between different cultures about fundamental human values than many believe. Variations of the “golden rule,” for instance, can be found across cultures and throughout world history. As the prominent anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn (1905-1960) pointed out:

Every culture has a concept of murder, distinguishing this from execution, killing in war, and other “justifiable homicides.” The notions of incest and other regulations upon sexual behavior, the prohibitions upon untruth under defined circumstances, of restitution and reciprocity, of mutual obligations between parents and children — these and many other moral concepts are altogether universal. (Clyde Kluckhohn, “Ethical Relativity: ‘Sic et Non,'” Journal of Philosophy 52 [1955]: 672)

C. S. Lewis, too, argued for the existence of an objective moral order — which he called the Tao — in The Abolition of Man (1943). He identified eight basic “laws” as components of the Tao:

The law of general benevolence: (a) negative and (b) positive
The law of special benevolence
Duties to parents, elders, ancestors
The law of justice: (a) sexual justice, (b) honesty, (c) justice in courts, etc.
Duties to children and posterity
The law of good faith and veracity
The law of mercy
The law of magnanimity

In fact, cultural variations may create variety in moral behavior and the implementation of moral principles even if the fundamental moral truths acknowledged by each society are more or less the same. Thus, the principle of respect for one’s parents has led some cultures to the practice of euthanasia or senicide (abandoning or even killing the elderly and the infirm), while it inspires other cultures to venerate them and to care for them at great expense. Respect for the dead motivates the building of funeral pyres, the construction of platforms to expose corpses to carrion birds or other forms of “sky burial,” cremation, interment, and so forth, but the motivating principle remains respect for the dead. The principle is more or less the same, while the rules derived from it vary.

To be continued.

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