This is an excerpt from Chapter 2 (The Problem of God’s Existence), from my book The Problem of God: Answering a Skeptic’s Challenges to Christianity (Zondervan, 2017).

What does the existence of objective moral values tell us about the universe in which we live? Most fundamentally, Christianity contends they point to the existence of a mind outside of us which is the standard of morality, and who ‘wired’ us with a sense of right and wrong as human beings. The Apostle Paul contends as much in his letter to the Romans: “For when Gentiles who do not have the law by nature do what the law requires…They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts while their conscience also bears witness” (Rom. 2:14-15). ‘Written’ of course implies a writer. And that rings true not only as a biblical teaching but experientially in our lives. The fact that you likely agree with the list above is evidence for an objective moral law-giver.

 

It is important to note that I am not saying that belief in a certain set of morals is necessary for them to exist; but rather that they do exist, whether a person or culture believes in them or not. This is a point often misunderstood by skeptics. In The God Delusion, for instance, Richard Dawkins cites the thought experiments of Harvard biologist Marc Hauser in his book Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, in which he proposes hypothetical scenarios about five people being saved from being hit by a train by the sacrificial death of one fat man, and five people in a hospital being saved by harvesting the organs of one healthy man in the waiting room.

 

Dawkins points out that almost everybody (97% of people) agrees that it is immoral to kill the fat man, and the healthy man in the hospital, in order to save the many. He says, “The main conclusion of Hauser and Singer’s study was that there was no statistically significant difference between atheists and religious believers in making these judgments. This seems compatible with the view, which I and many others hold, that we do not need God in order to be good – or evil.”[1] What Dawkins and others skeptics often don’t understand is that Christians agree that you do not need to be in a relationship with God, or even believe in him to be good, or to want to be good, or to know what good even is. The study simply proves what Christianity actually proposes: that every person has, what the Apostle Paul calls “a law” written in their hearts, a conscience, whether they believe in God or not. Which is actually his whole point, because Paul was talking about Gentiles who don’t believe in God in the passage!

 

This is true sociologically as well, for as we study cultures around the world we find that villages, towns and cities all create a rule of law to some degree to govern themselves. Civilization is dependent on us having things we deem to be crimes, and then punishment for those crimes. “For there is no nation so lost to every thing human, that it does not keep within the limits of some laws…. Some notions of justice and rectitude…as they could not otherwise distinguish between vice and virtue.”[2]

 

Why then do human beings disagree with one another on what is right and wrong? Why does the village believe in eating people if it’s objectively wrong? Because, like in mathematics itself, people some times get their sums wrong, but that doesn’t mean the multiplication table isn’t right, or that it doesn’t exist! Morals are not a matter of mere taste or opinion any more than math equations. Sums wrong, or not, there really is a right answer.

 

[1] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, 226.

[2] John Calvin, Romans-Galatians: Calvin’s Commentaries (Delaware: Associated Publishers and Authors, 1980), 1358.

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