By Brad Warner
Contributor
In a letter last week, Grant Baker complained that my previous article, “The incredible ‘god’ of entertainment,” wasn’t clear enough for his liking. Among others things, I was inconclusive, non-committed, and mysterious.
Mr. Baker’s central complaint appeared to be that I was intentionally bewildering people for some nefarious purpose. Yet what I found quite interesting was Mr. Baker’s moral statement about what I wrote: “It’s obviously not moral.”
Now one thing that Mr. Baker and I agree on is that there’s real right and wrong. And he is either making an objective moral value claim or he’s making some form of subjective statement. If it’s subjective, it has no moral force; but if he believes what I wrote is really wrong, that’s curious.
For it’s plausible, that apart from God, objective moral values do not exist. Notice I am not saying that people, whether or not they believe in God, cannot recognize objective morality. I believe that everyone, unless they are morally damaged, can recognize objective moral values.
But it is difficult to provide a foundation for objective moral values apart from God.
If one is committed philosophically to Naturalism (the idea that there’s only natural ‘stuff’ in the universe, no supernatural ‘stuff’), it is difficult to ground any type of objective morality. That’s why atheistic philosophers of science like Michael Ruse confirm this point.
He says the position of the modern evolutionist is that humans have an awareness of morality because such an awareness is of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory.
When someone says, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, and any deeper meaning is illusory.
Ruse basically says that if naturalistic evolution is true, objective morality is illusory.
But if Mr. Baker thinks that “bewildering people is objectively immoral,” and not in some sense just subjective or relative, then he’s committed to the objectivity of moral values. But if objective moral values cannot exist without God, and objective values do exist, then it follows inescapably that God exists.
Brad Warner is a pastor at Burnett Fellowship.