God's Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (8 page)

The moral law is written on the heart of every person. If there are things that are wrong, regardless of the country, culture, or context they are committed in, then there is an ultimate law and therefore
lawgiver. Lewis spoke about the existence of a transcendent
moral
law that is pressed upon the hearts of every person.

Harris, on the other hand, attempts to establish a “moral landscape” without God: “Science can, in principle, help us understand what we
should
do and
should
want . . . to live the best lives possible.”
¹²
But science has its limits. Even British
agnostic
David Hume, famous for his writings against belief in
miracles
, argued that no description of the way the world is scientifically can tell us how we ought to live morally.
¹³
But Harris attempts the impossible in trying to do just this. He states his own version of a universal moral truth very succinctly: “I am arguing that, in the moral sphere, it is safe to begin with the premise that it is good to avoid behaving in such a way as to produce the worst possible misery for everyone.”
¹⁴

So according to Harris,
morality
comes down to this: judge your actions by whether they hurt everyone. Does this mean that if my actions hurt only a few, I’m okay? That’s like someone who committed a murder standing before the judge and saying, “I know I killed that man, but think of all the people in this town that I didn’t kill.”

T
HE
C
ATEGORICAL
I
MPERATIVE

In direct contrast to Harris is Immanuel Kant, an eighteenth-century philosopher who spoke of the evidence of God coming from the “starry sky above me and the moral law within me.”
¹⁵
In other words, the natural order of the cosmos spoke of the existence of God, and the moral order within us does as well. Kant explained morality in terms of this axiom, possibly giving
a hint of the type of
language
Harris attempts to employ: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”
¹⁶
This was what Kant called the
categorical imperative
.
¹⁷
In other words, judge the rightness of your actions by asking this question: What if everyone acted this way? This truth is synonymous with what Jesus taught in the
golden rule
: “Do to others as you would have them do to you” (Luke 6:31
NIV
).

It’s almost humorous how atheists both affirm this moral law taught by Jesus and simultaneously downplay its importance, referring to it as common sense. That’s because they are projecting the cultural backdrop of the twenty-first century on previous generations. Historically the golden rule is a complete reversal of the survival-of-the-fittest mind-set of the past. Can you imagine Alexander the Great or
Napoleon
agreeing to live by that rule?

Friedrich Nietzsche, who heralded the phrase “God is dead,” also asserted that with the death of God came the death of
morality
. By saying God is dead, he did not mean he believed in a God who existed then literally died. He saw it as the death of the idea of the
Christian God
. He understood the implications of eliminating this ideal in terms of its impact on morality. “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident. . . . By breaking one main concept out of [Christianity], the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands.”
¹⁸

When the restraining force of God and His
knowledge
are removed, evil is free to fully express itself.

D
ARWINIAN
E
THICS?

Let’s for a moment look at the primary scientific story of our existence and major alternative to believing in a divine Creator, Darwinian evolution. It claims all of the species that exist today have come through the process of natural selection, or as Herbert Spencer called it, “survival of the fittest.”
¹⁹
Weaker organisms are eliminated as natural selection picks the stronger genes to pass to the next generation. Elements of this theory are unquestioned and verified from a scientific standpoint, yet the real question remains: Is that the whole story; is there no other law or influence at work in our midst?

Let’s return to the question of why humans possess this universal
sense of right and wrong
. Good and evil exist, and we know it. How could a blind process such as natural selection, which came into existence by chance, produce this universal sense of right and wrong? If life arose spontaneously from random chemical processes, we would have no more
moral
obligation than a bowl of soup. Amazingly, evolutionists tend to distance themselves from the ethical and philosophical implications of Darwinian evolution. Thomas Huxley, known as “Darwin’s bulldog,” tried to say that this instinct of survival of the fittest should be resisted. “The ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.”
²⁰
Combating it? That would mean denying our evolutionary
instincts
programmed into our
DNA
. As Richard Dawkins insisted, “DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”
²¹
If DNA neither knows nor cares, then how do you explain the fact
that we can know and care? Why would we care if our genetic
wiring
were just the opposite?

Why do we know that we should fight these instincts? In a debate with the
archbishop of Sydney
, Dawkins flatly stated that living by Darwinian ethics wouldn’t be pleasant, demonstrating the inconsistency and contradictory nature of those who claim there is no God and we are the product of blind forces:

I very much hope that we don’t revert to the idea of survival of the fittest in planning our politics and our values and our way of life. I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist. It’s undoubtedly the reason why we’re here and why all living things are here. But to live our lives in a Darwinian way, to make a society a Darwinian society, that would be a very unpleasant sort of society in which to live.
²²

This attitude seems to be in direct contrast to the emphatic statements that our purpose is simply to propagate our
DNA
, and our DNA doesn’t care, and the universe doesn’t care.

Why do we still care? Aldous Huxley, grandson of Thomas, would see the
evolutionary
worldview as liberation from that struggle. Far from an object lesson on how not to live life, Darwinian evolution was
freedom
to live as one pleases. He said, “For myself, no doubt, as for many of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of
morality
. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.”
²³

W
ITHOUT
G
OD
, A
LL
T
HINGS
A
RE
P
ERMISSIBLE

During the nineteenth century,
Russia
was experiencing the birth pangs of its future upheaval. In the face of a rising tide of atheism
and nihilism
, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s books such as
Crime and Punishment
and
The Brothers Karamazov
spoke to the sluggish conscience of a nation. The warning rang out through his writing: “without God all things are permissible.” Jean-Paul Sartre, himself an atheist, connected the absence of God with the absence of real
moral
foundations.

Existentialists . . . find it extremely distressing that God no longer exists, for along with his disappearance goes the possibility of finding values in an intelligible
heaven
. . . . Nowhere is it written that good exists, that we must be honest or must not lie, since we are on a plane shared only by men. Dostoyevsky once wrote: “If God does not exist, everything is permissible.”
²⁴

Dostoyevsky’s own
suffering
led him to a religious awakening that gave him relief for the rampant despair of the age. While in prison he read the New Testament and discovered the difference between a dead religion and a relationship with Christ. “It is the belief that there is nothing finer, profounder, more attractive, more reasonable, more courageous and more perfect than Christ, and not only is there not, but I tell myself with jealous love that there cannot be.”
²⁵
The rationale that if you eliminate God, you’ve taken away the foundation of
morality
still must be addressed. In an almost blind leap of faith, by denying God,
atheists simply assert that they are moral and have a basis for morality without God. The problem is, they never identify it. It’s simply asserted and assumed. Dawkins made this assertion in a public debate in Birmingham against John Lennox: “I cannot conceive of a logical path that says because I am an atheist therefore it is rational for me to kill or murder or be cruel.”
²⁶
It was precisely this fact of the logical movement of atheism toward violence and cruelty that made the twentieth century the bloodiest in history. The godless regimes of Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot eclipsed the horrors of previous centuries primarily because the moral restraint was removed when God was eliminated from their thinking. Without God, moral commands are met by the schoolyard cry of, “Says who?” Why should we obey any moral commands if they are simply one group’s opinion?

M
ORAL
L
AW
E
XISTS TO
P
ROTECT
U
S

Skeptics claim that if God is a loving Father, then He should be held responsible for not doing something about evil and suffering. Let me offer an analogy from my own life. As a father of five children, I prepare my children to face the challenges of evil in the world. The most important lesson I try to teach them is to first keep evil subdued in their own hearts. They are taught to walk wisely in their relationships with others. They are also taught to care for their physical health and protect themselves from being exposed to harmful influences. I do everything to prepare them to face people who would intentionally hurt them or circumstances that could be dangerous. Using wisdom and common sense, they can avoid an enormous amount of pain, at
least the part that is self-inflicted. The other pain that comes from the evil actions of others can be either avoided or understood in a clearer way.

In the same way, God gives us instructions on how to live our lives so as to avoid the maximum amount of pain. His commandments are like signs in the road warning us of coming danger. If these signs are heeded, we have a better chance to experience greater joy and peace in the long run. God is not just a Father. He is the Creator who designed a planet with a multitude of interconnected parts, systems, and processes. Imagine stepping into a complex factory where the activity is necessary for the successful operation of the systems but hazardous to the humans if they come in contact with it without taking the necessary precautions. Understanding your environment would be crucial for your survival. God created a
world
where humans are exposed to factors that are necessary to their ecosystem and the proper functioning of the planet at large but are also harmful to people if they come in contact with these elements in a wrong way. Science, medicine, and reason are helping us become aware of ways to avoid these things and find cures when we are afflicted. Technology that can help humanity can also be harmful if abused. God gives us wisdom to improve our lives and rid our world of disease, poverty, and abuse. To be angry with God for allowing evil is to be angry with Him for allowing you to be born and live.

He gives us not only understanding to harness the physical world around us and the dangers that are present but also insight into the unseen spiritual world. There are not only evil humans but evil spirits. Far from a premodern view that all disease and mishaps are due to spirits that must be pleased and appeased, there are evil entities that we must be aware of. Jesus dealt first
with these evil entities at the
beginning
of His earthly ministry (Mark 1:21–27). Later Peter would tell the Gentiles, “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the
Holy Spirit
and with power, who went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil” (Acts 10:38). God’s mercy is demonstrated by His becoming a man in Jesus Christ and dealing with our ultimate enemy who lives in the unseen world.

The skeptical mind scoffs loudly at this, but there is evidence of this unseen evil entity that inspires and energizes evil in humans. This evil may be ignored by Western culture and its
naturalistic
worldview, but evil is understood very well by the non-Western developing world, which constitutes two-thirds of the planet.

T
HE
O
RIGINS OF
E
VIL

So where did evil come from? Did God create it? How could a loving, all-powerful God subject us to this kind of a world? The answer is straightforward: God created beings who had the capacity to fail. Failing meant making the choice
not
to do good. From the beings we call
angels
to the humans made in His image, God’s creations have real power to make real choices. If God created us without that right and ability, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

In countries where dictators rule, fundamental freedoms such as
freedom
of speech and freedom of expression are missing. We live in a world where God allows the atheist, skeptic, and believer to express themselves. Christopher Hitchens used to say that he refused to believe in God as a
Supreme ruler
because a
world ruled by God he envisioned as “a celestial
North Korea
.”
²⁷
The irony is that the world he lived in was made by God and was the furthest thing from the cruel dictatorship he wrongly compared it to. In North Korea Hitchens never would have been able to voice such an opposing view of the leader. He never would have been heard from. In God’s world Hitchens had a real choice. God gave us this right to choose, realizing that we would make the wrong choice. This started with angels and spread to men. The fact that God didn’t create a species of robots that had to obey Him blindly underscores the awesome privilege and responsibility we have for making choices.