Re-introducing the Moral Argument
A new series of posts on how the Christian God best explains our longing for the moral good
Arguments for and against the existence of God abound throughout church history. There is nothing new under the sun. It would be tempting to believe that all of the best (and worst) arguments for the God of Christianity have been tried and found wanting over the course of the last 2,000 years—since we not only still have atheists (smart ones, at that) but live an increasingly secular society.
I certainly have been guilty of that. Not believing that there is no good argument for God—I am still a Christian, don’t worry—but believing that an argument is not the way to draw someone into belief. God is the one who has to do the work: to instill faith in the hearts of men, to give sight to minds blinded by sin, etc.
And certainly all that is true. God is the one who has to do the work—not only am I a Christian but a Calvinist, to boot! Yet, there remains a place for apologetical work. Not necessarily because new, better arguments need to be made (although I doubt we’ll ever exhaust the ways in which God’s existence and glory can be seen in the world), but because old, classic arguments need to be repeated. I can see two reasons for this, at least:
God does draw new believers through apologetic work. Apologetic arguments are not foolproof ways to bring someone to faith, certainly—you don’t logic your way into salvation. Yet, God does use the gift of reason to get people to see the light! My confidence in salvation of unbelievers can’t come from my own crafting of arguments, but God can and does use those arguments.
Believers are strengthened in their faith by such work. My personal opinion is that it is a very few number of believers that reach glory without at least a brief stay in Doubting Castle. Certainly, the ultimate key to unlock the doors of doubt are the promises of God, but one way that the Lord instills faith in us that is ready to believe those promises is through intellectual assent to the fact that God is real and can promise things! At my lowest moments, some of my greatest comfort has come from apologetic arguments that squash the doubts of my soul.
Anyway, all of that is simply to say that apologetics actually can and does matter in the 21st century. And I’d add this: It matters because ultimately, what apologetics does is tell a better story of the universe and ourselves than any worldly alternatives. And that is, after all, what I want my writing, and my life, to point to: The best story that is compelling because it’s beautiful and hopeful because it’s true— the true myth, you might say.
Now, I’m not going to start an apologetics blog. But, as I am struck by the better story (and want to keep exercising this shamefully weak writing muscle), I will occasionally dip my toe into the ocean of apologetics.
And that is where I find myself today.
A Series of Moral Arguments
As our church was preaching through the first two chapters of Romans this past fall, I was once again struck by the compelling nature of the moral argument for God’s existence, goodness, and justice.
Paul is utilizes something adjacent to the moral argument, in Romans 2:14-15:
14 For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. 15 They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them
Now, this isn’t the moral argument, per se. Paul isn’t, after all, trying to prove that God exists. But he is using the same principles and assumptions as the moral argument—not to prove that God exists, but to prove that God is just to judge all human beings, no matter their access to the written law of God.
Regardless of Paul’s intentions, though, this sent me down a rabbit hole of reflection on the moral argument for a week or two, and this is my attempt to synthesize those thoughts and resources into a multi-part writing project. So, expect a few more of these posts over the next few weeks.
But first, I want to finish this piece by briefly laying the foundation of what the moral argument is and is not.
Foundations of a Moral Argument
The moral argument, simply, is the argument that the best explanation for objective moral instinct in human beings is the existence of an all-powerful Creator God. To put it another way: real, meaningful morality can only exist if there is an all-powerful God with the right to impose that morality on his creation.
In other words, all of us intrinsically believe in some kind of right and wrong, and we live that way!1 We may not always agree upon the details of what is right and what is wrong, but we agree on quite a bit, and we always agree that there is such a thing as right and wrong.
We’re not just talking about internal disappointment or frustration that we’ve been inconvenienced in some way. If someone is distracted and backs into my car in the parking lot, I’m going to be frustrated and upset with them. If a kid is walking through the parking lot bashing windows in with a baseball bat, I’m going to have a totally different level of moral outrage. Because I have a sense that that is wrong. It goes totally against a moral standard within each of us.
So, the argument goes, if we share an awareness of moral standard, a standard outside of ourselves that honors courage and sacrifice, a standard that values truth and loyalty, a standard that holds us to something—then that objective standard had to come from somewhere, something greater than ourselves.
Now, some important caveats:
The moral argument is not saying that only Christians can be moral.
This seems to be a common misconception: “I can’t believe you would say that only people who believe in God can be moral!”
All of us know people who profess zero faith of any kind and yet are perfectly nice, even loving and kind, people. All of us know people who profess faith (Christian or not) and are—to borrow an older word—horrid.
This has nothing to do with whether individual people feel moral instincts or can act in a generally moral capacity. In fact, part of the argument here is that all humans do have moral instincts and act in moral capacities, regardless of their religious identity. The question is: Where does the instinct to be “moral” come from?
My confidence in the moral argument doesn’t stem from the fact that nobody can come up with any other explanation.
Plenty of objections or alternative solutions have been proposed over the years. Clearly people can come up with some interesting hypothetical workarounds. I’ll look at some of them later in this series.
My contention is that all of those workarounds have significant issues that you have to grapple with—and most of us don’t ever grapple with them. And my hope for this series of articles is to do just that.
Next up: The Christian Case for Objective Morality
Of course, there are some people who say that morality doesn’t exist, there is no objective right and wrong, but they don’t actually live as if this is true. More on this to come.