Atheism and Morality

My friend Jeff Robinson yesterday posted the following snippet of Albert Mohler’s recent message at a church meeting on the campus of the Univ. of Louisville.

I think the question is morally and intellectually significant. If there is no God, if the Bible is not His revealed Word to us and if it’s just a human artifact, then it would frankly be immoral to try to advise persons on the basis of the Bible now. We don’t go back to anything else that is that old and say, ‘This is how you should live your life.’ I’m thankful we don’t have doctors who use Galen’s medical books from ancient Greece. I don’t want my house designed by somebody that doesn’t understand anything about modern engineering. But when it comes to morality, we as Christians keep going back to the Bible. When it comes to basic worldview issues, plausibility structures, truth, we keep going back to the Bible saying, ‘God is here speaking to us.’ If that isn’t true, we are immoral people. We are about an immoral experiment, because we are telling people, ‘You need to organize your life this way, we know the truth about you, we know the truth about what God intended for us and our sexuality, we know what God thinks of marriage. It is for God’s glory and your good, your thriving, your happiness, that you are organizing your life this way.’

If the Bible is not the Word of God, then we are just the agents of prejudice, and agents of a system that, frankly, is making claims that would be immoral to make, that would be overreaching, that would be spectacular. If God is not speaking to us in the Bible, then we’d better shut up. And when you have a contentious issue, a very controversial issue like sexuality and sexual orientation, that’s where it comes down to the fact that, if there is a God, not merely a deity, but the God of the Bible is indeed the God who is, then the issue of sexuality is very limited in terms of any elasticity. To put it bluntly, in the Bible, we find a very tightly defined understanding of human sexuality. It’s not only heterosexual; it’s monogamous marital heterosexuality. The Bible is very restrictive monosexuality, in terms of the norm, is that human beings are to be related to each other sexually in one and only one way and everything that falls short of that, everything that is other than that, whether heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, you name it, is wrong. And you have an entire structure of law in the Old Testament that is incredibly specific about exactly what this is…It is very clear. And we believe as Christians that it is essentially for our good. Then in the New Testament, you have the law of Christ that is deeply rooted in the very same understanding of sexuality—restricted to heterosexual marriage.

This is where this plays into atheism: if indeed there is not God, then there are no rules. If evolution is the only mechanism and if a naturalistic worldview applies, then you can’t bring any ‘ought’ into this other than the naturalistic ‘ought’ of natural selection. You could say this is a behavior that does not lead to optimal reproduction, but you could come back and say that reproduction is not the only issue, we seem to be reproducing just fine and that’s not all that important and the rules are off. I would say that is true when it comes to sexuality, but that is true when it comes to any area of morality; if there is no God, then there is no judge at the end and there is no lawgiver at the beginning, so everything moral is by definition constantly socially negotiable. There is the great divergence. If there is no God, not everything is permitted—no sane society or group permits everything—but it is a process of constant, necessary social negotiation. If there is a God and He does exist and He has spoken in the Word, we’ve got very little room for negotiation. It’s a very tight understanding of human sexuality to God’s own glory, by His own creative purpose and, as He has the authority to tell us, for our good, our thriving, our happiness as well.

You can watch the entire message here and read Robinson’s blog on the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

The Greatest Commandment

I just began reading Philosophy and 24: The World According to Jack, a book on the moral and ethical issues in the popular television series 24.  While people have different reasons for their interest in the series (and suffering withdrawal between seasons), mine comes from watching and assessing the moral dilemmas that are presented over and over again, often in the heroic character (?) of Jack Bauer.  If you are a 24 fan this is a must read, especially as an introduction to utilitarian and deontological ethics.

In the book, philosopher Randall M. Jensen defines moral reason: “A moral reason is a reason to do something because it’s the right thing to do and not for some other reason, such as because it will impress someone or because it will please me or whatever else.  While moral philosophers argue about exactly what counts as legitimate moral reason, it’s pretty safe to say that moral reasons usually concern how we treat other people” [p. 5, italics his, bold mine].

For the Christian, questions of moral reasoning are defined in and by the ethical imperatives of Scripture.  We are given some pretty clear mandates on how we are to treat other people, most notably by the command to love God, neighbors, and self.  This has been called the sommum bonum, Latin for “the greatest good” [see David Clyde Jones, Biblical Christian Ethics, chapter2, "The Goal of the Christian Life"].  Further, this ethic is expanded on, particularly in the ‘One Another’ passages in the New Testament epistles.  A series of messages on these texts can be downloaded here.  As Jack would say, “You’re running out of time!”