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The Moral Law
Posted
by
arsindelve, Executive Director, Delve Christian Ministries
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The moral law provides extremely compelling evidence that we were created for a purpose and with an expectation of how we ought to behave. From this, we can deduce that our creator is "good" and is interested in also having us be "good". This is a God who is active and immanent in our lives, otherwise God would have no interest in our behavior. If our creator is interested in our behavior, it strongly suggests He wishes to have a relationship with us.
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There are many avenues to learning about God through nature. Scientists have been unlocking the mysteries of the universe for thousands of years, discovering the often beautiful and elegant ways in which God formed the world and its inhabitants. Francis Collins who headed the human genome project, called DNA, "the language of God" and remarked that after decades of study, we now understand the code which God used to create mankind. Recently, astronomers and cosmologists have discovered the incredible precision in the fine-tuning of the universe which permits life to exist.
Yet, perhaps one of the simplest and most often overlooked methods of learning about God rests within each one of us. There is something unique about our level of consciousness, self-awareness and ability to overrule our instincts. What do we learn when we look inside ourselves and reflect on the qualities which set us apart from other animals?
We discover that there is something inside all of us which compels us to behave in a certain way. This compulsion is to do what society calls, "good". By nature, we desire to do decent, charitable acts and to avoid causing pain or suffering to anyone. We do not always comply with this desire, and when we fail to do so, we experience the odd sensation of guilt. Most commonly, people will call this a conscience, or we can call this desire, as C.S. Lewis did, the Moral Law.
We see dozens of examples of this moral law in effect every day. Accuse someone of doing something which is generally accepted as being "wrong" and the most common response you will get is either a denial or an excuse. The person will claim that you don't understand their extenuating circumstances, or that you've misunderstood what's really going on. They will defend to you how their actions do not constitute a "wrong."
But when confronted with an obvious wrongdoing, how often will someone reply, "What are you even talking about? Of course I did it and there's nothing wrong with it." It's extremely rare. Now, accuse someone of doing something very ordinary, such as eating lunch at noon, and that is exactly what they will say.
These everyday exchanges give us a glimpse of the moral law at work. Why does someone defend their actions in the first example but not the second? When you accuse your coworker of theft, why does she defend herself, but when you accuse another of eating lunch, he thinks you irrational. There must be some common standard of right and wrong about which we all, for the most part, agree. If this were not the case, no one would ever defend themselves. They would simply ask, "By what standard do you judge me?" Each time we defend ourselves we are acknowledging that indeed, there is a standard. It is God's moral law.
If you are now shaking you head and saying, "We defend ourselves because we will be punished if we do not" then you might be right. It's true that we sometimes break laws with which we do not agree and then defend ourselves rigorously simply to avoid the punishment. But then you are confronted with the issue of how our government came to have laws at all. How can it be that every country on earth has a law against murder? You may be one of the few who thinks that murder is acceptable and will defend yourself against the charge to avoid jail, but then you still have to explain why it is that almost everyone else on earth emphatically disagrees with you.
With few, if any, exceptions, this moral law is relatively constant from nation to nation across the span of human history. There have been variations in such things as sexual permissiveness or legality of incest from one culture to another, but there has never existed a culture where it was generally and widely acceptable to force a woman to have intercourse against her will. Forget all your social conditioning for a moment and ask yourself why this should be the case. It's difficult to come up with an explanation for why rape is wrong, except to simply say that it is. It's self-evident to everyone.
Yet, there are rapists and murderers in our midst. Does this sink the argument for the moral law? On the contrary. Some people have become extremely adept at ignoring the desire to do good and the guilt which comes as a consequence of our failure to do so, but it remains that there was first something there to suppress. No one is born numb to the moral law; they must be taught this behavior by a parent who is already numb to it, or else circumstances cause them to suppress it over time. It also occurs that some extremely rare people never have this desire to do good (or an aversion to causing harm). Our reaction to these people -- calling them psychopaths and locking them up -- reinforces the idea that this desire to do good is something real in the rest of us. We instinctively feel that it is proper that we should have a conscience and are repulsed by anyone who lacks one.
Now consider what happens when we obey they moral law. Most people will agree that doing good makes us feel good. Performing acts of kindness and charity rewards us with a deep and lasting sense of joy and peace. It's true that we can also find some happiness from breaking the moral law, such as if we were to embezzle money and spend it on a nice new car. Yet, beyond the initial guilt, most criminals find that their happiness is fleeing and hollow. When we pursue happiness through breaking the moral law, a constant level of happiness becomes elusive, as we have to sink further and further into depravity to maintain the same level of happiness. It's a downward spiral into misery.
We also find that this moral law defines all naturalistic explanations. It could only have derived by means of evolution if it served to further the species. Such a "naturalistic law" if it existed would place the highest value on preserving any healthy life which is capable of reproducing. Yet, we find the moral law sometimes compels us to place other values above life. For example, we will send our young men to fight a war and risk their lives for the principles of freedom and righteousness. Furthermore, a "natural" law as opposed to a "moral" law would place almost no value on lives which are unhealthy, cannot reproduce or cannot contribute to society. Such a law would not compel us to care for the elderly, sick or crippled, yet we find the moral law obliges us to do exactly that. A young woman will fight to the death to save her baby, yet her instincts if guided only by a consideration of the of survival of the species would prescribe that she save herself and then go on to have more children.
To further see just how different a "natural" law would be from our actual moral law, consider the example of a nation where the government puts to death all of the crippled, unintelligent or sterile people among them. Most of us would feel justified in waging a war to topple this heinous government; it is exactly what the moral law would compel us to do. Yet consider for a moment that what this government is doing is exactly what a "natural" law, - one arisen solely from evolutionary processes - would compel them to do. If this were all the moral law consisted of preserving the young and healthy among us - then we would be violating our own "natural" law by sending people to die at the hands of a government which was doing only what was natural. So, clearly, the moral law is something far more than an instinctive desire to preserve our species. It cannot have purely evolutionary roots, since preservation of the species is precisely what concerns evolution.
If you find this example far fetched, consider the historical example of World War II where something very much like this actually happened. Though their campaign of mass execution began with the Jews, the Nazis ultimately had their sights set on any man or woman who did not fit their genetic ideal. The Nazis wanted to bring about a race of supermen through a campaign of purging and purification.
In their defense at the Nurnberg trial following the war, the Nazis asked how another nation could presume to impose their morality on another sovereign nation. Where do we get the moral laws that transcend the society, they asked? They argued that no such transcendent law exists and accused the allies of imposing their morality arbitrarily simply because they were the victors in the war. The judges disagreed. There is, they contended, just such a moral law and the Nazis had violated it. For the most part, the rest of the world agreed as witnessed by the massive, worldwide opposition to the Nazi's atrocities.
So, if this moral law is something real, what can we learn from it? It provides extremely compelling evidence that we were created for a purpose and with an expectation of how we ought to behave. From this, we can deduce that our creator is "good" and is interested in also having us be "good". This is not the cold, indifferent God of the Deists; this is a God who is active and immanent in our lives, otherwise God would have no interest in our behavior. If our creator is so interested in our behavior, it strongly suggests He wishes to have a relationship with us.
We have thus arrived at a very basic definition God and we did so without consulting any ancient texts or examining any religious doctrine. We simply looked inside ourselves - at how we were made to behave - and there we found God.
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