Origin of Satan & Evil

God did not create Satan, He created Lucifer.  Lucifer was a mighty archangel who had charge over many other angels.  He dwelt in the glory of God in the realm of the heavenlies. 

Lucifer began to get proud and think He could be better than God. He rebelled against God and caused an uprising of angels to join forces with Him in efforts to go against God.  Due to this, Lucifer and one-third of the heavenly hosts were cast out of heaven.

To continue reading this article please click here to be taken to Helium.com where the original article is posted. 

Dorothy Sayers: The Origin of Evil

Excerpt from The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy Sayers written in 1927 on the topic of the existence of evil with regard to the existence of a good God.

Note: As an author of mystery novels and as a playwright she uses analogies of authoring a book or a poem or play in her discussion about the nature of God.

We will also remember that we are not, for the moment, discussing what happens to a bad writer. A bad writer is so clearly the author of the badness in his books that the point scarcely needs making. If the Creator of the world is wicked, then we are not - obliged to think up difficult answers to the question, "Who made the Devil?" The difficulty only arises when we say, "God made everything and God is good: then where did Evil come from?" Is there, then, within the terms of our analogy, any sense in which we can say that a good writer is the creator of artistic evil-or artistic "wrongness"?

It is here that we come up against a bunch of fascinating speculations about the "on kai me on"-being and not-being. It is all very well for Marlowe's Faustus to exclaim impatiently, "Bid oncaymeon farewell"-the inquisitive mind finds it very difficult to bid farewell to this intriguing subject. "Being" we can make a shift to understand, but what is "not-being"? If we propose to ourselves to "think about nothing", we find we have engaged in a very difficult exercise. It does not seem to be quite the same as "not thinking about anything". "Nothing" only seems to remain nothing so long as we refrain from thinking about it; any active thought is apt to turn it into a "sort of a something"-it acquires, in fact, precisely that vague and disquieting sort of reality that we are accustomed to associate with the minus signs in algebra. Professor Eddington has put the essentials of the problem neatly before us in the riddling query: "Is the bung-hole part of the barrel?" It depends, as he says, on what you mean by "part"; it may also depend, to some extent, on what you mean by the "barrel". This is where we get tied into knots over the definition of Evil as the "deprivation of Good"; we have to explain to ourselves why this wholly negative concept takes on the appearance of a very positive and active phenomenon.

"He created the world out of nothing"-nothing existed before it was made; that is, colloquially speaking, easy. It is less easy if it presents itself in the form: Before the creation of anything, nothingness existed. The somethingness of nothingness attains in the minds of some philosophers so convincing an aspect of reality, that they ascribe to it qualities and a mode of existence. _ Berdyaev finds in the nothingness that preceded creation the origin and abode of freedom, including the freedom of will;

'The world and the centre of the world-man, is the creation of God through Wisdom, through Divine Ideas, and at the same time it is the child of meonic untreated freedom, the child of fathomless non-being. The element of freedom does not come from God the Father, for it is prior to being.... Fathomless freedom springing from non-being entered the created world, consenting to the act of creation.'

And he adds:

If we think deeply and consistently we are compelled both to identify evil with non-being and to admit its positive significance. Evil is a return to non-being, a rejection of the world, and at the same time it has a positive significance because it calls forth as a reaction against itself the supreme creative power of the good.' ( Nicholas Berdyaev: The Destiny of Man.)

The phrase in all this that is perplexing is, I think, that which asserts that meonic freedom is "prior to being". If God is the ultimate and absolute Being, then the suggestion is-not merely that "nothing is prior to God (which, in the purely negative sense is an orthodox truism), but that this nothingness is a somethingness, with a property of its own, namely Freedom, and a mode of existence of its own, namely Time. For the words "prior to suggest a priority in Time. The conclusion would seem to be that there was a time when God (who is Being) was not. Elsewhere, however, Berdyaev maintains that God exists in the mode of Eternity, which has no connection with Time at all.

Time is so intimately the mode of our own existence that it is equally difficult to conceive of Time apart from Being or of Being apart from Time. Perhaps this means that we ought not to try to conceive of them separately: for scientists frequently warn us that questions which produce meaningless answers usually turn out to have been meaningless questions. It may be more fruitful to consider Time as a part of creation, or perhaps that Time is necessarily associated with Being in Activity-that is, not with God the Father but with God the Son; with the Energy and not with the Idea.

This is where our analogy may be useful to us, by demonstrating the curious association of Not-Being with Being, and the still more curious effect that both exercise upon Time. What I want to suggest is that Being (simply by being) creates Not-Being, not merely contemporaneously in the world of Space, but also in the whole extent of Time behind it. So that though, in the absence of Being, it would be meaningless to say that Not - Being precedes Being; yet, in the presence of Being that proposition becomes both significant and true, because Being has made it so. Or, to use the most familiar of all metaphors, "before" light, there was neither light nor darkness; darkness is not darkness until light has made the concept of darkness possible. Darkness cannot say: "I precede the coming light", but there is a sense in which light can say, "Darkness preceded me".

Shakespeare writes Hamlet. That act of creation enriches the world with a new category of Being, namely: Hamlet. But simultaneously it enriches the world with a new category of Not-Being, namely: Not-Hamlet. Everything other than Hamlet, to the farthest bounds of the universe, acquires in addition to its former characteristics, the characteristic of being Not-Hamlet; the whole of the past immediately and automatically becomes Not- Hamlet.

Now, in a sense, it is true to say that the past was Not - Hamlet before Hamlet was created or thought-of; it is true, but it is meaningless, since apart from Hamlet there is no meaning that we can possibly attach to the term Not-Hamlet. Doubtless there is an event, X, in the future, by reference to which we may say that we are at present in a category of Not-X, but until X occurs, the category of Not-X is without reality. Only X can give reality to Not-X; that is to say, Not-Being depends for its reality upon Being. In this way we may faintly see how the creation of Time may be said automatically to create a time when Time was not, and how the Being of God can be said to create a Not-Being that is not God. The bunghole is as real as the barrel, but its reality is contingent upon the reality of the barrel.

Arguing along these lines, we may make an attempt to tackle the definition of Evil as the deprivation or the negation of the Good. If Evil belongs to the category of Not-Being, then two things follow. First: the reality of Evil is contingent upon the reality of Good; and secondly, the Good, by merely occurring, automatically and inevitably creates its corresponding Evil. In this sense, therefore, God, Creator of all things, creates Evil as well as Good, because the creation of a category of Good necessarily creates a category of Not-Good. From this point of view, those who say that God is "beyond Good and Evil" are perfectly right: He transcends both, because both are included within His Being. But the Evil has no reality except in relation to His Good; and this is what is meant by saying that Evil is negation or deprivation of Good.

But we have not quite finished with our Hamlet example. So long as Not-Being remains negative and inactive, it produces no particular effects, harmful or otherwise. But if Not-Hamlet becomes associated with consciousness and will, we get something which is not merely Not-Hamlet: we get Anti-Hamlet. Some one has. become aware of his Not-Hamletness, and this awareness becomes a centre of will and of activity. The creative will, free and. active like God, is able to will Not-Being into Being, and thus produce an Evil which is no longer negative but positive. ( Theologically: privatio issues in a real depravatio. -Robertson.) This, according to the ancient myth of the Fall, is what happened to Men. They desired to be "as gods, knowing good and evil." God, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, knows Evil "by simple intelligence"-that is, in the category of Not-Being. But men, not being pure intelligences, but created within a spacetime framework, could not "know" Evil as Not-Being - they could only "know" it by experience; that is, by associating their wills with it and so calling it into active Being. Thus the Fall has been described as the "fall into self-consciousness", and also as the "fall into self-will". And we may see why the Manichaeans were to some extent justified in connecting Evil with Matter; not that Matter in itself is Evil, but that it is the medium in which active Evil is experienced.

Once more, our literary analogy may be used to illustrate this distinction between Evil known by pure intelligence and Evil known by experience.

Our perfect writer is in the act of composing a work - let us call it the perfect poem. At a -particular point in this creative act he selects the "right" word for a particular place in the poem. There is only the one word

that is "dead right" in that place for the perfect expression of the Idea. The very act of choosing that one "right" word, automatically and necessarily makes every other word in the dictionary a "wrong" word. The "wrongness" is not inherent in the words themselves - each of them may be a "right" word in another place * -their "wrongness" is contingent upon the "rightness" of the chosen word. It is the poet who has created the "wrongness" in the act of creating the "rightness". In making a good which did not exist before he has simultaneously made an evil which did not exist before. Nor was there any way by which he could possibly make the Good without making the Evil as well. (*Always excepting, of course, words like "sportsdrome" and "normalcy", which are so steeped in sin that no place is "right" for them, except Hell, or a Dictionary of Barbarisms.)

Now, the mere fact that the choice of the "right" word is a choice implies that the writer is potentially aware of all the wrong words as well as the right one. In the creative act, his Energy (consciously or unconsciously) passed all the "wrong" possibilities in review as an accompaniment of selecting the right one. He may have seized immediately upon the right word as though by inspiration, or he may actually have toyed with a number of the wrong ones before making the choice. It is immaterial which he did-the Energy has to give out more sweat and passion at some moments than at others. But potentially and contingently, his intelligence "knows" all the wrong words. He is free, if he chooses, to call all or any of those wrong words into active being within his poem-just as God is free, if He likes, to call Evil into active being. But the perfect poet does not do so, because his will is subdued to his Idea, and to associate it with the wrong word would be to run counter to the law of his being. He proceeds with his creation in a perfect unity of will and Idea, and behold! it is very good.

Unfortunately his creation is only safe from the interference of other wills so long as it remains in his head. By materialising his poem-that is, by writing it down and publishing it, he subjects it to the impact of alien wills. These alien wills can, if they like, become actively aware of all the possible wrong words and call them into positive being. They can, for example, misquote, misinterpret, or deliberately alter the poem. This evil is contingent upon the poet's original good: you cannot misquote a poem that is not there, and the poet is (in that sense) responsible for all subsequent misquotations of his work. But one can scarcely hold him guilty of them.

Misquotation, misinterpretation and deliberate distortion produce the same kind of evil in different ways. We may feel that they are quite dissimilar offences. Misquotation arises from carelessness or bad memory; misinterpretation from lack of understanding; deliberate distortion from a perverted intention: we may call them mechanical (or material) defect, intellectual error, and moral wickedness. In fact, however, they have this much in common, that they all arise from the circumstance that the other person is not God and is trying to be "as God". The poet (within the terms of the analogy) is God-the one and only God of that particular creation. He is the only mind that knows its own Idea. If anybody else could be the god of the poem, his Idea would be identical with the poet's Idea, and his Energy would issue in the same "good" creation. But since that is not the case, the new will runs counter to "God's" Idea, and by associating itself with "wrong" words produces active Error.

To be sure, the new will may be full of excellent intentions. The better the intentions, the more strongly does the will associate itself with them, and the more disastrous the results. To say, carelessly, "caviare to the multitude" instead of "caviare to the general" is an error made almost without wilfulness, which does comparatively little harm to Hamlet. It is more harmful to Hamlet to quote:

more honoured in the breach than in the observance

as though it meant "more often honoured" rather than "more properly honoured", because the Idea is more violently distorted, and the loss of Power is greater. But infinitely more damaging than either to the Power of Hamlet is to behave like David Garrick, and re-write Hamlet deliberately for the express purpose of improving it. This kind of grasping at equality with God really does do untold damage. It reduces a noble work of creation to nonsense; and the excuse that Garrick thought he was making it into a better play only aggravates the presumption.

The mind of man has always appreciated this ascending scale of Evil, from the material through the intellectual to the moral. It recognises that the moral Evil is the worst, because it is associated with more will and more self-consciousness, and consequently with more Power. Power can proceed from Evil, so soon as Evil is called into active Being, because it then comes back as it were into touch with God, the ultimate Being and source of Power. For this reason it is said that all activity is of God-even evil activity. Such Power as anti-Hamlet possesses derives originally from the Power that is in Hamlet, without which it could have no Being.

What are we to do with the anti-Hamlets? In this particular case we can, to some extent, check the evil and prevent it from doing harm in the future, though its record of past evil remains. But there is a further thing we can do. We can redeem it. That is to say, it is possible to take its evil Power and turn it into active good. We can, for example, enjoy a good laugh at David Garrick. In so doing we, as it were, absorb the Evil in the anti-Hamlet and transmute it into an entirely new form of Good. This is a creative act, and it is the only kind of act that will actually turn positive Evil into positive Good. Or, we can use the dreadful example of David Garrick for edification, which is what I have tried to do here, in the hope that this will prove to be a good, creative activity.

We can do this, only if we first get back into contact with the original great Idea that was in Hamlet-since we can never see how wrong Garrick was till we realise just how right Shakespeare was. In such ways, we can (while still thinking it a pity that David Garrick ever set pen to paper) enrich the world with more and more varied Goodness than would have been possible without the evil interference of David Garrick. What we must not do is to pretend that there never was a Garrick, or that his activities were not Evil. We must not, that is, try to behave as though the Fall had never occurred nor yet say that the Fall was a Good Thing in itself. But we may redeem the Fall by a creative act.

That, according to Christian doctrine, is the way that God behaved, and the only way in which we can behave if we want to be "as gods". The Fall had taken place and Evil had been called into active existence; the only way to transmute Evil into Good was to redeem it by creation. But, the Evil having been experienced, it could only be redeemed within the medium of experience-that is, by an incarnation in which experience was fully and freely in accordance with the Idea.

A Standard For Knowledge and Morality

Note: This post began as a comment to respond to cyber kitten's comment to my last post. Due to the length I am posting it here. Please note that I am addressing the perspective shared as quoted and not suggesting it is representative of all atheists.

Cyber kitten: “I'm not sure if there is such a thing as a representative atheist just as there is no such thing as a representative theist. Personally I'm on the subjective end of the spectrum.”

I can certainly accept that there are differing perspectives within the broader atheists’ category. I try to address the main ones I have encountered. I was hoping to see what Kevin’s response was to your response before responding, but he has not weighed in yet. When I address subjectivism I am not saying that all atheists think this way, but I am addressing those who do. I am not trying to claim that all atheists think the same way. All theists are not the same. I hope everyone can understand that simply because I address a way of thinking that I am not trying to set up a straw man for all who claim to be atheists. Moreover as Quixote pointed out we may mean different things by our word choices and need to look at that before assuming what we mean.

Cyber Kitten: “I think he's right when he says that if you're not a Christian you can't really have Christian values - but of course many of the values claimed as Christian are pretty universal (the Golden rule for example).”

There are ethics that are specific to Christian teaching. I think though what I gathered from what Nietzsche was saying wasn’t simply a certain kind of morality, but the base for morality itself was nonexistent if there is no God. Again I am no authority on Nietzsche, so if anyone reading this is better acquainted with him please correct me if I err. I think he did indeed struggle with the conclusion for he saw that such a world without moral adherence would be unlivable. I think this bothered him greatly. I also see that “new atheists” do not agree with Nietzsche because morality is so widely adhered to regardless of belief in God. (see next paragraph for qualification)

However, I contend that it’s not ones belief in God or lack of belief in God which creates the need to be moral, but that we are designed by God with the moral knowledge irrespective of our environment or culture unless some stimuli robs us of our moral sense. Just the same, due to our fallen nature we often do the things we know we ought not to do even while we understand we “ought not to.” That moral awareness is a God given protection to keep us physically, emotionally, and spiritually from the consequences of living outside our created order and to draw us to Him who can supernaturally enable us to live life to the utmost – the fullest available to us which is beyond our imagination, but can be found in Him.

Cyber Kitten: “I think that largely Secular societies are 'going through the motions' where morality is concerned. Few people have any ethical training and I don't think that most people really give it much thought. Of course this doesn't mean that its either Christianity (or theism) or nothing (or nihilism). There's lots of ethical thinking out there that can be accessed by anyone with an interest in the subject.”

Small children know right from wrong even before they are taught. They will cry out “I had it first.” or “He can’t take it from me.” or “She shouldn’t hit me.” They know from a young age what’s right and wrong. All cultures have a sense of right and wrong even if they disagree on the code of ethics. Yes, much of the world simply goes through the motions. Even Christians in churches are merely trying to follow a moral code because they think they ought to, to earn favor with God. Jesus, however, came to change our nature to ones who live lives of love from a place of knowing Him and pouring out to others selflessly. Not because we follow a code of morality to earn righteousness, but because righteousness was given freely to us by God and it is He who enables us to love in a way that is impossible without being united with Him the way we were created to be. It is through that relationship with Him that we can become people who start to love like God does.

karla said: The only way to be certain is to find a stable eternal foundation for all knowledge/truth. If such a foundation doesn't exist there can be no certainty.

cyber kitten said: That pretty much is my position.

What is the point of knowing anything if it is all unknowable if there is no firm foundation? If all that you know is uncertainly known then it seems pointless to gain more knowledge. How can you trust anything you know even that there is no God? You may say given the lack of evidence it’s the surest place to be in, but if there was evidence you couldn’t trust it without believing He exist and is the eternal stable firm foundation of all truth.

Cyber Kitten said: But nothing is "wrong for all people in all times" is it?

I don’t see right and wrong as being solely culturally determined. Sure cultures create morality at times – certain dress codes or city laws etc. But over all things like child abuse, murder, rape, etc. are wrong for all times in all cultures and in all places. Even if we don’t talk specifics we know that all people (except a few with physiological disorders) have a sense of right and wrong even if the specifics are disagreed about. That knowledge of not living up to a standard of good is in all of us, we all fall short of it, every one of us.

cyber kitten said: I find it difficult to understand how anyone can say that morality is objective. There is nowhere outside of culture that we can stand to say such a thing.

Only if an eternal good God exists do we have a place to stand to know that there is objective morality and at the same time love those who fall short of the standard (which is all of us). If there is no objective standard, there is no wrong doing that means anything beyond the cultural level. Yet we all have this feeling of failure to live as “good” as we feel we ought to and yet we have no foundation to posit an “ought” without an objective standard. Otherwise we have no reason to feel we have missed the mark or to see anything another does as wrong no matter who is harmed. We have no call to claim an “ought:” without the firm foundation of an eternal good God.

If you have a piece of cloth that appears to be white and you place it up next to a piece of paper that is perfectly white you will see that the cloth looks rather dirty in contrast. The only way one could say that cloth isn’t white is in comparison to a greater standard than itself. If we look at ourselves in light of the rest of humanity we can say we are doing pretty well. We haven’t killed anyone or hurt anybody and we try to treat people well. Then we look at ourselves compared to a perfect standard, the living God, who created us and we see we aren’t so clean after all and yet there is hope for He offers to freely clean us from all unrighteousness and to show us how to live in a way that frees us from all bondages of sin. He can show us this because He sent Jesus to live the life of a man stripped of His divinity yet still being God to show us how to live a life rightly related to God. Moreover, He doesn’t ask us to live that life on our own strength, but by His strength which enables us to live like never before. Jesus took upon himself our debt to sin so that we could live a heavenly reality.

I think atheists want a solution to the evil in the world just as much as everyone else. However, if God is denied, not only is the solution denied, but also the problem. For if there is no standard then all the “evil” in the world isn’t really evil for there is no standard to judge between good and evil.

Also I have heard some say that if God exist, He is to blame for the evil because He is all powerful and hasn’t ended it. G.K. Chesterton once responded to an editorial question “What is wrong with the world?” with two words, “I am.” He knew the evil starts in our hearts and minds before it is actualized in the world. If God eradicated evil from the planet, who would be left standing? Is any heart perfectly free from evil? Is any mind perfectly good? Is any person perfectly good? God doesn’t end evil the way we want Him to because He loves us and has a better way of bringing about our redemption. The Bible says that God isn’t slow in keeping his promises as some understand slowness, but he is patient wanting none to perish. He is working in this world through those who have joined Him in Christ and through His Holy Spirit. He doesn’t force us by His omnipotence to come to Him, but He does pursue us with His love.

The Existence of Evil

If God did not create then there would be no evil. But He is a Creator by nature and His plan for all creation is greater than the existence of evil that comes from His creation rejecting Him and being separated from Him. He did not create evil. He said all He created was good. Sin entered into all creation by Adam’s sin. But even before that happened in our time, God had already purposed Jesus’ redemption in time for all mankind. He already saw the beginning from the end. It wasn’t a huge “oh, no, what have I done.” He knew all that would happen before He spoke a single thing into existence. And He sees the glory of all creation that comes through Christ and is being revealed in time. The glory of creation and of the Church being made ready as heir with Christ for all eternity far exceeds anything evil that can be brought about in this earth before evil is banished from creation.

Now is it evil for God who created a life to take a life? Life belongs to Him. He’s the author and giver of life. Life does not belong to us. It is wrong for us to take a life. It is not the same thing for God to do it. God sees the beginning from the end. He is God. Do we have cause to judge God as doing something wrong in bringing the Flood to wipe out a perverse generation and saving Noah and His family who serve Him? God’s justice was brought forth with the Flood. God’s justice was also brought forth by saving Noah.

If God does not exist, the whole discussion about good and evil and if God is good is a moot point. But if He does then the only way we know what good and evil are is because He revealed that knowledge to us and the self-sustaining self-evident God is the only standard of all holiness and righteousness.

Good and evil exist and we know the difference between them because there exists a Good God.

Also regarding suffering: see Peter Kreeft's essay.

Goodness Derives From God

I would like to address the matter of humanities knowledge of good and evil from the Christian worldview. At this point, I am going to deal with the topic in a foundational philosophical manner that would be agreed upon by all theists. While theism is broader than Christianity, Christianity has the foundational adherence to the position I am herein presenting. Therefore I am not delving into Scripture nor Christian doctrine to address this topic at this point. In future posts, I will develop it out and provide a more detailed response as prompted by questions this post will undoubtedly produce.

As far as I have deduced, my audience accepts that there are good actions and behaviors as well as bad ones and that humans for the most part know the difference between the two. Further, I think all cultures no matter how remote have a system of right and wrong even if their standard of moral judgment is different than the next culture. So where does that idea come from? How did we gain a moral construct of right and wrong? Is it mere social conditioning? Is it merely instinctual impulses of survival? Is something wrong because society says it’s wrong? Can one culture condemn the actions of another as wrong? If so, by what standard?

Theists maintain that we have knowledge of the difference between good and evil (even if we disagree sometimes on specifics) because there is a standard of good outside of nature because a good God exists. When we break from that standard we have the conscious to know something doesn’t line up with the way we are created to live. We know when something is foreign to goodness.

From what has been presented to me thus far, atheists maintain that because they know right from wrong without believing in or fearing God that is proof that moral knowledge is not something related to knowing God. However, Christians maintain that we have a moral compass even if we are not brought up in Christianity or in religion. A person in the most remote village of Africa with no contact to the outside world would have a moral compass even if some of his actions were barbaric to the civilized world. His village would still have a system of right and wrong because they are humans living in reality. Thus, atheists will have just as much knowledge of the existence of good and evil and the desire to be moral people as anyone else.

Atheists, from my rudimentary observations, maintain that Christians believe morality is connected to a system of punishment and rewards of a demanding judgmental invisible God. They believe, therefore, that Christianity is a manmade system of controlling people into an outdated conservative system of morality by manipulation and the promulgation of the fear of hell.

I can understand why it may look like this is a fair description of Christianity. If the only Christians I had ever met were the ones I encountered this summer at the beach holding signs listing sins God was going to judge people for and shouting about hell into a crowd of teenagers--I would run the other way too and declare it a barbaric brainless religion. I cannot say strongly enough that people like that are not representing true Christianity and are decidedly giving Jesus a bad name by their shameful actions. My husband, a pastor, spoke with these people when we came across them and asked that they cease antagonizing the crowd of angry youth. We emphatically urged the crowd to disperse, to no avail. They were having too much fun heckling the beach preachers. I don’t blame the young people for their responses. My husband and I were greatly disturbed by this misrepresentation of the heart of God towards people.

I would asks that people look past the extremist and religious nut cases to the real nature of truth and examine the truth claims themselves despite some of the misleading representations often depicted in the media and sometimes observed in real life. Please don’t let the attitude and actions of some keep you away from really examining the truth claims of the Christian worldview.

To touch briefly on a more specific Christian view of morality: it isn’t about adhering to rules out of fear of divine retribution or hope of divine rewards. For some, granted, it is thus. However, for many others it is simply this: that man is separated from God because of our sinful nature and consequently fails to live up to even his own standard of right and wrong perfectly. However, because Jesus paid the price of sin in our place we are freed from the bondage of sin and empowered by Christ to love and know God and love and live with our fellow humans the way we were created to do so.

What God asks from man, is not blind obedience, but a real tangible relationship that starts with accepting the free gift of salvation from sin and death offered through Jesus. Thus we become reconciled back to God, ensconced in His love, and we begin life anew learning from God how to be all he created us to be. The work Jesus did on the cross is not simply to redeem mankind, but to redeem all of creation back to its full glory.

Moral Framework

A response to http://godlesswoman.blogspot.com

I will now respond to your second objection on the topic of morality. I asserted that there is a moral law at work in humanity and that for there to be such a construct there must be a moral law giver, God.

To set it up as a syllogism it would look like this:

• If there is a moral law, then there is a Moral Law Giver.
• There is a moral law
• Therefore there is a Moral Law Giver

Let’s unpack the idea of the existence of a common moral framework in all of mankind. In use of the term “moral law” I am merely claiming there to be a moral framework at work in mankind.

There is a difference between agreement on specifics of right and wrong and a basic understanding that there is right and wrong. The specifics can be subjective at times; however, the framework is objective. For instance, you give the example of slavery.

Throughout history slavery was not always seen as wrong by all people. Even today, slavery continues in parts of the world such as in Sudan. If morality was subjective to a culture or a person, one could say that the English slave trade or the American slavery was not wrong to those who didn’t believe it to be wrong. However, I think the reality is that it was always wrong even when people justified it to be right. Also, just because a community justifies something to be right, doesn’t mean deep in their souls they know it to be right.

When someone is on trial for murder, they can submit a plea of insanity if they have no understanding between right and wrong. One of the key things the prosecutor must prove is that the Defendant not only committed the act, but that the Defendant was cognizant the act was wrong. For if the defense attorney proves through a physiologist that the Defendant has no moral understanding he is able to present the defense of insanity. So even if someone does something wrong and is convinced that it is not wrong, even in a court of law, it is still wrong and the person is seen as insane.

If morality is subjective then we have no right to judge another culture or community for doing atrocities to people such as the holocaust. However, if it is objective and all people really do know right from wrong somehow then the Nuremburg Trials were warranted. However, if moral truth is merely what a community agrees upon there could never be any justice for the millions of Jews exterminated in the concentration camps. Was this historical event evil? Or was it merely Hitler, to quote Richard Dawkins, “dancing to his DNA.”

[Regarding the Bible condoning slavery, it does not. Jesus didn’t come to force political change; that was not His mission. He knew that the heart change that happens from knowing Him would change the world and force would never produce love which was what was needed to treat people the way He designed them to be treated]

The second part of the syllogism proclaims God must exist because there is a moral framework. How else could a standard of morality exist in humanity if it were not for a conscious designer placing it there? The objective nature of a moral standard that man kind experiences guilt when he breaks it and demands justice when it is broken against him is not explained by evolution. Again that is why I maintain that non-Christians must borrow from the Christian worldview regarding these things to even posit questions about good and evil and how to differentiate between the two. It’s the only worldview that gives a good explanation about how this all works and is the most viable in corresponding to reality.

To Be Continued: Last Response Blog will address the matter of how God sees mankind in light of moral failures