Yesterday on the way to work I was listening to a podcast by atheistic philosopher, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, based at Duke University in North Carolina. He was ridiculing the idea that you have to have a God in order to have morality. There were many aspects of his reasoning I found suspect, including the way he simply lumped all religious thought together and treated it as basically homogeneous. He argued that morality can be grounded in the simple principle that it IS wrong to hurt other people, which he treated as a self-evident, common sense truth. Again I found this specious for various reasons.
But as he talked one thing in particular struck me. Sinnott-Armstrong argued that if we remove God from the picture it makes no real difference. We would still have morality. However, in so arguing Sinnott-Armstrong made the fundamental mistake of treating God as if he was nothing more than a concept, a human creation (remember all religions are the same in this respect for him). What must be understood against this is that not merely the concept of God serves as the indispensable foundation for morality, but more particularly, the reality of God - the living presence of God.
Not one of us would draw another breath were it not for the life-giving and life-sustaining presence of God. We do not live in a Deist’s universe - a universe that has been wound up like a clock and left to run automatically on its own. The entire fabric of the universe, every expression of energy and movement and progress is utterly and completely dependent on the presence and power of God. Of course, all materialists like Sinnott-Armstrong see is the material - they are engaging reality only at one level of observation, and not the deepest and most profound level at that, as Paul clearly teaches at Romans 1:19-20). The reality is that if God withdraws his presence the universe crumbles.
Let us suppose God merely withdraws his presence in a more limited manner so as to leave people entirely to their own devices. In Romans 1 Paul describes what happens when God, in judgment, gives people up to do what they want. Their lives inevitably are characterised by ever-increasing manifestations of wickedness. Here is what Paul says in verses 28-31:
Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God [that is, relational, not merely intellectual knowledge], he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.
That’s what happens when God gives people over to do whatever their depraved minds lead them to do. It’s not so much the absence of a concept or the presupposition of God which leads to the tragic disintegration of moral behaviour. More telling still is the withdrawal of God’s restraining influence.
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Posted October 22, 2009
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