In building a case for belief in God, the cosmological and teleological arguments appeal to evidence in the world around us, whereas the anthropocentric arguments rely on our own capacity to exercise thought.  Our minds provide such evidence because we are made in God's image.


The Argument


The best statement of the moral argument appears in C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. Briefly stated, a similar version of the argument goes as follows:

  1. Every human being has a sense of right and wrong, a conscience. We all understand what guilt is. Never has there been a human being who altogether escaped its accusing finger.

  2. We perceive moral value as objective rather than subjective. For example, if I see a vandal breaking a windshield, I perceive not only the incident itself but also its moral significance as external to my own mind. The car is real. The boy is real. The shattering of glass is real. Also, the wickedness of what the boy does is real. I see the wickedness as inherent in the vandalism, not as a product of my own judgment.

    Throughout every day we all have experiences of the same kind. We see something that triggers within us an immediate recognition of wrongdoing. The wrongness of it seems to reside in the offensive act itself, not in our personal view of the act. Upon reflection, we might decide that our judgment is subjective or even incorrect, but at the moment of the act, we have no doubt that the moral value we place on it is objective.

    Anyone who denies that he himself perceives moral value as objective may in fact be hampered by a defective conscience, or by a conscience so habitually suppressed that it no longer functions normally. Yet at the very least, every man unfailingly perceives that a correct opinion is good objectively, not just subjectively. That is, every man feels that it is truly and certainly good to be right. Any man without such a feeling would not care whether he was right or wrong. He would not defend himself. Nor would he speak at all, for all speech serves to promote an opinion.

  3. We rightly accept our moral perceptions as correct. In general, I believe something is real if I perceive it as real. Suppose I walk out of my garage and find a bicycle lying in the driveway. I have no doubt that it is there. I believe in its presence as firmly as I believe in anything. Why? Because my sense of vision has brought to my conscious mind an image of a bicycle. The image appears wholly objective; that is, it differs from images that I can readily identify as the work of dream or imagination. In every respect my perception of the bicycle points to something real. What do I conclude? Do I ponder the image and debate its significance? Do I question whether a bicycle is truly there? Do I feel that there are any grounds for doubt? Of course not. What I perceive leads directly to the conviction that I see a real bicycle. I come to this conviction without taking any intermediate steps of further scrutiny.

    The act of vandalism suggests a similar analysis. Before I believe the act to be wicked, I have already perceived it as wicked. The belief follows directly from the perception. Should I doubt my conclusion? In my interaction with the physical world, I trust my sensory perceptions for two reasons. First, I assume that my five senses have been built to assure correct results. Second, experience has shown that my perceptions are reliable. Why then should I not trust my moral perceptions? They are trustworthy for comparable reasons. First, it is a good assumption that whatever made my conscience certified that it would function correctly. Second, my conscience has always been a dependable guide to moral judgments.

    The analogy between sensory perception and moral perception therefore suggests that we have as much basis for believing that things are good or bad as for believing that physical things exist.

  4. The objectivity of moral value points to a Creator. How could there be objective moral value in a universe evolving by chance and containing only matter in motion? Such value could exist only in a universe created by a moral Being—that is, by God.

A Counterargument


Evolutionists respond to our reasoning by reminding us that a worldview distinguishing right from wrong helped man in his struggle for survival. From the perspective of social psychology, field of my doctorate, man and his primate ancestors became predisposed to live in social groupings because these afforded a safer life, and for man in particular, all social norms including moral standards arose because of their value in protecting social units from forces that would otherwise demolish them.

There is no doubt that for man and many other species, social cooperation is a huge safeguard against many dangers. And there is no doubt that moral convictions make it easier for men to live together in peace and harmony. But the practical value in good ethics by no means undermines the moral argument for the existence of God. Let me offer three critiques of any attempt to portray morals as simply a byproduct of evolution.

  1. A strong inner sense in every member of a social group that it is wrong to victimize others by violence or thievery or slander certainly helps this group to meet the challenges of life in an uncertain world. But in the experience of every human society, one enormous threat to survival has always been neighboring societies. The villages or tribes that are actually most successful are the ones who reject general moral standards and prey mercilessly upon their neighbors. The demands of survival might have favored evolution of a strong sense of duty to a local leader and a strong sense of obligation to help close family and friends, but not a general capacity for guilt after doing harm to any human being.
  2. No evidence of inhibition against attacking a same-species individual who does not belong to one’s local group appears in any subhuman species, even in those with fairly elaborate social structures.
  3. Deeply implanted in every person's mind is a sense of duty to honor the dictates of conscience. Its dictates are not nebulous feelings, but a set of clearly formulated ideas implanted in the mind. They are no less than the very law of God. Every human being who has ever lived has known by instinct, not by training, that it is wrong to hurt other people. God has made us so that when we heed His law, we feel peace, but when we disobey, we feel guilt. Yet the essence of conscience is not these feelings, but the law dictating right choices. Since abstract principles in the form of moral law exist solely in the realm of thought, they cannot be the product of biological evolution.

The Scriptural Basis


Paul teaches that there is not only a law written on parchment or paper, but also a law written on the "heart," which evidently refers to that deeply implanted detector of right and wrong that we call conscience.

14 For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves:

15 Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another.

Romans 2:14-15

By whom is the law written on the heart? Paul does not answer the question explicitly, but clearly he means that the writer is God. Only a moral Creator could be the source of man’s moral intelligence. The righteousness of the source is reflected in how quickly an uneroded conscience responds to things good and bad and in how keenly it feels the difference.

Footnotes

  1. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (orig. pub., 1952; repr., London and Glasgow: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1960)