Do Moral Absolutes Exist in Our World?

 
Whose Idea of Right and Wrong Is Right?
The people in the world around us embrace a number of different world views, and many of them contradict the Christian perspective. It’s often difficult to get people to even consider the Christian version of moral accountability. In fact, many resist the notion that there is an absolute morality that comes from a source higher than themselves. The question comes down to this: does morality come from people or does it come from God? Does our society shape our moral beliefs, or are they handed down to us from God? If the former is true, then we can simply follow our own path, if the latter is true, than we have a direct responsibility to our creator! The world will tell you that morality should come from people and societies and not from God:

 
Friedrich Nietzsche
“The masters have been done away with; the morality of the common man has triumphed.”

Albert Einstein
“I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it.”

 
They will also try to tell you that the idea of absolute morality is dangerous:

 
Henry Thomas Buckle
“If you can impress any man with an absorbing conviction of the supreme importance of some moral or religious doctrine, if you can make him believe that those who reject that doctrine are doomed to eternal perdition; if you then give that man power, and by means of his ignorance blind him to the ulterior consequences of his own act, he will infallibly persecute those who deny his doctrine”

Marquis de Sade
“All universal moral principles are idle fantasies.”

 
Does It Come From the Culture?
See, many people in the world have adopted the idea that our culture is responsible for our values and morals. The idea that we have somehow decided as a group what we should believe and how we should behave. Where did we decide this? Well, many would argue that it is decided every day in our courtrooms. Every day, cases are tried in our courts that have moral implications and the courts make decisions that don’t simply reflect our moral values, but actually shape our moral values. But if an issue is decided in a courtroom, does that make it right from a moral perspective?

What about the issue of abortion? Does the fact that we made it legal now mean that it is moral. On the day that this case was decided, was there actually a change in moral truth (what was morally true one day, completely changed the next)? Regardless of how you feel about the issue, it’s hard to believe that the court decision itself makes it a moral truth… What if a culture decides to overlook the killing of millions of baby girls because poverty and overcrowding are so severe that only the most treasured of children (boys, namely) are commonly desired? What if cases of this kind of infanticide never even reach the courtroom because the culture has accepted it? Does this LACK of legal intervention make the act a moral one? Clearly, whatever does or does not happen in the courtroom, the act has to be judged by another measuring stick.

What if a society repeatedly authorizes and establishes a discriminatory system like apartheid? What if the courts in that country continue to uphold the principles of this system? Are all its proponents then off the hook because they are simply responding to the values established in the court, or is there a higher authority on all this? If the society and courts are the shapers of morality, then we are powerless to judge apparent evil in the world. Even when we see an evil regime involved in incredible destruction, we will really have no right to say or do anything about it if there culture is the bottom line authority in issues of morality. This is exactly what Hitler’s henchmen stood behind when they were on trial in Nuremburg following World War 2. They were tried as war criminals for the incredible evil they inflicted on millions of war prisoners. But they argued that their culture and courts had decided this kind of behavior was legal and we had no right to try them after the fact. Clearly, we realized then that there was a higher source for deciding morality, and we were willing to appeal to this higher source in deciding the fate of these war criminals.

The Rise of Romanticism
So how did we get to a place in our own culture where we are about to reject the idea that morality comes from God, not the people or the courts? It all started in the 1800’s in a movement known as Romanticism. This movement was clearly a response to a social system in which there was a true gap between those who had everything (money and power) and were able to shape the morality of the culture, and those who had nothing (living at the lower levels of society) The Romanticists developed from the Age of Reason, which produced the ideals of political, economic, and religious freedom, individual human rights under God, and intellectual scientific endeavors. From this, the Romanticists reacted with their own versions of social justice, basically teaching that the poor are morally superior to the rich and that the criminal is somehow spiritually superior to the law-abiding citizens. This was done to force monarchies of the 1800's to change their political and elite structures. Thus evil concepts, like hell and Satan, were glamorized into glorious figures of goodness under this ideology. Good was evil and evil was good, all in order to protest moral, social, and political injustices, if imaginary or real. Romanticism became a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.

The Cause of Communism
The basic ideals of Romanticism became popularized by Karl Marx, the founder of Communism, and Friedrich Nietzsche, the founder of Nihilism, both from the 1800's. Communism is a theory and system of social and political organization that dominated much of the history of the 20th century. In theory, communism is a classless society in which all property is owned by the community as a whole and where all people enjoy equal social and economic status. As a political movement, communism sought to overthrow capitalism through a workers’ revolution and redistribute the wealth in the hands of the proletariat, or working class. Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy. While few philosophers would claim to be nihilists, nihilism is most often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche who argued that its corrosive effects would eventually destroy all moral, religious, and metaphysical convictions and precipitate the greatest crisis in human history.

Our World Today
How does all this apply to modern times? Throughout the 20th century, more and more people became educated and exposed to this spirituality, basically because the elitists of the 1800's who were taught these doctrines gave birth to more elitists who became professors, teachers, judges, and journalists, jobs that were once highly respectable and honest professions. As a result, our culture is quick to accept moral relativity and even to praise those who live a life that is contrary to the moral norm.

Our history is replete with the adoration of bad boys. We love them and promote their behavior. Our society has been captivated with known criminals like Al Capone, and Bonnie and Clyde. We’ve also loved the edgiest of celebrities like James Dean and Vin Diesel. And our sports heroes always include a healthy dose of near criminals like Dennis Rodman. Just like the romanticists of the past, we continue to lift up the lowest values in our society until there is no distinction left. All morals, either good or bad, are of equal value.

The Lie
So here is the lie that the world tries to push on us: All morality is personal. No one can judge their own morality as better than the morality of others. But if there is no common universal baseline for moral behavior, our world falls into chaos. God’s law is a necessary absolute. Let’s read Romans 7:7 from The Message paraphrase of scripture:

 
Romans 7:7
But I can hear you say, 'If the law code was as bad as all that, it's no better than sin itself.' That's certainly not true. The law code had a perfectly legitimate function. Without its clear guidelines for right and wrong, moral behavior would be mostly guesswork.

 
But God does not want our lives to run adrift in moral relativity. He has a plan and wants our lives to conform to his will. God knows that people will deny an absolute morality, and God expects us to live by His absolute morality:

 
2 Peter 2:20-21
When they learned about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they escaped from the filthy things of this world. But they are again caught up and controlled by these filthy things, and now they are in worse shape than they were at first. They would have been better off if they had never known about the right way. 

Hebrews 5:12-14
By now you should have been teachers, but once again you need to be taught the simplest things about what God has said. You need milk instead of solid food. 13 People who live on milk are like babies who don't really know what is right. Solid food is for mature people who have been trained to know right from wrong.

 
As Christians live and work in school and in their community, if they share their faith in the living God, they may eventually be seen as intolerant. Their views of what God is calling them to be and do are going to vary from those views held by others and the world is going to try to label Christians in order to limit the Christian worldview. Christians will once again be called INTOLERANT. But what does that really mean?

What is Intolerance?
When the world talks about being intolerant, they are really trying to get us to tolerate every other worldview. When they say tolerate, what they really want is for us to accept their position and even embrace it as our own. That’s what they really mean by tolerance. They want us to agree. But that is not the classic definition of tolerance and we need to understand the definition and live by it:

 
Tolerance is:
“To recognize and respect others’ beliefs, practices and lifestyle without sharing them”

 
And here is the important part: “without sharing them”. Yes it is possible to tolerate the moral perspective of others. To understand it, to examine it. To resist the temptation to utterly destroy it, without embracing it or sharing it. And that is what Christians are called to do. Recognize and respect it, without sharing it.

Things Change Over Time
Part of the reason why people believe that all morality is relative and that Christians should accept diversity in this area is because the world recognizes that societies often accept changing morality over time. Let’s face it, we hold certain moral beliefs today that would have been out of the question years ago. It wasn’t that long ago that sex outside of marriage might have occurred, but was certainly not accepted. It wasn’t that long ago that abortion was against the law, that assisted suicide was considered unthinkable, that homosexuality was seen as something unnatural. Times have changed, and unfortunately our morality has often changed with them. As a result, many in academia now believe that there are no absolutes at all (in either truth or in morality). So how do Christians respond to this kind of argument when it is delivered by a teacher at their school?

 
All Praise Requires A Moral Absolute
Now how many of us have heard a teacher praise someone who recently won some type of humanitarian award? Many teachers hold high value for those who win awards and honors in the pursuit of humanitarian efforts, but remember that it is impossible to praise anyone without having an established absolute morality! Without an absolute morality, no one can be praised because there is no standard! The very thing that might be considered praiseworthy to one person could be seen as despicable to another. So how can we praise?

All Condemnation Requires A Moral Absolute
On the other hand, it is also impossible to punish anyone unless there is an absolute standard to judge morality. Teachers often find themselves condemning those who obviously deserve punishment (Hitler is a good example) but without an absolute, even those accused of something could argue that it was a completely moral act in their view. Similarly, most teachers will affirm the presence of evil in the world and condemn it, but that too is impossible without an absolute morality. What is evil in one situation is often praised (misguidedly) in another! In fact, no teacher can make the claim that anything is unjust! Because these kinds of judgments require there to be a value system. Without absolute morality, nothing is wrong, nothing is just, nothing is praiseworthy, nothing is condemnable.

All Activism Requires A Moral Absolute
And how many times have you heard teachers talk glowingly about moral reformers like Martin Luther King Jr.? Well, there are definitely times when an activist sees a society in need of improvement and feels compelled to propose some alteration for its citizens. However, the theory of moral relativism prohibits such an action because it requires the acceptance of the society as it is. In short, “anyone who advocates reform is mistaken”. In fact, a moral reformer like a Martin Luther King, Jr. would be immoral by definition because he's violating the rules of society and he's violating the law of the land.

All Tolerance Requires A Moral Absolute
Finally, you cannot even have tolerance in a world that is plagued with moral relativity. By definition, tolerance is something that you have with people with whom you disagree. Does that make sense? If you agree with someone, there is nothing to tolerate. You simply agree! Tolerance is reserved for those with whom we disagree! But if we are living in a society in which all diversity is to be embraced with equal status, a world in which nothing is wrong and we accept everything, there is nothing with which we can disagree. For that reason, there is nothing left for us to tolerate. The same world which screams for us to be tolerant, is a place where tolerance is impossible by definition!

 
How Can We Judge If A Particular Moral Perspective Is Valid?

It is true that you can, in a sense, assess the significance or the value or worth of a particular moral point of view by asking, “what kind of moral champion does this point of view produce?” Where does moral relativity ultimately lead? What kind of world and what kind of person does it produce? As Greg Koukl says, “if your moral point of view is that you should take no thought for yourself but always think of other people, and you watch people who live that out most consistently, this ethic produces someone like a Mother Theresa, for example. Or if you have someone who says that one of the highest ethics is non-violent passive resistance and lives that out in exemplary fashion, it produces a Gandhi. If the ethic is to obey the Father in all things and you live that out thoroughly, it produces a Jesus Christ. When we look at the moral champions of these different viewpoints it speaks well for the standard they espouse.” But where does moral relativity lead? What kind of person lives by the ethical standard that says that his own perspective is the only one that matters and that his own idea about morality is the only standard by which he should be judged? This kind of person is clearly a sociopath! Jeffrey Dahmer was someone who operated in this manner and exemplified the extreme reality of moral relativism. A Dahmer is the moral champion of moral relativity.

When they conducted the search warrant at Jeffrey’s home they found the remains of 17 victims. Clearly Dahmer had developed a personal morality which allowed for the murder, dismemberment and cannibalization of his human victims. It didn’t matter what the culture thought. It didn’t matter what God thought. He was moral relativity personified to the extreme.

The Reality
In spite of what the world may be trying to tell us, there is a truth about morality: There is a singular moral truth each of us accepts. No one truly lives without an absolute moral value. Many simply will not admit this is true. There’s a consequence for blindly accepting everything:

 
Proverbs 15:9-10
The LORD is disgusted with all who do wrong, but he loves everyone who does right. If you turn from the right way, you will be punished; if you refuse correction, you will die.

 
The world would have us believe that all morality has an origin, but that origin is not God Himself. They would have us believe that we simply learned morality from our families, from our parents. OK, let’s assume that is true. Where did they learn the moral truth from? Well, they must have gleaned them from their parents, and they too could attribute their morality to their generation before them. So we can continue to trace our understanding of morality back generation before generation, and ultimately we will still have to ask, “Who is the first teacher?”

It Doesn't Come From Our Primitive Past
The world would like us to believe that primitive man is the original teacher of morality. They would heave us believe that our morals evolved based on behaviors that would assure the well being and furtherance of the species. But is that true? Does that explain the origin of our moral hatred of cowardice, or our moral hatred of selfishness, or unfaithfulness, or of senseless cruelty? It can easily be argued that these behaviors can actually promote the success and survival of a primitive group of humans as they combat the competing people groups around them. Sometimes cowardice leads to running and assures your survival! Selfish tribes who think only of themselves are MORE likely to survive in a dog eat dog world. Unfaithfulness will lead to further propagation of a blood line with an even larger number of children. Doesn’t that help assure the survival of the species? And in the most primitive of times, senseless cruelty and the killing of infants will certainly guarantee that your enemies will not grow up around you. All of these moral taboos could easily be seen as virtues to primitive cultures. Yet they are almost unanimously accepted across cultural lines. Could they simply have evolved or do they come from a common source? Is the world trying to tell us that the most primitive of men, thousands of years ago (cavemen, if you will) would somehow hesitate to kill a rival based on a self imposed ethic? It simply cannot be…

So Why Do Christians Stumble?
So if Christians are so sure that Morality does not come from people, but comes instead from a much Higher Source, why do they sometimes succumb to the morality of our society when it runs completely contrary to their beliefs? Is it because they want to avoid confrontation, or is it just because it is often easier to live life with the morality of the world instead of the morality of God?

Part of their problem with relativism is that even when Christians say that they reject it and believe that there is a higher absolute standard, they still live as though there are several standards. Even Christians have to admit that they sometimes live one way in their church setting, and another when they are away from the safety and boundaries of the church family.

Live Above the Lies
So here’s the challenge for those who call themselves Christians as they come to grips with God’s Moral Standard. We all must avoid moral relativity in your own life. Live with one morality, regardless of your environment, because there clearly are moral absolutes.