Where does morality come from?

This is a quick blog today dealing with similar ideas obtained from two different sources.

The first is from Greg Koukl, a great source of wisdom and practical knowledge about all apologetics issues. He’s on the radio every Sunday from 2-5 p.m. on KBRT-AM 740. If you can’t listen to him, go to his web site (str.org) for downloads and great articles.

He was talking to someone about the issue of morality. He claims atheists can be moral, but they have no grounding (ultimate reason) for their morality. He ended the conversation by saying something simple but profound. Atheists and evolutionists can talk a good morality line, but they fail at a key point. Evolution is descriptive—it tries to tell what happened. But morality is prescriptive—it tries to tell what we ought to do.

These are two very different things. They don’t overlap. You can talk all you want about how things came about, but you’ll never be able to say why we should obey the rules that you say have evolved.

The second reference to this concept came about from a CD I’m listening to. It’s The Lamb and the Fuhrer by Ravi Zacharias, an imagined discussion between Jesus and Adolf Hitler. This question came up: “How can you make moral judgments in a world without moral laws?" We see this today—people refuse to say things are truly immoral because they have jettisoned the idea of moral laws, existing beyond the whims and opinions of fallible human beings. If there is no higher morality and it’s all a matter of taste, then we can’t judge anything as immoral.

But it’s impossible to live this way, so we hear people complaining of true moral issues (“the war is wrong,” “that’s immoral,” he’s guilty of genocide,” etc.). We need to call them on it. If they have turned their back on the existence of a God who has standards of morality, they can only say they don’t like the issue at hand. Morality becomes an issue like flavors of ice cream—we like some and dislike others.

Those who say God doesn’t exist don’t want to do this, so they act as if there is true morality in their issues. They have smuggled in Christian morality while rejecting the God who established the standards. Again, we need to remind them of their double-mindedness.