MORALITY - Can we have morality without God?

EXPLORING CHRISTIANITY - MORALITY

THE BIBLE
Can we trust a book written 2000 years ago?

EYEWITNESS
Did the writers of the New Testament get their picture of Jesus right?

GOD - MAN
Is Jesus really God?

RESURRECTION
Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

RELIGIONS
With so many religions, why Christianity?

SUFFERING
If there is a God, why is there so much suffering?

TRINITY
Understanding the Trinity.

SCIENCE
The complementary nature of Science & Christianity.

FORGIVENESS
What it is and why it matters?

GUIDANCE
How does God guide?

REPENTANCE
What it is and why you can't get to heaven without it.

BORN AGAIN
What does it mean to be converted and born again?

SAVING FAITH
The kind of faith that will get you to heaven

ASSURANCE
Can I know for sure that I am going to heaven?

TRUTH
What is truth and does it matter?

MORALITY
Does it matter how we live? A Christian view of morality.

THE CHURCH
God's vision for his family, the Church. A call to the churches of the new millennium.

PURPOSE
How can I find a great purpose for living?

IDENTITY
Who am I; Finding my true identity as a human being and as a child of God.

SELF-ESTEEM
How can I feel good about my self? The Christian basis for proper sel-esteem.

LIFE AFTER DEATHChristianity's Hope & Challenge.

THE CROSS
Why did Jesus Die? What the Bible says about the Cross.

Can we have morality without God?

Lord Devlin said some years ago, "No society has yet solved the problem of how to teach morality without religion." It has always seemed rather ridiculous to me for people to think that you can still have "morality", particularly Christian morality, without God. C. S. Lewis said:

If no set of moral ideas were better than another, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to Nazi morality. The moment you say one lot of morals is better than another, you are in fact measuring them by an ultimate standard.

And the moment you admit that there must be some ultimate standard, you are arguing for the existence of God.

"This is a moral universe, and you've got to take account of the fact that truth and lies and goodness and evil are things that matter"
Desmond Tutu

Even someone like Nietzsche, the German philosopher who is credited with giving a major boost to the elimination of God from Western culture, never tired of pointing out that Christianity is a whole and that one cannot give up faith in God and keep Christian morality. He said:

When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. The morality is by no means self-evident. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole. It stands or falls with faith in God.

In chapter 1 of his letter to the Romans, Paul spells out very clearly the moral consequences of people turning away from God. Three times he declares that, as a result of rejecting the truth of God that he has clearly made known in his creation, "God gave them over..." (vv. 24, 26, 28). But what did he give them over to?

"God gave them over in the sinful desires of their heart to sexual impurity..." (v. 24).

"God gave them over to shameful lusts..." (v. 26).

"God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done" (v. 28).

This is from the New International Version. Another very good modern translation, The Contemporary English Version, has "God let them...". However, the word is stronger than that. It is the common word used for "handing over" people to the courts or the arresting officer or prison. In other words, if we choose not to give God the place he deserves in our lives, then the inevitable consequence is moral decline. This is the way his judgment works. At the end of chapter 1, Paul gives the end result of this process. "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. Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practise them" (vv. 29-32). That's quite a picture!

Is the picture given in Romans 1 really an exaggeration of the way things actually happen? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who suffered much under an atheistic system, doesn't think so, and he speaks from personal experience. In his 1983 Templeton Address, Men Have Forgotten God, he said:

The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century.

Now, when a society turns from God, what we have described above may take a few generations to be fully worked out. We may cope for a while on the spiritual and moral heritage of our forebears. But if we don't make that heritage our own, then we will be in trouble. The Swiss theologian, Emil Brunner, put it like this:

The feeling for the personal and the human which is the fruit of faith may outlive for a time the death of the roots from which it has grown. But this cannot last very long. As a rule the decay of religion works out in the second generation as moral rigidity and in the third generation as the breakdown of all morality. Humanity without religion has never been a historical force capable of resistance.

One could say that the very act of rejecting God is in itself an immoral act. Stephen Keillor, in Prisoners of Hope, says:

The initial act of eliminating our Creator God from our thinking is so immoral and unethical in itself as to render the following concern with ethical fine points quite absurd. It's as if students were to murder the teacher and then sit down to have serious discussions about proper manners in the classroom.

If, indeed, we are living in a "moral vacuum" today, it is instructive to note that vacuums don't happen by chance. You have to deliberately suck the air out. Chris Wright, in an article in Themelios, says: "Western culture for the past 200 years has been systematically sucking out the transcendent [God] from its public heart and core." If we want to do something positive about the situation then we must look to the cause. We must begin with God. And I am not talking about "religion", which can mean anything. I am talking about the God who is really there.

Bishop Desmond Tutu was recently interviewed by Bill Myers in a TV documentary on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which has been a focal process for enabling the people of South Africa to make peace with the injustices of the past. Describing the purpose of the TRC as he reflected on the perpetrators from both sides of the apartheid struggle, he said:

We're not seeking to humiliate them, we're not even seeking to prosecute them. We're just saying that this is a moral universe, and you've got to take account of the fact that truth and lies and goodness and evil are things that matter, and we've got to acknowledge them.

Without morality, there is no basis for reconciliation, and without God, there is no basis for morality. Tutu can speak with conviction on such issues because he believes not only in God, but in a God who is both loving and just.