On Religion and Ethics

The Christian view is that ethics and morality flow from the person of God himself. His perfect nature is one of perfect love and perfect justice. As humans made in his image, we have a similar capacity for these things, but in our fallen state and choice to be separated from God we are destined to fail. You can have ethics without acknowledging God, but only because God gave us a conscience to have an inherent sense of right and wrong. But if you try to construct an ethical system without God, you will fail since there is no sound philosophical basis for it. Even the founding fathers, many of whom where not Christians, but Deists, recognized that our human rights are only inherent because they were endowed to us by our creator, because (not stated, but implied from John Locke) we were created in his image.

If you deny God's existence, you can't justify morality or human rights. The God-denier is destined, as Nietsche indicated, to make his own morality. The 20th century was the bloodiest in human history because dictators who denied God's existence made their own morality: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot for example. By the way, they all thought what they were doing was for the benefit of humanity and their culture by eliminating the weak and inferior, i.e. other races and anyone who disagreed with them. This was the argument that the Nazi's used to defend themselves at Nuremberg. The atheist who is intellectually honest will admit this, like "ethicist" Peter Singer of Princeton, who devalues human life below animal life in some instances.

If you have a deep sense of morality and ethics, I urge you to search for why you have it and don't accept the pat answer that "it evolved" without really testing that idea. If you say, that you believe it because scientists tell you so, you are assuming what you are trying to prove, because their is no scientific proof that morality evolved, its just a hypothesis. For a good exploration of the questions which challenge God's existence, I recommend Tim Keller's book "The Reason for God" or Norman Geisler's "I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist". Both are written by outstanding intellects and are very readable. God bless you all.

-Daniel Murphy (Some dude who commented on the WSJ)