The woman once said to me ‘After what had happened, we had every right to be together’. She believed that the betrayal somehow owed the betrayed a shot at a relationship too. In the back of her mind she was claiming that this tiny little pocket of the universe - the part with her in it - owed her something; that it had some sort of meaning. Perhaps she is justified in feeling this way, perhaps not - but one thing is certain, you won’t find any rhyme or reason (aside from that which you create for yourself) in a Godless universe which resulted from irrational entropy. 

 

That is, if any of us claims that the universe has no Creator and no meaning, we have no business expecting any universal sense behind it all. Yet somehow, everyone seems to know, or think they know, what constitutes good, what constitutes as just, and what constitutes as right. Not only that, they also behave as if they think that this universe owes us meaning; that there must be a purpose behind every thing and, indeed, every individual. 

 

It is not surprising that religious people feel this way, for they think they know who created this universe and why it was created. The fact that we demand meaning, the fact that we seem to know what is right and wrong and what is good and bad does not surprise me at all. Being a Christian, I believe that a true explanation of the universe and, also, morality and goodness, comes from God. Yet somehow it is not always seen as surprising that naturalists and materialists feel this way too. They do not, of course, ascribe these things to God or a supernatural being, but they think that everyone knows the immutable standards by which we measure these things. 

 

But it has not always been noticed that this is quite a strange proposition to take if they believe that we are merely a result of a random configuration of atoms, with no purpose or direction. If this were true, should we not expect to find moral dystopia, or at least, should we not expect to find naturalists believing that there is no ultimate purpose to anything and, thus, living their lives accordingly? But we don’t, just like my friend, we all think we can find situations, events and actions that fit in with the overall purpose. We feel that justice will even itself out, we feel that earnest pursuits of goodness will eventuate in man’s betterment; we feel that all the times the pendulum swings disfavour, it will swing equal amounts of favour. 

 

Many Darwinists ask the question, why are we quite so moral as we are? Altruism is certainly necessary for survival, and slowly, incrementally, species have behaved more altruistically to fellow members of their species in order to make survival and reproduction more conducive. But that explanation far from explains why humans are so moral and compassionate towards people that we might never meet again - people who our helping will serve for us no advantage whatsoever. Once again I could bring in the argument that morality comes from God, thus we all have innate knowledge of what being moral and compassionate is like, but I have no intention of using the argument thus. It so often brings about ambivalence which leads to a stalemate. 

 

There seems to be something holding humanity together, just as a pair of stabilisers stops a child from falling off his bike when he cannot yet balance properly. Even if humans acted in accordance with a perennial conscious awareness that everything was meaningless, surely the Darwinian argument that we carve out for ourselves certain strands of happiness in a universe of irrational entropy would, if it were true, lead to a very different world to the one in which we live. It seems to me very likely that the travailing effort to carve out happiness and meaning in a universe with no meaning would surely produce creatures whose lives consisted of perpetual discomfort, disconsolation and despair. 

 

We have evolved into the present times with a fundamental belief that we have rights to certain things. We have been told ‘it’s a free country’, therefore we all have a right to take a walk in our local park if we wish; but we do not have the right to walk in someone’s garden without their permission. We have a right to apply for any job we wish, but we have no right to expect a good job. We all hope for a sunny day on our wedding day, but we have no right to expect a sunny day. And, of course, we can act in accordance with what we know is our right and what we know is merely our reliance upon something else. In other words, we can improve our chances and work towards better things to which we have no right, but with which we can use hard work or good planning or good logic to help our situation. We could put a lot of effort into researching the company that we hope to be employed by. We can, and usually do, plan our wedding day in one of the summer months; thus we would have more right to feel aggrieved if it were cold and raining on our wedding day booked on July 25^th than if it were cold and raining on our wedding day booked on February 25^th. 

 

We as humans who are, I believe, created in the image of God reflect Him in many ways, although we are imperfect, He is not. So we have tacit understandings about what are rights between individuals and what are expectations regarding manners, courtesy, honesty and charity. Now many of these we had to be taught, but many of them we have known all along. It is true that we do not remember exactly where and when we learned most things, but if we think carefully, we know that we knew many things about right and wrong, and about courtesy, honesty and charity without ever having been taught them. 

 

We know from experience that if two gentlemen go out for quiet drink, if A buys the first round, B is tacitly expected to buy the next round. But we also know that it would be a sin against charity and kindness if, say, A refused to buy B a drink because he had forgotten his wallet. It would be a sin against honesty if B had deliberately left his wallet at home in order to avoid having to buy a round. And equally, it would be a sin against chivalry if A came through the door and failed to hold it open for the lady coming in behind him. 

 

Here we have just seen some examples of things that we were taught when we were young. We were taught about right and wrong actions, about honesty and courtesy and compassion - and a real absence of those things is usually noticeable straight away. Now if we are the result of a purely naturalistic and purposeless beginning we should expect that every individual has to be taught everything from the cradle up. After all, we all know that we do not inherit acquired characteristics - therefore we should not expect to find any correlatives of our conscience innately in us. It is true that we acquire, through heredity, quite a few of our parents’ features, traits and qualities - but there is absolutely no evidence that things like the human conscience and perceptivity are passed on genetically (in fact, the evidence that this is not the case seems quite conclusive). 

 

All anthropological studies of families show that these things are not passed on genetically, and, as a Christian, I believe that each individual is given these things from God. And if, by the way, anyone thinks that there is no moral standard, that we are taught everything we know and feel about right and wrong; if you doubt that you are born with unique conscience and with the perceptive qualities that enable you to know without being taught what the moral standard is, I will offer you a hypothetical situation which I think substantiates my claim. Suppose it were possible that a child could be taught from the cradle upwards only bad things. Suppose that he was never taught or never given any examples of goodness, honesty, charity, kindness, common courtesy, good manners and decency. In fact, suppose he was taught that all these bad things were, in fact, good things, and that he should take great delight in his own bad manners, dishonesty, wickedness and inconsiderate behaviour. 

 

It is true that he would grow up into a wretched person, but it seems ridiculous to suppose that there would be no part of his inner self that was whispering to him that he should not be behaving this way. There would surely be a inner voice which constantly told him that the delight he had been taught to feel at such atrocious actions was, in fact, an egregious solecism; that he had, in fact, been born to be something very different from what he had become. And of course, that inner voice would be the part of his own reasoning which came to him from the divine. 

 

 

More next week….