STAND TO REASON Solid Groundtop 1 A Foundation for Building Ambassadors Celebrating 20 Years of Ministry July/August 2014 IN THIS ISSUE: Quick Summary • The Brighter Side of Evil • Good without God? • Goodness and Grounding • Readers and Writers GOD, EVOLUTION, AND • Science as Morality MORALITY PART II • “Flourishing” Falters • Bait and Switch Missed PART I? Click Here to Download CLEAR THINKING CHRISTIANITY There Are In this month’s edition, I explain why challenges from atheists like, “We can Apps for That! be good without God threats,” and, “If there were no God, would you still LEARN At be good?” completely miss the point. It’s the same reason Christopher www.str.org Hitchens’s famous dare—“Name one moral action performed by a believer that could not have been done by a nonbeliever”—misses the mark, too. STR WEEKLY BROADCAST Tuesdays 4–7p.m. PST Listen and call with your questions or comments, click here LISTEN LIVE ON STR’s APP You Can Help Stand to Reason The kind of analysis I offer in this Solid Ground is often missing in the broader Christian community. The result is that empty LISTEN TO THE PODCASTS challenges—like those promoted by Sam Harris—go unanswered and gain traction in our culture. That’s why Stand to Reason is STR’s Podcast Page so important. And that’s why your support makes such a big difference. Your generosity helps us train tens of thousands to SOCIAL MEDIA defend classical Christianity with arguments that are both gracious and compelling. Please consider a gift of any amount this month to support this vital work that’s bearing fruit in the lives of so many people. 1 Enhanced Solid Ground Clear-thinking Christianity top 2 Clear-thinking Christianity July 1, 2014 Dear Friend, In the last Solid Ground, I began my defense of the moral argument for God’s existence by demonstrating that no appeal to either Darwin or Rousseau—to the evolved individual or to the constructed social contract—was capable of doing it damage. Neither of those alternatives could, even in principle, account for the existence of objective moral obligations. Both collapse into relativism. In this month’s edition, I explain why challenges from atheists like, “We can be good without God threats,” and, “If there were no God, would you still be good?” completely miss the point. It’s the same reason Christopher Hitchens’s famous dare—“Name one moral action performed by a believer that could not have been done by a nonbeliever”—misses the mark, too. Finally, I critique new atheist Sam Harris’s clever—but compromised—attempt to escape the relativism trap in his book, The Moral Landscape. The material in this Solid Ground is not as easy as other installments. As always, though, I worked hard to “throw the ball so you can catch it”—stepping you through the information so you grasp the key issues because this theme is a common objection from atheists. You’ll encounter it sooner or later if you haven’t already. Give this analysis some attention and you will begin to understand a central component of this debate that virtually every atheist misses. It’s called the grounding problem. I think you’ll see that nothing the atheist can throw at us will deliver him from the daunting problem that the existence of objective morality poses for his materialistic worldview. The kind of analysis I offer in this Solid Ground is often missing in the broader Christian community. The result is that empty challenges—like those promoted by Sam Harris—go unanswered and gain traction in our culture. That’s why Stand to Reason is so important. And that’s why your support makes such a big difference. Your generosity helps us train tens of thousands to defend classical Christianity with arguments that are both gracious and compelling. Please consider a gift of any amount this month to support this vital work that’s bearing fruit in the lives of so many people. And thank you so much for your partnership. With confidence in Christ, Gregory Koukl 2 Enhanced Solid Ground A Foundation for Building Ambassadors top 3 GOD, EVOLUTION, AND MORALITY PART II By Greg Koukl In 1982, I lived in Thailand for seven months of what people think or feel (remember, the Khmer supervising a feeding program in a Cambodian Rouge had no moral qualms about what they did)— refugee camp named Sakaeo. My charge: 18,250 then the evil is objective. If the wrongness is only Khmer refugees who had escaped the holocaust in the mind of the subject—the person or group perpetrated on Kampuchea by the Khmer Rouge making the assessment—then the evil is merely after the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975. subjective and relativistic. In that case, the atrocities The first-person accounts told to me of the were only wrong for those who object, but would slaughter that took place were mind-numbing. Even be right for those who approve. The behaviors children relayed stories of unthinkable brutality. By themselves would be morally neutral; Pol Pot would 1979, nearly two million Cambodians had perished, be off the hook. almost half of the population. It was the greatest act Here’s the take-away: The problem of evil is only of genocide ever inflicted by a people on its own a problem if morality is objective, not subjective. population. Relativistic morality is not sufficient grounds for the It’s virtually impossible for any thoughtful complaint about human suffering. Only objective human being to countenance such barbarism— morality will do. As it turns out, though, objective such innocent suffering, such inhumanity to morality supports theism and undermines atheism. man—without recoiling from the wickedness, the The theist must rise to the challenge of evil, to be depravity, the unmitigated evil that took place there. sure. But for her, the problem turns out to be an Surprisingly, though, atrocities like the Cambodian ally. It fits her worldview like a glove. First, genuine carnage provide an unusual opportunity for the wickedness depends on the existence of good in theist and a striking liability for the atheist. the same way shadows depend on the existence of light. One cannot have the first without the second. The Brighter Side of Evil The theist accounts for that good by grounding it The problem of evil is a daunting one for in the character of God. Second, the biblical view Christians, to be sure, yet ironically it places us of reality doesn’t merely explain atrocities like the on very solid footing to make the case for theism. Cambodian massacre; it actually predicts them. It is The very same problem, though, puts atheism on precisely what you’d expect if the biblical take is the ropes. To make this point during debates, I ask true. two questions of my audience after I describe, in gruesome detail, the events of the Khmer crisis. The very same problem of evil, though, undermines atheism. The atheist must also take his First, what is their assessment of the behaviors turn offering his own explanation for evil, but he I just recounted? It’s a rhetorical question. To a faces a complication the theist does not encounter. person, they judge the savagery profoundly evil. How can anything be ultimately evil or good in Second—and this is the important question— a materialistic universe bereft of a transcendent what are they describing when they call these standard that make sense of the terms in the first acts evil? Do they mean to be describing the place? actions themselves—the cruelty, the torment, the injustice—or merely their own feelings or beliefs When an atheist bemoans real evil—not the about the actions? relativistic “evil” that evolution fooled us into believing or the actions violating a social contract If the actions themselves are evil—if the that serves our cultural purposes for the moment— wrongness is somehow in the behaviors regardless he must explain how objective evil could exist in 3 Enhanced Solid Ground Clear-thinking Christianity top 4 the first place to make room for his protest. He Second, he can cast about for an alternate must account for the objective, transcendent moral explanation for our universal experience of morality. standard that has to be in position before moral The current main contender is Darwinian evolution. judgments of any kind can be made. His complaint In the last issue of Solid Ground, I showed why would be unintelligible without it. that route is a dead end. I argued that since the moral argument for God is based on the existence “No, the atheist has Not gotteN rid of of objective morality, only a successful naturalistic the problem of evil by rejectiNg god. accounting of the same—objective morality—would he has compouNded the problem.” be sufficient to undermine it. However, evolution is not capable—even in principle—of delivering to us So, the atheist who challenges Christianity by anything but relativistic morality. asking how God can exist in a world with evil faces If Darwinism is only capable of explaining our a bigger challenge than the theist. The atheist must feelings of morality—if the definition of good and account for the problem of evil and the problem bad is simply subjective and “up to us” in some sense of good. The difficulty is, there is nothing in his (biologically or culturally)—then objective evil worldview that allows him to ground—to make is reduced to a fiction after all and the complaint sense of—vice or virtue in the objective sense.