In a conversation with The Diary of a CEO host Steven Bartlett, Greg Koukl explains that even those who reject belief in God can still experience some fulfillment when living according to the purposes God built into creation. However, if God didn’t exist, there would be no right and wrong for anyone.
Transcript
Steven: Greg, can I ask you, do you think you can have a fulfilling life without having a transcendent purpose?
Greg: In some measure. In some measure. What I described earlier is if God made us for a purpose and made the world for human flourishing, and I think we get a basic description of that in the beginning of our story, for example. Then people who don’t even believe in God or even anything religious at all, if they fall within the pattern of the things that God has created for flourishing, they’re going to flourish in some significant measure.
You mentioned a few moments ago about having children, and this is somewhat of a universal experience. Now, you made a kind of a naturalistic characterization of why we feel that way. My sense is that God made us for that purpose. Be fruitful, multiply, subdue. And subdue doesn’t mean rape the earth. It means to work productively what God has given us to serve. Now, somebody can get married and stay married and have children and fulfill that purpose there and be very satisfied in doing it—as opposed to all kinds of other variations that are just going to mess up their life—and they’re going to experience satisfaction and fulfillment in it. But that’s because, in a certain sense, they’re doing the things that God has made human beings to do so that they would flourish. It’s just like, you can think of it in very mechanistic terms. You have a vehicle that’s meant to operate a certain way, and if you do the things properly for that vehicle, it’s going to run well and do so.
Steven: So, I can have a grand feeling of purpose if I do many of the things that are considered virtuous within Scripture, without needing to believe.
Greg: Yeah, you could still be virtuous. Certainly, you can do those things. My argument—and this is what I was getting at a little earlier, Dr. K—is that if there is no God establishing a right and wrong, then there is no right and wrong because there is no law that we’re conforming ourselves to. We are just doing stuff. All right?
Steven: Now, if you believe the, sort of, evolutionary perspective on this—
Greg: I don’t, taken as a whole. Not the way that Alex has taken it. It’s a grand explanation of pretty much everything.
Alex O’Connor: It’s not an explanation of everything. It’s an explanation of the variants of life on earth.
Steven: Because evolution does—I was thinking about my dog. I was thinking about Pablo, and I was thinking, why does he have sex with other dogs? Why does he protect his puppies? You know, why does he do these things that, somewhat, in Dr. K’s example there, he takes care of things? He takes care of me when I’m not in the house. If someone comes in, and my girlfriend’s there, he takes care of my girlfriend. He barks only when she’s home alone. So, he seems to be expressing some form of morality. He seems to understand his own, sort of, idea of right and wrong.
Greg: Well, I wouldn’t characterize it that way—as if he’s thinking, “I ought to do this, and if I don’t do that, then I’m doing something wrong.” I think animals have instincts that they’re imbued with that can be influenced by natural factors to some degree, I guess. But they are made for purposes. And this is the reason that many of the creatures act the way they do—because of these very sophisticated instincts that allow them to get along in life and do well.
Steven: And survive and reproduce.
Greg: But I don’t have any reason to think that they’re—yeah, survive and reproduce, of course—but I don’t have any reason to think that they’re thinking, “I’m doing the moral thing,” and if they didn’t do the thing, it would be appropriate to accuse them of doing something immoral—violence or whatever.
Steven: History’s amost shown that even in times where we look back and go, “That was not the moral thing”—like, you know, Nazis in World War II. They acted in a way that helped them survive in the context they were in. So, the Nazi that would go to the concentration camp then come home and be really nice to his family, he thought he was doing the right thing.
Greg: This is one of the reasons I think the evolutionary explanation is inadequate, because it seems that there are lots of things that people do that seem to be good for them or for their tribe that, characteristically, we’ll look at, and we’ll assess it, and the assessment is that that is wrong, it’s evil, it’s wicked. And I think our assessments are reliable in that regard—that we have moral intuitions that allow us to see things that are real about that. And these things are relatively universal. I mean, it doesn’t matter where you live or when you live. People are asking the question about the problem of evil in the world.
Steven: But their definition of what evil was seems to change over time because, me, I wouldn’t be sitting at this table a couple hundred years ago, because I’m black, and everybody at the time thought that that was the right thing. They didn’t think that was an evil thing at the time.
Greg: Well, everybody at the time didn’t think that. You know, there are going to be social mores that are going to change over time, and people do respond in different ways. But just because you have variations in the way people believe about morality doesn’t mean that there isn’t a morality that’s a sound morality. And C.S. Lewis has done a study of this, looked at the kinds of things that seem to transcend culture in terms of assessments—moral assessments—that seem to be true about every culture. A lot of times the differences are not differences in moral facts, like the morality is actually changed, but a difference in perception. So, what counts as heroism in some cases would not count as heroism in other cases, even though heroism is considered a noble kind of thing.