Greg Koukl and Justin Brierley highlight the growing realization among secular thinkers that the moral values we take for granted actually stem from Christian beliefs, not from ancient Greece or modern science. They argue that secular worldviews struggle to justify true moral claims without a belief in God.
Transcript
Greg: Why the delay? Secular thinkers are really smart. They’ve been thinking about these things for their whole lives. They have degrees in these things, and some of them are just beginning to see that the things they value have no grounding in their worldview, but they have a grounding in the Christian worldview.
I was just talking this weekend about the problem of evil and how the problem makes sense in Christianity. It belongs in our worldview. It’s part of our story, and our story is not over yet. The atheists can’t even make sense of the problem of objective evil, which atheists have complained about. I have always wondered, why? Why don’t they see that? Why don’t they see that all of the things they’re advancing and expressing as values in conversation are not at home in a world in which there’s no good, no evil, nothing but “blind, pitiless indifference,” which is one of Richard Dawkins’s citations.
So, do you have any sense of why it took some of these people so long to figure this out?
Justin: I think there are a number of reasons. I think sometimes people don’t want to see what is often right in front of them because it does make a claim on your life. There’s an implication. It’s not just assenting intellectually to something if you say God exists, especially if you say Jesus Christ was God in the flesh. There are going to be all kinds of implications for that. So, I can understand why some people want to hold that off at arm’s length as long as possible.
The other aspect of it, though, is, I think, the fact that so many people in the West take the idea of human rights, for example, absolutely for granted. They’ve been brought up assuming this is completely natural. This is just the way any civilized society functions and thinks. As one of my friends who has written a book on this subject, Glen Scrivener, calls it, it is like the air we breathe. We don’t notice it, because we’re so steeped in it.
Another friend of mine, Tom Holland, who’s a secular historian, wrote this fantastic book called Dominion, which really looked at the way the Christian revolution has completely shaped the moral instincts of the West. He says we’re like goldfish in a bowl. We don’t even think about the water we’re swimming in, but the waters we’re swimming in are, in fact, Christian waters. And I think the reason why, just now, just at this moment, some of these intellectuals are starting to wake up to the fact that, actually, it’s Christian waters we’ve been swimming in this whole time is because, suddenly, the foundations of their own moral structure are being challenged. They’re starting to realize that, oh, it turns out that not everyone has the same idea as me about the nature of reality, about physical biology, about why some things are right and why some things are wrong. And I think that has led some of them to realize that the Western values we hold so dear are not necessarily just the product of common sense, reason, and science.
I’ll give you the example of Tom Holland, here, the historian I mentioned, who’s a very popular podcaster here in the UK and has written a best-selling book. I’ve had him on the Unbelievable? show several times for conversations. He, essentially, grew up with a very secular mindset, went to university, studied history at Oxford, and went on to start writing very popular historical works on the Greeks and the Romans. But what he said to me was, “The more that I got into the mindset of the Greeks and the Romans, the more I realized how very alien their world was to my own. This was a world where slavery was just an absolutely accepted part of the economy, where some people could be the sexual property of others, where the lives of women and children were cheap, where a Roman emperor would parade through the streets of Rome, boasting of killing and enslaving a million Gauls. This world was so alien to me I suddenly realized, well, why do I believe in freedom, equality, and dignity?” And he realized it’s not because of the Greeks and the Romans. It’s not because of science and reason. It’s because of this man, Jesus of Nazareth. The movement he began is what gave me my moral instincts today. And he ended up saying, “I realized that in almost every way, I am, in fact, a Christian.”
So, when someone like Tom Holland goes on that intellectual journey, suddenly, I think it starts to niggle away. And he himself is now openly critiquing his secular peers and saying, “Look, just face up to it. Your belief in human rights is a theological belief. It doesn’t come from science or reason or ancient Greece. It comes from Christian assumptions about us being made in the image of God.” It’s so interesting to hear him say that. In Tom Holland’s case, I think he has been edging toward Christian faith. That’s very much hit him at a personal level. I think others are still managing to hold it out as sort of an abstract thing. It’s almost a kind of useful fiction, if you like. “That’s helpful, but I don’t have to accept that it actually has any supernatural implications.” So, I think it depends on the individual as to what they’re willing to accept in the end when it comes to these ideas.
Greg: I have a lot of thoughts here. Even the concept of “useful fiction.” Well, in these kinds of things, they’re not useful if they’re fictions. They are just fictions that maybe you subjectively happen to like, because if we have a deep belief in human rights, and our deep belief entails that these aren’t really real—we’re just playing at a game—this undermines the force of human rights. And this gets to a point—I talk about it a lot, and I want people to see the distinction—the way you put it is that they’re realizing these kinds of things do not come from reason. Reason may be a way we know these things, just like a stop sign is the way we know that we ought to stop, but that’s not what gives the stop sign its authority. It’s the governing authority that the stop sign comes from. And this is the distinction that’s really important. People say, “Well, where do you get morality?” And they say, “It’s just common sense.” Well, wait a minute. That wasn’t the question. The question isn’t how do you know it. The question is where does it come from? And that’s the key thing that gives morality its force.