The Why for the What
If God is, everything changes
By George “Chip” Hammond
When I was young, I believed many things that brought me into conflict with popular opinion. I believed that abortion was an acceptable option for birth control. I believed it didn’t matter whom or how many people one slept with. Back then these beliefs brought me into tension with the dominant culture because most people who were culturally powerful held these things to be wrong.
It would be incorrect, however, to assume that I held these things because I thought they were “right.” When I held these beliefs, I was an atheist. If there is no God, there is no reason or purpose to our existence.
I realized, then, that if there is no God and there is no purpose to my existence, nothing was wrong and nothing was right. Morality as such was a convention of societies or, if adhered to by individuals, a compulsion of brain chemistry. There was no such thing really as “right” and “wrong.” “Right” and “wrong” would require a standard that existed outside of human conscience and outside of human societies. Such a standard would require God, and without a God there was no such standard. Social commentator and self-described “irreligious person” Bill Mahr observed based on his premise that there is no God, “We’re just all wasting time until we die.” Whether you agree with Mahr’s premise of “no God” or not, you must praise him for his logical consistency.
I used to shake my head at the foolishness of those who shared my premise of “no God” but who would then sanctimoniously declare that what the Nazis did in Germany in the 1940s was “wrong.” “Do you mean you think they were right?” one of my fellow freethinkers asked me. Surely the answer to that is obvious. Of course they were not right. If there was a “right,” there could then be a “wrong.” But in a universe without God there is no right or wrong. There’s just what people do. You or I may like it or dislike it, but there is no basis on which to say that anything is right or wrong.
Clearly some of my fellow unbelievers were uncomfortable with this. They thought maybe right and wrong could be rescued by finding it in consensus, but can it? When most Americans thought that slavery was acceptable, or later that segregation and black codes were beneficial, did that make these things “good” or “right”? Does the fact that when I was young most people thought homosexuality and abortion on demand were “bad” make it so? Was Hitler’s “final solution” “good” because most of the German population endorsed it or at least didn’t oppose it?
My fellow atheists who had suggested that maybe “right” and “wrong” could be found in consensus now all seemed to want to maintain that certain things were right or wrong even if they went against all of society and culture, and that people who held to what was “right” in the face of societal disapproval and/or penalty were courageous. But the inconsistency of their position and the tenacity with which they wanted to cling to these categories of “right” and “wrong” caused me to laugh.
Think about it. The people who were exterminating people in Germany’s death camps simply did what they did. Those who opposed them simply did what they did. Four billion years from now when earth’s sun self-destructs and takes the earth with it, what will it matter what anyone did? If there is no God, “right” and “wrong” are meaningless categories. Rescuing hurricane victims with Samaritan’s Purse or lynching innocent black people with the KKK are both equally meaningless, neither right nor wrong. Scream about that all you want, it won’t change the fact.
Some of my friends called me “evil” for pointing this out to them. By so doing they were trying to shame me into admitting I was wrong. Ah, but there’s that word again. Shame depends on there being a “right” and a “wrong,” and without a God there simply is not. There is only the compulsion of your brain chemistry. Hitler’s brain chemistry may have been different. If you insist on using the categories of “right” and “wrong,” you can only say what is right and wrong for you, not for anyone else. It may be “wrong” of you to take part in genocide because your brain chemistry causes you to have an aversion to it, but if Hitler’s didn’t you can’t say that he was “wrong.” Moreover, Hitler had good intentions in what he was doing, trying as he was to restore Germany to its former greatness. Hitler himself would have told you that what he was doing was “right.”
So, yes, sleep with whom you want, do with pregnancies what you want, do anything you want, because if there is no God there is no right or wrong to any of it. Do whatever you do, take the societal consequences if you don’t care, escape them if you can, impose them if you wish, none of it matters. None of it is right or wrong because there is no right or wrong. Right and wrong are categories that must transcend us if they are to be valid at all, and there are no such categories because there is no such being as God.
But . . .
If God is, everything changes. If God is, there is such thing as right and wrong. If God is there is a standard outside of my individual conscience and societal sensibilities that stands over them and by which those things can be judged as “right” or “wrong.”
And . . .
If that God has revealed himself to us; if he has declared to us who he is, has told us what we were created for, and he has disclosed to us standards of right and wrong, then it doesn’t matter what “seems right to me” or what the societal or cultural consensus is. If there is a transcendent God and if that God has spoken to us in propositional ways, what he says is the only determiner of right and wrong.
When I was nineteen years old something happened to me. I went suddenly from believing that there was no God to believing that there was, and that this God had spoken to us in the collection of the books we now call the Bible. If there is a God and if he has spoken, then there really are categories of “right” and “wrong,” categories that transcend my personal opinions, my likes and dislikes and all societal constructs.
Because there are transcendent standards it is no longer “nothing matters.” Now it’s “today counts for eternity.” If God is and there is a standard, then murder (whether carried out by a man in a hood or a doctor in a lab coat) doesn’t “not matter.” It will be judged and punished, if not now, in a coming time.
There are people ignorant of the Bible (or those who have given it a cursory reading looking for its “problems”) who will point to the ceremonial or civil laws of the Old Testament to lampoon the notion that it conveys what is “right.” Not only is their understanding of the text facile, but they are invoking categories (namely “right” and “wrong”) that they can’t reasonably invoke.
If there is no God and he has not spoken, then there is no right or wrong. There are only one’s own preferences or societal standards. Then racism is fine and homosexuality is wrong in the 1950s, but homosexuality is fine and racism is wrong in the 2020s. In fifty years, what’s “right” and what’s “wrong” may flip again. But if God is and he has spoken, then his transcendent standard condemns both the 1950s and the 2020s, for it teaches that both racism and homosexuality are transgressions of the “good” and are therefore “wrong.”
When I believed that there was no God and thus no transcendent standard it brought me into conflict with the dominant culture. Today believing in God and in a transcendent standard brings me into conflict with the dominant culture, because the culture has changed.
But it would be simplistic and reductionistic to think that this means that an earlier time in our culture was somehow better than it is now. The fact is, if you believe in the God who has spoken and revealed himself then the thoughts, words, and deeds that you must hold as “right” and “wrong” (irrespective of your mere conscience or societal preferences) will always bring you into conflict with the dominant culture at some juncture. At no time does the dominant culture get everything wrong. But to even say that requires belief in a transcendent standard to which to compare it. Human societies are never right in all that they approve or do. Nor again are they always wrong. Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every now and again.
If there is no God, there is no standard. If God is, there is a standard. This is why I believe the things I do about right and wrong.
