To begin I will admit that the title seems like an oxymoron. We can easily understand that someone can create something that goes wrong, but that is because we are imperfect. We understand that if God would have truly created us then we wouldn’t have gone wrong (and my have we gone wrong!) simply because God would be perfect, and he wouldn’t have gotten it wrong. This is reasonable, but it brings one big question to mind.
The question is how did we know that there is something wrong? I mean how do we know that we as humans are imperfect? To me it is a fascinating question. Where did we get this concept of being imperfect? What or who is perfect? If something is deteriorating it is because it is leaving its good state-we have no point of reference on how we should be-at least to the atheist. We seem to base our state to something we should be, but the naturalist doesn’t believe in a God, and a perfect God at that. Yet! He realizes that there is something wrong with mankind. A friend of mine has a blog that asks the question “why?”, and I pose the same question to the atheist-why? How do we know what is a good state, if there is no good state? Could it be that we put ourselves against some kind of moral standard? I dare say not! We cannot, and will not do such a thing if there is no God! There must be no wrong.
C.S. Lewis made the observation that people get upset at others who would try to trip them, but are unsuccessful, yet that same person wouldn’t be angry over someone that mistakenly tripped them, but they finished the job. It seems that everyone is aware of this standard to not hurt somebody purposely because it is just plain wrong, but we don’t give it a second thought. I have observed that this breaks the naturalist’s views on human value, but works accordingly with the Christian faith.
The naturalist views everything as material. That is; nothing exists that is not physical. We as products of evolution are the same as our ancestors; apes, trees, bacteria, slime, etc. And because we are just material we don’t really matter. I think Ted Bundy (serial killer) gives the perfect example of an evil person with the worldview of the naturalist.
Ted Bundy had confessed to thirty murders, but never took responsibility for them. He said that "It hurts you ... I guess I am in the enviable position of not having to deal with guilt. There's just no reason for it." I find it chilling that a man that had destroyed other humans could not feel guilt or remorse because he has no reason for it. I remember hearing a quote from him, and he said to a victim that there is no difference to him between enjoying a piece of ham, and him enjoying torturing a victim. Why would this be wrong to the naturalist? If we are as Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Hawking say that we are just “dancing to our DNA” then how can anyone truly hold him accountable. And don’t we believe in survival of the fittest? Obviously the attacked didn’t survive, and he moved up the food chain, but the idea of the food chain is just convention anyway because there is no absolute there is no standard. This is exactly what is justifiable in a material world. This is exactly what would happen when one truly takes away God from this world, and most importantly his heart.
The very concept of good and evil cannot stand if there is no true good. This is true because if we are just products of primordial gunk then every moral dilemma is unimportant, because it goes by the standard of a moral law, and a moral law leads to a moral lawgiver. If anything bad happens it is not really bad. It’s only an event-it neither matters to; you, me, and the un-existent God. We as humans base the question of evil and God the same. We know that there is some kind of wrong, but we usually don’t think about where we got this concept from. I am amazed that the skeptic uses an evil world to debunk the existence of God, because he borrows the Judeo-Christian worldview to disprove God. To the naturalist he should be fine as he is, because we would be imposing some kind of standard upon us highly evolved animals.
We see that the human being has some kind of flaw-but why? If this world is evolving then this world cannot grade it according to anything else beside the past, but that was when we were lesser creatures. We see war, rape, murder, torture, pain, and death, and we are all haunted by these because it is thriving today, but we are evolving! This is a paradox. How can we say anything is wrong? If there is no true morality then there is no true wrong. You see when we compare any crooked line, even a slightly curved one; we know that it will be proven to be un-straight only by comparing it to a straight line. This also works with evil and good. There must be a good God, and he must be the standard by which we compare ourselves with, or else we are truly living according to an inexistent standard. How can we be put up against an inexistent wall? Yet we seem to uplift it to be our standard. If we truly reverence goodness as an ultimate state of being; wouldn’t goodness be God, or-I would dare say-wouldn’t God be true goodness?
Once Jesus was called “good master”, and he responded to that by saying “why do you call me good, no one is good but God.” –and to those that question Jesus’ divinity he never denied it- Isn’t this exactly our condition, and standard? We see that everyone has flaws, and Jesus calls us out. In that short phrase alone Jesus describes our human condition, “no one is good”, and he tells us how we know: God. Jesus had told us centuries ago that our evil is only evil in comparison to God. In that he had answered the skeptic on where we get this concept of good and evil. Only a good God could truly explain any evil if there is no good, then there is no evil.
I had recently heard someone quote their brother in saying that evil is good because it shows how good Christians are, but I disagree. By analogy I will explain. Dr. Martin Luther King had once stated “darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that, and hate cannot drive out hate only love can do that.” I feel the same about good and evil. Can one know light without knowing darkness? Isn’t darkness just an absence of light? Because light is not the absence of darkness, but the fulfillment of itself. Likewise the farther one is from light the more one is in darkness. If we as humans pull away from this standard of good (which is God) then we as humans cannot truly see, and that is why there is evil in this world. It is not because God doesn’t exist in our world, but because he doesn’t exist in our heart.
Has anyone lived the standard of ultimate goodness? Or has someone been truly good? St. John recorded Jesus’ words when he said “ I am the light”, Jesus claimed to be goodness and in through Him he claimed that we can be pulled out of darkness. In the scriptures we find that Jesus was perfect. He was what man was meant to be. He is our standard by what we should go by. Because we are not good, and that we cannot be good by our own accord we must have our condition fixed, and Jesus claimed to be our answer. We are bound by our flaws, and Jesus said “the truth shall make you free.” He said he was the light, and he also claimed to be the truth. He is not only our “straight line”, but he is our line “straightener”! I will end this post with that mainly because Starbucks is about to close, and if they weren't my chair is getting uncomfortable. I will continue this discussion with human value.
