“I Thought That I Ought”
Paul explained to Agrippa that, before he became a Christian, he had supposed, or had been of the opinion, that he was obliged to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth and to seek the death penalty for many of His saints (Acts 26:9,10). He felt an obligation. He considered it the right thing to do. He later was convinced that he was completely wrong in this moral judgment. There are things which people think they ought to do. They feel satisfied if they do them and guilty if they do not.
Human beings have a sense of obligation, but the obligation felt varies from person to person. Who sets the standard by which to judge which, if any, of the conflicting obligations is “right”? Currently much stress is placed on the desirability of “fairness”. Allowing that competing interests will result in grey areas, who can determine the standards by which fairness is assessed? Where does the sense of moral obligation – the sense of obligation reinforced by the activity of conscience – originate? What explains the huge variety of conflicting conclusions to which people come as to what they ought to do? Is there an arbiter to decide which, if any, of these conclusions is right or fair?
The Christian answer to these questions is that God created man in His own image and impressed upon his consciousness his obligation to keep the law governing his behaviour which was revealed to him by God and is consistent with the holy character of God Himself. Man fell from the state in which he was created by sinning against God and, ever since, human beings have “glorified Him not as God”, have “changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator”. And “even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient,” or fitting (Rom 1: 21,25,28).
These facts explain why human beings still “show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another” (Rom 2:15). They also account for the fact that their interpretation and application of that law, and sinful ignorance of and enmity against the Lawgiver, results in the perversion manifest in what they think they ought to do. Without God there
can be no absolute standard of morality. Apart from the revelation of His will in His Word there can be no accurate knowledge of that standard. Without regeneration and the renewing of the mind there can be no approach to conformity to that standard.
Today people are encouraged to make their own moral consciousness the standard of their behaviour. Everyone can believe and judge that to be right and true which conforms to his own moral consciousness. The only exception is that the resultant action must not infringe upon the rights of those whose moral consciousness has the loudest voice in the democratic society. One religion is as good as another and one moral code as acceptable as another, so long as it does not claim and demonstrate the authority of the God of the Bible and so long as it does not interfere with the perceived rights and well-being of those whose moral consciousness is ascendant.
The result of this failure or refusal to recognise accountability to God and to His moral law is a society increasingly adrift and bankrupt morally, with no absolute standard by which to judge what is right or what is fair, and on its way to chaos or totalitarianism. In his useful booklet, Can We Be Good Without God? (Evangelical Press) by John Blanchard develops the following important points: “In trying to find a basis for behaviour, nature is not the answer, as it is impossible to jump from atoms to ethics and from molecules to morality. . . . If morality is completely subjective, nobody can condemn what anybody else does, as even something considered grossly immoral by everybody else might be considered moral by the person concerned . . . [If morality is tied to culture or consensus] can we really separate right from wrong by a show of hands? Why should a collection of individuals have any moral authority over a single person who fails to agree with their conclusions?” Dr Blanchard’s conclusion is that “without a transcendent, perfect, unchanging and personal basis for morality we have no way of defining right or wrong – and only God has all those qualities”.
It is not enough to have “thought that we ought” to have done what we did. Our sense of obligation must be informed by the clearly-revealed will of God, grasped by a mind disposed to prove and approve, by obedience and experience, “what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God” (Rom 12:2). HMC
The British Humanist Association
The writer recently received an unsolicited advertising leaflet for the British Humanist Association (BHA). For £35 one can join this sad and wicked organisation, while £500 secures life membership. The Association has developed from a body with a different name which was founded in 1896.
Currently it has 20 000 members. Perhaps there will be a BHA around in 20 or 30 years’ time for those who have taken out life membership, but, unlike the continued existence of the Christian Church, this cannot be guaranteed. Atheists and agnostics have the same depraved human hearts as others, and pride and jealousy are always liable to rend their organisations to pieces, if a revival of true religion does not sweep them away entirely.
The supposed “need” for the BHA is unclear. The advertisement states that Britain is becoming “increasingly secular” and that “more and more people are not religious”, and one wonders why these non-religious people feel the need to unite against the little religion that remains. The real reason, we think, is twofold. Firstly, they hate true Christianity and see an opportunity, as they imagine, of eradicating it from Britain. Secondly, they are afraid of Islam, which they rightly recognise as endangering the whole of Britain’s current hedonistic society. Particular aims of the BHA include the removal of Bishops from the House of Lords and the abolishing of “faith” schools.
One fatal weakness in the BHA’s position is over the meaning of the words right and wrong. It cannot avoid using these words and, if pressed, it refers to the pursuit of “human welfare, happiness and fulfilment” as defining the meaning of right and wrong. But it is evident that such a definition is too vague and uncertain to be of any practical use. Any evil could be justified in these terms. If a future Muslim government were to remove children from BHA parents, the government would doubtless pretend that it was, on balance, increasing “human welfare, happiness and fulfilment”. How would the BHA refute that claim? The reality is that BHA morality simply borrows selected parts of the Ten Commandments without acknowledgment, but is entirely unable to justify its selection.
Another weakness in the BHA position is that it is purely for the comfortable. The advertising leaflet features a dozen “celebrities” who belong to the BHA. These are all people who have had easy adult lives and who have money and opportunities of pleasure in abundance. The bus advertisement which the BHA sponsored last year claimed: “There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” But what about the multitudes of human beings who are not “celebrities” and who are not in a position to “enjoy their lives”? What about the miners in Chile, for instance? Did the BHA have any message for them when they were trapped underground for two months? Possibly the message would have been to commit suicide. One of the dozen BHA “celebrities”, sad to say, is now suffering from an early and very rare form of Alzheimer’s disease, according to his Wikipedia entry. As a result, he has become a campaigner for assisted suicide.
The heart of the BHA position, asserted more than once in the leaflet, is
that we have only “one life”. There is no life after death. But how does the BHA know this? It boasts of “reason” and “science”, but where is the scientific or mathematical journal in which it has been proved that there is no life after death? Interestingly, one of the dozen BHA “celebrities”, a brilliant mathematician, has argued that the famous mathematical theorem, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, implies that current computers are not capable of human intelligence. This argument has been hotly contested but, if correct, it would go a long way towards undermining the humanist position.
But Christians are not dependent on reasoning of this sort. God has given a conclusive argument in the resurrection of Christ: “He hath appointed a day, in the which He will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom He hath ordained; whereof He hath given assurance unto all men, in that He hath raised Him from the dead” (Acts 17:31). DWBS