Twenty years ago, on the morning of September 11th, 2001, at 6:55 am pacific time, I was sleeping in my basement apartment in Langley, British Columbia. September 11th was going to be the first day of classes at Trinity Western University, where I was about to start my second master’s program, this one in the Old Testament.
Suddenly, I heard someone banging on my bedroom door. It was Charlie, the carpenter whom the owners had hired to convert their basement into an apartment they could rent out, and who still had a little bit of flooring to put down in the kitchen to finish the job. Since I had moved a few days earlier, I had gotten to know him a little…and here he was at 6:55 am, banging on my door, saying, “Joel, get out here! A plane just flew into the World Trade Center in New York!”
“Oh, get out of here…I’m trying to sleep.”
“No, I’m serious! It just happened a few minutes ago! It’s on the television!”
He was serious. And so, I stumbled out of bed, into the living room, and there on the television was an image of black smoke pouring out of one of the towers. The news anchors were trying to piece together what had happened. Was it an accident? Was it a terrorist attack? What? Within a few minutes, it became obvious that this wasn’t an accident.
As Charlie and I were watching the events unfold, all of a sudden, another plane appeared over the New York skyline, heading straight toward the World Trade Center. Everything went into slow motion, and I got that feeling that you get in your stomach when you are on a rollercoaster as soon as the cars begin a steep drop.
The plane then smashed straight into the second tower in a fireball. I know this will sound completely strange, and perhaps offense to some, but as I watched that plane crash into the second tower, seeing the fireball, coupled with the black smoke already billowing from the first tower, the whole spectacle against the blue sky and New York skyline, my first thought was, “This is art.” And it was—a horrifically evil and powerful work of art.
I just watched in silence. Thirty minutes later (7:30 am out on the west coast) the news came that a plane had flown into the Pentagon. Thirty minutes after that, around 8:00 am for me, within the span of only a few minutes, the south tower collapsed and Flight 93 had crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. And thirty minutes after that, around 8:30 am for me, the north tower collapsed.
I kept watching for another hour, but then around 9:30 am, I changed and decided to drive over to campus for what was supposed to be the first day of class. Unsurprisingly, everything was shut down for the day. I went back home and was glued to the television for the rest of the day.
The next day, I got a call from my sister.
“Hey Joel, wasn’t there a Todd Beamer in your high school class?”
“Yeah, why are you asking that?”
“He was on Flight 93. He was the guy who said, ‘Let’s Roll’ before they tried to storm the cockpit.”
Now, in all honesty, it wasn’t like Todd and I were best friends or anything, but we did play on the same baseball team, if only for the first part of our freshman year. He was so good that he was called up to play on varsity halfway through the season, while I and the rest of our sad excuse of a JV team continued to flounder. I remember the following baseball season, when were both sophomores, and both the JV and varsity were together for the first few days of “spring training” in the commons at Wheaton Christian High School, one day I warmed up throwing with him, and for some inexplicable reason, I completely forgot how to throw straight and one time I almost hit the coach with an errant throw.
Todd just kept encouraging me. He was the big athlete, and I was a scrawny 110-pound kid who was easily intimated by, well, virtually everyone, because they were all bigger than me, and I was wholly embarrassed that I couldn’t throw straight that day. Todd didn’t laugh or get exasperated with me, though. He just kept encouraging me. Like I said, we weren’t best friends, and we ran in different social circles in high school, but when my sister told me Todd Beamer was on Flight 93, I immediately thought of that day of baseball practice, 15 years earlier. He encouraged me, and he was the one who said, “Let’s Roll.”
That was when 9/11 became a little more of a reality for me. I actually knew someone who died that day. I had played catch with a hero.
***
Over the course of the next few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, I read countless newspaper articles of a certain group in Afghanistan called the Taliban, and how they had been absolutely terrorizing the people of Afghanistan for five years—beheadings at soccer games, shootings in the streets, the constant raping and beating of women and children. I remember thinking, “We suffered one horrific day of terrorism on 9/11, but those people in Afghanistan had suffered and been terrorized every day for the past five years.”
For that reason, I absolutely supported our invasion of Afghanistan, not only for what Al-Qaeda and the Taliban did to us on 9/11, but to try and save the lives of the innocent people in Afghanistan from those monsters—and yes, the Taliban are monsters. Sure, we are all sinful, but there is a difference between being sinful and outright evil. And the Taliban were…are…evil.
Now, at that time, and a couple of years later with the Iraq War, supported President Bush’s decision to go into both places, not out of some mindlessly-patriotic, Toby Keith “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way” mindset, but because I had the hope that perhaps the United States could use its power to oust these regimes that ruthlessly terrorized and slaughtered their own people, and perhaps could help establish democratic forms of governments, and by doing so , help bring peace to the Middle East.
Looking back in hindsight, that was a pretty naïve, albeit well-intentioned, goal. Western democracy isn’t a magic pill, certainly not in places that have never known anything other than monarchies or other types of authoritarian government. In hindsight, the thought that the United States could engage in nation-building in those places has proven to be quite foolish. Still, during those years, a number of my former students had joined the army and had been deployed in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and I will always be extremely proud of them.
In any case, let’s face it, the United States’ decisions following 9/11, particularly those attempts to “nation build,” and not just completely knock out the Taliban, has led to an entirely different global reality that everyone is still trying to figure out. The violently partisan divisions we seem to now have in the United States stem from our post 9/11 decisions. That immediate sense of unity in the aftermath of 9/11 quickly dissipated into the worst kind of hyper-partisanship I’ve ever seen. Why? I’m not sure I can give a definitive answer to that.
Perhaps the initial (and oversimplistic) “Us vs. Them” mentality that said America was 100% good and all the evil was to be found in the terrorists, sparked a backlash among some Americans when we learned about waterboarding and Abu Graib prison. When some realized America wasn’t 100% good, they ended up rushing to the other side of the spectrum and became convinced that America was 100% bad: how can we really blame the terrorists and state sponsors of terror (like Iran)? After all, America really is evil! It has always been that way! Hopelessly racist, and capitalism is evil and racist to boot! America must atone for its sins!”
I think there might be something to that—oversimplistic patriotism that refused to see America’s flaws resulted in a growing segment in American society that can’t see anything but America’s flaws and refuses to see how much good America has done. But reality is always a mixed bag, and it takes a lot of sobriety and maturity to keep both eyes open and acknowledge, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said, “The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.”
That isn’t to say that there aren’t real, demonstrable acts of evil in the world that are objectively evil. September 11th 2001 was a day in which we all were witnesses to evil. And yes, the Taliban are evil. Any group that purposely terrorizes and kills innocent people is evil. Purposeful genocide is evil.
Responding to evil and the reality of warfare—that can get messy. What are governments to do when they see a regime engage in that kind of evil? They can’t sit idly by and let it happen. They must act, and that often results in war. As horrible as it is, though, I can never be a pacifist—for true evil must be fought against. For the poor, needy, orphan, and widow to get justice, sometimes that will require war. For that matter, although many are against the death penalty, I am not. Some actions are so evil, that I think the death penalty is warranted. As I teach my Old Testament Introduction course, I always come across those commandments in Deuteronomy that call for “evil to be purged from your midst.” And ever since 9/11 and my reading of the atrocities that the Taliban did to innocent Afghans, and whenever I read or see a news story of someone committing a truly evil act—I understand and agree with that sentiment. There are some actions so evil, that a truly just response is to “purge it from our midst.”
In any case, looking back at 9/11 twenty years later, and the subsequent decisions by the United States in the “War on Terror,” there are a number of things I wished we would have done differently. But the reality is that we are always forced to make decisions on incomplete information. And we are all imperfect and flawed people to boot. We make choices and then have to live with the consequences—especially the unforeseen consequences. We are always faced with the constant challenge of learning from our mistakes, however well-intentioned they were.
I will always look back on September 11th 2001 with a sense of horror at how artistic evil can be, and I will always admire all those Americans who bravely sacrificed their lives in the more beautiful artistic work of heroism, self-sacrifice, love, and honor, not only on that day at the World Trade Center and in that field in Shanksville, but over the past twenty years, in those highly complex and admittedly problematic wars, where we did the best we could as we tried to battle real evil, both from without and within.
There will always be evil in the world, and we will always be battling it from without and within. I pray, though, that when we are faced with such clear instances of evil as we were twenty years ago, and when we bear witness to those acts of bravery, love, and heroism in the face of evil, that we remember those acts of heroism often sprout from much smaller acts of love, compassion, and kindness…like playing catch with a JV player who was so easily intimidated by bigger kids.
May we never forget them…any of them. And may learn to imitate them in kind.
Joel, Thanks for posting this. I was struck by your reference to art related to the evil of the attack, because I saw something similar. I was in Manhattan that day, and was in the process of fleeing uptown when the second tower began to fall. People began screaming and I turned around and watched the building collapse. And I saw something that was never captured by any camera. Right next to the falling building high in the sky for a brief moment I saw a bright twinkling, as if the sky was filled with bits of crystal distorting the light in a beautiful way. In fact later I realized that it was actually the enormous quantity of broken glass from the huge building, floating in the air before falling. Amidst the horror of the sight, I thought “how beautiful” and also thought that what I was seeing might be the souls of the 100s of people whose lives were ending as I watched. It’s been 20 years, but I will never recover from that day. Peace and blessings,
Sy
Thanks, Sy.
It is hard to believe all that was 20 years ago.
I was working from home and had a builder fixing something in my new house while listening to the radio. He told me a plane had just crashed into the WTC. I turned on the TV and a few minutes later a 2nd plane went into the 2nd tower. The strangest feeling came over me, as I knew the US had just been attacked and I knew that things would be very different from then on.
It turned out that I was scheduled in 2 weeks to be at a weeklong meeting in one of the smaller buildings around the towers that also got destroyed when the towers came down. I realized that my relatives and friends would not know exactly where I was and when and so I contacted them to inform them I was safe and to see how they were.
P.S. There is still info about the attacks that the US government is keeping under wraps and that many of the relatives of survivors are asking to be released.
Which kid are you in the picture?
I am sitting, bottom row, in the middle. Todd Beamer is kneeling, right behind me.
I applaud your shout out to the brave heroes who act with courage in the midst of evil. I think of all those firefighters who had to haul heavy equipment up stairs for over an hour just to try and save people and then tragically were killed when the towers collapsed.
But I, an atheist, have to ask you, a Christian, were do you believe God was during that day and the subsequent years especially after God supposedly told GW Bush to end the tyranny in Iraq?
The ‘art’ of evil is one of the main reasons I don’t believe the Christian God exists.
Hi James,
As soon as one gets into the issues of “Why is there evil in the world?/How could there be a good God if there is evil in the world?” –well, that’s diving into some deep waters that a quick reply in a blog can’t really do justice to. On that issue, I’ve always like C.S. Lewis’ wrestling with the problem in his book “Mere Christianity.”
As for your specific question, though, it is hard to answer without expressing what I think the nature of human beings and this created order really is. It really goes back to the ancient Christian teaching regarding Genesis 1-3. Without letting myself get into a long, rambling response, I’ll put it this way: I think THIS creation is (obviously) imperfect and everything thing in its natural state dies. It’s inevitable. And human beings, in their natural state, are naive, foolish, immature, you name it–and that means we inevitably make bad choices and do bad things. And sometimes those things snowball to the point where people choose to do outright evil things. That is just the nature of reality.
But I think that human beings in their natural state aren’t supposed to be God’s finished product. Just as in Genesis 1-3, we are told that human beings are made in God’s image, but they are not yet according to God’s likeness. That requires growth and maturity, and that is something that human beings naturally do not have. Therefore, I think all the imperfections, challenges, and evils in this world are there as means by which we mature and grow. Simply put, the hardships in life, if we react to them rightly, will makes us stronger, wiser, more mature human beings. And that is how we are to become more like God.
It is inevitable that we all suffer at various times and we all die. That is just what life entails in this natural order. But Christianity basically states this natural world is just “phase one,” so to speak. It is the arena in which we are to be transformed from merely natural Christians made in God’s image to transformed children of God who bear God’s likeness.
I hope that makes sense. It boils down to: (A) God creatures us as natural, imperfect creatures, (B) This created, natural order is one of imperfection, sin, and death, yet (C) Those are the things that transform us into God’s likeness, and because of Christ, death isn’t the end…well, it’s the end of living in this imperfect world dominated by death; but it’s the beginning of living transformed lives that have conquered death.
I agree that the problem of evil is not a topic for a comment section. You bring up C.S. Lewis, I would counter with Epicurus and it devolves from there. You did actually touch on one of my big frustrations when I was a Christian and now, as an atheist, I understand that I was just doing massive rationalizations. I naively assumed that belief in God granted Christians some sort of special favor while here on earth (Mark 11:24, Matt 7:7, John 4:13-14, etc.) but you have pointed out (some might even say ranted) in previous posts that this is folly. Believers should not expect life to be easier for them than non-believers. I think of the estimated 200 people who jumped from the towers probably because they felt is was their only option. Had some of them been fervently praying for rescue up until that moment? Now I know there are Christians that will say that it was God’s will, they’re in a better place. Every time I hear that statement at a funeral I want to stand up and scream ‘Rationalization’. Something bad happens it’s God’s will, something good happens it’s an answer to prayer.
Ultimately it came down to this question for me; what’s the point? If God’s will is always done and there is no advantage for being a believer then, quoting Epicurus, that God is malevolent. Why would I believe in that God? Fear of Hell? There’s a great reason to believe in something; eternal torture for not worshiping Him. I know you don’t believe in that version of Hell but I can’t tell you how many Christians have used that concept to try and convert me. The promise of Heaven? There are all kinds of issues with that concept, the biggest being why would I want to spend eternity worshipping a God that sent some of my loved ones to be tortured for that same eternity?
You say that the trials in life are meant to transform us into God’s likeness. What about the people that don’t transform? That actually leave the faith because of those trials? I met a former pastor who turned atheist because his young daughter drowned in a bathtub. He said the pain never went away and he thinks about it everyday and it caused him to lose his faith. Was that’s God’s will?
Yes, I can see why many who used to be Christians left the faith, IF they held to that assumption that being a Christian meant everything should go well for you. Yes, unfortunately (ESPECIALLY in the “health and wealth” brands of American Evangelicalism) that is how Christianity is presented. Any honest reading of the Bible shows that to be a complete falsehood. Any faith that is based on that assumption is a lie and won’t hold up under pressure.
But I think a close reading of the New Testament (and the early Church Fathers) teaches the exact opposite: Suffering and death are inevitable, and if you’re a Christian, you should especially expect to suffer. The essential difference lies in how one goes about dealing with it. The Christian “good news” isn’t “Accept Christ and avoid suffering.” It’s “Accept Christ and you make it through that suffering and come out on the other side of it transformed and experiencing life in God in the new creation.” If the sufferings in this life are equated with fire, they will either consume you or refine and purify you. So, to your question, “What about people who don’t transform?” I tend to lean toward the idea of annihilationism: those who don’t accept Christ don’t ‘burn in hell’ for eternity, but rather they lose their life and cease to exist.
But the problem of suffering and evil is obviously always going to be a hard thing to grasp. Some people lose their faith when a loved one dies, but then there are also countless stories of people whose faith has grown stronger in the face of extreme suffering and torture. But ultimately, it will always be a extremely tough thing to deal with. Without wanting to sound trite, it comes down to either suffering consumes us or it transforms us–that, though, doesn’t diminish the agony of suffering at all.
Though I understand why people do so, to me, personally, to jettison the faith because of the continued existence of evil would be a cop-out. It’s too easy.
Because if evil exists, so does God; if God doesn’t exist then neither does objective evil. Not in any real, meaningful sense. In that case “evil” is merely in the eyes of the beholder.
No, you only get real, objective, evil like the 9/11 attacks if God exists. Without an overarching moral standard bigger than us good and evil are mere relative terms. Our evil is the Taliban’s good. Or vice-versa; without some kind of objective moral standard there’s no basis for preferring one, western democracy, over the other, the Sharia Law of the Taliban.
AS NT Wright points out in his book *Simply Christian,* our human longing for justice is an “echo of a voice” which tells us the world doesn’t always work the way it’s supposed to. No one even has to tell us, we can simply observe that the world is broken and doesn’t work right. Yet absent God and a moral law, we wouldn’t know or care about any of this. But the fact that we *know* something’s wrong is a big clue.
Thus I can’t abandon my faith simply because of the continued existence of evil. You can argue about why God doesn’t abolish evil if he’s a just god, but that’s a different argument.
Part of the problem is this massive misunderstanding that many people, even a lot of Christians, especially a lot of Christians, have, which says that the aim of our faith is for God to one day rescue our immortal souls from their embodied existence on earth and whisk them away into heaven where our immortal spirits will reside forever (the one which says we turn into angels when we die is even worse). However the aim of Christianity is not, and never has been liberating “divine sparks” from embodied existence–that was what the 2nd century Gnostic heresy was all about. True, authentic Christianity insists that heaven, God’s dimension, and earth, our dimension, will one day fully and finally intersect and God will rule over/in a completed, restored, renewed earth where peace and justice reign supreme, and human beings will live in resurrected, yet still tangible and physical, bodies.
Authentic Christianity teaches that evil will one day be conquered and abolished, and that actually the process has already begun with Jesus’ defeating sin and death via his bodily resurrection. As the Church Fathers insisted, what sins must be judged, in order for God to be righteous, and our bodies sin.
We tend to forget that theire will one day be a cosmic reckoning where God does judge and evil will be fully and finally purged from the earth.
I realize that most of the above is based on faith, however not a blind faith devoid of evidence and arguments..
I was at work when my brother called and told me to turn on a TV, so we all went downstairs to watch the coverage on TV. What I especially remember from 9/11 is watching the NYC firemen and policemen and how they were the true heroes of that day. Then when Rudi Giuliani hosted Saturday Night Live that Saturday night and made an inspiring speech I remember thinking, tonight we’re all New Yorkers!
Pax.
Lee.
First let me preface this post by saying I am not a philosopher nor do I play one on TV. This is yet another subject too big for the comment section but I will respond. I have never understood the Christian insistence for both objective evil and objective morality. I get that it is used as evidence for God and it sounds compelling but when you actually investigate it the arguments fall apart. My understanding of objective is that all agents need to agree on the premise. Yes, the vast majority of the world would call the events of 9/11 evil. But the terrorists, planners, adherents to that sect of faith considered it a righteous, religious victory, thus making it subjective. I can point to dozens of OT stories that in today’s society would be considered pure evil but because they were God commanded Christians are now forced to defend those actions again making them subjective. Morality would be the counterpart to the instances of evil being subjective to that particular event. One argument I’ve heard is that you can’t use ancient events as examples because it was a different time and society but isn’t that the very definition of subjective? That fact that society no longer condones slavery means that it was a subjective evil because at one time it was widely accepted.
Can you point to one evil in the world where every person who has ever lived has agreed that it was evil? That would be an objective evil. Everything else is subjective.
As far as a cosmic reckoning and the judgement of God (another too big topic) I’m wondering if you can explain what you believe will happen. What is your eschatological view? I’m guessing it is different from Joel’s. Why can’t Christians agree on one succinct version of the end of the world? Sounds subjective to me.
If I can jump in…
I understand what you are saying, in that different people have different views on what constitutes right/wrong, or at least to what degree those things are right and wrong. In that sense, there is a certain amount of subjectivity. A couple of years ago, I actually debated the atheist Dan Barker on the topic of morality. Personally, I think I didn’t do that well, but afterwards, I wrote a blog post clarifying what I was trying to say on the topic. But in any case, I think it is pretty clear that human beings have a sense of morality that other animals don’t have. No one brings murder charges upon a lion for killing a gazelle. We don’t think the lion has done anything morally “wrong.” But we do think it is morally wrong for a human being to murder another human being. In that sense, I would say, it is “objectively true” that the very sense of morality is unique to human beings. And the very fact that human being debate over morality, that certain things are right and other things are wrong, shows that there is some sense within human beings of a very real morality.
Human behavior and actions are like keys on a piano. Sometimes to play a certain key is right, and other times it is wrong. Thus, morality is like the music and our instincts and passions are the keys–there are right times and wrong times to play them. And, of course, sometimes if one is playing a tune and hits a wrong note, we can hear it is off, but the tune is still distinguishable. A singer can be flat–we still know what the song is, but it’s not being sung well. I tend to view morality more along those lines.
As for views on the end of the world…yes, quite another topic!
I realize that Christians desire everything to be black and white, you guys do not deal well with ambiguity. Studies of serial killers have shown common personality disorders including antisocial personality disorder; They are incapable of understanding murder is ‘morally wrong’. Your comment that humans debate over morality only re-enforces my point that is subjective. Why would you debate over something that is objectively true no matter what? But I have to ask about your statement that we think it is morally wrong for a human being to murder another human being. Do we? Or do we subjectively decide whether a murder was morally wrong with laws and the court system? Take the ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws found in 38 states which basically allow someone to kill another person if they feel threatened. Sometimes the person is found guilty of murder, sometimes they are acquitted because it was deemed self-defense. Interestingly a study showed that in about 35% of cases where a white person killed a black person it was deemed self-defense. But it was only 3% self-defense where a black person killed a white person. Seems quite subjective. How much of our sense of morality is there at birth and how much is learned or environment? Looking at how an entire race was marginalized in the South; back of the bus, separate bathrooms/ water fountains/ dining areas, etc. That seems morally wrong to me now and I assume it does to you as well. But if we were raised in that time and environment would we still have thought that? I wonder.
James, I don’t think a person has to be a philosopher to understand and discuss basic human morality.
According to Webster’s online “objective” means:
expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations
That’s how Christians use the word in relation to morality. Just because the 9/11 terrorists thought their actions were morally right doesn’t mean they *were* morally right. No. Their actions were objectively, morally wrong whether they were aware of that fact or not. That;’s how morality works.
As for the US legal system, why does our legal system say that premeditated murder is morally wrong? Not only says it, but seems to take for granted that it’s objectively, morally wrong to kill someone in cold blood. Otherwise, why put someone on trial who stands accused of that crime? Why even criminalize it if it isn’t morally wrong? But we punish premeditated murder because we all know deep down inside us that it is morally wrong.
That there may be occasions in which it is morally right to take a life doesn’t invalidate the overarching fact that premeditated murder is normally morally wrong. Obviously the law takes into account whether a killing was planned or accidental, and even the “stand your ground law” you referred to doesn’t allow indiscriminate killing for any reason, but *only* if they feel their life is threatened.
There simply *have* to be objective moral standards, otherwise the Allies had no basis for punishing the Nazis for the Holocaust. Without an Objective Moral Law, morality is simply whatever one individual or group says it is. Thus, the Nazis argued that the Holocaust was morally right, while the allies argued that it was morally wrong. Without an Objective Moral Standard bigger than both societies and which they’re both answerable to, there’s no basis for calling the Holocaust “evil.” Without Objective Moral Standards how can you object to any of those Old Testament stories you mentioned above on moral grounds? You can’t. The best you can do is to say that you, personally, don’t like the stories of, say, Israelite conquest, but you can’t call them “evil.”
Without Objective Morality there’s no basis for thinking that racism is wrong, sexual harassment, or lots of other behaviors we punish or criminalize are wrong. Absent a Moral Law, these behaviors are neither good or evil, they just are.
As CS Lewis demonstrated in his book *Mere Christianity,* there are some behaviors that everyone knows are wrong without having to be told. One example Lewis used was that of a man whose seat gets taken on a bus. When the man objects to having his seat taken, the seat-thief never responds by saying “to h*ll with your moral system.” Instead the guy will try to justify why stealing the other guy’s seat wasn’t really stealing.
Another example Lewis used is two kids on the playground. If one kid takes another kid’s toy away from him, that kid will say something like, “that’s not fair! I had that toy first!” In doing so, this preschool kid is appealing to an unwritten yet nonetheless *real* moral code which says that taking someone else’s toy away from him/her isn’t right or fair.
If you look carefully at every human society on record you’ll see that every single one shares certain basic moral assumptions in common: for example, every human society on record values bravery but not cowardice, honesty rather than lying. No society has ever seriously tried to argue that, most of the time, cowardice is preferable to bravery. Is that mere coincidence? Now a given society may say a man can have only one wife whereas another society might allow a man more than one wife, but both societies would insist that a man can’t simply take any woman he wants anytime he wants.
Even the Taliban, while believing that Jihad allows the premeditated killing of certain non-Muslims, wouldn’t argue for the indiscriminate killing of anyone for any reason.
Dr. Anderson is right. Humans don’t punish lions for eating gazelles (nor do gazelles punish lions for eating gazelles). Human beings are the only species on the planet which lives according to a Moral Law. But as CS Lewis demonstrated, the Moral Law is one Law that human beings are allowed by their Creator to violate if they so-choose.
Pax.
Lee.
I think James is taking issue with the term “objective.” And to a point, I sort of agree. As human beings, whenever we come to the topic of morality, WE are coming at it from our subjective points of view. STILL, I think we are unique in that we have a sense of morality, which nothing else in the natural world has. Morality isn’t always crystal clear, but at the same time, just because people have different opinions on specific things considered moral or immoral, that shouldn’t lead us to saying there is no such thing as morality, and that it is all JUST a matter of opinion. In reality, none of us live like that.
Well, I’d have to say you’re somewhat arguing against your point. You say serial killers don’t really know that murder is wrong–but I would have to think that you really think murder is wrong. Hence, you are saying there is something wrong with those types of serial killers that prevents them from realizing something you know is really wrong.
And that isn’t to say that every instance of someone being killed is 100% crystal clear whether or not it is morally wrong, but I think the point is that the very fact that humans debate over this issue shows/indicates that there really is some sort of concept of real morality. Sure, we come to it through our subjective lenses–and hence the ambiguity and uncertainness in societies over certain things–but human beings really do have this sense of right/wrong that isn’t found anywhere else in the natural world.
As for the example of racism in the South, history shows that there really was a very heated debate and controversy over slavery and Jim Crow. Just because those in power enforced those things, it is equally true, from even before the United States existed, that there was a very fervent abolitionist movement that railed against the evils of slavery. And, of course, I think you’d agree the abolitionists were right: slavery is morally wrong. And by agreeing, you are, in fact, admitting some things are really right and some things really wrong, even though there is often controversy within society over certain things.
I’d agree that there’s an element of subjectivity involved in making moral decisions,
What CS Lewis called the Moral Law, NT Wright calls the “echo of a voice.” Yet just because some people don’t hear it, ignore the voice, change the channel, or pretend as if they can’t hear it, doesn’t make that echo of a voice any less real. That says more about human beings and our flawed human nature than it does the Moral Law itself.
The sun is always there, for example, whether I can actually *see* it or not, just as the speed limit on the interstate is 65 whether I see the sign or not. If I get pulled over for speeding and try to argue that because I didn’t see the posted sign, or because I think that the posted 65 mph limit is too subjective, thus I shouldn’t get a ticket for driving 85 mph, I’m probably still gonna get a ticket.
Maybe that clarifies what I’m trying to say. Probably not.
Pax.
Lee.