Timothy Keller in his book “The Reason for God” wrote, “Conservative writers and speakers are constantly complaining that the young people of our culture are relativistic and amoral. As a pastor in Manhattan I have been neck deep in sophisticated twentysomethings for almost two decades, and I have not found this to be the case. The secular, young adults I have known have a very finely honed sense of right and wrong. There are many things happening in the world that evoke their outrage. There is a problem with their moral outlook, however.
Free-Floating Morality
In many cases I have to put on my philosophy-professor hat in order to be a good pastor to people. A young couple once came to me for some spiritual direction. They “didn’t believe in much of anything” they said. How could they begin to figure out if there even was a God? I asked them to tell me about something they felt was really, really wrong. The woman spoke out against practices that marginalize women. I said I agreed fully since I was a Christian who believed God made all human beings, but I was curious why she thought it was wrong. She responded, “Women are human beings and human beings have rights.” I asked how she knew that.
Puzzled, she said, “Everyone knows it’s wrong to violate the rights of someone.” I said, “Most people in the world don’t ’know’ that. They don’t have a western view of human rights. Imagine if someone said to you “everyone knows that women are inferior.’ You’d say that’s not an argument, it’s just an assertion. And you’d be right. So let’s start again. If there is no God and everyone evolved from animals, why would it be wrong to trample on someone’s rights?” her husband responded: “Yes, it is true we are just bigger-brained animals, but I’d say animals have rights too. You shouldn’t trample on their rights either.” I asked whether he held animals guilty for treading on the rights of other animals if the stronger ones ate the weaker ones. “No, I couldn’t do that.” So he only held human beings guilty if they trampled on the weak? “Yes.” Why the double standard, I asked. Why did the couple insist that human beings had to be different from animals, so that they were not allowed to act as was natural to the rest of the animal world. Why did this couple keep insisting that humans had this great, unique individual dignity and worth? Why did they believe in human rights? “I don’t know,” the woman said, “I guess they are just there, that’s all.”
The conversation was more congenial than this very compressed account conveys. The young people laughed at some of their responses, which showed me that they were open to exploration and that encouraged me to be more pointed than I would normally have been. However, this conversation reveals how our culture differs from all the others that have gone before. People still have strong moral convictions, but unlike people in other times and places, they don’t have any visible basis for why they find some things to be evil and other things good. It’s almost like their moral intuitions are free-floating in midair—far off the ground.
Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz spoke of this: What has been surprising in the post—Cold War period are those beautiful and deeply moving words pronounced with veneration in places like Prague and Warsaw, words which pertain to the old repertory of the rights of man and the dignity of the person. I wonder at this phenomenon because maybe underneath there is an abyss. After all those ideas had their foundation in religion, and I am not over-optimistic about the survival of religion in a scientific-technological civilization. Notions that seem buried forever have suddenly been resurrected. But how long can they stay afloat if the bottom is ripped out? 1
I don’t believe Milosz is right. I think that people will definitely go on holding to their beliefs in human dignity even when their belief in God is gone. Why is this the case? I have a radical thesis. I think people in our culture know unavoidably that there is a God, but they are repressing what they know. ~Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2018), 148-51
(continued with . . . “The Concept of Moral Obligation”)
(Posts with a preamble asterisk are for a more general audience and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
