From a previous post: Leff is not simply concluding that there is no basis for human rights without God. He is also pointing out (as are Dershowitz and Dworkin, in their own way) that despite the fact that we can’t justify or ground human rights in a world without God, we still know they exist. Leff is not just speaking generically, but personally. Without God he can’t justify moral obligation, and yet he can’t not know it exists. ~Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books, 2018) 158-60 (The Problem with Moral Obligation III: Timothy Keller writes. . .* continuing . . . .
The Argument of God from the Violence of Nature IV — Why should we know this? To sharpen our focus on the significance of this indelible knowledge of moral obligation, consider the observations of writer Annie Dillard. Dillard lived for a year by a creek in the mountains of Virginia expecting to be inspired and refreshed by closeness to “nature.” Instead, she came to realize that nature was completely ruled by one certain principle—violence by the strong against the weak.
There is not a person in the world that behaves as badly as praying mantises. But wait, you say, there is no right and wrong in nature; right and wrong is a human concept! Precisely! We are moral creatures in an amoral world. . . . or consider this alternative . . . it is only human feeling that is freakishly amiss. . . . All right then—it is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave . . . lobotomized, go back to the creek, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first. 19
Annie Dillard saw that all of nature is based on violence. Yet we inescapably believe it is wrong for stronger human individuals or groups to kill weaker ones. If violence is totally natural why would it be wrong for strong humans to trample weaker ones? There is no basis for moral obligation unless we argue that nature is in some part unnatural. We can’t know that nature is broken in some way unless there is some supernatural standard of normalcy apart from nature from which we can judge right and wrong. That means there would have to be a haven or God or some kind of divine order outside of nature in order to make that judgment.
There is only one way out of this conundrum. We can pick up the Bible account of things and see if it explains our moral sense any better than a secular view. If the world was made by a God of peace, justice, and love, then that is why we know that violence, oppression and hate are wrong. If the world is fallen, broken, and needs to be redeemed, that explains the violence and disorder we see.
If you believe human rights are a reality, then it makes much more sense that God exists than that he does not. If you insist on a secular view of the world and yet you continue to pronounce some things right and some things wrong, then I hope you see the deep disharmony between the world your intellect has devised and the real world (and God) that your heart knows exists. This leads to a crucial question. If a premise (“There is no God”) leads to a conclusion you know isn’t true (such as “killing the innocent is culturally relative”) then why not change your premise? ~Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books, 2018) 160-162
