Apologetics III: It’s the Doink Doink
Law and Order is catchy, don’t try to deny it. The original series started back in 1990, and has had several spin offs (Criminal Intent, Trial By Jury, and every woman’s favorite, Special Victim’s Unit…it’s Elliot), launched video games, movies and automatically qualified Fred Thompson to run for president. And of course, there’s the doink, doink. Perhaps people watched just for Iced T’s acting, but I think what attracts people to the show is the desire to see the bad guys locked up and justice done (all in under an hour too!). This brings me to (probably) my final post on apologetics: the moral argument.
Have you ever thought about how every society, whether it is some remote island in the South Pacific or even your home town, has a moral code? Usually the legal codes is representative of the moral code, for example murdering someone is ‘wrong’ and it’s also illegal. But there are other ones that we perceive as wrong that aren’t necessarily illegal, like adultery. And then there’s the laws that that don’t make any sense (who cares if someone goes fishing for whales on Sunday …on Lake Erie).
While each culture may disagree on what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong,’ it’s hard to deny that morality does in fact exist (Romans 2:14-15). Atheists, agnostics, and relativists claim that they do not believe this to be true, but if you actually push them on it, they’ll eventually contradict themselves. While some will suggest they are satisfied (a human construct) with there being no morality, they always have someone/thing in their life that they love or gives them pleasure, perhaps a spouse, dear old grandma, or cause such as helping Sarah McLachlan save the puppies. The problem is that in order for them to ‘love’ these things, there must be a God that gives these concepts their intrinsic value.
If we are all simply highly evolved self-aware star dust that magically appeared on its own 14 billion years ago, love, hate, passion, envy, right, wrong, every emotion is a figment of our imagination. They are all human constructs that we invented to cope (also a self-made concept) with life (and the fact that we are lying to ourselves is neither good nor bad). It does not matter if you are a working in a lab to find and cure for cancer or if you’re Hitler seeking to slaughter millions of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and other ‘undesirables.’ Human rights don’t actually exist, so genocide and letting people wither away in pain is ‘fair’ game.
Skeptics like Dawkins and Provine say that they don’t see anything wrong with having a moral code and also not believing in God, but they are on borrowed capital when they use such terms as ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ Without an absolute truth, these words have no meaning. Ironically, these men are some of the ardent proponents for fighting for groups that the Church has ostracized, like homosexuals, and also call for the Church to stop lying to people about creationism because it’s ‘wrong.’ At the other end of the political spectrum, Ayn Rand championed individual rights, while failing to see that the individual only has worth if he has a Creator that gave it to him. Otherwise man has just as much purpose as an ant, and squashing his ‘individual rights’ is just as acceptable as never recognizing such rights to begin with (good news for all those tyrants).
