RELIABLE TRUTH by Simmons Richard E

Author:Simmons, Richard E.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Union Hill Publishing
Published: 2013-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

ALL THINGS PERMISSIBLE

Do you see what happens when we are left to create our own morality? The Nazi regime believed that killing millions of innocent people was lawful under the value system they had established. Brutality was cultivated as a virtue. This is why Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky’s famous quote, although written in the mid-18th century, rings so true, even today. “If there is no God, all things in life are permissible.”

At the Nuremberg trials in the 1940s, however, it’s interesting to see the response of the Allied judges. The chief counsel for the United States at these trials, Robert Jackson, appealed to permanent, trans-cultural values. He said you have to look to a law beyond the law. A universal law. He said that a system of ethics must point beyond itself. It has to be transcendental and its basis cannot rest within the finite world. Otherwise, he asks, how could one in good faith say the Nazis were guilty of a crime?139

Dr. Arthur Leff, now deceased, was a brilliant professor at Yale Law School. Back in 1979, he published an article in the Duke University Law Journal titled, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law.” Today, it’s considered a very important and prominent essay. It is uncertain what Leff believed about God, but what troubled him was that if there is no God, then there’s no way that one can make any kind of case for human morality, particularly human rights. Here is a paraphrased summary of what he said,

You can say it is wrong for a majority to take advantage of any minority by force, but that is an opinion and not an argument. You can assert all sorts of things, but what you cannot do is say one point of view is morally right and all others are not. If someone says it is all right to enslave a minority, and you say no, it is wrong, who is to say your view of morality is right and theirs is wrong. Maybe it helps to frame it this way: if there is no God, who among us gets to impose their will on everyone else? Who gets to establish the moral laws that people are to follow? These questions are so intellectually troubling that you would think there would be more legal and ethical thinkers trying to come to grips with this. 140

Leff ’s words suggest that if there is a God, then he would make the law for us to follow. We’d base our law on him. And this, by the way, is how Western Civilization was built, with Biblical truth as its foundation. We require a moral foundation on which to build a culture.

As T. S. Eliot penned many years ago,

It is in Christianity that our arts have developed. It is in Christianity that the laws of Europe . . . have been rooted.141

In his well-documented book, How Christianity Changed the World, Alvin Schmidt shows how the moral, biblical worldview of Christianity has had such a powerful and positive influence on the world.

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