“There is no God and no soul. Hence, there are no needs for the props or traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable [unchangeable] truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for fixed natural law or permanent moral absolutes” [6].

“After studying his environment man has begun to study himself. Up to that point, he had assumed his own reason and through it seen all other things. Now, his own reason has become the object: it is as if we took out our eyes to look at them. Thus studied, his own reason appears to him as the epiphenomenon which accompanies chemical or electrical events in a cortex which is itself the by-product of a blind evolutionary process. His own logic, hitherto the king whom events in all possible worlds must obey, becomes merely subjective. There is no reason for supposing that it yields truth” [12].

Statement: There is no such thing as absolute truth; [or alternatively, there are many truths.]

quote:

---

You Shouldn’t Force Your Morality On Me!

-First Person: “You shouldn’t force your morality on me.”
Second Person: “Why not?”
-First Person: “Because I don’t believe in forcing morality.”
Second Person: “If you don’t believe in it, then by all means, don’t do it. Especially don’t force that moral view of yours on me.”

-First Person: “You shouldn’t push your morality on me.”
Second Person: “I’m not entirely sure what you mean by that statement. Do you mean I have no right to an opinion?”
-First Person: “You have a right to you’re, but you have no right to force it on anyone.”
Second Person: “Is that your opinion?”
-First Person: “Yes.”
Second Person: “Then why are you forcing it on me?”
-First Person: “But your saying your view is right.”
Second Person: “Am I wrong?”
-First Person: “Yes.”
Second Person: “Then your saying only your view is right, which is the very thing you objected to me saying.”

First Person: “You shouldn’t push your morality on me.”
Second Person: “Correct me if I’m misunderstanding you here, but it sounds to me like your telling me I’m wrong.”
First Person: “You are.”
Second Person: “Well, you seem to be saying my personal moral view shouldn’t apply to other people, but that sounds suspiciously like you are applying your moral view to me. Why are you forcing your morality on me?” [15]

---

Self-Defeating (Again, Relativism: Feet Planted Firmly In Mid Air)
“Most of the problems with our culture can be summed up in one phrase: ‘Who are you to say?’” – Dennis Prager. So lets unpack this phrase and see how it is self-refuting, or as Tom Morris (footnote # 7) put it, self-deleting.

When someone says, “Who are you to say?” answer with, “Who are you to say ‘Who are you to say’?”

This person is challenging your right to correct another, yet she is correcting you. Your response to her amounts to “Who are you to correct my correction, if correcting in itself is wrong?” or “If I don’t have the right to challenge your view, then why do you have the right to challenge mine?” Her objection is self-refuting; you’re just pointing it out.

The “Who are you to say?” challenge fails on another account. Taken at face value, the question challenges one’s authority to judge another’s conduct. It says, in effect, “What authorizes you to make a rule for others? Are you in charge?” This challenge miscasts my position. I don’t expect others to obey me simply because I say so. I’m appealing to reason, not asserting my authority. It’s one thing to force beliefs; it’s quite another to state those beliefs and make an appeal for them.

The “Who are you to say?” complaint is a cheap shot. At best it’s self-defeating. It’s an attempt to challenge the legitimacy of your moral judgments, but the statement itself implies a moral judgment. At worst, it legitimizes anarchy!

Moral Duty
Our language is another key that reveals what we really believe. It’s virtually impossible for someone who believes in the truthfulness of relativism to communicate in a way that is consistent with his or her beliefs. The words we use for speech testify to our deepest intuitions about the surrounding world we live in.

In speaking with said person, you can usually show them to be inconsistent in only a few minutes when moral words like should or ought creep into the conversation. When these words appear, you should show the relativist how they are undermining their own stated position. You see, morality is in our nature, it is built in. Human beings have an innate capacity to reason in moral categories and to make moral judgments. Instead of arguing for morality, we simply ask a question or make a comment that gets the person in touch with his or her own moral intuition. We then ask her to make sense out of her response in light of her relativism. Most will recognize this as the Socratic method. One must make the distinction that there are descriptive and prescriptive ethics. To notate and try to explain by behavior why a young man did not give up his seat to an elderly woman, is differanmt than saying he “ought” to do so [16].

A Challenge In The Classroom (for clarity purposes this actual conversation has been excerpted from the book Relativism)

quote:

---

Teacher: “Welcome, students. This is the first day of class, and so I want to lay down some ground rules. First, since no one person has the truth, you should be open-minded to the opinions of your fellow students. Second… Elizabeth, do you have a question?”

Elizabeth: “Yes I do. If nobody has the truth, isn’t that a good reason for me not to listen to my fellow students? After all, if nobody has the truth, why should I waste my time listening to other people and their opinions? What’s the point? Only if somebody has the truth does it make sense to be open-minded. Don’t you agree?”

Teacher: “No, I don’t. Are you claiming to know the truth? Isn’t that a bit arrogant and dogmatic?”

Elizabeth: “Not at all. Rather I think it’s dogmatic, as well as arrogant, to assert that no single person on earth knows the truth. After all, have you met every single person in the world and quizzed him or her exhaustively? If not, how can you make such a claim? Also, I believe it is actually the opposite of arrogance to say that I will alter my opinions to fit the truth whenever and wherever I find it. Moreover, if I happen to think that I have good reason to believe I do know truth and would like to share it with you, why wouldn’t you listen to me? Why would you automatically discredit my opinion before it is even uttered? I thought we were supposed to listen to everyone’s opinion.”

Teacher: “This should prove to be an interesting semester.”

Another Student: “(blurts out) Ain’t that the truth.” (Students laugh) [17]

---

¨ Politics & The Modern Liberal Contradiction

Arbitrary Values / Relativism
In many cases, “modern liberal” positions are based on the idea of tolerance, the freedom of the individual to do as he or she pleases. This in turn is based on moral relativism, the idea that morality is relative to the individual and the situation (which distinguishes it from “classical liberalism”). Again, what is right or wrong for you may not be right or wrong for others. As a result, you cannot tell others not to have an abortion, not to look at or publish pornography, or not to live by an “alternative lifestyle.” Educational environments must be “value free,” there must be no restrictions on sexual and artistic freedom, and according to some, even activities such as recreational drug use should be decriminalized [although I do disagree with “the war on drugs”]. Because there are no absolute values, each person must discover his own morality, a process taught in our schools as “values clarification.”

The liberal contradiction lies in the fact that every liberal position claims to be morally correct and objectively true. It is right to allow abortions and wrong to oppose them. Tolerance (in its modern definition) is good, intolerance is bad. Children should be allowed to grow up in a value-free environment; parents should not impose their own values. Modern liberalism takes a moral stance on every issue, but it undermines its own foundation by claiming that there is no moral absolute or guide to adhere to.

To put it into simple terms, yet once more, when a liberal tells you that you cannot tell other people what to do, he or she is contradicting himself by telling you what to do! And there is another side to the liberal contradiction. While many liberal positions are based on tolerance and complete individual freedom, other liberal positions are based on strict authoritarianism.

According to contemporary liberalism, the common good (what Rousseau called “the general will”) necessitates the suppression of individual rights when it comes to “saving” the environment, creating a more “equitable distribution” of wealth, achieving “equality” between races and sexes in all walks of life, and enforcing a strict separation of church and state. Paradoxically, that same “common good” takes a back seat to individual freedoms when it comes to the detrimental effects of: pornography and sexual freedom, reduced police power and criminal punishment, or drug use, or firearm mandates, etc..

Let me hasten to add that I too am for tolerance, equal rights, and ending unjust discrimination. I too am for freedom of speech, artistic freedom, academic freedom, and the separation of church and state. I too am for protecting the environment and helping the underprivileged. But I am for these things because I believe in the tenants of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition, not because I reject these absolutes.

If I were to reject the idea of moral truths, what possible motivation (moral duty) could I have to champion these or any other causes? More important, on what basis could I hope to persuade others of the importance of these causes? It is inconsistent to claim to be concerned about rights while rejecting the moral foundation from which rights are derived.

The rejection of one’s own moral foundation leads one to be not only immoral, but also illogical. It leads to positions that are inconsistent with themselves and each other (self-deleting). It leads to outcomes that directly counter one’s original intention and that threaten one’s own goals. It is unfortunate for the liberal agenda, but the liberal contradiction poses just such a threat. And it is not a threat from “conservatives” or from any outside source – it is a threat from within. Because of the rejection of the moral foundation for liberalism, liberalism is failing to protect the rights it claims to cherish. “What is is?” Please Mr. President!

¨ Conclusion

I will conclude with some words by some great thinkers of our time. These quotes are to show the importance of our foundations for our worldview and how that belief effects the environment we live in.

Schaeffer: “People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently on the basis of these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize. By ‘presuppositions’ we mean the basic way an individual looks at life, his basic worldview, the grid through which he sees the world. Presuppositions rest upon that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists. People’s presuppositions lay a grid for all they bring forth into the external world. Their presuppositions also provide the basis for their values and therefore the basis for their decisions. ‘As a man thinketh, so he is,’ is really profound. An individual is not just the product of the forces around him. He has a mind, an inner world. Then, having thought, a person can bring forth actions into the external world and thus influence it. People are apt to look at the outer theater of action, forgetting the actor who ‘lives in the mind’ and who therefore is the true actor in the external world. The inner thought world determines the outward action. Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society the way a child catches measles. But people with more understanding realize that their presuppositions should be chosen after a careful consideration of what worldview is true. When all is done, when all the alternatives have been explored, ‘not many men are in the room’ – that is, although worldviews have many variations, there are not many basic worldviews or presuppositions” [18].

Once someone has a good idea of what worldview (Weltanschauung) is true, whether by a) investigation; or by b) bias, they then live out their lives according to those principles presupposed. John Stott explains, somewhat, the power of that worldview in the bringing forth “of actions into the external world” and influencing it.

Stott: “Every powerful movement has had its philosophy which has gripped the mind, fired the imagination and captured the devotion of its adherents. One has only to think of the Fascist and the Communist manifestos of this century, of Hitler’s Mein Kampf on the one hand and Marx’s Das Kapital and The Thoughts of Chairman Mao on the other” [19]. [I would include the Humanist Manifesto’s I, II, and 2000 as well.]

In this world of ideas, one cannot logically discern what truth is without a worldview founded on a principle (dare I say “Principle”) that both defines who and what we are as volitional beings. The only worldview that offers a non-self-refuting outlook on life, purpose, and truth is the theistic one [20]. This is the only view in which one can enjoy the absolutes of morality that best hold a free society together [21]. Any other view is tyranny by the majority (or the few). Which has, in every sequence of world history, ended with the “guillotine,” so-to-speak. Unfortunately, our path here in America is one that is replacing our “inalienable rights” – rights that exist independent of man or government – with those rights that the ever increasing government sees fit to define and bestow, oh so graciously, upon us. The worldview [absolutes] that the Founding Fathers used to write the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is now in the minority, thus inhibiting our freedoms that we so dearly fought for not so long ago.

This is most evident in the fact that Americans today must obey thirty times as many laws as their great-grandfathers had to obey at the turn of the century. Federal agencies publish an average of over 200 pages of new rulings, regulations, and proposals in the Federal Register each business day. That growth of the federal statute book is one of the clearest measures of the increase of the government control of the citizenry… [22] and it’s all rooted in a worldview that has rejected moral absolutes in favor of relativism. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s maxim rings just as true today as it did in his day, “If God does not exist, all things are permissible,” a statement which Sartre called the starting point of existentialism [23].

This age is an age of religious cacophony, as was the Roman Empire of Christ's time. From agnosticism to Hegelianism, from devil-worship to scientific rationalism, from theosophical cults to philosophies of process, virtually any worldview conceivable is offered to modern man in the pluralistic/relativistic marketplace of ideas. Our age is indeed in ideological and societal agony, grasping at anything and everything that can conceivably offer the ecstasy of a cosmic relationship or of a comprehensive Weltanschauung [worldview].

…What is your worldview? Moreover, is it logically “coherent” and defensible?

Footnotes:

Mussolini, Diuturna pp. 374-77, quoted in A Refutation of Moral Relativism: Interviews with an Absolutist (Ignatius Press; 1999), by Peter Kreeft, p. 18.
J. P. Moreland, Scaling the Secular City: A Defense of Christianity (Baker Books; 1987), p. 274; “relativism.”
“…any theory of knowledge, truth, morality, etc,…” Random House Webster’s College Dictionary (Random House; 1995), under “relativism.”
Christopher Norris, Against Relativism: Philosophy of Science, Deconstruction and Critical Theory (Blackwell; 1997), p. 3.
Edited by Robert Audi, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge Univ; 1999), p. 790.
[6] Gary Kah, En Route to Global Occupation (Huntington House; 1991), p. 60.
[7] Edited by Robert P. George, Natural Law Theory (Oxford Univ; 1992), p. 230.
Charles Colson & Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live? (Tyndale; 1999), p. 93.
[9] Ian Robertson, Sociology (Worth; 1981), p. 68. < from: http://www.discovery.org/w3/discovery.org/views/lewismat.html
[10] See footnote #8.
[11] http://homeschool.crosswalk.com/partner/Article_Display_Page/0,,PTID74453%7CCHID194888%7CCIID512704,00.html
[12] C. S. Lewis, "The Poison of Subjectivism," Christian Reflections (Eerdmans; 1967), p. 72.
[13] Tom Morris, Philosophy for Dummies (IDG Books; 1999), p. 46
[14] “…is considered the foundation of logical reasoning,” Manuel Velasquez, Philosophy: A Text with Readings (Wadsworth; 2001), p. 51. “A theory in which this law fails…is an inconsistent theory”, edited by Ted Honderich, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, (Oxford Univ; 1995), p. 625.
[15] Francis Beckwith & Gregory Koukl, Relativism: Feet Planted in Mid-Air (Baker Books; 1998), p. 144-146.
[16] http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~lin/files/absolute.html & http://www.lar.arch.vt.edu/Resources/courses/LAR-3034/readings/Geisler.pdf
[17] Francis Beckwith & Gregory Koukl, Relativism: Feet Planted in Mid-Air (Baker Book House; 1998), p. 74. This quote is referenced to Allan Bloom, and, I am assuming to his book The Closing of the American Mind (Simon & Schuster; 1987). Although I have read this book, quite some time ago, I can’t recall if I came across such a conversation.
[18] Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (Crossway Books; 1976), pp. 19-20.
[19] From a radio sermon
[20] For further reading: Ronald H. Nash, Faith & Reason: Searching for a Rational Faith (Zondervan; 1988); Alvin Plantinga, God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God (Cornell Univ; 1967); Richard Swinburn, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford; 1977); Jerome I. Gellman, Experience of God and the Rationality of Theistic Belief (Cornell Univ; 1997); edited by Michael Beaty - Carlton Fisher - Mark Nelson, Christian Theism and Moral Philosophy (Mercer Univ; 1998); William Lane Craig & Quentin Smith, Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology (Oxford Univ; 1993); edited by Daniel Howard-Syder, The Evidential Argument from Evil (Indiana University; 1996); C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Simon & Schuster; 1996); J. P. Moreland, Love Your God With All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul (Navpress; 1997); Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (Notre Dame Univ; 1983).
[21] See, for example: Francis Canavan, The Pluralist Game: Pluralism, Liberalism, and the Moral Conscience (Rowman & Littlefield; 1995); Robert P. George, Natural Law, Liberalism, and Morality (Oxford Univ; 1996); Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (Simon & Schuster; 1987).
[22] James Bovard, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (St. Martins Griffen; 1994), p. 1.
[23] Jean-Paul Satre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet, pp. 32-33. Quoted in Does God Believe in Atheists? (Evangelical Press; 2000), p. 123.

“If homosexuality is really genetic, we may soon be able to tell if a fetus is predisposed to homosexuality, in which case many parents might choose to abort it. Will gay rights activists continue to support abortion rights if this occurs?” ~ The Liberal Contradiction, by Dale Berryhill.

“Since women that believe in God are less likely to have abortions, does that mean that natural selection will result in a greater number of believers than non-believers.” ~ A question asked by a student attending a debate between Dr. William Lane Craig (a theist) and Dr. Massimo Pigliucci (an atheist).

“The biggest misconception is that the Democratic Party does so much to help poor people. In a whole lot of cases, the Democratic Party keeps people poor.” ~ Charles Barkley

“Unfortunately, when the Attorney General, as the highest law enforcement official in the country, does not vigorously pursue justice in cases where government clearly employed improper force, a cancerous suspicion metastasizes in the body of society with potentially devastating effects. Not least of all, it encourages dangerous extremists like those in the Oklahoma City bombing.” ~ Ambush at Ruby Ridge, forward by Dean Koontz (speaking of Ruby Ridge and WACO).

“The atheist can’t find God for the same reason a thief can’t find a policeman.” ~ God Doesn’t Believe in Atheists: Proof That the Atheist Doesn’t Exist, Ray Comfort.


Edited by - SeanG on 05/07/2003 3:35:44 PM

Edited by - SeanG on 05/07/2003 3:38:12 PM