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Topics / Faith and God

The challenge

“Morality is just opinion; there is no objective right and wrong”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

Right and wrong are real, and you already live like you know it. After World War Two, the Nuremberg tribunal charged Nazi leaders with crimes against humanity whether or not German law allowed what they did. That only works if there's a law above every nation's law. Martin Luther King wrote from a Birmingham jail that a just law squares with the law of God. He didn't say he preferred equality. He said segregation was wrong. Take God away and I don't see what's left but opinion, and when it's opinion against opinion, the side with the most power wins. You'll say cultures disagree. People once disagreed about the shape of the earth, and the earth didn't care. Let me ask you this. Was slavery wrong before anybody voted on it? If morality is just opinion, nobody ever made moral progress. They just changed their minds.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. The world's verdict on the Holocaust assumed a moral law above any nation's law. Without it, the Nazis were only unpopular, never guilty.

    Article six of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal defined crimes against humanity as punishable whether or not they violated the domestic law of the country where they were committed.

  2. The great reformers never said we prefer equality. They said the law was wrong, measured against a higher law.

    In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that a just law squares with the moral law or the law of God, and an unjust law is out of harmony with the moral law.

  3. Even people who deny objective morality get angry when they're cheated. Scripture says that's the moral law written on the heart, and its author is God.

    Romans 2:15 teaches that the work of the law is written on human hearts, with conscience bearing witness.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: Different cultures have held completely different moral codes, so morality is obviously something humans invent, not discover.

Nate: Cultures disagree about medicine too, and nobody concludes there's no such thing as health. If morality is invented, the culture that ended slavery wasn't better than the one that practiced it. It was just different. You don't believe that, and neither do I.

The lines

Sources

  1. International Military Tribunal, Charter of the International Military Tribunal, Article 6 (1945)
  2. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963)
  3. The Bible, Romans 2:15 (first century)

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