calling the President a criminal.

This is the same Saddam Hussein who attempted to overthrow the governments of Iran and Kuwait through the use of naked and aggressive military force. Hussein justified his behavior in a variety of ways, but when the same was done to him, he objected! Somehow, even a homicidal maniac like Hussein thinks there is a standard of right and wrong to which he can appeal.Another angle that Lewis takes is comparison. Once you compare two moral ideas to one another, and determine that one is superior to the other you are comparing them to a standard. He states the case in this fashion:If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality. In fact, of course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others. The moment you say that one set of moral ideals can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.9 A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.10 Of even greater interest is the fact that, if you continue upward with each higher moral standard succeeding the previous standard, you must continue with comparisons until you reach an ultimate, absolute standard. This progression must eventually terminate in an eternal, uncaused, absolute, perfect, moral, personal standard. You cannot terminate the chain of standards at a finite level, because the finite level you appeal to must have a standard by which it can be measured. The line of increasingly superior moral standards can only terminate in an infinite, absolute moral standard. Only Christianity provides that type of personal and absolute standard. That standard is, and only can be, the God of the Bible.To further substantiate our case, we return to C.S. Lewis. Lewis not only speaks of an appeal to an independent moral authority and to moral comparisons between certain actions, he also discusses the inherent sense in all humanity that we somehow fall short of a standard that we know we should achieve, but somehow cannot. He writes:I now go back to what I said at the end of the first chapter, that there were two odd things about the human race. First, that they were haunted by the idea of a sort of behaviour they ought to practice, what you might call fair play, or decency, or morality, or the Law of Nature. Second, that they did not in fact do so.11 The laws of nature [physical laws], as applied to stones and trees, may only mean ‘what Nature, in fact, does’. But if you turn to the Law of Human Nature, the Law of Decent Behavior, it is a different matter. That law certainly does not mean ‘what human beings, in fact, 'do' for as I said before, many of them do not obey this law at all, and none of them obey it completely. The law of gravity tells you what stones do if you drop them; but the law of Human Nature tells you what human beings ought to do, and do not. In other words, when you are dealing with humans, something else comes in above and beyond the actual facts. You have the facts (how men do behave) and you also have something else (how they ought to behave). In the rest of the universe, there needs not be anything but the facts. Electrons and molecules behave in a certain way, and certain results follow, and that may be the whole story. But men behave in a certain way that is not the whole story, for all the time you know that they ought to behave differently.12 This law hangs over us, constantly reminding us that we fall short of its standards. It is certainly real, and really cannot be rationally denied. It is somehow a real thing, a law which we did not create, but we nonetheless find it persistently whispering to us, sometimes screaming at us, but always pressing in on us in some tangible way. Skeptics often call this guilt, imposed upon us by parents, environment, societal standards, etc. But this argument is untenable. How do small children know they should hide when they knock over the lamp for the first time, and have never seen such a thing before? Some SS officers in the Third Reich committed suicide because of their guilt in committing murder. Their guilt was not derived from human law (it was legal to do this in Nazi society), but from a Law higher than man, higher than themselves. The proper purpose of these human institutions is to keep us tune with the Law of Nature. They are not the creator of the standard itself. They are intended to help us, to attempt to minimize the deviation from the Law of Nature. Of course, they never work to perfection, for we all fall short. (Romans 3:23). These standards run through most societies to one degree or another. They are quite universal. Human imperfection makes them inexact at points, but they are consistent for the most part. And, we never evaluate these societal standards in isolation; we always compare them to one another. This returns us to the idea of the comparison between two moral ideas, and each must appeal to another standard in order to be weighed. Nazi laws dehumanizing Jews cannot be deemed immoral unless we can assert that some other standard is morally superior to them, and that can only be determined when it is weighed against some transcendental norm. This is inescapable.In conclusion, we can say the following with certainty: 1) It seems quite impossible that personal moral standards can even exist in an impersonal universe. 2) Even if personal moral standards could arise in a materialistic universe13, how could we determine their certainty if our very thoughts are random chemical processes? 3) It is certain that once you admit the superiority of one moral idea against another, you cannot logically substantiate your argument without ultimately appealing to an absolute, personal source of morals, the God of Scripture. 4) All human beings know there is a standard which they fall short of, and they often demonstrate this knowledge in their own hypocrisy. This knowledge of good and evil is the human conscience, given by Almighty God. 5) Subjectivism is logically impossible, for its assertion is self-refuting. Only personal absolutism can rationally explain morals at all, and as we have stated previously, morality can only have its origin in the God of the Bible. Recommended Resources for Further StudyWhy Trust the Bible?Searching for theOriginal Bible Bibliography Batten, Don. “That’s Nice For You But It’s Not For Me.” Creation, 26(1) December 2003-February 2004, 6. Frame, John. Apologetics to the Glory of God. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1994. Frame, John. The Doctrine of God. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2002.Gish, Duane. Creation Scientists Answer Their Critics. El Cajon, Ca.: Institute for Creation Research, 1993.Ham, Ken, Jonathan Sarfati and Carl Weiland. The Answers Book. Green Forest, Arkansas: Master Books, 1990.Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. New York, New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1952. Morris, Henry. Many Infallible Proofs. Green Forest, Arkansas: Master Books, 1974.Morris, Thomas. Our Idea of God. Vancouver, BC, Canada: Regent College Publishing, 1991.Nash, Ronald. The Concept of God. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1983.NIV Men’s Study Bible. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1997.http://www.carm.org/relativism/relativism_refute.htm.. "Refuting Relativism", Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry. http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/5836/"Can We be GoodWithout God?", Creation Ministries International. Footnotes[1] The creationist Duane Gish has sarcastically pointed out that perhaps the cosmic egg was laid by the cosmic chicken, but this would leave us wondering where the cosmic chicken came from![2] John Frame, Apologetics to the Glory of God.

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