When Man Abandons God
by Ralph Woerner
We don’t like to think about it this way, but it’s a law of nature: Whenever a society abandons God, the moral center around which it spins breaks apart. When truth be-comes relative, everyone becomes a law unto himself. Survival of the fittest becomes the only ethical code that remains.
You can write it in stone: Once God is eliminated, good and evil become im-possible to define. Fixed standards by which to measure the rightness or wrong-ness of any kind of behavior no longer exist. Everything is up for grabs. No kind of behavior, regardless of how reprehensible it may seem to be, can be condemned.
If you have difficulty believing this, tell me please, who is going to have the moral authority, once God is removed, to say what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil — the president, the governor, the mayor, the preacher, the priest, the professor, the pedophile, the homosexual or the individual who places a crucifix in a bottle of urine and calls it art?
To say that something is wrong you have to have a standard by which to measure it. You must have someone with the moral authority to say it is right or wrong. To have a moral law you must have a “moral lawgiver.” Once God is removed there is no longer anyone with the moral authority to say what is good or evil.
ILLUSTRATION: During a meeting of college educators at Harvard University in the fall of 1987, President Frank Rhodes of Cornell University addressed the issue of educational reform. He suggested in his lecture that the time had come for universities to pay close attention to their students’ moral well-being, as well as to their intellectual growth and development.
Students began to snicker throughout the auditorium. Finally one of them stood to his feet and indignantly asked: “Whose morality are we going to follow?” The students applauded thunderously, affirming that the heckler had settled the issue by posing an unanswerable question. President Rhodes sat down, unable or unwilling to respond. The entire student body knew that without God morality is impossible to defend.
Two thousand years of accumulated moral wisdom, which sprang from God, were cast aside when educators, who should have known better, began telling their students that truth is “relative” and that moral absolutes do not exist. In one clean sweep right and wrong were re-duced to matters of taste or preference. You have yours. I have mine. Who’s to say which one is superior?
A world in which God does not exist is a world in which everyone does that which is right in his own eyes. It’s a world where good and evil are only matters of taste or preference. And this, we must not forget, applies to the thief, the murderer, the rapist, and the pedophile the same as it applies to anyone else. In this kind of society, parents who love their children, and care for their every need, are no better morally than those who neglect or abuse their children.
In a society where no moral lawgiver exists, the person who runs a home for battered women is no better morally than those who batter them. A Boy Scout leader is no better morally than a pedophile. Mother Teresa was no better morally than Hitler. Those who hid the Jews during the Holocaust were no better morally than those who killed them. For something to be morally better than something else, there has to be a stand-ard by which to measure it. Without God morality ceases to exist. Tell a person he shouldn’t lie, cheat, steal, rape, murder or commit adultery because it’s wrong to do these things, and he can always silence you by asking one simple question— Says who?
In this kind of culture prostitution is merely another line of work. Sexual deviance is merely an alternative lifestyle. Abortion is merely a matter of choice. Genocide, murder and rape are merely tools to ensure the survival of those who have the largest weapons.
You may think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. This kind of moral insanity has already infected our society so deeply that recently, when a group of college students were discussing the Holocaust, they could not bring themselves to condemn what Hitler did. He was only doing what brought purpose and meaning to his life! Can you imagine in a few years what is going to happen to our nation when those darkened souls are in charge of things?
The one thing that we’ll have to hand these students is, at least they were being consistent with the “relativistic” doctrine. Once truth becomes relative — and moral absolutes cease to exist — no one has the right to condemn any kind of behavior regardless of how reprehensible it may be. Without God survival of the fittest is the only ethical code that remains. Everything becomes a matter of taste or preference. So if you offend me, I can put a bullet through your temple without feeling guilty about it. Right and wrong are merely in the eyes of the beholder.
Once God is removed, asking a person to be politically correct is rubbish. Who is going to have the authority to say what is correct and what isn’t? Here again you must have a standard for measuring. Without God no such stand-ard exists, and no one, dead or alive, has the authority to create one. To say that we evolved by a natural process in one breath and that we should be politically correct in the next is a contradiction of terms. Without God no one has the moral authority to say what is correct and what isn’t.
The truth that we seem to have forgotten is, morality doesn’t spring from nature or from man; it springs from God. A thing is moral or immoral because it conforms or fails to conform to the righteousness of God.
If you’re inclined to believe that evolution has given to each of us a moral sense which we ought to obey, my question is: Why didn’t it give the same moral sense to each of us? And how can we be sure that the so-called “moral sense” that we possess was not a mutational mistake? After all, the intellectuals have been telling us for years that happiness will be achieved when everyone is free to do whatever he pleases without a twinge of conscience or guilt. Isn’t that the philosophy by which Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy chose to live?
Whether we like it or not, the truth is, without God no benchmark (or reference point) by which good and evil can be measured, exists. Camus promoted the philosophy which says, “Do whatever you want, but don’t do anything unethical.”
A friend of mine recently said: “That’s a fine statement, but it raises a very big question: Who is going to say what is ethical and what is not? Mr. Camus, what do you mean, unethical? Mr. Camus leaves us hanging. He doesn’t venture to say how we are to determine what is ethical and what is not. Camus doesn’t follow his own philosophy to its logical conclusion. For once you eliminate God, as Camus does, you have no standard or criterion by which to measure whether a thing is ethical or not. Let me illustrate what I mean:
“Everyday, on his way to work, a man in Leicestershire, England, went by the watchmaker’s shop to synchronize his watch with the huge clock hanging there. One day the watchmaker came out and said: ‘Excuse me, sir, but I see you are adjusting your watch everyday as you go to work.’ ‘Yes, sir,’ the worker replied: ‘You see, I am the timekeeper at the factory. I’m the one who blows the whistle. My watch doesn’t work very well, so I stop by here everyday to set it by the large clock there on the wall.’ The clockmaker answered: ‘You’re not going to believe this — it’s really funny; the tragedy is, that clock doesn’t work very well either, so I synchronize it everyday with the whistle that I hear from the factory.’
“Now follow me carefully. The sun is the only true source from which we can measure time. Once you move away from the sun, no one can be certain whose time is right, or whose is wrong.
“Similarly, God is the only source from which we can measure morality. Take God away, and who is going to say what is ethical and what is not? Once you remove God, the words right and wrong — ethical and unethical — become nonsense words.
“So, when I hear Mr. Camus saying: ‘Do whatever you want as long as you don’t do anything unethical,’ I want to pound my fist on the table and say: ‘Mr. Camus, what do you mean unethical? How do you define it? By what standard or criterion do you measure it? Are you going to set yourself up as God and tell the world what is ethical and what isn’t?’ Once you eliminate God no fixed stand-ards of right and wrong exist. Every man is free to decide for himself what is right and what is wrong, what is ethical and what is unethical.
“Many years ago the lawkeepers of the world met together in an effort to design a legal system for the whole world. After many hours of discussion they finally came up with the idea that right and wrong would be decided by whatever comes naturally. Whatever comes naturally to man would be legal. Whatever comes unnaturally to him would be illegal. That’s how they would set up an international system of law. That was fine until an anthropologist appeared and said: ‘Just a minute — I’ve been hiding behind bushes — and in certain cultures people are killing and eating one another; what do you mean, ‘what comes naturally’? It seems quite natural for them to engage in cannibalism. It doesn’t seem unnatural for them to do this at all. What are we going to do with that?
“In utter chaos the lawmakers abandoned any hope of agreement, and finally decided that each country would have to make its own laws. And that’s what they did, until Hitler came along.
“Some time ago, it was my privilege to go behind the Iron Curtain in East Berlin. I went to visit some of the old concentration camps — primarily Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There I beheld with my own eyes the gas ovens and the huge system which mutilated and chopped up the Jewish people into millions of pieces of humanity.
“When American and English prosecutors went to Germany to settle this issue — to bring those evil men to justice — the German lawyer stood up and pointed his finger at the American and English prosecutors and said: ‘Gentlemen, who in the world do you think you are? You are coming over here and condemning to judgment, men who have acted within the law of their own land. You are condemning men who were obeying the commands of their superiors. On what authority are you condemning these men and trying to punish them as criminals? They were acting within the law of their own land!’ The American prosecutor wrestled with this argument for a while. Finally he stood up with a beleaguered look on his face and cried: ‘Ladies and gentlemen — is there not a law above the law? Is there not a law above the law?’
“If you say, ‘Do whatever you want so long as it brings purpose and meaning to your life, but don’t do anything unethical,’ you have no way (once God is eliminated) of knowing what is ethical and what is not.Without God the word ‘ethical’ has no meaning.
“If you say, ‘Do whatever you want so long as it brings purpose and meaning to your life even if it happens to be unethical,’ you destroy morality altogether.”
The absolute truth is that without God no reference point exists by which morality can be measured. Everything is allowable including theft, rape, murder, and adultery. Everything is reduced to a matter of preference. Is there any wonder that our society has lost its way — why in our educational system condoms have become more important than character; why so many people feel no need to live above the level of their glands; why children can kill their classmates and teachers without a twinge of guilt or remorse?
Why shouldn’t a person do whatever he pleases if he sprang from nothing, exists for nothing, and shall return to nothing, as Darwinism asserts? If life has no eternal significance in the present, and death is the termination of our existence, why not grab all the gusto you can find even if it causes pain or loss to others?
Through the promotion of “moral relativism” we are sowing the seeds of our own demise.
No one seems to have the answer. No one seems to know why children are killing their classmates and teachers. The liberals would like to blame the entire ordeal on guns rather than the depravity of our hearts. They’re wrong! By the very nature of things godless children have no inner restraints to keep them from doing godless things. Without a sense of right and wrong (which springs only from God) no kind of behavior is too vile to commit. Godless humans are going to engage in godless behavior. It cannot be otherwise. We can call it sickness if it makes us feel better. God calls it sin!
It’s true, a lot of individuals who do not know the Lord have high moral standards and are a blessing to their community. They’re not doing it, however, because they have any high or compelling reasons for doing so. They’re doing it because they’re still running on the moral capital of their past.
Their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc., loved the Lord. The values which they held were passed down from one generation to the next. After a society cuts itself loose from God it can run on the moral capital of its past for a generation or two. Sooner of later, however, it is going to run out of gas. Without God, the moral influence from the past grows weaker with each passing generation, until finally society collapses from within.
This happened in the days of Noah and in the days of Lot so completely that God felt he had no choice but to step in and cut the moral cancer out. Now it is happening to us.
When I was in school we were taught that God and character were crucial to our lives. Rather than being told we were nothing more than high-grade-animals, our biology teachers led us to believe that we were created in the image and likeness of God, and that we had more noble things to do with our lives than to gratify every lust or passion that arose.
Darwinism, which teaches that we’re cosmic accidents and that there is no eternal significance to our lives, hasn’t lifted us up to new moral and spiritual heights. Contrariwise, it has dragged us down until today fourteen-year-olds are crawling under tables in our public schools to have sex, while their peers hide their behavior from their teachers with their coats.
When man abandons God, light becomes darkness. Human hearts become so depraved that sixteen-year-olds, without a twinge of conscience, can drive onto a freeway, pull up beside a couple of complete strangers and shoot a man’s nineteen-year-old bride to death; because, as they told the police, they felt like killing someone. Godless humans do godless things!
If you think God doesn’t make a difference in the behavior of those who know him, tell me — if you were broken down in an inner-city on a dimly lit street, and you saw five young men walking toward you — would you be relieved to know that they were coming from a Bible study?
It’s the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard, but there is a group of intellectuals out there who actually believe that once God is removed from our society, and men are free to do whatever they please, they will be so noble in their thoughts, words and deeds that righteousness will cover the earth as water covers the sea.
As much as we know about human nature, one has to wonder if these people have taken leave of their senses.
The writers of scripture had it right when they said: “Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people. …The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; and the knowledge of the holy brings understanding” (Proverbs 14:34; 9:10).
It’s a law of nature — the relationship a society has with God shapes its values. The further a society drifts from the Almighty the more decadent it becomes.
I don’t want to minimize the importance of government, but the moral rot which is taking place in our society doesn’t spring from a lack of laws, a lack of prisons, or a lack of social programs. It springs from the depravity of our hearts.
Because of the punishment it can inflict, government can control human behavior to a certain extent. But it cannot bring about the moral change where it is needed most — deep within our hearts! Only God can do this.
Government can station a policeman on every corner, but only Christ can walk across the landscape of a person’s heart and change it from the inside out, so that a policeman will no longer be needed.
Throughout history every culture which has perished has died from within. Without spiritual renewal there is no reason to believe that ours will be an exception.
