On more than one occasion, I have made the passing comment that “the Darwinist has no answer to…” this or that phenomenon. For instance, we have said that the Darwinist has no answer for the irreducible complexity of particular biological systems in nature. Recall that an irreducibly complex system could not have come into existence through the slow step-by-step process of evolution because the system is not functional until all the components are in place.

More recently, we have said that Darwinists seem to have no answer to how humans “evolved” self-consciousness from simple atoms found in the human brain. But these are rather general statements to provide evidence that “the Darwinist has no answer for…” We could say the same when it comes to morality and the universal moral obligations pending upon all human beings. The same statement could be recycled: The Darwinist has no answer for how morality evolved in human beings. However, the statement demands a better answer than that because the Darwinist does put forward an answer to the morality question that deserves consideration.

Darwinists and evolutionary theorists in general suggest that man can know what is “good” and can be “good” without grounding it in God. Reproductive success, it is claimed, depends upon more than one individual dominating another for survival, but “group selection” requires individuals to work together for the good of the entire group. Throughout millions of years of human evolution, moral norms have been selected for the good of the group, they say. The poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, however, coined the phrase that nature is “red in tooth and claw,” meaning that the nature of nature is at its core self-serving and singularly focused upon survival. Writer Doug Groothius points out that one need not look very far to see the fallen and brokenness in humanity that cannot help but continually kill one another, be it through “war, racism, slavery, female subordination, planned famine (Stalin), genocide, and lots more nastiness and cruelty.” Not only nature but mankind itself is “red in tooth and claw.” It would seem that nature, including human nature, is a poor candidate as the source of a universal moral standard. In short, people are not objectively good enough to set their own moral standards. Groothius writes, “Nature cannot yield a moral standard because nature is nothing more than “the collection of physical things and processes” and has no “normative properties” regarding vice, virtue, and moral obligation.

Atheist Richard Dawkins is direct and honest in his assessment: “In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you will not find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. Dawkins, a Darwinist, freely admits that evolution has no answer to where universal moral obligations come from. And yet, a universal moral standard does exist. In truth, the evolutionists have a threefold problem. First, nature displays a vast array of biologically derived possibilities, making no ultimate standard for deciding what behaviors and values ought to be preserved and handed down. In historical evolutionary processes, who got to decide what was a moral good? What moral traits are worth keeping? According to whom?

Second, if nature sets moral standards, then moral standards would be contingent upon the culture or the environment. Darwin himself recognized this writing; “If … men were reared under precisely the same conditions as bee-hives, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their daughters: and no one would think of interfering.” But once again, moral obligations are standard across cultures and environments because they are based upon a universal moral standard: there are absolute truths that are true for all people in all places in all times. Third, evolutionists suggest that moral obligations are evolutionary by-products that reside as “instincts” within human beings. But this cannot be true either because, as Groothius writes, “if we make moral decisions based upon instinct, we are left with an unreliable faculty of moral judgments, since our instincts are in conflict.” This takes us back to Tennyson and nature (and mankind), “red in tooth and claw.” Christians understand this state of the world to be Fallen in that things are not as they ought to be, nor as they were in the original perfection of Paradise. Since the Fall of nature and mankind, no element or aspect of creation (or man himself) can bear the burden of producing moral standards to which man is instinctively and universally bound. Therefore, it seems to me that the common moral obligations pending upon all human beings have a Higher source, a Divine source. Perhaps the same source who created everything that exists. Perhaps the same source that has written the moral law on each man’s heart. Join us again next week as we look with “Expectancy” to the return to the original perfection. Until then, step outside on a clear night and look up; is God dead?

Gloria in excelsis Deo! — Ty B. Kerley, DMin., is an ordained minister who teaches Christian apologetics and relief preaches in Southern Oklahoma. Dr. Kerley and his wife Vicki are members of Waurika Church of Christ and live in Ardmore. You can contact him at dr.kerley@isGoddead. com.