Morality and the Divine 

Two friends are sitting across from each other having a talk about the nature of morality. One friend asks, “Can there be absolute, universal truths?” The other friend replies “No. However, there is such a thing as my truth and your truth, everybody has their own truth.”

The other friend ponders this response. “If that’s true, and there are no objective truths, how can you truly know that I have a truth and you have a truth?”

Morality and Objectivity

The scenario paints an important picture about human nature. Human beings have an instinctive understanding about what is right and what is wrong. This sense of right and wrong is usually referred to as morality. This article will provide a sufficient argument for proving God’s existence through morality.

One heavy debate among atheists and theists is the question of whether morality necessitates a divine being. Of course, the answer is yes. One step toward an answer is that throughout different religions in multiple time periods of the world, morality has always consisted of basically the same principles. Most religions, for example, share the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”). This points to something outside of time, something objective, that morality reflects.

Likewise, human beings have universally agreed that certain acts are right and wrong. For instance, murder of the innocent has always been considered a deplorable injustice across many different cultures and peoples. This is one of many instances that indicate that there is something objectively right and wrong beyond merely subjective human experience. So far, we’ve proven that morality necessitates something outside of (or greater than) time, people, and cultures.

Morality and the Divine

Once you point out the necessity of something outside of time, material, and people, the opposing party will usually start to crack a little. They may agree that at least morality points to a supreme lawgiver of some sort.  At this point two different objections may arise. 1) How do you know your religion is true as opposed to other religions? Or 2) Can’t morality be proved by science and nature?

There is a sufficient answer to both of these questions. While there are aspects of truth in every religion, there is an infinite and objective truth. It then becomes a matter of what that objective truth is. Like a roadmap, objective points about God are like roads that lead to the correct destination. Objectivity gives us a glimpse into who God is. And while science, nature, and morality are aligned together, they are all reflections from the same divine source, God.

While the Catholic faith theologically affirms that morality is written on every human heart and reflects in us the image of God, many people either search to disprove or affirm the existence of God solely through moral philosophy. This is because during the Enlightenment period atheistic philosophers began to isolate the natural law from the divine law. This started a train of philosophers who questioned their existence and the world around them without any concept of the divine life.

Arguments For and Against Morality

Some moral theologians argue that without God you cannot have morality. While this is technically true (God is the source of the moral law), there needs to be a lot more nuance between the premise and the conclusion. It’s difficult to prove the existence of God through morality.
For example, an atheist, while not believing in religious truth, can still believe that morality is true because the natural law is written on every human heart and into our nature as humans. Romans 2:14-15 says “For when the Gentiles who do not have the law by nature observe the prescriptions of the law, they are a law for themselves even though they do not have the law. They show that the demands of the law are written in their hearts.”

Morality and Teleology

Teleology is the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purposes they serve rather than the causes by which they arise. If you are familiar with Aquinas’ Five Ways, the argument from teleology is his Fifth Way, or the argument from natural design. For example, a person can know that plants need water to grow to maturity (their purpose or end) without realizing exactly where the water comes from (the cause of their growth).

In the same way, an atheist can know that morality exists by observing human nature without acknowledging that it has its source in the divine.

In Ed Feser’s article “Sartre on Theism and Morality”, he describes how atheists and theists alike link morality to God. Theists tend to conclude that because God exists, morality exists. Atheists say that because there is no God, there can be no absolute morality. Feser uses teleology to bridge together the gaps of the grey area in between. He writes:

From an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) point of view, the natures and final causes of things are immanent to them. Natural objects are not like machines, the parts of which have no inherent ordering to the end they serve, so that the parts cannot even be made sense of as serving a common end apart from a “designer” who forces them into their machine-like configuration. Rather, that a heart (for example) is “directed toward” or “ordered to” the end of pumping blood is something true of it simply by virtue of its being a heart at all, and would remain true of it whatever its cause or even if (per impossibile) it had no cause. For A-T, the natures of things can be known, at least in principle, entirely apart from questions about their origins, and human nature would still be what it is whether or not we were created by God.

This is not to say that God isn’t the lawgiver of morality, but rather that morality can be proven to be objective without an atheist acknowledging a final cause that morality is direct to simply because it’s objective. There is a gap in the atheist/secular mind from objective things that exist to them coming from God.  An example of this is Sam Harris and his talk on how science answers questions about morality. Harris, an atheist, is able to realize that morality is as true and objective as science. However, he does not understand that these things are reflections of God. Morality, nature, and science are like the arrows being directed by the divine archer.

The Final Cause: Bridging the Teleological Gap

Now that we have discussed teleology, we know that atheists can see a part of the truth without realizing the whole picture. They can see that morality and science are objectively real, but they cannot explain where it comes from. Where it comes from is the grey area for them. As Christians, we can demonstrate the whole picture of the divine archer and the arrows of morality, science, and nature being directed to their end. There is a way to tie them altogether in order to prove God’s existence through morality.

For one, we can establish that objectivity exists. Since objectivity exists, we can agree that certain things in nature are indeed objective such as morality or patterns in nature.

Once your secularist or atheist friend admits this, they use a teleological argument to say that you can believe certain things exist without agreeing about where they came from. In order to fill in that grey area for them (where nature and morality come from) we can establish the need for a divine final cause (God).

Examining Divinity through the Five Ways

Teleology proves in and of itself that there is something outside of nature towards which nature is directed. The conclusion is that this force is outside of nature and since nature is directed towards it, it reflects nature. Now that we’ve established that there is a final cause in which nature is directed, the final step is proving that the final cause is divine.

We know that nature did not create itself. Therefore, something outside nature had to create it. Because this force created nature and everything else within the universe, it must have an essence outside of the material world towards which all matter is directed. This is also demonstrated in Aquinas’ Fourth Way, the scale of perfection. This proof demonstrates that things in nature are more perfect the more objective they are. This perfect objectivity must reflect something (i.e., divinity).

Pure Actuality

One final argument that leads to divinity is potentiality to actuality. We have already discovered that there is a created matter that exists. Items that are material are constantly changing because they have to come into a state of existence from non-existence, or from potentiality to actuality.

However this cannot go on forever, there has to be something that exists outside of being brought to existence in order for the first thing to be brought into existence and everything else subsequently. This force that cannot be brought into existence must be the essence of existence itself (or actuality) since it cannot itself be brought into existence.

In conclusion

Though we cannot begin to grasp the pure divinity of God, He has given us proof of His existence all throughout the created universe. These things consist of both the material and the immaterial. We can use these things that He has given us to bring others closer to Him, and to better understand who He is when coupled with theology.