No God, no injustice

I sometimes wonder how many of those who oppose ICE’s immigration activity in the name of justice have a foundation for their anger and indignance. On what do they anchor their perception of right and wrong?

If they do not sincerely believe in God, as I suspect is true of many of them, their protestations carry no weight. If the material world is all there is, then anything goes because no moral law exists. But if God exists then objective morality exists, and though we may disagree on how to reconcile seemingly conflicting moral values and duties, believers at least have a firm foundation to stand on as we wrestle with them.

Those who forcefully, and sometimes violently, push back on the federal government’s efforts to deport law-breaking non-citizens yet do not believe in God would say they are abiding by some moral duty. But if God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist, and their objections and arguments can be disregarded.

God does exist, however, and what we celebrate at Christmas testifies to that. The evidence for the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth – Immanuel, God with us – is plentiful. And when added to all the other evidences for God – the fact that the universe came into being from nothing, its incredible fine-tuning, the reality of objective morality, to name a few – it becomes quite risky to deny God’s existence without losing credibility.

So let’s not be like so many getting caught up in a cause they can’t defend and recognize that a moral law requires a moral Lawgiver. And that if we want to be right in our politics we must do more than give lip service to a nebulous moral ideal untethered to a transcendent standard. 

God himself is the standard. We can’t expect to truly know right from wrong if we don’t know him.