Go to Charles in...do you think it's Villa Park or Villa Park? Villa Park, I would assume.
Alright, Charles in Villa Park, California, listening on Catholic.com. Charles, your
question for Jimmy Akin. Hello, hi, can you hear me? Yep. What's your question?
Alright, thank you. This is an argument that I've heard from atheists, and I
don't know really how to respond to it; and that is that you don't really need
religion in order to be moral, because you just have natural law.
Like, if you just use natural law and reason, that can be enough to kind of figure out
what's right and wrong, and so Christianity, or any religion in general,
is, that's superfluous and not really necessarily for being moral. So how
would you respond to that? I'd make a couple responses. The first one is:
there's an element of truth here, because God's Law is written on the hearts of
men, even when they aren't religious. This is something that St. Paul talks about--
he doesn't talk specifically about atheists, but he acknowledges that even
Gentiles--who don't know the God of Israel or the scriptures of Israel--
nevertheless, they have consciences, and that shows that the Law of God is
written on their hearts. And so there's an element of truth here. But we--it
doesn't mean religion is superfluous. Because, number one, simply being a good
person is not the end-all and be-all of life. I mean, I don't want to just be good,
I also want to know the truth. And if it's true that God exists, I want to know
that. That is not superfluous. Similarly, if God exists, and if an
afterlife exists--and that's something I want to know too--I'm going to want to
know how to get to Heaven in the afterlife, how to arrange the best
afterlife for me possible. And so other areas of religion besides morality are
not superfluous. Even in the area of morality, religion is not superfluous,
because one of the things that we find, and this is also true of everybody
regardless of whether they're religious, is: we aren't always good. And
we can and do do evil things. And we're pretty good at self-justification and
self-deception. And so consequently, it can help to have a reinforcement of
things we already know or should know in the form of God communicating it to us
and saying, "Okay, listen, I know it's tempting at the moment, but really do not
commit adultery. Or do not kill. Or do not bear false witness." Or whatever it may be.
Having that stated explicitly makes it harder to rationalize away what your
heart might tell you. And so even in morality, the role of religion is not
superfluous. Also, I'd make another point, which is that if you have an atheist
who's acknowledging that right and wrong exist and that good and evil exist; okay,
how do you explain that on--I'm assuming you're talking to a scientific
materialist as an atheist, someone who thinks matter is the only thing that
there is, and, you know, science is the way to learn about stuff--well, okay...one of
the things about good and evil is, they're not empirical properties.
They're not sensory. You can't detect them, either with your your senses or
with the extensions of our senses that we have in laboratories. You know, you
can't see under an electron microscope what a particle of goodness looks like.
And so you're--if you believe in good and evil, that they're real--and everybody
has this innate sense that they are--then your worldview is incorporating
something more than just the empirical, something more than just what we have
scientific access to. And that means there's a whole other realm of reality
that we have intuitions about, but that we don't have scientific access to. And
if you're willing to acknowledge that, that there's this second dimension to
the universe beyond what we can detect with our senses, then you should be open
to religion as well, which brings us knowledge of that area.
Charles? Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. I'm glad that it makes sense. I thought it made sense
too, Jimmy. Charles, thank you very much.