The Moral Argument

The moral argument was C. S. Lewis’ more famous apologetic argument in his classic Mere Christianity. But as with the other arguments, much more can be added or refined. In one sense, this is an evidential argument, and in another sense this is what is called a Conditional Proof. Lewis does a bit of both. Which one it is will depend upon whether our audience requires us to establish its first premise, or whether we can simply assume it. The “condition” that is asserted with be some inward moral sense of right and wrong. This is nothing new. Not many assumptions can be more familiar to the average person, which is the argument’s great popular appeal.

Unlike the other proofs that we have looked at so far, there is a sense in which the skeptic can dispense with this condition—morality—but it will come at a cost that should inform the Christian apologist as to tactics. Denying that there are at least some actions that are evil puts one in an awkward position, especially in front of a large group of people who, for the most part, can at least agree that Hitler ought to have been stopped.  

Lewis’ Direct Argument

We begin with two observable facts of common experience: we all have the sense of right and wrong, and none of us ever lives up to it. This sense is of something so objective that it is worth calling a “law,” all parties making their appeals to it and expecting others to recognize it. But there are immediate objections that Lewis has to field. First, can’t this “law of right behavior” simply be our instincts? No. Because we will notice that,

“There is none of our impulses which the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage” [1].

Now that which judges between the instincts—one of which is called on to suppress or to awaken another—cannot itself be one of the instincts [2]. He compares this moral standard to a sheet of music and our instincts to keys on the piano. In this light there is not one “right note” and another “wrong,” but each of them are those motions of the soul that must answer the right way to the Law.

The second objection is that this so called “right and wrong” is really nothing more than social convention. Lewis says No, that these are actually more like mathematical truths. And the morality of nations has not been totally different, but only slightly different. And of course the notion of moral progress and judgment is given up if they were totally relative. We can see that Lewis’ argument really depends on the other person agreeing that there is an objective “right” and “wrong.” 

Two more objections of a larger naturalistic kind. Perhaps these “laws” that one takes to be normative are really just descriptive, so that the law of nature is like natural laws. But these laws of nature are not like the physical laws that merely describe how things do behave. This is how we ought to behave, whether we do or not. One last objection is more strictly evolutionary, but also utilitarian. Moral laws are nothing but the finished product of what has happened to pay. So morality today is “what works.” But very often the moral law tells us to do that which does not pay off. Very often it will tell us to suppress not only that instinct, but precisely that action, that will benefit me personally. The evolutionist may get more sociological and say that what is “right” is “what is good for society.” Lewis replies again, “But why should we care what is good for society except when it happens to pay me personally?” [3] This still assumes a larger right. Without recognizing that fact, we are arguing in a circle.

Lewis uses a phrase that really becomes the punchline to his early premises. This law exhibits attributes of personhood. It is “More like a Mind than anything else … that somebody or something wants me to behave in a certain way” [4]. We can summarize Lewis’ moral argument in the following way:

1. All humans have the sense of objectively right behavior.

2. No humans live up to that standard of right.

3. Therefore no human is the source of that standard.

4. This standard chooses, over and above finite instincts, consensus, and ends.

5. Such choice implies mind and will.

6. Therefore the source of this moral standard is a transfinite mind and will.

7. Such choice is of an objective right (or good).

8. Therefore this transfinite mind and will is also good and righteous.

9. But mind, will, goodness, and righteousness are attributes of a person.

∴ The source of this moral law is an intelligent, good, righteous, transcendent person.

Unfortunately that is as far as Lewis’ internal logic can take us. But it does not follow that other deductions could not be made. 

Now we have cause to be uneasy about the existence of a morality that is pressing in on all of us. Goodness is not, at first, good news. It all depends on how we have responded to it. The direction that Lewis takes this has more to do with his overall apologetic, as it leads to an exploration of Christ and the gospel—Lewis’ own theological shortcomings that inform that gospel notwithstanding. For our purposes, it may do us well to work from this idea of goodness, not being good news, to other objections, such as that a moral law might benefit some (a priestly or ruling class) even if not all. We will come back to that in our objections section. 

Naturalism may not have been able to account for objective and transcendent moral “oughtness,” but does it follow that the Christian conception of God is our only option? Lewis explores the possibilities of Monism and Dualism. In his chapter on “Rival Conceptions of God,” he works through two levels. The first division: Those who believe in some kind of divine (majority) and those who do not (modern Western materialists). The second division: Those who believe that he is beyond good and evil, such as Pantheists, versus those who say that God is “good” or “righteous.”

His contemporary, the Anglican theologian, E. L. Mascall, gave a much more satisfying such breakdown in his work Via Media [5]. From reading Lewis’ other works—such as The Abolition of Man and Miracles—one can be sure that Lewis’ own breakdown can get more sophisticated and would likely be at one with Mascall’s. He is well aware, for example, that the modern Western materialist is not the only materialist, and in fact he leans on that fact in other arguments. Here is just keeping things simple for the layman. It was at first a BBC national broadcast after all.

At the next level of comparison, he takes on Dualism. Both Christianity and Dualism take good and evil seriously. But Christians believe that good is original and evil a perversion of it. Dualism holds that they are equal and independent realities behind the reality we see. Both are autonomous.

So what is the basic problem with Dualism? You can’t have two equal, autonomous, and ultimate entities. We call one good and the other evil, not from personal preference. If evil were equal, we would see preference for evil acts for the mere sake of evil. But this is not so. Evil acts are done to obtain good things, only in bad ways.

Here Lewis makes his moral argument in a most Augustinian way. Evil is a good gone bad. Not only is it parasitic, but there are implications for the world. We live in enemy occupied territory. Down here there may be the illusion of perfect duality. One argument that good is the original and evil is the parasite is that we always measure what is bad by what is good. Indeed the words “bad” and “evil” really mean “not good” or “not the way things should be.” But we never measure good up by bad. Even when we lament that we do not see the “good” in the bad things that it took to attain it, we are still measuring both the good and the bad involved by some greater good. There is a clue in the phrase, “the ways things ought to be.” Here morality is made to rest in metaphysics. And in fact this was precisely what Augustine retained from Plato: that Goodness is Being. It can not be otherwise, since any standard for the way things ought to be must mean some moral state that holds over all moral agents and circumstances, and thus this state must be immutable and eternal.

Transcendental, or Indirect, Argument

Note first of all that the presuppositional approach so often called “transcendental” really has to start the same way as a classical approach. He must depend on his audience possessing the common notion of morality. “So, as a matter of fact, we act and think as if these values were objective, rather than merely subjective.” To the next step, Frame reasons, “Now, where does the authority of the absolute moral principle come from? Notice that I am not asking where the conviction itself comes from, as if this were a causal argument … The question concerns the authority of that principle” [6].

To get right to the point, absolute moral obligation demands two things: ultimate authority and personality. When we canvas all of the examples that come to mind of personal obligation, we are never finally obligated to a material object or a principle, as these are only the mediums of moral exchange. Even if we owe a debt to a man who dies, the necessity to pay it to his offspring is still rooted in his personhood and theirs, and the personal relationship between them. Atheistic philosopher Richard Taylor even recognized this and yet denied such a Person, and therefore went all the way, denying objective moral obligations [7].

In short, what is presupposed is an Absolute Person. One thing we may want to ask is whether this concept of Absolute Person has really been presupposed or concluded. Even if there is a presupposition of an Absolute Person, do we really mean that it is presupposed in the argument itself, or do we only mean that our moral action presupposes it? In either case, the direction of the transcendental argument rooted in morality should be ordered in something like this way:

1. Objective morality exists.

2. Objective morality implies an authority sufficient to bind all moral agents under its law.

3. Objective obligation implies a person to whom one is finally bound.

∴ The only possible source of moral obligations is an Absolute Person (God) [8].

The argument of fellow presuppositionalist James Anderson is worth summarizing here. It is only a bit more complex, but gives us some different angles.

1. Human moral judgments presuppose absolute norms of morality.

2. Norms of morality can only arise within a personal context.

3. If norms of morality were grounded in non-absolute persons (e.g., human culture), then they would not be absolute (i.e., they would lack necessity and ultimate authority).

4. Therefore, absolute norms of morality must be grounded in a Personal Absolute.

∴ Human moral judgments presuppose a Personal Absolute (i.e., God) [9].

Note the different starting points between Frame and Anderson. Both arguments begin with the truth of objective morality, and yet Frame’s form asserts it, whereas Anderson assumes it, using his first premise rather to point to a necessary condition. Frame gets to that same place more concisely. The greater difference becomes the extent to which Anderson engages the alternative position, a kind of reductio ad absurdum packed into a single premise (Premise 3), which in turn falls back on 2 and then back to 1. Why must norms be personal? Why must they be absolute? My point is not about how easy or difficult this will be to show. It is only rather to show how this transcendental approach is still going to have to use all of the same concepts that the more natural theological arguments have always used.

To conceive of the form of this argument as “indirect” as opposed to Lewis’ “direct” approach is somewhat problematic. If one’s opponent accepts and explicitly depends upon objective moral values, then it is already indirect, exploring only the necessary conditions of such an obligation. Such as indirect argument can be activated in response to the so called problem of evil, which I prefer to call the “Problem of Saying ‘Evil’” for this very reason. The skeptic cannot; the Christian can. And so the “tender hearted” skeptic is forced to choose his poison. Lewis gives us another “cardinal difficulty” of sorts, in criticizing God for x in the world (that x can be evil, or for suffering, futility, or even meaninglessness). Pondering his own past thoughts as an atheist, Lewis asks: Why is there evil if a good God made the world?

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has the idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? … Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too—for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning [10].

Some skeptics can see where all of this is going and opt for a more “tough-minded” nihilism where morals and meaning are dispensed with. But this is where apologetics turns to the standard of “liveability.” Can we really live in a world in which abusing children is no longer frowned up, or where what Hitler did was acceptable?

Objections and Evaluations

In the transition between Lewis’ fourth and fifth premise, we may challenge whether or not a tendency in the standard of right is truly a “personal preference” reflected in the law. Remember:

Premise 4. This standard chooses, over and above finite instincts, consensus, and ends. 

Premise 5. Such choice implies mind and will.

But does this necessarily imply a choice in the cause of this tendency? Suppose we find that the standard always seems to exhibit a consistent pattern. Why infer a preference from this? Since the nature of “tendency” or even “design” is already implied in the claim and the objection, we can see how the moral argument seems to be borrowing from the teleological argument. So morals are inseparable from meaning. The question is whether we can entirely reduce this idea of meaning to subjectivity, or whether morals and meaning are objective. If they are both objective, then there is a cause in our moral sense from outside of that sense, and the meaning intended is exactly what we mean by preference. In fact the cause will be shown to be a personal preference for right behavior over wrong. 

There is another more cynical objection. This comes most famously from the Marxist. Here the question of objective morality is ignored as one goes on the offensive: “Religion is immoral. Nothing has been more immoral, as nothing has unleashed more evil upon the world!” Now the person who raises the objection is a person with an agenda, and therefore I reply by turning their standard back on them. Here is where the presuppositionalist retort, “By what standard?” is most welcome. Moreover, states have controlled their populations by other worldview as well (often by those that are antithetical to religious claims of any kind). So we must ask more philosophical questions about the true nature of the cause of oppression.

Aside from the logic problems, there is the common sense view toward history. If religion is the “opiate to the masses,” or was a grand conspiracy to keep the common folk down, it must be admitted to anyone with serious knowledge of history that these leaders did a very poor job of it. From the fall of man (outside of Israel) to the coming of Christ, mankind was a mere number, an ant in a hill, or a cog in a machine. He was nothing. Slavery, colonialism, misogyny, child sacrifice and all manner of other abuse, was the norm. 

Then came Christianity, and the liberation of the image of God across the world—often sloppily, inconsistently, and in an assembly that carries about in her ranks the many hypocrites that give the faith a bad name in these very moral categories. In the final analysis, however, the ideas contained in the biblical worldview exalt the same law above both monarch and subjects, and have been used exactly toward that end. 

If I were a ruler and wanted to invent a narrative to persuade people that they were beneath me, I would want to look as far away from the Christian account as I could. And I would be busy about burning every Bible and demolishing every church I could to hush things up. The Chinese, Iranians, and Nigerians might provide a few stories of that happening at this very moment. The Marxist take on religion just doesn’t fit the facts of history or the logic of the case. Those very states in the modern world who were most antagonistic to religion have killed more people in the last 100 years than all other people have killed in the name of religion in all other centuries combined. So, in short, my reply to them would be that they ought to brush up on both their logic and their history.

In the very explicit cause of ridding the world of God and his image, traditionally conceived, the following stats from the 20th century are in:

Communist China: 76,702,000

Soviet Communism: 61,911,000

Nazi Germany: 20,946,000

Imperial Japan: 5,964,000

The Khmer Rouge: 2,035,000

This does not include the other well over 3 to 5 million in the satellite communist states in that same era, nor the over 100 million aborted babies in the Western states in that same era. Nor the combatants of war of those in the Free World attempting to stop their global enslavement. Compare this quarter of a billion deaths in such a short generation or two of time, to the accepted estimates of the Inquisition, and the deconstructionist who may also know his history (There is the rub—good luck finding one!) will be silenced.

Some Closing Thoughts

As a caveat to the transcendental argument, Frame makes much of the naturalistic fallacy: “Valueless facts do not imply values. ‘Is’ does not imply ‘ought’” [11]. While we can agree that a “valueless fact” cannot demand certain moral obligation, we must be careful of a false dilemma. Frame uses this same logic in other writings to call into question natural law [12]. His understanding of natural law is that the nature of things per se are made the standard of morality. But the term “nature of things” is ambiguous. The implication is that these are included in the class of those “brute facts” that are so named because they are true apart from any interpretation: even God’s. However, what if the “things” and “natures” in question are precisely things and natures that are full of value? What if it is the nature of God that is ultimately grounding the nature of things? Why does this matter for the moral argument for God’s existence? It is simply that the line of reasoning will not get very far if we force the unbeliever to begin inferring a transcendent moral lawgiver only by recognizing the precise moral obligations of the Bible. We must be content with his sense of morality as it pertains to the elements of natural law. That is, we must be content with this as a starting point.

Contrary to the caricature that presuppositionalists have of this, to start where the unbeliever is does not mean leaving him where he is. Corrections can happen along the path, but they cannot happen if we never start down that path. And we cannot start our race down the path if we insist on confusing the finish line of divine law with the starting line of natural law.

In conclusion, lest there is any misunderstanding, the moral argument is not what Kant thought was so compelling: that is, the pragmatic appeal that there must be a final judgment. This is not irrelevant to apologetics. But it belongs to a different arena of apologetics that we might call “existential.” It belongs to the question posed to the individual: Can we live without God? Can we make sense out of ultimate needs without him? Belonging to this category is a deep moral need. While we do not want to confuse our sense of fairness with objective right and wrong, nevertheless that subjective sense is still rooted in the objective moral law. The very reason that there is a problem of evil that the skeptic takes to be so powerful is precisely owing to this universal sense and the obvious fact that the world is not as it should be. This is a great area of interest for the apologist. But it must be stressed that these more existential arguments are not the same thing as the above moral arguments for God as the transcendent Moral Lawgiver.

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1. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 23.

2. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 23.

3. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 30.

4. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 34.

5. E. L. Mascall, Via Media (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1956), 3-4

6. John Frame, Apologetics to the Glory of God (Philipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1994), 95.

7. Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith, and Reason (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985), 83.

8. Frame, Apologetics to the Glory of God, 97.

9. James Anderson, “Apologetics,” RTS Lecture Notes, 2016

10. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 44.

11. Frame, Apologetics to the Glory of God, 94.

12. cf. Frame, A History of Western Theology and Philosophy (Philipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2015), 76, 78.