What about Morality?

We have been talking recently about aspects of worldview. What is the overarching narrative of how a person lives out their philosophical views? Not only in the aspect of theory, but how we live out the need for consistency in the laboratory of life itself.

Often times, a person will not walk in a consistent tune with his/her underlying position. Dissonance is often present, but tends to remain undiscovered.   Dr. Ronald Nash, in his book titled Worldviews in Conflict states “It is one thing for a worldview to pass certain theoretical test such as reason and experience. It is another for the worldview also to pass an important practical test, namely, can the person who professes that worldview, live consistently in harmony with the system he professes? Or do we find that someone is forced to live according to the beliefs borrowed from a competing system? Such a discovery, he suggests, should produce more than just embarrassment."

There is a dichotomy between a Christian out-look, when compared to an agnostic or atheistic perspective according to European Christian thinker Frances Schaeffer. He further explains, “Only the presuppositions of historic Christianity both adequately explain and correspond with the environments in which every man must live; the external world with its form and complexity; and the internal world of the man’s own characteristic’s as a human being. This inner world includes such human qualities as a desire for significance, love and meaning and fear of nonbeing among others.”

What Schaeffer talks about that I would like to emphasize is the aspect of inconsistent internal struggle. Actually, the non-theist must steal Christian ideas of morality and desire for significance in order to attempt to create cohesive meaning in life. Where else can issues of morality come from? Survival of the fitest would seem antithetical to moral behavior. A cold heartless pitiless universe is not conducive to moral behavior either. Whereas ethical standards are the hallmark of Judeo/ Christian values. The naturalist obtains moral values by the theft of these ethics because according to their worldview, there is no good naturalistic explanation for it's cause.

Is the entire universe just molecules in motion with no intrinsic purpose? if the cosmos is just a random lucky accident that occurred for our benefit, then there is no real standard for moral behavior.