In your opinion, is lying:
- objectively bad
- objectively good
- good when done to deceive people you hate
- good if done to deceive someone who would cause physical harm and prevent them from doing harm
- neither good nor bad, morals are a human construct based on arbitrary metrics.
If you chose 1. you have Christian values. If you chose a different answer you don’t.
Making truth an absolute moral value is one of the things which separates Christianity from all other religions and all other philosophies. Lie or die? Christians choose to die. Lie or watch your family be tortured to death in front of your eyes? Listen to the accounts of Christians in the former Soviet Union. Lie or have people believe a different religion? Tell the truth even if the consequence is the only Christian left on earth will be you.
I find it amusing and ironic when an athiest or agnostic puts up the argument “there are thousands of Gods, everyone believes theirs is real, how do you know yours is the real one? What makes your God true?”
Well if every other God and philosophy of life provides caveats as to when its okay to lie, how can you trust any of them to be telling you the truth about themselves?
Jesus says “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father, except through me”. (John 14:6). Note that He is “the” truth. That means all truth. It is an absolute statement not a partial or relative one. Everything that is truth is Him, and in John 8:44 Jesus says of Satan: “When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”
It couldn’t be clearer. Truth good, truth God. Lies evil, lies Satan.
“But surely”, says the “rational” athiest, “rising from the dead after being crucified is impossible, therefore Christians tell the biggest lie of all.” (Don’t call me Shirley.)
Where is the lie? The whole point of Christianity is that its central claim is impossible according to everything we think we know about reality. We can’t prove it happened by any basic standards of science, logic or reason. We simply choose to believe that it did on the basis of faith.
And the central truth that underpins this faith is that we cannot explain our own existence. Life itself is impossible by every single law of physics and testing of reality that humanity has uncovered and yet here we are.
Our observations combined with logic and reason only take us so far. We observe that our reality obeys fixed laws and an objective truth, yet our own existence appears to defy these laws or be operating in a dimension outside of them. We have no way of escaping our reality to see it from an outside perspective, so we have no way of proving how we came to be using the same methods that tell us the rules about our being.
So we choose a faith. We ground all other truths under an “impossibilty” that bridges the limits of the understanding of finite humans in a universe where infinity is possible. Reality objectively exists. So do we. But none of it should according to everything we have discovered about it. Whether you choose Big Bang or “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1), “who created God” is the same fundamental question as, “what came before the Big Bang”.
How do we square the circle? What is infinity plus 1? As finite beings there are simply concepts that we will never be able comprehend. We cling to the ego of “I think therefore I am”, but it is insufficient. It’s not complete. It’s not the whole truth.
Humans understand and inherently experience a sense of morality. It is real. It is also true. But how can we trust even the concept of truth if we are willing to find excuses to lie? Would Richard Dawkins lie about his own claimed beliefs to save himself from crucifiction or his family from death by torture in a gulag? If truth can be sacrificed, then how can we ever trust any claims about it?
How do we live, how do we make sense of our lives and give it meaning without adhering to the absolute of truth and acknowledging the fundamental pull on our moral proclivities? How do we live by truth when we can never know everything?
The answer is we look for something to put our faith in that could be true but which is also as impossible as our very existence. Because searching for what is true about ourselves is the only way we can have peace in ourselves, but we can never know everything and we could be wrong about everything.
So when you are choosing your central, fundamental belief to anchor everything else in your life upon, why would you put your faith in anything that permits you to lie? Choose a faith that doesn’t allow you to knowingly lie. Because that is the only hope you have of discovering at least some truth. Its also cuts down the smorgasbord of choice down to one, and in a universe where you are overwhelmed by infinity, that’s very comforting.
You can find Stephen Wells at Telegram and purchase his books here.
