In the Absence of God

       Today in my History of African Slavery class, I read an account of how Thomas B. Chaplin was called to court after the death of one of his slaves named Roger. Due to the harsh punishment inflicted upon Roger by Chaplin, for being physically incapable of fulfilling the task ordered of him, Roger died. The punishment he received was extraordinarily brutal: he was “placed in an open out house-the wind blowing through a hundred cracks-his clothes wet to his waste-without a single blanket- and in freezing weather, with his back against a partition-shackles on his wrists, and chained to a bolt in the floor, and a chain around his neck-the chain passing through a partition behind him, and fastened on the other side- in this position the poor wretch was left for the night… The verdict of the jury was, that Roger came to his death by choking by a chain put around his neck by his master-having slipped from the position in which he was placed” * (Thomas B. Chaplin, Manuscript diary, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, S.C.)

       Why is the (true) story I just told so repulsive? Well for one it goes against our western belief system that  all men (and women) are created equal. There is a problem with this though, and the problem is that while we believe that we are all entitled to equal rights, we have no reason to explain WHY we are all entitled to equal rights. If “God is dead and we killed him” according to Nietzsche, then all notions of ‘good and evil’ are unjustifiable. 

        Some have argued that our notions of morality are simply social constructs that are passed down from generation to generation.  C.S. Lewis takes this statement head on: “I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilizations and different ages have had quite different moralities. But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference… I need only to ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five.” Ultimately then, there can be some differences in minor details of morality , however, similar concepts of ‘good and evil’ are still very much present in our world.

        Do you not find it odd then, that we have these notions of ‘good and evil’ and that they are in fact cross-cultural? Why are they there? Yale Law Professor, Arthur Leff also questions this: “When would it be impermissible to make the formal intellectual equivalent of what is known in barrooms and schoolyards as ‘the grand Sez Who’? In the absence of God... each... ethical and legal system… will be differentiated by the answer it chooses to give to one key question: who among us… out to be able to declare ‘law’ that ought to be obeyed? Stated that baldly, the question is so intellectually unsettling that one would expect to find a noticeable number of legal and ethical thinkers trying not to come to grips with it… Either God exists or He does not, but if He does not, nothing and no one else can take His place…As things are now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless: napalming babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked. Buying and selling each other is depraved… There is such a thing as evil. ALL TOGETHER NOW: Sez Who? God help us.” 

       Finally, Timothy Keller (in reference to Annie Dillard) suggests, "We inescapably believe it is wrong for stronger human individuals or groups to kill weaker ones. If violence is totally natural why would it be wrong for strong humans to trample weak ones? There is no basis for moral obligation unless we argue that nature is some part unnatural. We can't know that nature is broken in some way unless there is some supernatural standard of normalcy apart from nature by which we can judge right and wrong".  So what is it then? Do we deny our moral obligations because God is dead? No, although many would say that they do not believe in a higher power, those same people never really follow through in fully leaving moral obligations in the dust. What is it then? Where does this conscience come from? 

Maybe, just maybe, God is not dead after all...


-Rachel S.