Morality, Abraham, and God

James McGrath posted a few days ago on the Abraham and Isaac sacrifice story. It made me think of an argument I often hear from Christian apologists about the existence of (a certain type of) God. It is especially common on the radio show "Unbelievable?" The host, Justin Brierley, seems very fond of it (or a variation of it at least).

The general argument I hear goes something like this: we have a common set of moral standards that human beings seem to agree are pretty much "absolute." These "absolute" standards must come from without and not from within human society - moral standards formed within human society can only be "relative." The most logical outside source for these moral standards (they claim) is God. Only with God setting a standard for goodness can we all agree on what it is.

"Unbelievable?" usually has a non-Christian (often an atheist) in discussion with a Christian. At some point in the discussion the Christian will often bring up a practical example of the above. The Christian usually describes some horrendous moral evil, perhaps killing a child, and will confront the atheist (who has usually been arguing that morality is relative to humanity in some sense) with a question like: "surely you would agree that the killing of an innocent toddler is always wrong?" The atheist will say "well, it is wrong to me. I still think it is relative though." And the Christian will say "Aha! That is why atheism fails! Without God there are no absolute morals and you can't even admit that killing an innocent toddler is wrong! But we all know, in our hearts, that killing an innocent toddler is wrong. We know it is not relative, but an absolute wrong. And the fact that we know that is best explained by the existence of God and His set of absolute moral standards that we feel in our hearts."

There is so much wrong with all that it is hard to know where to begin, but one thing that always occurs to me when I hear this argument is the Abraham story. This is because it seems to me that Christians have the very same problem coming from the "we know in our hearts that X is wrong" argument that atheists do. The Christian believes that God determines in an absolute sense what is "right" and "wrong." So what if God tells you to kill an innocent child? Don't you have the same problem, then, as the atheist? Yes you know it is wrong, but if God tells you to do it, then where does the "absolute" moral standard come from? This doesn't usually get brought up on "Unbelievable?" but I imagine that if it was the Christian might object that God wouldn't give such a command and so the question is moot. And then there is the Abraham story. But, the Christian might object, God lets Abraham off the hook in the end and so he never really demands that Abraham actually kill his innocent child. But what about the accounts of God demanding genocide? or even committing mass murder during the flood (presumably there were pregnant women around at the time of the flood too - God committing abortions too??).

The fundamentalist God is not a solution to this problem. If God is a "super-being" who can take action, change his mind, act in an angry or jealous way, this doesn't produce an "absolute" morality any more than the relativist atheist viewpoint does. In fact if you take literally a God who can order babies killed (see 1 Samuel 15:3 for instance) not only do you have to surrender (it seems to me) an absolute morality, you have to live with a relative value system handed down by a tyrant.