Ask an atheist where their “moral compass” comes from and they will eventually have to admit it’s self-determined. Oh, they’ve probably considered the consensus of various worldviews and agreed that the “Golden Rule” (Do unto others…) is a good starting point. But beyond that, it mostly boils down to what feels right for me.
It takes an intellectually honest non-believer to think that position through to its inevitable conclusion: if right and wrong are ultimately subjective, then each individual moral compass is effectively set to nothing.
While most of us go through our daily lives without paying much attention to the big picture, we all do have an internal compass, a personal philosophy that undergirds our actions and activities.
Frequently it takes a life-threatening event to make us re-think our worldview; “there are no atheists in foxholes.” But sometimes those with curiosity and integrity are nudged out of their comfort zone and will sincerely question whether their belief-system actually matches reality. Less commonly, some will find the courage to acknowledge the Truth.
Leah Libresco recently become one such individual: Popular Atheist Blogger Announces Conversion to Catholicism.
According to her blog post from Monday, as an atheist she couldn’t fully explain where human’s obtained their understanding of moral law, despite the many non-theistic theories that are out there. The day before Palm Sunday, she says, she got into a discussion with a Christian friend, who asked her what she believed was the source of moral law.
After some thought, she realized that morality comes from neither evolution nor philosophy, but from God.
“I believed that the Moral Law wasn’t just a Platonic truth, abstract and distant,” she wrote. “It turns out I actually believed it was some kind of Person, as well as Truth. And there was one religion that seemed like the most promising way to reach back to that living Truth.
What Libresco discovered was that only the Word of God portrays a true picture of human nature, one that agrees with our real world experience. This being the case, it naturally follows that the Bible’s “compass” is absolutely the best one we can use to navigate our way through life.
Libresco is in good company. Not long ago a previous atheist, German sociologist and philosopher Professor Jürgen Habermas, finally concluded that:
“Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options… We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.”
