Relativism on the Ropes

by Gregory Koukl –

There are many ways to prove Christianity false. If the evidence for God is compromised, all forms of theism fail. If there is no soul, there is no afterlife, and planning as if there were is wasted effort. If the resurrection of Jesus is a myth, even Paul the apostle admits Christians should be pitied for their false hope (1 Cor. 15:19).

There is another way to render faith in Christ completely inconsequential. Central to the convictions of Christians is that Jesus is a savior, rescuing miscreants from the guilt of their sin. Sin is a violation of God’s moral law. But if there is no objective moral law, there can be no sin. And if no sin, then no moral guilt. And if no moral guilt, then no need for a savior, Jesus or otherwise.

Moral relativism is the idea that the existence of transcendent, objective, moral law is a fiction. As you can see, if the idea prevails, then Christianity is finished. But I don’t think moral relativism is sound, and I want to tell you one decisive reason why.

Ice Cream and Insulin
Here is a simple way of understanding moral relativism. Think of the difference between ice cream and insulin. With desserts you choose what you like—what’s true for you, the subject. With medicine, it doesn’t matter what you like. You have to choose what heals—what’s true of the object, regardless of your preferences.

Moral relativism is the view that ideas of right and wrong are more like ice cream than insulin. For relativists, the word “truth” describes a person’s mere belief. It doesn’t tell you anything about the object in question (the morality of certain behaviors, for example). It only tells you the preferences of individual people. There can be as many moral “truths,” then, as there are people who believe in them. Consequently, moral relativism is a kind of subjectivism. When it comes to moral rules—principles of right and wrong—it’s up to the subject, the individual, to decide. Morality is a personal matter because there are no true, universal, ethical obligations or moral principles that apply equally to everyone.

Note, by the way, that the “subject” determining right and wrong can be an individual person or an individual culture. Most relativism today is the latter sort. Right and wrong are socially constructed by the group. However, since no universal standard exists to govern all, each group decides right and wrong only for itself without judging those that hold other values. This neutrality is often characterized as “tolerance” and “respect.”

Moral relativism is also called moral non-realism because moral statements do not report facts, but fictions. Moral claims may be a result of mistakes in thinking, or they may describe emotions (what philosopher A. J. Ayer called “emotivism”), but they do not describe reality.

By contrast, moral objectivism is the view that morality is like insulin, not ice cream. There are right and wrong answers to moral questions, even when difficult to determine. Morality is not created by the subject—either by personal conviction or group consensus— and it doesn’t disappear when an individual or a culture rejects it. Objectivists hold that moral truths exist whether we believe in them or not. When they say an action is right or wrong, they are not expressing preferences, but convictions about objective facts.

Let me take a moment to give you a more precise way of understanding the difference between relativism and objectivism. When I address students about truth, I find it helpful to make a statement, then ask two questions. Their answer to the second question tells me if they are relativists or objectivists.

First, I make a dramatic display of placing a pen on the podium, then state, “The pen is on the podium.” Next, I ask if the statement is true. They nod in agreement (or at least those who have been paying attention nod). Then I ask the final question: “What makes the statement true?”

Hands begin to shoot up. “Because you see it there,” one person says. But if I didn’t see it, I ask, wouldn’t it still be true that the pen was on the podium? Seeing might help me know the claim is true, but it isn’t what makes it true.

“Because you believe it,” another offers. But if I didn’t believe it, I challenged, would the pen disappear? No, the pen would still be there, it seems. And what would we make of your belief if it were contrary to fact? Would it be fair to say your belief was true just because you believed it? If so, there could be no delusion or denial, only differing beliefs.

The correct answer to the question “What makes the statement The pen is on the podium a true statement?” is a pen and a podium, and the former resting on the latter. Beliefs or perceptions could not be what makes something true because we have all had false beliefs and misperceptions.

Generally, then, we use the word “truth” to describe when our beliefs about the world match up with the way the world actually is. Philosophers call this the “correspondence” view of truth, but it is not a rarified view. Rather, it is what most people—philosophers or otherwise—mean when they talk about truth.

Relativism, however, is the exception. All forms of relativism deny this common instinct about truth. In objectivism, the object makes a statement true—truth is determined by the way the world is, not by what an individual believes. In relativism, the subject—her beliefs, tastes, or preferences—makes a statement true. In a relativistic world, then, no belief can actually be wrong. Instead, it is right for the person who holds it. It is true for her, even though it might not be true for others who hold different beliefs.

Notice that at the moment I am not claiming objectivists are right and relativists are mistaken. I am simply trying to be clear on the differences between the two views. I am defining terms, not defending my own view. That I will do in a moment. First, though, I want to answer an objection.

Monopoly and Morality
Based on my definitions, it would seem that relativism amounts to an “anything goes” approach to conduct. Some relativists object to this characterization. Within certain frameworks, they say, there is a genuine distinction between right and wrong even when the system is relativistic. It simply is not true that “anything goes.” This is a misrepresentation, they say. Every community has rules people must live by, even if they do not claim that what is right for them is right for every other group.

A simple illustration is adequate to answer this charge. Let us pretend that you want to play the classic board game Monopoly. Like every other game, Monopoly has rules. There are standards, a framework of right or wrong of sorts. According to the rules of the game, for example, you cannot have houses and hotels on the same piece of property. That would be wrong. Parker Brothers, the inventors of the game, said so.

Relativism is like Monopoly. In one sense, it’s not the case that “anything goes.” Rather, standards set by the community provide guidelines for behavior. These laws are “true,” though, in an entirely different way than, say, the laws of gravity are true. They are not true because of the way the world is structured, but because of the way human beings (subjects) have arranged the game. If you don’t like the rules, you can change them (variations that are sometimes called “house rules”), or play a different game, or play no game at all. It’s completely up to you.

You can’t do that with gravity. If you don’t like the laws of physics, too bad. Adapt or die. Reality will punish you if you don’t take it seriously. Yes, even in relativistic systems you can get punished by the group if you break the rules and get caught. But I think you can see this is a contrived sort of “punishment” based merely on human conventions (“Go directly to Jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.”), not on transcendent standards.

In the end, as I said, anything goes. That’s always the case with relativism. If you are a moral realist, you think moral rules are real things, not individual whims or social conventions created by culture. They are like gravity, not Monopoly. If you are a relativist, then you are playing Monopoly with right and wrong.

Of course, this would not make relativism false. It might be that, given the nature of reality, all we are left with when it comes to ethics are human conventions. But I do not think this is so. Moral relativism is in serious trouble in a way that even self-proclaimed relativists quickly betray when their guard is down.

The Fatal Flaw
If someone claimed that a particular thing did not exist, but you believed it did, what would be the simplest way to show he was mistaken? Probably to produce a bona fide example of that which he denied. If a person did not believe in dinosaurs, but you were able to show him a fossilized reconstruction of a brontosaurus, he would have to modify his beliefs if he were intellectually honest. That is how I intend to disprove moral relativism, but in this case the relativist himself will provide the example.

As the Monopoly illustration shows, if moral subjectivism is true, then ultimately anything goes. No transcendent moral objection can be raised against any conduct. No objective moral judgment can be properly made against any state of affairs. Yet every thoughtful human being instinctively and—in the case of relativists—unwittingly, makes such judgments. One in particular stands out from the rest.

Let me ask a question: What is the most enduring and, for many people, the most compelling evidence against the existence of God? What argument for atheism is first on the skeptic’s lips? What challenge gives even staunch believers pause? The answer, in the words of Boethius, is this: “If God, whence evil?” The problem of evil has kept multitudes from believing and has shipwrecked the faith of countless others. Not only is everyone familiar with it, but everyone has raised the question for himself at one time or another.

Regardless of what one thinks of possible solutions to the difficulty, the problem itself is instructive regarding moral relativism. I want you to think for a moment about what must be true for such an objection even to be raised. When someone asks, “How can a good, powerful God exist when there is so much evil in the world,” the question is meaningful only if there actually is evil in the world, as it were. If there were no genuine evil, there could be no objection.

Note that only objective evil will serve this complaint. Evil has to be real—“out there,” in some sense, as part of reality—for the protest against God’s existence to gain a footing. An “ice cream” morality won’t do because it reduces the problem of evil to the trivial “I cannot believe in a God who allows flavors I don’t personally like.” The problem of evil, though, is not trivial, but supremely weighty.

In 1982 I supervised a feeding program in a refugee camp in Thailand for 18,200 Cambodian refugees who had escaped the holocaust perpetrated on Kampuchea by the Khmer Rouge after the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975. By 1979, nearly 2 million Cambodians had perished, almost half of the population. The first-person accounts told to me of the carnage were mind-numbing. Even children relayed stories of unthinkable brutality.

It is virtually impossible for any thoughtful human being to countenance such barbarism, such innocent suffering, such inhumanity to man, without recoiling from the wickedness, the depravity, the unmitigated evil. But the minute he does so, he has effectively denied his neutrality and fatally undermined any relativistic convictions he might have held. To make this evident, I ask a question of such responses: “When you say those things are evil, do you mean to be describing the actions themselves— the savagery, the torment, the injustice—or merely your own feelings or mere beliefs about the actions?” No person of integrity will say the latter.

The problem of evil puts moral relativism on the ropes because evil depends on good in the same way shadows depend on light. You cannot have the first without the second. When a relativist bemoans objective evil, he implicitly affirms objective good because his complaint would be unintelligible without it. The only way to rescue his philosophy is to deny evil. Yet this is the one thing he cannot do because he knows too much. Thus, the relativist himself provides the bona fide example of that which he claims does not exist—objective morality.

If morality is simply “up to us,” then evil disappears into the relativistic mist and the objection against God based on evil vanishes with it. If, on the other hand, our indignation against evil is well-founded, then our objection against God is at least intelligible (though not necessarily sound). Moral relativism then becomes the casualty, though. One cannot have it both ways.

Relativists cannot help themselves to the complaint about evil in the world, yet they always do. They cannot do otherwise because objective morality is undeniable. The universal awareness of the problem of evil makes this clear.

Morality, Guilt, and Forgiveness
If relativism is false, then morality is true. And if moral laws are real, this is very bad news because we now have no place to hide. The light of Law has exposed us and we see ourselves as we really are. We are profoundly guilty and we know it. In biblical terms, we are sinners facing judgment. Apart from mercy, we have no hope.

At this point the Christian message of guilt and forgiveness begins to make a lot of sense. It speaks truth that resonates with our deepest intuitions about the world. First, the universe is a moral universe with laws that uniquely apply to human beings. Second, we have violated those commands many times and are guilty of moral crimes against our sovereign. Our only hope of rescue is forgiveness. And this is where Jesus comes in.

The Christian message, then, not only makes sense of this world, but also speaks to our deepest longings. It is a dual message of justice and love. Justice, that those who commit moral crimes ought to be punished. That’s bad news. Love, that amnesty and mercy are offered to anyone who abandons the rebellion and seeks forgiveness on God’s terms. And that is very good news.

Gregory Koukl is founder and president of Stand to Reason (str.org), an organization devoted to a thoughtful and even-handed defense of classical Christianity. He is the author of Tactics—A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions (Zondervan, 2009), and co-author of Relativism— Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air with Francis Beckwith.