Morality – Does Evil Exist?

Objective Moral Law

Living through the past 3+ years has been an experience without precedent. Known facts in medicine were abruptly claimed “untrue’ (natural immunity, for example), standard practice of medicine was curtailed (off-label use of drugs has always been a part of medicine), informed consent in medicine (especially participation in research) was denied, healthy people were forced to ‘quarantine’ … and I know you are thinking of many other ‘new experiences’ in your own lives. In the course of a few months part of the dialogue began to shift from medicine & science, to that of ethics & morality. The word EVIL began to be applied to various elements: origins of the virus, political decisions, economic harms, abandonment of public education, and others. It wasn’t just that we didn’t like what was happening, some of us characterized the actions as evil. But what does evil actually mean? Does it exist? How do we define it?

I wrote a critique of a recent interview of Aaron Kheriarty, a psychiatrist with years working in medical ethics. In this I began to address the problem with how morality may be considered or explained.

As a physician who also happens to be a follower of Christ, I hold certain beliefs as moral standards. I would say they are TRUE. They are real, and they aren’t simply a matter of personal preference. What I am getting at is the nature of morality from the view that objective moral principals exist. In my first post I addressed the idea of TRUTH being based in reality, a representation of things AS THEY ARE. So to go a little further, OBJECTIVE TRUTH is not dependent upon the observer, the truth is a quality of the statement or proposition itself. “The dress is red” is an objective statement, and anyone looking at the dress can see whether the statement is true or not.

Where does the truth lie? As you reflect on this you will note that the color “RED” is a property of the dress. No matter what you do or say, it is still red. This is what is meant by objective: the property belongs to the dress itself. If I ask “is this dress attractive” we have a different sort of quality. The notion of whether or not the dress is attractive is something that resides within you, the observer. This is a subjective opinion (remember basic grammar: you are the subject, the dress is the object – “You observe the dress.”). This is a crucial distinction to make as we live in a world where this has been distorted as you will see.

Corruption of language & critical thinking is rampant in our educational system. Radical subjectivism, the idea that most if not all truths are relative or subjective, seems to be the dominant mode of thinking in some circles. Each person is to decide his/her own reality. Even the previous sentence comes under fire by ‘his/her’ because now people wish to claim 100 different genders! When this is carried into morality we have moved into very dangerous ground.

One must ask: is there really such a thing as objective morality, are there universal moral truths? I will make the claim that objective morality DOES EXIST, even if there are aspects that are hard to clarify. One prominent but now deceased public speaker (ironically enough discredited due to his own imoral private behavior) used to ask a provocative question to stimulate people to think about morality:

“Is it wrong to torture babies for fun?”

This is a marvelous way to examine the issue, as it is so much “in your face.” We recoil at such a question and say ‘of course it is wrong’ because we intuitively know it is evil. What makes it evil, is it our view of it, or is the evil in the act itself? This makes a clear case for morality being objective. In other words the ‘right or wrong’ of an act is a property of the act, not of the person thinking about the act. If we can agree that this is an objective moral truth, then we claim that morality is objective. This does not leave room for “well, it may be wrong for you but it isn’t wrong for me!” Obviously there are matters of taste & preference, but that takes us back to the subjective.

When we say “it is evil to force or coerce people into taking a potentially dangerous shot” we are making a truth claim, a statement about the way things actually are, and that there are moral issues involved. The fact that someone may be comfortable being coerced does not make it right. There are people who seem quite comfortable victimizing others, and sadly there are people who are comfortable being victims. This does not change the underlying morality, we agree it is still wrong.

Denying effective & available treatment for critically ill patients is evil. The act itself is wrong. Misrepresenting the safety & efficacy of Ivermectin in treating SARS-2 is morally wrong. Hiding clinicial trial data about a gene therapy injection masquerading as a ‘vaccine’ for 75 YEARS is morally wrong. I think we can agree that not allowing children to play outside in playgrounds (about the safest place to be when concerned about a respiratory virus) is evil. The list goes on & on.

As a point of clarification I want to add this: consensus does not produce moral truth. When one people group believes they have a right to enslave another group, to view them as property rather than persons, this is evil. It matters NOTHING that the society at large may endorse that view. Throughout history we can see great acts of evil that were embraced and approved by societies, but we still know these acts are evil. The killing of a person is not necessarily an evil act (taking the life of a person attempting to abduct & kill your children, for example) as long as there is sufficient moral justification. The 6th Commandment is often misconstrued as ‘You shall not kill’ when actually it is better translated as ‘You shall not murder'.’

The issue of moral justification is where a great deal of manipulation may come in. We have heard an entire array of attempts to justify the curtailment of our liberty during the ‘lockdowns’ and even after, and most of you who are reading this post did not buy into the justifications. Obviously many people did, just as many people are always subject to manipulation. At any given point, we all have our ‘squishy’ points, areas where we have doubts. I would simply state that for the ‘big picture issues’ we can usually rely on our intuitions if we have given these things some thought.

Finally I would add a brief closing question: what is required to make the claim that objective moral laws exist?

What is needed is a ‘yardstick’ for measurement, a standard that is not subjective and variable because we all have different tastes in some things. We need a foundational standard outside of ourselves. As you and I move forward together in this conversation - this interface between science, engineering, medicine, psychology, philosophy, and spirituality that I call “Wrestling with Truth” (and note: conversation implies dialogue, so please share your thoughts in the comments!) - I will gradually weave various lines of thought together. For now I would simply state my opinion that God is the source of objective morality. Without God there is no basis to believe that objective moral truths exist! To move from subjective opinions into objective standards there must be ‘grounding’ for this morality in a morally perfect being. Remember, morality does not apply to physical objects, but rather to acts; an act requires an 'actor’, this is a personal quality. So we aren’t talking about some vague, ethereal concept. We are describing a personal entity. God.

“God talk” is off-putting for many people, much less my mentioning Christ at the opening. Modern science has tended to reject things outside of the material world and I confess that 30 years ago I mocked such ‘God talk.’ But as I have sought to make sense out of the world: good & evil; beauty; love; rational thought; human relational needs; and other immaterial (non-physical) elements, it became quite obvious that there is far too much to our existence that cannot be attributed to material causes: matter, energy, space, and time. As we have seen our world turned upside-down, many foundational beliefs have been shattered. I have found great joy recently in dialogue with a physician who has shared with me her own radical transformation in how she views the world.

As I talked about last week concerning the FLCCC conference:

The technical, medical information conveyed was phenomenal, but the human element was even better! This again points to the importance of the immaterial aspects of our existence, and thus my desire in writing: to produce some sort of synthesis as I share my own journey through our chaotic world. If you find yourself wanting to disagree or turn aside from these issues, PLEASE allow yourself to take in what I share. It won’t hurt you, and perhaps, just maybe, I can help lead you into an entirely different understanding of life in our world.

For now recognize that I have presented a case that objective moral principles exist and that the best explanation is that a perfect moral being exists who establishes these moral laws.