The previous article dealt with the way mankind interprets the world around him. The focus was on how one specifically interprets the historically challenging events of the distant past. The significant observation that needs to be made is how the Christian world view fits the facts, while the narrative of others doesn’t.

This brings us to the question, why do others argue so vehemently against the Christian world view? The simple answer is because of the fall, when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and sin entered into the world. Man was kicked out of the garden and the whole world suffered. Ever since mankind acquired the knowledge of good and evil, at some point, he or she chooses to sin. The most significant manifestation of that choice is to try to be divinity themself. Man has this ill-founded belief that he doesn’t need God. He instead believes he can determine his own way and in so doing reject the One True God and his relationship with his Creator. 

Knowing about the fall of man makes the intentions of man’s denials obvious. To start, if man himself can determine what actions he chooses are right and which are wrong he can justify and do about anything he wants. Morality becomes self-determinate based on the individual whims of the one who is acting on them. One falsely believes he doesn’t need the one true God to tell him those things he shouldn’t do.

The problem with this reasoning, the snake in the grass so to speak, is that there are no standards for everyone to live by and that means chaos in some form rules supreme. That lack of order, either at a personal level or collectively in a society is one nasty culprit, a fly in the ointment so to speak.  All it takes is one person to disagree, and who is to say he is wrong. Yes, a social group can make a proclamation that he is wrong. But then that oppressed individual can make his own group to stand up and fight, to the finish, for his pet cause to be right. No, order cannot be established through man’s machinations. Mankind cannot establish what is right or wrong without outside intervention. Someone needs to be able to make an authoritative determination of what is right or what is wrong.

There needs to be a way to transcend our sinful world and the unscrupulous lives we lead to determine what the correct choices are. Man, himself can’t rise above this corporeal, terrestrial, temporal ground in which we live to make those determinations. Many philosophers have tried, many politicians and tyrants have made their own claims, and many millions of people have died as a result of those injustices and their attempts of world domination and immortality.

There is a recent attempt by man to write in a set of new justifications for establishing right and wrong. This new movement is trying to establish a new definition for the word truth; to counter the established definition of the word truth. The new phrase being bantered about is to use the term ‘my truth.’ Every time believers in God hear this phrase they must object and shut it and the idea it’s based on completely down. There is only one truth, there is no other explanation for truth other than ‘The Truth.” That Truth is God. As Jesus said in (NASB) John 14: 6, “I am The Way, The Truth, and The Life.” Everything else is false whether people deny that reality or not.

There are authors who have tried to explain why mankind himself cannot be the arbiter of moral truth. C. S. Lewis has been prolific in his attempt to show how man is unqualified and inadequate to the task. “The Abolition of Man” is just one example of this in his non-fiction writing. The space trilogy, “Out of the Silent Planet”, “Peralandra”, and “That Hideous Strength” are fictions he wrote that directly expose man’s futile and even evil intentions in trying to do so. “The Screwtape Letters” is another book that exemplifies the diversity of Lewis’s writing skills used to make the point that man can’t make those truth determinations himself.

Another philosopher, whose work was grossly misinterpreted, makes it absolutely clear where the morality we must adhere to comes from. His name is Soren Kierkegaard and subsequent philosophers who misinterpret his work and joyfully put the title of ‘the father of existentialism’ on Kierkegaard are doing a major injustice to him and his writings.

To get a better understanding of what Kierkegaard wrote I suggest you read Articulation 7 of the Book “A Conversaunt Existence,” by your truly. In it I state what Kierkegaard’s intentions were.

There was a group of people from his time, he called Christendom, who lost their foundational grip on truth. Kierkegaard claimed no one can know anything about ultimate Truth or moral truths until you put Christ into the center of your life. The Spirit of God and Christ is what leads us all to the real Truths of God and is our guidepost for how to live. Man, alone can never reach truth. Truth and any moral standards need to be provided from outside the boundaries of our paltry existence.

So, what Kierkegaard was trying to tell everyone was that the establishment of objective truth is impossible for man to achieve. The only hope for mankind to have objective Truth is to have God tell everyone what the Truth is, otherwise it is merely an ineffective, subjective endeavor. Therefore, Soren Kierkegaard was correct when he said that by using mankind’s standards, “truth is subjectivity” and it is the unregenerate man whose intentions are to deny and live within the real Truth of God. Believers know man himself can’t replace the Truth found in the Holy Scriptures.