This is a continuation of a question asked by an international at AIF.
Q: Proof that God exists.
A: I was communicating with a scholar interested in human rights. He was not a Christian, but he knew that humans have rights beyond those of animals. Here is some of our conversation:
You focus on human rights, and that focus is good. But can human rights be its own moral foundation? In other words, if there is no God, why care about human rights? If there is no God, what makes humans more valuable than monkeys? If there is no God, then we are all atoms just as dogs are all atoms. Why is our arrangement of atoms more special than a cow’s arrangement? Atheist writers have been unable to answer this question. They say that they can be atheists and simultaneously care about human rights, and they are correct. But they have no explanation for the moral foundation that makes human rights right. I believe that the idea of human rights assumes God. This assumption is in the American Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights.” Therefore, I believe that your focus points you to God, even if you do not recognize God in your motives. What do you think?
Those words prompted a conversation. So let me ask you what I asked my friend. Consider. You will kill and eat a chicken, but you will not kill and eat a man. Why? You assume that humans are valuable, but I want you to think about why. Where does our value come from?
If God does not exist, then nature is our creator, but an impersonal nature can have no moral authority or ability to give us special value. We are the random products of evolutionary forces just as mosquitoes are. It makes no sense to talk about human worth or rights. If, however, human beings are created in the image of God, then human rights make sense. God is the common sense foundation for them.
Attempts to answer this question without resorting to God always assume a moral standard. Sometimes that standard says that intelligent beings are more valuable than less intelligent ones. Sometimes it says that a species cannot survive if it treats its own members poorly. But if the universe is neither personal nor rational, who cares whether the human race survives? And who cares whether an organism is intelligent or dumb? If the universe is neither personal nor rational, then it has no purpose, and if it has no purpose, then the survival of the species can achieve no purpose. You see, even these explanations assume some standard, some purpose beyond us. And that takes us back to God.
The existence of human rights is not itself a proof of God’s existence, but, like the phenomena we discussed the past two weeks, it does point us in the direction of God. If you assume that humans have intrinsic rights, then God is the best inference from the data.
Interestingly, the scholar I had the discussion with saw this too.
