Douglas Groothuis: Morality as Evidence for God

Knight & Rose Show — Wintery Knight and Desert Rose

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Douglas Groothuis: Morality as Evidence for God

March 22, 2025

Knight & Rose ShowWintery Knight and Desert Rose

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose welcome Douglas Groothuis to discuss morality. Is morality objective or subjective? Can atheists rationally ground human rights and moral duties? Can atheists appeal to Darwinian evolution to get out of relativism? Is it rational for atheists to do the right thing when it goes against their self-interest? Does the Bible teach Christians not to judge?

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Show notes and transcript: https://winteryknight.com/2025/03/22/knight-and-rose-show-60-doug-groothuis-the-moral-argument

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Transcript

Welcome to the Knight & Rose Show, where we discuss practical ways of living out an authentic Christian worldview. I'm Wintery Knight. And I'm Desert Rose.

Welcome, Rose. So today, we're delighted to welcome a special guest onto our show, Dr. Douglas Grothuis. Dr. Douglas Grothuis is the Distinguished University Research Professor of Apologetics and Christian Worldview at the Cornerstone Theological Seminary.

Dr. Grothuis holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Oregon. He is the author of 20 books, including a popular textbook, Christian Apologetics, which is now out in its second edition, and published by IVP Academic. He also co-authored an introductory textbook on apologetics called The Knowledge of God in the World and in the Word, published by Zondervan Academic, and his co-author there is Andrew Shepherdson.

Dr. Grothuis has published over 30 academic articles in journals such as Academic Questions and Philosophia Christi, as well as dozens of pieces in publications such as the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Christian Research Journal. His encouragement to pastors appears regularly at the Focus Pastor on the Focus on the Family Online Portal. So, welcome to the Night in Rose Show, Doug.

Thank you. Happy to be here. We're excited to have you.

You have been a source of encouragement, a mentor, and just a source of wisdom for me for a very long time. I was wondering if you might just tell our audience a little bit about your education, career, and specialization ministry work in your own words. Yes, so I became a Christian in 1976 when I was 19.

I have a background of some secular philosophy and I was also interested in Eastern religions and New Age spirituality at the time. And in June of 1976, I became a Christian and eventually I went on to get all my degrees in philosophy from secular schools, but I kept an interest in Christian worldview, apologetics, ethics, and so on. And my first book was on the New Age Movement, came out in 1986.

That was quite a big phenomenon at the time. It still is, except now it's just more mainstream, sadly, taken for granted. And along the way, I've written 20 books.

They all relate to philosophy of religion or apologetics or cultural critique in one way or the other. I was a professor for 31 years at Denver Seminary. And then this last fall, I came to Cornerstone University and Seminary to be a distinguished professor.

So I'm teaching both undergrads and graduate students and learning how to adjust in moving from Denver to the Midwest. That's been a challenge. One of my biggest issues is there's hardly any jazz out here, but you know, I'm surviving.

I'll make it. I did go to a good jazz concert last Sunday with a big band. So that was terrific.

That's great. That's great. So we want to talk about the moral argument for God.

And this is something that comes up a lot of time, especially with young people. And I was wondering if you might briefly explain what the moral argument is and maybe explain the difference between objective morality and subjective morality. Right.

Well, the moral argument is one of many faceted, one argument in a many faceted apologetic for theism and for the whole Christian worldview. And it's part of what's called natural theology. And that's where we argue from some aspect of the natural world or the human person and say that through a pattern of reasoning, the best explanation for this would be a personal and unlimited God, the God of monotheism.

So the moral argument has two stages. The first stage is that there is such a thing as objective morality. And by objective, I mean something that is the case whether or not anyone believes it, whether or not a society affirms it.

Something like racism is always wrong. Rape is always wrong. You can use negative examples.

Female genital mutilation is always wrong. And then underneath that, of course, is some constructive evaluation of what it means to be a person, that people should not be hurt through rape, racism, terrible physical procedures like female genital mutilation and so on. So the first stage of the argument is against relativism, that morality is merely relative to or dependent upon individuals, groups, or maybe historical period.

So you argue that there is objective moral truth, there are dimensions to that. One is simply that some things are right, some things are wrong. You also have the basis of moral obligation.

And as well as moral principles, you also have the idea that some ways of living are better than others, so the account of virtue and vice. So when it comes to explaining or giving an account of what we'll just call objective morality, the three big options would be atheism, theism, and pantheism. And we can get rid of pantheism very quickly, although I've probably written about a thousand pages against pantheism in my career, so that wasn't too quick.

But in this case, pantheism is the belief that everything is divine, there's no distinction between the creator and the creation, we're all part of one universal energy. But that universal energy is abstract and impersonal. So if you have an impersonal force or principle or vibration or substance, there's no way that could be the source of morality, because morality has to do with imperatives.

You should be kind, you should not be a racist, you should not exploit people. And another reason pantheism fails is that on most accounts of pantheism, everything is ultimately one reality. So it's all divine and it's all one.

And so dualities or distinctions, like the human and the divine or the person and nature, or even good and evil, end up disappearing. So there's simply no philosophical resources available in pantheism to ground objective morality. So the other choice would be broadly atheism.

And atheism teaches that there is no God, all that exists is the physical universe. And it has no purpose, human beings have no purpose. We're not made especially by God, we're just the result of time, space, chance and matter.

And so we're not special in the world. So a recent atheist has said the idea that all men are created equal is a Christian idea. And if you're an atheist, you just have to say people evolve differently, because there's no objective grounding for morality.

That's Yuval Harari, I believe his name is in his book, Sapiens, very influential writer. Now there's one form of atheism, which is sometimes called atheistic moral realism, that claims that there are objective moral truths without God. They're just there in the universe.

They're not dependent on the character of God. This is kind of an odd halfway house, because you take the idea of objective morality based on the character of God, and then take God out of it, and then somehow try to keep the objective moral reality. There are lots of problems with this.

I address this in my book, Christian apologetics, we also deal with it in my book, the knowledge of God and the word in the world. But one problem is that it's just an odd viewpoint. So the world was not created or designed, human beings have no special status.

But somehow we have this moral intuition that some things are absolutely right, and some things are absolutely wrong. That's a strange view. Now on the Christian view, we're made in the image and likeness of God to know God and to know morality.

Genesis 1 & 2, Romans 1 & 2, really the whole Bible. And there's another problem here just to give you two, and that's moral obligation. On a theistic view, God is not only the source of what is right, he grounds obligation.

So we owe God our moral activity. We owe God a good life. And on atheism, of course, these moral principles are just floating free of God and from any moral obligation.

So those are the three basic possibilities, pantheism, atheism, and then theism. And for Christian theism, and the claim here is that, to use shorthand, God is an infinite and personal being who is the source of morality. He does not change.

His character is the moral backbone of the universe. And he has made moral knowledge available to us both in our conscience, naturally, and then he's given a lot more specifics in biblical revelation in Holy Scripture. And since this is Christian monotheism accounting for morality, we certainly add that through the works of the law, shall no one be justified.

So even though we have knowledge of morality given to us by God, on the Christian worldview there's no way that anyone can adequately follow their conscience to somehow be justified before an infinitely holy God. So we need Christ as Lord and Savior and mediator. And also on a Christian account of morality, Jesus is the perfect moral exemplar as to the way we ought to live.

But we can only come to God through the mediatorial work of Jesus and living the Christian life is done through the power of the Holy Spirit. Okay, so let me see if I got a quick summary here. So objective morality, it includes the idea of objective moral value, so something like human dignity and human rights, and it includes objective moral duties.

And these things are objective in the sense that they're true whether anybody believes them or not, because they are not grounded in humans. And then for relativism, that just means there's no objectivity about this and it varies. It could vary by the individual or it could vary by societies.

And then for the individual relativism, yeah, well, we'll talk, we have questions about atheism later. So I'll leave, I'll leave that one for later. That was, moral realism is a big one I want to hear you, you know, talk about.

So what are some reasons to think that moral relativism is false? Well, one good way to argue is what's called argument by counterexample. So when I was teaching a class at Metro State University 10 or 12 years ago, most of the students are relativists. And I asked them, do you know what female genital mutilation is? And most of the students did and you really don't like to go into too many details because it's so horrible.

I said, do you think that's wrong, morally wrong? And everybody said yes. And I said, what makes it wrong? And they said, well, the women, the women are hurt by this. I said, well, a lot of women have been inculturated to think this is a good thing.

And in some countries, they go along with it. It's a real minority that disagree with it. And so they were having trouble finding anything that made it wrong.

Because after all, the culture teaches it and most of the women agree with it, even though it's harmful to them and does no positive good. So I let them stew in their philosophical juices for a few minutes. And I said, God makes it wrong.

And I said, let me explain that because if we have value objectively given by God, and this is something that is cruel and hurts people, then even if the whole culture agrees with it, even if it's been embedded in history for hundreds of years, it's still morally wrong, because it goes against our objective moral goodness given to us by God. And it goes against God's commands to not be cruel and not to wantonly hurt other people. So I just let that sit for a while.

Another way to deal with this is to use monstrous examples, monstrous moral examples. So think of someone like the serial killer Ted Bundy. He stated that he learned in college that morality was completely relative and that laws were arbitrarily created by society.

So he said, if that's the case, then an animal has no more value than a human. So if I can kill and eat an animal, why can't I do anything I want to other human beings if I'm clever enough to get away with it? So that was really his philosophy of being a mass murderer was relativism. Now, it's possible that Ted Bundy repented before he was executed.

I certainly hope so. But I did this in another class at Metro State as an adjunct years ago, I gave a paragraph from Ted Bundy, where he said everything's relative laws are arbitrary. I learned this in college, humans are really of no more value than animals.

And I gave that statement to the class and I said, write a few sentences about what you think of this statement. And almost all the students agreed with it. And then I gave him the rest of the statement where he said, this is why I'm a serial killer.

And that surprised them. It was my favorite quiz I ever gave. I said, you might want to rethink your philosophy because if you are a moral relativist and there's no objective standard above you, then really it all comes down to what you can get away with and nothing more than that.

So that's also the argument form called reductio ad absurdum that relativism leads to this absurd conclusion that no right thinking person should accept. That's a great answer. I mean, additionally, if cultures can decide what is morally good or bad or whatever, then anybody who is any sort of moral reformer would have to be bad, right? Because they're going against the consensus.

If the consensus is all that there is, then, you know, Luther King Jr. was wrong to be opposed to racism in, you know, in the 1960s. Anyone who was opposed to the Nazis in Germany was wrong, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's one version of relativism.

That's cultural relativism, which says the culture in some way or another determines what's right and wrong. But then you have reformers who call out the culture on the basis of a transcendent standard. But if culture is all there is to morality, then someone who goes against the culture and tries to refute it on some other basis would have to be deemed as wrong and immoral.

Well, obviously, Martin Luther King is not wrong and immoral to call America to be true to her standards of the founding that all men are created equal. So there's a problem there. Moral reformers are never relativists.

They're always making a claim sometimes wrongly that society needs to be reformed, needs to be changed, and that it needs to be changed in light of a better, higher standard. Also, the idea of moral progress is nonsensical if relativism is true. All you would have would be change.

So you change from the Jim Crow society to a more egalitarian society where people of various races have more opportunities. Well, we view that, we should, as progress, as an advance, as a improvement in the state of affairs for people of color. But if relativism is true, it's only a change.

You couldn't say it was a change for the better because to measure something, you have to have something independent of what is measured. You can't say, well, how big is this room? Well, we have no idea. Well, let's get out a measuring tape.

Well, there's no such thing as a measuring tape. We need a new carpenter here. This is bad.

So if someone says there's nothing out there to measure morality, then basically, anything goes that you can get away with. And that's absurd. I was on a debate a few years ago on the internet.

It was two Christians and two non-Christians. And one of the non-Christians was some kind of secular humanist minister. It was very odd.

But anyway, she said that since there's no God, there are no absolute moral standards. And then later, she talked about how we are improving morally as a society, and we need to be desiring further improvement morally. And I said, wait a minute.

You contradicted yourself in long silence. Right, right. Exactly.

One of the things that people in our culture today seem to really value is this idea of tolerance. So can that idea be grounded by moral relativism? Not really. You might think it could because you could say, well, everything is relative, so no one can take the high moral ground.

No one can rightly condemn any viewpoint as wrong or any action as wrong. So that's being tolerant. Well, for one thing, we should be intolerant of a lot of things like racism and antisemitism and genocide and so on.

We shouldn't tolerate those kind of things. But let's talk about tolerance in a constructive sense of agreeing to disagree agreeably on important matters, not attacking the character of the other person, not physically threatening the other person. And in that sense, Christians should be tolerant because we should aim to persuade people that Christianity is true, not to bludgeon them or intimidate them or anything like that.

But if you're talking about tolerance as a constructive virtue, that is, to be intellectually patient and kind with people you disagree with, well, that's a claim of objective, universal, absolute moral truth. We ought to be tolerant of people we disagree with. But tolerance really needs a moral framework and a moral foundation to obtain at all.

Being indifferent to everything is not tolerance. In fact, you should not be indifferent to evil. You should oppose evil.

Hey, I want to raise a point, maybe this is a bit controversial, but like we've been hearing a lot in the political realm about this idea of weaponization of government. And it's there are cases where pro-lifers have been, I think, unfairly arrested, or parents who disagree with certain school policies being pushed onto their kids or certain books in the library. They're talked about as being, I don't want to say this phrase, but domestic, very bad people by the government.

And I'm just wondering, do you see a difference there between how Christians have traditionally handled different points of view? And is there something about the kind of secular left worldview that doesn't have that? And so they seem to jump quickly to using force to course. And I mean, just think historically what that's looked like. I just see a big difference.

I was wondering if there's something there. Well, there definitely is. And a few years ago, I put out a book called Fire in the Streets, which is about critical race theory or what we sometimes call wokeness.

And I have a chapter on free speech. And I said that free speech is a good idea because it really comes out of a worldview that there is such a thing as objective truth, and we can know it through reason and evidence. And discussing it in a civil way is the best way to at least attempt to come to the truth.

Now, what happens on the hard left is the idea that we're not interested in objective truth. Objective truth is a myth. We have an ideology that we need to propagate, and we'll use any means necessary to propagate that.

In fact, I was listening to the radio a few years ago on National Public Radio. It takes some fortitude to do that. But they still cover jazz pretty well, but that's about it.

One of the people on there said the idea of objective truth is racist. I thought, good night, isn't the host going to call her out on this? The idea of objective truth is racist. Well, that's a claim of objective truth right there.

So you just condemn yourself as racist. You know, is two plus two equals four racist? Is the law of non-contradiction racist? Is Alaska was the 49 state racist? I mean, good grief. Let's try to think carefully and critically about this thing.

But that's behind cancel cultures. We don't like this idea. It disagrees with our hard left neo-Marxist ideology.

So we don't want to refute it. I mean, we don't want to muzzle it and silence it. Yeah.

All right. Now I'm going to ask you about an objection to Christianity that I find most frequently on my blog in the comments section and even in real life. And this is where atheists say to me, well, Christians were silent during slavery and slavery is so terrible.

So I think that Christianity doesn't have any kind of corner on morality. So what would you do if somebody pushed that objection from an atheistic worldview, they said slavery is wrong, you know, and implied that you as a Christian had a bad record with respect to it. You know, you couldn't affirm that as well.

Well, there's so much to say about that. I do address that in some detail in my book, Christian Apologetics. But first of all, you've got the concept of objective right and objective wrong there.

So where does that come from? It's based on the idea of the unique value of human beings. And where do we get that from? Well, we get that from the Bible. You don't really find it in Islam.

You don't find it in Hinduism. In fact, about a year and a half ago, Vivek Ramaswamy was trying to get the nomination for the Republican candidate for president. And he said, I'm a Hindu.

And because I'm a Hindu, I believe people are made in the image and likeness of God. And I just about fell out of my chair. Hinduism is the caste system.

The caste system, right, sir. So you are stealing from a worldview you do not hold. So first of all, what grounds objective moral goodness, it's really the Bible.

And then secondly, we always may want to make a distinction between the actions of a church and what the Bible actually teaches. And the Bible does not teach that slavery should be a perpetual institution based on race. It teaches nothing like that.

It's a little complicated, but the Old Testament allowed for some slavery. It was much less severe than the nations around Israel. Slaves could be released.

Slavery is not based on race. But it was never meant to be an order of creation, so to speak. It's something that came about because of the fall.

And then when you get to the New Testament, Paul says that trading slaves is sinful. And you've got this idea that if you can find your freedom as a slave, find your freedom. And we've got Philemon about the freed slave Onesimus and how he should be treated.

So you need to make those distinctions. What makes slavery wrong? Well, it's because we're made in the image and likeness of God, and it should not be a perpetual institution. And then what does the Bible actually teach about it? Well, nothing like the Southern views of slavery, chattel slavery.

And the church has been inconsistent, but Christians led the charge against slavery in the United States. And it was the Christian nations that first completely argued against and abolished slavery. It certainly was not Muslim nations or Hindu nations.

So that would be my basic take on that. If you want to get into the details of how slavery worked in the Old Testament, I give some references to other sources on that in my book, Christian apologetics. It's certainly not the case that the Bible says slavery is a great idea and Christians should own slaves.

There's nothing like that whatsoever. It's really much more nuanced than that. And when you go to the big themes of Christianity, we're made in the image and likeness of God, we're all fallen, we all need to be redeemed, and Christ came to set people free.

There's obviously no room whatsoever for slavery on that theology, that worldview. All right, let me give you a quick follow up on that, and then Rose can ask a question. So it seems to me that whenever you say something is wrong, you're implying that there's some kind of duty there to not do that action.

And on an atheistic worldview, I'm trying to figure out how they could ground the free will necessary to make those moral decisions. And like you were saying before, I don't see that there's any moral accountability. So if you get away with it, like Ted Bundy, for a long time, there's no real problem with it.

And I think incentives matter. Like if I feel like my moral actions are part of an ongoing relationship with the God of the universe, I'm going to do the right thing whether anybody's watching or not. So what do you think about that? Do they have a way to work around that and explain how they can make moral choices? And how do they get around that problem of moral accountability when there's nobody who can catch them? Well, there is no final moral accountability on an atheist worldview because there's no God to hold us accountable, and there's no reckoning in history or in the afterlife.

Now the other issue is, do they have a metaphysic of human persons to allow for two things, one, moral knowledge and two, moral agency? And the answer to both questions is no. Because human beings are simply evolved animals, kind of glorified meat machines. So you can explain us in terms of matter, energy, space, time, and then cultural conditioning.

There's nothing else left to appeal to unless you're one of these atheistic moral realists, and I think that's a very untenable, unstable kind of position. So are we in a position to have moral knowledge that has justified true beliefs about the good, the true, and the beautiful? No. And secondly, given that same atheistic metaphysic of the person, you undermine a sense of moral accountability and responsibility.

Because all you have is instinct and social conditioning. C.S. Lewis pointed this out in Abolition of Man, particularly in chapter two. If you say, well, go by instinct.

Well, which instinct? You've got a number of instincts. Some say, do the courageous thing. Others say, protect yourself.

Some would say, do this for posterity. No, just put yourself first. So you can't just appeal to instinct because instincts conflict with one another.

And even the strongest instinct could be wrong. So neither on the idea of moral knowledge nor moral agency does atheism have a way to make sense of the universe morally. And typically what atheists do is they just cheat.

They steal ideas from Christianity and try to argue that their worldview actually supports these things. But sometimes they'll be extremely honest and say, well, we don't believe we're created in God's image, so we're all evolved differently. So there is no one standard to relate to all people.

But that's pretty hard to swallow. And you've got Tom Holland's book Dominion, where he says that all the greatest ideas of Western society, like individual rights, championing the downtrodden, universal human rights, limited government, and so much great art, comes from, guess what, the Bible, and no other worldview supports these things. In fact, that was one of the reasons why Ayaan Hirsi Ali converted within the last two years.

She was arguing for these sorts of values about the rights of the downtrodden, universal human rights, and so on. And she realized that as an atheist, she had no support for it whatsoever. She realized as a former Muslim that Islam could not support this.

And so she realized that all these high ideals of Western civilization had a root in the Bible. And then also she had her own psychological struggles and crisis and turned to Christ for both objective historical philosophical reasons and also the reason of subjectivity, that she was struggling to find meaning and purpose in life and found that in the gospel. So it's the beautiful thing.

Absolutely. Yeah. Along similar lines, what are some of the problems with trying to ground morality, objective morality, in Darwinian evolution? Well, the only resource you have if you make Darwinian evolution the reference point is that it only tells you what activities are necessary for survival, and that's it.

It's not anything beyond mere survival. And Viktor Frankl said if survival is your only value, then you're essentially a nihilist. And we know what the Nazi party did with the idea of survival.

They thought that the German race was the superior race, and they were one of the favored nations, actually to use the term from Darwin. And so when they added that idea to anti-Semitism and certain ideas of blood and soil, you came up with the ideal of the Third Reich. Now, just based on Darwinian principles, no God, and evolutionary history and evolutionary forces, I don't see how you can condemn that.

So if you can't condemn Nazism as objectively moral wrong, morally wrong, then there's something very wrong with your worldview. Now, people might say, well, through evolutionary changes, we found what kinds of mores are conducive for free or better society and which aren't. Say, wait a minute, you begged the question there.

You're assuming certain views of society. Sam Harris does this in his book, The Moral Landscape, and he debated Bill Craig. And the debate was over in the first 10 minutes because Bill basically said, Sam, you're cheating.

You're saying you like free societies, you like representative government, so let's just use science and politics to bring that about. Well, how do you justify those as objective moral values on your naturalistic worldview when there's nothing but the universe and nothing outside the universe? That's a great point. Exactly.

Does atheism offer rational basis for choosing the moral action when it goes against self-interest? When nobody may find out, we hear from atheists quite a bit, well, I'm good. I choose to do what's right. One of the things we talk about among ourselves sometimes is what about when no one's watching, you won't be caught, and it does, in fact, go against your own self-interest.

Is there any rational basis for choosing what is moral? Well, I don't think so because you don't have the worldview resources to draw from. If you're a Christian and you know you could supposedly get away with something immoral, you know that God is your witness and you know what the moral standard is, so you choose to, as Jesus said, deny yourself, take up your cross and follow him, and that's the right way, that's the best way. But for the atheist, it really just comes down to personal choice, and probably the exemplar there would be Jean-Paul Sartre from his book, Existentialism and Human Emotions.

He says there is no God, there's no human nature because there's no God to bring it about, and there's no heaven of ideas, meaning there's no objective moral values, no standard. So human action boils down to just creating values as you go along. That's all there is to it.

He tries to rescue morality in various ways about not having bad faith, not blaming things on others, and choosing for the whole human race, which I think is just a smokescreen. I don't even know what the heck he meant by that. But if there's no God and we're not moral creatures made in God's image, then pretty much it comes down to arbitrary personal choice, and the atheists, as I said earlier, are often stealing.

You know, they're cheating, they're taking ideas from Christianity and applying them to a worldview where their ideas don't belong. So I say, well, go back and read Frederick Nietzsche, the madman. What's left of the universe and society and the person when God is removed? Nothing is the same.

Everything has radically changed. The earth is hurtling through space, unchained from its sun, there's no up or down left. Or to get a little more obscure and nerdy, read Max Dernert, the great German atheist nihilist, who said, absolutely nothing is forbidden if there's no God.

All that matters is your ego. And his book was called The Ego and Its Own. I talk about that actually in Christian apologetics.

He makes Nietzsche almost look wimpy. He's so insistent in his nihilism. Nietzsche tried to overcome the nihilism in various ways.

Of course, he couldn't do it. Yeah, I'm seeing that a lot. Like today, it seems like there's a lot of support for follow your heart, you know, and everybody seems to be even when you're doing prudential judgments, like I don't think it's a good idea for you to take out $100,000 of student loans for a degree in English.

You know, if you're thinking that you're going to start a family and have four kids, you may struggle to find work unless you're the best, in which case you could do anything you want. But I remember working with a coworker of mine who was raised Christian named Will, and he dropped his faith the minute he hit college. And he is very successful as a software engineer.

And I tried to ask him on what basis he was justifying adopting the moral point of view, donating money and all the good things that he was doing. And he said, well, doing the right thing makes you feel good. And it makes people like you.

And I'm just thinking, I'm not so sure if it's always like that. And I think that's where people are at. They're not seeing things the way that you described it.

They're seeing it more like this as an aid to survival is to comply with the society that's around me. Do you have any thoughts on that before I go on to the next question? Well, sure, you could say that altruism has certain personal benefits. But I don't even think that's a moral statement.

I think that's just trying to survive and thrive and get along in life. Morality really has to do with doing the proper action for the right reason. It's far more than just engaging in actions that seem generous or which end up being for your good.

Morality is really having the right view and putting it into effect come what may, though the heavens may fall, so to speak. Yeah. Yeah, I think so.

And as the culture changes and has changed drastically since your friend was in college, if he's still doing what makes him popular, what makes people like him, what makes him feel good, he's probably living his life in a completely different manner, wouldn't you think, than he would have 20 years ago? Yeah, definitely. I think things have definitely gotten worse in many areas. So you would be at the mercy of that if your standard was, what do the people at work think of me? How do I get ahead? I mean, people in Stalin's Soviet Union and Cambodia and these other communist countries, if they said that, if they said, oh, morality, that's just doing what makes people like me and what makes me feel good.

Well, you'd be doing some pretty bad things in order to get ahead. And FA Hayek talks about that in his book about why planned economies are bad because he says the worst get to the top in these planned economies. Exactly.

That's who they're looking to promote. So yeah, when you're living on the fumes of kind of declining Christian civilization, then it's easy to say doing the right thing is giving money away, but you're kind of in a good spot to do that. Move yourself to North Korea and you might find that you could be doing something else entirely.

All right, let me ask you another question. So I want to get real practical with my next two questions. Although I think what you've said already was really fantastic to get people to think, just trying to challenge them to say, are you going to go through life with this kind of with someone who doesn't have this solid in their mind? But here's my question.

So I've noticed today that many people are uncomfortable with the idea of judging. The most popular Bible verse among non-Christians seems to be don't judge, and that's all they don't quote the rest. In the context of romantic relationships, how does the ability to be moral affect the quality and stability of the relationship? And especially with what we were just talking about, which is grounding the ability to do the right thing when it's against your self-interest and you're not going to get caught.

Hmm. Well, the question is whether you have a reliable moral compass within you, and if you have a standard outside of you that that compass points toward. So we could know what's right and wrong and not obey it.

Obviously, Paul talks about that problem in Romans chapter seven, but you need to internalize what the biblical standards are, and there are various ways of doing that. You look at the Ten Commandments. Jesus summarizes that with love the Lord your God with your heart, soul, strength, and mind, the first and greatest commandment.

The second is like it, love your neighbors yourself. Then you can go to the fruit of the spirit and ask whether or not these traits are present and dominating or growing in your life, love, joy, peace, patience, and so on. And of course, you realize that the Bible gives us a lot of no's.

Many years ago, probably in the 60s, early 70s, Francis Schaeffer said we live in a society that says no to nothing, and it's even worse now. So a big part of morality is no, is saying, I won't look at pornography, I won't commit fornication, I won't put myself in morally compromising situations, and I will pursue godliness. So it means no, I'll give you an example.

I won't give you any indication as to who this is, but I have a good friend who's mid 40s, sadly recently divorced, very nice looking guy, very outgoing, strong Christian. And he tells me that, and this is nothing against women desert rose, but he keeps telling me that I can't believe how many of these women, including church women, are after him to have sex on the first date. Or even with no date.

And I said, all right, my friend, you know what to do. You got to do what Joseph did. Run away, brother, run away.

Exactly. So a lot of morality is simply knowing where the boundaries are and what you say no to. And if you've said yes to bad things, then repent, confess your sin, maybe become accountable to somebody, especially if it's something like pornography, do what it takes to stay away from it.

And realize that Jesus said there's a narrow path that leads to life and a broad path that leads to destruction. So at least in the short run, it's always easier to do the wrong thing than because we're sinners and we've fallen short of the glory of God. But once you say yes to biblical principles and yes to the Holy Spirit, and you're in a community of people who are seeking God, then doing the right thing becomes easier and you can get stronger in doing that.

But I've been saying this for many, many years, even before the whole LGBTQ explosion. But when it comes to sexuality, our culture is just morally insane. And it has been ever since the sexual revolution.

Right, exactly. So when we're sane and we're trying to be biblical and say no to things, we'll be viewed as prudes or puritanical or judgmental or whatever it is. And it's just the case that we have some boundaries based on objective truth, and that's how we want to live.

Exactly. I actually was talking a few weeks ago to a friend from high school who is late 40s and a very good looking guy. And he was saying the same thing that he's trying to surround himself with Christians and make good decisions.

And women who claim to be Christians are just throwing themselves at him, sending him pictures of themselves that are totally, totally inappropriate, unclothed and saying, you know, want to come over and just constantly bombarded by these temptations. And I'm thinking, wow, it seems like you have to change your phone number, maybe move and do whatever you have to take to get those temptations away because, wow. Well, I remember listening to a lecture many, many years ago by a man named R.J. Rush Dooney, you've probably heard of him.

Yes. And he said, when people lose the desire to fulfill the creation mandate and serve God and glorify God in all things in their work and their family, when that's not their main goal, people tend to substitute sexual enjoyment because that is so present and so obvious, and it can take you in the wrong place very quickly. But if you really want to seek first the kingdom and its righteousness, love God, say no to yourself and dedicate yourself to the things of God, like building up culture, evangelism, apologetics, helping the poor, then you've got meaning in those things.

And then when it comes to your sexuality, you want to live within the biblical framework because sexuality is not the only thing in life, the most important thing in life. And when it becomes that, it obviously becomes an idol and it ends up debasing everyone. Well, tell us where people can find your writings.

We know that you have a podcast as well. Where can people find that? Is there any recent work you've done that you'd like to tell people about? And I would just recommend that people listening write these down, follow Dr. Grotice. His writings, his speaking, his work will be edifying and encouraging and challenging to the mind and the soul.

And so if you could just share where people could find you, that'd be great. Yes, I have a web page with a very exciting name, douglasgrotice.com, and everything there is free. Lots of links to lectures, articles.

I have a blog you can sign up for. There's also an essay about seminars and teachings I could give to your church or Christian organization. Seminars like on CS Lewis, apologetics, philosophy of technology, things like that.

I have a weekly podcast called Truth Tribe, which is at Life Audio. That's been going for almost two and a half years. Comes out once a week.

Haven't missed a week yet. Congratulations. Yeah, thanks.

That's usually between 10 and 20 minutes long. I talk about apologetics, philosophy, cultural criticism, sometimes music, sometimes dogs. So theology of dogs, of course.

Yes. And I teach full time at Cornerstone University and Seminary. I think we have a tremendous school.

We really emphasize teaching everything from a worldview perspective, Christian worldview. So you could find out about us at the web page for Cornerstone University and Seminary. Excellent.

All right. Well, thank you, Dr. Gertheis again for coming onto the show and discussing morality and objective morality and relativism with us today. So listeners, I think that's a good place for us to stop for today.

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