Since the horrific killing of George Floyd, the moral outrage in our nation is palpable. Moral consensus, however, is not.
While some cry out against violence by police, others cry out against violence against police. Systemic racism is either the most important problem we face, some say, or it doesn’t exist at all, others say. We must defund the police, according to some, and we must support the police, according to others.
Certainly, the debates over what exactly is wrong with this world and what must be done to fix it will continue. In the meantime, we ought not miss what the moral outrage, even when wrongly conceived or violently expressed, reveals about who we are and the kind of world we live in.
In his discussion of morality and the meaning of the universe in “Mere Christianity,” C.S. Lewis observed that humans are irrepressibly moral creatures. We believe that there is such a thing in the world as justice. That we protest when we see behavior we believe to be unjust, especially when directed at us, reveals that we believe there is a way the world should be. “A man does not call a line crooked,” Lewis wrote, “unless he has some idea of a straight line.”
But where does even that idea of a moral straight line, of justice and morality, come from? Why do we even think in terms of justice and morality in the first place? Any naturalistic worldview, built on atheism and concluding the world is merely a product of natural causes and forces, cannot explain the existence of justice and morality.