A dear friend of mine who has abandoned Christian belief to become an agnostic naturalist has challenged me to set forth an absolute Biblical ethic to counter his relative, culture-based ethic. He maintains that the Scriptures present a contradictory account of what is right and wrong, and that there are no truly absolute ethics - even if we look to the Bible as the standard. After I began to present an absolute Biblical ethic based on the Law/Gospel distinction and the twin concepts of love for God as the ultimate good and sin against God as the ultimate evil, and as I was building upon these ideas, my friend replied that if there is no God then this ethic is meaningless and useless. My reply to that:Sure, but aren't you stating the obvious here? Either position is a matter of faith, or belief in something which can't be proven. You will say there is no proof for the God of the Bible. I will agree. But I will add that without Him there cannot even be the idea of proof or of proving things. Without Him there can be nothing to prove, no reality, no anything. He is the ubiquitous, invisible Presupposition you unwittingly presuppose even in your arguments against Him.
You have a competing presupposition that prevents you from acknowledging the logical necessity of God. It is the idea that you are a capable judge of what is real, or that all significant reality is perceptible to you via your senses (i.e., your perception of the natural world) and thoughts (or at least perceptible to another human who will relay his perceptions to you). You do not accept that there may be a sovereign Determiner and Creator of reality who alone is the true Perceiver of all that is actually "real" and "significant."
I don't know if my answers are any good for my friend, although I believe they reflect Truth. What would you say to a friend who has turned from the faith but still wants to talk to you about it?
