Christianity,
when interpreted properly, gets everything right. Here’s one of those profound
things it gets right that virtually everyone would know if asked and were honest
about it, but to which few pay attention. Picture a staircase, with humans near
the bottom. Imagine this staircase represents an upward journey, where each
step takes you to higher moral truths and more elevated standards. Moral
standards ascend in accordance with God’s goodness and ultimate standard,
similar to how true facts are objective imperatives that supersede all
falsehoods in accordance with God’s Truth found in Christ.
From this we can recognise 3 key things: 1) All humans can keep tapping into higher standards than the ones in which they are currently operating. 2) However high we climb on the staircase of improvement, we can never reach a point at which there is no further improvement we can make. 3) These imperatives point beyond human ability to God’s holy and perfect nature, where God is at the very top of the staircase (Matthew 5:48: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect”).
What this means is that we continuously recognise higher standards, but cannot fully attain them in our own power - and we can always go higher, but we can never reach the top of the staircase, because that is where God alone is. It’s the strongest indication that the highest standards cannot rest in human construction alone. If humans are the highest minds in the known universe, as atheists believe, then it’s extraordinary that every individual recognises the need for superseding imperatives but cannot ever reach them, and that the only consistent grounding we can conceive is idealised, perfect, transcendent standards. The situation makes sense with God’s nature (perfectly good, holy, just, and loving) providing the highest and ultimate imperatives, but it makes far less sense if we are just naturalistic beings. The true picture is this:
1) Human attempts (limited).
2) Human ideals (recognised but unattainable).
3) God’s perfection (the true grounding).
Where the
staircase illustrates our conception of the hypothetical climb.
The naturalistic, evolutionary reason alone only explains it in part, but like a house of cards, it falls down the higher we try to build it. The correct part is that, yes, humans evolved as social animals, and groups that developed shared rules and expectations (fairness, loyalty, prohibitions on murder, etc) survived better than groups without them. Over time, these moral instincts became deeply ingrained because they helped with cooperation, trust, and long-term survival. And because of this adaptive instinct, and the importance of cooperation and fairness, evolution may have “over-engineered” our sense of duty and obligation, making it feel more absolute and universal than it actually is.
But I think it shows itself to be inadequate, similar to the way that those who think we merely invented mathematics are inadequate – there is no way to construct something that high that is both a) based on ultimate, absolute truth, and b) an ever-ascending staircase of standards that is impossible to keep climbing without sensing further steps still to climb.
Let’s take something like justice as an example. In a Christian framework, the concept of justice can be seen as having an ever‑ascending trajectory, consistently moving from human approximations toward God’s perfect standard. We can start by recognising basic human justice, associated with honesty, keeping promises, treating others fairly, punishing theft, honouring contracts, that sort of thing. And then we can tap into higher standards of human justice, like deeper considerations of human needs, addressing systemic injustices, striving to reduce oppression, that sort of thing. And then, even with profound accomplishments in higher forms of human justice, we can still conceive of ideal aspirations that tap into both a quantitative and qualitative advance up the higher reaches of the staircase – a conceived radical transformation of the world in which full cosmic justice occurs (as per Romans 2:5-6, 2 Corinthians 5:10, and Revelation 20:12-13), but is beyond the scope of ordinary human achievement, however long our evolution carried on.
The whole staircase of justice finds its upper limit in God’s perfect justice, where the very best of our idealised human justice is fully integrated with His Divine love, grace, mercy, and holiness, bringing about perfect foresight of consequences, simultaneous mercy and righteousness, and eternal consistency in accordance with God’s love and goodness.
Consequently, what we have here is a profound sense of God at work in nature, both by what we conceive His ideals to be, and by how evident it is that we fall so short of those standards.
