Moral Absolutes

Most of the time I read the evangelical outpost to keep me up to date on intelligent conservative thinking. I can disagree with Joe Carter, and often do, but I never call him stupid.

Today, however, he hit on an important topic–absolute truth. Now I’m all in favor of humility about our personal knowledge about truth, and about the appropriateness of trying to force truth as we understand it on others, but the post-modern age bothers me a good deal in that so many people appear (to me, at least) not to be in the search for truth at all. They’ve given up.

Carter put it in balance here:

Christians, on the other hand, would be more like the second umpire, who recognizes that there is an objective reality even if our ability to perceive it is somewhat limited.

You’ll have to go read his whole post to get his truly great baseball analogy that makes this whole idea even clearer.

The only place I would amend his statements is where he says: “Christians, however, can know moral truths and thereby know more than their po-mo neighbors.” I have two amendments. In spite of significant problems I might have with their epistemology there are post-modern Christians. Post-modern isn’t binary. One can be more post-modern and less, in my non-absolute, relative opinion. But further, those who are not Christians can also know moral truths, though that is a longer topic.

I also wrote on this for my wife’s devotional list today, Seeking Truth. In that one I allowed myself to have some fun! Yes, I’ve been writing quite a few devotionals for the list recently.