You will find very few people who are unwilling to condemn Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The news of innocent Ukrainian civilians fleeing their own country, Ukrainian orphans being forced to flee orphanages and find housing in neighboring countries, civilian fathers hugging their wives and children goodbye as they prepare for combat without knowing if they will see them again, Ukrainian maternity hospitals being indiscriminately bombed—the sights and scenes have been deeply saddening. There is almost universal agreement that what Putin is doing is not only sad but also is immoral.
Yet how do we arrive at such conclusions? How do we know, almost intuitively, that what is occurring in Ukraine is immoral? The Christian answer is that we are all made by God in His image. C. S. Lewis, in his renowned work Mere Christianity,spends much time answering these sorts of questions with depth and clarity. This essay will consider some of the ways in which Lewis addresses what he calls the “Law of Nature.”[1] But I want to go beyond Lewis’s discussion of the existence of the Law of Nature and consider some of the ways in which even those who reject the notion invariably act in accordance with it.
The Existence of the Law of Nature
So, what is the Law of Nature, according to Lewis? It is essentially a universal, innate awareness of right and wrong, and that these things are not merely a “matter of taste,” or things invented by a given community.[2] Furthermore, the Law of Nature transcends not only locales but also time. Some have objected to the notion of the Law of Nature by arguing that societies have differed drastically on matters of morality, but Lewis points out that these differences are mostly superficial. Lewis appeals to selfishness as an example:
Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to—whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or every one. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.[3]
Other examples could be given. But the primary point is that across various cultures and time periods, humans have essentially agreed, in practice, on the major principles of morality.
That we are aware of the Law of Nature can also be seen in what is sometimes called “fairness.”[4] This point is most apparent when we believe someone has wronged us, and we attempt to correct their actions or call attention to the way in which they have wronged us. Even this practice is founded upon an innate awareness of right and wrong, or at least a sense that right and wrong exist.
A Sense of “Ought”
We are also plagued by a deep sense of “ought.” By that I mean that, when presented with two options, we are aware of the choice, as well as the point that we ought to choose one over the other. The two desires, as Lewis so helpfully points out, both arise within us. But the sense of ought seems to be something that comes from the outside. Lewis illustrates this principle well:
Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires—one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot be either of them. . . . The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.[5]
Lewis goes on to say that the sense ofought within us when we are faced with a decision like saving a man in danger or protecting ourselves typically informs us that we ought to perform the weaker of the two desires—risk our life to save another’s. The implication is that we do not act merely in accordance with the stronger desire. We know that we oughtto act in accordance with the weaker desire. The sense of ought is not merely one of our instincts since it is telling us that the right instinct, the weaker of the two, is the oneto follow. The sense of ought comes from outside of us. We do not always obey it, but we have it.
“We Have Cause to Be Uneasy”
What stands behind the Law of Nature, or as Lewis later refers to it elsewhere, the Moral Law? According to what Lewis calls “the religious view,” what stands behind the Law of Nature might be something like a divine mind.[6] Of course, Lewis eventually argues that it is the God of Christianity. But if this claim is true, if the God of the Bible is behind this sense of ought, if He is telling us how to act, then we should be concerned.
Even when we know what we ought to do, we do not always act accordingly. If the sense of ought is not merely a chemical reaction, or what our parents told us, or mere herd instinct, then we are found opposing God Himself. That is, we are not disobeying an abstract law but rather God. Lewis poignantly writes, “God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies.”[7]
Late-modernism and Borrowed Morality
I think this last point is the very reason that we want to reject the existence of the Law of Nature or a universal Moral Law—the existence of such a Law would mean that we are accountable for our actions. And if God is behind this Law, then the defiant question, “Who says?” is answered with utmost clarity and finality. Yet in order to justify doing what we please rather than what we ought, we often suppress the ought and chalk it up to the guilt of religion or some aspect of our upbringing. We deny that there is an ought altogether. We deny that there is a Law of Nature because that might lead us to the terrifying conclusion that there is a God and that we are His enemies.
But we cannot totally escape the sense of ought and the Law of Nature. We certainly try—and it leads to utter chaos. Just consider the debates and court cases surrounding sexuality and gender. But then something pops up like Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and we are somehow deeply convinced and in agreement that what is happening there is indeed “wrong,” though we lack any sufficient grounds for that claim apart from the existence of God and the Law of Nature. Once we say that Putin or any other dictator ought to act in one way instead of another, or that what he is doing is wrong, we are admitting that there is a fixed sense of right, and that he is (or at least ought to be) aware it. We are appealing to the Law of Nature.
Leroy Forlines encourages us, when we assess and test worldviews, to ask whether a given worldview is livable. By that he simply means that we should ask if we could live in accordance with it. We are living in what some have called “late-modernism,” which I think is a better title than “postmodernism” because it better emphasizes its continuity with modernism. Neither modernism nor late-modernism are truly livable worldviews because they rule out any real foundation for morality.
Consequently, they are unable to condemn the world’s greatest atrocities. They possess only a borrowed morality—a morality that borrows from the capital of Christianity and pretends that it is its own. This materialist worldview excludes God and therefore undermines the foundation for human dignity, worth, and value. There is no real basis for opposing the bombing of maternity wards in Ukraine within the worldview of late-modernism. It is an unlivable worldview that borrows its sense of right and wrong from Christianity.
Conclusion
Christians in the twenty-first century need to “turn up the volume” on morality, as Forlines rightly says.[8] By that statement I do not mean that we need to be rude or bombastic in the pulpit, online, or in personal conversations. I mean that we need to highlight the way in which we live in a moral universe and are moral beings created by God in the image of God. We need to be clear that disobedience to the Law of Nature is really disobedience to God Himself. We need to show the inadequacy of late-modernism to address the atrocities and ills of the twenty-first century. We need to demonstrate the sufficiency of Scripture and the gospel contained therein to address society’s greatest needs in every age, beginning with reconciliation to God.
[1] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952; repr., New York, NY: HarperOne, 2001), 4.
[2] Lewis, 7.
[3] Lewis, 6.
[4] Lewis, 3–4.
[5] Lewis, 9–10.
[6] Lewis, 22.
[7] Lewis, 31.
[8] F. Leroy Forlines, The Quest for Truth (Nashville: Randall House, 2001), 459.
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