This entry is an epilogue to a series on the moral argument. The entries in that series:
- The Moral Argument for God Part 1: Going from Morality’s Existence to God’s Existence
- The Moral Argument for God Part 2: Does Objective Morality Exist If God Does Not Exist?
- The Moral Argument for God Part 3: Does Objective Morality Exist?
- The Euthyphro Dilemma
- Epilogue: Awakening the Sensus Divinitatis
The Sensus Divinitatis
A huge portion of people in humanity’s history have come to believe in God or at least something like God; it more or less comes naturally. Theologian John Calvin (1509-1564) used the term sensus divinitatis (SEN-suhss div-inn-uh-TAW-tuhss) to refer to an intuitive sense or awareness of God.
If you’re like me, for at least a large portion of your life you didn’t quite have this, at least not very strongly. When I was a child, even though I was much more theologically conservative than I am now, I believed in God and angels and all that but I was of the “I wish I could see a miracle or an angel, just to be sure” mindset. I didn’t quite feel an assurance of God’s existence that the sensus divinitatis seems to suggest. Now I don’t have that much doubt anymore. My own experience is somewhere between knowing that God exists and sensing God’s presence. Still, I wondered how that happened. As far as I know, I haven’t become any less sinful. I do know this happened after I accepted the moral argument for God’s existence and concluded that God is probably the source of moral obligation. I’m about as confident in the existence of God as I am about objective morality existing. From a previous blog entry:
When it comes to flagrantly morally wrong behavior like impaling babies with bayonets just for fun, most of us intuitively recognize that there is something in reality, transcending our opinion, that says people shouldn’t behave that way. It seems that raping children and committing genocide would remain morally atrocious regardless of what we believed. Even for many who don’t believe that God is the source of moral obligation (as I didn’t at one time), there just seems to be some component of reality beyond us, even if we can’t identify what it is, that says we should not do such things.I now know that God is that component of reality beyond us that says we shouldn’t do certain things, so that when I ponder on the wrong I’ve done, I feel accountable to a sort of presence that exists beyond myself. It thus occurred to me that my acceptance of objective morality and God as the source of moral obligation was likely the cause of my sensus divinitatis experience.
From Christianity to Atheism to Christianity
When I read Why I Am a Christian: Leading Thinkers Explain Why They Believe, a book written by a variety of authors, J. Budziszewski wrote what was for me the most insightful of all the book’s essays. He is a Christian who became an atheist who then became a Christian again. How he converted back to theism mirrored how I think I would return to theism if I ever became an atheist. Budziszewski tells what happened one night when he prayed to God as an atheist.
I told him that I thought I was talking to the wall. I said that if he existed, he could have me, but he would have to show me because I couldn’t tell. As the minutes ticked past, the wall looked more and more like a wall, and I felt a fool.The conviction of sin is something I’ve felt as well. Though I am a Christian and believe I am saved through Christ’s sacrifice, I have no self-righteous delusions of being a sinless creature. Even if I were not a Christian I would believe that there is a moral standard beyond me and I have fallen short of it, and I would know the probable source of this moral standard. For me, the moral sense was the gateway to sensus divinitatis.
Yet he did hear my prayer. I came, months later, to feel a greater and greater horror about myself, not exactly a feeling of guilt, nor of shame, nor of inadequacy—just horror: an overpowering true intuition that my condition was objectively evil. I could not have told why my condition was objectively horrible; I only perceived that it was. It was as though a man noticed one afternoon that the sky is blue when for years he had considered it red.
Nothing like this had ever happened to me before, and I could not explain it. The intuition of the objective evil of my condition appeared as though from nowhere and contradicted everything I had been telling myself. I experienced it not as an inference but as direct knowledge. It had authority, commanding assent—and I assented. Though I did not know it at the time, it was what John’s Gospel calls the conviction of sin. I believe that the Holy Spirit, in answer to my prayer, had been secretly cutting a door in the stone wall of my self-deception.
