“I will put my law within them, and on their heart, I will write it.”
—Jeremiah 31:33
The Unwritten Code
I am reading Godforsaken by Dinesh D'Souza. One sentence in particular stayed with me:
“The atheist seeks to get rid of moral judgment by getting rid of the judge.”
Whether one agrees or disagrees with that statement, it raises an interesting philosophical problem worth thinking about.
One of the most common arguments against God is this: “There cannot be a God because there is too much suffering in the world.” At first hearing, the statement feels powerful and compassionate. Human suffering is real. War, disease, cruelty, and loss weigh heavily upon the world. But hidden inside the statement is an assumption that is rarely examined.
When someone says there is “too much suffering,” they are not merely describing pain. They are making a moral judgment. They are saying something is wrong. Yet if humanity is simply the accidental product of blind evolution, if morality is nothing more than chemistry and survival instinct, then on what basis can anything truly be called wrong?
Evolution, if you adopt the theory, explains survival, not morality. It may attempt to explain why humans developed social cooperation, but it cannot explain why we feel certain acts are objectively unjust rather than merely inconvenient.
And yet we all instinctively appeal to some invisible standard beyond ourselves.
Consider something ordinary. Someone jumps the queue in a supermarket. Immediately people react: “That’s not fair.” But what exactly is “fair”? You cannot weigh fairness on scales or place it under a microscope. It is invisible, yet almost universally recognised. We appeal to it as though it exists independently of our opinions.
The same happens whenever we condemn cruelty or praise kindness. We speak as though there is a real moral law written somewhere deeper than personal preference. We do not merely say, “I dislike murder,” in the same way we might dislike olives or rain. We say murder is wrong. Truly wrong. Wrong even if a society approves of it.
This creates a dilemma for strict materialism. If human beings are only biological machines shaped by survival pressures, then morality becomes subjective — a useful social invention perhaps, but not ultimately true. In that case, terms such as justice, evil, dignity, and fairness lose their objective meaning. They become preferences rather than realities.
Yet most people do not live as though morality is subjective. Even those who deny God continue to speak in moral absolutes. They protest injustice, defend human rights, condemn oppression, and appeal to concepts such as equality and fairness. In doing so, they seem to rely upon a moral framework larger than themselves.
This does not prove God in a mathematical sense. But it suggests that our moral instincts point beyond biology alone. The existence of objective moral obligation may hint at a moral source — a lawgiver behind the law.
Ironically, then, the problem of suffering may not disprove God as easily as some imagine. In order to call suffering evil, we must first believe evil is real. And once we admit objective evil, we have stepped into the territory of objective morality.
The question then changes. It is no longer simply, “Why is there suffering?” but also, “Why do human beings possess such a deep and universal sense that suffering matters?”
That is worth pondering.
