(If you're interested in a much more detailed examination of this topic, please see this post.)Audio

TranscriptWas the Orlando massacre wrong? And if so, why?

Now, at least to avoid any confusion, I want to affirm where I stand right off the bat today. I unequivocally affirm that what happened this last weekend in Orlando, Florida — where over 50 people were killed and 50 more were injured — was unequivocally wrong. That was a grave moral evil. And you are probably thinking, "Yeah, I agree. Is there any question about that?" Well I have not seen anyone raise a question about if what happened was wrong or not. And I think that is interesting for a number of reasons. Not because I think it was not wrong; I think it was wrong. But it is very interesting when people in our society today, who are not Christians, take a firm stand on a moral issue. Because, you see, there are only a few reasons why what happened this weekend was actually wrong. And we are going to look at each of those together today.

Option 1 - Why was it wrong: It wasn’t

So the first of our five options was that it was not wrong. You might think this is a very odd view to hold. But there are some people who would just say that it a pattern of behavior that was anti-social . And you might say, "So you do not think anything wrong happened?" “Well, no. It was just the result of a certain brain-state or series of brain-states. I do not like it, but I cannot say it was wrong. Because it is just a matter of someone living out what their neuro-biochemical impulses coded for them to do.” So, nothing actually wrong happened. There are some people who intellectually believe that.

And I actually know some of these types of people. But you know what is interesting, when someone throws a baseball at your face, you instinctively raise your hand because you know that a ball is coming at you. And you know how most of these people initially react to mass killings? They say, "This was a horrible evil." They feel this. And sometimes, those are the words out of their mouth. And I think their innate moral knowledge actually betrays their intellectual commitments. That they know something is wrong even if they would say, sitting back in their arm chair, that it was not. And we can push on that. We can trade on the fact that what they instinctively know to be true about reality, namely that murder is wrong, is accurate. It informs them well, just like a baseball coming to the face means you raise your hand.

So the first of our five options we were going to look at was it was not wrong. And some people will hold this line. But often times, they are going to live like it is not true.

Option 2 - Why was it wrong: I believe it to be wrong (Relativism)

The second option for why the massacre was wrong is; well, I say it is wrong. Where does morality come from? Well, it is up to me; this is called relativism: Where moral truths are only true for the person making them. Where they are relative to the person making them. This is a subjective view of truth. Where truth depends on a person and how they feel. One way to think of this is that it is kind of like an umpire at a baseball game.

If the pitcher is throwing the ball across the plate, the umpire has two ways he could look at how to come up with if it is a ball or a strike. He could say, "I call them as I see them." In other words, if the ball goes across the plate and it is a strike, I recognize and describe the reality that was in front of me and say it was a strike. Or he could say, "They are nothing until I call them."

Now, where is the truth in these two different views? Well in the first view, "I call them as I see them", the truth is in the world and we are simply describing it. On the second view, "they are nothing until I call them…