Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

ethical absolutes (Craig, 1994:67).
Sartre, Russell, Nietzsche, and many others, have argued that moral absolutes are
possible without a transcendent source (i.e., God). Sartre and others also argue that there
is no inherent human nature, that man is not ‘imprinted,’ as it were, from birth, with
character traits, or predispositions. “There is no human nature. In other words, each age
develops according to dialectical laws, and what men are depends upon the age and not
on a human nature” (Sartre, 1947:87). According to this assumption, people are a socalled,
‘blank slate’ from birth and consequently shaped by their environment and the
choices they make.
William Lane Craig, along with Francis Schaeffer, J.W. Montgomery, and many
others, disagrees. Craig claims the conscience is instilled within all human beings by
God, providing an innate sense of right and wrong. This is precisely what the Apostle
Paul said: “For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the
law, these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves, who show the work of
the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and between
themselves their thoughts accusing or else excusing them” (Rom. 2:14-15). Thus, when
Sartre and others condemn the Nazi atrocities, they actually do so from their God-given
conscience, and from their Judeo-Christian cultural conditioning. Rev. Richard
Wurmbrand, who was tortured for years in Ceausescu’s [Communist] Romanian prisons,
said:
The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe when
man has no faith in the reward of good or the
punishment of evil. There is no reason to be
human. There is no restraint from the depths
of evil which is in man. The communist
torturers often said, ‘There is no God, no
hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do
what we wish.’ I have heard one torturer even
say, ‘I thank God, in whom I don’t believe,
that I have lived to this hour when I can
express all the evil in my heart.’ He expressed
it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted
on prisoners (Wurmbrand, in Craig, 1994:68).
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University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa