MICHAEL R. EGNOR, M.D.
NEUROSURGEON AND SENIOR FELLOW AT THE WALTER BRADLEY CENTER FOR NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Michael R. Egnor, M.D., is a Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics at the Renaissance School of Medicine, at Stony Brook University, New York. He graduated from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, and trained in neurosurgery at the University of Miami. He has been on faculty at Stony Brook since 1991. He is the neurosurgery residency director and has served as the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Stony Brook.
In 2005, “New York Magazine” named Dr. Egnor one of New York’s best doctors. His research on hydrocephalus and intracranial dynamics has been published in leading medical journals including the “Journal of Neurosurgery and Cerebrospinal Fluid Research.” He is a Senior Fellow at the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence at the Discovery Institute, and has lectured extensively on medical and philosophical topics in the United States and Europe.
Moral Law Demonstrates God’s Existence
MICHAEL R. EGNOR M.D.
For many years my love of science hindered my conversion from atheism to belief in God. Yet my faith in science left me with a haunting feeling that I couldn’t explain where I really came from or why I was alive, and I couldn’t shake the conviction that I needed to know truths that science couldn’t provide, especially after a loved one had a miraculous recovery that my knowledge of medicine couldn’t explain.
I began to read the work of skeptics of ‘consensus science’ — intelligent design advocates like William Dembski, Mike Behe, and Stephen Meyer — and I saw that the science of our origins wasn’t so settled. I grew fascinated by the rational evidence for God’s existence. That evidence pointed to a Mind at the source of nature. I studied the proofs for the existence of God — Aquinas’ Five Ways, the Augustinian proof, the Rationalist proof, and more. I found that they gave compelling rational frameworks for my belief. But one proof in particular fascinated me. Unlike these subtle and complicated proofs of ancient theologians, it was simple but sublime.
Where do universal moral laws come from? You and I and every human being on earth (with very rare and pathological exceptions) have an intuitive sense of right and wrong. This moral sense is essential to our humanity. Of course, our moral sense isn’t perfect, and goodness knows that we transgress the
Moral Law on a regular basis — but we know intuitively when we transgress it.
Moral Law is, by its nature, objective, meaning that it is something that arises from outside of us. We discover Moral Law, we don’t invent it. We know it’s wrong to torture people or to kill innocents or to steal from the poor, and the wrongness isn’t just a matter of personal taste. There are things that are wrong intrinsically, and not even a human consensus to the contrary could make them right.
But Moral Law is still a judgment, not a material thing or a law of physics. It’s an opinion, but it’s an opinion that we discover, not one that we merely invent. But if it’s not just a human opinion, whose opinion is it? No one human or group of humans authored our universal conscience, and virtually every human struggles with it, contests it, tries to evade it. Yet Moral Law is orderly, abstract, and clearly the product of an intellect.
The answer is that Moral Law originates outside and above the sphere of humanity, though it operates within us. Moral Law is God’s will, written on our hearts. We experience it constantly in our most intimate thoughts. Every moral act, every comforting gesture, kind word, and helping hand, is God with us, even closer to us than we are to ourselves.
Moral Law is the most sublime proof of God’s existence, whispering at every moment in every human heart.