Right and wrong

I'm getting a jump start on my reading list for 2012. My wife bought me two of the books for Christmas and I ordered the other four books on Amazon. I've started reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and I'll make some comments on the first few chapters.

Lewis is a great writer and I'm a fan of his Narnia series and I love the recent movies as well. He starts out Mere Christianity making an argument that all humans have a built-in sense of right and wrong and that things should be fair. It is the argument for absolute morality and he does it very carefully and gives replies to some common objections. I've given this some thought. Do we want things to be fair? Do my kids want things to be fair? Well, yes, ... when it is in their favor! They want to take turns when they are not the one playing the Wii, but they'd be perfectly happy not taking turns if they were the one playing it. Does everyone have the same standard of fairness or morals? or is it subjective? Some people think it's o.k. to eat animals and others don't. Some people are racist. Do they KNOW "deep down" that they are wrong or do they simply have a different opinion of what WRONG is? I think it's easy to see that everyone has their own opinion of what is right and what is wrong.

I'm not a philosopher so perhaps I'm missing something critical. Is Lewis instead asking why do we even think in terms of right and wrong in the first place? Well, it's true, as humans we DO think in terms of right and wrong, but don't animals (the more advanced ones) possess this ability too? I have a big, friendly Labrador Retriever. He knows that it is wrong to go in the house and you can tell he feels awful if he has an accident and will slink around with his tail between his legs. If God did create us and gave us this ability to perceive a "right" and a "wrong", I find it odd that he would give those same abilities to animals as well. And if God embedded this ability as a perfect standard, why do different cultures have different standards?

While I've always thought that there are some good arguments for an intelligent designer, I can also imagine that there might not be one. I also think that Christian apologists take a great leap when they go from an intelligent designer to the god depicted in the bible. For some reason, they think if they can prove that a god exists then it almost automatically means the Christian god exists.

Rather than reading a book from cover to cover I plan on jumping back and forth between books..... so my next post will be.......................you guessed it.... random.