Can People Know What Good Is, Without Being Christian?

Once in a while, I'm not building from CMI as Creationists, but opposing their Protestantism. Today is one of those days.

It is impossible, especially for those who do not know the Lord, to have any kind of mental framework in which they can recognize what ‘good’ really is. As fallen people, we are born cut off from knowing the only right and good Being in the universe [God], and therefore, we are also cut off from knowing what is really good. Sinners think sinning is good, and God is bad! Clearly, their thinking is upside down!

Thinking ‘upside-down’!
By Gary Bates | Published 23 Nov, 2011 | Updated 09 Jan, 2014
https://creation.com/en/articles/thinking-upside-down

And, unfortunately, Gary Bates says "spot on".

No, it is somewhat beside the point. If we were born thinking upside down about morals, Pagans wouldn't be without excuse. They are.

For professing themselves to be wise, they became fools
[Romans 1:22]

Who, having known the justice of God, did not understand that they who do such things, are worthy of death; and not only they that do them, but they also that consent to them that do them
[Romans 1:32]

St. Paul doesn't say the Pagans had no idea these things were wrong. It's just that they had got socially used to thinking they were excusable.

A sinner is born with knowledge of God's justice, instinctively. Any theoretical deviation from it comes from three issues:

• excusing oneself when one sins (and as people sin on different issues, this involves excusing different things), ad hoc each time;
• generalising an excuse (whether for oneself or for someone one admires or loves), hoping others will agree;
• being taught by others to excuse a bad thing.

As different cultures are dominated by different bad men, different cultures will go wrong in different directions. And will teach this wrongdoing to the young, who weren't born to this evil thinking and didn't arrive there by themselves, most of them.

The diversity of moral systems are not in and of itself one moral systems, but surround it as more or less bad approximations, with the correct one (on most issues) in the middle. Often with one of the bad extremes being less popular. Saying "no one should drink alcohol" is less popular than "getting drunk is no sin" ... saying "no one should have sex" is less popular than saying you don't need marriage or a heterosexual setup of it, as well as other factors of fertile intention, to have sex. But the truth is still in the middle and attacked from both sides: you can drink alcohol, but not get drunk. You can have sex, but within marriage, open to procreation, and you should not obsess about that aspect of your partnership. And it's still pretty close to what people before their teens could have figured out if they weren't corrupted one way or the other in education or in comradeships.*

We are however born without the capacity to consistently follow the right morality. We only get that by Baptism. We only keep that by staying faithful to Baptism or returning to Fidelity with Confession.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Vigil of Epiphany
5.I.2026

PS, see also:

For when the Gentiles, who have not the law, do by nature those things that are of the law; these having not the law are a law to themselves:
[Romans 2:14]

St. Paul doesn't say the Gentiles are always doing things of the law, he's saying when they act against it, they act against their own nature and reason./HGL

* Some are seduced to some things before puberty. With gluttony, that's pretty common. With some other sins it's rarer.