Is Conscience Valid?

Just as I know for sure that my mind exists [1], I know for sure that I have deep moral intuitions.  At multiple points in my 19 years of life (20 years in slightly over a month) I have experienced immediate and jolting moral reactions towards events, behaviors, attitudes, and even my own motives and actions.  The conscience is the inner moral sense that activates when people do or observe something they think is wrong.

Deep down, I do have strong moral intuitions that things like racism, sexism, hypocrisy, perjury, torture [2], and intentionally violating my conscience are wrong, and that helping the poor, pursuing the truth, combating injustice, compassion for others, and acknowledging human rights really are intrinsically good.  The question is not whether or not I carry forceful and innate moral ideas within me, for I know for sure that I do actually have them.  If these intuitions conform to some higher moral reality or if they simply reflect my own personal moral preferences--that is the right question.

I have experienced guilt over things that in the Christian worldview are not sinful or evil, though I viewed them contrarily at one time.  My conscience has at times conformed itself to false moral beliefs--but my conscience exists regardless of its accuracy.  Even when other people contradict my moral compass, it persists.  So independent of the accuracy of my conscience at any precise time, I have confronted such vehement and intense moral reactions that I have erupted into rather volatile anger upon merely hearing someone suggest that something evil is good or amoral.  There are people who seem to truly live without conscience or ethical regret, and although they could be in constant internal and emotional agony from guilt I could never verify their inner state.  But the existence of morals, which my conscience seems to hint at, does not hinge on the consensus of humans or whether or not people violate or adhere to them.  Ultimately, the human conscience only possess objective validity if God exists, for without theism there could be nothing transcendent to ground morality.  In God's absence the moral impulse within humans could at most only amount to personal preferences that do not align with any transcendent or binding obligations; without God there can be no right or moral way that things should be, only a way things are or a way humans socially or personally prefer them to be.

In this post I am not addressing whether or not my individual conscience is reliable or if the consciences of most people actually correspond to what is truly right and wrong; I am instead proving that the conscience could never possess any authority to begin with unless there is a god.  I know for sure that it seems as if there are genuine moral obligations--but such a position is impossibly mistaken if God does not exist.  No conscience could be valid in God's absence because there could be no moral authority or standard to validate it.  So, does God exist?  The correct answer to this question drastically alters the nature of reality, for the existence of ethical truths is entirely contingent upon the truth of the matter.


[1].  "It is true that my mind exists.  Now, I could be a disembodied mind stimulated by a malevolent and deceitful scientist into imagining all of my sensory experiences even though they do not correspond to the real world where the scientist resides . . .  However, whether I am in the Matrix being drained of my energy by sentient robots or a disembodied mind in a vat being deceived by a scientist or the world I perceive is the true external world, my mind exists and I know this for sure.   There is no possible way I could be wrong about this."
--http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/09/truth-how-things-are.html

[2].  Yes, as a Christian I must admit that corporal punishment consisting of 1-40 lashes (Deuteronomy 25:1-3), possible removal of a limb for removal of a limb (Leviticus 24:19-21), and possible amputation of a woman's hand for a certain crime (Deuteronomy 25:11-12) are morally permissible.  However, any intentional infliction of pain other than these exceptions is morally abominable, and there could be no evil greater than the worst of tortures.