The Bible Does Not Praise Conscience

Conscience is one of the most dangerous distractions from truth that a person could succumb to.  A person is perhaps never more willing to commit immoral acts than they are when they think they have morality on their side, but many attempts to argue for one moral position or another reduce to appeals to conscience.  However, anyone who truly cares about morality itself, rather than simply about their own feelings about morality, will silence and ignore conscience whenever it interferes with their pursuit of moral knowledge.

Christians often fallaciously hold conscience in a very high regard despite its inherently subjective nature and despite the Bible explicitly teaching the doctrine of theonomist moral epistemology.  On one hand, they claim that objective moral obligations exist (and according to the Bible they do); on the other hand, they often defend the idea that an arbitrary set of subjective emotions that differ from one person to the next can actually inform someone of objective moral facts.

Adding to God's commands is explicitly forbidden by the Bible (Deuteronomy 4:2), for only divine laws could have legitimate moral authority (1 John 3:4), and yet there is no way to know if one is adding to its commands apart from knowing the Bible itself!  According to the very framework of moral epistemology that the Bible teaches, one cannot know moral obligations through conscience, societal standards, or consensus.  The Christian who argues that conscience has genuine authority contradicts the Bible he or she claims to represent.  As Romans 7:7 says, one could not know what sin is apart from God's primary moral revelation in Mosaic Law (though the other books of the Bible clarify some issues as well).

Christian theology is not necessary to refute the idea that conscience is a source of legitimate moral knowledge, of course; logic accomplishes this on its own by revealing that moral emotions only inform someone about his or her perceptions and preferences, proving nothing about whether morality even exists in the first place.  Conscience can be useful for encouraging oneself to act in a certain way, but it is epistemologically useless when one wants to know about morality itself.

Apart from some sort of divine revelation, moral epistemology inescapably collapses into skepticism where one can only know 1) what follows from a given moral premise and 2) one's own moral emotions and preferences, having no reason to treat one moral premise as more likely to be true than another.  The only moral ideas that can be disproven by logic alone are those which contain internal contradictions.  The whims of conscience are not the moral revelation many Christians mistake them for, and the Bible does not praise conscience as necessary either for knowing moral obligations or for living them out.