Where did your conscience come from?

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Remember Jiminy Cricket? He was a personification of Pinocchio's much abused conscience. The human conscience is a universal assumption like the law of gravity and yet, it remains a mystery. Have you ever seen cartoons where a devil and an angel are on either shoulder trying influence a person’s behavior? These are expressions in popular entertainment of the common understanding of human conscience. It is so simplistic, so basic, it is just assumed. Why do humans universally have a conscience? Why do we have a sense of right and wrong? That is the mystery.

Have you ever stopped to contemplate the uniqueness of the human conscience among creatures on earth? No animal has a conscience. No animal ever struggles with right and wrong. Animals have no conscience. When their owner dies and cannot feed them, they will eat their master. See an example here: http://edition.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/05/15/austria.dog/

Or there is the case of the man that had no feeling in his foot due to diabetes, who fell asleep only to wake up and find that his dog chewed his foot off. http://kdka.com/local/local_story_133180307.html

The dog did not feel any guilt for eating its master. It didn’t need to seek counseling or forgiveness. Animals have no conscience. If a dog steals your hotdog off a picnic table, it doesn’t feel bad later for stealing. When the lion pounces on the gazelle, breaks his neck and eats his raw flesh, he feels no guilt. He loses no sleep. Animals live and move by mere instinct, reacting to positive and negative stimuli like Pavlov’s dog.

The spider feels no guilt for eating her young. The mother bird feels no guilt for pushing a baby bird out of her nest because it has the scent of human touch on it. Chickens feel no guilt for pecking to death another chicken with a wound. Buzzards feel no guilt for eating another dead buzzard. There is no conscience in an animal, only instinct. They are servants to their hunger and the training of positive and negative stimuli. Animals do not know right and wrong. They don’t understand righteousness and evil. They are not moral or wicked.

Humans, on the other hand, do have consciences. Granted our conscience can be seared (1Timothy 4:2), callused (Acts 28:27) and warped (Titus 3:11), but never-the-less, we still have them. This is one of the ways in which we are created in the image of God. We have a conscience. We have a built-in sense of right and wrong. The very fact that we all have a sense of right and wrong, proves there must be some universal source for that built-in assumption. Even moral relativists, who say there is no right and wrong, by saying so, have just declared an absolute and thus contradicted their own theory. In so doing they prove there must be some ultimate authority or truth by which all truth may be measured and judged.

Romans 2:14-15 says, "Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them."

Our conscience sets us apart from all other creation. It is an imprint of the image of God on our soul. It is written on our hearts. Many a man has tried to scratch out that law written on the heart. But even their anger and vehement opposition to the existence of God is evidence of the imprint that will not fade. Their very outrage at our supposed bigotry for having a set of convictions and the audacity to believe truth is knowable is evidence that that think they are right. We don’t get all worked up about something without convictions. If there is not right and wrong we can have no convictions. The very moral outrage they have at people of conviction shows their own. Even criminals have a sense of right and wrong. The mafia has a gentlemen’s code of conduct in how they murder people. We all have a conscience. It may be twisted, denied and perverted but it’s there.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov, "Without God, everything is permitted." How true. If there is no God, then there is no authority on morality. If nothing is right or wrong and no one has a right to dictate morality, then Hitler was not evil and murder is not wrong. The existence of truth is self-evident in our consciences. Although many people say they believe in moral relativism, it is very rare to find a person who lives that philosophy out in every day life. If they did, I would guess they would end up in jail. With no definite standard of good and evil or correct and incorrect, the search for truth becomes impossible.

What are we going to school to learn if it is not truth and fact? If no concept is more accurate than another, there is no point in evaluating what we believe or trying to find the truth -- since there is no possibility of ever being right or wrong. Without truth, science is impossible. Without truth, law is impossible. Without truth, love is impossible. We all live like there is truth. The existence of right and wrong it is written on our heart to cause us to search for the whole truth which is found not in our molested consciences but completely in the Holy Scriptures.

Creation Is Guided By Law And Thus A Law Giver