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Confident Christianity at Deeside

It was a real joy to welcome Andy and Gavin to Deeside Christian Fellowship in the western suburbs of Aberdeen, for an evening of Confident Christianity, on Tuesday 6th June. Deeside has been building fruitful links with Solsas over the last few months, not least as we supply them with two board members – Derek Leith, recently retired from Ernst and Young, and an elder at Deeside, as well as Elizabeth McQuoid, Commissioning Editor for Keswick Ministries.

Over 150 enthusiasts gathered, mostly from Deeside, but including a group from our church plant at Donside, as well as a smattering of other local believers, to listen to very engaging talks from Andy and Gavin. The evening represented the firstfruits of a partnership we pray will blossom, encouraging church members to become bolder in sharing their faith, and giving very practical pointers on how to open up conversations with unbelievers.

Andy gave the first talk, helping remove some of the barriers, both theological and psychological, that prevent us from speaking out about Christ. He suggested that asking good questions is a better way of opening the secular mind than going straight for a ‘Romans road’ version of unsubtle evangelism. His assertion that Jesus asked a lot more questions (306 in the Gospels) than He gave answers was thought provoking, and the easy-to-digest questions he suggested, for both those interested and those showing no interest in Christianity, were as helpful as they were accessible.

Gavin then gave a passionate argument about the need for persuasive evangelism. We may feel that using logical arguments bypasses the necessary work of the Holy Spirit in convicting men and women, but Gavin dispelled that myth by showing how the Spirit’s power is unleashed in tandem with the kind of persuasion that the apostles consistently presented. Passionate prayer allied to well thought through arguments are a dynamic combination that can lay bare the most obstinate heart.

The talks were interspersed with ‘time outs’, necessary on a Tuesday evening after a long day at work, and a gentle introduction to the work of Solas to inform and enthuse those new to the ministry. As a refreshing conclusion to the evening, we enjoyed a Q and A session where people further probed how to use questions skilfully in very secular contexts, and included an advert for Andy’s newest book, hot off the press, ‘How to Talk about Jesus without looking like an Idiot’.

Excellent feedback has followed the evening, and a deepening desire from church members to pursue this partnership with Solas.  We aim to have another session with Gavin and Andy in November, before moving into home group studies, prepared by Solas, for Deeside small groups to study in the New Year. In the words of Humphrey Bogart in the movie Casablanca, ‘this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.’


Jeremy McQuoid is the Teaching Pastor at Deeside Christian Fellowship Church, and author of several books including “The Amazing Cross” with his wife Elizabeth.

Where Do We Find Our Identity?

Integrity. We admire it. We demand it in our leaders (and criticise them when they lack it). Organisations write it into their values. We aspire to it ourselves, wanting people to see us as having it. But why does integrity matter? Why all the fuss about it? What’s the basis for it? And do we need to think very carefully about some of life’s bigger questions if integrity is going to make any sort of sense?

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Short Answers is a viewer-supported video series: if you enjoy them, please help us continue to make them by donating to Solas. Visit our Donate page and choose “Digital Media Fund” under the Campaign/Appeal button.

Undercurrents: Echoes of Eden at The Chelsea Flower Show

Two years ago, I moved house and for the first time in my life, had a garden of my own to enjoy. Suddenly a previously unexplored world of horticulture opened to me and I was eager to learn everything I could. I read every gardening magazine and book I could get my hands on and quickly learnt to tell my pelargoniums from my penstemons. I got excited about the benefits of well rotten farmyard manure and even spent a happy day shovelling a tonne of it onto my flower beds from a nearby farm (a less happy day for our neighbours admittedly!). Finally (with a little embarrassment for fear that it was indicative of my approaching middle age), I joined the RHS and went, for the first time, to the Chelsea Flower Show.

It turns out that far from being alone, or pursuing a minority interest activity – I was amongst the 168,000 people who attended Chelsea in person, and the 3.14million who watched the coverage on the TV. Gardening is in fact something of a national sport in the UK today, a £3.1bn industry, that involves 27million people![1]

So, despite the heaving crowds and overpriced Pimm’s, I loved the Chelsea Flower Show. Some of the show gardens were simply spectacular and inspired me to get home and working on my own with a long list of new plants that I wanted to try to grow. There was however, one garden that stood out – mostly because, in my opinion, it wasn’t even a garden at all! ‘A rewilding Britain landscape’ seemed little more than a dilapidated shed surrounded by a weed infested stream! I was therefore rather surprised when I heard later that it had been awarded ‘Best Show Garden’ by the judges! Interestingly the general public didn’t appear to agree as the garden that won the ‘People’s Choice’ award was much more of… well… a garden!

This year we went back to Chelsea, and to my dismay, discovered that nearly every show ‘garden’ seemed to have been designed with an attempt to impress last year’s judges rather than the public – with dandelions and nettles and a host of other weeds littered throughout the show! One garden alone seemed to buck this trend by actually trying to be a nice garden with attractive and luscious planting. I was obviously not alone in this thought and I was not at all surprised when I heard it had won the ‘People’s Choice’ award.

All of this got me thinking. Despite the fact that we are regularly exhorted by gardening experts as to the benefits and virtues of ‘rewilding’, are we actually convinced that this is the best way to go? And if not, why not?

Don’t get me wrong. I love the wild and need little encouragement to enjoy the benefits of it. I’ll find any excuse I can to hike up a mountain, camp by the beach, wander through a forest or paddle board down a river. I love going out into the wild. But that doesn’t mean that I want my garden to be wild – for by definition as garden is surely something that isn’t wild? Plus, I could spend a lot of time, money and effort trying to recreate a small corner of the Scottish Highlands in our garden but it will never be as good as the real thing!

Where has all this come from? Perhaps it stems from an unspoken belief that nature would be better off without us. It’s easy to see why people might think this. Just look around the world and you can see the many ways that humans have polluted, exploited and scarred our beautiful world. We have done so much damage you might be forgiven for thinking that our influence only ever makes things worse. But is this true?

We are blessed to live in a beautiful area of the Leicestershire countryside. When people who live in the city come to visit, they sometimes comment about how nice it is to be out in ‘nature’. The impression can be that cities are what people create – the countryside is what nature creates. What they can easily forget is that the countryside itself is the product of human influence. Those beautiful hedge rows, so attractive both to us and to wildlife, don’t just come about by accident – they take a great deal of time and skill to produce.

Sure, humans can make the world worse. But they can also make it better. It seems that we, out of all of natural world, have a unique ability to both destroy and beautify our world. Why is this?

If, as humans, we are no different to the rest of nature (except that we are more evolved) it would seem strange to impose such moral expectations on ourselves. We don’t hold a lion accountable for eating its prey nor a beaver for damning a river nor an eagle for eating its own young, nor even a black widow spider for its weird practise of sexual cannibalism! So why get upset at the actions of some humans or expect us to do better?

Perhaps we would do well to look again at the Biblical story of creation if we wanted to better understand our relationship to nature. It is easy to dismiss the Bible’s creation story for being unscientific despite the fact that it’s primary aim is not to teach us about the scientific mechanism of creation. Its primary aim is to help us understand why we are here, not just how we got here.

According to the Bible, humans are differentiated from the rest of nature by virtue of the fact that we are created in God’s image. This doesn’t just give us unique value (it’s actually the basis behind the whole idea of human rights but that’s another story) it also gives us unique responsibility – especially in terms of how are to care for and steward the rest of creation.

Interestingly the Bible story also differentiates between a garden and the wild. God places the first humans in a garden for which they are to tend and care. While all of creation is originally deemed as good, there is something different to the garden than the wild outside. Interestingly it is also a place of both aesthetic and culinary delights – the trees are noted as being both pleasing to the eye and good for food.

Sadly, this ideal picture of creation doesn’t last long. Just three chapters into the Bible’s grand narrative things go pear shaped (or maybe we should say apple shaped?!). Significantly, the world goes wrong precisely because we as humans have gone wrong. Instead of caring for creation we have often selfishly exploited it for our own benefit.

Thankfully though this is not the end of the story. The Bible speaks of God who became part of this world himself to put things right. He would take upon himself the responsibility for and the consequences of the mess we have made making it possible for us to be forgiven and made new.

If the brokenness of humanity led to the brokenness of our world, so the restoration of humanity also breathes hope for our world. The Bible story not only begins but also ends with a garden. Perhaps our love for gardening not only stems from the fact that it is a part of what we were created for, but also because it gives us a sense of what we might also be longing for.

[1] https://www.gardenpatch.co.uk/gardening-statistics/, https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/garden/plants/g47/chelsea-flower-show-facts/, https://www.hortweek.com/rhs-chelsea-flower-show-bbc-tv-viewing-figures-peak-314m/retail/article/1435709

The Scottish Baptist Lay Preachers Association

The Scottish Baptist Lay Preachers’ Association is a network of members of Scottish Baptist churches, who have been called by God to preach His Word. The Association exists to provide mentoring, training, ongoing development and support for Lay Preachers and to link Churches in need of pulpit supply with available preachers. Every year they hold a conference to equip these lay preachers in an aspect of the task of proclaiming the word. This year’s conference was held in Wester Hailes and Andy Bannister from Solas joined them to speak about evangelism today. In the video he reports back from an encouraging day in Edinburgh.

PEP Talk with Andy Bannister

Gavin Matthews fills in as host this week, so Andy can swap chairs for an interview about his latest book, How to Talk About Jesus Without Looking Like An Idiot. From “crunchy Christians” to comedy footnotes to Master Question-Asker, Gavin finds out what to expect from Andy’s book-length version of his highly popular seminar.

With Andy Bannister PEP Talk

Our Guest

Andy Bannister is the Director of Solas and is a highly in-demand speaker, writer, and broadcaster. From universities to churches, cafes to pubs, schools to workplaces, Andy regularly addresses audiences of both Christians and those of all faiths and none on issues relating to faith, culture, politics and society. His previous books include Do Muslims and Christians Worship the Same God? and The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist. He also hosts two podcasts, PEP Talk and Pod of the Gaps and presents the Short Answers video series for Solas.

About PEP Talk

The Persuasive Evangelism Podcast aims to equip listeners to share their faith more effectively in a sceptical world. Each episode, Andy Bannister (Solas) and Kristi Mair (Oak Hill College) chat to a guest who has a great story, a useful resource, or some other expertise that helps equip you to talk persuasively, winsomely, and engagingly with your friends, colleagues and neighbours about Jesus.

Talking About Jesus Better – Andy on the FILTER Podcast

With Andy’s book How To Talk About Jesus Without Looking Like An Idiot, about to hit the bookshops, Aaron Shamp invited him onto the “Filter Podcast” to discuss how we can talk about Jesus better. It’s an engaging and lively conversation.

You can play the podcast episode video (above), or for audio only click here. Aaron’s mainpage for his programme’s where you can access all the rest of his content can be found here.

To find out more about Andy Bannister’s How To Talk About Jesus Without Looking Like An Idiot bookclick here. The page contains a sample chapter of the book, where to buy it, and details of a special offer for Solas supporters.

Pub Evangelism in Glasgow

Glasgow Grace is a comparatively new church plant which meets in the west of city and has a great vision to share Jesus with the people of their city. In this video Andy Bannister talks about a recent outreach event he spoke at for Glasgow Grace in a city centre pub.

We often find that neutral venues outside traditional church settings are really conducive to engaging the many people who are interested in questions of life, purpose, meaning and even God – but who wouldn’t go to a more ‘churchy’ event. If your church is interested in running an event like this, we’ve written a handy how-to guide here.

Why Does Integrity Matter?

Integrity. We admire it. We demand it in our leaders (and criticise them when they lack it). Organisations write it into their values. We aspire to it ourselves, wanting people to see us as having it. But why does integrity matter? Why all the fuss about it? What’s the basis for it? And do we need to think very carefully about some of life’s bigger questions if integrity is going to make any sort of sense?

Share

Please share this video widely with friends or family and for more Short Answers videos, visit solas-cpc.org/shortanswers/, subscribe to our YouTube channel or visit us on Twitter Instagram or Facebook.

Support

Short Answers is a viewer-supported video series: if you enjoy them, please help us continue to make them by donating to Solas. Visit our Donate page and choose “Digital Media Fund” under the Campaign/Appeal button.

God & The Value of Information

If asked whether God exists, many people will say that they do not know because there is not enough information. Give me more evidence and perhaps I will believe. One way to deal with this situation is to borrow an approach that is used in medical decision-making, known as Value of Information analysis.

Imagine you are the doctor looking after Mary, a 72-year-old lady with a cough. Her symptoms and your findings on clinical examination suggest a lung infection and the appearances on her chest x-ray support this diagnosis. But things are not entirely certain and other causes are still possible. Is there enough evidence to commit to treatment with antibiotics or should you do more tests to confirm lung infection? Doctors need to make decisions like this every day, but their choices are not based on a whim. They are made scientifically using a method known as evidence-based medicine. Much of my work as a clinical academic has involved discovering new ways to support these kinds of medical decisions. I have also found that the same principles can support faith.

By way of example, let us use Value of Information analysis to decide whether we should arrange more tests for Mary or commit to treatment based on current evidence. As we shall see, this situation is comparable to deciding whether to ask for more evidence of God’s existence or commit to God based on currently available arguments. If we had perfect information, we could give Mary antibiotics if she had a lung infection but not do so if there was no infection. In medicine, such an ideal situation happens rarely if ever. Nevertheless, we can estimate a theoretical value for having perfect information by looking at the difference between a decision made with perfect information and the best decision we can make based on currently available evidence. In Mary’s case, because antibiotics are so effective, it would be reasonable to prescribe this treatment based only on her symptoms, clinical findings, and chest x-ray. Notice that if Mary does have a lung infection, we would have made the right decision whether we had perfect information or not.

On the other hand, having perfect information would enable us to avoid giving antibiotics if Mary turns out to have something other than a lung infection. But is it worth doing extra tests to avoid unnecessary antibiotics? Probably not given the costs and additional radiation required to obtain the additional evidence. But notice that the value of perfect information is determined by what might happen if there were no infection.

The Value of Information for God’s Existence

Now let us apply the same approach to the question of God’s existence. If we decide to believe in God based on less-than-perfect evidence, we might gain the considerable benefits of correct belief, but then again, we could end up believing in God unnecessarily. On the other hand, with perfect information, we would know to believe in God if he does exist and to withhold belief if he does not exist. Because the benefits of correct belief are large, the value of perfect information for God’s existence is determined by what would happen if God does not exist. This is directly analogous to Mary’s situation where the value of perfect information is determined by what would happen if there were no infection. Perfect information would only have value if correct unbelief were more favourable than believing in God even if he does not exist. If it were the other way around, then then the expected value of perfected information will be zero or less. And if perfect information has no value, then any additional evidence for God would also be worthless.

Belief in God has inspired many things that have enriched civilisation, including works of art and music. The concept of universal human rights has its origins in Christianity. Even modern science emerged in a Christian context and many of its basic assumptions have their origins in Christian thinking. Benefits to the lives of individuals committed to God can be seen to follow from participation in public worship and other practices that aim to facilitate interactions with the reality of God. Regular attendance at public expressions of worship is associated with fewer physical and mental health problems, and a longer life span, not only in comparison to people who are socially isolated but also relative to those who are supported by secular social networks. Contemplative practices, such as focused prayer and meditation, reduce stress which, if chronic, increases susceptibility to a wide range of illnesses. An attitude of mind inspired by religious faith can also activate health-enhancing mind–body interactions.

But what about negative aspects of religious belief? Undoubtably, religion is vulnerable to being hijacked by people with violent intentions, but established scientific criteria fail to demonstrate that religious faith causes violence. Furthermore, belief in God does not in itself give license to others to hold unsubstantiated beliefs that may be harmful. Although religion can be associated with intolerance, particularly when approached as a means to an end or as a set of unquestionable beliefs that are handed down from above, belief in God does not have to be followed in those ways. This effect is not found when faith is seen as a quest for knowledge.

It is common for sceptics to base their unbelief on a lack of proof for God’s existence. When asking for more evidence, some may even think that they are being scientific. But how often do they use decision science to determine the value of the information they are asking for? If they did so, they would find that there are good reasons to think that even perfect information for God’s existence would be of no value. Therefore, before asking for more evidence of God’s existence, there is an onus on sceptics to demonstrate that correct unbelief is better than believing God even if he doesn’t exist, something they might find difficult or impossible.

About the author:
Ken Miles is a Clinical Academic and author of “From Billiard Balls to Bishops: A scientist’s introduction to Christian worship”. His website can be accessed here.

“Christianity: Irrelevant, Out of Date and Intolerant?” Outreach in Ellon

It was a joy for the Solas team to head up to Aberdeenshire to serve with Ellon Baptist Church again. Ellon Baptist had previously hosted a Confident Christianity conference, and invited us back for an outreach event. The aim of the evening was to give non-Christian folks in Ellon the opportnity to hear something about the gospel of Christ – and to help them think through some common objections to Christianity.

The evening began with a great welcome from the church community, the building was alive with conversation as tea and coffee flowed and plates were loaded up with an array of cakes and snacks. There was a good crowd present, and the church were encouraged to note that several people who do not have Christian faith had felt willing to join us for the evening.

Andy Bannister was given the topic, “Christianity: Irrelevant, Out of Date and Intolerant?” and half an hour to work through that most profound series of objections many people have to even considering the claims of Jesus, or reading the Bible for themselves. It is increasingly the case that people today are only willing to investigate the truth-claims of the Christian faith, if they are first persuaded that it is desirable. Parts of the media and secular commentary are relentless in asserting that the Christian faith falls at this hurdle. The problem with that assertion is that it rests on a whole series of assumptions which are highly questionable!

Andy delved into the concept of “Freedom”, and showed that there is little grounding for genuine human agency in atheism, with a raft of quotes from Atheist thinkers to prove the point. Freedom has two sides to it, Andy explained; Freedom From and Freedom To and these can be in tension with one another. Christian ethics, which can be misportrayed as restricting freedom actually deliver other kinds of freedoms – notably the freedom to live the kind of relationship with God for which we were designed. Andy used the illustration of marriage and parenthood. In chosing to get married, someone willingly restricts their autonomy and parenting is a massive commitment with costs in time, money and emotional ties. Yet – countless people say that the thing they are proudest of in life is what they invested in their children. What if these costs are not terrible restrictions on freedom, but a freedom to be involved in this a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human. Andy painted a compelling picture of the kind of freedom that Christ offers, and commended it to everyone. This led to a really good time of Q&A with a wide range real-world questions and examples. The Q&A got off to a slow-start, but as is so often the case, once the first question was raised the rest came in a deluge.

The pastor of Ellon Baptist Church, William Butchart was pleased with the way the evening went and wrote:

As a church we are very aware that our culture can be an intimidating one to speak about the gospel in. The ministry of Solas is so helpful in giving Christians ways of speaking about their faith. We were delighted to host Solas last year for a training evening which really benefited the church and were looking for how we could build on this with an evangelical evening that people could invite others along to.

We held this event on 14th May and it was very well attended with quite a few non Christians coming along. Andy did an amazing job highlighting how our culture promises something it cannot deliver and the questions that came following this showed a good number of people were pondering this message. Feedback has been that it has generated a lot of conversations and some seeking are watching all the material on the Solas website! Working with Solas has proven to be such a blessing to us and we hope to do so again in the future.  

We were also really inspired by the plans that Ellon Baptist Church have for their new building in the town and to see the plans. It’s exciting times for Ellon Baptist as they have moved forward with their bold plan to build an up to date facility in which to meet, worship and share the gospel.

If your church hasn’t tried a community outreach event for a while, but would like some help in putting one together, please do get in touch with Solas. It really is one of the things we love doing most – and are happy to travel all over the country to work with churches who want to reach their communities.

PEP Talk with Jason Lane

Today on PEP Talk we hear from a ministry leader helping to train, equip and release other missional leaders across Europe and Central Asia. Although his earliest experience was one of rejection and lack of support, today he has some amazing insight into what coming alongside gospel workers looks like. The lessons learned can help us no matter what our context for sharing Christ is today.

With Jason Lane PEP Talk

Our Guest

Jason Lane founded Innovista, aged 26, to equip leaders and teams to change their communities with the hope of Jesus. He holds an MDiv in Theology and Leadership from Bethel Seminary having graduated in Business Management. The practical, experiential and insightful training experiences developed by Jason and his team have been translated into ten languages and deployed in more than twenty countries. In his free time Jason enjoys windsurfing (badly) and good coffee. He lives with his wife Rachel, daughter and dog in Oxford, UK.

About PEP Talk

The Persuasive Evangelism Podcast aims to equip listeners to share their faith more effectively in a sceptical world. Each episode, Andy Bannister (Solas) and Kristi Mair (Oak Hill College) chat to a guest who has a great story, a useful resource, or some other expertise that helps equip you to talk persuasively, winsomely, and engagingly with your friends, colleagues and neighbours about Jesus.

Food for Thought in Chester

Andy Bannister from Solas, and Dave Stott from Upton Baptist Church recorded this short video from the Food for Thought event at the church, at which Andy was speaking. Dave explains the vision for evangelism the church has, and how they use these food-based events to welcome people in to hear the gospel. Andy spoke about some of the problems with atheism, and why he finds real hope in Christ, this led to many useful conversations with the many friends of the church who had come along to the event. The full story is in the video!

Can Atheists Be Good People?

Can atheists be good people? Do you need to believe in God to be good? Questions like that can cause huge arguments: but what if those are the wrong questions? Solas’s new speaker, Steve Osmond, digs into what we mean by ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and shows why if God doesn’t exist, these words are meaningless anyway.

Share

Please share this video widely with friends or family and for more Short Answers videos, visit solas-cpc.org/shortanswers/, subscribe to our YouTube channel or visit us on Twitter Instagram or Facebook.

Support

Short Answers is a viewer-supported video series: if you enjoy them, please help us continue to make them by donating to Solas. Visit our Donate page and choose “Digital Media Fund” under the Campaign/Appeal button.

Undercurrents: The Good Place

“When your time on earth is ended, we calculate the total value of your life…” 

These are the ominous words our protagonist, Eleanor, hears as she comes to terms with her untimely death in the hit Netflix show, The Good Place (2016 – 2020).  Death is not a usual conversation starter; in fact, it can often kill a joyful mood (pun intended).  For some, death is the end.  Beyond the material world there is nothing more and so when we breathe our last, that’s it.  But the popular series, The Good Place, took a comedic route to explore, not just our inevitable destination of death or what could lie beyond it, but how we determine how good our lives have been.

 The Good Place follows the story of Eleanor, who dies and goes, not to heaven, but to ‘the good place’.  As she becomes conscious in ‘the good place’ she learns why she has made it there instead of the ‘bad place’.  “During your time on earth, every one of your actions had either a positive or negative value, depending upon however much good or bad that action put into the universe. Every sandwich you ate; every time you bought a trashy magazine, every single thing you did had an effect that rippled out over time and ultimately created some amount of good or bad… When your time on earth is ended, we calculate the total value of your life… Only the people with the very highest scores, the true cream of the crop get to come here…”

These rules or criteria for access to the ‘the good place’ seem pretty straightforward.  Good deeds on earth = a good afterlife.  And yet we soon discover that Eleanor, our newly dead citizen of ‘the good place’ is actually not supposed to be there.  Why?  On earth she was a horrible, selfish person.  Suddenly the paradise and perfection of ‘the good place’ starts to fall apart, and all because Eleanor’s negative past has come back to haunt her and everyone else in ‘the good place’.

I’ll be good and not give any more of the plot away at this point.  Yet, on the surface, the value system of ‘the good place’ appears to be… well… good.  Good deeds on earth = a good afterlife.  However, several questions arise: Who decides how many points to assign for certain acts? Even in the imaginary world of The Good Place someone is deciding what’s good and what’s not.  What if person lives a wealthy life on earth so that they’re able to do seemingly more good than another person who is struggling with the cost of living crisis?  It’s one thing to assert that ‘good’ should be our eternal goal, but it’s an entirely separate issue when it comes to deciding what is ‘good’, what we mean by ‘good’ in the first place.

In a short but profound book called, Where is God in a Coronavirus World, John Lennox examines our notion of ‘good’.  He writes, “Justifiable outrage against natural or moral evil presupposes a standard of “good” that is objectively real and independent of us, so that we expect others to agree with us in condemning certain things. These standards are “transcendent”— that is, they exist above the level of individual opinions.” Lennox is showing us that we all share ideas about what is objectively good and what is objectively bad.  We’d all agree, for example, that abusing children is wrong.  This agreement that you and I have is outside of ourselves; we just know it’s wrong.  We’d be shocked if someone tried to argue in favour of such treatment of children. It’s “objectively real and independent of us”, as Lennox says.  It’s more than mere preference or opinion to know that we shouldn’t exploit children.

But how do we explain this intuition?   If we believe that there is nothing beyond death, then there is also nothing prior to life.  If we came to exist in this universe through unguided and purposeless evolutionary processes, then meaning, value and significance are things we must decide for ourselves.  We are free to make our morals up as we go along.  This freedom can often lead us to great goods, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but as our collective history shows, sometimes this can cause great harm, such as apartheid or the holocaust.  The freedom to choose what we deem to be moral or immoral stands on shaky ground if it is indeed subjective, a matter of choice.  As the apartheid and the holocaust demonstrate, we don’t always agree upon how we ought to treat one another.  The idea of human flourishing for some has all too often meant disadvantage and oppression for others.

The Christian worldview posits that our ability to know what good and evil is actually points to God; good resides in his very character and being.  As a personal, relational being, God is the transcendent standard by which we all measure morality.  Does this mean that people who aren’t religious are without morals?  Not at all.  We don’t have to be believe in God to know objective moral values, but it seems that God (transcending shared or unshared human opinions) would need to exist in order for these objective moral values to exist.

Unlike the points system of morality in The Good Place where you earn your way into eternal bliss through good deeds, within the Christian worldview good is not a place, good is a person – good is God.  In  John’s gospel in the Bible (17:3), we’re shown that life after death is not primarily about a place but rather relationship with God: “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”