Philip Hallie is a philosopher who did primary research on the cruelties of the Nazi Holocaust. It included the so-called medical experiments Nazi doctors did on defenseless children. Hallie’s ominous research shredded his soul as these atrocities assaulted every sense of decency. “I had learned that you cannot go down into hell with impunity.”
Hallie’s intellectual descent into darkness took its toll, as he often responded to his students with explosive rage or cold silence. After an episode frightening his family, he went for a walk while thinking of taking his own life. He ended up at his office where he found a book. Its pages chronicled events in Le Chambon, a Protestant village nestled in the mountains of southeastern France.
He read about a pastor who refused to turn in Jews to the Nazis, while villagers risked their lives to courageously hide Jews. “When I got to the bottom of the third page of the article my cheeks started itching, and when I reached up to scratch them I found that they were covered with tears. And not just a few tears—my cheeks were awash with them.”
In that moment Hallie began his ascension from darkness. He continued to read about how a village of 3500 people saved almost 6000 Jews, mostly children whose parents were killed by Nazis. Under the leadership of French pastors they sheltered children in their own homes until they could be taken through treacherous mountain passes into Geneva, Switzerland.
This story illustrates the existence of an objective moral reality, which is the first step in offering a moral argument for the existence of God. In other words, there is something inside the human heart that believes in right and wrong, and the paramount question an atheist must ask is: How did it get there?
In future posts we’ll continue exploring the moral argument for God’s existence, considering the plausibility of evolution giving rise to morality, and eventually demonstrating how a personal and moral God best explains the existence of objective morality.
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