The Atheistic Logic of LGBT Sexuality

The belief that God exists and that He has spoken in the Scriptures cannot be reconciled with arguments that promote the moral goodness (or moral neutrality) of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender views of sexuality. To believe both is a logical fallacy because God clearly sets forth His good design for human sexuality in the Bible, and it is a very narrow vision.

The force of this logic seems to elude many in the current debate as they seek to hold the veracity of Christianity alongside the “right” of sexual/gender self-identification. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and member of The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, who is one of the clearest thinkers in the evangelical world, exposed the logical fallacy of this position well in a recent appearance on campus at the University of Louisville. Mohler discussed his 2008 book Atheism Remix: A Christian Confronts the New Atheism (Crossway) at The Campus Church which meets at the U of L. During a question and answer session, Mohler gave a clear-headed analysis of the logic that should drive our thinking on issues of gender and sexuality. Here is his answer in its entirety to a question on the relation of atheism to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender sexuality:

“I think the question is morally and intellectually significant. If there is no God, if the Bible is not His revealed Word to us and if it’s just a human artifact, then it would frankly be immoral to try to advise persons on the basis of the Bible now. We don’t go back to anything else that is that old and say, ‘This is how you should live your life.’ I’m thankful we don’t have doctors who use Galen’s medical books from ancient Greece. I don’t want my house designed by somebody that doesn’t understand anything about modern engineering. But when it comes to morality, we as Christians keep going back to the Bible. When it comes to basic worldview issues, plausibility structures, truth, we keep going back to the Bible saying, ‘God is here speaking to us.’ If that isn’t true, we are immoral people. We are about an immoral experiment, because we are telling people, ‘You need to organize your life this way, we know the truth about you, we know the truth about what God intended for us and our sexuality, we know what God thinks of marriage. It is for God’s glory and your good, your thriving, your happiness, that you are organizing your life this way.’

“If the Bible is not the Word of God, then we are just the agents of prejudice, and agents of a system that, frankly, is making claims that would be immoral to make, that would be overreaching, that would be spectacular. If God is not speaking to us in the Bible, then we’d better shut up. And when you have a contentious issue, a very controversial issue like sexuality and sexual orientation, that’s where it comes down to the fact that, if there is a God, not merely a deity, but the God of the Bible is indeed the God who is, then the issue of sexuality is very limited in terms of any elasticity. To put it bluntly, in the Bible, we find a very tightly defined understanding of human sexuality. It’s not only heterosexual; it’s monogamous marital heterosexuality. The Bible is very restrictive monosexuality, in terms of the norm, is that human beings are to be related to each other sexually in one and only one way and everything that falls short of that, everything that is other than that, whether heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, you name it, is wrong. And you have an entire structure of law in the Old Testament that is incredibly specific about exactly what this is…It is very clear. And we believe as Christians that it is essentially for our good. Then in the New Testament, you have the law of Christ that is deeply rooted in the very same understanding of sexuality—restricted to heterosexual marriage.

“This is where this plays into atheism: if indeed there is not God, then there are no rules. If evolution is the only mechanism and if a naturalistic worldview applies, then you can’t bring any ‘ought’ into this other than the naturalistic ‘ought’ of natural selection. You could say this is a behavior that does not lead to optimal reproduction, but you could come back and say that reproduction is not the only issue, we seem to be reproducing just fine and that’s not all that important and the rules are off. I would say that is true when it comes to sexuality, but that is true when it comes to any area of morality; if there is no God, then there is no judge at the end and there is no lawgiver at the beginning, so everything moral is by definition constantly socially negotiable. There is the great divergence. If there is no God, not everything is permitted—no sane society or group permits everything—but it is a process of constant, necessary social negotiation. If there is a God and He does exist and He has spoken in the Word, we’ve got very little room for negotiation. It’s a very tight understanding of human sexuality to God’s own glory, by His own creative purpose and, as He has the authority to tell us, for our good, our thriving, our happiness as well.”

You can watch the video of Mohler's message here .