Ravi Zacharias' argument for 
biblical moral-law giver

Ravi Zacharias, the Christian apologist, is a glib speaker who mesmerizes his Christian audience by parlaying a collection of well-practiced arguments.  The most frequently used argument is the one that asserts that morality is meaningless without the foundation of the biblical god and his directives to mankind.  

Argument stands on two claims: (1) morality is absolute, and (2) absolute morality is sourced from the biblical god, the moral-law giver.  This is the stronger form of  the argument for morality which not only requires there to be a transcendental God who represents all that is good but also requires God to be the moral-law giver.  

Ravi Zacharias central assertion is that these very biblical commandments as ontologically essential to the very concept of human morality.  For morality to be more than a convention, God has to exist and provide an existential basis for morality.  However, God is not merely gifting mankind the mental faculties to reason about morality.  Ravi requires additionally that absolute morality is given to mankind as laws by the Biblical god.  In saying this, Ravi Zacharias is staying faithful to the Bible.

The Old Testament is very clear: (1) Sin is violation of Biblical god's command.  (2) Where there is no biblical god's command, there can be no sin.  Thus, morality is indeed provided by the Biblical god in the form of divine command's or laws.

Ravi's central argument is that one cannot speak of good and evil, values of morality,  without the Biblical God.

Ravi's argument can be summed up as follows:

• Whenever people speak of evil, they are also implicitly positing the concept of good.
• To express moral judgments about good and evil, you must posit that good and evil exist
• If good and evil exist, you must posit a moral law by which we can distinguish between good and evil
• If a moral law exists, a moral law giver must exist
• If a moral law giver does not exist, moral laws do not exist.
• If moral laws do not exist, we cannot distinguish between good and bad.
• If we cannot distinguish between good and bad, then there is no problem of evil.
• Then the entire argument of using the problem of evil against God self-destructs.

Did you spot the fallacies? 

• Ravi is conflating existence of the concepts of good and evil with the existence of good and evil. We can all agree that concepts of good and evil exist, but that isn't the same thing as saying that good and evil actually exist in any form or capacity beyond their human constructs.  
• Besides presupposing existence of good and evil, Ravi further assumes the need for a cause for their existence - a moral-law giver.  This assumption too is unwarranted.  It is a fallacy because it is presupposing the conclusion.  
• Ravi's argument that good and bad become relativistic without a God is just absolutist speak.  Saying that good is defined by the God who represents all that is good hardly clarifies what is good.  Defining one unknown in terms of another unknown which is much more complex is no clarification at all.  This is the well known God of the gaps fallacy.  In addition, by associating all goodness, and nothing but goodness, to the biblical God,  Ravi in fact quietly conflating the abstract transcendental notion of God, who is all good and nothing but good, with the biblical God who regularly interacted with humans, showed human emotions, and showed proclivity to pick one side and punish the other.  Biblical God's tyrannical acts and pronouncements countenanced in the bible are opposed to our modern, conventional sense of what is good and moral.  Moral commandments  of a jealous God, who sides with a chosen party in the desert and smites hard another party not on the same side, is arbitrary and unjust.  Founding fathers in America saw no usefulness for the moral law-giving biblical God and instead sought a naturalistic approach to foundational principles of equality and justice where the natural order is the God's will.

Thus, Ravi's argument does not offer any support to the existence of good and evil, the existence of absolute morality, the need for an absolute moral-law giving God, and finally why the biblical god should be the same as the God of goodness.

So where, then, do we derive the concept of good and evil – or, more pragmatically, right and wrong? We derive them not from the metaphysical absolutes given by God's decree, but from universal principles that are grounded in the philosophy of fairness and justice, while ensuring complete absence of arbitrariness in meting out moral judgments of fairness and justice.  Immanuel Kant did exactly this.  Moral commandments  of a jealous God, who sides with a chosen party in the desert and smites hard another party not on the same side, is arbitrary and unjust.  Founding fathers in America saw no usefulness for the moral law-giving biblical God and instead sought a naturalistic approach to foundational principles of equality and justice where the natural order is the God's will.

Notwithstanding dire pronouncements of biblical moral-law giver, we can say this because we have faculties of reason independent of the bible.  Smarter apologists are fully aware of this predicament and spend enoromous efforts to align biblical interpretations with reason.  William Lane Craig, a famous and much better kniwn apologist than Ravi Zacharias, recognizes the difficulty of appealing to absolute morality.  Instead, he only speaks for objective morality and limits his argument to use of an abstract concept of God as the source and basis of morality.  That is, however, a big limitation as there is no seemless bridge to go from the abstract concept of God to the interference-prone, moral-law giving God.