What ought our world be like?

What ought our world be like? I would say everyone knows how the world really is, but I just finished Educated by Tara Westover, so maybe it is safer to say that most people know how the world actually is.

So how is the world actually? Life is a gift with too many blessings to even fathom, but let’s be realistic if just for a second. For most of us life has not exactly turned out the way we had planned it. Why is the man I fell in love now more in love with drinking than with me? Why when I confront him about this, does he throw things and smash dressers with his fists?

Why are things so backwards? Why did I have to bury my son, when the natural order is that my son is supposed to bury me? Why isn’t life anything that we think it ought to be?

David Hume a Scottish philosopher and skeptic claimed that there was no logical connection between the way the world is and the way that it ought to be. Now this is a man who was skeptical of his own existence since he could not empirically verify it. Yet is he right? Is there no connection between the way the world is and the way we think the world ought to be?

With all due respect to Mr. Hume the only way we know the way the world ought to be is by looking at the way the world is. We know that something is inherently wrong with our world. Why do we murder one another for senseless reasons, why do we get sick and have to take a couple of days off work at the most inopportune times?

To Mr. Hume’s eternal demise he did not consider the God who created us with a conscience, which includes a clear enough intuition about how the world ought to be. We know that we ought not to steal, or murder, or have an affair, known even by those who commit these evils.Yet how so?

God has created with the knowledge of right and wrong. The knowledge of the way things ought to be not the way that things are/is! The logical connection between the two is the conscience that the God Hume denied existed, created within us.

The is ought problem is solved by looking to the God who created us and the original design He had for His created order. Our hearts continue to call us back to what we know we ought to do. Our rebellion call us to do what we actually do.

So the real paradox is not between the logical connection between is and ought. The real problem lies in actually doing what we know what we ought to do.

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