lves. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them…”
It is important to recognize that the link between Creator and conscience is not merely one of Catholic theologians and Scripture scholars, but practitioners in other fields as well such as anthropology (the study of the nature of man), sociology (the study of the nature of society), and epistemology (the study of the nature of knowledge).
Many practitioners in these fields have regarded this link between Creator and conscience inescapable. In a nutshell, they ask: If there is no God, where in the world—both literally and metaphorically—does conscience come from?
For instance, some anthropologists and sociologists ask: Why do all cultures in history consider things like theft and lying wrong? The variables of times, place, and cultural influences may vary, but the constant is that the moral judgment of these behaviors is not exclusively reliant on religious explanations.
They often conclude that conscience is a clear cut case of nature—not nurture.
Some epistemologists, those who study the science of knowledge, ask: Where does morality come from? How can we know that good is good, and evil, evil? And how does man, even when he is separated by external religious influences and external moral codes, tell the difference between the two? Of course, the answer is not external, but internal—intrinsic—to man.
Relatedly, why does man feel guilt? In The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis put it this way:
“All the human beings that history has heard of acknowledge some kind of morality…And it has one characteristic too remarkable to be ignored. The moralities accepted among men may differ— though not, at bottom, so widely as is often claimed— but they all agree in prescribing a behaviour which their adherents fail to practise. All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt.”
Why Are Consciences Different?
So the presence of conscience is a powerful argument for the existence of God.
But wait a minute! you might be thinking: If all consciences have the same origin, why do not all consciences agree on everything? Even given free will, in which man can choose to violate his conscience, how can one conscience differ from another?
To begin to answer this question, it is helpful to recognize that some men do not always follow their conscience. People are not automatons, after all; they might be guided by conscience but they are not, in the final analysis, ruled by it, especially if they do not want to be ruled by it.
Conscience may be a “law of the mind,” but people can break the law. Confession lines in Catholic Churches consist of people who are cognizant of the fact that they turned against their consciences.
They knew that they shouldn’t have indulged in a third ice-cream sundae, or gossiped, or had impure thoughts. But to their credit, these penitents admit that they violated their conscience. They recognize that their conscience put up a “stop sign,” and they drove right through it anyway.
Sadly, from Auschwitz to Zagreb, history abounds with those who claimed they never saw the stop sign. But did they really not see it? And it is in the answer to that question where things can get a bit scary.
Some decades ago, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, sought to address these difficult questions of conscience. He writes, “It is never wrong to follow the convictions one has arrived at—in fact, one must do so.” Cardinal Ratzinger is simply expressing the consistent teaching that is reflected down through the ages and is currently in the Catechism: man must follow his conscience.
Man must follow his conscience. End of sentence. End of paragraph. Right?
Not exactly. That’s not the end of the story—or perhaps a better way to phrase it would be, that’s not the beginning of the story, nor is it the whole story.
Cardinal Ratzinger explains that, while men have a duty 