Are There Absolutes?
Renewing Your Mind
Ligonier Ministries
4.8 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 17 February 2026
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Everyone knows there is such a thing as right and wrong. Why, then, do so many people say that morality is entirely relative? Today, R.C. Sproul shows how skepticism, in its attempt to escape accountability, brings only emptiness.
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Meet Today's Teacher:
R.C. Sproul (1939–2017) was founder of Ligonier Ministries, first minister of preaching and teaching at Saint Andrew's Chapel, first president of Reformation Bible College, and executive editor of Tabletalk magazine.
Meet the Host:
Nathan W. Bingham is vice president of media for Ligonier Ministries, executive producer and host of Renewing Your Mind, and host of the Ask Ligonier podcast.
Renewing Your Mind is a donor-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Explore all of our podcasts: https://www.ligonier.org/podcasts
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Why do people so vehemently deny the existence of God? |
| 0:04.1 | The primary reason, in my opinion, why man does not desire to affirm the existence of God |
| 0:11.2 | is because he understands that if he affirms the existence of God, |
| 0:15.5 | he is then immediately thrust into a situation of moral responsibility. |
| 0:27.1 | Moral responsibility. |
| 0:29.2 | That's what they're afraid of. |
| 0:36.0 | Christians believe in absolutes, moral absolutes, ethical absolutes, and an ultimate being, |
| 0:40.3 | the one who is the standard of moral perfection. Welcome to Renewing Your Mind on this Tuesday. I'm Nathan W. Bingham. |
| 0:45.3 | This week, R.C. Sprole is helping us to think rightly about many of the objections that come to Christians and come against the Christian faith. It's a series recorded with a group of students at the Ligonier Valley Study Center, |
| 1:00.0 | and a series that hasn't been featured on renewing your mind for almost two decades. |
| 1:05.0 | It's a great joy to be able to go back into the archives to feature some of these classic messages from the early days of what |
| 1:12.7 | has now become a global discipleship ministry. The refrain from the world today is, well, |
| 1:20.1 | that's your truth. There's a widespread denial of absolutes. So, are there absolutes? Here's Dr. Sprole. What I want to look at briefly is the very common |
| 1:34.3 | objection to Christianity. It's not so much an objection to the Christian faith as it is a defense |
| 1:40.6 | mechanism used by other people to offset the claims of the Christian faith, |
| 1:46.4 | and that is the statement that you've all heard many, many times, there are no absolutes. |
| 1:53.2 | The reason why that particular statement has been problematic vis-a-vis the Christian faith |
| 1:58.5 | is because the Christian faith is a faith that |
| 2:01.9 | professes confidence in absolutes, absolutes with respect to being, absolutes with respect to value, |
| 2:09.5 | absolutes with respect to meaning, and certainly absolutes with respect to ethics and to commandments. |
| 2:17.4 | And there, I think, is the real rub. There's the real clash |
| 2:20.4 | between the believer and the unbeliever. Dostoevsky's famous statement, if there is no God, |
... |
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