What Justin Verlander And C.S. Lewis Tell Us About Morality

I know very little about sports. It’s not that I don’t know the basic rules of baseball or football, but I do not keep up with them. That’s a flaw I’ll own, but for whatever reason, as an adult, I lost the sports “gene” I had as a kid.

What I do know, as a Christian ethics professor, are questions of morality — the topic we associate with what is true, good, and beautiful. I’m particularly interested not only in what they are, but how we justify them.

So, count me a little surprised that over the weekend, my X feed intersected with sports and, rather quietly, morality. In a now-viral post, we saw Detroit Tigers pitcher Justin Verlander overcome with emotion during the final game of his storied career. About to pitch, his teammates meet him on the mound in one final bon voyage act of honor, and then we see a grown man whose athletic prowess is unquestionable be reduced to sobbing tears as he sees his young daughter sprint to the mound to greet her father. It’s a storybook ending to a storied career. It’s a moment of sheer beauty and goodness. It’s well worth the 90 seconds to watch. If you’re anything like me, you may get a little something in your eye.

Justin Verlander says goodbye to his teammates

And then holds his daughter’s hand as he leaves the mound 🥹 https://t.co/huyCnsijTR

— MLB (@MLB) September 26, 2026

Let’s consider what’s underneath the scene: Verlander and his daughter embrace in a moment that only makes sense if what we see between father and daughter is real and truly beautiful. Of course, everyone watching takes for granted that what they see before them is truly spectacular in its grandeur. But can secular society make sense of what it just saw?

This is where things get interesting. If you follow along with the moral assumptions we’re taught at virtually every avenue of secular society — moral assumptions where the universe we inhabit is the result of blind chance and the existence of the human species is purely contingent and accidental owing to evolutionary forces guided by no outside designer — then the video of Justin Verlander and his daughter is emptied of real moral content. Evolved carbon molecules don’t possess moral value in this paradigm since we are just “star stuff,” to quote Carl Sagan. In this accounting, the scene that brings us to tears is all a façade. The scene just collapses into a rush of pleasant emotions. But emotions themselves are just intensely felt sensations of either happiness or, conversely, pain and dread. Emotions have no moral content; they are just a barometer of pleasantness or pain.

The scene with Justin Verlander and his daughter presses us to get clear on the moral terms of what we just saw. C.S. Lewis makes this ancient moral debate eerily clear in “That Hideous Strength.” In the novel, he describes a dystopian society in which scientists and technocrats try to remake the world and alter the givenness of human nature. Enter a quote from one of Lewis’s characters that, when read, forces us to ask whether the morality we’re conditioned to accept within a secular frame can adequately account for the events and circumstances of our life that overwhelm us with their beauty. “Social relations are chemical relations,” one scientist mutters. Five words demonstrate an entire worldview. What does Lewis mean by this phrase? If people are nothing more than bundles of chemical reactions owing to evolutionary programming, then what we call morality — or what we call “true,” “good,” and “beautiful” — is nothing more than preference. Love is nothing more than pheromones; justice is little more than one group claiming their definition of “justice” over another group’s. To put it bluntly, in Lewis’s novella, the mystery of being human just collapses into the mechanics of biology.

Another scene could help unpack this heady idea. Imagine a young mom gazing into her newborn child’s eyes. It’s late at night, and she’s singing softly to calm the newborn. The mother is filled with the rush of beauty, glory, and contentment because the child she’s holding is her own, a child she is tasked with caring for and loving. In that moment, something magical is occurring — a mother partaking in the unique glories of motherhood. But that’s only true if we can say, with certainty, that what we’re seeing is not just a collection of pleasurable dopamine hits, but something objectively true, good, and beautiful. The secular and scientific narrative is that the scene between Verlander and his daughter, and the young mother and her child, are merely explainable as a survival strategy — that behaviorism has determined the parent-child relationship is more conducive to survival. In this accounting, meaning dissolves into mechanism.

I raise both scenes because they demonstrate that questions of ethics and morality are not just topics relegated to abstract debates among philosophers. They center around the everyday, tactile events that concern our knowledge and pursuit of what is genuinely good — what is worthy of love, loyalty, and sacrifice.

And let me be very clear: Without a transcendent foundation to justify calling these scenes “good,” as in that they were designed by a Creator and fitted to the conditions that cause us to prosper as human beings, we are left with mere gestures and speculation.

But if we return to “That Hideous Strength,” we see how Lewis’s phrase captures the reductionism of modern materialism when applied to ethics. In such a worldview, no objective good exists. Nothing is truly right or wrong — there are only evolved instincts, psychological impulses, and social agreements.

But here’s the problem: we do not live well inside that story. Even those who espouse doctrinaire materialism live in ways that defy their own beliefs. Perhaps they cannot explain such scenes that evoke such beauty and contentment, but nonetheless, they live off the borrowed moral capital of objectivity that they turn around and deny elsewhere. But when societies live as if morality is an illusion, they unravel. Just look at our society today and its epidemic of social ills.

We can call the scene of Justin Verlander and his daughter “good” only if a source and standard for that goodness can ground it beyond mere description.

Moral goodness, from a Christian perspective, is that which conforms to and participates in the character, will, and purposes of the triune God, as revealed in creation and Scripture, and is ordered toward God’s glory and the true flourishing of creatures in right relation to Him and one another. In a Christian narrative, what humans experience when we live as we ought is “good” because it aligns with the design that our Creator has stamped upon us. This is way more significant than we can quickly move on from. That a Creator etches goodness into His creation lets us name the experiences of our lives as truly good or bad. Christianity’s explanatory power to anchor our lives and give name to our joys is not trivial.

As one former atheist and now Christian put it on X last year, his atheism could let him dismiss belief in God, but it could not explain the measure of love that he felt was objectively true and good; that was truly binding rather than just biologically determined. Materialism could describe his feelings and sensations, but it could not ground his account of love or justify his obligations.

This is why Lewis’s warning matters so much. If we abandon the transcendent ground of morality, we don’t merely lose a theory — we lose the ability to make sense of ourselves. This is true everywhere. Even on a pitcher’s mound.

***

Andrew T. Walker, Ph.D., is Dean of the School of Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology. He is a Fellow with The Ethics and Public Policy Center and the Managing Editor of WORLD Opinions. You can follow him on X: @AndrewTWalker.