God & Morality
A favorite goal-attempt by theists against atheists is to argue that without God we could have no morality. That, in fact, is an own goal.
How so? Right off the bat (to mix metaphors), even if the point were true, it wouldn't prove God's existence. The most it would do is show that if we want a moral society, we'd better persuade a whole lot of the people to that believe God exists. When atheists see things that way, it's call a "noble lie." But that's not what the theist intends, I presume.
More fundamentally, the claim is just wrong. God is not needed for morality. I'll make just one point here. What is God's supposed relationship to morality, good and bad, right and wrong? Does God make it up as he goes along, or does God discover morality? Bertrand Russell had a go at this question in 1927 in "Why I Am Not a Christian." Russell wrote:
In other words, either the content of morality is a matter of divine whim, which means it's changeable anytime -- mass murder could become a virtue tomorrow with the twitch of the divine nose-- or God's rules merely reflect an objective morality. For obvious reasons, neither alternative should be attractive to the theist. If morality is just whatever God fancies, it loses a whole lot of significance. And if God can figure out the content of an objective morality, why can't we human beings? Any argument to show that we couldn't discover morality on our own would be ahistorical and end up in a hopeless morass of question-begging, "stolen concepts," and contradiction.
Bottom line: we can have -- and do have! -- sound notions of good and bad, right and wrong without God.
I'll go a step further. We can do so only without God.
How so? Right off the bat (to mix metaphors), even if the point were true, it wouldn't prove God's existence. The most it would do is show that if we want a moral society, we'd better persuade a whole lot of the people to that believe God exists. When atheists see things that way, it's call a "noble lie." But that's not what the theist intends, I presume.
More fundamentally, the claim is just wrong. God is not needed for morality. I'll make just one point here. What is God's supposed relationship to morality, good and bad, right and wrong? Does God make it up as he goes along, or does God discover morality? Bertrand Russell had a go at this question in 1927 in "Why I Am Not a Christian." Russell wrote:
If you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, you are then in this situation: is that difference due to God’s fiat or is it not? If it is due to God’s fiat, then for God Himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God’s fiat, because God’s fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that He made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God.
In other words, either the content of morality is a matter of divine whim, which means it's changeable anytime -- mass murder could become a virtue tomorrow with the twitch of the divine nose-- or God's rules merely reflect an objective morality. For obvious reasons, neither alternative should be attractive to the theist. If morality is just whatever God fancies, it loses a whole lot of significance. And if God can figure out the content of an objective morality, why can't we human beings? Any argument to show that we couldn't discover morality on our own would be ahistorical and end up in a hopeless morass of question-begging, "stolen concepts," and contradiction.
Bottom line: we can have -- and do have! -- sound notions of good and bad, right and wrong without God.
I'll go a step further. We can do so only without God.
I'm not convinced that we have it in us to know what objective morality is, or that it matters if we know. How could we demonstrate that a thing is right or wrong? I believe that the best thing we can do in order to maintain a peaceful society is to try and find common ground about what we believe is right or wrong and structure our laws based on this common ground. On things like murder, rape, theft and fraud there is almost universal agreement that these things are inherently wrong and should not be tolerated, so there is no need to be able to demonstrate to anyone that these things are wrong. But other things are not clear, and invocations to God's law does not make them any clearer.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment and question. We are not so far apart. My approach to ethics is like that of the ancient Greeks, particularly Aristotle, and the 17th-century philosopher Spinoza. In that approach, which is called virtue ethics or eudaimonism, ethics is an inquiry into this question: what ways of living will best promote the flourishing of rational social beings? The answer produces a range of appropriate ways in which such beings can achieve excellence and what could be called happiness or contentment. One size does not fit all, though some things -- such as injustice -- are ruled out.
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