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:

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.

Comments

  1. AnonymousMay 8, 2020 at 5:55 PM

    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.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sheldon RichmanMay 9, 2020 at 4:17 AM

      Thank 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.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Impossibility of Illogical Thought

Thought can never be of anything illogical, since, if it were, we should have to think illogically. It used to be said that God could create anything except what would be contrary to the laws of logic. The truth is that we could not say what an 'illogical' world would look like. It is as impossible to represent in language anything that 'contradicts logic' as it is in geometry to represent by its a coordinates a figure that contradicts the laws of space, or to give the coordinates of a point that does not exist.... In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic.... Self-evidence, which [Bertrand] Russell talked about so much, can be dispensable in logic, only because language itself prevents every logical mistake.--What makes logic a priori is the impossibility of illogical thought. --Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus   3.03, 3.031, 3.032, 5.473, 5.4731 (H/T: Roderick T. Long )      
Read more

Is He Having a Laugh?

According to the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, the government is God's appointed agent on earth, and each of us owes it allegiance and obedience. If that's so--and I for one don't believe either part of that statement--I'd like some believer to explain what God had in mind when he arranged things so that one of the two major-party clowns running for president will be elected in November. Is He having a laugh?
Read more

What Was the Point of the Bible?

It's more than plausible that the Five Books of Moses and the rest of the Hebrew Bible are about political domination and submission. (The other bibles may well be that too, but I haven't read them.) It's reasonable to think that the authors wrote them on behalf of, or to curry favor with, their rulers in an attempt to make the masses afraid to think for themselves and perhaps defy the ruling elite. (They may have had more than one motivation, of course.)  There were 12 tribes that a ruling class wished to hold together through anticipation of divine rewards and fear of divine punishment. The objective was to promote allegiance. (I can imagine an honorable but misguided motive for this -- group survival in a violent world.) The scriptures were a warning: do what we say your god commands or Yahweh will be so angry he will do some or all the horrible things that are threatened and in some cases perpetrated throughout these books. Follow his commands to a T (as conveyed by us)
Read more