Board index ‹ Morality

[Auto Teacher]

I don't need God to be moral; I can be moral just fine without him. Religion actually interferes with moral practice.

[jimwalton]

You don't need religion to have morals, but without religion there is no objective basis for your moral system. If your morals are based on "the good of society," even Hitler and Stalin felt they were serving the good of society in their murderous genocides, as were the butchers in Rwanda and their genocidal mayhem. There is a fluid definition of "the good of society". Therefore without an objective basis, "good" has no particular meaning. If you put your iPod on shuffle, the iPod can't create a "good" list or pick a "good" song. "Good" has no meaning in a system defined by randomness. "Good" only has meaning if there is an objective standard by which it can be defined.

Others might claim that "Morals is what I perceive to be good." And that can work, but maybe not. What you perceive to be good is obviously and necessarily self-oriented, and people are too easily self-deceived. A more reliable definition comes from objective grounds. Perception as a standard is self-defeating. Ultimately being moral is often at odds with self-interest, because it usually involves some action in the interest of others or a greater good, possibly to the detriment of oneself. If there is no God no heaven, and no hell, there is simply no persuasive reason to be moral.

If you admit that there is such a thing as evil (that evil exists), then you must assume that good exists in order to know the difference. "Good" and "bad" can only make sense if we can perceive them as antithetical, and they can only then be defined if there is some standard by which they can be evaluated. There has to be an objective standard by which they can be measured, or they are relative, and therefore meaningless. But if there is an objective standard, it must lie outside of ourselves, and there must have been something (or someone) that was the source of that objective standard.

This is not to claim there is no rationality without God, and no goodness. Of course there is, but there is no way to define goodness without God. Objective moral values exist only if God exists. No one thinks it's OK to mutilate babies for the fun of it. No one ever did, anywhere, anytime. We know that objective moral values do exist, and therefore God must exist.

Thinking atheists corroborate. J.L. Mackie said, "We might well argue...that objective intrinsically prescriptive features, supervenient upon natural ones, constitute so odd a cluster of qualities and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events, without an all-powerful God to create them."

Joel Marks says, "The long and the short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality. I call the premise of this argument 'hard atheism.' ... A 'soft atheist' would hold that one could be an atheist and still believe in morality. And indeed, the whole crop of 'New Atheists' are softies of this kind. So was I, until I experienced my shocking epiphany that the religious fundamentalists are correct: without God, there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality."

Richard Dawkins says that his belief that rape is wrong is just as arbitrary as the fact that we've evolved five fingers rather than six.

William Provine, biology professor from Cornell University: "Modern science directly implies that there are no inherent moral or ethical laws, no absolute guiding principles for human society … We must conclude that when we die, we die, and that is the end of us … finally, free will as it is traditionally conceived—the freedom to make un-coerced and unpredictable choices among alternative courses of action—simply does not exist … There is no way that the evolutionary process as currently conceived can produce a being that is truly free to make moral choices."

That's not to say people who don't believe in God believe in rape and genocide. That's ridiculous. It's just to say that they have no real GROUNDS for believing what they believe except, "That's what I think is right." Nor is it to claim that atheists can't live a moral life; they can. But the only reason to believe that something is right or wrong is (1) if there is a standard, as I said, and (2) if there's a reason to believe that there is such a thing. As I've asserted, if we are simply matter + time + chance, evolved by random processes, and survival is our modus operandi, then "truth" (and therefore "right" and "good") are not intrinsically part of the equation AND CAN'T BE. Nor can "purpose" or "reason." All we are is chemicals.

But couldn't consciousness and "good" have evolved? No, because there's no rational source for it. If we evolved truly by chance (like "shuffle" on your iPod), then "shuffle" is the only source in the system. You can't say to your iPod, "Oh, GOOD choice." It wasn't a choice, and therefore it wasn't good. It's random. So with ALL of life without objective morality.