From: Solistics
Date: Saturday, 18 October, 2003 (7:13 am)

A point that interests me is this idea of “God and Morals”. If there’s no God, no afterlife, no real meaning, then what’s all this nonsense about “good” and “evil”? Aren’t such terms meaningless divorced from the concept of the Almighty?

This is one I struggled with for quite a while, and indeed still struggle with at times. How can atheists be moral?

The usual rebuttal points out that Christians aren’t that moral themselves, for the most part. I like Richard’s point that “‘good’ merely means what God says is good, irrespective of the inherent nature of the act. If God says ‘Kill your son’, that is ‘good’. Or if he says ‘Destroy your neighbor’ that is ‘good’.”

Good points, but unfortunately, these replies don’t help us along much. For the first, it’s very possible that Christians are just imperfect beings and don’t live up to their own standards. (Most Christians will be the first to admit this.) The latter is also a good method of attack, but again can easily be explained away in any number of ways. “God knows what’s best, so if he says, ‘Destroy your neighbor,’ it must be for the good of all.” or “If God ever commands something that’s not actually good, then it’s the devil faking it—it wasn’t really God after all.” (This tends to be a problem if you actually believe in the Old Testament; those people tend to be proponents of the first argument.)

But better than the “tu quoque” argument, for me, was the discovery that atheists could just make up a moral system and stick with it. Even better, a moral code like “be nice to other people” or “do to others what you’d want them to do to you” could easily be shown to beneficial for the whole world, if the whole world would simply agree to do it.

Unfortunately, for me, this still has one fatal flaw, pointed out by Richard Feynman and C. S. Lewis alike. The latter points out that we might have natural, evolutionary urges to be nice to other people, to live an a “moral” way, to serve posterity, etc. — but ...

“the Naturalists have cured us of mistaking these feelings for insights into what we once called ‘real value’. Now that I know that my impulse to serve posterity is just the same kind of thing as my fondness for cheese—now that its transcendental pretensions have been exposed for a sham—do you think I shall pay much attention to it? When it happens to be strong (and it has grown considerably weaker since you explained to me its real nature) I suppose I shall obey it. When it is weak, I shall put my money into cheese.”

Or, like Feynman says,

“The source of inspiration today—for strength and for comfort—in any religion is very closely knit with the metaphysical aspect; that is, the inspiration comes from working for God, for obeying his will, feeling one with God. Emotional ties to the moral code—based in this manner—begin to be severely weakened when doubt, even a small amount of doubt, is expressed as to the existence of God; so when the belief in God becomes uncertain, this particular method of obtaining inspiration fails.”

In other words, we might be able to come up with some moral code that we feel is pretty good, but what inspiration do we have to follow it? When our impulses are strong in telling us to do good, we’ll probably obey them. When our impulses to do other things are strong, we’ll probably obey them instead.

*shrug* I really don’t know how to get around this problem. But, really, my faith in God’s existence has been shattered—so what other choice to I have? Pretending to believe won’t give me any more impetus to “Choose the Right”. So I go along doing the best I can with what I’ve got—and I feel I’m still a pretty moral person.

From: Richard Packham
Date: Sunday, 19 October, 2003 (4:19 pm)

In the law, crimes are divided into two categories: malum in se, and malum prohibitum. These are merely Latin terms for “inherently bad” and “bad only because they are prohibited by law.” Examples of the first category are murder, theft, assault, etc. Examples of the second category might be: driving without a valid license, charging usurious interest, smoking in a no-smoking area, etc.

When we talk about “morality” I assume we are talking about acts which are of the first kind. However, even that is a troublesome area, since different societies had differing ideas about what is inherently bad. Things which even the most “moral” people in America accept as permissible are thought to be inherently evil in other “civilized” societies. We have no problem with women being seen in public with their faces uncovered. We don’t feel that it is inherently evil to eat pork.

Even if one believes in God one is not helped along very much (in my opinion), because you have to then rely on knowing what God thinks is right and wrong. There are only three possibilities for knowing that:

  1. personal revelation (God or the Holy Spirit tells you directly whether what you are going to do is right or wrong);
  2. God’s written Word (the Bible or whatever other scripture you accept);
  3. statements by God’s spokespersons (prophets, ministers, priests).

Each of these has problems and dangers:

Personal Revelation

There are so many examples of how people commit really evil acts under the mistaken idea that God has told them to do it, that this would seem to be the most unreliable method of determining God’s instructions. The 9/11 hijackers, the Lafferty brothers, the recurring news stories about how parents starve their children or refuse them medical treatment or even drown them, because they are convinced that God has told them to do it. Believers often reject that argument by suggesting that “God would not tell someone to do something so morally wrong!” But that begs the question, and, in effect, makes personal revelation unusable as a morality test, since it requires you to test the instructions you are receiving from God against some other standard. It requires you, in effect, to doubt God, to deny the validity of the revelation that God is personally giving to you. No believer in God would dare to do that—the example of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac is the model.

Written Word of God

The problem as I see it with using scripture (I will use the Bible as the example) is three-fold:

  1. it is not complete;
  2. it is self-contradictory; and
  3. its moral code frequently violates even Bible-believers’ sense of morality

The Bible is not complete as a moral code; there are many areas of life—especially modern life—which are not specifically covered by the Bible. Even proponents of this standard for morality tell us that the scriptures can only teach us “correct principles,” and that it is up to us (using the promptings of the Holy Spirit) to know how to act in any specific situation. However, that ends up being not much different from the “Personal Revelation” standard. It also has the problem that the “correct principles” are the very same basic ethical principles that have developed in every society since the beginning of history, such as the “Golden Rule.” With the one exception, “great commandment” to “love God.” To “love God,” however, ultimately means to obey God, which takes us back to the same problems we start out with.

The Bible is self-contradictory:

And so on....

The moral rules given in the Bible are not even followed by many devout Christians today, and (in my opinion) rightly so. But they are there:

and many others. Many additional commandments are given in the Old Testament, but Christians explain that we can ignore them, since Jesus did away with the Mosaic Law. But they are still there in the Bible, and part of the “Word of God.”

Statements of God’s Servants

So we come to the third source for God-given morality: the statements of God’s servants (prophets, teachers, preachers, ministers, popes). This is the natural result from using the Bible as the sole standard, since the Bible must be interpreted or it will be misunderstood (according to most Christians). The person who will interpret it correctly, of course, is usually the person who tells you that you are interpreting it incorrectly.

There are also problems with this, since it is obvious that there are huge disagreements among the many people who claim to know what God says is right and wrong. Not only disagreements about Bible interpretation, but also disagreements about the areas not covered by the Bible. All are relying on God, but they disagree. If we follow one, all the others say we are wrong. If we rely on the “Holy Spirit” to tell us which one is really speaking for God, then we are back to Personal Revelation.

The conclusion which seems obvious to me is that we cannot rely on any kind of “God-given” morality. In practice we always decide for ourselves what it right and wrong.

What, then, can we use as the source of our notions of right and wrong? It appears to many (including me) that human beings have always been able to develop sets of rules about what is right and wrong, based on the mere necessity of living in social groups. For the group to survive, its members must survive and thrive individually. What harms your “neighbor” also harms the group. Whatever disturbs social cooperation or destroys mutual dependence, diminishes the group’s chances for survival. Almost all societies that have survived and thrived for any length of time have developed standards with many basic principles similar to our own. Of course we modern Westerners condemn some things that other societies deem “moral” or “permissible,” but they are no more despicable than many of the “moral” positions of the Bible.

Proponents of God-based morality often argue that if we all decide for ourselves what is right, we will allow ourselves to do all kinds of despicable things. Here are my responses to that argument:

  1. Even people whose morality is God-based do despicable things, either in defiance of what they think God has commanded, or because they believe that the despicable things they do have been commanded or condoned by God.
  2. It doesn’t seem to work that way: the world is full of good, kind people who have worked out their own moral codes rationally, and who harm no one.

One last comment: a believer in God-given morality who says “God is ‘good’” is making a tautological statement. One must ask, “‘Good’ by what standard?” If God is by definition good, and whatever he commands is good in God’s eyes (even though it may appear repugnant and evil to non-believers), then the term ‘good’ loses all meaning.

“Morality” for the believer in God-given morality becomes then simply a matter of obedience, even blind obedience. One does not ask why something is good or evil. It is so simply because God says so (of course, it is usually God’s spokesman who says it). Obedience is the key. You obey. You follow orders. (Notice that this was the defence used by some of the Nazi war criminals.) Abraham was blessed for being willing to kill his son. Saul was cursed because he failed to obey the letter of God’s command, and spared the life of Agag and saved the sheep for sacrifice (1 Samuel 15).

Richard in Oregon

From: Solistics
Date: Tuesday, 21 October, 2003 (9:36 pm)

Richard,

Thanks for that reply! It really opened my eyes to a lot of things. In fact, it cleared up that whole subject for me. I know see what you meant in your essay “Morality and Religion”, and your other replies. I had always thought this line of attack was simply another “tu quoque” argument, saying that “Christians don’t have good morals a lot of the time, either!”

In this response of yours from Sunday, however, I realized that morality is fuzzy for everyone. Christians don’t get their morals from God, or from “the prophets,” or from the “Bible.” For any particular Christian, their morals often contradict all three, in one point or another. Their morals have always been there—they’re innate—and they just interpret God’s word, the prophets’ words, and the Bible, according to whatever their own morals happen to be, the way they truly feel inside.

At least, that’s how it always was for me. I always knew what was right and wrong—I didn’t need to have anybody tell me. So, as an atheist, I still know what is right and wrong. Except, now, I can really look inside myself to unearth those values—I don’t have to manipulate religious texts to somehow fit my own value system any more.

I hope this is all making sense; it didn’t make sense to me for many long years.