If God didn't exist (although he does) wouldn't all actions, idealogies be permissible?

  • Thread starter Thread starter theCardinalbird
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
T

theCardinalbird

Guest
I believe that we need God for many things. One of the things is that he gives us a just moral code that explains what is right and wrong.

So if God didn’t exist wouldn’t all actions/idealogies be permissible? Wouldn’t the only thing that stands in the way of someone doing something is the government?
 
Last edited:
Love is the driving force.
God is pure love.
Without love, it doesn’t matter the ideology. It would be doomed to fail. Or at least be really intolerable on a human level. We’re made to love, be loved, and give love.
Simply existing? No bueno. God clearly knew that we couldn’t be left to our own devices. That, in itself, is an example of His great love.
 
Consider it this way. Atheists already presume that God does not exist and is unnecessary for existence and morality. There are many moral frameworks across the globe, from confucianist fillial peity to the western Nietzchean Will to Power etc etc and many more. Indeed, in this view religious moral codes are indeed also relative, if misguided in what they use as their chief value.

What stands in the way is what an individual, group or society values most. In some societies this is faith, in others it has been violence, in others freedom; it could be anything really provided it has the majority backing it to become a force to be reckoned with.

What stands in the way is group consensus, you can be as physically strong as you like but without that group consensus (See Focault in Crime and Punish and other works that discuss the development of a societies values) you’re unlikely to be percieved as good. A prime example is religion, because a wide varity of divinities including but not limited to the Abrahamic God have committed acts that when undertaken by any other (such as flooding the entire earth and murdering almost all life) would be seen as horrifically evil are seen as good, laudable even by their devotees; while non-believers tend to look aghast at this rather macabre story, though to them fictional is no less gruesome and suggestive of what else they might deem “good”.

Good is relative after all. It might be very good for the hungry crocodile to eat you alive, but I doubt you’d see it that way. You value your own life over the crocodiles, wheras the crocodile values his above your own as well.
 
Last edited:
It is in either case. God apparently does not stop “false” ideologies from being presented and or acted out. Experience tells us this. Yet ultimately if God exists he would be comparable to the powerful “government” which declares what is permissibly right and impermissibly wrong. There is no reason that what one has deemed God to have declared moral cannot also be declared moral by a man. You’ve simply moved the defining entity from one thing to another. The emphasis on God being the only entity capable of defining what is moral lies with the proposition that God is the apex judge capable of enforcing such definitions within natural and supernatural reality and also with Gods attribute of omniscience , i.e., though man may see the apparent immorality of an action, e.g., when Abraham was asked to sacrifice Isaac, God see’s beyond to the ultimate morality of his request. What God declares moral is moral and any so called moral code would be a matter of perspective. Contrast this with a Government of men capable of enforcing a moral code. In the absence of God this Government may establish a moral code in exactly the same legitimate fashion as God but with this caveat, their moral code would be contingent upon their understanding and ability to recognize what is right and what is wrong as agreed upon by their definition of morality, that is to say what has been ingrained into their nature. This may at first glance indicate that man is incapable of establishing a true moral code since we are not omniscient beings, however the definition of morality is understood from a mans point of view, impressed upon our nature by God or by nature, whichever is your view point, and as such cannot be applied universally to other entities. Mans code of morality as man is capable of understanding breaks down when applied to God. In either case with or without a God man is only subject to a moral code in so much as he is aware of one and or agrees to follow it. If you have a reason why natural processes could not produce some semblance of a moral code in man then you may have an argument but I for one am unaware of any. The question should then be, “Are natural processes capable of producing some kind of awareness of morality in man without the existence of God.”
 
Guess I don’t really understand the subject. To be honest it hasn’t been proven either way about God existing, that is the mystery of the meaning of life. So to answer, even if the whole world was atheist, there would still be love, rules and morals.
 
Would you agree then that a true universal moral code is a non existent mythological beast who’s description is entirely dependent on the viewpoint of the experiencer?
 
Because whether one believes in God or not has nothing to do with how they act as a person and their morals or emotions.
 
I see what your saying and agree, keeping this in mind, some would say that because God exists, whether or not one believes he does, is why any of us are even capable of love and morals or emotions. In other words they believe God sustains these things within us but with his non existence all bets are off.
 
I was referring to absolute truth and trying to show that God can only create such a thing and that man cannot.
The reason I say this is because humanity is known to be biased by having their own ideas of what are right and wrong (that is caused by his/her emotions, desires etc). The problem with this is because everyone has different views on certain subjects that conflict with each other. So what I figured is that although we have different opinions on certain topics the fact still remains that there is a true right and wrong and that some people are in error about the truth.
What society does however, especially with government, is that they go by the will of the people and whatever the will of the people is, they must adhere for it. For example, before a present day, abortion was illegal and then today it becomes legal. How does one thing that is considered evil become accepted and allowed? They don’t follow an absolute truth because what once was considered wrong is now good and (rarely) what is considered good is now wrong. Also the will of the people changed and so did their values.

What I am saying is that society does not understand an objective moral truth because of different idealogies. What God did however was give us the truth through Jesus Christ to live by. The Church is known to not change its mind on morality which it shouldn’t because God gave them and us what is truly right and wrong and compare this with secular society you find that God is far more reliable than society’s views.

This then leads us to the question, if God does not exist and his absolute truth than couldn’t in theory everything be permissible?
 
Last edited:
I wouldn’t use that terminology personally, but I would say a universal moral standard is non-existent yes. That presupposes a situation where in two locales one can find identical histories, cultures, individual perceptions of cultures etc which simply in practice cannot happen.

What I would add on to that however is that there are morals which are more likely to be shared by cultures. Take for instance state sanctioned execution of the disabled or mentally feeble. We know there are societies in history, modern and ancient, such as Sparta and Nazi Germany who found this to be a moral good. In these societies physical strength and military power were seen to be the chief value in many respects, so actions towards furthering this value (purging the state of individuals who did not contribute towards it) was a “good”.

The vast majority of tribes, cultures, states etc have not; particularly in the more recent centuries with the occasional exception have not seen this as a moral good, because such an action conflicts with whatever their chief value is; freedom, filial peity, arete/honor. There’s a wide variety of them with which that would conflict and again leading to a majority seeking to punish or purge the individual/group which disagrees with their moral code. Oddly enough, the Catholic Church on gay marriage is actually a fantastic example of this; it’s not enough for a Catholic to not contract a gay marriage themselves because they dislike it: they are compelled to prevent everyone else from obtaining one as well because they find it so awful. Muslims on pagan worship, the North Korean government on South Korean media; it works for so many contexts and cultures.

Theft, cannibalism, incest, rape etc. These things tend to be near-universally condemned, with exceptions like IS, because it is near impossible for a stable state to be formed when one is at risk of being eaten on the commute to work or it becomes impossible to breed reliably due to severe genetic malfunctions

TL;DR: There’s no such thing as a universal moral code, but there are specific taboos such as a prohibition of theft which are more likely to be shared and condemned by relativistic codes than others.
 
Without God or some higher power, I think a stronger case could be made for moral relativism, so I’m tempted to say “yes”. I figure that human worth would be reduced if we really were just the product of some cosmic coincidence.

That being said, I’m seeing things in terms of “the person who creates the game makes the rules”, which probably isn’t a completely logical position, and which wouldn’t apply if no one “made the game”.
 
Thom18 said:
Without God or some higher power, I think a stronger case could be made for moral relativism, so I’m tempted to say “yes”. I figure that human worth would be reduced if we really were just the product of some cosmic coincidence.

That being said, I’m seeing things in terms of “the person who creates the game makes the rules”, which probably isn’t a completely logical position, and which wouldn’t apply if no one “made the game”.
Click to expand...
Moral relativism is a fact with or without God. Morals, even Judeo-Christian morals, have shifted a great deal over time. Slavery and the lower status of women were all perfectly permissible, even recommended moral positions throughout much of the history of Judaism and Christianity, and yet now in most Western countries bot are viewed as not just wrong, but outright reprehensible. By the same token, prostitution in many Western countries was tolerated, and in a number of Western countries, in particular the English-speaking countries, prostitution is in most jurisdictions still effectively outlawed, if not outright censured.

Going outside the Judeo-Christian sphere, moral codes have varied widely throughout history and in different societies.

The only conclusion I can draw is that if there is a universal moral code, it is only poorly adopted, and if there is an omnipotent being behind it, He has taken darn little interest in its enforcement, to the point that even if it does exist, it might as well not. The fact is that morality is largely what any given society says it is. Humans seem to require some code of behavior, that’s our nature as a social species, what precisely that code is largely a construction of each human society.
 
niceatheist said:
Moral relativism is a fact with or without God. Morals, even Judeo-Christian morals, have shifted a great deal over time. Slavery and the lower status of women were all perfectly permissible, even recommended moral positions throughout much of the history of Judaism and Christianity, and yet now in most Western countries bot are viewed as not just wrong, but outright reprehensible.
Click to expand...
I don’t think that is entirely accurate about slavery being perfectly permissible.

Please read:

 
I think you misunderstand. By “moral relativism”, I mean the belief that every belief system is equally good. The fact that Christian morality had to develop to what it is today doesn’t mean that we’re moral relativists. We believe that our set of morals is superior to all others, and that they’re the most correct. Again, the fact that they have gone through development doesn’t make us relativists. It means that we responded to and adopted what we believe is objectively true.
 
Joe1 said:
40.png
niceatheist:
Moral relativism is a fact with or without God. Morals, even Judeo-Christian morals, have shifted a great deal over time. Slavery and the lower status of women were all perfectly permissible, even recommended moral positions throughout much of the history of Judaism and Christianity, and yet now in most Western countries bot are viewed as not just wrong, but outright reprehensible.
Click to expand...
I don’t think that is entirely accurate about slavery being perfectly permissible.

Please read:

Slavery and the Catholic Church
Click to expand...
I wouldn’t accuse the Church in particular, although there were permissible states of bondage that certainly resembled slavery (peasants in some part of Christendom were often indentured, and the Russian peasants had a particularly rough lot). But most certainly some Christian churches approved of the practice. Indeed, the entire reason for the founding of the Southern Baptist Convention was due to the split with Northern Baptists over the issue of slavery, and the SBC only fully recanted that in the last 10-15 years.

But slavery certainly existed in the Old Testament, and had laws surrounding the practice.
 
There are Atheists who believe in objective moral truths - secular humanists being an example.

Likewise, scientists have seen children being distressed with morally reprehensible things without being told that such things are wrong. This suggests we have an innate sense of right or wrong, at least at first.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top