Morality without God?

[Leela]

That the world is only a complex machine, of some sort, which it is best to know as much about as possible, so that I (the atheist) can be most prepared to deal with it’s machinations

Hi Cats,

Can you contrast that statement with the theist’s view of the world?

Best,
Leela

 

[CatsAndDogs]

Quote:
Originally Posted by CatsAndDogs View Post
I really wish that atheism was called what it is as well.

A religion? How would that help your cause?

It would simply be calling a truth a truth, which is what “proclaiming the gospel” (which means proclaiming the good news) is.

It is a religion, and should be called what it is.

Quote:
Originally Posted by CatsAndDogs View Post
It is scientistic materialism. The reverence of the power of human reason over the material universe to do perfectly as it wills.

It seems to me that it is you who posits a material universe? I don’t make any such metaphysical claim, and as I said before, if I were inclined to make such claims I find it more defensible to think of reality as “value” than as “material stuff” since it is more empirical and doesn’t fall apart at the quantum level.

I DO posit a material (portion of the) universe. It is a part of the WHOLE universe. The whole universe is the material part, which is the machine that is our environment, and the personal part, which is the “other” part composed entirely of persons in “person space” (whatever that means!). That “person space” occurs in both the material portion of the universe as well as the “non-material” portion is SOME hint as to the meaning of it, I suppose.

Scientistic materialists want their cake and to eat it too.

Reality is (to use your word) “value”, but value in relation to what?

You want reality to be “only what I experience” (value), but then discount anyone else’s experience as “subjective”, and insist that they (non-you) base their communication of their existence only on matter and energy transfers.

So, you claim that the universe is entirely material/energetic but utterly unknowable as being material/energetic.

The dogma of the nonexistence of dogma is the prime self-contradiction of atheism. There is no base on which to base anything if there are no things needing bases.

:shamrock2:

 

[Fran65]

Islamic fundamentalism is really scary to me as I’m sure it is to you, but I am further discomforted by the fact that the ones demostrating the most moral clarity on the issue are Christian Fundamentalists like Bush. I don’t think the answer is to fight one mythic vision with another. I think we need to rid ourselves of dogmatic beliefs rather than mount another crusade?

Thank you for your apology.

However, please do not include me in your view of Islam. I’d rather not be associated with this type of discourse.

I experience many of your statements as unnecessarily emotive and provocative.

 

[CatsAndDogs]

Quote:
Originally Posted by CatsAndDogs View Post
The great deception imposed on the atheist, by the demonic, is that it’s not a belief system but a “freeing from” all belief systems that “don’t matter”.

Who decides which belief systems “don’t matter”, and why do they decide as they will?

Aren’t there beliefs systems that you don’t subscribe to? I don’t think I understand what you are getting at?

I agree that atheists do have belief systems. I just don’t think there is a single belief system that characterizes all atheists or that an atheist must necessarily subscribe to some dogma, though some of them certainly do.

Part of the common atheistic belief system is that only non-atheistic belief systems are belief systems.

The thought is that “being an atheist is not a belief system, aka a religion, but a freeing from belief”.

That is false, and is “reasonable” only because religion is seen not as what it is, but as what makes all belief systems (religions) sub-“super-human” (ie merely human) such that only being an atheist makes one truly super-human. That is the “engineered” re-tooling of “religion” (the word) to mean something other than what it is so as to debase religion of it’s strength.

Only those who “worship words”, yet another variety of the puritan manichaean (gnostic), are swayed by this wacky argument, of course, but there are many good folks who look up to these largely successful puritans and are lead down the garden path by idolizing these “successful” folks and following the piper’s tune over the hill and into the pit.

That is a plea to vanity and pride, which works extremely well with hyper-intellectuals, and wannabe hyper-intellectuals, as you might imagine.

:shamrock2:

 

[CatsAndDogs]

Quote:
Originally Posted by CatsAndDogs View Post
God is the source of correct morality, whether one chooses to believe in God (qua God) or not. But it is quite easy to label “want” as “morality” if obeying natural law is overridden by not realizing the actual source of true/correct morality.

I often read references to “natural law” from Catholics. Can you explain what that means. i tend to think of natural law as the law f the jungle, but I don’t think that is what you mean.

Natural Law (New Advent)

Natural Law (Catechism)

Natural law is a super-set of “the physical law of nature”.

:shamrock2:

 

[CatsAndDogs]

Quote:
Originally Posted by CatsAndDogs View Post
A belief in the nonexistence of God (qua God) doesn’t preclude being morally upright (“good” and therefore “saved”, or “savable” at any rate) due to the availability of natural law to which to listen and obey, but to be motivated to override “(attractive) immoral wants” (false morality) due to natural law is EXTREMELY difficult to do.

Maybe this is more of a protestant view but I thought salvation was about believing the right things rather than doing the right things?

“Faith without works is dead.”

Salvation doesn’t happen til it happens. We’re not saved til we’re saved, and we have opportunity to not chose to be saved until the last.

Believing in God (as a more or less defined thing) doesn’t save you. REALLY believing in God qua God (as He actually is) makes it more likely that you might be saved, but that determination is up to God Himself, and can’t be presumed to be known either to one’s advantage or elsewise.

Being closer to believing in God qua God is a motivation to acting rightly, and essentially shows that you are somewhat close to believing in God qua God.

:shamrock2:

 

[Leela]

Hi Cats,

Part of the common atheistic belief system is that only non-atheistic belief systems are belief systems.

The thought is that “being an atheist is not a belief system, aka a religion, but a freeing from belief”.

That all sounds dead wrong to me. Who claims that they do not have a belief system? In fact, it is this acknowledgment that we have worldviews that act as lenses through which to view the world is exactly the postmodernism that is so feared by Catholics and thought to lead to atheism.

Best,
Leela

 

[Jean_Anthony]

The thread is going off topic. Please, to be fair to those who wish to continue discussing the OP’s topic, take side discussions to new or existing threads in the appropriate fora. Thank you all.

 

[Leela]

Hi cats,

I DO posit a material (portion of the) universe. It is a part of the WHOLE universe. The whole universe is the material part, which is the machine that is our environment, and the personal part, which is the “other” part composed entirely of persons in “person space” (whatever that means!). That “person space” occurs in both the material portion of the universe as well as the “non-material” portion is SOME hint as to the meaning of it, I suppose.

As I expected, it is you who is a materialist at heart. But since values don’t reside in objects, and since values residing in subjects would make them “just subjective” you need to posit a “non-material” location for morality. The choice for you seems to be “materialism plus God” or “scientistic materialism.” These are not the only possible philosophical positions.

Since I am not a materialist and don’t see subjects and objects as primary reality, I have no problem with the reality of morality, because for me, values are primary. I have no need to posit anything supernatural, and I’m not stuck with the nihilistic reductionism and yeastless factuality of scientistic materialism.

Scientistic materialists want their cake and to eat it too.

Reality is (to use your word) “value”, but value in relation to what?

Value is primary. It is a non-personal monism. It is not defined in relation to anything. I’m talking about Robert M Pirsig’s Quality if you are familiar with it? It is the source out of which experience arises, The ground of being. The undifferentiated aesthetic continuum. Tao. Primary reality. It is what is left when the distinction between knower and known is dissolved. It is the selfless consciousness you may experience through prayer or meditation.

You want reality to be “only what I experience” (value), but then discount anyone else’s experience as “subjective”, and insist that they (non-you) base their communication of their existence only on matter and energy transfers.

Since I’m not a materialist like you, I don’t put a lot of stock into subjective/objective knowledge distinctions. Like you I think there is a world that exists independently of my thinking about it? But as an empiricist I recognize that this is an inference that I make from experience and that primary experience is value.

I don’t discount anyone else’s experiences as “just subjective” any more than I would think of my own in that way.

So, you claim that the universe is entirely material/energetic but utterly unknowable as being material/energetic.

You must have me confused with someone else? I can’t wrap my mind around what matter and energy are supposed to be, but value is something anyone can understand.

The dogma of the nonexistence of dogma is the prime self-contradiction of atheism. There is no base on which to base anything if there are no things needing bases.

I believe in the existence of dogma. How else could we understand what 19 educated middle class men perpetrated on 9/11?

I think the basis we need to discuss morality and make progress in uncovering moral truths is to agree that morality is concerned with human flourishing.

Best,
Leela

 

[Il_Cattivo]

sure but they’ll be hypocrits. most atheists are just science geeks doing it for attention… they still got remnants of Christian morals and haven’t logically followed through with their godless endeavor.

when I was an atheist, I just said hey, if God’s not real, I’m gonna do whatever the heck I want. that means throwing on a jimmy and having sex with any hot girl I could get, getting stoned, getting drunk, starting trouble wherever I could… eventually though, any thinking atheist will become criminally insane e.g. the Joker

 

[MindOverMatter]

You misunderstood. What I said is that atheism does not provide a basis for anything. It is not a philosophy. It is simply the lack of believe in God or gods?

You choose not to believe in God or Gods

I think that reason is all the basis for morality that we need.

How does one get from reason to the argument that an act is universally immoral? Let me rephrase this question. How does reason prove that one “ought” to behave in a particular way?

If you are talking about biological behavior

No I am not.

It is very different to say that one only seeks to survive and say that morality is based on reason.

Morality isn’t based on reason, it is based on revelation and instinct and a belief that those things reflect an objective truth about reality. Reason is then applied according to that foundation.

No, but such a belief is not necessary for morality nor does such a belief ensure moral behavior.

If you do not believe that the “Perfect Good” exists in objective reality and is the cause of all being, then there is no standard upon which you can judge one act from another. Morality then has no logical choice but to be reduced to a subjective expression of your mind (a mind that is caused by chemical reactions in the brain) which has no true application to real events. There’s is no right or wrong. In order for something to be wrong, it has to be oppose something that’s “real”; otherwise you are simply deceiving yourself if you think that somebody ought not to cause harm to others. At the most, you are merely expressing how you would like things to be; not what they are. You might like to think that you life has objective value and that humans ought to respect it, but in the real world, such a concept is meaningless; it is not true.

nor does such a belief ensure moral behavior…

I never claimed that it did ensure moral justice. I believe that presupposing the existence of a transcendent objective perfection provides a basis on which one can make a logical claim about somebody’s behavior; in other words, if perfection exists, then I can make the claim that some behavior is not compatible and is therefore imperfect. How do we know what is perfect? Well…that’s the whole point of revelation; we cannot know just by reason alone what is perfect or good, we have some instinctual and experiential understanding of those concepts; but that isn’t enough. However, this is beside the point. The fact is you made a claim, arguing that one can know right and wrong through reason. I am merely challenging that claim. Whether people care enough to act out their moral obligations, is irrelevant so far as clarifying the truth of things.

I do believe in good.Leela

No you do not. What you believe in, is something you made up according to how you feel (the chemical reactions in your brain), or rather you have been influenced by society and you are simply expressing that influence. You are not expressing truths, such as 1+1=2, but rather you are expressing myth without any realization of it. You are comfortable with rejecting the concept of God and Gods reality because you do not see its necessary link with moral truths; but you are not comfortable with rejecting moral truths because that would reduce you to a mere vulnerable object with no value whatsoever, except for the myths that other objects bestow upon you.

Sorry to be blunt, but the reality is that there are something’s that you don’t like, and there some things that you do like; that is all. An honest Atheist, or existentialist, has no choice but to be a “Nihilist”. “All things are permissible”

Some things are better than others.Leela

You have no logical basis for making this claim. You are arguing from experiential data.
How do you know that something’s are objectively better then others? Are you not merely expressing a subjective opinion about things? Explain to me why reason obligates me to agree with you?

I don’t have to believe in God to recognize that simple fact. Best,
Leela

I agree. You don’t have to believe in God to recognize good, but it is irrational to claim that something is immoral if you do not at least believe that the root of all reality is an objective transcendent perfection by which are actions are judged. The fact that you sense right and wrong ought to suggest to you that a perfect transcendent good exists

 

[bobcat]

Thank you moderator. I cannot even make sense of half of what some are saying.,

 

[Fran65]

MindOverMatter,

Thank you for your concise and clear post. You have made my own (sometimes less articulate) thinking clear to me!

Fran

 

[Greg27]

This question can be approached in a number of ways. First, one can posit or assume that God exists, and then try to see if the deity has given us any guidance about morality and laws to live by. The monotheistic religions have generally answered ‘yes’ to both questions; God left us explicit moral norms and laws to live by, either in the form of revealed scriptural commandments or by a divinely ordained set of natural laws (or both).

One can also adopt the so called divine commandment theory; something is good in a moral sense because God has commanded it. However, there is not necessarily any constraint on the divine will in terms of what God decrees; whatever God decrees is good or evil by divine fiat, not by our own standards.

Another view is that people who have a religion are motivated to behave in morally good ways by belief in a deity. This argument does not necessarily rest on the actual existence of a divine being in reality; it could be made by without personally believing in God.

A further possible argument is that God is not necessary to live a moral life, and on top of that, another argument is that belief in religion or a God is actually deterimental to morality and the good life. Such arguments have been made recently by atheists such as Richard Dawkins.

 

[Leela]

Hi Mindovermatter,

You choose not to believe in God or Gods

I don’t have the ability to CHOOSE to believe things that I’m not convinced of. Do you? Perhaps you could demonstrate your power of mind over matter by believing that there is a large diamond buried somewhere in your backyard? (I just wouldn’t want to live in a world where there wasn’t a large diamond buried in MY backyard.) The fact is that there is a big difference between wanting to believe something and actually believing something. To believe something you have to actually believe that it is true.

Before I address your comments about morality, it’s important for me to point out that whether or not belief in God is essential for moral behavior has nothing to do with whether or not God actually exists.

People on this site who bemoan the bad effects of not believing in God never seem to realize that such effects fail to demonstrate the truth of any religious doctrine. This is why we have terms such as “wishful thinking” and “self-deception.” There is a profound distinction between a consoling delusion and the truth.

In any case, the good effects of religion can be disputed. In my opinion, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available. Ask yourself, which is more moral, helping the poor out of concern for their suffering, or doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do it, will reward you for doing it, or will punish you for not doing it?

How does one get from reason to the argument that an act is universally immoral? Let me rephrase this question. How does reason prove that one “ought” to behave in a particular way?

I don’t think that even the Catholic church holds that any particular acts are immoral in and of themselves, do they? The act of killing, for example, is not considered universally immoral. There are justifiable circumstances. Context is always important to questions about morality.

As for reason proving anything, are you suggesting that you have proof of something? I’ve never claimed to have proof, I’ve just said that there are good reasons for doing good and not doing evil.

If I do to others what I say should not be done to me, who would take me seriously? What is more rational than the Golden Rule?

If morality is concerned with human flourishing, then there are true and false things that can be said about how to achieve it.

To be continued,
Leela

 

[Leela]

Hi MIndOverMatter,

If you do not believe that the “Perfect Good” exists in objective reality and is the cause of all being, then there is no standard upon which you can judge one act from another.

You don’t need to believe that good exists as an essence to believe that perfect good exists as a concept or a possibility for human behavior.
MindOverMatter;4346562:

Morality then has no logical choice but to be reduced to a subjective expression of your mind (a mind that is caused by chemical reactions in the brain) which has no true application to real events. There’s is no right or wrong. In order for something to be wrong, it has to be oppose something that’s “real”; otherwise you are simply deceiving yourself if you think that somebody ought not to cause harm to others.

If morality is concerned with human suffering and human flourishing then there is no question that morality corresponds to real events and that there are verifiable objective truths that can be claimed about it. Love is more conduscive to happiness than hate. Cruelty is wrong. It’s good to teach your children to respect adults. These are all valid faslifiable claims that we can make about morality that either promote human flourshing or they don’t.

I believe that presupposing the existence of a transcendent objective perfection provides a basis on which one can make a logical claim about somebody’s behavior; in other words, if perfection exists, then I can make the claim that some behavior is not compatible and is therefore imperfect.

What evidence could you ever hope to provide to others to convince them of your claims? It seems to me that you’ve postulated a basis with no pragmatic value.

Sorry to be blunt, but the reality is that there are something’s that you don’t like, and there some things that you do like; that is all.

That is not true. There are somethings that really do make good societies that promote human flourshing and others that make bad societies. There are objective truths to be discovered about morality.

You have no logical basis for making this claim. You are arguing from experiential data.
How do you know that something’s are objectively better then others? Are you not merely expressing a subjective opinion about things? Explain to me why reason obligates me to agree with you?

That somethings are better than others? You can verify that fact for yourself at any time. Try sitting on a hot stove and notice the low quality of your situation for yourself.

[Edited]

Best,
Leela

 

[davidv]

{snip}
I don’t think that even the Catholic church holds that any particular acts are immoral in and of themselves, do they? The act of killing, for example, is not considered universally immoral. There are justifiable circumstances. Context is always important to questions about morality.
{snip}Leela

You are thinking wrongly. A number of acts have been declared intrinsicly immoral by the Church, fornication and masturbation are two, that immediately come to mind.

 

[bobcat]

Leela. Most of your ideas are not founded in logic or God or the church.

 

[Contarini]

Hi All,

In the now closed science versus faith thread, we began talking about morality. A common belief among religious people is that atheism provides no basis for morality. That’s true, because atheism is not a philosophy, it is merely the lack of belief in God–the state that every human being is born into? It doesn’t claim to be the basis for anything. But that does not mean that without a belief in God there is no basis for morality.

I think that people who don’t believe in God actually have the same basis for morality as those who do. Even those who believe in God suppose that God had good REASONS for making some things good and others bad? Christians point to the Bible as their moral basis, but if a person doesn’t already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won’t discover it by reading the Bible which is bursting with celebrations of cruelty. We read these celebrations of cruelty and judge them to be immoral, and we read the Golden rule and judge it to be good. We decide what is good in our good books (or in the unique case of Catholics, you decide to abide by what the Church teaches about the Bible) by recourse to moral intuitions that are developed and that have been refined by thousands of years of thinking about the causes of human suffering and the possibilities of human happiness.

We have made considerable progress in ethics over the years (just as we have in every other field of human inquiry), and we didn’t make any of this progress by reading the Bible more closely. For example, the Bible condones the practice of slavery, yet every civilized human being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination. We didn’t learn that slavery is immoral from the Bible.

I think I’ve said ebough here to get discussion started? I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Best,
Leela

I would suggest that you are making two confusions:

1. You are confusing the question of “morality without God” with the question of “morality without specific sources of alleged divine revelation.” I don’t see how you can have a stable basis for morality without some account of the universe that goes beyond a purely naturalistic, scientific one. The “God” who is the source of morality may not be a creator God or in any way analogous to a person. But there must be some transcendent source of morality (by “transcendent” I mean not simply an emergent property of biological organisms who think), if morality is not to be defined in purely utilitarian terms. That is not the same thing as the question of the relationship of the Bible or any other particular revelation to morality.
2. With regard to this second question, you are identifying “the Bible” with a literalistic proof-texting of the Bible. But the Bible functions culturally in all sorts of ways. Many of us see the Bible primarily as a grand narrative of God’s dealings with human beings–a narrative one of whose principal moments is the liberation of slaves. Of course slave-owning and slavery-defending Christians had all sorts of hermeneutical ways of neutralizing this narrative. But the narrative is at least somewhat difficult to reconcile with the practice of slavery. It creates a pressure toward liberation. It is no accident that abolition movements arose in Western societies influenced by Christianity, and that most of them were in some way Christian (some of them quite conservative and orthodox, others less so).

So in summary, I would argue the following:

1. Without positing some sort of transcendent principle of Good, you cannot provide a coherent account of the basis of morality without undermining morality.
2. As a matter of fact no one just believes in a transcendent principle of Good. There is always some kind of narrative about how that principle relates to human beings and human history. While the Christian narrative, as it has been believed and practiced throughout history, certainly has had some morally questionable consequences (an apocalyptic view of the world that leads to ruthlessness toward heretics and unbelievers, for instance), it has also been a powerful force for justice, mercy, and liberation. As a Christian, even though I am ashamed of much that Christians have done (and for that matter much that I personally have done), I see no convincing challenger to the Biblical story as a way of making sense of our nature as moral beings. So I don’t think you have to be a Christian to be moral. But I would argue that Christianity makes more sense morally than the alternatives–it combines an account of why we have moral intuitions with an account of why we exist at all, and with an account of what sort of beings we are intended to become.

Edwin

 

[Leela]

So in summary, I would argue the following:

1. Without positing some sort of transcendent principle of Good, you cannot provide a coherent account of the basis of morality without undermining morality.

Hi Contarini,

I tried to address this point in my post to MindOverMatter but was censored. I’ll try again: I don’t need to posit some transcendent principle of Good for moral realism any more than I need to posit a transcendent essence of Heat to believe in the existence of heat.

Best,
Leela