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March 08, 2005

Picking up the discussion - Morality & God

Michele picks up today a a discussion on morality and God that she began yesterday. It is yet another great piece of writing by Michele and I wish to answer it at length. I do agree that a personal belief in God is not necessary to live a moral life. I also believe that a personal belief in God is not a guarantee that one won't live an immoral life.

Michele takes as her jumping off point in the discussion a column by Roy Moore. I'd like to add into the mix some columns by Dennis Prager who is writing at length about the value of Judeo-Christian values.

Now, Roy Moore claims there is "no morality" without God. Patently offensive and unsupportable as very moral people like Michele clearly demonstrate. Dennis Prager offers a different argument

Though most college-educated Westerners never hear the case for the need for God-based morality because of the secular outlook that pervades modern education and the media, the case is both clear and compelling: If there is no transcendent source of morality (morality is the word I use for the standard of good and evil), "good" and "evil" are subjective opinions, not objective realities. ...

Years ago, I debated this issue at Oxford with Jonathan Glover, currently the professor of ethics at King's College, University of London, and one of the leading atheist moralists of our time.
Because he is a man of rare intellectual honesty, he acknowledged that without God, morality is subjective. He is one of the few secularists who do.

Understand, Prager doesn't argue that without God morality is impossible, he just says it's subjective.

In my arguments with leftists who decry what they see as "legislating morality" I state -- it is NOT a matter of legislating morality or not..all legislation is a statement of morality. The true question is WHOSE morality is going to be legislated.

More later. Discuss at will.

Posted by Darleen at March 8, 2005 06:51 AM

Comments

I think that talking about absolutes isn't helpful in this instance. Is faith required? No. Is faith irrelevant? No. The truth lies in between.

I think there are two motivations that drive people to forego rational self-interest and do the morally correct thing (in those cases where the two don't coincide). Those two motivations are the desire to do what's right and the fear of doing what's wrong.

I think most of us have a learned desire to do what's right. Not all of us, but most of us. We learn it from our parents, who give and withhold praise to teach us to pee in the toilet, to sit up straight in church, to chew with our mouths closed and not to do drugs.

But some of us also have a learned fear of doing what's wrong. Sometimes that fear is social: the fear of humiliation or embarrassment. But sometimes it's existential: the fear of eternal damnation.

Clearly the fear of doing wrong is a stronger motivator than the desire to do right. I don't think anybody would argue that point.

So I think if you compare two people, one of faith and one without, you'll find that the person of faith generally makes moral choices more often or makes them more easily than the person without faith, because the person with faith has an extra incentive.

We're not talking about absolutes here. It's not true to say that people of faith are morally superior to people without faith. But I think morality is a vector sum of motivations, and that because people with faith have an extra vector nudging them in the direction of what's right, I think people of faith, taken as a group, are going to end up slightly more moral slightly more of the time.

Posted by: Jeff Harrell at March 8, 2005 07:36 AM

What are we to make of the indigenous peoples living in the rain forest? Before they were found by Europeans they had a "moral" code of their own without Judeo-Christian teachings. They taught their children it was wrong to steal or kill, and they had a "marriage" ceremony whereby the bride and groom were dedicated to each other. That would seem to indicate a sense of what's moral without the J-C faith.

Posted by: teaspoon at March 8, 2005 10:47 AM

I find that argument to be kind of tautological, Teaspoon. If you believe in the traditions of the Jewish or Christian faith, you believe that people are tainted by original sin, and therefore while they may be able to tell right from wrong because of the presence of the Lord, they will succumb to temptation.

If, on the other hand, you don't believe in religion, then you believe that all moral systems, religious and otherwise, come from the same set of basic, innate principles.

See what I mean? Either way you look at it, the existence of primitive people who have a sense of right and wrong makes perfect sense.

(For the record, I am not a man of faith. I think morality comes from an instinctual sense of right and wrong. Where does this instinctual sense come from? I haven't the foggiest idea. "God" is as good an answer as any to me, though I'm not a church-goer myself.)

Posted by: Jeff Harrell at March 8, 2005 03:05 PM