Talk Elections

One of the main charges against atheists is: "How can an atheist be moral"?  The argument is that morality comes from God, and that without a set of rules from a creator, there is no basis for saying something is right or wrong.  Atheists usually respond to this rather defensively, saying that one can make personal value judgments to develop a sense of right and wrong, God is not necessary for this.  While this is definitely true, I don't think it's the only or even the strongest counterargument one can make.  Suppose there is an all powerful God.  How does it follow that God is necessarily good?  As Alan Dershowitz once pointed out, power has certainly not equaled goodness where humans are concerned.  Why then should it necessarily be a feature of a deity that has unlimited power over the universe?  If God is not necessarily good, it follows that even if religious rules and commandments do indeed come from God, obeying them is not necessarily morally right. 

You don't even need to go there.  Philosophers have been designing moral systems that have nothing to do with God for over 200 years now.  You can take your pick.

The last set of questions I think betokens a slight misconception of how morality is conceived of as working under a traditional/'standard' Western religious worldview. Right and wrong, in this view, flow from attributes of God's nature, so the way a universe is constructed will inevitably be such that its creator's characteristics will be reflected as, among other things, moral attributes. So morality as such doesn't preexist the universe but is created as a function of it. If morality does preexist either the universe or any being that might be in the business of creating it then God is not the first cause and hence isn't God as defined in Western monotheism; when you're to that point, you're best advised to remember that religions that think of things in this way generally don't assume that God or gods are automatically good (though they may be likely to be so for various reasons).

I think one of the more convincing arguments for this position runs that morality requires free will and free will requires an extra-natural sphere which then in turn requires God.

None of the claims in that are uncontroversial of course.

Atheists can be moral if they behave morally, just like anyone else.  If there can be such a thing as an immoral believer, there can be such a thing as a moral atheist. 

Sure they can.  Even if you get past Gustaf's point about free will (which I believe is a good one), I'm sure anyone can adhere to a set moral standard.  The real question is what does an atheist believe to be moral?  It is why, in my opinion, politicians running as independents have an inherent disadvantage.  Voters notice an R or D by a candidate's name and have some idea of what the candidate stands for even if they know nothing more about them, but an "I" by the name is a blank slate.  An independent could be an anarchist, communinst, facist, libertarian, or something in between.  Certainly an independent can be as Republican as any other Republican or Democratic as any Democrat, but since they give no hint of their beliefs in their party affiliation, the average voter may have no clue what to expect.  Similarly, an atheist could act within the moral precepts of Roman Catholicism as well as the average Catholic or adhere more strictly to the tenants of Sunni Islam than the average Sunni Muslim.  However saying you're an atheist does not convey any sense of what you hold to be moral.  If you wish to convey to what system of morality you hold, describe yourself as an Objectivist, Utilitarian, Christian Atheist, Hedonist, Nihilist, etc, this says volumes more about your moral convictions that simply saying "I'm a moral Atheist."

I think this is an interesting point.  I've never read a particularly compelling theistic argument for how one ascertains omnibenvolence, or from what omnibenevolence originates (certainly not omnipotence?)


Ay, what argument is this?  I'm not sure to what your antecedent ("this position") refers, but in any case, what you're saying is not ringing any bells.

Theistic definitions of morality tend to have a certain element of tautology in this sense, since morality is typically defined in terms of God rather than the other way around.

Right -- but this doesn't seem like any less of a first principle than "morality is just defined this way" to an atheist.

I'm not sure quite what you're saying or asking here. Obviously an atheist wouldn't have much use for this definition of morality, or at least I wouldn't expect one to.

I'm not making a point about why atheists can't be moral, but whether morality requires God to exist. There's a difference between belief in God and existence of God as a prerequisite. So this position is the position that God must exist for morality to exist.

I'm beginning to realize that might not have been the question though. I think it's the relevant question however. Whether atheists in fact behave morally or not seems like an empirical question rather than a philosophical one.

I can't really name a philosopher off the top of my head (I'd like to say I invented this argument myself, but that's obviously not true either ;) )I think Kant's position on morality covers parts of this though.

I guess I didn't pick up on that in your original phrasing, sorry.  I think what I was noting actually is an objection about the argument you're alluding to.

Maybe I'm being completely thick now, but what are you noting? That God cannot be proven to be omnibenevolent?

Basically

Obviously one can't prove omnibenevolence without first defining goodness, and most struggles are between one 'good' and another 'good'.

Also obviously, God's existence (if one takes it as a given, which I know you don't, but still...) makes His position on what is and isn't 'good' the one that really matters in the end.

But why?  Just stating that it's true begs the question.  How could you possibly ascertain this?

I'm not sure it's obvious even beyond that, since some traditions posit a God that isn't at all benevolent.

All right. God as defined in Western philosophical and theological traditions. To an extent morality becomes tautological at that point. To an extent morality is tautological anyway. The way to ascertain it would be to have God existent and judging one based on such-and-such standards.

Precisely what omnibenevolence means in practical terms is, though, a bit difficult to nail down one we realize that in a worldview that assumes God as absolute Creator it's an almost entirely reflexive concept.

I think you are also making an assumption that if there was a god, it was capable of conscious thought. Part of the reason why I doubt the existence of one is that all thought requires matter and energy; you cannot 'think' without electrical impulses bouncing around brain matter. Since notions of a creator god pre-exist the creations of both electricity and matter, then how could a deity possibly think to then act? Unless of course you simply make an exception for the deity. If you end up having to make exception after exception to justify a concept then you end up defending what is indefensible.

I don't really see how that relates to my point though? My argument does not seem to require God being omnibenevolent?

Like Andrew says, this answer doesn't work.  You can't just define the problem away.  You can say that omnibenevolence is an intrinsic part of anything.  It could be an intrinsic part of my cat who, coincidentally, is really nice.  Why do you presume it's an intrinsic part of God and not of something else, or of nothing?  How do you observe this to be true?  Considering that God is ostensibly omnibenevolent and yet terrible stuff happens, it's not as if this can uncontroversially be accepted as a tautology even if God does exist.


I suppose it's possible for God to establish moral standards and then behave against them.  Your argument is that there are no moral standards without a God, no moral standards without omnipotence, or what?  Are you folding "ability to create objective moral standards" into omnipotence?  In any case, it still problematizes your argument; if God isn't definitionally omnibenevolent (whatever that is), it makes the question of "why should we trust this entity on moral issues?" even more confusing.

@Gustaf:

Kant does affirm the the existence of a God (rather than the existence of the noumenal idea of God that is the a priori condition for the possibility of rationality) as a prerequisite for the possibility of morality. It's one of the postulates of practical reason.

Forgive me, but I remain mystified as to how one could possibly define any kind of absolute as opposed to subjective morality contra God in the event of God's existence. Again, if God has the position with regards to the universe that He's constructed as having in Western thought. If it's otherwise I don't honestly understand why we would even be talking about this.

With response to Andrew, I'm also mystified as to why exactly one would apply the standards of the universe to God, in general. Asking why features of the physical universe don't apply to God is preassuming a materialistic outlook that doesn't hold water when God comes into the picture. We might as well ask how God can see the entirety of the universe when He hasn't got an optic nerve or retina. It presupposes a materialist conclusion. (It also presupposes the absolute and universal truth of the current Western construct of what constitutes 'thought', but I'd rather not get into that.)

The original question of the thread was whether people could be moral if they were atheists.  On the traditional Christian metaphysical account, goodness, strictly speaking, constitutes the divine essence, so that nothing could be good without God.  But, even if we were to accept this account, the question of being does not necessarily implicate the question of any individual creature's belief.  One could conceivably still be good, or do good, without believing in God's existence, even if the believer insists that goodness has its origin in God's nature, which is unknown to or denied by the non-believer.

As for other conceptions of the divine that do not attribute to the divine goodness or intentional consciousness, such conceptions certainly exist, and indeed require that moral goodness has some other origin.  It's still a perfectly reasonable thing to discuss, at least.

As for Andrew's comments about thought and the materialist assumptions behind them, I think the argument he is making rather goes something like this (and please correct me Andrew if I'm wrong):  What we know to be "seeing" and "thinking" are invariably processes that require a nervous system and a brain structure of a certain complexity, and thus we cannot really conceive of anything that we could properly call "seeing" and "thought" that does not involve these material preconditions.  If God is supposed to be a spiritual being who does not have material existence, then either God does not really "see" or "think," and such activities can only be metaphorically applied to him or her or it, or there is simply no such being as the God spoken of by the Christian scriptural traditions that attribute states such as consciousness and will to him.  It's not an argument that necessarily makes unwarranted assumptions about God, but rather an argument about the nature of sensation and consciousness as we can conceive of them, and how far, or whether at all, we can attribute these processes to supposedly non-material beings. 

Yes, certainly. The title of the thread was open-ended, though, so I thought I would explain why, in Western thought, God and morality are constructed as connected (which you've just explained much better than I did. Well done). The last sentence is a very good summary of my beliefs on this subject, since obviously it's not only possible but downright common to lead an upstanding life without having conventional religious beliefs of any kind.


I'm thinking here particularly of Shinto, in which (if you're not familiar with it, since I know you have a subspecialty other than Japan) 'gods and animals are free' (pace Orwell); Shinto 'deities' are perceived as acting in a manner similar to wild beasts (understandable, since it's a nature/fertility/'Dionysian' religion), less a power over human existence than a symbiotic existence that can be extremely dangerous to humans if upset, since the gods precisely are not bound by morality and operate on a basis at least partially of tit-for-tat. Indeed in some Shintos (being a folk religion that is about two and a half thousand years old but doesn't have any written scriptures from the first millennium or so, it's the sort of religion that it's even easier to treat as a complex of related but distinct belief systems and cults than most) humans are treated as the gods' 'prey' (these Shintos tend to be more...fatalistic than most; sometimes a god is even treated as having a 'destined prey' whom they must 'consume', either in some spiritual sense or just by the god's attributes being the prey's eventual cause of death, to the exclusion of other humans). It's worth noting that as a Christian I actually don't see any particular reason to disbelieve in the 神　(kami, the word that I'm translating as small-g god) and as a literary anthropologist it is in fact easier and more worthwhile to believe in them at least for purposes of my work; I just can't attribute to them actual divinity, strictly defined.


Oh, I'm not denying at all that 'seeing' and 'thinking' as they apply to God (or any souls without bodies, however conceived of) are at the most analogous to seeing and thinking as we understand them. The parenthetical remark at the end of my post was poorly-phrased. What I was wondering was if it might be questionable to attempt, in this instance, to problematize that analogy, especially if there isn't a better analogy to be put forward. (We could simply make up new terms for the things that God does that are, or that seem, analogous to 'perception' and 'thought process' but I think as long as we all understand what the analogies are there to do there isn't really any need to.)

I don't really understand how this argument is different than "that's just part of God and we know it is"?


Without judging God using any standard related to our observation of existence (material or otherwise), how do you arrive at any position about God?  How does your own argument here not demand you take no position on the God matter?

Because if God has the rest of the traits defined in Western theology, then I don't understand how there's any basis for holding back on omnibenevolence. It's conditional on the idea that that's the concept of God that we're going with. If you want to discuss concepts of deity more generally in this area, then by all means, I'm fine with having that conversation too.


We are judging God using a standard related to our observation of existence when we use analogies like perception and thought process to describe things that He does or that He might do. Thinking of God analogically like this demands, technically, a position of agnosticism, yes.  It doesn't necessarily demand de facto agnosticism, since we can still determine which of various possibilities of God's very general nature we're talking about and go from there by analogy. For example, if we were discussing the set of possibilities relating to how the universe would work if the supreme existences were the kami, then we'd have an opening to discuss concepts like humans being destined prey of the gods or the gods existing in a dangerous symbiosis with humanity and nature. Since we seem to be discussing the set of possibilities relating to how the universe would work if the supreme existence roughly resembled the God of the Book religions, we have an opening to discuss concepts like omnibenevolence and how it relates to the fact of having created the universe and everything in it (including such things as 'right' and 'wrong'), even if we don't (as I assume you don't; you may correct me if I'm wrong and you're doing something Socratic or diabolically advocative) actually think that this is the way the universe does work.

As for how one can be other than agnostic while taking the position that thinking about God in terms of what is observable will be analogical at best, there are at least two ways to go about this. We can make an attempt to assign probabilities or guesstimates as to the likelihood of different conceptions being the way things are, and/or we can do it emotively or volitionally (the 'leap to faith'). In fact if you take this position any belief or strong hunch about God, even strong agnosticism, is one of these things.

behh.  I had an extensive post typed and then "session expired."  Road trip tomorrow but I will reply ASAP.  Sorry for ruining the flow of things.

It's all right, I have some stuff coming up too. My dad's fiftieth birthday celebration is this weekend and there are several things that I'm supposed to be working on writing.

Most posters in this thread seem to be accepting as axiomatic that there are objective rules by which one can determine whether certain behaviors are moral. I disagree with that proposition.

While in general we can define moral behavior as that which achieves the greatest good, the question is, the greatest good for whom?  The individual?  The family?  The clan?  The tribe?  The nation?  Humanity? Sapient life? All living things? The universe?

Even if one chooses to define "good" for social structures larger than a single individual by the rule that the good of the whole equals the sum of the good of its parts, acts can have varying degrees of morality based on the scale at which we consider the consequences of the act.

Consider that much of the storytelling in Asimov's robot stories comes out of the difficulty in quantifying the concept of "harm" as it is applied to the three laws of robotics, which are an idealized version of morality expressed in terms of minimizing harm.

We're accepting several things as axiomatic for purposes of this argument that we might not accept as axiomatic in other circumstances. We're accepting the idea of absolute moral facts for purposes of arguing about how that ties into ideas of God and where such facts come from or would come from in the event of God's existence.

And yet the Bible can be viewed as showing God as having a changing standard of morality.

In the time of Abraham, the good of the family was the paramount good, to the point that Lot was saved because he was a close relative.

In the time of Noah Moses, the good of the nation was the paramount good, to the point that other nations are to be destroyed or subjugated for the sake of Israel.

In the time of Christ, the good of humanity as a whole was the paramount good.

Of course this need not mean that God changed, but that man changed so that his ability to apply moral behavior expanded to encompass the good of larger groups.

(EDIT - Did a Perry there and goofed on which three I meant to use. Oops.)

Except for the good of the nation of Israel coming in actually significantly after Noah (remember, the Noahide Covenant is the one that's considered to be binding on the whole human race in traditional Jewish law), yes. I'm particularly fond of your last sentence, as that's long been my understanding of it.