Morality exists without your God.

[Askthepizzaguy]

It is silly, because outside of God, there is no morality.

6,973,738,433- Current world population.
http://www.pewforum.org/Christian/Global-Christianity-exec.aspx
2,184,060,000- Number of Christians in the world.

That number of Christians includes people who identify as Christian but don't go to church or practice the faith outside of believing in God and having a certain (variable) set of beliefs about what is or isn't moral. Within that group alone, there's wide disagreement about what exactly is moral. This means that many of these folks are the folks who will believe in God just as much as you and still vote to make, for example, same-sex marriage legal. Because this group of folks is not in lockstep agreement. I think it fair to say on some issues you see as black and white, as many as half of those folks will disagree with you on. Even in the comparatively conservative USA, the number of Christians supporting expanded rights for gays is about half of them. Somehow, your idea of God's morality didn't reach those people.

The other 4,789,678,433 people on the planet, which is more than twice that amount, are not all believers in God, not all believers in your God, and do not all agree with your set of values either.

Somehow, they manage to go through their entire day without engaging in blood orgies. Even the folks who believe that your God is imaginary, like me.

Not only that, but Christianity has existed for roughly 2,000 years. During most of that time, it made up a relatively insignificant portion of the world population. There weren't many African, American, or Asian Christians for the grand majority of that time.

Even if you believe in the nonsense that is a 6000 year old Earth, that's still a fraction of human history that's on the small side. The actual age of humanity is much, much greater. Which means for well more than the majority of human history, in actuality more than 99% of human history, the belief in God, specifically your God, but even in One God in general, did not exist.

To put it into perspective, your claim is exactly analogous to any claim that Scientology might make, to the effect of you cannot be happy or moral or sane without Scientology. When the shoe is on the other foot, it's utterly ridiculous. Scientology hasn't even existed for 100 years. The vast majority of the planet is not a member of Scientology. You know for a FACT that you can be happy and moral without it. So whenever somebody says something that ridiculous, you'd feel pretty confident calling them out on it.

But the fact is, the vast majority of the people on the planet do not believe in your religion, your God, or subscribe to your code of values. Even within your own religion, the divisions are great. The extent to which a person believes the literalness of the Bible is also quite divergent among this greater group. There are Republican and Democrat Christians. Socialist Christians, Libertarian Christians. There are Pro-Choice and Pro-Life Christians. Pro-Death penalty, Anti-Death penalty. Pro-gun laws, anti-gun laws.

Your standard of morality doesn't even extend to all the people sitting next to you in your church pew.

To claim a monopoly on morality, is not just worthy of a hearty chuckle. Somehow, the human race got by for hundreds of thousands of years without your beliefs. The number of humans who have lived, without your God and your beliefs about morality, is somewhere in the vicinity of 99% or more. Many more have believed in different One gods. Many many many more have believed in several Gods. And many more than that had no concept of a distinct god. And yet somehow, the human race survived then, just as it does today in the parts of the world that have religions that are native to their region.

The vast, vast majority of the human race never even heard of your God, because during their lifetimes, not a single human being had ever spoken of him. This is a fact. Monotheism is a fairly recent development in human history.

That means that your "revealed" faith was revealed after 99% of all humans who will ever live or die had already lived and died. Otherwise there would have been some evidence of belief in your God hundreds of thousands of years ago, and there's exactly zero evidence of that.

Which means your religion is just as likely to be true as a church that is conceived of today and opened up tomorrow. Your claim to a monopoly on morality, your claim that no one can be moral without your God, is null and void. Furthermore, the ignorance behind such a statement, and the arrogance involved, is breathtaking.

There's no denying that Christianity is a major world religion that flourishes today. There's no denying that many Christians are decent people. But to state that people can't be moral without your God, is essentially a supremacist belief on par with believing you're a member of the master race. The only difference is that it's not race you're talking about, but religion. Believing you're part of the master religion is the same thing, believing that you're better than everyone else. That means your faith hasn't elevated you in the slightest.

Even the most fundamentalist Christians don't believe that they can just kill people who go against some of the Old Testament teachings, even though that's what it says you're supposed to do in the Bible, in no uncertain, metaphorical terms. It's in black and white LITERAL terms: KILL PEOPLE who disobey these rules.

And that goes for Jewish folks who don't have New Testament excuses for why they pick and choose which parts of the Old Testament to believe in. Those laws supposedly apply to them, today. Yet you don't see Orthodox Jews stoning prostitutes or burning heretics.

Do you know why that is?

It's because you CAN have morality outside of God. Even the most devout people on this planet can read the Old Testament, and say.... no, I'm not going to MURDER PEOPLE even if God says it's Okay to do so. Proof positive that you can be the most religious person on the planet and still have morality outside of God. It's called having a conscience, and most people on the planet have one.

That's how you can have morality outside of belief in your God, even if you also believe in God. You can believe in God and still have your own opinions on what is moral or immoral. Which means that morality comes from you, not a book.

At this point, you may cling to your belief that we're all here because God created us, and that makes what you said okay, because ultimately we wouldn't be here without your God. Which is interesting, because at one time, many more folks believed that this is how it all began:

In the beginning there was an empty darkness. The only thing in this void was Nyx, a bird with black wings. With the wind she laid a golden egg and for ages she sat upon this egg. Finally life began to stir in the egg and out of it rose Eros, the god of love. One half of the shell rose into the air and became the sky and the other became the Earth. Eros named the sky Uranus and the Earth he named Gaia. Then Eros made them fall in love.

Morality can exist without a belief in Nyx, the bird with black wings who gave birth to Love, the Sky, and the Earth, even if at one time, more people believed that this was how the world came to be, than from Jehovah saying "let there be light". A time before that, lots of people believed in Nyx, and nobody believed in Jehovah. A time before that, nobody believed in Nyx.

Kinda puts the whole nobody can have morality without your God thing in perspective. Your God is the same as Nyx in the following ways: it is a creation myth that was conjured up in an age before literacy became widespread, and people believed the world was flat. And even during that time, people still contemplated what was moral or immoral. Without your God.

 

[AdamGM]

These are all just examples.

Let's say that I believe X is wrong, and you don't, and we are the only beings in the hypothetical universe. In this example, there is just our two opinions.

Ultimately, I believe without a higher power, people can enforce their own beliefs but in the end they are opinions and you can't talk about a real "right".

 

[classical_hero]

I definitely disagree since who's morals are we using? You do realise that the Nazi's used a set of moral when they were trying to make the world pure. Just because you have a set of morals doesn't make them the right ones. Everyone has a different set of moral values and as a result of that we find in the space of a few decades one thing that was one considered moral is not consider immoral and vice versa. We change so much that it is pointless basing our moral system on what we think right, considering how fast it changes.

 

[Synobun]

I definitely disagree since who's morals are we using? You do realise that the Nazi's used a set of moral when they were trying to make the world pure. Just because you have a set of morals doesn't make them the right ones. Everyone has a different set of moral values and as a result of that we find in the space of a few decades one thing that was one considered moral is not consider immoral and vice versa. We change so much that it is pointless basing our moral system on what we think right, considering how fast it changes.

I dunno, I think "not murdering innocents" is a pretty solid moral.

Don't think that one will be changing any time soon unless you're a douchebag.

 

[Dreadnought]

I think calling out someone in a thread that they haven't posted in is against the rules.

Sorry to interrupt your rant though.

 

[IdiotsOpposite]

Godwin'd by the third post. This thread's going real far.

 

[Integral]

"Morality exists without your God."

I agree, but I'm not exactly orthodox.

And yes, I am a moral realist.

 

[Lillefix]

That number of Christians includes people who identify as Christian but don't go to church or practice the faith outside of believing in God and having a certain (variable) set of beliefs about what is or isn't moral.

That number also includes people like me(including me) who are die hard atheists, but are to lazy to do anything about it.

And we don't get our morals from the biblical God, thank God.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

We change so much that it is pointless basing our moral system on what we think right, considering how fast it changes.

So biblical morals haven't changed lately?

I thought we didn't stone people to death, [insert one of many hundreds of examples here] anymore?

 

[Mr. Dictator]

I definitely disagree since who's morals are we using?

Well, those who aren't afraid of ourselves tend to just put on our big boy pants and figure this out for ourselves.

 

[Synobun]

Well, those who aren't afraid of ourselves tend to just put on our big boy pants and figure this out for ourselves.

But.. but.. That would require self-determination!

 

[Formaldehyde]

Godwin'd by the third post. This thread's going real far.

Yes, it is a real shame all those godless Christians decided to try to "purify" the world of Jews and other minority ethnic groups.

Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians in particular seem to have a real difficulty understanding that "Just because you have a set of morals doesn't make them the right ones". That "in the space of a few decades one thing that was one considered moral is not consider immoral and vice versa". Take virulent antisemitism, segregation, discrimination against women, and now discrimination against homosexuals, for instance.

The great thing about the morals of atheists and agnostics is that they are based on secular reasons instead of religious ones taken from scriptures written thousands of years ago. Scriptures which were written by other men in an age when it was perfectly acceptable to stone people to death, kill the firstborn in every family as a form of retribution, and to think your god committed genocide on a regular basis because you were his chosen people.

 

[peter grimes]

I definitely disagree since who's morals are we using? You do realise that the Nazi's used a set of moral when they were trying to make the world pure. Just because you have a set of morals doesn't make them the right ones. Everyone has a different set of moral values and as a result of that we find in the space of a few decades one thing that was one considered moral is not consider immoral and vice versa. We change so much that it is pointless basing our moral system on what we think right, considering how fast it changes.

NO.

Just because there are some differences between one group's moral system and another's doesn't mean they are completely different in all ways. In fact, the similarities vastly out-number the differences no matter which groups you choose to compare.

Your argument above is akin to the discredited canard 'Science used to say that cholesterol is bad, now they say it's good, so science can't say anything useful'

 

[Integral]

Most atheists I know are intuitive utilitarians. It's not a particularly bad place to start if you're looking at moral philosophy, but shouldn't be where you end up.

 

[lovett]

These are all just examples.

Let's say that I believe X is wrong, and you don't, and we are the only beings in the hypothetical universe. In this example, there is just our two opinions.

Ultimately, I believe without a higher power, people can enforce their own beliefs but in the end they are opinions and you can't talk about a real "right".

You do not say why you believe this. Why do you believe that 'without a higher power you can't talk about a real 'right'? What arguments or evidence leads you to this position?

Certainly, your first sentence provides no sound support for your belief. The mere fact of disagreement over an issue does not mean there is no fact of the matter regarding that issue. We do not conclude, from observing disagreement between two individuals, that there is no fact of the matter over which they are disagreeing. We tend to conclude that one is right and one wrong (or both wrong).

Scientists disagree all the time. Scientists disagree as to whether the universe consists of pulsating stringlike objects, or some other fundamental constituent. They disagree as to whether mantle plumes exist,whether we've found the Higg's Boson and so on and so forth. Disagreement is a pervasive feature of our every day life; one may disagree with one's partner about whether one promised to bring the map, one may disagree about dates of particular events so on and so forth. Yet in all these cases disagreement does not lead us to believe that there is no fact of the matter. There is a fact of the matter as to whether the universe consists of strings and of who it was who promised to bring the map. The mere fact of disagreement does not impinge this. Why would the fact of ethical disagreement entail there were no ethical facts?

Nor does ClassicalHero's argument provide support for your belief. He thinks that because what is commonly taken to be morality changes there is no such thing as non-religious ethics. In its bare form, this is simply absurd. The body of facts which constitute physics changes with much greater speed than that which constitutes ethics, yet we do not think that this is evidence again physical facts being facts!

As it happens, many changes in commonly accepted morality -specifically moral progress- can only be accounted for if we do believe that moral facts exist. The slow decline of slavery, sexual oppression and racial oppression are all examples of moral progress. They are 'progress' precisely because it is the case that slavery, sexual oppression and racial oppression are wrong. If this weren't the case, they would just be 'change'. If we think these changes, or any other moral changes, constitute moral improvement we are under considerable pressure to accept objectivity in ethics (the existence of moral facts). This is because, absent moral facts, all states of affairs would be equally moral. An improvement implies one state of affairs (no slavery in America, for instance) is better than another (widespread slavery in America). If all state of affairs were equal, this could not occur. That moral progress occurs means moral facts exist.

So, I'm left somewhat at a loss as to why you endorse the sceptical position you do. I rather suspect it is because you have not encountered an adequate and compelling account of the nature and substance of moral facts. If this is the case, perhaps I will provide one later. Suffice to say, at this point at least you should consider stepping back from the belief you profess in the quoted post.

I'll leave with a quote I think relevant to this thread. It is by an All Soul's philosopher called Derek Parfit. He lays out his high hopes for the future of normative, first-order ethics. Largely, I agree with him.

Some people believe that there cannot be progress in Ethics, since everything has been already said. Like Rawls and Nagel, I believe the opposite. How many people have made Non-Religious Ethics their life's work? Before the recent past, very few... Buddha may be among this few, as may Confucius, and a few Ancient Greeks and Romans. After more than a thousand years, there were a few more between the Sixteenth and Twentieth centuries. Hume was an atheist who made Ethics part of his life's work. Sidgwick was another. After Sidgwick, there were several atheists who were professional moral philosophers. But most of these did not do Ethics. They did Meta-Ethics. They did not ask which outcomes would be good or bad, or which acts would be right or wrong. They asked, and wrote about, only the meaning of moral language, and the question of objectivity. Non-Religious Ethics has been systematically studied, by many people, only since the 1960s. Compared with the other sciences, Non-Religious Ethics is the youngest and the least advanced...

[In the long-term future,] there could be higher achievements in all of the Arts and Sciences. But the progress could be greatest in what is now the least advanced of these Arts or Sciences. This, I have claimed, is Non-Religious Ethics. Belief in God, or in many gods, prevented the free development of moral reasoning. Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a recent event, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes.

 

[AdamGM]

Certainly, your first sentence provides no sound support for your belief. The mere fact of disagreement over an issue does not mean there is no fact of the matter regarding that issue.

Where does the fact of the matter come from than?

 

[lovett]

At this point in time, I would say facts about our normative reasons. Normative reasons are reasons which rationally justify an action. They derive from those things we would value if we were fully rational. Moral facts are fact about what we would value under conditions of full rationality. They are counterfactual facts, but fact nonetheless.

That's a taster. I will try and expand on it tomorrow, if I have the time.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

At this point in time, I would say facts about our normative reasons. Normative reasons are reasons which rationally justify an action. They derive from those things we would value if we were fully rational. Moral facts are fact about what we would value under conditions of full rationality. They are counterfactual facts, but fact nonetheless.

That's a taster. I will try and expand on it tomorrow, if I have the time.

How dare you keep him from walking the discussion back to everything coming from God (obviously) 5000 years ago!!
Shame!

 

[El_Machinae]

These are all just examples.

Let's say that I believe X is wrong, and you don't, and we are the only beings in the hypothetical universe. In this example, there is just our two opinions.

Ultimately, I believe without a higher power, people can enforce their own beliefs but in the end they are opinions and you can't talk about a real "right".

If you and I both existed by our lonesomes in this hypothetical universe, each of us could also have an opinion on the wisest dietary regimen. This opinion would be subjective, formed from incomplete information, and unlikely to be (completely) agreed upon.

That said, one of us would be objectively more correct, even though both of us only have our own opinions.

 

[AdamGM]

If you and I both existed by our lonesomes in this hypothetical universe, each of us could also have an opinion on the wisest dietary regimen. This opinion would be subjective, formed from incomplete information, and unlikely to be (completely) agreed upon.

That said, one of us would be objectively more correct, even though both of us only have our own opinions.

What makes the one more correct though? I would think that would require some kind of foundational beliefs which are just more opinions in the end.