Friday, May 03, 2013

Do You Need Religion to Have Morals?

I recently had a friend who posted a picture to a social media site. It was an Internet meme, one of those quick little quips that have become so popular online. This one had symbols from all the larger faith systems (and a couple of lesser ones as well) with text that read "You don't need religion to have morals. If you can't determine right from wrong, then you lack empathy, not religion." Is this right?


My first reaction to the post is that it reminds me of the objection I always hear when discussing moral grounding with atheists. I argue that the only way objective moral values and duties can exist is if they are grounded in God. In other words, in order for morals to be prescriptive (that is, how we should act), they must come from a lawgiver that is above humanity.

Now, most atheists misunderstand this argument and retort that even though they don't believe in God, they are moral people. But that isn't what I was trying to say.  I can freely admit that relatively speaking there are many atheists who act more uprightly than some people of faith. The question isn't if adherents to one faith (or no faith) are behaving morally. The question is how can a moral prescription such as "Thou shalt not commit adultery" be binding at all times for all people unless there is an authority higher than man who prescribes it?

And that's the real problem with this meme. Sure, we may all agree that things like torturing small children for no other purpose than one's own entertainment is wrong.  That's because the law of God is written on the hearts of all men (ref. Rom 2:15). However, the sticky part comes in when we consider moral laws like the prohibition against adultery. Is adultery wrong even if your spouse has already been cheating on you? Is adultery wrong if you both agree to be "swingers"? What if someone has enough empathy to make sure his or her spouse never finds out about the affair? Is it wrong then? Jesus placed an even higher demand on moral purity when he said that if you lust after a woman in your heart you are as guilty as if you committed adultery with her. Is that a lack of empathy?

There are other moral questions that become hopelessly confused when we rely on ourselves as the yardstick for morality. The famous Heinz dilemma is a good example:
Heinz's wife was near death, and her only hope was a drug that had been discovered by a pharmacist who was selling it for an exorbitant price. The drug cost $20,000 to make, and the pharmacist was selling it for $200,000. Heinz could only raise $50,000 and insurance wouldn't make up the difference. He offered what he had to the pharmacist, and when his offer was rejected, Heinz said he would pay the rest later. Still the pharmacist refused. In desperation, Heinz considered stealing the drug. Would it be wrong for him to do that?
One I've used before is should we harvest organs from a living inmate on death row if we can save the lives of five young individuals who are upstanding citizens? What if they are all brilliant scientists close to a cure for cancer and the inmate is a child-killer? Should we take his organs then? Right and wrong are sometimes not as clear as we like.

Above all, though, the biggest problem with the meme is that it assumes too little about morality. It ignores that recognizing and properly acknowledging God as our creator is itself a moral act. In fact, it is the first and most important of all our moral requirements – to love God with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strength. If we are not doing this then we are being immoral, we are not behaving as we ought to behave. Therefore it is impossible to be completely morally upright and shun God if God does indeed exist and as the source of the Good He deserves our worship.

Because God must exist in order to ground moral law, then one can't ignore God and still claim morality. Morality requires God's existence; since He exists it follows that one has not properly determined right from wrong if he is not recognizing Him as God. Thus, it is impossible to be irreligious and completely moral together.

14 comments:

  1. You say the law of God is written on the hearts of all men, but others say the evolutionary struggle for survival is written on the hearts of all men. Maybe the two are actually the same? The basic morality works out very similar, for sure.

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    1. How is it the same? Why in hardships of struggle or starvation do we preserve the life of a child - when by evolutionary standards, we are bigger and can eat them?

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  2. Hi John,

    The problem with basing morality on evolutionary paradigms is that evolution doesn't care a whit whether an action is right or wrong. Survival of the fittest has at its root the goal of leaving more offspring than another. So acts like rape and adultery can actually be an evolutionary advantage, producing more progeny. The rightness or wrongness of these acts don't work when leaving the most offspring is the measuring stick.

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  3. Maybe you're taking a short-sighted view of evolution. It's true rape and adultery might give a man a short-term advantage, but genetic survival requires much more than just having children. Raising children is also essential.

    For humans, the greatest tactic enhancing our survival is cooperation, but rape and adultery destroy cooperation, so that's why rape and adultery are generally immoral acts. They're generally not the best evolutionary strategy.

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  4. So.. Had you not believed in god, you would have no problem raping, killing, torturing?
    Your belief in god is the only thing thing standing between how you behave now and how you otherwise might behave?
    That is truly sad.

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  5. So.. Had you not believed in god, you would have no problem raping, killing, torturing?
    Your belief in god is the only thing thing standing between how you behave now and how you otherwise might behave?
    That is truly sad.

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  6. Cloggy, you miss the distinction between acting morally and having a grounding or basis from which moral laws derive. As an example, traffic laws come from a city council or state government. They write the laws that the citizens are obligated to obey, such as the speed limit. However, there are some areas where there is no speed limit. In those places, one may drive as fast as he or she wishes. There is no obligation.

    So, tell me on an atheist worldview, what is the source or grounding for the laws of morality?

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  7. I think you might misunderstand what morality is. Being a moral agent means considering that other beings have moral standing, and exercising morality is making decisions about what should be done and what should not be done. But, if you are following a religion's prescriptive rules about what to do and what not to do, you are in fact not acting morally at all. All you are doing is following rules, that's it. You are not deciding anything, but just consulting a book of rules and acting in accordance with those rules. That is not morality.

    Holy books hardly count as examples of definitive 'right for all, at all times' morals anyway, given that sometimes killing is cool, other times it isn't, sometimes slavery is fine, then for some people they should be free etc.

    Empathy for one's fellow human beings is a pretty good 'yardstick' for moral acts. It's objective in the sense that all human beings, no matter what culture they come from, possess empathy (apart from sociopaths).

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  8. Here is another meme which I have seen somewhere and you may want to consider ..."  I would add that you don't need religion to be insane, but it's a start!"

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  9. I mean you really don't need religion to know what's moral or not, its instilled in us, we just know but how do we know, we know because we can feel that energy inside, either a negative or positive, in ourselves we have that conscience inside our mind determining what's right from wrong, it was implanted in us. I believe in God and I am a God fearing person who believes in Jesus Christ, that God sent his only Son to save us from death and the the power sin but even before I knew Christ I still had a conscience, I still had morals but where did that come from, it came from my parents and where did they get it from...it leads all the way back to the beginning and how did we all begin?

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  10. Adultry is wrong because it hurts your spouse. You don't need any higher being to tell you that. It comes with empathy.

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    1. But how do you answer the Heinz dilemma posed above?

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  11. "I argue that the only way objective moral values and duties can exist is if they are grounded in God."
    That is merely your opinion. Do you have any facts to back it up?
    "...in order for morals to be prescriptive (that is, how we should act), they must come from a lawgiver that is above humanity." They must?!?!? Says who? Oh, just your opinion...again.
    Your arguments (and I use the word argument VERY VERY loosely in your case) have no substance.

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    1. I have an abundance of support for those statement in this very blog. You can watch this video at http://apologetics-notes.comereason.org/2015/05/is-morality-grounded-in-nature-utility.html or read this article: http://apologetics-notes.comereason.org/2014/04/moral-grounding-and-confederate-money.html for a start. Much more can be found by clicking on the morality tag at the bottom of the post.

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