The Deity-Free Moral Challenge

The debate about the origin of morality has been beaten to death by a dead Calvary of horses. They aren't recently dead either, rigamortis set in long ago. Anything you or I can say about the merits of grass roots societal goodness or objective moral truths, has been said before--and I hate being unoriginal.

In an effort to avoid rehashing the claims of people far smarter than I, even though I came to said claims completely organically, I have two options. First, I could hang up my argumentative guns and ride into the sunset confident that I'm right while unwilling to engage the opposition--but I run a freakin' atheist blog, so obviously that's not going to happen. I'm left with option two. Much like Kirk and the Kobayashi Maru, I must alter the parameters of the argument. Instead of debating why we have morality, I'd like to debate why we share (or don't share) specific morals.

The Challenge

If you believe the only way to explain common morality is by appealing to a higher power, it must be that you can't think of natural, human reasons to be good. If you could, then those reasons should be all the explanation you need. To defend your position, I ask you to submit a moral situation for which only God can be the explanation for why a reasonable person would do the right thing. In return, I will offer an entirely human answer for the moral choice I, and likely many others, would make.

The moral situation should be fairly straight forward to best make your point, if, of course, you can stump me. An ambiguous moral situation is more likely to draw different choices from different people, and would only contribute to the idea of subjective morality. If you think your choice for the ambiguous moral situation is the objectively correct choice, that's only you elevating your opinion to the status of truth and there is likely no way to prove your moral high ground without referencing the Bible, which I don't accept. So, to sum up, I'll accept situations where one pushes an elderly convict into a child, thereby pushing the kid out of the way of an oncoming train and dooming the old fella, but...let's try to stick to scenarios both likely to happen and without too many moving parts.

Morality Week: Explaining to a True Believer Why He Shouldn't Kill Grandpa

The following is another pointless debate with a theist.

Apologist: What is the source or determinate of morality in a purely naturalistic reality? I understand that murder can be bad for society as a whole, and therefore a naturalistically adopted rule. But if benefit to the whole is the goal, shouldn’t we euthanize the elderly, physically disabled, etc? Society would benefit and thrive greatly without the burden of those who can not sexually reproduce or contribute labor or mental innovations. By what moral code do you defend the life of a person who is unable to contribute to society sexually, mentally or physically?

Grundy: The majority of civilized people defend the life of the elderly, myself included, because humanity is sympathetic to the Golden Rule. We love our grandparents and we know we will one day become old, so we want old people in general protected. I would never want the elderly euthanized because I know and care about old people and I wouldn’t want them euthanized. I know I will one day become old and don’t want to set the example that would let me be euthanized. I’ve met a bunch of people in my life and the vast majority of them are decent so it is reasonable to assume that a random stranger who is old or disabled is likewise someone decent and should not be put down. Why wouldn’t you euthanize the elderly?

Apologist: The reason I wouldn’t pull the plug is because God teaches us that all human life is intrinsically valuable. It has no relationship to what I think about the persons worth to me or others. And I would defend these by stating that I believe God is the standard of morality in the universe. So you would not rid society of the noncontributor, but under what standard could you argue to someone else who wanted to, that they shouldn’t?

Grundy: I already provided some perfectly acceptable reasons for why we shouldn’t euthanize the elderly that could easily be explained to anyone. Your single reason would never work on someone who is an atheist. So my reasons are more likely to convince the most people...assuming you find many people who don’t already have similar reasons.

I have a reason for every moral choice I make. To say that God gave you your morality is to say that there is no reason behind it. You are saying morality is completely arbitrary. I know that isn’t true for me and I doubt it is true for anyone.

Apologist: To say that God gave us morality is the only reason to embrace it. If you have to have reasons to be moral then it isn't morality. You simply weigh the pros and cons. So you would never be able to tell someone that anything is wrong, and that is reason enough not to do it. Morality is a standard of truth about what is right or wrong, not beneficial or diminutive.

Grundy: Morality is adherence to a moral code, not God. Individuals or societies can have moral codes--The Golden Rule is an example of a moral code that pops up organically in many societies and was part of my reasoning to not shut down nursing homes. This action would be wrong according to my moral code. Is it wrong to the universe’s moral code? Or God’s? I don’t believe it can be because the universe has no moral code and God may or may not if he even exists--which I think is very unlikely.

It is better to have reasons for what we do when the alternative is following arbitrary values of right and wrong. I can explain why rape and murder is wrong on a deeper level than “God made it so.” Telling someone to not do something is one thing. But when they ask why, your plan is to say "because God says so." That reasoning works for children, but not for me.Why didn’t God make rape and murder right? Did God have a reason for what is right and what is wrong? If so, then we can discover the same reason and cut out the middle deity. If not, then it is arbitrary.

Morality Week: A Moral Obligation to Ourselves

This week I'm going to be talking about my views on morality and specifically voicing objections to "moral truth" as an argument for the existence of God. I currently have multiple debates logged on the subject and will be drawing on them as prompts to flesh out my position. I'll round out the week with a post summing up morality as I see it. Should be fun, right? Right!

The following is a question from an apologist arguing that morality is objective and that moral truths can only come from God: “Do we have a moral obligation to be fair, or to act in our best interest, or to refrain from killing, stealing, etc.?”

Our moral obligation is not to a higher power, it is an obligation to our own happiness, and in some cases, our survival.

Imagine a grouping a strange humans before modern civilization. Let’s say that they start off on the wrong foot and engage in a fight to the death. The surviving alpha male has a few kids with the women he’s won. After all the pain and bloodshed, do you think he’d show his offspring to avoid the similar fights to the death in the future? Maybe, maybe not. But if he doesn’t this will repeat until some surviving family unit finally notices that more can be accomplished by teaming up with other family units--even if the only goal is to kill a larger rival tribe. Eventually other tribes unite until they have no reason to kill others. With their needs net, and considering that engaging in combat is costly to all parties involved, this pointless killing will become more and more rare.

Enough of these interactions lead to the smartest (those who know that combat should be avoided unless necessary) survive while others don’t. The genes that lend themselves to this personality trait get passed down while most of the others die out. These genes govern our empathy, instinct, intuition and other matters of thought that are not analytical. This is how we know right from wrong without sitting down and thinking about each moral choice. However, if we did sit to think about it, we can always come to a reason why the right choice is the right choice.

The apologist admits that this could explain how a "sense of morality" would emerge spontaneously within a civilization, but it doesn't explain the existence of moral values themselves. He asks, "Do moral values exist whether we believe in them or not?"

I agree with the traditional view of social scientists that morality is a construct, and is thus culturally relative. Our current moral values would not exist if we didn't believe in them, but if that was the case we would believe in other moral values. Some moral values are unlikely to change, not because they are intrinsically right as set by God or some law of the universe, rather because any other value would negatively affect the group that holds the moral value--the group in question could be a certain culture, a country, humanity as a whole, a pod of dolphins, whatever. Valuing human life, or if you prefer the Biblical "thou shalt not kill," is an example of a moral value that is unlikely to ever change, making it seem objective.