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 Reflection

During Morality Week, I tried my best to explain morality from an atheist perspective. I hoped to be able to sum up morality in a tight text snippit. A typographic sound byte. The tagline for godless goodness. I think I failed.

Is this because I suck? Maybe, but I doubt it. Morality is a multilayered issue. It’s more than commandments. It’s even more than the Golden Rule, which is probably the most utilitarian moral cliff-note available. I think the best way to verbalize my view of morality is a set of “best practices” to live by. Let's break it down one last time.

Right vs. Wrong

Let’s rebrand “right” and “wrong” as “better” and “worse.” I say “better” and not “best” because the “best” thing for an individual may be at the expense of others. Morality only makes sense as a term when it's applied to the group. We are moral because we are social. We are social because others enrich our lives.

Objective vs. Subjective Morality

Morality varies across cultures. Even within the U.S., polls show there are many issues that have the population split as to their moral worth. This is evidence for subjective morality. The only "evidence" any one has ever presented for objective morality is asking a question similar to "is murder wrong?" To which I give my answer, "yes." The answer is my belief that murder is wrong. It's subjective. Your belief, which is also likely to be that murder is wrong, is subjective. The argument of common consent basically states that most people believe in God therefore God exists. This argument of common consent seems to be their basis for objective morality as well. Most people believe murder is wrong, therefore it is wrong. Unlike the argument of common consent as applied to God, I am part of the consent in regards to murder, but that only means that we should treat murder as wrong. To say it is wrong, or in fact exists at all outside of humanity's ability to conceive and act upon it, is unfounded. In addition, belief in objective morality is dangerous. The same people who don't just believe murder is wrong, but know it is wrong, also know that homosexuality and other victimless "sins" are wrong. With this supposed infallible knowledge they can enforce what are really just opinions without considering the possibility that they are wrong. Abortion clinic bombers not only know that abortion is wrong, but they know they are doing the Lord's work. To paraphrase MiB's Agent Kay, "Imagine what they'll know tomorrow."

The Argument from Moral Truth

While I don't see any evidence for objective morality, this argument is flawed to the point of uselessness even granting a universal moral truth. The argument states:

1. There exist objective moral truths. (murder is not just distasteful, but it's actually wrong.)
2. These objective moral truths are not grounded in the way the world is but, rather, in the way the world ought to be. (Consider: should white supremacists succeed, taking over the world and eliminating all who don’t meet their criteria for being existence-worthy, their ideology still would be morally wrong. It would be true, in this hideous counterfactual, that the world ought not to be the way that they have made it.)
3. The world itself—the way it is, the laws of science that explain why it is that way—cannot account for the way the world ought to be.
4. The only way to account for morality is that God established morality (from 2 and 3).
5. Therefore God exists.

Why did God make murder wrong? Why not make it right? Is there any reason for God's choice or is morality completely arbitrary? If God had a reason, then we should be able to come to the same reason. If God had no reason, then why follow pointless rules? Either God is a redundant middle man or we are still left with no reason moral truths are true. If we feel the need to explain our possible objective morality, then why are we more comfortable with a lack of a supernatural explanation then we are with a lack of a natural explanation? At least we know the natural exists! The whole argument is passing the buck.

The Bible as a source of morality.

Item 4 of the argument leads to where believers go to find God's established morality. The Bible is a popular repository of perceived goodness. Shall we start with the Old Testament that commanded people to keep slaves, slay their enemies, execute blasphemers and homosexuals? Hmm...it might be best to pick and chose which Biblical morals to follow and interpret them to be relevant to our society. The question here is, if you need the Bible to give you your morals, how do you know which morals in the Bible are the most moral? It's, of course, because we already had morality before we checked the "good book." It makes sense, if the majority of people didn't think murder was a bad thing prior to Moses, I doubt humanity would have survived long enough to get those tablets. If you believe that sort of thing.

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.