Religion and Morality

Morality has a long association with religion, and on most ethics panel there's a minister.  So, it’s natural to ask whether morality essentially depends on God.
Some philosophers (e.g., Anscombe) have argued as follows:

1. Contemporary morality uses the notion of moral obligation.
2. The notion of moral obligation presuppose that of moral law.
3. But a legalistic system of morality presupposes a law-giver.
4. However, laws and norms of human society and individual conscience won't do because they are often wrong, absurd and idiosyncratic, as history amply shows.
5. Hence, the only plausible law-giver left is God.
6. So, contemporary morality entails a divine law theory of obligation in which moral laws are divine commands.

The view that moral laws are constituted by divine commands is the clearest (but not the only) way to make morality depend on God.

1. The basic issues about the relation between morality and God concern:

· the relation between God's commands and morality.

•  the role of God in moral knowledge
•  the role of God in moral motivation.

i. The relation between God's commands and morality:

•  Right actions are right just because God approves of them and wrong actions are wrong just because God disapproves of them (moral theological    subjectivism). This is the essence of the Divine Command Theory of morality: God is a legislator of morality; he decides what's right or wrong in the same way in which the state decides what's legal and what's illegal.

This view highlights the idea of divine omnipotence.
Problems:

1. Divine commands run the risk of being arbitrary. Note that one cannot say that murder is forbidden by God because it’s wrong, if being wrong amounts merely to being forbidden by God.  That is, on what basis does God decide what's wrong?  Obviously, not on a moral basis.
2. When religious people say that God is moral, they want to convey more than a simple truism.  But this is possible only if God follows the moral law, which, therefore, cannot depend on His will or promulgation. If morality depends on God’s will, then those who praise His morality for doing what he does would praise His morality for doing the opposite; this does not sound right to many theists.
3. If God commanded to kill the innocent wantonly, would murder still be wrong?  Many would say it would.

What could a theist say? Those theists who adopt this view often say that divine commands stem from God’s nature, which is absolutely good, and that therefore they are moral.

Thought Question: does this work?

• God approves of right actions because they are right and disapproves of wrong actions because they are wrong (moral theological objectivism). So, morality is independent of God’s will; however, since God is omniscient He knows the moral laws, and because He’s moral, He follows them.

Then, God is a mere transmitter of values much in the same way in which a math teacher is a transmitter of mathematics which, however, does not depend on her.

This view highlights the notion of divine righteousness.
Problem: Is theological objectivism sufficient to base morality on God, as it does not depend on His will? 

Thought Question: if you are a theist, which of the two previous positions do you adopt?

ii. The role of God in moral knowledge
Suppose you are a moral theological objectivist but still think that some aspect of morality depends on God. Then you might hold that morality depends on God in the weak sense that God is the only original transmitter of morality.  On this view the dependence of morality on religion is epistemological.  True, there are atheists who seem to know that murder is wrong, but they don't really fully know it; they are like non-physicists talking about atoms: they may get it right, but they are unable to justify their beliefs.
Problem: This view is hard to support.  Ethicists, theist and not, have often produced systems in which they have argued that moral laws can be arrived at simply by the use of our natural capacities. Presumably, many an atheist has good justifications for the belief that murder is wrong or, at any rate, not worse justification than those a religious person could offer. Much depends on what kind of justification one is looking for.

iii. The role of God in moral motivation.
One might argue that the presence of a God who will punish and reward us in the afterlife on the basis of our deeds is a necessary component of moral motivation.
Problems: The issue is complicated because the question “why be moral?” can be more difficult to answer than it seems.  However:

1. At a minimum one might argue that acting out of fear has little or no moral worth: threats extort but fail to impose moral obligation.
2. As a matter of fact, many atheists and theists behave morally but not out of fear of punishment in the afterlife.

iv. The role of God as the ultimate administrator of justice.

Some theists have argued that morality depends on God because God is the only person who can assure that justice is done, namely that in the next life one receives good and evil in proportion to the good and evil one has done. In other words, morality can be fully actualized only if God exists.

Thought Question: The requirements for salvation are obviously relevant here, as this will work only if what happens in the next life depends, at least in part, on our actions in this life. What do you think?

2. Some theists have argued that God, whether the legislator of morality or not, has implanted in us the ability to understand the basic laws of morality, so that believers and nonbelievers alike can come to know how to behave. Believers, however, have an advantage because of revelation, where God tells the faithful how to conduct their lives. This last point moves the discussion from morality and God to morality and religion. Note that they are not the same: The Christian God is good, but hardly anyone today would say that Christianity as a religion has always been good; just think of the Inquisition and of forced conversions.

3. If one makes morality dependent on religion, there arise the problems of determining what counts as sacred texts and what their teachings are. These are serious problems a theist must address:

• Which texts or oral traditions constitute God's message to us? The Hebrew   Bible? The Christian Bible? If so, which version?  The Koran?  The Book of Mormon?  Some other text in some other culture?
• Suppose we are agreed that the sacred text is, say, the King James Bible. How does one decipher God's will from the Scriptures?  This presents two types of problem:
• The Bible is a very old text, the compositional details of which are very often obscure and whose interpretation is often controversial. Compare this with the US constitution, written in relatively clear English about 200 years ago by people who have left letters and documents on the details of its composition and the politics of its adoption. And yet its interpretation is far from obvious, as the nasty political battles for each new supreme-court justice and the split decisions of the court indicate. That scriptural interpretation could reasonably be any easier defies belief; in fact, one should expect it to be much harder than constitutional interpretation.
• At times divine behavior and commands really seem immoral. For example, God
• orders the wholesale slaughter of children and pregnant women (Hosea 13:16)
• allows the beating of slaves to death as long as they survive for two days (Ex. 21:20-21)
• orders the killing of children who strike their parents (Ex 21:15), witches (Ex 22:18), Sabbath breakers (Ex 31:14-15), idolaters, including friends and family (Deut. 13: 6-10, 12-16; 17:2-7), homosexuals (Lev. 20:13), rebellious or disobedient sons (Deut. 21:18-21), and adulterers (Deut. 22:22); He also demands miscellaneous stonings, such as that of women who are not virgins when they marry (Deut. 22:13-21)

Jesus’ teachings are typically humane and, by any standards, often highly moral. However, Jesus

· is unclear as to whether the Law, issued as binding forever and containing some of the above commands, is really still binding. Twice he says “yes” going as far as claiming that not one iota should be changed (Matt 5:17-19 and Luke 16:17); once, he seems to say “no” (Luke 16:16). Other parts of the NT say “no”. Note that following Lev. 20:9, Jesus may think that children who curse their parent should be killed (a part of the Law), depending on whether he’s using a rhetorical device against the Scribes or not (Matt. 15: 4-7; Mark 7: 9-10)

· tells the parable of the talents at the end of which the lord, God’s analogue in the parable, orders his followers, the analogues of the Christians, to kill those who refuse him as lord (Luke 19:27). Of course, since this is a parable, it can be interpreted differently by different people.

· speaks in parables so that many (most?) won’t understand (Luke 8: 10). Shouldn’t Jesus see to it that the divine message is made available to all very clearly?

Thought Question: Is God morally bound to give everybody the amplest possible opportunity to be saved? Should our salvation depend, at least minimally, on us? Luther and Calvin did not think so. What do you think?

So, all in all if one adds Paul’s claim that the Christian god sends powerful delusions to those who refused to love the truth so that they will not believe what’s needed for salvation and will be damned (2 Thess. 2: 11-12, assuming the text is authentic), and the various prophecies in Revelation involving mass killings, it looks as if one is left with a seemingly immoral god and/or with conflicting texts. If we discard the first option, we are then left with the problem of which texts we are going to give prominence to. One obvious way to solve the problem is to appeal to morality.

That is, we use morality to determine the boundaries of what "proper" religion should say; for example, presumably we don’t want religion to say that Sabbath-breakers, witches, apostates, and children who curse their parents should be killed; nor do we want to interpret Luke 14:23 as saying that non-believers should be compelled to become Christians, especially after the forced conversions Christianity has been guilty of. But this enterprise seems reasonable only if we are already prepared to assess moral standards at least partially independently of religion. Keep in mind that religion is not God and therefore a theist may hold that morality depends on God, but that He has given all of us the ability to understand morality, and that theists should use that understanding to interpret God’s word properly.  

• Since sacred texts are at times opaque, it's tempting to read them so as to have God say whatever one wants God to say, which is not only blasphemous but all too often also has given religious sanction to sexism, racism, and intolerance. In short, some atheists and non-Christian theists are distrustful of Christianity because historically they have been persecuted and sacred texts do contain commands at times directed against unbelievers. They may be read away, but, also, they may not. Ultimately, the problem here seems to arise from the nature of canonical scriptural passages, which cannot be changed. Compare this with, say, the US constitution.

In sum, in the eyes of many, theists and not, bracketing religious considerations is a precondition for doing ethics.

There’s another practical reason for bracketing religion; we live in a society in which believers of different persuasions, and unbelievers, live. So, as far as possible we should do ethics without appealing to religion or God.