Is a God Needed for Morality?

[Soggy]

Here's the other side of that coin. I believe that you lead what you think is a moral life. However, since I believe that there is a God and that, by default, He decides what is moral, I am more than suspicious of anyone who thinks they are able to discern apart from God. Again, the fallibility of mans wisdom compared to the infallibility of Gods wisdom is a basic tenant of what the Bible teaches. You trust you but I don't. I trust God.

I guess we're at an impasse on that one, huh?

 

[Thalassamania]

You trust you but I don't. I trust God.

And I don't trust what your perception of what god might be. Trusting "fallible" humans' perception of god brought us the rape of the North American continent, the Spanish Inquisition, the and the Witch Trials of Salem, to name but a few. I'd much rather trust the atheists, Stalin notwithstanding, they've a better overall record.

 

[Bryan]

And I don't trust what your perception of what god might be. Trusting "fallible" humans' perception of god brought us the rape of the North American continent, the Spanish Inquisition, the and the Witch Trials of Salem, to name but a few. I'd much rather trust the atheists, Stalin notwithstanding, they've a better overall record.

Science also brought us medical bloodletting, radium watch dials, lead-based paints, thalidomide, fen-fen, the hydrogen bomb, to name a few.

I don't discount science as a useful thing, despite its past shortcomings; perhaps we shouldn't dismiss religion so readily--simply on the basis of its past shortcomings.

 

[MikeFerrara]

Umm, no that isn't the logic they use. That's part of it, but the important part that you are missing is the lack of sentience in a first trimester baby.

You use God's ultimate word as your basis for morality, I choose to use reason.

This may be the perfect example of what I was getting at in my last post.
By what reasoning do we relate ones momentary or current sentience to ones value or right to live?

The Bible dosn't say anything about abortion but the reasoning is simple. Since each is created in Gods image, each is valuable. Would you agree that all else being equal and left to run its course that being a "first trimester baby" is a temporary state? Isn't this "lack of sentience" then a temporary state? What about more or less permenant conditions that result in varying degrees of sentience...those in a comma, retarded, just plain stupid or even sleeping. If we assigned the "right to live" only on the basis of sentience we might have to start preserving the lives of some cattle and eating some people. ok, that might sound a little silly but it sounds like your assessment of my right to live is dependant on your perseption of my sentience. One who appears to be "not sufficiently sentient" to you might be in real danger.

My reasoning results in a greater level of safety for you because I don't believe that your right to live is in any way dependant on my perception of your sentiance. Being human and created in the image of God is where your "right to live" originates.

Left to their own, people can rationalize just about anything and think it all completely reasonable.

 

[Soggy]

The Bible dosn't say anything about abortion but the reasoning is simple. Since each is created in Gods image, each is valuable. Would you agree that all else being equal and left to run its course that being a "first trimester baby" is a temporary state? Isn't this "lack of sentience" then a temporary state? What about more or less permenant conditions that result in varying degrees of sentience...those in a comma, retarded, just plain stupid or even sleeping.

Ahh...the old temporary state argument. It's tired, but still gets brought up. I really don't want to get into a debate about abortion, since we speak different languages on the topic, but unborn babies, while in a temporary state of non-sentience, never were sentient. This differs from a comatose patient who used to be sentient and may become so in the future. Although, that is why we have medical proxies and DNRs, so patients can choose (or have their proxies choose) their fate should they end up in a vegetative state. I have no doubt that you believe a terminally ill patient living the remainder of their life in excruciating pain should suck it up rather than end their pain through euthanasia, also. Or that parents should care for brain-dead encephalitic babies rather than have them euthanized.

Anyhow, Sentience has nothing to do with intelligence. I can accept the consequences of your argument. Yes, there are some that fall into the category of not sentient and I do believe as humans we have the ability to discern who has the 'right' to live.

My reasoning results in a greater level of safety for you because I don't believe that your right to live is in any way dependant on my perception of your sentiance. Being human and created in the image of God is where your "right to live" originates.

Well, my perspective is that your 'reasoning' was taken from a book of stories analogous to Grim's Fairy Tales. Maybe I should use Hansel and Gretel as my moral compass. It has just as much validity. That's what I mean by speaking different languages. You assume that there is a god and you assume that the bible is not just a book of stories. We can't really have much of a conversation on the matter since we don't share the foundational beliefs.

 

[agilis]

Mike Ferrara, I'd be perfectly willing to trust God if He/She/It were to unambiguously establish His/Her/Its existence. Nothing inferential, like "look around you", etc. I mean like appearing on my TV when it is turned off, in 3D, while the thing is levitating, as the sky is rolling back to reveal some kind of big head surrounded by angels, and maybe the departed soul of my cousin Michael revealing exactly what we did, and with whom, the night before he got shipped off to Viet Nam in 1968, just as a clincher. I'd also want something notarized, establishing that this entire phenomenon was not produced by Hollywood, the Devil, or any variant thereof.

Otherwise, there really is no moral guidance available directly from God. It's coming from other humans, people like Jimmy Swaggert or some other con artist. They may claim to be getting their info from God, or from someone else who supposedly got the straight dope from the Almighty, but I have about as much confidence in their integrity as I have for a member of the US Senate.

However you cut it, it comes down to human generated moral constructs; either my own, or those from people who hear voices.

 

[Thalassamania]

Science also brought us medical bloodletting, radium watch dials, lead-based paints, thalidomide, fen-fen, the hydrogen bomb, to name a few.

I don't discount science as a useful thing, despite its past shortcomings; perhaps we shouldn't dismiss religion so readily--simply on the basis of its past shortcomings.

Science has brought us wondrous and terrible tools, but it does not attempt to claim to bring us mortality or ethics. You might even indict science for discovering the fire that the Inquisition used to burn heretics. But it really gets down to "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Science is amoral, like a hammer or a saw, while religion is often immoral.

 

[Hemlon]

ok, now that the Creation v. Evolution thread is gone (and what a great thread it was), i figured i'd ask a question:

how do you do right in the absence of absolute right (i.e. God)?

how do you know what's "wrong" without a GOd telling you?

or is that possible? is morality the exclusive domain of a deity, be it our God or Buddha?


i guess my question is:

can there be moral lives without God in them?

Absolutely yes, people can and do live moral lives without the need for a deity.

 

[MikeFerrara]

And I don't trust what your perception of what god might be.

I find this completely understandable and I would never ask you to trust my perception on the matter.

Trusting "fallible" humans' perception of god brought us the rape of the North American continent, the Spanish Inquisition, the and the Witch Trials of Salem, to name but a few. I'd much rather trust the atheists, Stalin notwithstanding, they've a better overall record.

Other than not being completey clear on what you're refering to as the rape of the North American continent I would certainly conceeed that all your examples could be used to illustrate the fallibility of human wisdom. I don't see why we should leave out Stalin, Hitler or anyone else though.

I'm not so sure that athiests have a better record at all. I'm not even sure that I see a way to measure such a thing since the vast majority of conflicts involve land, power or wealth regardless of any attempts at justification on religious grounds. We would have to somehow seperate conquests for land, power or wealth that would have not taken place sans any religious beliefs...in other words, identify the religious beliefs as causal.

I don't have numbers or calculations to prove it but my gut feeling is that if we took a close look at war and conquest throughout history, the range of cultures and the number of different religions followed by those cultures, religion might statistically prove a "don't care". ie...could we show a correlation between the religiousness of a society and their likelyhood to commit what we might consider a wrong and could we further correlate that likelyhood with a specific religion?

It might be convenient to use the spanish inquisition or the salem witch trials to make a point but if we look at the whole picture we have countless other things to look at including the Romans, Vikings and hundreds of indigenous warlike societies that have and do exist all around the world.

What if we try to put some numbers to it?
from...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition#Death_tolls

García Cárcel estimates that the total number processed by the Inquisition throughout its history was approximately 150,000. Applying the percentages of executions that appeared in the trials of 1560-1700--about 2%--the approximate total would be about 3,000 put to death. Nevertheless, very probably this total should be raised keeping in mind the data provided by Dedieu and García Cárcel for the tribunals of Toledo and Valencia, respectively. It is likely that the total would be between 3,000 and 5,000 executed. However, it is impossible to determine the precision of this total, owing to the gaps in documentation, unlikely that the exact number will ever be known.

An estimate of 5,000 total killed in the spanish inquisition? I'll see you that and raise you 800,000 per year killed in abortions in the US as reported by the CDC.

While the salem witch trials are interesting the numbers hardly seem worth mentioning...some 20 dead? About like a single bad weekend on Illinois highways. Even so, the role that land and power played in the disputes probably shouldn't be ignored.

 

[Midnight Star]

Actually I think the question makes more sense if it's reversed.
Did Man seek God because of intrinsic moral feelings that needed to be explained?

Some do yes. Others hide behind the idea of God to justify doing terrible things (as do others outside religious context, attack religion in general without knowing the person or what they believe for example), some find a strange sense of power and rulership in religion (people have a desire to know and find and look to God, so some abuse this to their own gain - exploit what they consider a given weakness - and some really hate the idea of others having a weakness), and yet still others simply follow the established norm (it's better to be safe than sorry, without really thinking about what they should really be doing - what if what's right goes against the norm). There are some though that simply are what they are, and love the idea of God and decide to follow that path as best they can - those I consider belonging to God; the children - not in age necessarily, but in spirit and malice - a child quickly forgives and it's forgotten.

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Mike.