Saying “I can be good without God” is like saying “I can be married without a spouse.” If God does not exist, then there is no ontological grounding for goodness. While atheists can surely behave in ways that humans have traditionally called “good,” their acts are without moral significance because morals as such cannot exist in an atheistic world. They are just socio-cultural preferences. Only the existence of God can ground objective goodness, and thus one can only be good if God exists.
See also:
- Since you would be good even if God didn’t exist, then God is not necessary for morality
- Would you be good if God didn’t exist?
- The Typical Atheist’s Response to the Moral Argument for God’s Existence
- Morality and the Epistemology-Ontology Distinction
- Why Atheists Can’t Have Objective Morality
- Can Morality be Grounded Outside of God?
Thinking to Believe 
February 4, 2013 at 11:02 am
“their acts are without moral significance because morals as such cannot exist in an atheistic world.”
Sure they can.
Assuming a god existed, how could doing what he told you be ‘moral’? It’s not moral, it’s just doing what the strongest being tells you because he’ll punish you if you don’t. That’s might-makes-right, not morality.
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February 4, 2013 at 11:20 am
This does not work:
1) My opponent says X
2) I proclaim that X relies on Y, and some others agree
3) My opponent rejects Y
4) Thus, my opponent is wrong when he asserts X
Expanding on (2), your “morals as such,” if “as such” means “ontological” in the sense of moral realism, don’t even exist in our theistic world (or “may not even exist” if I’m being charitable). And yet the word “good” survives. Perhaps that’s because “good” is a lot closer to “in sync with someone’s preferences (a pronoun for which God qualifies)” than “proceeding from some preferenceless fountain.”
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February 4, 2013 at 11:30 am
NotaScientist,
Just saying “sure they can” does nothing to show how they can. Please tell us how there can be objective moral truths (rather than mere moral preferences) in an atheistic world.
You clearly do not understand theism if that is what you think theistic ethics entail. Otherwise, I’ll assume you’re just blowing rhetorical smoke.
Jason
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February 4, 2013 at 11:32 am
Stan,
Huh?
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February 4, 2013 at 11:44 am
” Please tell us how there can be objective moral truths ”
I was responding specifically to your quote. You said that an atheist’s actions can’t have moral significance.
They can because I understand morality to be something determined by humans for practical reasons. Not created by some outside source.
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February 4, 2013 at 11:48 am
This is what you did:
1) My opponent says X
2) I proclaim that X relies on Y, and some others agree
3) My opponent rejects Y
4) Thus, my opponent is wrong when he asserts X
Here it is with X and Y defined:
1) My opponent says “I can be good”
2) I proclaim that “goodness” relies on “some preference-independent, ontological grounding,” and some others agree
3) My opponent rejects that preference-independent, ontological grounding
4) Thus, my opponent is wrong when he asserts that he can be good
That is the argument you made. #2 is really obvious question-begging, because moral realism is not at all a given.
I expanded on that by telling you that “good” has meaning even for folks who reject that “preference-independent, ontological morality” you think exists. I proposed that the reason for this is because “good” is about preferences and interests (which you dismissed out of hand by announcing that human opinions on good behavior are “without moral significance”).
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February 4, 2013 at 11:52 am
If humans determine what is right and wrong, then morality is just a socio-cultural expression of what we prefer. It’s no different than saying vanilla ice-cream is good, and chocolate ice-cream is bad. That is not morality. That gets you accepted and rejected behaviors, but not true morality. There is no real moral significance to following the culture’s prefernces, or rejecting them. It’s just bare behaviors that people pretend have some significance beyond themselves.
Jason
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February 4, 2013 at 11:54 am
>That is not morality. That gets you accepted and rejected behaviors, but not true morality.
That may be what “true” morality, in fact, is, and that “ontological, preference-independent” notions of morality are fictitious or imaginary.
Whenever you stick “true” or “genuine” in front of a contested concept you want interpreted the way YOU want, that should be an immediate red flag.
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February 4, 2013 at 11:56 am
“If humans determine what is right and wrong, then morality is just a socio-cultural expression of what we prefer.”
Kinda, yeah.
We’ve gotten better through experience, however.
” It’s no different than saying vanilla ice-cream is good, and chocolate ice-cream is bad.”
Sure it is. We can determine things like harm and benefit, and act accordingly. Obviously there have been disagreements…and those have led to wars.
“but not true morality”
We fundamentally disagree what ‘true morality’ is.
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February 4, 2013 at 4:42 pm
Of course , MAN DOES DECIDE what is right and wrong. All things, including religion and its derivatives(Holy Books) all derive from a person.
Look at Romans which acknowledges that atheists know right from wrong and act accordingly despite religious insanity and the God Myths they promote by men twisted in their own sense of worth.
ROMANS 2:13-15 K J V
13(For not hearers of the law are justified, but doers of the law shall be justified.
When the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves:
15Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness; and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another;)
16 In the day when Good shall judge the secrets of men
Thus is the purest scriptural acknowledgment that Man, without God but not without Good Values, does righteousness accordingly. And How religion hates this scripture because it goes against everything religion teaches about the god myths they created.
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February 5, 2013 at 3:20 pm
Stan,
You are right. It is possible that moral realism is false, which means that what we call morality is nothing more than normalized social preferences that can change over time. But if moral realism is false, then there is no real distinction between moral values and personal/social preferences, so even calling some behaviors “moral” is pointless. Saying “vanilla ice-cream is better than chocolate ice-cream” and saying “telling the truth is better than lying” are the exact same kind of claims: personal, subjective preference. No oughts are involved. Rather, they are mere autobiographic or (to possibly coin a new term) sociobiographic statements. They describe, rather than prescribe. As such, if moral realism is false, then there is no such thing as morality and everyone should excise that word from their vocabulary.
If moral subjectivism/relativism is true, then saying “one ought not kill other people without sufficient justification” just means “we prefer that you do not kill other people without sufficient justification” since there is no such thing as an objective “ought.” If one has a different preference, however, and chooses to kill someone without sufficient justification, they haven’t really done anything objectively wrong. They are merely being socially unfashionable, sort of like wearing white socks with a black tuxedo. Or, one could say they are socially undesirable, like the person who demands to collect $200 without passing go – sure the rule that says they must pass go first is just an arbitrary convention, but we’ve all agreed to adopt that arbitrary rule and don’t like anyone trying to play by their own house rules. We may punish them for disregarding our preferences and choosing their own, but that is just our preference as well. The fact of the matter is that there is no real moral wrongdoing involved.
But I think it’s obvious that there are moral truths. We recognize that when someone kills another human being without sufficient justification, they have not merely chosen a different preference (comparable to preferring chocolate ice-cream over vanilla), but have done something actually wrong. That is why we call one’s preferences in food “opinion” and call one’s choice to murder other human beings “immoral.” They are not both preferences. One pertains to a subjective personal preference, while the other pertains to an objective moral truth.
Jason
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February 5, 2013 at 3:29 pm
NotAScientist,
You say we’ve gotten “better through experience,” but if moral realism is false, then “better” is a vacuous concept. To say a state of affairs X is better than a state of affairs Y presumes some objective standard to judge between them. But you deny that there is an objective standard, so “better” is itself relative. What you may consider “better” someone else may consider “worse” if they have adopted a different set of “moral” preferences than you.
I wrote “If humans determine what is right and wrong, then morality is just a socio-cultural expression of what we prefer. It’s no different than saying vanilla ice-cream is good, and chocolate ice-cream is bad.” You disagreed with the second sentence on the basis that “we can determine things like harm and benefit, and act accordingly.” If you mean to say that some preferences result in harm whereas others do not, I’ll give that to you, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are both just preferences. The fact that one preference may have more personal or social implications than another preference does not change their fundamental nature as mere preferences.
See my comment #11 to Stan.
Jason
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February 5, 2013 at 3:33 pm
Leonardo,
If you mean to say that man decides what is right and wrong epistemically, then I agree. But if you mean to say that man decides what is right and wrong ontologically, then I disagree.
As for Romans 2, it presumes moral realism is true, and that all men have basic moral knowledge because they are created in God’s image.
Christians do not hate this passage at all! If you think theists are arguing that man cannot be good without believing in God, you need to read more. Our claim has always been that all men have moral knowledge because they are made in God’s image, and that man can even behave morally apart from believing in God. What man cannot do is make sense of his awareness of a realm of objective moral values apart from grounding them in a transcendent moral being.
Jason
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February 5, 2013 at 3:56 pm
Jason, you said,
‘You are right. It is possible that moral realism is false, which means that what we call morality is nothing more than normalized social preferences that can change over time. But if moral realism is false, then there is no real distinction between moral values and personal/social preferences, so even calling some behaviors “moral” is pointless. Saying “vanilla ice-cream is better than chocolate ice-cream” and saying “telling the truth is better than lying” are the exact same kind of claims: personal, subjective preference. No oughts are involved. Rather, they are mere autobiographic or (to possibly coin a new term) sociobiographic statements. They describe, rather than prescribe.’
You are conflating interests with moral statements. Often the two are similar, so this is an easy thing to do.
For instance, I have interests in relative novelty, having my hunger satisfied, and delicious tastes. These are pretty fundamental interests, in that they are traceable to neurochemical reactions (interest in relative novelty from dopamine, interest in having hunger satisfied from blood sugar drops detected by the lateral hypothalamus, etc.).
When I’m pondering what to do around dinner time, I can weigh potential choices against those interests. And different options would satisfy those interests to different degrees. It may be that one particular option far outweighs the others; in fact, that option is the optimal option, since it will optimize that interest set. In the context of that interest set, I SHOULD elect that option.
Making rational evaluative judgments about potential decisions requires several things. First, it requires an interest set (which could be ANYTHING). Second, it requires that I have a sufficient understanding about how the world works in terms of causes and effects (investing in an unattainable option would be irrational, for instance). Third — and this is mostly a corollary and exception to the previous one — if I have an insufficient understanding, I have to employ probabilities in order to make a risk assessment.
So when we say that interests are subjective, we mean two things: First, they proceed from things with interests. Second, they can vary. We do NOT mean that they are whimsically arbitrary.
In addition, interests are different from the evaluative statements we make about how optimal (or suboptimal) a potential choice is. As it turns out, if our interest set is well-defined and our knowledge of the world is fixed, the rationally optimal choice PROCEEDS OBJECTIVELY.
Now, this is basically just decision theory. Generally we don’t consider questions like “Which type of screwdriver should I use on this screw?” a “moral” question. But that’s how morality works. The term “morality” just has extra baggage and overtones, e.g., it’s usually only about ‘the big stuff,’ it’s usually about things that harm or help others, it can get mixed up in deontological traditions or social customs, etc.
You said,
‘As such, if moral realism is false, then there is no such thing as morality and everyone should excise that word from their vocabulary.’
That’s certainly an option. Whenever we dramatically refine a concept, we have to decide whether to be radical (excise the word and pick a new one) or conservative (keep the word, but make sure everyone understands its more refined definition).
Imagine a culture that believes water is one of the Four Sacred Elements. Eventually, it is discovered that water is a collection of innumerable tiny particles, and that it isn’t an element at all. A radical reaction would be to excise the word ‘water’ and call that liquid something else. A conservative reaction would be to keep the word ‘water’ with the understanding that it is not a Sacred Element.
With regard to all sorts of concept-refinements throughout history, radicals have won many battles, and conservatives have won many battles.
You said,
‘If one has a different preference, however, and chooses to kill someone without sufficient justification, they haven’t really done anything objectively wrong. They are merely being socially unfashionable, sort of like wearing white socks with a black tuxedo.’
They haven’t done anything objectively wrong in the sense that there is no “objective interest set.” Moral judgments ALWAYS make an appeal to an interest set that comes from some entity with preferences. In practice, we theists often make an appeal to what we’re told of God’s interest set and NICKNAME that appeal “objective morality.”
They are being “socially unfashionable,” but as I implied above, the gravity of the event makes it of a moral intensity more severe than what we would typically describe as “merely unfashionable.” It is not “like mismatched clothing.” Rather, “it is like killing someone.” It can be very tempting, when facing a paradigm shift, to use pejorative hyperbole as an argumentum ad absurdum.
You said,
‘We may punish them for disregarding our preferences and choosing their own, but that is just our preference as well. The fact of the matter is that there is no real moral wrongdoing involved.’
You are again doing what I warned you about before: attaching “real” or “true” or “genuine” in front of a term you’d rather define the way you want. When party A makes a decision in violation of party B’s interests, then that is REAL moral wrongdoing from the perspective of party B’s interests. As theists, we would say that a sin is REAL moral wrongdoing from the perspective of God’s interests.
Note that denying moral realism is a powerful solution to the Euthyphro dilemma. Morality doesn’t ontologically exist somewhere out there.
You said,
‘But I think it’s obvious that there are moral truths. We recognize that when someone kills another human being without sufficient justification, they have not merely chosen a different preference (comparable to preferring chocolate ice-cream over vanilla), but have done something actually wrong. That is why we call one’s preferences in food “opinion” and call one’s choice to murder other human beings “immoral.” They are not both preferences. One pertains to a subjective personal preference, while the other pertains to an objective moral truth.’
The difference between minor bad decisions and major bad decisions is not, “the former is with regard to subjective things, while the later is with regard to objective things.” All decisions are modelable in the same way, which is why consequentialism (tempered by subordinate deontology to handle our shortcomings) is so elegant. The difference is that the latter are major, and not minor. And the latter are to what we typically refer when we talk about “morality.”
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February 6, 2013 at 10:19 am
I am not going to insult anybody here by insisting they must believe in God in order to know right from wrong.
I truly believe that every individual can discern right from wrong regardless of what they believe.
You often here sweeping generalizations of how all the religions are basically the same because they all teach about the same principles such as love, kindness etc…. To a certain extent this is true. So what are we to make of all this ?
I would propose that knowing right or wrong isn’t the primary objective in our journey in life. The primary objective is knowing Who God truly is and worshiping Him. To conclude that all gods are equal because all religions preach and promote love is a bad conclusion. Also, to conclude that you “don’t need God” because you behave as a moral person anyways also misses the mark badly.
If I can use an analogy, it’s like saying I don’t need soda to bake a cake. We all know that you don’t bake a cake with soda. In the same way, your sense of morality is irrelevant when it comes to the question of God.
Our performance of good deeds cannot make us gain standing in the spiritual realm. Only our faith in the true God counts for anything beyond this life. So we can argue about objective vs. subjective morality all we want, it doesn’t do us any good in the hereafter. I am not going to die on the hill of objective morality even though I believe it is true. At the same time, there are some very difficult circumstances in life where our morality needs to be subjective, even if for that one particular case. The reason is that morality is not always the prime mover, Love is. While I believe there are certainly some intrinsic built-in objective morals that we all have, there is a place where our morality can be challenged in order to serve a higher purpose.
As an example, although we know killing is objectively wrong, we would not hesitate to say that the killing of those responsible for WWII was justified and satisfied a higher moral purpose – the freedom from German tyranny !
Naz
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February 7, 2013 at 10:58 pm
On a personal level, I admit: I can’t be good without God. Hey, I can’t even be good with God. But God, who is good, can effect good things in and through me.
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October 1, 2014 at 7:34 am
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