Morality and God

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Morality and God The belief that morality requires God remains a widely held moral maxim. In particular, it serves as the basic assumption of the Christian fundamentalist's social theory. Fundamentalists claim that all of society's troubles - everything from AIDS to out-of-wedlock pregnancies - are the result of a breakdown in morality and that this breakdown is due to a decline in the belief of God. This paper will look at different examples of how a god could be a bad thing and show that humans can create rules and morals all on their own. It will also touch upon the fact that doing good for the wrong reasons can also be a bad thing for the person. The belief that morality requires God is not limited to theists, however. Many atheists subscribe to it as well. An existentialist once wrote, "If God is dead, everything is permitted." In other words, if there is no supreme being to lay down the moral law, each individual is free to do as he or she pleases. Without a divine lawgiver, there can be no universal moral law. The view that God creates the moral law is often called the "Divine Command Theory of Ethics." According to this view, what makes an action right is that God wills it to be done. That an atheist should find this theory suspect is obvious, for, if one doesn't believe in God or if one is unsure which God is the true God, being told that one must do as God commands will not help one solve any moral dilemmas. According to Divine Command Theory, nothing is right or wrong unless God makes it so. Whatever God says goes. So if God had decreed that adultery was permissible, then adultery would be permissible. Let's take this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion. If the Divine Command Theory were true, then the ... ... middle of paper ... ...hat God is the only possible source of such standards. Philosophers as diverse as Plato, Immanuel Kant, and John Rawls have demonstrated that it is possible to have a universal morality without God. Contrary to what the fundamentalists would have us believe, then, what our society really needs is not more religion but a richer notion of the nature of morality. Bibliography Louis P. Pojman, Ethical Theory (Belmont,CA: Wadsworth, 1998), 635-637. Pojman, 646 Robin Le Poidevin, "Are God and Ethics Inseparable or Incompatible", *http://hem.passagen.se/nicb/god_ethics.htm* (10 Oct. 1996). Poidevin, article Mark I. Vuletic, "Against Moral Argument", * http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mark_vuletic/moral.html* ( 1997). Mark I. Vuletic, "The Night I Saw the Light", *http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/allen_wayback.html* ( 11/10/2000).

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