I have been writing about ethics without God. I should say that the problem of ethics was the last thing that kept my belief in God. I was convinced by the argument from C S Lewis about morality. It was apparent all humans had a very deep sense of morality. This was universal, not cultural. It seemed that moral sense was tapping into something outside of us and must have been given by God. Now I’m not sure why I didn’t consider an evolutionary explanation for that sense, but I didn’t. We understand quite a bit about how a moral sense can evolve now. Also, it seemed that without God, ethics were relative and had no solid basis.
In my earlier posts I showed some of the problems with my former view. God doesn’t really solve the problem of what compels us to be moral. An enlightened self interest is better than God, and ultimately, God still requires self interest to compel compliance.
When I still believed, I knew that non believers can be ethical, but I thought it was likely that those ethics were smuggled in. We grow up being taught what is right and wrong. Those ethics originally had a basis in religion. Later, we reject the religion, but still accept the ethics we were taught, even though the basis for them is gone. Eventually, if everyone did that, the ethics would crumble because there is no longer a foundation for them.
I thought that because I had a hard time figuring out how ethics could not degenerate into complete relativity, and I knew that such subjective ethics were dangerous and couldn’t hold up. Even after I rejected God completely, I still wasn’t quite sure how to ground ethics, but I had at least some idea.
An important insight was realizing that religion smuggles in secular ethics as often or more often than the other way around. For most of our behavior, we give reasons why something is right or wrong. When asked why lying is wrong, even believers don’t say it’s just because the Bible says so. They would say, what if everyone lied, or explain how it hurts people, things like that. They use purely secular, non religious reasoning. More impotantly, some religious views have changed, and they have changed not because of revelation or anything related to God, but because of reason.
Slavery is a good example. The obvious reading of the Bible is that it condones slavery. It has various rules about how to treat slaves, which certainly implies an endorsement of slavery. There were no church teaching against slavery for 1500 years. It was during the enlightenment, when the use of reason lead to concepts of universal rights, that slavery was condemned. Anti slavery views were often taken up very strongly by the religious, and they felt that it was God’s will and they might find some Biblical passage to justify it after the fact, but in reality, their newfound belief was smuggled in from secular reasoning.
If we can use reason to justify most of the traditional teachings in the Bible, and if many religious teachings have changed due to reason, what is the need for religion in ethics? The only thing left purely to religion are rather silly things like whether we should eat pork, and some strictures on purely personal behavior (such as masturbation, etc.). Strongly secular societies, such as Europe, have not seen a decrease in morality, at least not public morality. They do better than the U.S. in most measures. The only thing affected by the loss of religion is private morality and religious observance.
This doesn’t completely get rid of the problem of relativity in ethics. We are still left with a situation where ethical views change over time. But it seems that morality has mostly gotten better. The religious often think we are in moral decay, but I don’t see going back to a time with slavery, racism, oppression, child labor, and women as chattel can be seen as an improvement. We can take the lesson of science when it comes to ethics. Science doesn’t know the truth. It just gets better and better at approaching the truth. Science has been called knowledge without certainty. Ethics can be like that as well. We don’t know for sure what is right or wrong. We can just approach it. Just as our science gets better over time, so our ethics gets better over time as we better understand what does and does not lead to human happiness. If you want absolute unchanging certainty, I guess you need God. You don’t have to think quite as much that way either. I prefer the other way.
Tags: ethics
July 23, 2008 at 6:57 am |
At the heart of the ethics of the Bible is the character of God. Holiness, morality is about God’s character. Lying isn’t wrong just because the Bible says so; it’s because it goes against the character of God – that’s what sin is. Pork wasn’t a sin because pigs were bad, it was sin because God set a standard, and challenged men and women to uphold it. Kinda reminds one of the Garden…
The ethics of the Old Testament and all the little picky rules are about what it takes to get to God – which is impossible for you, me, everyone. The Law points out our failure.
The ethics of the New Testament is about grace, the fact that God did what we couldn’t… because of love. Most of the major improvements in personal rights were championed by Christians who understood that God values everyone.
Our ethics in society aren’t any better, they are a hollow drum. Now, it is big business and money that control western politics and our economies. The violence done in our society is more often in ways that don’t leave physical marks, because we are “civilized”. I don’t believe we are better off than we were in days gone by ethically, just more comfortable because we have more stuff. Take the bigger picture of China, Iraq, Iran and a host of other places and look at the poverty, look at the abuses, look at the masses.
The ethics of today are all about our personal rights… but how often do you hear the limitation that my rights only go so far as they begin to infringe on someone else’s rights? You don’t, because it is me, me, me.
Statement of fact of situations does not imply condoning. The message of the New Testament was not political – it was about love. It was about giving up self in order to understand the reason why we are here. You have to read those passages in the context of their times and look at what that world was like at the time of writing. Jesus did not come to set up an earthly kingdom.
Smoking is our personal “right”, yet it consumes billions of tax dollars in health care issues, both for cancers as well as heart and other health issues. Drinking is our personal right, yet drunk drivers and abusive alcoholics are all around us. Drugs are a personal right, yet the percentage of break-ins attributed to fuel drug habits is like 80%. And in all those things a there are industries doing billions of dollars of business. The rich get richer and do whatever it takes to get and keep control. Kudos to a free society!
July 23, 2008 at 5:16 pm |
I do not support any ethic based just on rights and never implied that I did. I certainly don’t support an ethic based on big business and money. In fact, I have an ethic based on love, amongst other things. I will address your point about things being wrong for reasons other than just the Bible says so in a planned later post.
You mostly support my case here. You are using reason to argue why an ethic based on personal rights doesn’t work out. You use reason to argue that an ethic based on power or money is bad. You argue that countries like China are a problem based on the visible effects, not on anything deriving from God. Adding God doesn’t help at all. If you want to argue that we shouldn’t be using drugs, you will do so using reason, not by appeals to God. You will appeal to publicly accepted norms, by appeals to consequences, both for society and to individuals, material and psychological. You will argue that it does not produce happiness. In that way, we don’t need God. Once you bring in God as a purely arbitrary thing without reason (because the Bible said so), it becomes empty.
Maybe I should have asked a simple question. What is something that can be shown to be wrong with only appeals to God, with no appeal to reason? The only examples I can think of are things that are still just rules to follow in religions, like keeping the sabbath holy, or not having false Gods. That has no force.