Can Morality exist without God?
One key point that has been argued down the ages is that morality is only of intrinsic value if it is objective, which means it needs to come from an external source God, not merely a set of opinions which we temporarily agree on. Here we investigate this point of view.
Introduction & Respect for Persons
Initially most people would think that the obvious answer to this question is ‘yes, of course morality can exist without God.’ It certainly seems that both atheists and agnostics alike can lead what we recognize as good and decent lives, despite their lack of belief in a deity. Often times, in fact, it appears that many unbelievers’ moral lives put many religious believers to shame. But the question here isn’t, can we act morally without belief in God, but, ultimately, can morality exist without God? This second question is different from the first – it’s a question about the nature of moral facts and values themselves, as opposed to how someone may or may not act.
Over the centuries various explanations and theories have been offered as to just what such moral facts and values are. Some see them as simply expressions of social and cultural conventions (i.e. like driving on the left hand side of the road as opposed to the right) or as questions of personal taste (i.e. like having a taste for certain kinds of food or not). In the abstract it’s often appealing for people to treat morality as simply a question of personal taste or social convention. Such moral relativism, however, often comes unstuck in the face of truly horrific evil – it seems hard for most people to really accept that anyone could seriously argue that the Holocaust or the recent genocide in Rwanda are simply issues on a par with how someone enjoys their curry or how a certain culture views its traffic laws (as crude as this may sound, this is essentially what many moral theories ultimately state). Such acts are evil, plain and simple, and there’s almost nothing to say to people who deny otherwise – in many ways it is equivalent to denying the laws of logic. Intuitively we all seem to know that some things are just wrong, whatever opinion any person or society may have to the contrary. In other words moral facts are objective and binding upon people in a way that’s independent of their individual opinions of them.
How can we best sum up this objective moral sensibility that we all seem to intuitively possess? The German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s idea of respect for persons or to treat people as ends rather than as means, as having inherent worth and dignity simply by the fact that they are human beings and nothing more, seems as good a summary as any. Kant thought that we should always act towards others in a way which considers people as ends in themselves rather than simply as a means to our own ends. This is why actions such as murder, theft and rape are wrong – because such acts treat others simply as a means and not as ends in themselves, thus discarding the inherent dignity they possess as human beings.
Evolutionary Ethics
For people who do not believe in God, then, and yet still wish to affirm the worth of human beings and the objective wrongness of such actions as murder/rape etc., what are the options? For most atheists and agnostics the most obvious explanation for how we came about our moral sensibility must lie in our evolutionary past. Though such theories of evolutionary ethics are still highly speculative it would seem that some process of natural selection would have genetically predisposed our species to act in certain ways and with certain ‘herd’ characteristics, for the simple fact that such behaviour contributed greatly to our survival as a species as opposed to some other different behaviour patterns. So, to give one example, perhaps altruism and self-sacrifice became characteristics we admire in people because, ultimately, one person sacrificing his life for others meant that fewer members of the species died, thus greatly enhancing the species’ chances of survival. Eventually such genetic predispositions came to be enshrined in various laws and cultures across the world.
But does such a naturalistic evolutionary account give us sufficient warrant for the inherent dignity of persons, as well as the objective wrongness of certain acts committed against them? It seems to me that, in effect, we could just as easily argue that the fact human beings have evolved a spleen or a kidney to aid in our survival as a species gives us inherent moral worth – but would anyone seriously propose such a thing? In this case it seems simply arbitrary that we should chose our evolved moral sensibility as something which endows us with inherent moral worth as opposed to something else we’ve evolved, such as a bodily organ – after all both are by products of an amoral evolutionary process aimed at survival and reproduction and not at moral action. In effect this raises David Hume’s old philosophical problem of gaining a non-naturalistic value from a naturalistic fact.
Furthermore, as philosopher of science Michael Ruse has noted, if we ‘roll the dice’ of evolution again, so to speak, there’s a good chance we would end up with intelligent creatures that somehow consider to be morally praiseworthy almost everything that we as human beings consider to be morally repulsive (i.e. cannibalism, murder, selfishness, rape, incest etc.etc.). From this Ruse concludes that there can be no such thing as objective moral truth – and even if there were such a thing it would remain simply irrelevant to us as a species, for the chances that we have evolved in such a way as to exactly reflect within our internal moral structure whatever such an objective moral order may be is vanishingly small.
As noted at the beginning, this does not entail that the agnostic/atheist cannot live a moral life in the sense of following the rules they intuitively feel they possess. But it does mean that they have no real objective basis for why they should do so. This poses a dilemma for many people – if they stick to naturalism and atheism it appears they must assert that there is no such thing as objective moral values after all and, therefore, no basis for inherent human dignity. But, on the other hand, it appears that most of us – atheist, agnostic or theist alike – sincerely wish to affirm the objectivity of moral values, as well as the inherent worth of persons. Something must give.
Christian Ethics & Conclusion
But what of theism in general and, specifically, Christian theism? The Biblical doctrine that we are all made in the ‘Image of God’ (Genesis 1:27) gives human beings an inherent moral worth that naturalistic philosophy cannot provide and, thus, a foundation for treating others as ends in themselves and, therefore, an objective morality. Jesus Himself summed up the essence of all morality in the so-called ‘Golden Rule’ (Mark 12:31) – to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ – or to treat people with the dignity they deserve, in the same way you consider yourself and your own life as intrinsically meaningful. When we realize that each individual person is created equally in the Image of God we cannot help but see them, and human beings in general, as possessing intrinsic moral worth – something that morality as an evolutionary byproduct cannot provide.
