Can We Have Morality Without God?

Can We Have Morality Without God?
by Aubrey O'Fallon

My assignment was to critically anaylize the following argument:
Morality is possible only if there's a God. That's because there's no objectivity in morality; it's just a matter of opinion or feeling. Sure, people can reach consensus about empirical, scientific matters of fact. But moral matters aren't matters of fact. People are bound to disagree with one another when it comes to right and wrong. So you really have only two options: you can either believe in God and know the objective truth about morality, or you can abandon belief in God and allow the world to plummet straight into moral chaos. Do you really want a world in which morals are totally relative and anything is permissible?

The argument in question says that morals can only be objective if there is a God. If you throw God out of the picture, moral choices become only a matter of feeling, and there’s no standard to decide if one person’s feelings are better than another’s. If there is no standard, every moral choice becomes permissible.

But is there really no standard to decide right and wrong? Most people who don’t believe in God would say there still is a standard: common human nature. That is, everywhere you go, no matter what the culture, there are certain fundamental values that everyone agrees on. Loyalty is Good. Treachery is Bad. Loving others is good. Selfishness is bad.

Yes, there are individuals out there who do not agree with these codes, but they are the exception to the rule. In the main, "Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it," says C.S. Lewis. In other words, people seem to have a moral code written on their hearts. "I dare say," says Immanual Kant, "that two things fill me with such wonder, the starry sky above and the moral law within." This law is still there in a people even if they abandon faith in God. And because the code is so similar universally, it seems it must be objective.

So far so good. But now I have some questions. Where did human beings get this universal ethical code from? If God did not give it to us, it must have come from evolution, as an instinct passed down from the struggle for survival. "All kinds of features of the human psyche -- persistent attitudes, fears, the things we find addictive, the things we find terrifying, the things we are naturally disposed to favor or dislike -- have an evolutionary basis," says Daniel C. Dennett, author of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. ("Still a Lot of the Stone Age in Us" San Francisco Chronicle).

But there is a problem with this. If one looks at the mechanisms by which evolution took place, they don’t strike us as very ethical. Animals evolved by natural selection and survival of the fittest. The "more fit" ones killed off the "less fit" ones, ate up all their food supply, or used up all their habitat. It was a bloody struggle for the chance to live long enough to get one’s genes into the next generation. The more selfish an animal is, the greater it’s chances of surviving. Charles Darwin, in his book A World of Natural Selection, said that violence is a logically deductible moral path from evolution. So is sexual exploitation. "For if God does not exist, then natural selection dictates that the male of the species is the dominant and aggressive one," says William Craig in Reasonable Faith. "Women would no more have rights than a female goat or chicken have rights. In nature whatever is, is right. But who can live with such a view?" (69).

He is right. No one can live with such a view. Looking to evolutionary heritage to find the basis for our morals leaves us in a scary place. This is exactly what Hitler did. He believed the Aryan race was the most fit, and went about exterminating all those who were less fit. In his view he was helping natural selection to proceed.

For this reason, most atheists really would not want to get their ethical code from the facts of nature alone. Most of them would rather come to the conclusion that Dennet does later, "An evolutionary explanation doesn’t mean it’s right or good," he says, "it’s just what we’re stuck with." "The real trick is stepping back and figuring out how to channel our stone age behavior in the modern context," says Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal. "We’re moral animals, so we can do that. It’s just not particularly natural."

Okay, but wait. That statement causes me to ask two more questions. The first is: If our ethical instincts come from nature, where did we get the thing that tells us some of the processes of nature are not ethical? The second is: Why should we channel our behavior into the modern context? Why should we do anything different than what comes naturally to us? I believe that without God a person cannot answer either of these questions. Let me take them one by one.

If our ethical instincts come from nature, where did we get the thing that tells us some of the processes of nature are not ethical? I think most philosophers would say "the thing that tells us" is reason. We humans don’t need God because we can use our reason to decide right from wrong. We can use reason as a judge of the natural feelings and instincts we have. Reason can sort out which are good and which are bad.

However, I could ask where we got reason from. If there is no God, our neurons and the way they are arranged all come from evolution. So, if we can get bad instincts from evolution, how can we be sure it gave us good reasoning powers? We can’t. But let’s assume our reasoning powers are satisfactory. If they aren’t, there’s no way we can figure that out, and we have to do the best we can with what we’ve got, I guess.

Immanuel Kant and other philosophers during the Enlightenment believed that humans could arrive at an ethical code solely through the use of reason and logic. However, before they could come to any coherent conclusions about right and wrong, these philosophers needed one fundamental premise. That premise was: a defintion of the purpose of human life. To explain why a person shouldn’t lie, or why they should be faithful to their spouse, it has to eventually come down to why we are here on earth and what we’re supposed to be doing here. "Time and time again it was proven that it is not possible to establish a reasonable and coherent ethical theory without first establishing the telos, i.e. the purpose and destiny of human life. Even Kant concluded that without a telos it all got wrongheaded," says Ravi Zacharias in Can Man Live Without God? (39).

The problem is, if there is no God, what is the purpose of life? There really is none. Humans are here on earth for no reason; we are just a product of blind chance. In the end, we are all going to die. Eventually the sun will go out and earth itself will cease to support life. The universe will be no different than it would have been had we never lived.

I love the book of Ecclesiasties because it so poignantly describes the state of man if there is no God. "Vanity of Vanities, all is vanity. What advantage does man have in all his work which he does under the sun?" (1:2-3). "For there is no lasting remembrance of the wise man as with the fool, inasmuch as in the coming days all will be forgotten. And how the wise man the fool alike die!" (2:16). "There is no advantage for man over beast, for all is vanity. All go to the same place. All came from dust and all return to dust" (3:19-20). In the scope of eternity it makes no difference at all how we lived in this short speck of a life. The destiny of human life is absolutely nothing. We are headed for nothing but death, and no one will be around to even remember.

So what is the purpose of ethics? "If life itself is purposeless, ethics falls into disarray." (Zacharias 39). The only purpose I can think of is to maximize human happiness during our short bout with existence. But if it really doesn’t matter what we do, why should we care about anyone’s happiness but our own?

This brings me back to my second question: Why should we channel our behavior into the modern context? Why should we do anything different than what comes naturally to us? "If life is pointless, why should ethics serve any purpose except my own?" (Zacharias 40). There is absolutely no good reason why it shouldn’t. In fact, being selfish seems the smartest thing to do.

"If life ends at the grave, then it makes no difference whether one has lived as a Stalin or a saint. Since one’s destiny is ultimately unrelated to one’s behavior, you may well just live as you please...On this basis, a writer like Ayn Rand is absolutely correct to praise the virtues of selfishness. Live totally for self; no one holds you accountable! Indeed, it would be foolish to do anything else, for life is too short to jeopardize it by acting out of anything but pure self-interest. Sacrifice for another person would be stupid" (Craig 61).

This is where rejecting God leaves the atheist. However, most atheists don’t live how their philosophy says they should. Most of them are still moral people, because they can’t get away from the moral law written on their hearts. They still behave like life has value, purpose and meaning, even though without God it cannot. Take for example Jean-Paul Sartre. He believed that a person could create meaning for his life by freely choosing to follow a certain course of action. William Craig objects to this, saying, "The universe does not really acquire meaning just because I give it one...the universe without God remains objectively meaningless, no matter how we regard it. Sartre is really saying, ‘Let’s pretend the universe has meaning.’" (Craig 65). When atheists embrace any moral code other than selfishness, they are stealing values that they really gave up when they rejected God.

In Francis Schaaffer’s book Escape from Reason, he says that man lives in a two story universe that looks like this:

GRACE, THE HIGHER: GOD THE CREATOR; HEAVEN AND HEAVENLY THINGS; THE UNSEEN AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE EARTH; MAN’S SOUL; UNITY

NATURE, THE LOWER: THE CREATED; EARTH AND EARTHLY THINGS; THE VISIBLE AND WHAT NATURE AND MAN DO ON EARTH; MAN’S BODY; DIVERSITY

Francis Schaeffer, Escape From Reason 9

Atheists, he says, are constantly making leaps of faith into the top story to affirm value, purpose and meaning, even though their philosophy says this story does not exist. They do this because, "A universe without moral accountability and devoid of value is unimaginably terrible" (Craig 68). And because, "[They] cannot live happily in such an absurd world" (65).

Man was created to live in a relationship with God. When he rejects God, something is terribly missing, and the only relief from being utterly miserable is to be inconsistent with his philosophy. So, when atheists say they can have ethics without God, even though ethics themselves depend on life having a purpose, they are not being consistent. But if they were consistent, they would have to affirm that their very life, everything they do, every choice they make, is ultimately meaningless, and who can live with that?

"If, on the other hand, I am fashioned by God for His purpose, then I need to know Him and know that purpose for which I have been made, for out of that purpose is born my sense of right and wrong" (Zacharias 40).