More on God and Morality

Many of the arguments I see about whether we need God revolve around the issues of God's existence and Creation. The question to ask, though, isn't whether we would be here without God, but whether we could be moral without God. That is in fact what drives theists - they're trying to defend the obligations they live by and want everyone else to live by.

Most theists would give at least one of two answers to the question of God's role in morality. One of the answers is that God actually determines what's right and wrong. I've already written a good bit about this, but I'll say here that this view precludes the whole idea of moral principle. If right and wrong depend completely on what God says, if - as Luther and Calvin wrote - things that are right wouldn't be right without the will of God, and things that are wrong wouldn't be wrong without the will of God, then morality depends on somebody's will and not on immutable moral principles. To say that morality is merely relative to God's will is to embrace moral relativism, which is no morality at all.

The other answer is that our imperfect human minds cannot know what is right without God pointing us in the right direction. Even if morality can exist without God, they say, our human minds always have the capacity to make an error, and everything that passes through a human mind is bound to be distorted. According to this answer, God's direction is supposed to insure us against inevitable human error. But can God's direction insure us against inevitable human error?

Even if God himself were to descend in a physical form and open the gold box of all morality and let each one of us see all morality with our own eyes, we're still seeing it with imperfect human eyes and processing it with imperfect human minds. Information would still be handled by humans, and so would still be subject to inevitable human error.

Let's leave the hypothetical now, and talk about what fundamentalists and many evangelicals actually believe. The Bible is supposed to be the word of God, and all that humans need for their present condition is to read the Bible and follow it. Or, that's what they say, until you ask them about things like slavery. Not a single Bible verse condemns slavery, and yet most every Jew and Christian considers slavery a sin.

Christians haven't always condemned it, though. Conservative Christians in America in the mid-19th century thought that since no Bible verse condemns slavery and since the Bible actually seems to condone it, slavery isn't a sin. The issue was so big that it split denominations. The Methodists split in 1844, the Baptists split in 1845 (that's why there are Southern Baptists), and the Presbyterians split in 1857. The disagreement was over how to interpret the Bible. The liberal Yankees couldn't find Biblical passages to condemn slavery, and, from the perspective of Southern conservatives, were relying on something other than the Bible for moral guidance.

Frankly, any time you use a Biblical passage to condemn slavery you're really reading the condemnation into it. Your own ideas and the norms you were raised with act like a lense to filter out the Bible verses that bother you, highlight the Bible verses you emphatically agree with, and give certain verses the meaning you want them to have. Whenever you read the Bible, you're introducing to your understanding of it various ideas that are not contained in the Bible itself.

Just look at how many disagreements fundamentalists have with each other over what the Bible really means. If all or at least most fundamentalists are saved and if they read the same word of God and listen to the same Holy Spirit, then apparently being saved and reading the Bible and listening to the Holy Spirit aren't enough to know for sure what God wants. If God is telling us all the same thing (and he would be fooling somebody if he isn't), then why do we disagree over what he's trying to tell us? The reason must be that on at least one issue each of us has a hard time telling what's coming from God and what isn't. Even though the Holy Spirit dwells in each saved Christian, the Christian still has an imperfect human mind that can be deceived by imperfect human reasoning. The indwelling of the Spirit cannot insure the Christian against his own mind.

There is a third answer to the question of God's role in morality, but I've only read it and I can't remember anyone seriously saying it to me in person. This is the idea that without God human beings would be so depraved that they wouldn't even want to be good or have any moral opinion. My interaction with unbelievers would suggest otherwise. And what about unbelievers who passionately share moral positions with conservative Christians, like the pro-life atheists and agnostics? These people seem to have a Christian morality but without God. Now, many Christians believe that God can and does work in and through unbelievers (no one would get saved if God doesn't). If God really does, then maybe obeying someone you believe to be God isn't necessary for a moral life. Of course, saying that God secretly guides unbelievers to be good is still attributing our morality to God's direction, and I addressed that in the previous 6 paragraphs.

The claim that we need God for morality seems dubious. That is, if we think of God as a person. If we think of God merely as The Good, then by definition it's impossible to be good without God. Or, as Roderick Long wrote, "The only intelligible conception of God is one that identifies God with logic and morality, or what contemporary philosophers call 'the space of reasons', which is what I think the Gospel of John was hinting at in speaking of the Logos as what is 'with' God and is what God is."

But now, by logic and morality, do we mean the human practice of doing logic and moral theory, or do we mean the abstract "forms" of logic and morality themselves? Because if we mean a human effort, then we're talking about something fallible, and if we mean the abstract forms, then we're talking about something that still requires fallible human effort to know.

I think Long uses "logic and morality" to mean the abstract "forms" of logic and morality themselves. If that's the case, then he's talking about God as something that still requires fallible human effort to know, and it seems this idea of God has the same problem that I mentioned above - that it doesn't ensure us against inevitable human error. But insurance against human error is a God criterion that the conventional theists came forward with; it's not a God criterion that Long uses, or that I use. And so, the fact of inevitable human error despite God is a problem for conventional theists, not for Long. All that Long is doing is trying to help the theist coherently say "Yes, you need God to be moral". If you define God as morality itself, as Long does, then the sentence makes sense: "Yes, you need morality to be moral."