| Site links | Sample essay answers - If God exists, then one should live according to His laws. If God does not exist, then what is the foundation of morals, ethics, honesty and charity? |
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"Have not all theists painted their Deity as the god of love and goodness? Yet after thousands of years of such preachments the gods remain deaf to the agony of the human race. Confucius cares not for the poverty, squalor and misery of people of China. Buddha remains undisturbed in his philosophical indifference to the famine and starvation of outraged Hindus; Jahweh continues deaf to the bitter cry of Israel; while Jesus refuses to rise from the dead against his Christians who are butchering each other." Emma Goldman, 1916 |
'If God exists, then one should live according to His laws'. This statement would naturally follow from a belief in the kind of god described by the major monotheist religions. In these religions god is a single entity and we are the special favourites of god. God is an all-powerful super-being who has made the universe for a purpose too difficult for us to guess at but whose purpose clearly places us in the centre of the scheme of things and involves us following a prescribed set of laws to fulfill his requirements of us. These laws might be of a kind that many non-theists would readily accept e.g., that in general it is wrong to kill another human being - or they might relate to such things as which shoelace we must tie up first when we have put on our shoes or how we should wear our hair. However, this statement would not apply to a god who had made the universe but took no special interest in what happened to its various inhabitants. We might only be a matter of curiosity to a god who might regard us in the way we regard the animals in a zoo. For us the lion is neither good nor bad when it hunts and kills, it is a lion. Our activities might be seen in the same light by a god. Some might argue that it would be impossible for a god not to care about what it had created. However, part of the definition of a monotheistic god is that it is vastly superior to us and beyond our comprehension for this reason. This being the case monotheists cannot describe its attributes with any confidence and cannot say what is possible or not possible. God might not care about us after all and might not have troubled to set us any laws to follow. Any laws we come across might have some other origin. When a number of gods are involved it is less clear that there are necessarily any laws to live by. The gods of Ancient Greece and Rome had distinctive personalities - not necessarily very nice ones, and were the victims of a number of less-than-moral human failings. These gods existed for us to ask favours of in return for an offering of some kind that would benefit them individually. 'If God does not exist, then what is the foundation of morals, ethics, honesty and charity?' This sentiment demonstrates one of the key weaknesses of the religious viewpoint. It suggests that there is no reason for us to behave in a moral way without the existence of god. To put it in another way human beings have no natural reason for behaving in a moral way and are at least equally inclined to act immorally. If this is a viewpoint generally held by theists then for them human beings are indeed monsters. It is also difficult to understand why we still exist as a species because morality, ethics, honesty and charity are all attributes that have evolved to aid us in our survival and have led to our becoming the dominant species on the planet. No religion is needed to give a mother her love for her child or cause her altruistically to defend her young against predators. No religion is needed to require people to work together to achieve a common objective or group survival. But something more than religion is needed to break down the forces that turn Serb against Bosnian or Catholic against Protestant - because religion is a partisan in the fighting and part of the problem to be overcome. If the foundation of morals, ethics, honesty and charity stem from the existence of god and are a product of following his laws we must ask ourselves what motive we could have for wanting to obey it. The motive is provided by our desire to go to heaven or perhaps to have our prayers answered. This is certainly no less selfish than a desire to work together with a fellow human being in order to run a business or raise a family - activities which need moral conduct to work effectively. As a motive it is also potentially dangerous because it gives priority to a direct link with god making it a duty to follow 'god's will.' This provides the opportunity to ignore one's fellow man and his needs and brainwash him into following the commands of a cruel deity who demands blood for the price of his cooperation. There is nothing about a god or gods that ties them to the notion of moral behaviour.
Footnote: I suppose there must be some really disturbing people out there but they'd be psychopaths or whatever, satanism or no satanism, and are part of a different problem altogether. |
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