Good or Evil?

Question

Can good or evil really exist without the existance of God?
If so, who would define them?

PLEASE REMEMBER........IN THIS QUESTION GOD IS GENERIC

God can be defined as any form of supreme being or set of supreme characters that influence thought through imagination and belief.

Has there ever been a society that developed these concepts without the influence of religion in some shape form or fashion? Please, note them.

My basic question is wouldn't good or evil always be based upon what a person or group of people believe, and therefore always be a religious set of values? Isn't that the definition of religion, the system of belief behind the concepts of good and evil, right or wrong?

Answer 1

Superb question. And, the answer is "No," not in a moral sense. What you have left if we divorce ourselves from God is societal notions and motions of what should be right and wrong, but no absolutes.

Societal notions change with the culture and the philosophical school of thought prevalent at the time. Philosophers struggle with an answer and have looked at both negative and positive utilitarianism, but that's just societal mood dressed in fancy words.

Ultimately, post-modernism, taken to its logical end, results in the implosion of a society, culture or nation. And, by the way, there are those in our world today who want that very thing! Yikes.

We need moral absolutes. Without God, you will have none. There is no adequate substitute for God!

Answer 2

Sure, if you define good as what a normal group of people would consider it to be. To answer your last paragraph, yes it would depend on what people thought, but religion is always in reference to a metaphysical being with rules and rituals. People deciding what is good doesn't have to even touch on that subject.

Good and evil are always relative. Even peopl within one religion can't decide what good and evil are.

I doubt any major culture developed rules absolutely devoid of religious influence since religion has been around far longer than any society from written history. There have been rituals around death for 70,000 years or more. Some communist countries try to be atheistic but the people who made the rules were at least exposed to religion.

Answer 3

Sure you can have good and evil without a God.

There is no connection although those who believe in a God have been told there is all their lives and have never questioned it.

Buddhism and Confucianism both do not have a God but have very strong ideas of good and evil. They show that you can have good and evil without a God. In fact they show you can have a religion without a God.

It is easy to say that a desert tastes good, or that someone did something that is evil without having to attach any religious idea to it at all.

I agree that people with a specific belief think that only their belief is valid, but they are never able to prove that. They can base their ideas of good and evil on their religions but that does not limit another person or group from describing good and evil by other means. Religious beliefs don't own the terms "good and evil".

Answer 4

No, good or evil wouldn't be based on belief, but rather the actions and the person's deeds. Good is an option each individual can choose to potray, it is the option of a positive life. Every man has a little bit of good in them, goodness is like a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished. Also a person can cose the existence of evil in his/her life. Evil is simply a vain and negative resideness of life, it is full of the consequences of destruction and death. A person has the power to choose either way with the possibilities given. God expressed good nature when He created a beautiful garden for the first beings he created to live in it (Adam and Eve), however they chose the way of evil by listening to the devil. (which is the serpent).

Answer 5

Other words. can morals be a genetic programming. an instinct.

the animal world shows a small example of animals protecting, sharing, giving.

But, it seems to be that killing and the choice to for go it, is hard to find.

Humans have an extended morality. We have the option to die so another would live. We can choose not to kill, even when we would benefit grandly and not be condemned. Good and Evil

This is a bad time to ask. The definitions and beliefs 200 years ago, let alone 2000 year ago...are different.

Today, things called evil are now called good or personal choice.
Things considered good then are now considered biased, wrong, out of place.

This scares me, because we are told that, in the end times...however that may last...good will be called evil and evil will be called good

Answer 6

Religion was not oganized to define good and bad - - right and wrong. The original purpose of religion was to cheat death. Of course, thousands of different ideas were used by the dozens of larger religions, and thousands of smaller ones.
The various beliefs evolved over thousands of years. It's very strange that that could happer if there is an almighty God. Almighty means able to do anything, but he couldn't come up with a way of spreading the word world wide. Perhaps we should refer to a God of limited might.

Answer 7

I'm not going to try to answer your question, but I would like to suggest that the concept of good and evil is in the eye of the beholder...I am coming out of a very difficult time in my life and I have discovered so many wonderful things through my trials. One of them, and probably the most significant is my belief that there is no such thing as evil...ALL situations under Heaven and of this earth, good & bad, serve for the betterment of the individual...

Answer 8

Even without the existence of God, human will still make their own rules governing what can or cannot be done. Simply because human are borned with conscience and a brain to reason and think.

Answer 9

No, "good" and "evil" don't have to be a set of religious values.
Those terms have always been defined by the people in a particular society -- even if they "believed" they were projecting whatever god's will by defining them.
They're simply rules that allow people to live together in reasonable harmony in a particular society. And, as further proof that "god" has nothing to do with them, they've always been fluid and different from one society to another.

In ancient Rome, it was not "evil" to own slaves, or to treat them roughly. In fact the bible, in Ephesians, tells slaves to be submissive to their masters and do what they tell them to do. Slavery was common, accepted, and not considered "evil" at all then. Now it is. Why? Did god tell people back then that it wasn't evil, and then tell somebody else recently that it was? No...we finally realized, as humans all on our own without any intervention from made-up gods, that treating any of our fellow humans beings as slaves, and owning them, was evil. So we changed our definitions of good and evil to accomodate our revised thinking. Just as it's always been -- no god involved.

There has been a basic concept throughout ALL societies that things that harm others are bad, and things that don't harm others are good. In many societies, it was only bad to harm others *OF YOUR SAME CLASS OF PEOPLE* -- but the concept still holds. We've just expanded our "same class of people" to be all humanity, that's all.

By the way, both Greek and Roman civilization, to just name two, derived their own laws, codes of conduct, and concepts of "good" and "evil" without gods. They believed in gods, mainly as instruments of punishment, but both civilizations did not depend on their god figures for deciding good or evil in their society -- they acknowledged that, and that they decided on their own laws and rules.

Answer 10

good question. generally in every religion there is a supreme ruler, one that seewed the world toghether and other gods that help it along. a socieity cannot exsist withour some sort of religion so i dont think there ever was. religion doesnt have to be good or evil it is ones belifs and views. i really like this question!