Does logic of morality break down without God?

Question

As I read Nietzsche and consider history it seems to.

After reading for years and asking many people, I come across basically two arguments for why we should be moral without God:

1. Good people want the world to be a good place, so its good to want the world to be a good place.
2. Consequences, Reward and Punishment, what goes around comes around. If you're good to people they'll be good to you. Cooperation.

These reasons fall apart. The first is just circular logic and doesn't go anywhere. The second is valid most of the time, but people can get away with things and escape this reward and punishment social system with money, power, force, deception. Any student of history can see that.

I read some Kant and Plato and Bible and kin selection and Nietzsche, and the only universally sound reason to be good/moral that convinces me is the idea that one day we will each stand before God to give an account of our lives.

Nietzsche shreds Kant into near worthlessness. The Categorical Imperative seems weak to me. it's purpose is to make the world a better place. Okay, but why do we want that? It very much falls into category 1. If its about self-preservation, it falls apart because there are many instances in which morality has no part in self-preservation.

Also, blithely calling the belief in God is lazy. the universe it too finely tuned for there not to be a god. Read Francis Collins (Leader of the Human Genome Project) or Stephen Hawking on the topic. Variables like constant of gravity, the proportion of quarks to anti-quarks, and about 13 other variables are balanced on a knife edge just suited for our existence. Read about it.

I'm still just getting tautologies. We should want to be moral because it's good to help people. Yeah okay, why? Please avoid circular logic.

"God is unnecessary in the definitiion of morality." That's neat, but why? Why? Why? Why?

Answer 1

You're correct. Logic of morality does break down without God.

I think that another attempt is to lay it at the feet of evolution, i.e. evolution made me an inherently good person therefore my conscience, given by evolution, is a trusted guide.

Answer 2

If you've read Kant, you should have run across the Categorical Imperative, which is basically that an act is moral if you would be willing for everyone else on the planet to do the same thing. That's kind of self-preservation. Add to that the belief that we are all part of a universal power and that we therefore hurt ourselves when we hurt others and you have a perfectly good reason for morality. And you can't call that universal power God since God-ness implies a separate higher form of being.

Answer 3

Man created God in his own image.
God has those morals because man has those morals.
Fear of judgment is a terrible reason to be good.
We have a thing called 'conscious.' When people do what's wrong, they get punished. Yes, it's possible to escape, but a majority of them don't. There are always exceptions. Religions throughout history have used religious texts to try to prove that human actions and the human body are unimportant, thus it doesn't matter what we do at all. We're all going to Heaven, do what you want, in short.
People are taught morals. When they see they do something that hurts another, unless they are told otherwise, they learn that what they did was bad. God isn't necessary to have a conscious.

Answer 4

By "without God" i assume you mean "without the BELIEF of God." Which would be untrue.... I know some athiests with better morals than thiests....

Lol. If there are absolutely no punishments or rewards (includign the sense of knowing you did good and other simpler ones), then it would be a complete toss up of which one you do. Even negative actions give you the "satisfaction" that you "got ahead" or "got even." Well actualy you wouldn't do ANYTHIGN most likely, seeing how we do things BECAUSE OF rewards and punishments. Like we eat for the reward of not being hungry and continueing to live.

Not only that, but if you take out rewards and punishments you REMOVE the concept of morals. Morals tell you what "right and wrong" are. Right and wrong are meerly telling you what beniefits others and what punishes others. So if you take punishments and beniefits out, you are left without right and wrong, and hence without morality.

Also one can use your own logic back at you for your "universally sound reason." Why do you want your account of your life to be good? So you can be REWARDED by going to heaven/nirvana/any other form of paradise?

Answer 5

I can't understand why you're asking this question if you've already read Nietzsche. Morality does not break down without God. Nietzsche merely recognized that it is MAN and NOT GOD who defines morality. God is there only to deflect the responsibility for creating his moral code to someone else. Under Nietzsche we do not stand before God, we stand before ourselves.

The way you posed the question, I think you are at the point of realizing this as well. I beg to differ with one of your opinions. Not only is God a lazy answer, it is a cowardly one. There is no grand order of schemes. If there were there would be justice in the world. The world does not operate where the good prevail over the evil.

Our notion of the afterlife (another notion of laziness) is also created so that we console ourselves into thinking that even though this criminal is rich, deceitful, hateful bastard who can get away with anything he wants in real life, this guy is going to Hell.

Here's one more argument to see whether it is God or Man who defines your morality. Tell me, how did you choose your religion?

Answer 6

To answer your last question first - Morality can exist without God because there is extensive historic evidence of cultures that had deep rooted moral standards without the belief in a judgement in the afterlife. Civilizations from Sumer, Carthage, Rome, Mayan, Aztec, Mongol, Egypt, and Norse, to name a few, all had moral constructs without believing that there was a God that would judge one's action or provide reward/punishment in the afterlife. While these moral codes may not match a judeo-christian format, they are indeed moral codes of equal reverence and complexity to that culture.

To another of your points - That our existence is predicated on very narrow windows of opportunity does not support the argument that only a supreme being could cause it. It only supports the argument that we would not exist if the conditions didn't allow us to. Unlikelyhood or complexity of occurence does not equal impossiblity of occurence. In other words, its not "finely tuned", it's correctly tuned for our lifeform. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be here to observe it.

The best example is the lottery winner. It is millions to one for any individual to win. Yet someone does. I don't think you could approach every lottery winner and say "Since the odds were millions-to-one against you winning, the only way you could exist as a winner was that a higher force fixed the lottery for you".

We're the lottery winners. All other lifeforms that required conditions other than ours are the lottery losers. And the fact that there are millions of lottery losers does not mean we didn't win, and it does not mean that a higher power was necessary for us to win. It just means that our conditions, in this case the selection of six numbers, met the requirements of the universe, in this case the six balls that defined the winner.

Answer 7

We're moral creatures because we are social creatures. We survive in societies and social units of more than one person. We generally die if we are alone or behave totally selfishly; at least, we wouldn't successfully hand down a constitution that wasn't inclined to behave morally. Societies that do not transmit shared basic values (values underlie morality, always) are unstable and don't support us as well as those that do. Overall, each individual is motivated to moral behavior -- not moment to moment intuitive, objectively moral behavior, but making decisions influenced by the innate inclination to follow learned shared values.

To conclude that morality implies god, you need to assert that there is an absolute moral law not related to values.

Answer 8

The "it must be god" theory is fine if you've bought into fantasy creatures whose "powers" in the here-after are too scary to contemplate... But, doesn't that just mirror your second 'no-god' postulate? Reward vs. Punishment?

No. Morality is a social/cultural measure of "goodness". Each culture responds with it's own brand of reward/punishment....

Answer 9

Fear of God is not necessary for morality.

People who live a moral life without such beliefs are, in many ways, even MORE moral than those who need the fear of God to keep them in line.

Answer 10

I would presume that its natural to be 'good' to people because it perpetuate our species....in the evolutionary sense. In order to survive in the savanahs of north africa, those groups that were cooperating and 'good' to each other were the ones that thrived. Those that were mean may have bashed in the heads of their fellow tribal members, but the 'good' of the many usually won out and the mean ones were outcast. After the eons, that instinct has been hard-wired into our limbic systems....at least most of us.