Louise Antony-Goodness Minus God

One of the things I will discuss quite a bit in upcoming posts is the subject of morality. For me it was my single biggest concern that I had as I felt my faith slip away. "Would I have any basis to continue to be a good person?"

As I discuss morality with more and more with theists and apologists I have been astonished to some of claims I have heard. For example, without God we would have no basis to say that rape was wrong or that the Holocaust was objectively wrong. Really? God or no god, if you were about to incinerate one of my family members, I would not need a divine command to pull them out of the oven and throw you in it instead.

Theists make such claims as appeals to outrage. Who in their right mind wants to be in a position where they can't condemn a Hitler or a Charles Manson? They think that the existence of objective moral facts are so inexplicable that only an appeal to a transcendant lawgiver can offer any plausible explanation and thus is a slam-dunk proof that a god exists.

Louise Antony, a philosopher at the University of Massachusettes in Amherst, explains in a clear and concise way the problems, absurdities, and down-right immorality of grounding morality in  a diety. Her article appeared in the New York Times and can be read here.

If you don't have time to read the entire article, here are a couple of quotes worth mentioning that highlight her key arguments:

“First let’s take a cold hard look at the consequences of pinning morality to the existence of God. Consider the following moral judgments — judgments that seem to me to be obviously true:

• It is wrong to drive people from their homes or to kill them because you want their land.

• It is wrong to enslave people.

• It is wrong to torture prisoners of war.

• Anyone who witnesses genocide, or enslavement, or torture, is morally required to try to stop it.

To say that morality depends on the existence of God is to say that none of these specific moral judgments is true unless God exists. That seems to me to be a remarkable claim. If God turned out not to exist — then slavery would be O.K.? There’d be nothing wrong with torture? The pain of another human being would mean nothing?”

Even if I were a moral nihilist (which I am not) the claim that I would not be able to recognize the pain and suffering, the thwarting of human desires that these actions cause to other human beings is really an extreme claim.

"If all “moral” means is “commanded by God,” then we cannot have what we would otherwise have thought of as moral reasons for obeying Him. We might have prudential reasons for doing so, self-interested reasons for doing so. God is extremely powerful, and so can make us suffer if we disobey Him, but the same can be said of tyrants, and we have no moral obligation (speaking now in ordinary terms) to obey tyrants. (We might even have a moral obligation to disobey tyrants.)"

Theists do have a response to this which I will take up in later posts, but it's not very persuasive and pretty much evacuates any meaning from the word "morality".

And lasty, "(T)here are things one loses in giving up God, and they are not insignificant. Most importantly, you lose the guarantee of redemption…I imagine that the promise made by many religions, that God will forgive you if you are truly sorry, is a thought would that bring enormous comfort and relief. You cannot have that if you are an atheist. In consequence, you must live your life, and make your choices with the knowledge that every choice you make contributes, in one way or another, to the only value your life can have.

Can I hear an "AMEN" to that?