Is religion required for morality and for people to behave morally?

[Jichard]

That's not exactly true. I believe that truth exists independent of what I believe.

Do you think that moral truths are true independently of what God believes, commands, feels, etc.?

If you answer, "no", then you're not a moral objectivist. If you think that moral truths are true in virtue of God's beliefs, commands, feelings, etc. then you're a moral subjectivist.

And I don't see what you mean by a contradiction.

The contradict isyou moved from saying that:

things are good or bad in and of themselves

to saying that:

someone has to decide things are bad in order for them to be bad

[JimL]

And you know this how, exactly?

Because once you are dead, you are dead. You may wish to believe that an earthquake will ensue one day in the very distant future and open up your grave allowing your undecayed body to crawl out and once again join the living. But that is a fairy tale taught to naive children. How do I know? Empirical fact. Bodies decay away, and that is what we are, bodies made of flesh and blood.

That chaos might result without it doesn't tell us whether an absolute standard of morality / ultimate justice (whatever that is) exists. The same would be true in a system that did have an absolute standard.

Thats true, if people acted in accordance with the golden rule with respect to each other, whether the golden rule is absolute and grounded in a distinct creator or not, then life would be better for all involved. So, all that tells us is that a distinct creator is not necessary for morality to exist, and neither is ultimate justice.

[Papa Zoom]

This reply doesn't help you for a number of reasons, which hinge on your answer to this question:

What aspects of God's character/nature make God good?

If you appeal to certain properties of God (such as God character traits), then God isn't required anymore. As the Christian philosopher Wes Morriston notes:

""

Of course, you could give other responses, but they'll result in other problems I've gone over elsewhere:

Unless one opts for something like divine simplicity, then God has multiple, non-identical properties. For example, on one traditional definition of "God", God has the properties of being omnipotent, being omnipresent, being omniscient, and being omnibenevolent, amongst other properties. Now, you seem to be claiming that God has the property of being morally good. In response to this claim of your's, one can ask "in virtue of what does God have the property of being morally good?" You could answer this question in a number of ways. For example, you could claim that God's moral goodness supervenes on other properties God has. Or you could claim that God's moral goodness is identical to other properties God has. Or you could claim that it's simply a brute fact that God is morally good, and there's nothing more to say on that. Or... So let's survey some of those options:

1. You could say that God is morally good in virtue of other properties God has, such as God having certain character traits (ex: being fair, being merciful, etc.), God acting to promote the welfare of sentient life, etc. This is a very plausible option, and is the path taken by various Christian philosophers such as Wes Morriston. This option also makes sense of the following thought experiment:
   Imagine a vicious, psychopathic deity who was also omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, etc. This deity commands that people do vicious things (like rape and genocide), just because that deity enjoys watching the carnage. Is that deity morally good?
   The obvious right answer is "no". And option 1 explains why: it's because the deity lacks certain character traits, and acts in a way that willfully, needlessly harms sentient life. Option 1 also has the further benefit of making God's goodness intelligible. So instead of making vacuous statements like "God is morally good because God is like God" that rob "is morally good" of any meaningful moral semantic content, one can instead say that "God is morally good in virtue of God's mercy, justice, etc." That actually gives some content to God's goodness. Of course, this means forfeiting the claim that moral properties can exist only if God exists. After all, if non-God things have the features in virtue of which God was morally good (ex: having certain character traits), then those non-God things can be morally good, even if God does not exist.
2. You could say that God is morally good in virtue of other properties God has, properties which God alone has, such as God being omnipotent, being omniscient, etc. This move suffers from a number of problems. For example:
   A) It undermines moral arguments for God's existence and it leaves theists susceptible to the very claims they use to to support their moral argument. After all, theists normally try to get their moral arguments off the ground by noting the existence of moral properties instantiated by non-God things. For instance: claiming that saving someone in the Holocaust was morally good. However, option 2 undermines this move, since on option 2 that action does not count as morally good because only God counts as morally good and that action is not God. And that means anyone who things that action was morally good, will have a ready-made objection to option 2: point out the numerous examples of morally good things that are not God, including the action I just reference. Really, option 1 commits theists to position very close to moral nihilism, where they they deny the existence of moral properties such as being morally good, "being morally right, etc. except when those features are had by God.
   B) Saying that "God is morally good because God is omnipotent" implausible confuses might with right. And it makes no sense to claim that a being is morally good because that being is omniscient, or omnipresent, or... After all, as I noted when discussing option 1, a psychopathic, vicious deity could be omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, etc. yet it would make no sense to call such a deity morally good just because it had those features. Being knowledgeable, or being everywhere, or being powerful, or... doesn't make one morally good.
3. You could saying that "God is morally good" is a brute moral truth, and cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else. But this response also has it's own problems. For example:
   A) Option 3 makes God's goodness morally unintelligible. After all, on option 3, you can't specify what you mean by "is morally good" beyond just saying that it refers to one of God's properties. There's no moral content there.
   B) You've made claims like "God is morally good" largely empty, since on option 3, that statement boils down to saying something like "God has a property that God has". Such a statement would be true regardless of what God was. For example, it'd be true even if God was a vicious psychopath or a turkey BLT sandwich.
   C) Unless you want to indict yourself for special pleading, you'll be unable to object to an atheist's position simply by saying because the atheist appeal to brute moral truths. After all, you've just appealed to brute moral truths as well. For example, an atheist, hedonistic utilitarian might say that it's simply a brute, unexplainable moral truth "Pleasure is morally good". And if you say that hey, you can't to brute moral truths, since brute truths are not allowed, you'd be engaged in special pleading (Eric Wielenberg has made related point against William Lane Craig's position).
   D) Your brute moral truths introduce unneeded complexity, with little-to-no-compensating benefit (Wes Morriston has made this point before).

Great post. I've been chewing on this for a few days and the more I chewed the more I read from both Morriston's work and that of WL Craig. I'm also trying to work through an article by Jeremy Koons. It's the proverbial biting off more than one can chew. I'm very busy at this time of year and wanted to be able to give this a proper response. Perhaps a separate thread as this strays from the OP a bit (though not entirely). But it is extremely interesting to me.

The OP asks: Is religion required for morality and for people to behave morally? Religion isn't required for morality. Neither is it required for people to behave morally. That's obvious by the fact that many non-religious people behaving in ways we all consider moral.

What does seem to be required (at least to me it does) is a Supreme Being of some kind. Unless we are saying that objective moral fasts exist apart from human invention. But that seems to beg the question. I'm still not clear where, apart from a Supreme Being, objective moral facts could come from.

One doesn't need a God for there to be an objective standard, regardless of whether the topic is physics, biology, morality, or something else.

This seems to be the ultimate questions philosophers have argued with for thousands of years.

Same false presupposition: no one needs to decide that actions are morally wrong, in order for those actions to be morally wrong, anymore than someone needs to decide that some animals are dogs in order for them to be dogs. To say otherwise is to a adopt a form of moral subjectivism, not moral obbjectivism.

Dogs are the animals they are by virtue of their existence. They are physical creatures. Morality is a metaphysical construct. What is responsible for the reality of the thing we call moral actions?

They don't. For example, neither utilitarianism, nor Kantian deontology, nor virtue ethics require that someone decide actions are wrong in order for actions to be wrong.

What makes them wrong?

If you felt differently or didn't care, that would be irrelevant to whether or not the moral theories were true,

I agree. But that doesn't explain where they came from? Morality is a concept. It's not a thing like a tree. It's an idea. People come up with ideas. What or who came up with the idea of morality?

just as it would be irrelevant to whether a scientific theory was true.

I think a scientific theory and the idea of moral actions are apples and oranges.

What's you're doing is akin to someone responding to evolutionary theory is true by saying "But what if I felt differently? Why should I care?" This response is ridiculous since the mere fact that one thinks differently has no bearing on whether evolutionary theory is true. Similarly if one doesn't care about evolutionary theory; that has no bearing on whether evolutionary theory is true. So those questions are simply red herrings.

I have no problem with what you are saying here except that scientific theories are not like morality. Science is what we observe in nature. We can explain it through observations and mathematical equations. We can falsify (and whatever else scientists do to test theories). I don't see how morality is similar.

Same for your questions; they are red herrings that have no bearing whether moral theories are true. Objective true caims are objectively true regardless of whether someone disagrees with them and regardless of whether someone cares.

A moral theory can only be "true" if it's actually true. If two moral theories contradict each other, they can't both be true. Right? And I totally agree that objective truth claims are true regardless of whether someone disagrees with them and regardless of whether someone cares - but ONLY IF those claims are actually true.

[Papa Zoom]

Whether you care is irrelevant to whether those theories are true, justified, etc. just like whether a creationist cares about evolutionary theory is irrelevant to whether evolutionary theory is true, justified, etc. So your question was an irrelevant red herring.



They are true if they provide an accurate account of moral properties and what other properties moral properties supervene upon, just as scientific theories are true insofar as they provide an accurate account of the aspect of the natural world which they describe. No one (certainly not a deity) needs to make them true or decide they are true, in order for them to be true.

I really think your explanations are begging the question. Sure it's irrelevant if I don't care about a particular theory. That has no bearing on the truth or falsity of the theory. But just as not caring is irrelevant, so is believing in the validity of a theory irrelevant to the ultimate truth of a theory.

You claim that a theory is true if it provides an accurate account of moral properties etc. Yes but how do you determine that they are in fact providing that accurate account? You seem to be assuming that they do without any sort of proof.

[Jichard]

I really think your explanations are begging the question.

How so?

Sure it's irrelevant if I don't care about a particular theory. That has no bearing on the truth or falsity of the theory. But just as not caring is irrelevant, so is believing in the validity of a theory irrelevant to the ultimate truth of a theory.

OK. But remember the point was to address your claim that:

Well that seems to be the question. Does morality depend on you and me and our collective views or is it something else?

You seemed to think that the only options available to atheists were "you and me and our collective views". I was pointing out that that was false, sicne there were other options on which the truth and falsity of moral statements neither depends on our views nor the views of God.

You claim that a theory is true if it provides an accurate account of moral properties etc. Yes but how do you determine that they are in fact providing that accurate account?

I've already gone over one way of showing they provide such as account:

"To which the objectivist has the same sort of response one would have in science, epistemology, etc.: because that's the answer one would come to after examination of the actions that most plausibly seem to count as wrong.

It'd be like if someone said "why is the Earth a planet?" You could list a whole bunch of features (F1, F2, F3, ....) in virtue of which Earth is a planet . And someone could then respond, "Why does F1, F2, F3... make something a planet?" And the answer is: because that's the answer one would come to after examination of the objects that most plausibly seem to count as planets (which is just another way of saying: doing science to figure out the features are had in common by objects that seem most likely to count as planets).

Similarly It'd be like if someone said "why is that belief justified" You could list a whole bunch of features (E1, E2, E3, ....) in virtue of which that belief is justified. And someone could then respond, "Why does E1, E2, E3...? make something justified"? And the answer is: because that's the answer one would come to after examination of the beliefs that most plausibly seem to count as justified (which is just another way of saying: doing epistemology to figure out the features are had in common by beliefs that seem most likely to count as justified).

"

You seem to be assuming that they do without any sort of proof.

No, i'm not assuming that. For example, I think Kantian deontology provides an inaacurate account. Instead, my point was 9as I mentioned above) that these are accounts that are compatible with both atheism and moral objectivism, where the truth and falsity of moral statements neither depends on our views nor God's views. And that would rebut your attempt to claim that the only options were God or moral subjectivism.