A young christian woman asks the question "Without god, how can you have any morality?" Most of the audience laughs since they have heard this a million times. But it is NOT a stupid question, it is a very good and difficult question. I reminded the audience that many atheistic philosophers agree with the assumption of her question. They agree that without God there are no objective moral facts. In fact, one-third of philosophers think there are no objective moral facts. That’s no laughing matter.
This is a paraphrasing of a blog post that I think really hits the nail on the head when dealing with this question from theists. The main part to look at is in the second to last sentence. "..there are no OBJECTIVE moral facts." That, right there, is the basis of this question being asked. You see, even from my own christian upbringing, I can say that this is the reason why Christians do not trust the morality of atheists and those without an absolute authority figure dictating morals to them. In a non-theistic world, this person is correct in a sense, there are no objective moral facts. There is no supreme and absolute end-all-be-all authority figure that is the final word on morality. Rather, we as individual moral agents create a type of subjective hive mind morality. We put forward our own ideas, debate them, discuss them, and choose the best answer that we can come up with at that time with the available evidence. We make our own individual moral judgments, and the collective majority seems to win out as the social norm. This is why we have outliers like serial killers and rapists and racists and the like, because they are also individual moral agents who go outside of the social norms that society has created. However, the vast majority of us have the ability to empathize with our fellow humans, and as we find our own moral truths we put them forward and add to the subjective process. Is it perfect? Nope. But it is all that we have. We have to work together and make the best social structure that we can.
This absolutely scares the shit out of theists. This idea that morality is not concrete, not absolute, and have the potential to waver is terrifying. The idea that they actually have to take responsibility for their morality and do some thinking and work is overwhelming. I used to be in this mindset, and that was my thought process. It is far easier to think that you are deferring your morality upwards to a divine being to dictate what you should and shouldn't do. When in reality, that's not what you are doing at all. In fact, you are just deferring to those who actually DO put in the work to build a proper social structure for morality. This is the exact reason why slavery used to be widespread and commonplace throughout a vast swath of human history, and now it is not. We learned and evolved and realized that this is not the way we should conduct ourselves in an empathetic society where everyone deserves freedom. But now the theist runs into a problem, because their absolute authority made the mistake of solidifying the sanctioning of slavery in their holy book. It is said to be the pinnacle of morality and divinely commanded by the creator of the universe, but slavery is not only sanctioned, but blatantly encouraged. This causes a problem, because the elasticity and allowance of subjective change in morals that non-theistic morality offers is not present in the theistic objective model. Where society grows and changes, learns and evolves past such barbaric actions and ideas, theism is now stuck. Saddled now to an iron age ideology that has been cemented as absolute.
So now how does the theist get around this? Well, first of all, try to bury it. Don't preach it from the pulpit. Don't use it as a constantly quoted bible verse. Literally the tactic of "just don't look at it and maybe it'll go away". But what if someone brings it up? Now you have to have a defense for it. Now they just have to turn to the problem of interpretation in order to wriggle free of this doctrine and wash their hands. They'll say things like, "well it wasn't really slavery as we know it today. it was more of indentured servitude and happy slavery." Even though the bible explicitly states that you should buy your slaves from the heathens around you, and also tells you explicitly how to trick your slaves into being yours forever and even able to be passed onto your children as property. It also sanctions beating your slaves as long as they don't die. You see, this is a huge problem. When you sanction something as absolute authority that was actually just part of the elastic and subjective morality of the age, and then the subjective moral zeitgeist changes and no longer supports this, your absolute authority is stuck. There is no changing it, and this leads to a lot of problems. Eventually, this rigidity of doctrine will be the down fall of falsehoods. If something is true and good, it will stand the test of time. Things like the golden rule, which was around long before the bible and it still holds true. Things like "love your neighbor as yourself", also has stood the test of time. Ironically, these are the things that theists redirect to when the bad parts of their holy books are brought up. A bit of slight of hand. A bit of redirection.
But this is the ultimate point of all of this. No, non-theists tend to not adopt worldviews of objective absolute authority. But that's just fine for now, because as a whole, whether we accept it or not, our overall social structure is built on a subjective and ever evolving set of morals decided on by the people of the current generation. It has always been this way. We are getting better and better at being better and better. There is no need for absolutes. This argument needs to finally be put to rest by recognizing that yes, we build our own morals based on empathy and subjective ideas. Life is preferable to non-life, pleasure is preferable to pain. You only have something to fear from this if you refuse to participate in the collective discussion of your age. So get involved! Make a difference!
This is a paraphrasing of a blog post that I think really hits the nail on the head when dealing with this question from theists. The main part to look at is in the second to last sentence. "..there are no OBJECTIVE moral facts." That, right there, is the basis of this question being asked. You see, even from my own christian upbringing, I can say that this is the reason why Christians do not trust the morality of atheists and those without an absolute authority figure dictating morals to them. In a non-theistic world, this person is correct in a sense, there are no objective moral facts. There is no supreme and absolute end-all-be-all authority figure that is the final word on morality. Rather, we as individual moral agents create a type of subjective hive mind morality. We put forward our own ideas, debate them, discuss them, and choose the best answer that we can come up with at that time with the available evidence. We make our own individual moral judgments, and the collective majority seems to win out as the social norm. This is why we have outliers like serial killers and rapists and racists and the like, because they are also individual moral agents who go outside of the social norms that society has created. However, the vast majority of us have the ability to empathize with our fellow humans, and as we find our own moral truths we put them forward and add to the subjective process. Is it perfect? Nope. But it is all that we have. We have to work together and make the best social structure that we can.
This absolutely scares the shit out of theists. This idea that morality is not concrete, not absolute, and have the potential to waver is terrifying. The idea that they actually have to take responsibility for their morality and do some thinking and work is overwhelming. I used to be in this mindset, and that was my thought process. It is far easier to think that you are deferring your morality upwards to a divine being to dictate what you should and shouldn't do. When in reality, that's not what you are doing at all. In fact, you are just deferring to those who actually DO put in the work to build a proper social structure for morality. This is the exact reason why slavery used to be widespread and commonplace throughout a vast swath of human history, and now it is not. We learned and evolved and realized that this is not the way we should conduct ourselves in an empathetic society where everyone deserves freedom. But now the theist runs into a problem, because their absolute authority made the mistake of solidifying the sanctioning of slavery in their holy book. It is said to be the pinnacle of morality and divinely commanded by the creator of the universe, but slavery is not only sanctioned, but blatantly encouraged. This causes a problem, because the elasticity and allowance of subjective change in morals that non-theistic morality offers is not present in the theistic objective model. Where society grows and changes, learns and evolves past such barbaric actions and ideas, theism is now stuck. Saddled now to an iron age ideology that has been cemented as absolute.
So now how does the theist get around this? Well, first of all, try to bury it. Don't preach it from the pulpit. Don't use it as a constantly quoted bible verse. Literally the tactic of "just don't look at it and maybe it'll go away". But what if someone brings it up? Now you have to have a defense for it. Now they just have to turn to the problem of interpretation in order to wriggle free of this doctrine and wash their hands. They'll say things like, "well it wasn't really slavery as we know it today. it was more of indentured servitude and happy slavery." Even though the bible explicitly states that you should buy your slaves from the heathens around you, and also tells you explicitly how to trick your slaves into being yours forever and even able to be passed onto your children as property. It also sanctions beating your slaves as long as they don't die. You see, this is a huge problem. When you sanction something as absolute authority that was actually just part of the elastic and subjective morality of the age, and then the subjective moral zeitgeist changes and no longer supports this, your absolute authority is stuck. There is no changing it, and this leads to a lot of problems. Eventually, this rigidity of doctrine will be the down fall of falsehoods. If something is true and good, it will stand the test of time. Things like the golden rule, which was around long before the bible and it still holds true. Things like "love your neighbor as yourself", also has stood the test of time. Ironically, these are the things that theists redirect to when the bad parts of their holy books are brought up. A bit of slight of hand. A bit of redirection.
But this is the ultimate point of all of this. No, non-theists tend to not adopt worldviews of objective absolute authority. But that's just fine for now, because as a whole, whether we accept it or not, our overall social structure is built on a subjective and ever evolving set of morals decided on by the people of the current generation. It has always been this way. We are getting better and better at being better and better. There is no need for absolutes. This argument needs to finally be put to rest by recognizing that yes, we build our own morals based on empathy and subjective ideas. Life is preferable to non-life, pleasure is preferable to pain. You only have something to fear from this if you refuse to participate in the collective discussion of your age. So get involved! Make a difference!
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