sadun%ucbbach@ucbvax.UUCP (06/24/83)
Absolute Systems of Morality and the Existence of God
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There was a recent message (#132), that purported to examine
the consequences of accepting an absolute morality. Unfortunately, this
treatise degenerated into an anti-sex, anti-choice piece of fundamentalist
Christian propaganda.
This is truly a pity, since there is much that COULD be said on the
subject. In the interest of argument, let me present my own (highly subjective)
view. I hope you find my line of argument (if not my conclusion!) interesting
and thought provoking, or at least nasty reply-provoking.
Let me warn people that I am going to argue, not to prove. I am trying to
present a motivation for my own point of view much more than I am trying to
construct any form of rigorous proof.
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Accepting an absolute morality opens up the obvious question: What (or
who) defines this morality? Surely human beings cannot do the defining, or
what is moral would vary from group to group, contrary to our definition of
absolute morality. Rather, anything absolute must be "handed down from above".
For lack of a better term, let's DEFINE God to be that agent that defines our
absolute morality.
Notice that by this definition God need not have any physical attributes
at all. His essential role is spiritual -- to define good and evil. He need
not necessarily manifest himself physically. It is then quite possible that
he cannot be detected physically, so that lack of physical evidence of a god
would in no way preclude the existence of god.
That's one possibility. Let's consider the other approaches to the nature
of morality. One alternative is that morality is relative; societies
define morality, or individuals define morality, but morality does exist. It
is meaningful to call an action right or wrong, but only within the context
of the situation. The other alternative is that morality is an illusion;
"morality" is merely a convenient name do fortify the rules of society, and
there is no true right or wrong.
I must admit that the second alternative is logically waterproof. We
have no evidence that ANYTHING is right or wrong. Indeed, we can never
have any such evidence; the only evidence we can gather is physical, and
physical evidence does not address moral issues.
On the other hand, I CAN argue that nobody REALLY accepts this
possibility as the truth. If you have a conscience, then you have accepted
that some actions are wrong, and so you have abandoned the notion that
nothing has value or meaning. No more need be said on that score.
Let's look then at relative morality. First we must ask :"how relative
is relative?".
If a (large) group of people believe that mass murder and sadistic torture
are the height of virtue (with generosity and kindness presumably being
unspeakable vices), and if they acted on their beliefs, would we not all react
with a sense of moral outrage? This sense of outrage is clear evidence that
deep down none of us believes that morality is quite THAT relative. (Note
that I have not claimed to have shown that morality is NOT that relative.
All I've said is that this position has no true adherents that I need convince.)
If morality isn't completely relative, then there must be some basic,
fundamental moral ideas that are absolute. Pain and suffering are bad. Joy
is good. Death is at least usually bad (some would say always), if for no
other reason than that it deprives one of the joys of life. The list of
more-or-less basic values goes on.
I claim that accepting that such a list exists is almost tantamount to
belief in in God. For one, accepting ANY absolute standards leads to the
question "who or what sets the standards?", and we are back to the absolutist
dilemma of page 1. Moreover, there is the folowing problem, which led me,
a few years back, to firmly believe in God's existence.
Take an ordinary, garden variety stone. Smash it into bits, and ask
yourself if I could pin any moral blame on you. Unless you are an absolutist,
who also believes in the sanctity of rocks (in which case you get to flip
back to page 1), you will deny having done anything absolutely wrong.
There is no overwhelming moral principle that all must accept which protects
rocks.
Now take an ordinary, garden variety person. Smash him to bits, and ask
yourself if now I could pin any moral blame on you. If you accepted our
minimal list of rights and wrongs then you have to accept that murder is
wrong. Smashing a rock was OK while smashing a human was not.
What gives the human this protected status? If a human were a purely
physical being (i.e. an incredibly complicated rock), then there should
be no such distinction. For a human death to carry moral value, a human
life must be more that a peculiar configuration of electrons. Man must
have some supernatural nature, which is what I define a soul to be.
Either that, or there is some higher being who has decreed that human life
is to be protected (i.e. there is a God).
From accepting that souls exist to accepting that God exists is then
a small step only. We have accepted the supernatural, and we have accepted
some sort of absolute morality, and we need only look for the source and call
that God. End of problem.
Of course, the souls and God that we have defined need not have the
properties that we usually associate with souls and God. The souls need
not be immortal. God need not be omniscient nor need He be omnipotent.
God need not perform miracles. In fact, God need not physically interfere
in human affairs at all!
Of course, it would be very nice to believe that God interferes in at
least one way: he lets us know (more or less) what the standards of
morality ARE. It would be pretty useless for Him to define a moral
standard without telling anybody. If we claim that the morality we
believe in stems from God, then we must believe that either God does
something physical to get us the knowledge of right and wrong (for
instance, he could give us your favorite holy text. ), or that our
souls, which exist in the spiritual realm, have an intuitive idea of
right and wrong which they then transmit to our physical being. In
either case we do not have a completely passive God.
However we fill in the details, a few things are clear. The gods of the
ancients, who existed to explain the lightning and the rain, are gone. In my
scheme, such beings would be merely super-powerful humans who provide no
help whatsoever in answering "whence comes morality". We have progressed, in
the last 3000 years, to the point where we do not need gods to explain the
physical world around us. Indeed, we do not need gods to explain things.
We need a God to JUSTIFY the moral structure of our world.
-Lorenzo A. Sadun
sadun@ucbbach