debate-points, moralityOr from God.
Answers should be in a form that would challenge religious people, rather than get applause from skeptics.
Phase 1: Ask the believer what are some actions he/she considers moral. Also ask, “Do you consider slavery moral? Rape? Incest? Invasion and land taking?.
Phase 2: With answers in hand, point out bible verses that are in direct contradiction with the believers’ “Moral” position.
Phase 3: Demonstrate civil/secular laws that are in alignment with believer’s moral beliefs, but which are clearly derived from legislation, negotiation and societal interaction, not from Biblical mandates.
Morality arises out of the interactions of humans, trying to establish rules that protect each individual’s interests without simultaenously undermining the global interests of the group. Consistent, generalizable ethical “norms” can be found virtually NOWHERE in the bible, and those that can be found there (Golden Rule) can be shown to have arisen elsewhere.
In a nutshell, you can either question the premise or you can offer a more logical alternative.
Some ideas for questioning the premises:
1) The assertion presupposes God Any argument for God (or religions texts) as a source of morality presupposes that God exists. As an atheist, you believe that God does not exist. As a moral person you believe (I’m assuming) that morals do exist. If God does not exist and morals do, God cannot be the source of morals.
2) Correlation does not equal causation If are considering God as a potential source of morality, then we must also consider morality as a potential source of God. In other words, could God have been made up to embody morality?
3) There isn’t actually any correlation There are both moral atheists and immoral theists. If theists are closer to God and God is the source of morality, it should follow that theists are more moral than atheists and yet there are plenty of exceptions.
As for alternative explanations of where morals come from, I’ll give you my own view:
Morality is innate, because we have evolved that way. Humans evolved using a “tribal” strategy (as did many other species) where we MUST rely on others to survive. We cannot rely on others that are immoral therefore morality is inherent to our strategy. The more we can successfully rely on each other (in other words, the more effective for survival our morality becomes), the more likely our survival as a species.
I will interpret your question to mean “…the assertion that people get their morality from religious texts?” If a theist insists that some absolute morality comes from God and anyone else’s idea of morality is meaningless, then there’s no way to refute that!
1) Clearly people had moral standards before they were revealed to them in books or by God. Did Moses think rape and murder were OK before he received the stone tablets?
2) Many religious texts have appalling moral standards, most notably concerning women and slavery. Try Deuteronomy 21:10-14 for starters: “When you go out to war against your enemies and the LORD, your God, delivers them into your hand, so that you take captives, if you see a comely woman among the captives and become so enamored of her that you wish to have her as wife, you may take her home to your house. But before she may live there, she must shave her head and pare her nails and lay aside her captive’s garb. After she has mourned her father and mother for a full month, you may have relations with her, and you shall be her husband and she shall be your wife. However, if later on you lose your liking for her, you shall give her her freedom, if she wishes it; but you shall not sell her or enslave her, since she was married to you under compulsion.”
3) Values have changed. Religious texts have not. (“But God changes his standards!” hehehe)
Religious texts are echoes of reality. Humanity and human morality existed before religion, not the other way around. A simple time line could be:
Man -> Morality -> Codification of morality in the form of religion
Religion had it’s place before there was widespread literacy. It perpetuated and reinforced our moral code before there was a written history, using allegorically poetic verses. Now that our society has advanced to the point we are at, we have found that religious practice has more to do with cultural phenomenon than with real life.
I have yet to come across a simple and effective way to refute this argument. However, the problem isn’t in the simple, it’s in the effective. The mere fact that someone can say: “God is good” and expect it to mean something more than just those three words requires that “God” and “good” be independent concepts. But the logic of that may be too subtle.
So, unfortunately, I don’t yet have anything too much more concise than what I’ve written below. There are two main points that need to be accepted by the religious-believer in order for the argument to hold. Here I build up to the first point:
If “good” is nothing more than “whatever God is” or “whatever God says”, and God is not limited, then “good” can mean anything at all. That is, maybe, for the moment, “good” means X, but, of course, God can change that to Y in the next moment for no reason other than whimsy.
Now, if the religious were truly complacent with the idea that God is unlimited and therefore can determine what is “good” or isn’t on a whim, then they would feel no need for there to be a “reason” (known or unknown) why God would command them to, for instance, rape ten women. They would not need to believe that “God has a reason for doing this [that makes it good]”. It wouldn’t matter. We would not feel the need to understand why something is “good” or “evil” or that there is, in fact, at least a reason in the mind of God. The moral status of an action would simply be so by decree or, as put another way, “Might Makes Right”.
If, instead, “good” has some other basis, something independent or, at the very least, indirectly-dependent of God, then the meaning of “good” is more restricted. There would be an actual reason, hidden or conspicuous, underlying the moral status of particular actions or intentions, not merely an arbitrary decree.
If this model of morality is accepted (and I do believe it actually is by the majority of religious-believers), then regardless of what that reason is behind what is considered moral, it has been established that there is one as opposed to morality by arbitrary decree. This is the first point that I think should be accepted by the religious believer. If it can’t be accepted, then you’ll need to go in another direction or, in the case that this is actually true, accept that they believe “might makes right” – and it is actually as simple as that for them. If another deity defeated or overruled theirs then they would follow that other deity’s arbitrary moral decrees. Nothing else matters.
Now on to the second point.
If the first point can be accepted, then most of the work is already done. If there is a reason behind morality, then it is necessarily independent (or indirectly-dependent) of any deity; the deity must apply that reason to determine what is moral and what isn’t. Surely a deity could have decided what that reason is, but an establishment of some measure of independence of morality from the deity itself is enough to further the argument. The argument can now become whether or not the deity provided the reason underlying the moral status of actions or whether that reason stands alone.
To best drive home this second point you can speculate about what reasons could form the basis for morality. For instance, morality could be something that arose from the natural laws of our universe. For instance, because of how our universe behaves, suffering exists and an autonomous being has the ability to cause another to suffer. One might suggest that to intentionally cause suffering as an ends is morally wrong. Keep in mind this is just an example. But the point is that we can examine an action and the intentions behind it to determine if and why it should be considered immoral. Furthermore, if the natural laws of the universe changed somehow, changing the consequence but not the action, we may come to another conclusion. If stabbing a puppy actually made the puppy more healthy and happy – we would have to reconsider how we morally label such an action.
If this point can be accepted, then the argument is complete and only the conclusion needs to be stated. Namely, if they so wish, they can believe that a deity created the natural laws of the universe and, by doing so, this deity has indirectly set up the rules for morality. However, they must also now concede that, if natural laws can exist without a deity, then so can morality. More fully, morality can exist without any particular religious text or decree.
Not even the most staunch fundamentalist can’t live by the teachings of their holy book (Fred Phelps doesn’t beat his children to death for talking back, Christians no longer keep slaves). Thiests and atheists alike are the garantors of their morality. Religious people just find elements of their book that they like the sound of and discard the ones that they think abhorrent.
Ask any theist to qualify their morality and you will see that the good that they espouse and it’s benefit to humanity is entirely based on secular ethical frameworks. Anything else amounts to an argument from authority.
Hope this helps.
One way to refute this is to point out the sorts of proto-morality revealed in developmental work by Kiley Hamlin with Karen Wynn and Paul Bloom.
Unfortunately, most of this work is unpublished yet so far, and I feel it is scientifically disingenuous to discuss the particulars of it before it has gone through full peer review. Nonetheless I link to Prof. Hamlin's website where some of the early publications can be found.
Nonetheless, it may be that at least simple forms of morality, e.g. wanting to associate with those who help others more than those you don't know more than those who harm others, is present in infants as young as 6 and 3 months old. This is clearly before any explicit religious texts could be read. There will be more awesome research coming out of the Hamlin lab that supports this point, but to see that to fruition will take some time.
Edit: I just remembered a good blogging heads vlog between Paul Bloom and Josh Knobe that is closely related to this issue. In it they discuss many things including the possibility of "hardwired" morality, which would be an extension of this style of refutation. The videoblog
Simply. All societies seem to exhibit similar degrees of hatred, murder, rape, war and disease - and only the emergence of a rational humanistic society seems to improve this condition, and rational humanism has no holy book - therefore correlation at a minimum seems to point to holy books being a cause of human suffering, regardless of content.
By asking: “the bible is quite adamant, for example, that we should not make images of god. Based on what moral authority did you choose not to obey this commandment, but to keep to do not steal?”
Of course there are examples coming from the gospels as well if someone retorts saying that the gospels override the old testament.
I would start by asking just what the person is asserting. In most cases, I have found they haven’t thought that out too well. They are likely to come up with something like, “well the 10 commandments are a good start”. You could point out that one of those says to observe the Sabbath, I don’t see how that is a fundamentally moral. If they mention a source you aren’t familiar with, they will need to supply you with more details. Listen carefully and don’t be combative. The idea is to get to a discussion going of just what the person considers moral.
As mentioned above, general moral standards will no doubt come up. For example, not killing. Again using the Bible, the story of Moses includes discussion of rules about killing that already existed in Pharaoh’s system, so that could lead to discussion about where that came from. Knowledge of any culture that had little or no contact with the texts they are asserting are the source of morality should be helpful.
Most likely, they will be relying on someONE telling them that some text is the source of morality, not their own actual analysis of the text or comparisons to other texts. This is not necessarily bad, it depends on how moral that person is. Discuss why they trust that person and how they are judging that they are moral. Whomever is making the assertion has a proclivity for following authority, so this needs to be done delicately, but hopefully they start to see that they are thinking for themselves. You can still pay homage to their authority figures or their texts and include them in the discussion, but point out that each of us needs to consider many sources and trust ourselves.
Religious texts are written by humans, therefore, morality is defined by human acts. Attribution of these texts to a divine source is also a human act. Some may call the texts “religious”, but at the base they are works of mortals (maybe very smart or thoughtful mortals, but mortals, nonetheless.)
Basically, the “morality” taught in such texts represents schemes for making communities work. Attributing them to divinity, to the extent that people accept the divine authority, can make enforcement easier among those disinclined to examine the rationale for the rules and the need for compromise in individual behavior. The more esoteric, ritualistic “morality” of worship practices, reinforces the power structure. Like Soylent Green, religious texts is people.
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