Morality, God, and Knowing What to Do

So, here you are. You believe that a god exists. You believe that objective morality is not possible without god.

How do you determine what is objectively right and wrong?

Yesterday, I wrote two stories. In one story, I wrote of a god who says "Love is love" and views homosexual love as equal to heterosexual love. The other was of a god that views reason as his greatest gift to humanity and faith as the rejecting that risk and in doing so, rejecting God.

Other people tell stories of a god that commands killing any young woman who is caught talking to a man, the slaughter of apostates, the slaughter of anybody who questions their claims about what God wants. Some say that god demands the execution of certain wrongdoers, and some say that god prohibits all killing. Some say blood transfusions are evil, others condemn cloning. Some say life begins at conception, others say the fetus as no soul until quickening.

All of these stories - in fact all similar stories that one can imagine - are consistent with, "There is a god, and objective morality would not exist without a god."

Even desirism, the moral theory I apply in these blog postings, is consistent with that view. There is a god. God is required for objective morality. Desirism accurately describes the objective morality the this god built into the world.

Now, how are you going to determine what is objectively right and wrong? How are you going to determine if your own actions are consistent with the objective morality god created, or a violation of that morality?

You could appeal to scripture.

Which scripture? There are a lot of scriptures out there. How do you know that yours is the right one.

Which interpretation of scripture? Even people who point to the same scripture disagree over what it says - what it commands. Does your interpretation capture what is really right or wrong? Or are you seeing a commandment to do that which objective morality forbids or to refrain from doing what objective morality requires?

It is the very essence of objectivity that where two people disagree, one must be wrong. There is no sense to the claim, "A person's religion gives them an objective morality." The only sensible claim to be made is, "A person's religion give them THE objective morality." However, where those "objective" moralities say different things, at least some of them must be mistaken.

We must also add the complication that, at some level of specificity, everybody's interpretation of scripture is unique. Nobody on the planet has exactly the same interpretation as anybody else.

This implies that at most one person in all of human history - at most one and almost certainly not even that - has the correct interpretation of scripture. And even this ignores the fact that a person's interpretation will change over time.

It seems quite arrogant for any person to claim, "At most one person in all of human history will have the correct interpretation of scripture, and that one person is me."

Is it objectively good to be that arrogant? Isn't a little humility a good thing?

So, where is your objective god-given morality and how do you know when you have found it?

Chances are, you have been warned about me - about the person who may temp you to question and to doubt. You have been told to ignore questions and doubt.

Are these truly virtues? Or are these vices you have been convinced to adopt by people who want your unquestioning economic, political, and social support. These religious leaders have a lot to lose if people go astray - if people quit contributing money and political and social power to them. It is only natural for them to fear the possibility of you questioning their word - questioning the claims that always end in a call to contribute money or power to them. But are they giving you a virtue? Or are they giving you a useful vice - useful to them?

Belief that there is a god, and that god is necessary for objective morality to exist, does not help a person one bit in determining what to do. It does not answer any real-world moral questions. When it comes to answering the question of what to do, the theist and the atheist are on equal ground.