What Is the Relationship Between Religion and Morality?
Thomas Swan at the Owlcation website
This thread was created by me basically to address what I have always construed to be the bottom line with regard to God and religion.
We need things. We want things. Sometimes the same things. Sometimes different things. And as soon as these wants and needs become entangled in an actual community of men and women there are going to be conflicts. And where there are conflicts there is a fundamental need for rules of behavior.
Call this morality, call it something else. But who actually decides what these rules are? Maybe those powerful enough to enforce behaviors that sustain their own perceived interests. Maybe that then evolves historically [with the advent of capitalism] into societies more inclined to choose democracy and the rule of law.
But there are always going to be human communities [large and small] where the idea of right makes might prevails. Power is vested in those – the ecclesiastics, the philosopher-kings – that embody such knowledge. They can revolve around one or another political ideology or one or another religious denomination.
But the crucial factor that joins them all together is this general belief that, through either God or reason, it is possible to actually differentiate right from wrong behaviors. The one important difference being that with religion this knowledge carries over beyond the grave.
For the secular objectivists, however, you do the right thing because it it is predicated on such things as “scientific socialism”, or tradition or even things like ethnicity and race. Or based on one or another Humanistic rendition of political idealism. Something able to meld together “for all practical purposes” individual freedom with social justice.
Here the argument of the religious folks is that without God, morality can never really be more than a particular consensus derived from a particular community historically and culturally. Why? Because without God, mere mortals lack the omniscience to comprehend beyond doubt which behaviors really are ever and always right or wrong. And they are not omnipresent meaning they cannot know beyond doubt who is being naughty or nice. Finally, they lack the omnipotence that seems to be absolutely imperative if divine justice is to have any substantive [and lasting] meaning at all.
Then the author basically tackles this head on. No God and how on earth can we realistically think about making those crucial distinctions between right and wrong, just and unjust behaviors?
If religion is able to be put aside in any particular community, what then of morality?