Gerald K Harrison from The Conversation website
I have no religious convictions. I am, or try to be, a man of reason, not of faith. Nevertheless, I believe a few simple arguments demonstrate that morality requires a god.
This is interesting. Someone who has no religious convictions but has managed to think himself into believing that among mere mortals God is an essential component of morality.
That's my own conclusion in turn. Well, "here and now". No transcending font seems necessarily to suggest that there is no one or no thing mere mortals can turn to when two or more sides pertaining to any particular set of conflicting goods set out to prescribe and proscribe behaviors in any particular community.
Take moral commands. It is trivially true that a moral command is a command. A command is a command, right? It is also true that commands (real ones, rather than apparent or metaphorical ones) are always the commands of an agent, a mind with beliefs and desires. My chair cannot command me to sit in it. And commands cannot issue themselves. It follows that moral commands are the commands of an agent or agents.
Which, of course, most call God. And while others call it something else -- reason, ideology, nature etc. -- they are all over the moral and political map in regard to what actual behaviors ought to be either rewarded or punished.
And this seems reasonable because no mere mortal in the secular realm appear able to demonstrate that their own moral font is either omniscient or omnipotent.
And that is important to assure that no one who breaks the rules can get away with it. That, in other words, they will ever and always be known to have broken the rules. And thus will ever and always be punished for doing so.
Only God fits the bill here.
Many philosophers maintain that moral commands are commands of reason. They are right, I think. But the point still stands. Reason’s commands are commands. Therefore, reason’s commands are the commands of an agent or agents. So if moral commands are a subset of the commands of reason – and they surely are – they must still be commands of an agent or agents.
So, it comes down then to comparing and contrasting a mere mortal as the agent of moral commands with God.
Right?