A young person on another forum said the following.
I don’t know where to even begin trying to answer that question, and I was wondering if anyone here had any thoughts?
Hi Michael
I don’t know if my attempt is complete nonsense but my initial reaction is that without faith there can be no foundation to any ‘morality’.
It has been said that atheists are moral parasites. The language may be rather inflamatory but I do believe there is a truth to that statement. Note I am not saying that atheists behave in a less-moral way than myself. Far from it. But I do believe that if they analyse the foundation for morality, they fall short and require something transcendent to argue a case for a moral system. In doing so, they are having to look outside of their world view.
So, perhaps, when scripture says ‘without faith it is impossible to please God’ and ‘the just shall live by faith’ it is because faith is essential for morality. It is the source. Perhaps atheists are relying on a faith system without knowing, without acknowledging it.
Just my 2pennyworth and I’m interested to see what others have to say.
God bless.
good point, Pilgrim…
i believe that faith without works is dead, so faith that doesn’t bear fruit is pointless and nonexistent.
so morality should grow from faith, otherwise i’d argue that the faith isn’t real.
so my view is that faith and morality are totally intertwined, that to emphasise one without the other is contradictory. even an atheist can have faith in a certain aspect of the universe, if not the spiritual, and that can be enough
This one is complicated. I think maybe we need a definition of morality and maybe even of faith. Are laws and morality connected, or does morality dictate our response to the law? Is our faith determined by our church or the Bible or Jesus, all of them, only one of them. Is it something that comes from inside you?
I believe that if you have faith in God, your actions should be determined by that faith. Go Corpselight!!! But won’t those actions also be determined by the kind of God you believe in??? People of faith opposed slavery, but other people of faith supported it here in the US, so does faith ensure morality? Women only got the vote in the 20th century and people on both sides of the sufferage controversy hurled Bible verses at each other. Even now, ask a gay person if he thinks people of faith are also moral?
The first laws known, the Code of Hamurabi(sp?) gave us an eye for an eye, a hand for a hand, etc. type of laws. I think most people today agree they were a bit too far on the punitive side and hence immoral. But for their time they were probably revolutionary and better than honor killing choas for every perceived injury.
So just what is morality and where does it come from?
excellent post, Lizbeth!
Thank you pilgrim.
Could you explain what you mean?
Morality could be defined by the golden rule of “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” (or, as formulated by Confuscious–“do not do unto others what you would not want them to do to you.”)
But what does this have to do with faith (however you define it)?
How does belief in a Deity ot deities, or trust in such a Being (or in Karma, or anything else) provide the foundation of morality?
If you died saving a helpless child from a burning building, wouldn’t the act be just as moral if you didn’t believe in God (or expect to be rewarded for your sacrifice in some afterlife) as it would be if you did?
This is why I ask (and I think why this young person asked) why God values faith.
Can you help me understand what you mean when you say that “without faith there can be no foundation to any 'morality,” and that without God a moral foundation “falls short and requires something transcendent”?
Faith is both trust (faith in) and fidelity (faith to). We must have faith in Yeshua as our Saviour, and be faithful to Yeshua as our Lord. The latter necessitates ever-upward works of love.
Michael: I think if anyone dies saving a child from a burning building she is acting from love—not morality. And a person who does not consciously know God will probably get a greater reward in Heaven than someone who does consciously know God because that person expressed love in the Greatest possible way without knowing He who inspired the love. After all this is an Evangelical Universalist Christian Board, so the person who acted unknowing will KNOW after her death is defeated.
Ok—I can see this as a good definition of faith, but how does it lead to morality?
If we trust that his life (his teachings and example) and resurrection is our salvation (the way to God, the only truth and all life), and endeavour to be faithful to that life, we would necessarily follow his “morality” (a spirit of unconditional, universal, self-sacrificial love and liberty).
So why does God value faith?
Why does He test it?
Why does He hide Himself?
Why does He seem to intentionally make it hard to believe He’s there sometimes?
Same questions.
Hi Michael
You ask some challenging questions. I’ll try and tackle them one by one.
I think the classical response would be that without an ‘absolute’ standard of morality, one that does not derive from human beliefs, we have no real basis for calling any act ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Dostoyevsky said it in The Brothers Karamazov – “if God does not exist, everything is permitted”.
Indeed, without absolute moral standards, the words ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ lose their meaning. And that is because your idea of ‘good’ might differ from mine. To take an extreme example, if I have sex with a woman forcibly because I am attracted to her, but she does not reciprocate my feelings, I don’t think you’d get much argument that this act of rape is wrong, indeed downright wicked. But if there is no absolute standard of right and wrong, then I could argue that because the act benefitted me, because it made me feel good, then it was not in fact ‘wrong’ – at least not as far as I was concerned.
This is, so far as I understand it, one of the foundational principles of existentialism, as propounded by atheist philosophers such as Sartre and Camus. Because there is no God, and hence no ultimate meaning in life, they argue, the way we give our lives meaning is through the things we choose to do, our actions – whatever they may be. In Camus’s novel L’Etranger, the protagonist kills an Arab, for no real reason. But he feels no remorse for his ‘crime’; indeed, his crime, even though it leads to him being sentenced to death, actually makes him happy, because – I think (long time since I read the book!) – in committing it he is at least ‘being true to himself’, doing what he wants to do.
Now you might argue that moral standards can be determined through consensus within a particular society, without reference to God or moral absolutes. But that doesn’t really fly. To illustrate, the Nazis, for reasons I don’t really understand, decided that the world would be a better place if they exterminated the Jewish people. (I guess it had something to do with their political ideology of the so-called ‘master race’.) Now under traditional Judaeo-Christian morality, the holocaust was truly wicked. But again, with no absolute moral standard to appeal to, who is to say that the Nazis were ‘wrong’ to do what they did? Indeed, if you asked them they would say what they did was actually ‘right’!
Two more thoughts on this issue:
As CS Lewis argued in his book The Abolition of Man, it is a remarkable fact that all societies and all civilisations throughout history have basically adhered to the same moral standards – ie that murder, rape or cowardice, for example, are ‘bad’, and generosity, unselfishness and kindness are ‘good’. Of course, there have been aberrations, such as the aforementioned Nazis, but in essence, all human beings everywhere have held the same standards of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Lewis argues, and I would agree with him, that this is because moral standards are innate in us, and are put there, in the form of our consciences, by our Creator.
You can’t tell me that the torture and murder of a child is only ‘wrong’ because our society chooses to define it as wrong, and that were we to believe differently it would not in fact be wrong. I know in my heart, know as deeply as I know myself, that such an action is fundamentally and unequivocally, always and everywhere, intrinsically wrong, wicked, ‘evil’ in the extreme. How do I know this? Not through evolution, surely. For evolutionary instinct may well tell me that killing another man’s babies is actually beneficial to the survival of my own children, as it eliminates competition for food or whatever.
And indeed, this is precisely the way lots of animal species behave. But of course, we don’t call a lion ‘evil’ because he kills a rival lion’s cubs. We say he is just obeying his instincts, doing what comes naturally. But if, as atheists believe, we are just highly evolved animals, why can’t we do the same? Why would it be any more ‘wrong’ for me to kill another man’s child than it would be for the lion?
This is basically the position adopted by people we call psychopaths. Moors murderer Ian Brady is one such example. He does not accept that his torturing, sexually abusing and murdering five children was ‘wrong’, because he rejects Judaeo-Christian moral standards in favour of his own self-defined ‘morality’. Hence he has never shown any remorse for his crimes, other than expressing regret that they led to him being locked up for life.
So, if our conscience was not produced via evolution, where then did it come from?
And of course, whether the atheists like it or not, the moral standards we all live by in western society are Judaeo-Christian moral standards. Camus and Sartre may have rejected the idea that morality derives from God, and yet they still lived their lives according to Christian moral standards (so far as I can tell).
I don’t see Richard Dawkins going around saying it’s okay to rape and murder as long as it makes you feel good. But that it is the inevitable logical conclusion of his beliefs: without God to ‘arbitrate’, we must each of use define our own moral standards. And you can bet your bottom dollar that if I went round to his house and nicked his car, or ran off with his wife, he’d be the first to protest that my actions were ‘wrong’ or ‘unfair’. Ah but Richard, I would say to him, by whose standards are my actions wrong? Why should I do something , or refrain from doing something, just because you don’t like it? The fact is that I want your expensive car, so I’m jolly well going to take it.
Bottom line: nearly all atheists are total hypocrites when it comes to this issue of morality. They reject the basis on which moral standards exist in the first place, and yet they continue to live by those very same moral standards. And thank God they do, otherwise society would collapse overnight.
I will try and respond to some of your other questions in a further post.
All the best
Johnny
Hi Michael
You asked:
If you do not believe in God, the question becomes nonsensical. As I hope I have made clear in my previous post, if you do not believe in God, you cannot define any act as ‘moral’ or ‘immoral’, for you have no basis on which to do so.
But if you are a believer, the answer to the question is definitely yes – your action would be just as moral if you didn’t believe in God as if you did (although of course, as we have seen, it is only the believer who can define it thus).
As a Christian, I believe that it is both ‘moral’ and ‘right’ to try and save others from harm, especially those who are unable to help themselves. I would say that if I sacrificed my own life to save the life of a child then this would be a ‘good’ act, an ‘unselfish’ act, a ‘heroic’ act, a ‘godly’ act even.
But the atheist could – indeed must, if he is being honest – respond that:
A) There is no such thing as goodness, or unselfishness, or heroism – or godliness, obviously! We may go around behaving as if these things were objective realities, but of course they aren’t. They are illusions.
B) Doing something which results in your own death is an act of pure folly, as it curtails once and for all your opportunity to pass on your genes, which is what you are ‘programmed’ to do.
C) Why bother trying to save the child’s life anyway, as ultimately it is meaningless?
Cheers
Johnny
Hi Michael
The original question asked by your young friend was this:
To me this is a red herring. A non-question in fact, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, as we have seen, morality is impossible to define objectively without God. The very word ‘morality’ becomes meaningless under atheism, other than in the loose sense of ‘however anyone chooses to behave’.
Secondly, the above notwithstanding, one cannot compare or ‘measure’ the value of faith against the value of morality, because the two words, or rather the concepts they describe, are not in the same category.
If I say I believe that “faith has more value than morality”, what would that actually mean in practice? That it is better to have faith than not, even if this leads me into doing something immoral? That it is more important to have faith than it is to act morally? Or what?
Faith, in the sense of faith in God, is a virtue – one of the three theological virtues, in fact (the others being hope and charity).
Morality is not a virtue. It is a set of values, a standard of behaviour against which our actions can be judged – an altogether different animal.
Under Judaeo-Christian standards of morality, it is a good thing to have faith. But we would not describe people who do not have faith as immoral, or say that they are incapable of acting morally. Indeed, many people of no faith behave far more ‘morally’ than do many Christians.
Perhaps you need to go back to the person who asked this question and ask them to clarify what they mean in saying that a theist “values faith over morality”.
Cheers
Johnny
Hi Michael
Fourth – and last – part of my response to your questions, and I have to admit the part where I am least sure of what I think. In fact, I think we are approaching the unknowable here, in my opinion. But anyway, let’s have a crack at it.
I guess my answer to all these questions would lie in the issue of our free will. All the evidence is that God does indeed allow people to act freely in this world – if He does not, why do we do so many bad things? And in order for us to be properly free, God must be ‘removed’ from us, at least in an immediate, sensory way – what is known classically as ‘epistemic distance’. For if He were to make His presence known to us openly, then not only would our freedom to choose to follow Him be severely compromised, if not removed entirely, but we would be completely ‘dazzled’ spiritually, as it were. An essentially Arminian theologian like Jurgen Moltmann (for Moltmann is basically an Arminian Universalist) would argue that good has no value unless it is freely chosen, freely embraced. We cannot be coerced into loving God, basically.
Further, it seems as though the process of us ‘finding God’ – when of course, it is really the other way around, He reveals Himself to us – is somehow a valuable one. There is something about coming to know God, rather than being born into His direct presence, which He clearly considers worthwhile.
This, incidentally, is one of the principal reasons why I reject that blasphemous theological atrocity known as Calvinism: if, as Calvinists believe, God preordains everything that happens, and our wills are not free but are completely controlled by His, then not only does that make Him directly responsible for all the evil acts we commit, but it makes His decision to remain largely hidden from us a complete nonsense.
I hope my musings have been of some interest or encouragement to you, Michael.
Peace and love
Johnny
Hi Michael
I agree with Johnny’s posts.
Let me tell you a story. Three teenage girlfriends had a sleepover. In the middle of the night two of them awoke and garroted the third.
It is a true story. I read it in a newspaper whilst sitting next to an atheist work-mate. I was horrified and we began talking about it. After a while I asked my friend why the two shouldn’t have done what they did from an atheists perspective. By that, I meant, “Give me a moral foundation strong enough to persuade one of those girls that what they did was wrong”. He couldn’t.
“Loving my neighbour” is guidance which I (as an atheist) can choose to agree with or disagree with. There is no one who can persuade me that I am wrong (as an atheist) should I choose my ‘moral code’ to be “If it makes ME happy and I can get away with it, then it is good and I don’t care *** about the damage I do to anyone else”
So is the atheist who chooses to love his neighbor without believing in a God who’s able to punish him for any wrong he does more or less praiseworthy than the Christian who believes there is such a God.
I was talking about this to a priest recently, and he pounted out that faith isn’t the cheif Christian virtue.
He pointed out that Paul said that even if he had the faith to move mountains, he’s be nothing if he didn’t have love.
The virtue of love I can understand, but the virtue of faith I have trouble with.
You and Johny (and the priest, if I recall correctly) seem to be talking of faith having a kind of instrumental value (i.e. a faith in God being intrumental in knowing right from wrong, and having love), and I guess that makes sense–but then the faith is kind of a means to an end, and not an ends in itself, so I still find it a little hard to understand why God seems to value it so highly.
But I do thank both of you.
I think that there no credit due to anyone whose motive to do good is born from an aversion to being tortured forever.
I think Jesus told a parable of two sons/servants?? one who said he would do the work but didn’t, the other said he wouldn’t but did. The loving atheist has some sort of faith in ‘love’ itself and God IS Love. He may be ‘more saved’ without knowing it than many of us so-called christians.
But I must mention something about the word ‘faith’ or ‘belief’. Again, Jesus reminded us that even the demons believe.
True ‘faith’ for a disciple of Christ is to fully TRUST and surrender to. There may come a day, in this life or the next, where no ‘belief’ is necessary on our part because seeing is believing and we will see face-to-face. But we still need, at that point in time or eternity, to fully TRUST this man/God we see and to fully SURRENDER to Him.
I hope that some of the above makes sense.
xx
Yes.
I think that last part does kinda make sense.
Thank you.
Here is my understanding of the teachings of Christ and His apostles:
- Jesus died so that we could overcome sin (at least most of the time).
*II Corinthians 5:15 And he died for all, that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.
I Peter 2:24 He himself endured our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. *
- We appropriate Christ’s death to overcome sin through faith. Paul wrote:
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” (Romans 1:16,17) RSV
The good news, repent (have a change of heart and mind) about your self-serving life and become a disciple of Christ, submitting to His authority, and you will have the power of God to save you from sin (salvation is a process). Then you will have a righteousness in your life which was given by God. When you entrust yourself to Christ as His disciple you begin to become righteous through this faith, and that righteousness increases as your faith goes from one level of faith to an even deeper level, of faith and therefore to an even deeper level of righteousness.
It’s not that God values faith per se. What He values is righteousness or morality. Faith is but a means to achieve it.
Depending on the religion, faith is belief in a god or gods or in the doctrines or teachings of the religion. Informal usage of faith can be quite broad, including trust or belief without proof, and “faith” is often used as a substitute for “hope”, “trust” or “belief”. Some[who?] critics of faith have argued that faith is opposed to reason. In contrast, some[who?] advocates of faith argue that the proper domain of faith concerns questions which cannot be settled by evidence. This is exemplified by attitudes about the future, which (by definition) has not yet occurred. - That is faith for me 