Without God one cannot meaningfully define good. A meaningful definition of good requires God.
The two aren’t mutually exclusive
The apophasis in the “without God” approach is clever since you can avoid making any assertion at all, perhaps you mean that we’re no better off with God than without.
Defining good as anything you like is not as good a definition as any other. To say that the definition is axiomatic doesn’t work either. By definition that would imply that the definition is self-evident, which it obviously is not. Furthermore, “anything you like” does not include or exclude anything.
You answered the OP no. But you’re reasoning implies that: Without God one cannot meaningfully define good. A meaningful definition of good requires God.
And I haven’t the foggiest as to why you think it would or what that question has to do with anything in my post.
To repeat the question: does a belief in some universal morality, in Right and Wrong that exist independent of evolutionary and cultural selection mechanisms and that exists independent of who does or do not believes it to be true, imply a belief in some sort of god concept, even if it ends up being more of a Spinozan sort of one?
The OP for me goes with the assumption that we are all relatively at the same starting point. As a theist I would say God works into my morality, and if I suddenly ceased to believe in God, it would probably impact my relative morality more than, say, someone who never meaningfully believed at all.
I don’t know if it’s a theological dilemma as such. If an atheist (hypothetically) held someone up as a paragon of virtue–a parent, close friend, politician, military strongman, etc.–and they were suddenly let down or betrayed, I imagine it would create an ethical crisis. If you discovered that God didn’t exist after making him the bedrock of your ethical system, then that’s the analogy I would make, i dont know if others think it’s fair or not. If you found out your dad was a petty thief or a philanderer, it doesn’t mean you would become those things, too, but perhaps you would view stealing or infidelity in a different light.
So to answer the question, I suppose I personally need God to be the particular brand of good which I espouse to be.
To me it seems obvious that the exact opposite is true, namely that religion motivates people to look outside the precepts adopted by their society and think about how things could be greatly different. Martin Luther king Jr. was raised in the deep South at a time when he would have been taught that blacks should accept an inferior social status. It was because of his religious education that he was introduced to the moral law of a God which demanded obedience that might mean disobedience to any human law or social norm. As a result he started a movement which upended the entire society of the South.
His experience is obviously not unique. One can see a great many individuals from a Franciscan friar to an Amish whose religious faith leads them to a way of life extremely different from society at large.
My answer: Not necessarily—and in my experience, some atheists believe in Good (in the sense you’ve described here) and some do not. But it does require at least as much faith to believe in Good without believing in God as it does to believe in God.
Rats breathe and eat and communicate and reproduce. Obviously, you don’t do any of those things…
Or, to be a bit more reasonable: some tendencies and behavioral traits appear to be universal among mammals, especially the social mammals. It can be instructive to study these traits. There may be generalities that apply to humans.
There may not be. It could be a false line of research. But I think it is suggestive, if nothing else, to read reports of “lower animals” engaging in behaviors we recognize as “good.” There might even be a tautology involved, in that we (in part) call these behaviors good because we have instincts that promote those behaviors in us.
Needing an outside source to compell you to do good always strikes me as immature.
Children need adults to teach social standards (“good”). “No no, we don’t take toys away from others; we need to share.” But eventually, children mature and start forming their own reasons for behavior, rather than those inforced from on high. And they live with the consequences.
Eventually people need to mature and take responsibility for their own actions. “I do good because I think it’s the right thing to do.”
No, God is simply besides the point. Even if gods existed, them saying something is good or bad doesn’t make it so. If there is such a thing as objective good and evil, it is true regardless of God’s opinion on the matter.
And given that God doesn’t actually show up, that makes his opinion useless for defining anything.
I do. I need the counsel of the Holy Spirit, his encouragements and his scoldings, or else I would not know how to be a good man in the biblical sense. I define good as allowing oneself to be controlled by the spirit of God.
I need God to be good. When God is not good, I make God stand in the corner.
OK seriously… I don’t think so, but there is something good about understanding, about there being a reason for it… “it” being our own sense that somehow, in some fashion, there exists goodness, a right way for things to be.
EDIT: yeesh, I genuinely thought you meant “do you find it personally necessary for God to be good”.
Answer to your actual question: no, it’s the other way around. I need to be good. For that to be possible there needed to BE a meaningful good, something other than “well you were born and raised in Culture X and therefore like everyone else a tabula rasa absorbed what you were socialized to believe is ‘good’ yadda yadda…” I sought answers.
Not at all. You need to consider “enlightened self-interest”.
“Murder is wrong because if we agree murder is not wrong, then it would not be wrong for someone to murder me or my loved ones. Since I do not agree that someone murdering me is not wrong, I agree to work towards a society where murder is deemed wrong in order to minimize the risk of me being murdered.”
It’s an applied version of the Golden Rule - you don’t do unto others (or condone others doing unto others) what you would not want them to do unto you.
The problems arise where people think of themselves as special cases. “I want to murder/steal/etc so me murdering/stealing/etc is okay. I don’t want others to murder/steal/etc me or mine, so other people doing it is not okay.” These are the people who are dangerous, and the reason we have laws.
God is not necessary to the process, although He serves as a simplistic means of communicating the former approach and reining in the latter.
Just wanted to mention that Cal Thomas deserves recognition for coming up with an even more offensively stupid column on Hitchens’ death than Ross Douthat’s. The highlight for me was Cal sneering about how Hitchens’ ideas were not “original”, followed by Cal attempting to debunk them via liberal use of Bible quotations.
There are people who rely on what they think is God’s word to be good, and some of them actually are (while others are actively evil). People who’ve taken the trouble to puzzle out standards of behavior that best serve society (without regard to religious rules) are more reliably good, in my experience.
