The most obvious proof morality isn’t faith based is that our community’s morals change faith despite the text never changing. Shellfish, wife beating, slave owning, adultery and many other facets of belief 2000 years ago do not coincide with what well all accept as moral today.
Faith is acceptance without evidence. The construction of those particular axioms come from evaluation of considerable evidence and experience. I’d say acceptance of them is precisely the opposite of faith.
If that is your definition of faith you then get a simple syllogism all the way to the conclusion.
There is only some overlap in those definitions.
Well, that doesn’t demonstrate that morality is not faith-based; it only demonstrates that faith is not strictly scripturally-based.
So someone who says there’s different acceptable moral codes depending on time, place, etc. is more arrogant than someone who says there’s only one correct code for all time and everyone else is wrong.
It’s a long thread, so forgive me if someone covered this already and I missed it.
There’s an interesting back and forth on what is or is not faith in this thread, but no matter how one defines faith, I’d say morality is pinned to it, initially, anyway. I would suggest that very few of us are taught any kind of moral code outside the confines of a religious background with faith at its core. I would further suggest that even those few of us that were taught our morality without an immersion in some immediate religious background still met with a great deal of faith in our broader environs, and that collective faith shaped the morality with which we were instructed. I would bet that very damn few of us developed our morality independent of some measure of faith in our earliest days.
I’m of the opinion that faith, someone else’s faith as it turns out which I only had on loan for a while, shaped and informed my morality, but the morality remains and the faith is long gone. So my morality is no longer faith-based, but it most certainly was faith-borne.
What I find fascinating is why does morality remain after faith has left us. I have a very simple code by which I attempt to face each day, what I consider moral and upright, and it has nothing to do with a Cosmic Scorekeeper. I find it repugnant, for instance, to inflict harm upon another. I feel this way even today, thirty some years after I decided there would be no Reckoning and I was on my own in this dark and scary place. So am I still just reacting to what I was taught at a remarkably early age?
Perhaps it’s simple expedience, morality is just masking self-preservation pinned to abstract thought. I can go along to get along and live to see another day, or I can short-cut morality to advance my own cause but at the risk of genuine repercussions should that go awry. Even internal consequences like guilt and shame are enough to deter me from becoming a bad actor, so perhaps my morality all boils down to my unwillingness to face my own scorn. A scorn directed by own sense of morality, though, so that’s too circular to be informative.
Well, this has gotten rambly and a bit too freely associated. I don’t think morality develops independent of faith, but I do believe morality can exist without faith holding its hand.
Not too rambly, and it raises the question of what kind of morality would develop if religious faith were totally absent from our lives.
Probably true in the US, but not in other countries. Not all religions propose any particular morality, and of course some countries have now been majority athiest/agnostic for a few generations. The Scandinaveans are mostly irreligious and yet probably are more “moral” than most other countries.
I wasn’t raised with any particular religion. I simply worked through the results of various behaviors in my head to their probable results, and adjusted as I experienced results contrary to what I had expected.
If (as has been suggested) morality is just choosing to behave in a way that reduces negative consequences for oneself (“I won’t murder you if you won’t murder me”), then I’d agree that it requires no faith. I don’t think it requires a whole lot of brainpower either - do I want war or peace with the rest of humanity? That’s a no-brainer as well as a no-faither.
But you seem to be suggesting that morality involves some sort of obligation on my part. Doesn’t the existence of an objectively real prohibition against bringing about the extinction of the human race (or against murder or torture or whatever a person’s favorite bedrock axiom happens to be) sort of imply the existence of a Someone to prohibit it?
The Buddha was 500 years ahead of Jesus ,and he taught the Golden Rule, it is just a matter of common sense. we need each other and need to respect each other’s beliefs. If I have the right to harm you then you have the right to harm me etc.
If one truly believes in God then they know he cannot be tempted. Faith is not truth based, just hope that it is.
If you can’t prove it is God reveling it self then you are just hoping or believing it is God.
You base belief on what you desire things to be because someone said it was God or you wanted it to be god.
It is an article of faith (that is without a basis in an investigatable absolute) that there is such a thing as “good.”
A wild dog kills a competitor. Good? Bad?
A human kills a competitor. Good? Bad?
A comet wipes out the earth. Good? Bad?
In the natural world, shit happens. And without faith that something can be good or bad, it’s not even shit. It’s just something that happened.
Without faith that something can be good or bad, all morality is reduced to an arbitrary, non-objectively verifiable opinion.
I think what you are arguing for is that atheists can create arbitrary standards which have as much utility as religious-based standards. Which is quite true.
But it’s an article of faith to call them “good.”
FWIW C S Lewis argued that the ubiquity of the idea that something is Right or Wrong/Good or Bad is prima facie evidence of God’s hand in the world.
that damn apple.
Meh. It’s prima facie evidence that we have symmetrically lateralized bodies. I didn’t need God to figure that one out, I have a mirror.
If we had three hands, three eyes, three brain hemi… make that thirdispheres ; we’d think more easily in threes than in twos. Good, Bad and Neither/Non-Applicable or Good, Left-bad and Right-bad or whatever. We might have a completely different conception of morality, or none at all.
That’s why Hindus have such complex morals. Their gods all have like 10 hands. 3 eyes. Crazy.
Note to self: Write book on multi-valued moral system.
I think you’re being unnecessarily defensive. My position is not at all a bias against religion, nor did I interpret your post, to which I replied, religious. No, to the contrary, this is an argument I use against secular humanists who would (IMHO very mistakenly) make “naturalistic” arguments on moral points.
Now, I might have made a mistake due to my bias about what I think are “natural laws” that are erroneously used by various apologists for causes (not including you, as you’re certainly not doing that here). So, we may mean different things by this term, or I might be objecting to a subset of what we might both call “natural laws”.
My point is we shouldn’t ever use (for example) human nature as a reason for supporting a political position that is based on what is really a moral principle. Human nature is what it is; politics should be informed about human nature in order to be effective, but our goals should not be predicated on human nature as the basis for determining what is right and wrong. (For one thing, it’s rhetorically dangerous: our understanding of human nature keeps changing based on what we learn from science, and we wouldn’t want a position like the equality of women to be based on a biological argument that turns out to be scientifically undermined.)
But if we include logic and math as “natural laws” then I certainly can’t exclude them from ethics! That’s not what I think of when contemplating the term, but I admit the definition is fuzzy and that might be where we disagree.
IMHO, respect for life is NOT a natural law. It’s a value we have chosen, or it’s an axiom, or it may be the logical consequence of more basic axioms. The “Natural laws” I see are things like “possession is 9/10ths of the law” and “might makes right”.
You’re absolutely right: it’s hard! But, it’s very important. It’s the difference between what we feel and what we decide; between what we want and what we choose. Yes, our decisions and choices are informed by our moral sense, but our moral sense does not dictate them. For example, we may feel totally justified to kill our lover’s lover, but decide that this would be ethically wrong. Something to keep in mind is that the moral sense is merely the outcome of an evolutionary experiment we call “homo sapiens”. It is not inherently right. (I’m assuming we’re secular here. Of course, a religious person could claim that the moral sense is a gift from God, and I couldn’t refute that.)
The moral sense, mostly! And I admit that whenever I work on an ethics puzzle, I do compare the results with my moral sense. But I do not assert that my moral sense is an authority. It definitely affects my values, and I’m happy to use it (just as I use my preference of chocolate to vanilla) when making certain kinds of value judgments or distinctions, as long as they don’t seriously contradict my most fundamental values (e.g., sanctity of human life and the need for society to be governed by shared values rather than someone dictating theirs.)
I disagree that atheist morality is based on faith as defined above. I admit I don’t like the example either, but that’s beside the point. The definition is clear, but the example muddies the water considerably.
There are things that are not subject to proof that are not based on faith. Values, in this case. Faith is not a synonym for values, and values are not necessarily based on faith. (Of course, values can be informed by faith.)
You are absolutely correct, and that proves Skald’s point. Axioms can be rejected, and when one rejects the axioms, one can ignore the consequences of the axiom. Ethical systems based on axioms are not Truth or Right. They’re merely consistent with the axioms. No faith required, other than a rather faint form of faith, one that I use myself.
I have faith in the proposition that it’s worthwhile to be ethical. I don’t KNOW that this is true. I just live as though it’s true, and that works for me. That’s the only kind of faith I know. Likewise, I don’t really understand the relationship between the laws of mathematics and the nature of reality. I’ve found them to be an indubitable guide, when properly applied. So, I have “faith in math”. This doesn’t mean I don’t acknowledge the possibility that I could be wrong about this. It’s just the best I can do, and it works for me.
My weak version of faith is very different than strong belief without evidence. It’s trusting what I’ve found to work, while admitting that it could be BS.
But an ethical system doesn’t even need this weak kind of faith. It can rest solely on axioms; anyone is free to challenge the axioms, and if they don’t accept them, they are not bound by the axiom’s consequences. And as mentioned above, values also affect ethical choices, but needn’t be based on faith, and those who have different values can question anyone else’s values.
And presuming that philosophers and the "divinely inspired’ were simply doing this - deciding a few axioms that they held to be valid, and using logic and reason to build out a set of rules based upon that - then one would expect that as axioms are swapped in and out of favor over time, we would see morality change. If morals were based on some constant, cosmic force, then we would expect morality to remain constant over time. If morality changes over the years, then all indications would be that mankind is simply following his own ideas of morality.