# Resolved: For God to have genuine moral authority, S/He must be comprehensible to mortals.

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-for-god-to-have-genuine-moral-authority-s-he-must-be-comprehensible-to-mortals/545223>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [July 1, 2010, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-for-god-to-have-genuine-moral-authority-s-he-must-be-comprehensible-to-mortals/545223 "2010-07-01T18:16:59Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\
**Post date:** [July 2, 2010, 7:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-for-god-to-have-genuine-moral-authority-s-he-must-be-comprehensible-to-mortals/545223/41 "2010-07-02T19:03:02Z")

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> [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#):
>
> They are evil or insane. I have not seen any evidence that morality (as opposed to empathy) can be inate.

They are evil because they do evil things, the definition of which is under discussion. Both a mad killer and an Aztec priest cuts out the hearts from living people, but one is condemned as a monster and the other has a high social position. Is the act inherently evil, or is it evil in context. And before you condemn too much, think of what a person in a purely vegetarian culture would say about us.

Empathy is a building block of morality. Like I said, detailed moral rules are certainly not genetic, just general principles, of which empathy is one. Same problem - if the Golden Rule (an expression of empathy) was so important, God could have built it in to everyone.

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**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\
**Post date:** [July 2, 2010, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-for-god-to-have-genuine-moral-authority-s-he-must-be-comprehensible-to-mortals/545223/42 "2010-07-02T19:38:54Z")

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> [@Blaster\_Master](#):
>
> This feeds back into what I said above… I think it is the responsibility of a moral authority not just to ensure that one knows what the rules are, but has some understanding of why they are that way. A parent who says “stealing is wrong, because I said so” hasn’t done anything to teach morality. Because, in the end, morality doesn’t live like that. To me, morality isn’t about a series of absolute rules, but a set of examples on some curve of high dimensionality that allows us to derive the model and apply it to a multitude of situations.

So, you expect justification for moral rules. So do I, but this makes them basically secular. There is a big difference between God as a super ethics professor who is better at explaining things to us and God as the arbiter of morality. I don’t know if **Skald** would consider the ethics prof god as a genuine arbiter of morality or not.  
I also have to add that none of the gods we have seen to a really good job of explaining of justifying morality.  
If you define morality as a curve, I’d say that the order of that curve is so great that it is hard to distinguish it from randomly plotted points. Did God create the curve from scratch, or is he fitting it to some pre-established data points. If the former, why didn’t he make it simpler, if the latter, where does the evaluation of these points as good or bad come from?

> [@](#):
>
> I think there’s also a further assumption that a God of supreme knowledge would necessarily be far beyond even the most knowledgable human. If we are able to derive a reasonable approximation of morality, then his knowledge would provide him with the ability to model it to a greater degree of accuracy. To carry this to your example, the only reason God would, say, support bigotry would be either he doesn’t know better (which violates one of the premises of the OP) or he knows and is deliberately deceitful, but then is unable to fulfill his obligation other than relying on appealling to his superiority.

Here you are assuming that bigotry is bad - not an unreasonable assumption, but one which is fundamentally atheistic. Not atheistic in the sense that only atheists are not bigots, but atheistic in a sense that bigotry is bad without reference to god, and that if a god seemed to be a bigot, it must be from deceit. If God truly sets or interprets morality, how do you know that bigotry isn’t moral under some specific interpretations of the curve?

> [@](#):
>
> I disagree, and I think this comes down to a fundamental difference in how we view morality. I don’t believe the moral code has changed at all but rather our ability to understand it has grown, just like a growing child. For instance, I imagine most parents would tell a 2-year-old that stealing is wrong, but when the kid grows a little older, that same parent may reveal some intricacies that it’s not necessarily wrong if one is stealing to feed a hungry family. The underlying rule didn’t change here, but the level of the child’s ability to understand, and thus the ability of the moral authority to explain the rule, is improved, and thus the underlying model of the child is improved.
> 
> I think many of the rules of religion have followed similar patterns. The 10 commands, being among the most famous, is an early example of some very broad rules of thumb that are a reasonable approximation for the ability of that culture to understand within the context of their lives. That our model of morality has changed since then, given our vast increase in knowledge, is expected. In fact, to argue otherwise is like arguing that the fundamental nature of the universe changed at some point between Newton and Einstein. Simply because our understanding has changed does not mean the underlying true nature is any different.

Do you have evidence that our fundamental ability to understand morality has grown?  
The 10 Commandments, to use my calculator analogy again, are like arithmetic with numbers \<= 10. The calculator may get them all right, but that doesn’t prove arithmetic with bigger numbers is correct.  
Plus, while most Christians only know the 10 Commandments, the number of actual moral instructions in that part of the Bible, and their complexity, would make your head spin. I was not brought up Orthodox, but I do know the rituals are extremely complex, and all based on morality, in the sense of being God’s commands. The writers of the Mishna and the Talmud would be quite insulted by you saying they didn’t understand the complexities of morality - I rather suspect that if they were around today they’d kick all our butts in GD. No, I reject that we are like growing children in this regard.

> [@](#):
>
> Neither. This is exactly what I was arguing against, is that this dichomoty is nonsensical.

It appears to me that you are arguing for the first position. Call it a complex morality curve, call it a pre-existing moral code, same thing.

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**Author:** ![Meatros](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b4bc9f/32.png) [@Meatros](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Meatros)\
**Post date:** [July 2, 2010, 8:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-for-god-to-have-genuine-moral-authority-s-he-must-be-comprehensible-to-mortals/545223/43 "2010-07-02T20:06:25Z")

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> [@Blaster\_Master](#):
>
> I want to comment on this because I think this is actually a general non-theistic view of morality that causes a lot of confusion. Basically, to me, this question doesn’t make sense. That is, it makes an assumption that there is some sort of ordinal relationship between morality and God. What we have to keep in mind is that, as the creator, then from our perspective both have always existed and are inseparable. Thus, to say that God simply knows what is moral or that he decreed morality just doesn’t make sense.

I’m not sure what you mean here - why are they inseparable? Further you don’t seem to be addressing the basics of the question, what is the ontological relation of morality with God?

You state later:

> [@](#):
>
> I was disputing the ordinality of morality and God as to whether there is some universal morality that God must obey or whether it is something that he simply decrees. Neither of these possibilities makes sense to me because ordinality is a meaningless concept in that context.

Which, to me, seems that you are rejecting both horns of the Euthyrpho (sp?) dilemma. That’s fine, of course, but exactly what are you suggesting? You can’t simply reject them without explaining the solution, if you want to say that objective morality somehow depends on God’s existence.

Are you going the route of “morality springs from God’s nature”?

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