Religion and the Objectivity of Moral Principles

One of the most often repeated criticisms of atheism is that it cannot account for morality. Of course, what this argument is really against is a naturalistic reductionism in which moral properties supervene the physical characteristics of things. What is ultimately real are physical facts and if there were no sentient creatures who have moral thoughts, then so goes morality while the laws of physics remain. Someone who is a realist about moral properties and who gives up on reductive materialism can still claim to be an atheist. It does not follow from the fact that matter in not all there is to the fact that there is a God or even some kind of immortal soul. Of course, the same arguments one finds convincing against the existence of God should also work against the positing of some immaterial stuff above and beyond what constitutes the physical world. So while it is not contradictory to believe in both, there may be reasons why holding the two views simultaneously lacks sufficient justification.

Grounding moral laws in God is supposed to overcome this problem for the naturalistic outlook. Since God is eternal and moral truths are grounded in God, then the death of all life does not entail the annihilation of moral properties. The objectivity of morality is thus ensured by the existence of God. The standard response to this view is from Plato's Euthyphro where the questions is asked: if it is true that 'p is good iff God commands p', then God either commands p because p is good or because God likes God. If the first disjunct is correct, then the analysis of what it is to be good has not explained what it is to be good, and, moreover, God is superfluous since it no longer grounds the good. If the second disjunct is true, then what is good is dependent on the whim of God. Torturing children and genocide would be good if God so commands (examples from the Old Testament). Those who subscribe to the belief that God is the source of what is moral must bite the bullet and admit that anything is permitted insofar as it is decreed by God.

I don't want to get into a debate about moral intuitions and whether this view really seems to be any more moral than a naturalistically conceived one. I want to ask whether the Divine Command Theory achieves objectivity or not. Since God is all powerful (this is an assumption but one that is often made) it could annul its own existence at any time. If morality is grounded in God, then when God vanishes so do moral laws. However, if natural laws, even if they were created by God, are not grounded in God’s continued existence (though this would be denied by some theologians), then the disappearance of God would not affect their functioning. God is a dictator whose disappearance would create a moral void as the death of the leader of a totalitarian state – without a formal constitution - would result in a similar power vacuum. This counterfactual difference suggests that moral laws impose themselves less stringently than do natural laws, and if this is the case, then moral laws do not have the same objective legitimacy as natural laws. Moreover, given that moral laws are regulative, one could rebel against God and decide to live a life according to another set of principles or none at all. But one is not able to live a life according to alternate laws of physics. Gravity is the same for all participants on Earth; natural laws are constitutive of existence.

At most, God serves as the last arbiter of justice, the one who balances the scales when mortal law fails to right a wrong. There is something appealing about this account but wishing something to be the case doesn’t make it so. Essentially, God is the most powerful law enforcement officer but one who seems to wait until death to pass down judgement. But how is this really different than imposing order on a population through coercive means? (By coercive I don not merely mean physically violence or intimidation but includes what some like to call structural violence and acculturation.) Divine laws are ontologically on the same level as human law as contingent prohibitions and allowances of behavior. What supposedly separates the laws of God from mortal law is their legitimacy, but if they are no more than the imposition of the will of God, then it would seem that what legitimates them is the threat of divine force, which is, hypothetically, many times more powerful than anything that can be imagined on Earth. On the other hand, terrestrial justice is much more reliable in the sense that it is within our power to enact it; one does not have to rely on a divine promise, if there is one at all, for a punishment to come.

Perhaps the Divine Command Theorist can counter that it is God's privileged position of having all true knowledge that would count as justification for its laws over those of man. Humans, despite having tasted the fruit of knowledge, are still in ignorance; we cannot reach a 'God's eye point of view'. God's laws, then, have the advantage of being formulated in accordance with all of the relevant information, which surely means we should trust its judgement over ours. But if moral laws and values are not something of this world that is there to be discovered and are rather just the whims of a deity, albeit an omniscient one, then there is no reason to trust God's judgement over our own. One should follow God's rules so that its plan is realized, but this plan is just as much a result of an arbitrary choice as anything humans can think up. In essence, there is nothing to know that would justify the moral laws of God in light of its overall plan so being omniscient is not an advantage. We're back to “we should follow God because it has the power to punish us for all eternity.”

The moral secularist and the divine command theorist find themselves in the same position in trying to justify the initial premiss of a fundamental project from which one can derive the moral laws that will help realize this end (think increase freedom or happiness as fundamental projects). Moreover, the moral secularist is in the beneficial position of not relying on a highly questionable theistic metaphysics. For the divine command theory to work one must justify the belief in a God, justify the ability to know what God decrees, and justify that we do in fact have such knowledge. It is one thing proving that it is reasonable to believe in the existence of God; it is a whole other thing to show that any of the competing world religions speak the truth of God. Even if the best explanation of our universe is a deity, there is the further burden of proving we have epistemic access to the dictates of God. Maybe humans just aren't made so that God can reveal itself to us. If that can be argued convincingly, then the theists must provide sufficient evidence that we in fact have such knowledge. I have the capacity to see a UFO as do others, but all the purported sightings in the world could all be hoaxes. Personal revelation is probably the most unreliable means of acquiring knowledge. Not only do we suffer from numerous cognitive biases that go mostly unacknowledged, the extent to which individual revelations differ between those of opposing faiths and those within a faith provides sufficient evidence that not only must most revelations be wrong, but we also should be actively suspicious of their claims. These formidable obstacles must be faced by the divine command theorist before his view can even begin at the starting point of the moral secularist.

To sum up, if there are naturally occurring moral properties akin to the usual physical properties, then morality does not depend on God much like natural laws. Therefore, God is not needed for morality. If there aren't moral properties, then both secular morality and theistic morality are based on contingent premises that must be chosen either by the individual or some group of individuals in the former case or by God in the latter. Thus, there is no objectivity gap between mortal morality and divine morality. However, the divine command theorist has the additional burden of proving the existence of God and knowing what it demands before it can be a candidate for a satisfying alternative to secular morality. (Even if none of it can be proven, it still remains an alternative moral system, though one that must rely on more faith based assumptions. Hence, why it is unsatisfying.) Therefore, one of the most common challenges to atheism/naturalism is just as much a problem for moral theists and, perhaps, more so because of the extra weight of the onuses their view faces.