How Can You Be Moral Without God?

It’s a common claim; you need god to be moral because without god you cannot have objective morality. As a claim it makes the theist feel all fuzzy inside. Sure it’s true, if it wasn’t then why would your pastor/priest/[insert religious figurehead] say it?

Let me set you straight. It’s not true. It’s nowhere near the town of truth, it’s way out in the upper mountains of fucking ignorant shit spouted by illogical and blinded/brain-dead theists.

God is not the source of objective morals. It has its own set of subjective morals which it backs up with a right-to-violence beyond measure. A quick thought experiment will show you that the big g cannot be the source of objective morals. Imagine you have a 7 year old daughter. If god instructed you to rape your little girl, would you? Would god telling you to do it make it moral? If you can answer yes to both of those, with honesty and not just in an attempt to save your delusion while safe in the knowledge that you’ll never actually have to do it because god doesn’t exist to tell you to do anything, then you’re a monster and should definitely not be allowed around children. Or humans of any age. Or animals either.

As can be seen from the above thought experiment, god saying to do something doesn’t make that something a moral act, which it would if god were the source of morality. God therefore (if it exists and other caveats) reflects a morality which is not created by it. That god cannot make raping pre-teens moral shows that god is not a source of morality at all. You’ve known this your whole life. If you’ve read any of the Old Testament then you know it. God tells the characters in the story to do all of the most horrific acts imaginable and it’s not morally right because it is commanded by god, it’s immoral, but commanded by god. You felt that while reading it. You felt the twang of ‘this isn’t right, how can a loving god command this?’ That’s because you know morality without god. You know morality is separate from god, but has been stolen by the godly as their own.

You can argue all you like that god “wouldn’t” command you to rape your pre-teen daughter or son, but that simply supports my point. If god is the source of morality, rather than a reflection of an external morality, then its word is moral. It could command you to do anything and it be moral. That you say god wouldn’t shows you also are aware that morality is outside of god, not inside of it. God wouldn’t tell you to violate your child because violating your child is wrong, and it’s wrong not because god says it’s wrong but because it’s just wrong.

You cannot get away from subjective reality by filling the gap with god. You simply supplant the subjective opinion of people with the subjective opinion of a fictitious being created by people.

The Bible is the Rock to Build Your Life On

Yeah, I’ve got a thing for post titles that are taken from the other side of the argument. It amuses me to use the rhetoric of the believer and put my own opinion underneath it.

So, this time it’s the turn to address the solidity of the bible vs the solidity of science.

Science is said to change all the time and sure it does, in a way. The old models we used to use can still be used, but they are known now to be imprecise, to have flaws and things they can’t account for fully (or in some cases, at all). The abandoned model might predict things with too great a margin of error, for example. The important point though is it wasn’t ‘wrong’ in the normal sense if the word. Imprecise and imperfect, but it does work in some ways or to some degree else it would never have been adopted. In this sense science shifts a small amount for the most part, like a building settling on it’s foundations in a controlled manner. Little shifts here and there to accommodate new ideas and new data. Very rarely does science undergo massive over-hauls, but it does from time to time. These are when an idea advances knowledge by such a huge amount that it practically changes everything.

On the other hand we have the bible which has had to alter it’s whole world view completely. It’s done so in a devious and dishonest way, claiming what were once held to be literal truths were actually always metaphors we mistakenly took literally. Each time the truth of realty is shown by science to be other than what the bible says it is (which is pretty much every single time), it isn’t science that changes, it’s the bible. The contradictory part becomes metaphorical suddenly, even though it had been literal just before science discovered a new truth about the universe.

Building your world view on the bible means either persistently ignoring reality, or accepting that the things you believe to be literally true today will be the metaphors of tomorrow when science expands our understanding to actually explain them. The god of most theists is a god of the gaps. It exists to give the theist the feeling that they understand what is currently not understood.

I love philosophy, which is why I enjoy theology, but I love science more. And I love that philosophers accept (generally) they operate in the gaps where science has no hold, in the normative and the subjective. Few non-theological philosophers bother to contradict science because it’s a fight they’ve lost before beginning. They know that. Their discipline isn’t making the same degree of knowledge-claim possible by science, so they content themselves with the places science cannot yet be wielded. In the past the space yielded by science was large, it included pretty much everything, today it isn’t. Politics and similar fields are trying to create ‘social science’ trying to ‘science’ up its act, despite the fact that the subjects are entirely normative – what should or should not be done. Practically every field which is concerned with being right is trying to become a science. Queue creationism/intelligent design. Christians seeing that science is the only real way to make knowledge-claims with any validity in the modern world, so they bastardise their mysticism and try to make it science. They fail because their mysticism is nothing at all like science and can only put on the scientific sheep’s clothing, it can’t change the fact it’s an unscientific, mystical wolf.

The Argument from Design

I’ve just about had it with the argument from design. I mean, I get how you think it’s powerful, it plays into the basic desires in the human animal to see patterns and relate those patterns to our knowledge and experience to form conclusions we can use. We do see design in a watch, yes. We can delude ourselves easily to also relate that design to the natural world, yes. It’s not right to do, but you can do it.

The basis of the design argument rest in both an argument from incredulity and an argument from ignorance. The argument relies on the supporter being unable to imagine how this thing they have decided exhibits design could have possibly come about to have that appearance without being actually designed by an active intelligent designer. They also cannot imagine that the question: “What would you expect an ‘un-designed’ [whatever they’ve said is designed] to look like?” has meaning. The crux here is that in order to have a working whatever-it-was there would have to be the appearance it was designed to do whatever it did or it wouldn’t be able to do it. A working eye has to give the appearance of being ‘designed’ to take in light and convert it into signals for the brain. It has to do that or it’s not a working eye, it’s a blob of cells. The question ‘what would a non-designed eye look like?’ doesn’t strike the design argument adherent with the force of revelation that it should because they’re starting with their conclusion and working backwards to find things that appear to be evidence for it.

Moving from biological design, the Earth orbits the Sun in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone, it’s not too hot and not too cold for liquid water to form on the surface, which is to a large degree the necessary conditions for life and is definitely the prerequisite conditions for intelligent, self-aware life to form. This ‘Goldilocks’ zone is said to be absolute proof of god’s amazing plan for us, if the Earth were moved ‘just a little bit’, they claim, the whole life experiment would be over. However, our estimates of the ‘habitable’ zone around the sun has the zone be from 0.5 to 3 AU from the Sun. 1 AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, so the Earth could be 1/2 the distance it is now, or 3 times the distance it is now, and we’d still be okay here, we could still survive that.

1 AU = 149,597,871 kilometers (92,955,807.3 miles)

Goldilocks’ Zone is therefore from 74,798,935.5 km (46,477,903.65 miles) to 448,793,613 km (278,867,421.9 miles). That crosses the orbits of Venus and Mars and the planetoid Ceres. That to me isn’t a ‘just a little bit’, that’s ‘a colossal amount’. We’re inside a region that is pretty massive, so the odds of a planet forming in it are ‘good’, not ‘slim’. After all, three planets are in it! The next problem becomes getting an Earth-like planet (i.e., big enough to sustain the generation of heat in its core and to sustain an atmosphere). We know Mars is too small to keep the heat of its core and therefore its atmosphere bled away as soon as its magnetic field degraded. On the other hand Venus has an atmosphere in the middle of an horrific runaway greenhouse effect, pushing temperatures massively above what is comfortable to multi-cellular life. It is also not tilted, so there’s no seasonal variation, just horrifying heat all year round. Earth has the size, the tilt, the stabilizing satellite, the correct chemical composition in its atmosphere, everything necessary.

When we consider the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast, vast, vast number of stars in the sky (approx. 300 billion in the Milky Way, approx 1 trillion in Andromeda, and that’s just two of the billions of galaxies in the observable universe) we have to, simply have to, come to the conclusion that since there exists a habitable zone around (some) stars, and since planets form in that habitable zone, and since planets of the right size and chemical composition can form in that habitable zone, the Earth was inevitable. Trillions and trillions of chances and we end up on the one (or maybe just one of the ones) which got the golden ticket. This isn’t divine, it’s good fortune. A turn of good luck we wouldn’t be discussing had it not happened. The event has to have happened for us to talk of its happening, so to talk of the divinity of the action because it’s happened makes no sense. We’re talking about it so it has to have happened and we have perfectly naturalistic models for how it could have happened. To invoke a creator because we’re here is sloppy and poor. It’s to stop inquiry just when it’s getting interesting. If you ask why your car has a dent in it and I answer ‘god’s will’ you don’t accept it as a full explanation. Within a theistic model of the universe it is true, it’s god’s will, but you want to know the actual cause, the actual culprit, the reason why your car has a dent. I want to know the reason why the universe is here, and you invoking god does not end that curiosity and it doesn’t answer that curiosity in any way. God is not testable and produces no predictions or usable technology. God, even if it exists, is worthless.