Does Your Morality Come from God or From Within? | A Simple Test

By Daniel Miessler on May 24th, 2009: Tagged as Atheism | Morality | Religion

abraham_kill_son

One of the most common arguments from the religious is that without God there would be no morality. Non-believers reject this, and there’s an easy though experiment way to see which side you fall on. So, to those who do subscribe to a mainstream religion such as Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, consider this:

Imagine that one day God comes to earth and announces a new rule that says it’s a moral responsibility of all believers to kill anyone who doesn’t have a copy of your religion’s Holy book in his/her house.1.

The question is: would you instantly accept this as morally acceptable because it came from God, or would you reject it because it’s wrong to kill someone for such a thing?

And here are the results. If you would immediately start killing people because God told you to (and therefore the command was “moral” by definition), then your morality comes from God. But if you would question and/or reject this command because it feels “wrong” to you, then your morality comes from somewhere else.

Which are you?

Notes

1 Forget the silliness of this particular rule; it doesn’t matter. Besides, God asked Moses to kill a man for gathering wood on the Sabbath, so strange requests aren’t without precedent. And don’t cop out by saying, “My God would never make such a rule, so it’s pointless to discuss.” This is the whole point of a hypothetical–to see what you would do. You don’t have to accept it as an actual possibility.

← Older Comments
  • Mitchell_lombard

    I am not going to make an argument one way or the other. I will only attempt to explain why this question is not valid.

    We can all agree that if God DOES exist, surely we cannot even come close to comprehending him, his power, his understanding, or his influence. With that settled, I can conclude that if God came down from heaven and asked me to do anything (no matter how ridiculous) I cannot in any way presume to know how I would feel after being asked. Without any such knowledge, the question now fails to have any relevance whatsoever. A God that gave us the morality we have now could very easily make it feel quite morally right to do anything He asked.

  • Pierre

    Daniel, stick to unix tutorials dude. You’re a lousy philosopher as most of these comments illustrate. But I love your tutorials, I must hit the tcpdump a couple times a month. Keep it up!

    The fundamental mistake you make is in the title. You imply that morality can come from within. Morality is not a feeling or internally generated thing. It is by definition a proposition of what is good/proper in terms of behavior, a sort of command that is first and foremost a communication between two or more minds.

    • http://danielmiessler.com/ Daniel Miessler

      I’m not a lousy philosopher, I’m a thinker who thinks about philosophy. I’m often sloppy, and this is a problem I continue to struggle with, but I think your criticism is not correct.

      First of all, the argument I’m giving here came from Plato (I think); I was simply restating it in a more verbose manner than the common quote.

      As for your criticism of the content, i.e. title, that’s just silly. I’m calling morality a sense of what a person thinks is right or wrong. This is not incorrect enough, if it is so, to warrant your comments.

      Call me sloppy, sure. But I am at least thinking and writing it down. I’ll take a crapload of constantly improving bad thought over none at all whenever asked.

      Sorry you’re disappointed.

  • Koopsta

    how can you objectify something that all objects are within, and is within all objects? and then, if it is within, how can that be getting them from ‘somewhere else’? all else is bonded

  • Dolceebella Gonzalez

    I will give you a very ingenious and witty remark, Mr. Know it All.

    First and foremost, you claim that God will come to me and tell me to kill someone because he tells me to do so. He won’t do that because I am not a perfect human being, and I don’t have the devine authority to receive such important information. It won’t happen- it is highly hypothetical and you made it up.

    Secondly, If a “God” tells me to kill an innocent man because he tells me so, he is ostensibly not God, but someone posing as God- a detail warned about in the Bible. There are usurpers who deceitfully turn themselves into God’s image; the devil, for instance, but that doesn’t make them God.

    Third, people can chose both of your premises: I would accept something that is morally acceptable because it comes from God, and I would accept something as moral because it comes from me. Why?

    Here is why.

    We were created in God’s image. Meaning: there’s a part of God that resides within us or within nature. For starters, moral judgement. We know that is wrong to murder, rape, lie and steal. Individuals are a link to God. God is morality. He is above men. He is absolute. I am not saying that I am a totally moral person, because nobody is perfect and we all comit sins. We lie at some point or another, and our behavior sometimes doesn’t reflect our moral judgement. What I am saying is that God will never tell me to kill a man because killing a man defies morality. God is good. God is moral. Morals and God are linked in some form or another, and there’s a fallacy in that argument because of that- your premise doesn’t have the real God; it is an evil ideology employed by an usurper God that is not the moral and real one.

    • Euqinom Drawoh

      It kinda sounds like you’re talking about the really nice God from the New Testament– I like to think that son of His calmed him down a bit. The God from the Old Testament wasn’t one to fuck with though; He did a lot of things that may not be viewed as moral or good. Killing first-born children isn’t all that moral or good and asking a man to kill his son (and then being like “Just kidding! I was just testing you!”) isn’t moral or good either (or remotely funny). Look at the many religious wars that have been fought of the premise that “God said it was just/We’re doing this for God”. Unless you’ve been assigned the billet of Legitimate God Checker then I don’t think you can challenge whether anyone is listening to the God you’re familiar with or some imposter. With some of the wonky ways that God has come to people, with your thoughts, you might miss Him if He doesn’t come the correct way you think He would.

      What I see that goes on with a lot of Christians is having selective memory of God– they remember certain things about God- of course, the good things- but disregard all the not-so-godly things. It’s important to remember that before His Son God was in the business of doing some sketchy things and being a little mean plus some. 

  • Dolceebella Gonzalez

    Furthermore, to clarify that God exists, most likely you think he doesn’t, I will employ a vary simple common sense response to the Men of Science.

    Again, I am not perfect. But I try to do as best as I can according to my reasoning.

    Science tells you space, time, and matter exists.

    It also tells you that the beginning of the universe occured at an infinitely small point of space,time and matter.

    God, according to religion, created life.

    He created space, time, and matter.

    If he created that, he had to come before it.

    If God is before the existence of matter, that means he is intangible, immaterial, a spirit.

    If God is before space, that means he is infinite.

    If God is before time, that means he is eternal.

  • Dolceebella Gonzalez

    Furthermore, if you believe that God isn’t the creator of morality, you believe, then, in relative morality.

    Take two instances.

    There was a tribe that believed in eating their fathers after they died (ridiculous and ghastly, i know). The Greeks, meanwhile, thought cremation was best.

    If the tribe were asked to cremate their father’s body, they would say it was wrong. If the Greeks were asked to eat their father’s corpse they would be repulsed and would think it wrong.

    There are two different societies that are shaping their moral codes.

    However, moral relativity tells you that since they are both different, and since there are many societies, then there’s no moral absolute or universal truth.

    Fallacy, again. Why?

    Take for instance… There were two groups that had different believes about the shape of the Earth. One group thought the Earth was round. The other thought of it as flat.

    Sure, relativity theories would tell you then that there is no truth in those arguments.

    But, obviously there is. The Earth is round, and if you say otherwise, slap yourself once, look in the mirror, and go slap yourself five more times, and go put on some 3D glasses.

    So, my point is, there needs not be two conflicting attitudes that downgrade the propinquity of one choice to its truth to prove that absolutes are not obsolete-they’re undoubtebly real ( ostensibly, not everything is absolute- but that is a paradox in itself). Differences in viepoints don’t make anything relative-the proliferation of wrongs and rights occur- points pertaining to morals themselves. There is one viepoint that is utterly wrong, and the other right.

  • Fafa

    First of all, why everybody in here is reasonning as if the concept “to kill” or “to be killed” are negative ones and are accepted by default. From human as a living physical creature perpective, the death “may be” something sad or bad, a loss. However, for humans from the metaphysical perspective, it “may be” a freedom.

    Now, let’s accept that “to kill” is a negative concept.

    About the morality…

    For occult religions where it’s taught to kill, it’s perfectly moral.

    Morality cannot be explored without the concept of society. We then should not forget that religion is transmitted to the person through society. What makes an act moral is usually what the whole think about it and what a person is taught to think about it.

    About God…

    “Thou shalt not kill.” and “… it’s a moral responsibility of all believers to kill anyone…”. Changing mind is in some way the proof of the presence of doubt about our previous ideas. If some “thinking” entity can change its mind that radically, it doesn’t deserve to be assimiliated to the concept of God because one premise of the concept of God (at least for the Catholicism) is that He is omniscient.

    Another point is that some humans tend to humanize concepts they don’t understand. It’s even worse when they don’t adhere to those concepts.

    This way of apprehending fuzzy concepts usually stands on the miscomprehension of the primary information and  distorts the deductions made from it. An example would be Moses who is instructed to kill. Suppose that he has really had some information about killing. Was he sure of the source of that information? Was he sure he understood it the right way? Besides, are we sure that the exact words in Hebrew has been transcripted and translated correctely?

    Humans should try first to make the difference between what they want and what is wanted by the entity they are believing in. The rest is a personal choice.

    So Daniel, you should not be attributing some forged facts to a concept you don’t adhere too, moreover without defining what you exactely mean by “God”. This behaviour is a open provocation to some of your siblings.

← Older Comments

Top

Popular

Information Security / Technology

Politics

Philosophy & Religion

Technology & Science

Culture & Society

Miscellaneous

Arguments

Projects

Collections

Twitter

What I'm Reading

Favorite Books and Essays

Top Blog Categories

Inputs