Engaging God's World

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Engaging God's World

From a social point of view of religion is a more complex phenomenon than a science. In each of the great historical religions, there are three elements: 1) Church, 2) faith, 3) code of personal morality. The relative importance of each of these elements varied with time and was different for different people. In the ancient religions of Greece and Rome - as long as the Stoics did not turn in their ethics - not too much attention paid to personal morality in Islam, the Church has always been less important than the secular power, but in modern Protestantism discerned a tendency to soften the dogmatism of faith. Nevertheless, all three elements - albeit not in the same proportions - are essential to religion as a social phenomenon. Religion comes into conflict with science for the very reason that it has social value. Personal religion, not making statements that science could disprove, calmly and in a scientific age (Berkhof, 1979).

God, Morality, and the Causal Order

Someone might respond to the above critique of Divine Command Theory by maintaining that since God, assuming there is a God, is the cause of everything, there could be (if the Judeo-Christian cosmological story is true) no goodness or anything else if there were no God. Given the truth of that tale, without God there would be nothing and thus there would be no valuables. But this confuses causes with reasons: confuses questions about bringing something into existence causally and sustaining and justifying its existence. If God exists and if he is what the scriptures say he is, everything causally depends on him. However, even if there were no God who made the world, it still would be vile to torture little children. Even if God had not created people and thus there were no people to be kind, it would still be timelessly true that kindness is a good thing. The goodness of kindness does not become good or cease to be good by God's fiat or anyone else's, or even because of the fact that there happen to be kind people.

In terms of its fundamental rationale, morality is utterly independent of belief in God. Atheists can respond to the religious claim that if God is dead nothing matters by asserting that to make sense of our lives as moral beings there is no need to make what may be an intellectually stultifying blind leap of religious faith. Such a moral understanding, as well as a capacity for moral response and action, is available to us even if we are utterly without religious faith. There is no reason the atheist should be morally at sea (Childs, 1974).

Religious versus Secular Morality

There are religious moralists who would acknowledge this and yet still maintain that there are religious moralities which are (morally speaking) more adequate than anything available to atheists. We are religious beings in need of rituals and saving myths. Without belief in god and immortality, our lives remain fragmented and ...