I want to further flesh out the
notion that morality finds value or meaning in the existence of God. More
specifically, that something is good or bad because God deems it so. If God
determines what is morally right and wrong, it does not necessarily follow that
what is right and wrong will or even can change. In other words, that
morality will necessarily possess an arbitrary nature (one subject to change). If
God deems what is right and wrong, morality firstly becomes something dependent
on the nature of who God is and what his (or her, but I will stick to a male
pronoun in this essay) role in the universe is. If God is someone who is
subject to change his mind about the matters of ethics and morality, then
ethics and morality will change with it. However, if God is not one to change
his mind about such matters, then they will not change either. Consider my
enjoyment of a nice sunset. I can easily imagine myself suddenly finding
sunsets unpleasant and thus deeming them unenjoyable. Even though I can imagine
such a situation, it does not follow that it will therefore change. Just because one could imagine God changing
his mind about something, doesn’t mean that he will change his mind about it.
But
surely morality cannot be reduced to an unchangeable opinion of God. Even if he
would never change his mind about such a matter, doesn’t morality feel like it
is rooted in something much more concrete than what someone deems so? This
brings me (very briefly) to my next point; the medium in which we detect
morality. The rightness or wrongness of something cannot be sensed in the
normal way through our five senses. Morality does not reside in some corner of
my room, smelled as some odor, or grasped physically by my hands. It cannot be
scientifically measured in any way. Rather, morality is something that resides
in the consciousness of the mind, being experienced and emotionally felt. The only medium morality is detected through
is from the perspective of the human mind. If God created what is considered
right and wrong and also created human beings (including the mind), could he
not have created us with a certain knack or feeling of what he made right and
wrong? If he did, then the very systems we use to detect morality itself would
have been created by God. Thus, anything he made our minds morally responsive
to (such that killing infants is wrong) would be entirely up to his decision
because he decides how we respond to it.
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