Thursday, September 4, 2014

Morality from God?

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.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.