Response to Ethics and Religion; Moral Relativism

The author of “Ethics and Religion; Moral Relativism”, is in the midst of arguing against the necessity of religion for morality on page 11. He provides a counter argument to the idea of living without moral codes since there may be no judgment after death leading to an afterlife; he claims that this argument assumes that as long as people appear good, it doesn't matter if their intentions were good. Put another way, his qualm with the argument is that it implies somebody can do something good with bad (or selfish) intentions and still be considered good. For example, the author believes that a man who rescues a child from a burning house so that he can get onto the news has not acted morally. I do not agree with the author on this point. The argument he is attempting to counterpoint assumes an atheist stance, but he goes on to list reasons why God would not operate in such a way to consider our hypothetical man’s actions morals. When faced with an argument based in an atheist reality, it doesn't make sense to follow that argument with “but that isn’t how God operates”. Used in this way, the author was blatantly committing an appeal to authority fallacy. Even though he cites Christian scripture to support his ideas on how God would think, this act itself contradicts both his later discussion on cultural relativism (if he failed to argue against it) and one of his major points against the argument for the connection between religion and morality (how can we really know what God thinks? [pg 9 bottom])

I also do think that he failed to support his argument against cultural relativism. By way of committing a false analogy fallacy, he gives this example; there used to be disagreement between cultures over whether the earth revolved around the sun or the sun around the earth…just because there is a disagreement over it does not mean that both cultures ideas deserve to exist, because there is an objective truth… therefore, just because there is disagreement about what is and is not moral does not mean that every culture gets a vote, but instead there is one objective moral truth that can be found through enough reasoning. I don’t think this analogy holds water because gravitational orbits in space are mathematical and physical realities, whereas morals are just a vague and somewhat malleable invented concept.