Q. If there’s no God, where do you get your morals from?
A. The same place you get yours. You don’t get your morality from God or the Bible. Morality is at the deepest part of us. In fact, what morality is and why we have it is on the frontier of neuroscience. And philosophers have been trying to tackle it since there have been philosophers. Even evolutionary biologists have things to say on it.
If you believe that God is the reason for your morality, then you present a basket with many holes. Because if morality is from God, then why is there so much suffering in the world? Why do children die every day from starvation? Where is this God with his morals? Why does he let bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people?
And the Bible? Well, I can go through and pick out all of the scriptures that say slavery is okay, stoning your daughter to death if she won’t marry the man that raped her is okay, killing all of the men, women, and children of a certain people, killing homosexuals, killing witches, killing adulterers, burning to death a priest’s daughter who fornicates, and I can go on and on and on. The point being - you do not get your morality from the Bible, and if you do, then you are NOT very moral.
The point is, our morality is more than just God or religious text. For instance, if morality were dependent upon religion, then you would expect every culture with different religions throughout time to have different moral codes. Yet actions such as murder and stealing were considered wrong by all cultures and religions. Common themes echo throughout independent civilizations.
So where does our morality come from? The short and sweet of it? I don’t know. Nobody really does, but we can make educated guesses based on evidence. We can continue to search for these answers. And it’s okay to say that you don’t know. Do you know why?
BECAUSE NO ONE KNOWS!!!!!
Saying that God/the Bible are the foundation of all human morality is an ignorant blanket statement that is not provable. There are older religions that had there own moral code - so why not see them as the foundation? There are older commandments than the simple ten Exodus outlines, so why not see those as the foundation?
Look at the Code of Hammurabi. A Babylonian king that lived some 300 years or so before Moses and recorded 282 laws, 34 of which are unreadable. If you make comparisons between the Code of Hammurabi and the Law of Moses, you will find a great deal of similarity. So why not follow this Code of Hammurabi and view it as the superior source of moral judgment?
There is only one honest answer to the question of where do we get our morals and that is “I don’t know”. It is an admittance, and once that is admitted, then we can have a discussion about opinion.
And in my opinion, morality is as complicated as anything we have. But, I treat it as everything else that is complicated. The human body and the human brain are complicated and have evolved over time to what they are now. And morality with it. You can even see how morality has evolved since the dawn of civilization. Since that time, our moral code has gotten more and more complex and well-defined.
Even in the animal kingdom, you see a certain amount of it. Loyalty, empathy, grief, etc. If you were to take an evolutionary biologist’s opinion, morality must be ingrained in our very genetics. From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense. Our morality helps us survive as a species.
And that whole bag of chips is rather deep, so I won’t venture any further into it. At least not yet. But the point is clear; morality is not determined by religion or theism.
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