Religion is good because it gives the believer an objective and absolute standard of morality

[Vivacia]

(This idea was introduced in another thread, but it felt like an unfair tangent for that thread to be taking in my humble opinion, but one I'd be interested in discussing).

Firstly, I absolutely disagree with the statement.

Secondly, I feel as an atheist I have an objective morality, if not an absolute one.

Are you saying that if survival instinct was/is a integral part in the development of morality that you would expect to see all humans all acting the same all the time? If survival has helped shape our morality I would still expect there to be other influences depending on personality and circumstance for example, along the lines of how babies are born with certain dispositions.

What about people who don't seem to have any empathy -- for instance sociopaths? If empathy and altruism were inborn we'd all have them, yet we don't. And this optimistic view of human nature can't cope very well with the problem of evil either.

If evil is defined as looking after yourself and is innate too (because part of our evolutionary heritage) then how does it work with our innate altruism and empathy?

My view is that this is a completely inadequate way of thinking about morality. A few examples to show why -

If we all have empathy, why is it that people like to hurt other people? It is rare to find someone who has never said or done anything hurtful to another and got some satisfaction out of it; and some people find hurting others deeply pleasurable, and grow to like it more and more. How does that fit with a view of humans as empathic? We plainly do not have empathy for all, since otherwise there would be no people who are shunned or uncared for in our communities.

If we are essentially altruistic, then how do we account for meanness, envy, cheating and telling lies? How do we account for those situations in which people deliberately act in ways that will be unkind and unfair to others?

If evil is merely a name for self-interest, then why is it that people deliberately hurt and destroy, damage and deface, torture and kill - when it is of no benefit to them to do so, but just because they can?

My view is that we have great innate capacity for good and for evil, and that we are shaped by our choices towards good and evil. Goodness is hard - especially it is hard because the right thing, the empathic or altruistic thing if you like, is so often the thing we do not want to do.

I don't want to give away my money so that women will have a refuge from violence (one of the things I do); I want the women to have refuges, but I'd like to keep my money for myself and buy things for me and my family with it. Giving away the money is a deliberate choice to do something I don't want to do, a discipline. Doing the right thing so often isn't a matter of what advantages us, or of our feeling, but of acting by principle. It gets easier, a bit, if you practice, and there are benefits to doing the right thing. But they are not always immediate and may be intangible.

In the same way, doing bad things gets easier the more we do it, yet the satisfaction we get from doing what we want to do doesn't last. It's a case of diminishing returns.

I'm just thinking that our morality has a natural basis and doesn't need to be complicated or God given

You could argue that being seen by others as altruistic is desirable which helps us foster those feelings. Or that as with any spread of personalities you will have some that display more empathy than others, in the same way that some have great difficulty feeling empathy. Also the problem with seeing that altruism comes from your particular god is that there are instances in the bible of this god not being altruistic, such as the flood, Jesus being racist and all the other examples we have covered, so to say that god is altruistic is to make an assertion that is not backed up by the text.

I get that, Juggling, but can you see there are problems with saying that altruism and empathy are innate?

And the reason that ethics is complicated is because human life is quite complicated.

'Love your neighbour as yourself' is really simple, but living it out ... well, it's really hard. Deciding what 'loving my neighbour' is in any given situation might be a lot more complicated than it sounds - in fact working out who is my neighbour might challenge me quite a lot. And what about when 'loving my neighbour as myself' turns out to mean doing something that I really don't want to do? And how do I explain when I do stuff that is really not very loving at all? What made me say that cruel and hurtful thing? How can I make amends? The questions go on and on and on...

A big part of me doing good/kind things is that it makes me feel good because I know how good it feels when people are kind to me. I also know how horrid it is to have people be mean to me, so I try not to be mean, but when I have, ouch! How bad did it make me feel!! and why? because I remembered how it feels to have someone be mean. Why was I mean? I was angry, I lashed out like an injured animal, my instinct was attack or be hurt further. In hindsight my base instinct was counter productive, I ended up with two problems, I still had problem number one in that I was still hurt but I also had a new problem, I felt guilty because of my well formed morality that has been built on years of experience.

to look closely at passages such as the one vivacia refers to above about sparing the rod, spoiling the child - that's when we come to understand that the rod does not mean a stick to beat a child but a gentle guiding discipline to help the child - as we all do here - not a physical tool of abuse at all.

Sounds more like you are interpreting that to fit the times and society.

Headinhands, I didn't mention God, I was responding to Juggling's ideas entirely in her own terms. We can talk about the Bible (again!) if you like, and we can talk about the basis of Christian ethics if you like.

Just to respond to your post, though, you say "Or that as with any spread of personalities you will have some that display more empathy than others, in the same way that some have great difficulty feeling empathy." That's the problem I have with naturalistic explanations right there: if empathy and altruism are genetically determined and innate then why is there a 'spread of personalities'?

And how do you account for the fact that we are all capable of behaviour that is not empathic or altruistic? And why is being seen as altruistic desirable? As far as I can see, looking around me, that is not entirely true - otherwise we would see Oxbridge graduates fighting to get into social work rather than investment banking, and the super-rich offering to pay more taxes rather than using tax avoidance specialist accountants?

I did mention my dog up-thread and his caring response if I was sad and I’d like to put in a good word for animals in general – although particularly mammals. Mammals do show conscious altruistic behaviour. Surviving as a social animal can be quite a ‘civilised’ endeavour.

I was intrigued to read about the rats that chose going to try to release a trapped and suffering fellow rat from a container over investigating another container with chocolate in it. If that is not the epitome of consideration for others, I don’t know what is!

greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/morality_animals

Morality wasn't created by religions. It is not even a uniquely human feature. The most you can say is that it has been fine-tuned or refined by us.

(Yes, I know this doesn't address the problem of evil - or an absence of goodness as I see it - much as coldness is only an absence of heat - but that's for a different post!)

I don't think it is innate, I do think it is learnt, and that some are predisposed to be more emphatic than others, not due to anything supernatural but in the same way that some are more predisposed to enjoy taking risks. There clearly are some who appear unable to adopt the moral code of their society.

We humans co evolved with dogs.

I think the principles of our morality can be simple though niminy, and are best that way, even if the working out of them on different issues and in individual situations can be complicated or difficult.

And no I don't think I do see problems with thinking that empathy and altruism are innate, even if some people are able to show more of it than others. I think we do balance it with self-interest (another innate tendency) and the exact balance between these two tendencies will be different for different people, and probably in different situations too. That is as headinhands said there will just be individual differences.

Yes, I see evil as lack of goodness/morality/empathy, sociopaths as having lack of empathy.

"A big part of me doing good/kind things is that it makes me feel good because I know how good it feels when people are kind to me. "

That's the easy part of morality. But what about when being good doesn't feel good? What about when doing good makes us feel very bad indeed? I don't feel at all good when I have to get up many times in the night because of a sick child. Ii doesn't make me feel all warm and lovely inside when I contemplate how my child will feel good because I've been kind to him, in fact I feel sick and tired and angry. My child may not feel very nice and warm and good either - he may be feeling furious because mummy can't make him better. Feeling good has almost nothing to do with being good in this situation. I get up in the night because that is what it means to love someone as myself - regardless of how I feel about it.

I'm really sorry I spent so long thinking about my post, Juggling, and so carefully thought about all my examples, since it can all be dismissed by saying 'oh it's all innate and we're all different'. Sometimes I wonder whether anybody on mn ever reads any post that is longer than one sentence!

Outwith I'm not convinced that your dog and rat examples are evidence of morality or altruism. They could just be evolutionary successful behaviours.

They say a dog looks guilty and contrite not because they feel guilt and contrite but that those puppy dog eyes and cowering are a successful means of avoiding being hurt.

I don't understand how even if god did exist, how does that give an objective standard for morality? What if god is evil? or not good?

The problem I can see with the view that morality is innate is that it means essentially that people are trapped by their biology. If this were true it would mean free will does not exist. If something is wrong with a person's biological capacity for morality, there would be no hope for rectifying this situation.

I thank God Christ offers hope of redemption.

I think that like many traits, empathy is both innate and learned.

Some are more predisposed to it than others but so much of it is learned from the values of our society at any given time.

I also think we are forgetting our parents in all this. My mum taught me empathy not just by her example but by explicit instruction. At first I felt a mixture of guilt and annoyance when she would tell me to show empathy for other people, to show an interest in their words and lives. As many children do, I found interests other than my own to be boring!

But eventually I saw the value in it, I copied it and empathy became a part of who I am. Putting God into the equation takes the credit away from our parents who taught us these things.

It also gives makes it seem exclusively human (as we are taught that God created man in his own image and put other animals on earth for our benefit) which it most definitely isn't. Our ability to empathise with humans but not animals (the non-pet type ) has terrible consequences for them.

when doing good makes me feel bad

Well we have big brains and can reason that it might be irritating to get up but killing him will cause a whole lot of problems. And the fact that you are a great parent may well be answered in evolutionary terms in that the humans that had the strongest hormonal response to their offspring, were more likely to care for them adequately enough to rear them to childbearing age, and because of genetics those children generally also had good levels of oxytocin, I think that's the one anyway. Whereas the parents with poorer levels of the love hormone were less likely to care well enough to rear that child to sexual maturity, and over many thousands of years you get a pattern similar to what we have achieved artificially in dogs. #So a case of natural #selection/survival of the fittest.

^ unless by some genetic modification I suppose. So we all would be reliant on doctors, who themselves would be reliant on doctors and so on ad infinitum (as none are perfect).

I feel nature has developed a brain structure that promotes collaboration between humans - that is our one major advantage over other species. Collaboration has enabled us to become engineers/scientists/living in houses with washing machines and has a direct impact on our standard of living.

Part of this collaboration requires empathy and understanding, compassion and the want to be nurturing to our young and other people's young. Therefore, we can be 'moral' as in kind, compassionate and considerate without a social construct like religion because of our brain processes that have been developed over 100s of 1000s of years. Humans are imaginative and able to create imagined constructs like religion or law that give us historical basis as to why we should be compassionate. But I believe that we are naturally like this anyway.

Obviously, not everyone falls into this compassionate category. There are a good percentage (5-10%?) that are psycho or sociapathic. In their case, they lack the brain processes to be compassionate or empathise with others. However, they are still useful to the human cause as the drivers of specific projects (business managers etc).

I consider myself agnostic rather than atheist, although I am swinging towards atheism, because I still consider the possibility of another being having had some influence in our development adn the development of the universe. I still haven't come to terms with why the universe might exist without a reason. But again, that's because I am human and I need an imaginative construct to explain something I can't understand.

God is the absolute and objective standard of good

we've read different bibles haha

"Whereas the parents with poorer levels of the love hormone were less likely to care well enough to rear that child to sexual maturity, "

If natural selection has worked to ensure that we have high levels of 'love hormone' (whatever that is!) then how do you account for those parents who neglect and mistreat their children?

The problem I can see with the view that morality is innate

I do think most of us can learn, and continue to learn through out life, a belief that shapes our rehabilitation program within the criminal justice system. I know my morals have shifted even in the last few years and I'm in my forties!