I was on the 99 to Granville on Sunday morning. In front of me were seated two fairly young men, who were holding an earnest conversation. About religion. One of them was a believer, the other was a staunch atheist. I'm not really religious, but I found myself siding with the believer - mostly because the atheist was a bit too smug. And as happens so often in these cases (to me, anyway), I started arguing my case - silently, of course, all in my head. Then the two of them got off and I focused my attentions on a baby who was trying to eat an Adidas shoe.
Not an Adidas shoe
I mulled over the argument over lunch and found myself fairly intrigued and disturbed in equal measure. The atheist's argument had been that belief in God was wrong because it was unscientific - that is, science did not support or verify the presence of a God. Also, God's decrees, as enforced by various organised religions, were, he claimed, the reason for all the wars and general misery in the world.
I have a problem with that view. Firstly, if God doesn't exist, then the decrees were written by people. And well, if they were written by people, they would have been written and enacted anyway, regardless of whether they were attributed to God or not.
Of course, decrees that do not have divine backing are less likely to carry weight. However, that works both ways. Just at the bad decrees are more likely to be ignored if they come from just a human source, so are the good ones. And that was, more or less, what disturbed:
Without divine backing, does morality carry any weight !?!
When someone steals and gets away with it, he has committed a crime - but only because the fairly arbitrary laws of the land say so. Did he do wrong, though !?! If you believe in God, the answer is simple enough - yes, he did, because God says stealing is wrong. But what if there is no God to say so !?! Then it's just the opinion of some humans (most specifically the guy who was robbed) against that of another human (the thief).
Another question. Atheists claim belief in God is wrong because there is no scientific basis for His existence. But if we are to use that as the yardstick for concept validity, then, well, what is the scientific basis for justice !?! Or, for that matter, morality itself !?!
2 comments:
First of all, for a second I thought you had taken a picture of the baby eating the Adidas shoe and that would have been kinda creepy.
Secondly, my problem with that arguement is that science doesn't prove anything, it can only disprove and in the case of God it hasn't done that nor will it.
Thirdly, I think that because all different deities all over the world have pretty much the same moral base. Isn't that justification of morality in itself? An almost global acceptance of a basic moral code? With or without the existance of a God, people everywhere agree that killing and stealing are immoral... Maybe I'm wrong but that seems like enough
The thing about the 'near global acceptance' argument is that it doesn't really provide a solid platform to argue with someone who looks at it differently, since that person is just, well, different and not necessarily wrong. Furthermore, we seem to acknowledge that certain attributes are beyond such moral consensus. The whole of the world might want to see a certain person hanged, but if there isn't enough evidence against him/her, that person lives. Democratic majority does not justify the killing of an innocent person. Similarly, democratic majority alone may not be enough to establish moral justification.
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