The Relationship Between

Religion and Morality

 Are Religion and Morality
Connected?
• Ethical obligations, duties or requirements
presuppose an authority behind them – What is
the source of authority – God?
• Religious believers argue punishment will be
dealt out to wrong doers in the afterlife, if not in
this worldly life – Eschatological justice.
• However, existentialists may argue without God
morality is meaningless and ‘everything is
permitted’. If this is true God is the guardian of
morality. Without God moral chaos or anarchy
would ensue.
Relationship between Religion and
Morality – 3 Views
1. Depends on religion
2. Independent of religion
3. Opposed to religion
 1. Depends on religion
• Moral codes are derived from religion.
• Moral opinions judged against religious
teachings.
• Authority of God, teachings from
sacred
texts, leaders and tradition – sources of religious
authority.
• Even secular society adopts or is influenced by
religious moral teachings ie Seeks guidance
from religious leaders in moral matters eg
Genetic Engineering/abortion.
• Suggests there is some connection.
 Religious leaders
• Expected to have extremely high
standards of morality.
• Exposed and condemned by media when
falling short of morally high standards.
 DCT (cont’d)
• Obedience is commanded.
• Punishment and the hope of reward are
the reason that it is ‘good’ to obey
Gods commands.
 Divine Command Theory
• Sacred texts – Exodus in the Old Testament ie
The 10 Commandments (decalogue).
• Gods will alone decides what is right and
wrong
• Human reason has no authority.
• Gods authority is absolute.
• All humans can do is accept Gods authority and
respond either rightly or wrongly.
• Sin is disobedience to the word of God.
 Problems
• Humans obeying Gods moral law out of fear of
punishment are acting out of self preservation or
hope of reward, rather than because it is moral
• Kant argued this should not be the motivation for
moral goodness.
• Also - if ‘morally good’ means ‘what God has
commanded’ we end up with a circular and trivial
claim.
• Eg What God commands is what God
commands and there is no separate or distinct
character (substance) to morality that
humans can recognise.
 Furthermore
• If divine commands come from a transcendental
supremely powerful being – how can humans
even conceive of being able to assess whether it
is morally good or not.
• Worship becomes passive and no relationship
with God.
• If obedience to DCT is rewarded in the afterlife –
what about the inequality of godly people in this
life?
Aquinas and Kant’s views on
the relationship between
religion and morality
 Aquinas
• Aquinas arguments for God based
on Plato’s eternal forms.
• Goodness found in human beings in this
contingent world are reflections of the
supreme goodness of God.
• Goodness on earth reflects Gods morally
good perfection.
• Beings in this life reflect different levels of
this moral goodness.
 Kant
• For morality and its goal the Summom Bonum to
be meaningful, God must be a necessary
postulate of morality.
• The Summum Bonum is not achievable in this
life, therefore the existence of God is necessary
for the goal of morality to be realised.
• There has to be a ‘holy author’ of the world who
makes possible the ‘highest good’.
• Reason dictates that morality demands his
existence.
 Conscience

• God given or the ‘voice of God’

• ‘the inner aspect of the life of an individual where a sense
of what is right and wrong is developed’
• Joseph Butler – conscience directs us to live
harmoniously with our competing drives of concern for
self and concern for others
• J. H. Newman – conscience reveals to us a higher
authority than any natural one, so therefore it must have
a supernatural origin of ultimate moral goodness.
• Feelings of guilt, shame, remorse are all testament to the
idea that there must be a higher power to which we
relate these feelings to.
 Criticisms

• Freud – the conscience is a moral policeman –

the internalised ‘super ego’ that controlled and
socialised human moral behaviour. Capable
of doing much damage to our mental health.
• The ‘super ego’ keeps the ‘id’ in check and is the
result of upbringing and environment.
• Conscience frustrates genuine moral
development and leads to universal neurosis
 Social conditioning
• Conscience has no supernatural origin
but is the product of social conditioning.
• Right and wrong are internalised
responses to our authority figures in
childhood.
• We learn right and wrong from
parents, teachers and the environment
we’re brought up in.
• Some argue conscience and morality
have a biological origin which serves an
evolutionary function to benefit living
harmoniously with others.
2. Critiques of relationship between
religion and morality
• Moral teaching based on scripture is unreliable
because sacred texts are culturally relative
and problems of interpretation.
• Is punishment a suitable motivation for
observing Gods commands – is this genuine
goodness?
• Demands of religious morality are sometimes
counter intuitive – Eg God commanding
Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.
 Euthyphro’s Dilemma
• Plato’s first investigation into the illogical
relationship between an all powerful God
and the nature of ‘goodness’.
• Does God command x because it is
good?
• Or is x good because God commands
it?
• Is morality independent from God?, if so
God is not almighty. If morality is dependent
upon what God commands, then morality
 Consider the case of Abraham
• The command to sacrifice Isaac – This
poses serious moral difficulties and is also
counter intuitive to what we understand
as being moral.
 Job and Jephthah
• Jephthah has to sacrifice his own
daughter in a bizarre twist of fate
because he made a deal with God
to give him a great victory in
battle.
• Job is punished by God in an
attempt to prove to Satan Jobs
unrelenting faith in the face of
such suffering.
• Stories like these in the Old
Testament appear to go against
universal understandings of
morality – clearly counter intuitive
 3. Morality is opposed to religion
R. Dawkins
• Dawkins – ‘The root of all evil’ religion leads to
evil.
• A malignant virus that affects human minds.
• An indulgence of irrationality.
• Uses examples of hell houses in the US to
show how religious fervour is whipped up by
condemning homosexuals and women who
have had abortions to eternal suffering in hell.
• Dawkins subscribes to a biological and
evolutionary account of morality.
• Morality is part of what it means to live in a
society.
 F. Nietzsche
• Morality is a disease.
• It is the curse of a herd mentality.
• It denies mankind striving to reach their ideal
state of ‘ubermensch’.(superman)
• Man has to overcome himself.
• Christianity is a disease on humanity Eg
Feelings of guilt, shame,remorse are forced
upon us from the pulpits of the churches. We
are made to feel bad for being human and
fulfilling our desires.
• The noble man lives life beyond ‘good’ and
‘evil’.