Good Without God?

A very common question from religious people is, “So, if you don't believe in God, where do you get your morals from?” The suggestion is that without God there can be no moral decision making.

At bottom, it is not an unfair question.

So, just where do atheists get their morality?

The answer is deceptively simple: the same places everyone else does.

Atheists get their sense of right and wrong from several sources. We are born with an innate sense of right and wrong, fair and unfair, pain and pleasure, happiness and sadness, goodness and badness. We are born with some degree of empathy, and some degree of sympathy toward others. However, what we are born with varies across the population, like hat and shoe sizes. Some folks have a governor in their brains that make them extremely prone to doing “good.” Others, like sociopaths, are born with little or no regard for whether they are doing good or bad.

In addition to what we are born with, we add to that a learned sense of right and wrong. We learn from parents, from family, from friends, from teachers, from clergy and from independent life experiences. We take all of the information that we gather and form a general sense of when a thing is right, and when a thing is wrong. Some of us go further and study philosophies and religions, seeking greater insight into what constitutes right and wrong in given situations, and what systems can be devised for gleaning right and wrong from general principles.

None of this pleases a person who demands an objective morality, and places their deity in the role of final arbiter, decreeing right and wrong from on high. They see the idea of innate and learned aspects of right and wrong to be too mushy. They say God is necessary to be an umpire, otherwise what one person thinks is a strike is just as easily called a ball.

That is true, of course. One atheist can say that killing a man under given circumstances is wrong. Another atheist can say that it is right. Neither has any basis to claim an inherent superiority. But this is no different whatsoever from the moral conundrum faced by the religious person. One theist might say that killing a man in given circumstances is wrong, because he thinks his god decreed it so. Another theist, however, can be just as sure that their god has decreed the same action right and just.

Quakers, for example, believe that God requires nonviolence in all circumstances,that the death penalty is wrong, and killing in self-defense is wrong. Many other Christians, however, would take the position that the Biblical admonition against “murder” does not extend to defense of self or others, killings for punishment for crime, or killings in war. They say their God finds some killings wrong, and others right.

If a person says they believe in a god, that provides no answer to the moral questions in life. That believer must still puzzle out just what their god supposedly wants. How does the believer make this determination? The reality is that the believer has only the same tools with which the atheist hammers out his moral decisions. The believer is left with searching his own feelings, his own innate sense of right and wrong, his own understanding of religious and philosophical writings, and his own understanding of what he was taught by parents, family, friends, teachers and clergy.

The end result is that there are just as many differences of opinion regarding the morality of most actions among religious people and among religions, as there are among nonbelievers and secular philosophies. We all get our morality from the similar places, and through a similar processes.

The theist simply takes an extra step and attributes his own conclusion to the mind and will of a deity. In the words of Susan B. Anthony, “I distrust those people who claim to know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”