Faith vs Reason
"If there is no God, the labels “good” and “evil” are merely opinions. They are substitutes for “I like it” and “I don’t like it.” They are not objective realities." (Dennis Prager, in a piece in National Review Online)
The argument is wrong twice over. The existence of a god does not solve the problem of justifying right and wrong and there are solutions that do not require a god.
The existence of a god does not solve the problem because we need some reason to conclude that the god is good, that his will defines what we ought to do. The existence of a very powerful being, even one who created us and the universe, does not imply anything at all about right or wrong. He could be a devil. He could, like gods in many religions, be no more morally perfect than humans. He could be a moral nihilist with no views at all on good and evil and a wicked sense of humor. His power may make it prudent to obey him but does not make it virtuous to do so. To get from a god to God in something like the Christian sense you need some further basis for moral beliefs, some way of deciding that the god is good.
If the problem is soluble it is soluble without a god. The solution that strikes me as least unsatisfactory is to posit the existence of moral truths analogous to physical truths, perceived by a moral sense analogous to physical sight or hearing. That describes the world as almost everyone actually perceives it; there are not many people who do not see torturing small children for fun as wicked. And that view of moral reality can be confirmed in the same way we confirm our view of physical reality, by subjecting it to consistency tests. If a moral universe exists there ought to be a reasonably good correlation across people in their fundamental moral perceptions.1
For a defense of that position see my earlier post Moral Realism or, for a longer and more professional version, Michael Huemer's book Ethical Intuitionism. I was first persuaded of its plausibility when, as an undergraduate, I lost an argument with Isaiah Berlin. His essential point was not that the evidence for moral reality was stronger than I thought but that the evidence for physical reality was weaker. If we applied the same standards to testing moral reality — rough consistency at the most basic level of perception — the case for it does not look that much worse.
Prager also writes:
If there is no God, the labels “good” and “evil” are merely opinions. They are substitutes for “I like it” and “I don’t like it.” They are not objective realities.
Every atheist philosopher I have debated has acknowledged this.
I am an atheist although not a professional philosopher and do not acknowledge it. Michael Huemer is a professional philosopher, I think an atheist, and does not acknowledge it. I once emailed Prager offering to debate him on the subject but never received a response. After I post this essay I will send him a link to it and a repeat invitation.
Mutazilites, Ash'arites, et multa Caetera
The early history of Islamic philosophy featured a dispute between two schools of thought.2 The Mutazilites, or rationalists, held that human reason was capable of recognizing good and evil; they concluded that although religious obligations such as prayers had to be based on revelation, other legal and moral rules did not. The Ash'arites held that human reason was unable to make such judgements, hence that all rules had to be based on revelation with reason limited, if I correctly understand their position, to interpreting the meaning and application of what had been revealed.
The problem with the Ash’arite position is the same as the problem with Dennis Prager’s claim: If humans are entirely unable to distinguish good from evil, how can they distinguish God from the Devil? The same problem should exist for other religions in which some theologians hold a position analogous to the Ash'arite.
When I raised that issue on my blog I got a number of interesting responses, including one arguing that Jewish doctrine, as revealed in the Torah, supported the Mutazilite view:
Ironically, the Torah itself makes the best case against Prager's point. … perhaps the clearest example comes from the story of Abraham arguing with God over Sodom and Gemorrah. After God announces that he will destroy the city, Abraham asks if he will really destroy the city if there are 50 righteous people in the city. Abraham then says to God "חָלִלָה לְּךָ" / "chalilah l'cha" / "shame on you" to do this thing. Abraham then asks "Shall not the judge of all the earth do justly?"
Now if justice or righteousness were derived solely from divine commands, then Abraham's question would be completely foolish. God would of course be acting justly because anything that God does is definitionally just. Abraham's impudence — saying "shame on you" to God — would not only be foolish and disrespectful, but completely incoherent.
The only way this makes sense is if normative ideas of justice exists independently of divine commands or actions. Given that, Abraham can hold God responsible for apparently acting unjustly.
One of the other interesting details I came across when studying Islamic law was the attitude of Islamic legal scholars to probability. In their view, again as I understand it, as probability becomes stronger it becomes certainty. An important example is the status of a hadith, an oral tradition about something Mohammed did or said. A hadith known through only one chain of transmitters is at best probable. A hadith known through N independent chains — legal scholars disagreed about the size of N — is certain.
That view of probability theory I had seen before. As anyone who has spent much time arguing with Objectivists, followers of Ayn Rand's philosophy, is likely to have discovered, they too believe in certainty where others would see, at most, a high probability.
I succeeded, with great effort, in resisting the temptation to title this part of the post "Was Ayn Rand a closet Muslim?"
Some readers may recognize the claim that there is such a correlation as one that C.S. Lewis makes in The Abolition of Man, where he refers to the shared morality as the Tao.
I somewhat simplify the history and the dispute. For more details see the Wikipedia article Mu'tazilism and others linked to it.
'If we applied the same standards to testing moral reality — rough consistency at the most basic level of perception — the case for it does not look that much worse.'
I've seen this argument before. Michael Huemer likes to say similar things, as you point out.
I think it's totally wrong. I'm actually a moral anti-realist myself, and as you might expect, I don't find this to be at all confusing or in conflict with my intuitions, whereas a non-belief in the existence of the physical world definitely would be.
Of course I have lots of thoughts and (sometimes strong) emotions about moral behavior, but this doesn't conflict with my intuitions, because I correctly recognize that as a fact about my own psychological makeup, not about 'moral reality'.
This one was addressed long, long ago by Plato, in the Euthyphro, where Socrates asks, "Do the gods love holy things because they are holy, or are holy things holy because the gods love them?" I've seen it said (I think by Anthony Flew) that an appreciation of the point of this question is one of the marks of a philosopher.
If the good is good because the gods like it, or command it, then the statement that the gods are good is merely a tautology, empty of content; we would still have to say that the gods were good if they commanded that we kill our fathers, marry our mothers, or torture our guests. But if the word "good" has actual content, so that saying that the gods are good means something definite, beyond "you had better praise the gods because they are more powerful than you are," then we must have the capacity to judge for ourselves that something is good, and then we don't need the gods to tell us what is good.
Ironically, this distinction is important to Ayn Rand's philosophy, though she doesn't credit it to Plato. She rejects the idea that ethical egoism means "I want this, and therefore it's good," which she calls "whim-worship"; her version is "this is good, and therefore I want it." This is something that a lot of her critics seem not to get, perhaps because the assumption that ethical judgment cannot be rational is so deeply ingrained that they see only a choice between the arbitrary commands of God and the arbitrary commands of one's own desires. That might have been true of Stirnerite egoism but it was not true of Randian egoism.