Critical Thinking: The Source of Morals

João Zeferino da Costa. (www.nobility.org)

ISKCON.  Original artist unknown.

I recently had a discussion with someone who made the following statement, "Everyone must get their morals from somewhere, and you need God for that".  We could not continue the discussion, but it is surprising to me that he was unable to see how oxymoronic the statement was.  This was a successful individual who got where he is today through his intellect and daily use of critical thinking.  However, in making this one statement, he failed to think through the logic of his statement and see the inherent contradiction in those few words.  

Now, he is deeply religious, presumably a Christian (but it does not matter), so I am assuming that he “takes his morals” from the Bible which he surely takes to be divine (or at least divinely inspired).  So for him, God through the Bible has provided us with what is moral and what is not.  But, the vast majority of the human population is not Christian.  In fact, no single religion is practiced by the majority of people.  Everyone, atheists and the religious, would agree with me that not all religions are divine or divinely inspired (I hope this is obvious for it may necessitate another posting).  Instead most would argue that only theirs is from God and that all others are man-made.  So, implicit in this argument is that while their flavor of morals may be from God, others have made up theirs.  That for example Islam is divine, but Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. are all creations of the human mind.  Since all religions purport to have morals, they are essentially arguing that man has developed a set of morals in these cases.  But this negates the original claim, and hence the contradiction.  

The fact that every religion provides its followers with morals, and that at best only one can be correct, means that the vast majority of humans on Earth live with man-made morals that are neither god-given nor even divinely inspired.  And this includes atheists.  Morality is not the exclusive domain of theists. By and large, every group, culture, and society, has developed a set of values and morals that for the most part agree with each other.  Regardless of who does a better job of sticking to those, basic fundamentals like not stealing and not killing are shared across the human race.  Oddly enough, it is the religious that most often violate them, especially the "not killing" part.

I hate to break it to you, but the morals you may hold to be absolute, they were invented, by a fellow human.  What should be absolute is human dignity and respect for this Earth and all those that inhabit it.  We do not need a God to tell us that.