I gather that many people believe that atheism implies nihilism ”” that rejecting God means rejecting morality….isn’t it true, as Dostoevsky said, that “if God is dead, everything is permitted”?
Well, actually ”” no, it’s not. (And for the record, Dostoevsky never said it was.) Atheism does not entail that anything goes.
Admittedly, some atheists are nihilists. (Unfortunately, they’re the ones who get the most press.) But such atheists’ repudiation of morality stems more from an antecedent cynicism about ethics than from any philosophical view about the divine. According to these nihilistic atheists, “morality” is just part of a fairy tale we tell each other in order to keep our innate, bestial selfishness (mostly) under control. Belief in objective “oughts” and “ought nots,” they say, must fall away once we realize that there is no universal enforcer to dish out rewards and punishments in the afterlife. We’re left with pure self-interest, more or less enlightened.
…[actually, however] many theists, like many atheists, believe that moral value is inherent in morally valuable things. Things don’t become morally valuable because God prefers them; God prefers them because they are morally valuable. At least this is what I was taught as a girl, growing up Catholic: that we could see that God was good because of the things He commands us to do. If helping the poor were not a good thing on its own, it wouldn’t be much to God’s credit that He makes charity a duty.
It may surprise some people to learn that theists ever take this position, but it shouldn’t. This position is not only consistent with belief in God, it is, I contend, a more pious position than its opposite. It is only if morality is independent of God that we can make moral sense out of religious worship. It is only if morality is independent of God that any person can have a moral basis for adhering to God’s commands.
This is really, really poor. Does the author actually teach philosophy? [url=http://thomism.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/on-what-can-be-meant-by-there-is-no-morality-without-god/]This[/url] is rather more illuminating.
To require that God conform to some exterior definition of “good” means that God is not God, but merely some spiritual being more powerful than we are.
Furthermore, while the author may talk about morality and the existence of some kind of “good” the content of which is accessible to all reasonably rational human beings, in reality the author has no ground upon which to stand. There are at least two reasons for this: 1) If no being transcends humanity, then who will arbitrate the various value claims that exist in the multitude of cultures on this planet? What “good” is is defined in many differing ways among the cultures of the world.
2) Even more, if there is no God, then we are mere accidents, the product of matter plus energy plus time interacting in a random way. How can breathing, walking, accidents have any moral value? Human beings may have preferences, may have the power to define “good” within their sphere of influence, or may feel strongly about some things – but who can gainsay them if a dispute arises?
This essay was an exercise in distraction. The professor does not deal with the major issues.
Add to the above, she is not very good at checking facts. A brief search gave the followng link dissecting the argument that Dostoevsky did not write what she says he didn’t write, or did he: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/andrei_volkov/dostoevsky.html