Saturday, October 25, 2008

Morality vs. Reason as Argument for God

In our discussion on Monday, we debated the concept of morality as proof of the existence of God. Basically, I thought the overall argument was very weak, and someone pointed out that where did morality come from, did it just appear at some point in the evolutionary process? I thought about it, and I believe that instead of morality, our sense of reason might make a better argument for God.

First, our morals make us do things that are not at all evolutionarily beneficial. There is nothing beneficial to feeding the poor, or rescuing abused animals. I think that any argument we make for the existence of God must also fit in with our understanding of the evolution process. Reasoning makes more sense in this context, as it has allowed us to grow and adapt as a species. Second, many of us showed support for in our discussion, morality is not one single idea, it is not objective. Morality is a very subjective concept. We can see this in slavery. A thousand years it was widely practiced and generally viewed as acceptable. Nowadays it is virtually banned across the globe, and the majority of humans would agree it is wrong. This shows that morality is contextualized. In contrast, reason is a singular concept. While the conclusions we draw through reasoning can be different, the way it is practiced is not. Since that is a vague way to say it, I compare it to this. 2 painters will use the same brushes and same paint, and end with a very different piece, but the fact that they both "painted" is the idea I'm trying to explain.

My point of all this is, wouldn't it seem like a better argument to use reason instead of morality as evidence of God?

1 comment:

pamela1103 said...

I think that you make a good point introducing the idea of reason into the argument of god, but it the same way that morality is subjective, can't reason be also subjective. Different cultures in different places have different ways of reasoning things like situations and living, much like morality.
I think that morality may seem to be subjective, but in actuality there is a moral truth. I personally think that there is natural law and natural morality that exists and is innate even though many cultures believe is to be subjective.