Ethics and The Existence of God

There is a popular argument for theism which is based on the claim that ultimate moral reality is dependent on. or best explained given, God. In this post, I want to explore what can be made of this argument and what the best way to understand this dependency relation is. Duly note that I am not particularly sympathetic to this argument, so this is as much an exercise in trying to understand as anything else.

First, what kind of dependency relation should we take this to be? First off, note that this is supposed to be an apologetic argument, so it cannot be simply the claim that all of reality depends on God for its being. No, something more must be meant here. A closer relationship between God's existence and moral reality is being supposed. The most popular way of making this out is that divine law requires a divine law-giver. This is sound as far as it goes, but many ethical views are reasonably coherent without claiming that there are any such thing as moral laws independent of our own existence. An Aristotelian view, which bases morality on what is good for creatures like us, does not require more than a recognizable human good (does this require God? Maybe. We'll come back to this).

Next, what about God as the best explanation for the existence of a moral reality? This is generally placed as an argument against an impersonal universe. So, this is the argument that random matter in motion could not give rise to moral realities. There are two possible reasons for this. On the one hand, one might view the processes which give rise to organisms on such a view as inherently incompatible with those beings having moral responsibilities or duties. On the other hand, one might think it unlikely that beings with the particular attributes which ground moral responsibilities and duties could have arisen in an impersonal universe. The former strikes me as conflating the ends involved in evolution with the ends of the organisms produced by evolution--simply because a being arose through selfish processes does not mean that the organism cannot have selfless motives itself. The latter sounds a lot like the simpler argument that consciousness could not have arisen in a consciousness-less world, which some atheists accept (many panpsychists are atheists: David Chalmers and Tom Nagel, off the top of my head).

So far, we have not made a very strong case for the argument in question. I promised to come back to the question of whether a recognizable human good requires the existence of God, however. This is where the argument has some strength. If you take all your goals and ask why you take them to be good goals, you must refer them to some further goal. At some point, one or more of your goals must stand by themselves, without reference to further goals. If there is no heaven nor any eternal guarantee that there there will be conscious beings into eternity, then our innate disposition to try to make the world better for those after us eventually runs out at the end of consciousness. If we make ourselves our final end then we will have to advocate a kind of selfishness, however well it may try to be self-effacing. If God or heaven exists, then our goals can reach an end in increasing the flourishing of consciousness. An alternative, and more orthodox, final end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, recognizing that communion with him is our flourishing.

But does this really show that God is required for moral reality? No, not quite. It does appear to show that some account of human flourishing as constitutively involving an other-focus must be true to ground moral reality--that is the form the orthodox final end takes. This may require God, but it may simply depend on our being communal beings.