LEARNING MODULE SURIGAO STATE COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY

TITLE: MODULE 3
TOPIC: Morality and Religion
TIME FRAME: 6 hours
INTRODUCTION:

Christians, Jews, and Muslims all believe that God has told us to obey certain rules of conduct.
God does not force these rules on us. He created us as free agents; so, we may choose what to
do. But if we live as we should, then we must follow God’s laws. This idea has been
expanded into a theory known as the Divine Command Theory. The basic idea is that God
decrees what is right and wrong.

OBJECTIVES:

In this lesson, learners will be able to:

a) clarify the role of religion in morality, and
b) dileanate the religious and moral standards.

PRE-TEST: Answer the following questions briefly.

1. Can morality exists without religion?

2. Do you consider all religious practices moral or all moral practices religious?

LEARNING ACTIVITIES:

Dicussions on Morality and Religion

PART FOUR. Morality and Religion

Actions that God commands us to do are morally required; actions that God forbids us to do
are morally wrong; and all other actions are morally neutral. This theory has a number of
advantages. For one, it immediately solves the old problem of the objectivity of ethics. Ethics
is not merely a matter of personal feeling or social custom. Whether something is right or
wrong is perfectly objective: It is right if God commands it and wrong if God forbids it.
Moreover, the Divine Command Theory explains why any of us should bother with morality.
Why shouldn’t we just look out for ourselves? If immorality is the violation of God’s
commandments, then there is an easy answer: on the day of final reckoning, you will be held
accountable.

There are, however, serious problems with the theory. Of course, atheists would not accept it,
because they do not believe that God exists. But there are difficulties even for believers. The
main problem was identified by Plato, a Greek philosopher who lived 400 years before Jesus
of Nazareth. Plato’s books were written as conversations, or dialogues, in which Plato’s
teacher Socrates is always the main speaker. In one of them, the Euthyphro, there is a
discussion of whether “right” can be defined as “what the gods command.” Socrates is
skeptical and asks: Is conduct right because the gods command it, or do the gods command it
because it is right? This is one of the most famous questions in the history of philosophy. The
British philosopher Antony Flew (1923–2010) suggests that “one good test of a person’s
aptitude for philosophy is to discover whether he can grasp [the] force and point” of this
question.

Socrates’s question is about whether God makes the moral truths true or whether he
merely recognizes their truth. There’s a big difference between these options. I know that the
Burj Khalifa building in the United Arab Emirates is the tallest building in the world; I
recognize that fact. However, I did not make it true. Rather, it was made true by the designers
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and builders in the city of Dubai. Is God’s relation to ethics like my relation to the Burj
Khalifa building or like the relation of the builders? This question poses a dilemma, and each
option leads to trouble.

First, we might say that right conduct is right because God commands it. For example,
according to Exodus 20:16, God commands us to be truthful. Thus, we should be truthful
simply because God requires it. God’s command makes truthfulness right, just as the builders
of a skyscraper make the building tall. This is the Divine Command Theory. It is almost the
theory of Shakespeare’s character Hamlet. Hamlet said that nothing is good or bad, but
thinking makes it so. According to the Divine Command Theory, nothing is good or bad,
except when God’s thinking makes it so.

1. This conception of morality is mysterious. What does it mean to say that God “makes”
truthfulness right? It is easy enough to understand how physical objects are made, at least in
principle. We have all made something, if only a sand castle or a peanut- butter-and-jelly
sandwich. But making truthfulness right is not like that; it could not be done by rearranging
things in the physical environment. How, then, could it be done? no one knows.

To see the problem, consider some wretched case of child abuse. on the Divine Command
Theory, God could make that instance of child abuse right—not by turning a slap into a
friendly pinch of the cheek, but by commanding that the slap is right. This proposal defies
human understanding. How could merely saying, or commanding, that the slap is right make
it right? If true, this conception of morality would be a mystery.

2. This conception of morality makes God’s commands arbitrary.

Suppose a parent forbids a teenager from doing something, and when the teenager asks why,
the parent responds, “Because I said so!” In such a case, the parent seems to be imposing his
will on the child arbitrarily. yet the Divine Command Theory sees God as being like such a
parent. Rather than offering a reason for his commands, God merely says, “Because I said
so.”

God’s commands also seem arbitrary because he always could have commanded the opposite.
For example, suppose God commands us to be truthful. on the Divine Command Theory, he
just as easily could have commanded us to be liars, and then lying, and not truthfulness,
would be right. After all, before God issues his commands, no reasons for or against lying
exist— because God is the one who creates the reasons. So, from a moral point of view,
God’s commands are arbitrary. He could command anything whatsoever.

This result may seem not only unacceptable but impious from a religious point of view.

3. This conception of morality provides the wrong reasons for moral principles. There are
many things wrong with child abuse: It is malicious; it involves the unnecessary infliction of
pain; it can have unwanted long-term psychological effects; and so on. However, the Divine
Command Theory does not care about any of those things; it sees the maliciousness, the pain,
and the long-term effects of child abuse as being morally irrelevant. All it cares about, in the
end, is whether child abuse runs counter to God’s commands.

There are two ways of confirming that something is wrong here. First, notice something that
the theory implies: If God didn’t exist, then child abuse wouldn’t be wrong. After all, if God
didn’t exist, then God wouldn’t have been around to make child abuse wrong.

However, child abuse would still be malicious, so it would still be wrong. Thus, the Divine
Command Theory fails. Second, bear in mind that even a religious person might be genuinely
in doubt as to what God has commanded. After all, religious texts disagree with each other,
 LEARNING MODULE SURIGAO STATE COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY

and sometimes there seem to be inconsistencies even within a single text. So, a person might
be in doubt as to what God’s will really is. However, a person need not be in doubt as to
whether child abuse is wrong. What God has commanded is one thing; whether hitting
children is wrong is another.

There is a way to avoid these troublesome consequences. We can take the second of
Socrates’s options. We need not say that right conduct is right because God commands it.
Instead, we may say that God commands us to do certain things because they are right. God,
who is infinitely wise, recognizes that truthfulness is better than deceitfulness, just as he
recognizes in Genesis that the light he sees is good. For this reason, God commands us to be
truthful.

If we take this option, then we avoid the consequences that spoiled the first alternative. We
needn’t worry about how God makes it wrong to lie, because he doesn’t. God’s commands
are not arbitrary; they are the result of his wisdom in knowing what is best.

Also, we are not saddled with the wrong explanations for our moral principles; instead, we are
free to appeal to whatever justifications of them seem appropriate.

Unfortunately, this second option has a different drawback. In taking it, we abandon the
theological conception of right and wrong.

When we say that God commands us to be truthful because truthfulness is right, we

acknowledge a standard that is independent of God’s will. The rightness exists prior to God’s
command and is the reason for it. Thus, if we want to know why we should be truthful, the
reply “because God commands it” does not really tell us. We may still ask, “ Why does God
command it?” and the answer to that question will provide the ultimate reason.

Many religious people believe that they must accept a theological conception of right and
wrong because it would be sacrilegious not to do so. They feel, somehow, that if they believe
in God, then right and wrong must be understood in terms of God’s wishes. our arguments,
however, suggest that the Divine Command Theory is not only untenable but impious. And,
in fact, some of the greatest theologians have rejected the theory for just these reasons.
SURIGAO STATE COLLEGE
LEARNING MODULEOF TECHNOLOGY

POST-TEST: Answer the following questions briefly.

1. What makes an action right or wrong, immoral or immoral?

2. If morality is above and beyond religion, what then should be the basis of judging moral
and immoral actions?
3. Express your thoughts in the image below.

Image Source: [Link]

REFERENCE:

Rachels, James “What is morality?” Chapter 1 in The Elements of Moral Philosophy 4th ed.
New York: McGraw-Hill College, 2004. 52-62.

GE Eth: Ethics 4
Second Semester 2020-2021