Morality Without GodSaying that without God, not everything is permitted, is not the same as saying that our complex ethical systems are possible without God. Such systems exist. Are they evidence of God? Or did they come about in some other way?
Darwin began by viewing God as the first cause, the force that set in motion all that he saw. Later, he came to understand that God was not required as part of the explanation.
Similarly, God is not required to explain moral systems. Yet the compassionate or just treatment of humans by their fellows who don't have to is one of the most compelling arguments ever offered for the existence of a just, compassionate God. To disagree with this, it is necessary to advance some alternative explanations.
The following is a brief survey of some other theories of the origin of morality, followed by one of my own. Just as biological, psychological and sociological influences conspire to influence any other human behavior, the following theories don't seem to be mutually exclusive; they may all hold true simultaneously.
Psychological Explanations. Freud wrote in The Future of an Illusion that religion was nothing more than a self-deception in which man engages to deny his own loneliness and fear. God is nothing morer than a projection of the infant's loved, feared, all-potent father.
In Civilization and its Discontents, he went further, to trace the interesting relationship between the infant's inability to distinguish its body from the universe and the religious feeling of oneness with existence. Just as we must renounce infantile impulses, no matter how gratifying, to avoid living our lives soiled, helpless and ineffective, humans collectively renounce chaotic impulses so that they may co-exist in a stable society. Morality ...