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For the sake of argument, let’s assume that a God does exist. From this premise/axiom, how would it logically follow that objective morality exists?

Even if it’s objectively true that God can punish people for actions deemed "wrong", this would only describe God's subjective opinions and behavior, along with the fact that God is powerful enough to impose His views on the universe, similar to a dictatorship. However, it doesn’t necessarily follow that what God declares to be "wrong" is indeed objectively wrong, or that we ought to refrain from such actions. It would only mean that if we don't refrain from those actions, we will be punished, which is just a description of what will happen, but not an ought.

Perhaps one might be able to argue that under a utilitarian ethical system, it would be rational to obey God to avoid punishment and maximize heavenly rewards. However, this reasoning presupposes that utilitarianism is objectively true, which implies the existence of objective morality ("we ought to maximize utility"), but this line of argumentation would be question-begging and circular. Assuming that we objectively ought to maximize utility in order to show that we ought to obey God as the utilitarian optimal decision is simply presupposing the very point that needs to be established (i.e., that moral oughts of any kind objectively exist in reality), regardless of whether God actually exists or not.

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  • Comments have been moved to chat; please do not continue the discussion here. Before posting a comment below this one, please review the purposes of comments. Comments that do not request clarification or suggest improvements usually belong as an answer, on Philosophy Meta, or in Philosophy Chat. Comments continuing discussion may be removed. Commented Aug 23, 2024 at 12:51
  • Let's assume that people want to be happy or enjoy goodness. The existence of goodness is not suppositional; if we are entertaining a proof of objective morality we must accept the existence of goodness, otherwise we are susceptible to redefine morality as independent of goodness, which would be circular. Commented Aug 26, 2024 at 16:25

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Let's assume that a God does exist

That's quite a thing to assume, and for us to base our morality on that, we may also need to assume that we have sufficient justification to rationally conclude this (and I don't consider us to have that).

Different motivations behind morality under theism may depend on God having certain traits, and the existence of souls or an afterlife (and I'd consider this to not just lack evidence, but to largely be contrary to the evidence).

And there's also a significant problem of knowing what God wants. Even if a god exists, it's undeniably the case in the world we're living in, that there are vastly different opinions about what God commands (even within the same religion, especially across time).

That seems like a necessary caveat to start with. But on to the actual answer.

It's just assertions

As far as I see, people only assert that something is objective morality, but no-one has ever been able to (rationally) conclude that something is objective morality.

People assert:

  • That "God's very nature is itself the objective standard of goodness"
  • That the morality of obeying one's creator is objective morality
  • That the morality of obeying God to avoid eternal torture or gain eternal bliss is objective morality
  • That the morality which God has "written onto our hearts" is objective morality
  • (There are also assertions about some natural things being objective morality outside of theism)

But these are just assertions. Subjectively, someone thinks that the above things are objective morality, but I don't recall (at least not at this exact moment) having ever seen anyone actually even try to explain why that's objective morality. It's just asserted.

It's not at all clear why a creator should have absolute (or any) moral authority over their creation. Parents don't have absolute moral authority over the children they "created". If a human creates a conscious robot and commands it to indiscriminately slaughter countless innocent people, it's possible that the robot's programming may prevent it from refusing (in which case it's not morality because it's not a choice), but if it can choose, I would not say that the robot must listen to its creator merely because it was created by them (even if the creator is able to erase the robot from existence or if they would reward them for obeying).

Eternal consequences is one is the only one that gets close to actually giving us something approach a good reason to follow that morality (even if that's a selfish reason). But that's still very much subjective (even if it might get close to being universal, if we can all agree that some god exists and what they command, which we definitely don't agree on).

The is-ought problem

Anyway, let's take a step back and ask: what is morality?

I would define morality to roughly be what we "should" or "shouldn't" do, specifically in relation to how we treat others, subject to some principle or goal. And this is commonly put forward as the recommendation for how everyone in a society should behave.

If you say we "should" do something, without some principle or goal, you run into Hume's is-ought problem of being unable to get a "should" from an "is".

Putting aside the fact that our perception of reality is subjective, if we're talking about objective reality, we can list of facts all day, but you're unable to cross the threshold from factual "is" statements to a moral statement about what you "should" do.

The only way it seems possible to get to a "should" is to add a goal:

  • I am hungry. ("is" statement)
  • I desire to no longer be hungry. ("is" statement)
  • Eating a sandwich will stop me from being hungry. ("is" statement)
  • I should eat a sandwich >IF< I want to satisfy my desire to stop being hungry. ("should" statement, with a goal)

The final statement with the "should" wouldn't follow from the statements above without the "if...". It might be the case that I'd rather eat something else, or that I don't have any bread, or that I have competing desires such that satisfying my hunger is not my immediate priority.

For morality, we also need to add a goal to get to a "should". Goals are subjective and dependent on the moral agent.

To say that something can be moral objectively, independent of a moral agent and independent of a goal - that seems incoherent. At that point it's not clear what we're even talking about any more.

God or no god, you can't get around that.

* If one says that God is the moral agent or chooses the goal or imposes it upon us, then that's still just subjective morality (whether someone asserts that to be objective or not). It doesn't solve the is-ought problem.

Do you really have a "should" when you have a goal?

Let's consider the statement above:

I should eat a sandwich if I want to satisfy my desire to stop being hungry.

We could rephrase this as:

Eating a sandwich will satisfy my desire to stop being hungry.

This communicates roughly the same sentiment, but the key difference is that the latter is an "is" statement.

We are making a factual statement that an action will result in some consequence, and the "should" becomes implicit based on whether that's a desirable consequence (all things considered). One could say that the "is" statement is no longer prescriptive and telling someone what to do, but the "should" statement was never truly that either - the "should" was entirely dependent on the consequence being desirable.

Any goal-based "should" statement can similarly be rephrased as an "is" statement.

This seems to leave the idea of an objective "should" in even more dubious territory, because I don't see any way to similarly convert such a statement to an "is" statement. The objective "should" is left as something that's incomparable to anything else, which has no frame of reference for what it means, in which case it's not far about gibberish.

Objective morality, attempt 2?

As a bad example of a moral standard, let's say whatever action results in you getting the most grains of rice is moral.

Now we could say that we can objectively measure the number of grains of rice that some action produces. So it could be said to be "objective" in that sense. But this doesn't solve the is-ought problem. We can't say we objectively "should" do something just because we can objectively determine that that thing will give you the most grains of rice. We need to first agree on the moral standard of trying to get the most grains of rice, and that is the is-ought problem and the problem with objective morality (which this doesn't solve).

To relate that back to the question, some people say we can objectively determine whether something matches what God wants (to which my immediately response is: no... how? ... what? Have you seen how many people disagree about what God wants...). But even in the best case, this still runs into the problem described above, of giving you an measuring stick that can be objectively measured, but not an objective justification for using said measuring stick.

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    The thought I often have is that all statements about God work just as well if God doesn't exist. We could still be following the orbit of God's moral gravity even if the focus of the ellipse is empty, so to speak. (because the real world is in the other focus... shhh!) Commented Aug 23, 2024 at 1:28
  • If we could all just figure out what good faith is, it would sure help. Commented Aug 23, 2024 at 11:34
  • "in which case it's not morality because it's not a choice" - Are you talking about libertarian freedom of the will here? Can you add a few thoughts on libertarian free will to your answer? Commented Aug 24, 2024 at 8:39
  • "The final statement with the "should" wouldn't follow from the statements above without the "if..."." - I still don't see how it follows logically (I mean, in a rigorous deductive sense). Is your position that this can be stated more rigorously and formally as a sequence of deductive steps, using symbols instead of natural language? The confusion is even more evident when you notice that the word "should" was never present in the premises, so I'm not really sure how you can manage to make the symbol appear in the chain of deductive steps. I'm probably missing something. Commented Aug 24, 2024 at 9:33
  • Would you please edit your answer to clarify that as well? Commented Aug 24, 2024 at 9:35
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I believe so, if defining "God" with some precision. By the term "God," even for people who don't believe in Him (at least in my culture), they mean the idea of an all-powerful, all-wise, all-good ("tri-omni"), transendent, personal Creator of the universe. Another simple definition might be a maximally great Being, which it seems to me, would include all these other attributes by default.

If God's nature is very goodness itself, then the correlation is consistent, and not circular. It's not saying that God is subservient to a concept greater than He; nor is it saying that He arbitrarily decides what is good and evil; but rather, that God's very nature is itself the objective standard of goodness. I.e., His very existence is what accounts for objective moral good and evil in the first place. And if we assume He has communicated this standard to us (I think implied in concept in the question's phrase, "to obey God"), then this standard will be honest per God's goodness, and correct per His wisdom. Put another way, His "subjective" opinion will necessarily correlate perfectly with reality. Even further, what is "subjective" for God in this regard is "objective" for us, because He created reality according to His nature (Acts 17:28, "For in him we live, and move, and have our being").

Could God, in theory, not be all-good? I don't think so. I think the concept of an "evil all-powerful, all-wise God" is incoherent. Evil is a destruction of what is good; and for an eternally existent, all-powerful, all-wise being to be so torn in fundamental nature, or to have two opposite natures (for one cannot be "all evil" without there first being some good to destroy), seems to me incoherent in principle. I am not sure such a being could eternally exist while maintaining omnipotence, even in theory, without at some point destroying himself or becoming powerless in the ebb and flow of his own evil. Thus an all-powerful, all-wise, eternally existent Being must of necessity be also all-good, as I see it; and certainly so, to be "maximally great," if using that definition. (The Bible also seems to address this, James 1:13 "God cannot be tempted with evil", Hebrews 6:18 "impossible for God to lie".)

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    You say it's not arbitrary, but... it sounds arbitrary. You're saying God's opinion is "necessarily" the same as (?) goodness, but that doesn't tell me which one supersedes the other, or how it logically makes sense for them to be equivalent. I consider it wrong to light someone on fire because my moral standard entail minimising suffering, and burning to death involves a great amount of suffering. If a similar argument applies under your God belief, that suggests suffering is why that's immoral, not because God says so. If it's immoral because God says so, then it's arbitrary. Commented Aug 22, 2024 at 18:47
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    It seems to me a bit murky how God's "opinion will necessarily correlate perfectly with reality" when reality includes stars exploding and destroying other star systems, whole galaxies disappearing in to black holes, the Permian Extinction, catastrophic asteroid impacts, parasitic wasps... How should we read these signs? God wanted caterpillars to be eaten alive by grubs? Lions to tear apart gazelles? Why make carnivorous animals at all? Commented Aug 23, 2024 at 2:51
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    As best I know, all the things I mentioned arose long before any human-like primates even existed, so blaming us for the Permian Extinction is rich. How does that work? This is why religious people don't want education, because the stories don't hold up to scrutiny. If they really loved people, they would pursue education for everyone like they were being chased by a bear. Commented Aug 23, 2024 at 11:49
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    @ScottRowe I would agree that blaming death on man's sin doesn't make sense if assuming evolution (universal common descent). Many Christians do believe in evolution, but I think it's very inconsistent with the Bible, largely for the point you raise. I also have scientific objections, like genetic entropy and the costs of natural selection, but I guess that's getting into another topic. :) Commented Aug 23, 2024 at 12:01
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    Excellent answer. The idea that God's moral commands are not arbitrary is a key point in the natural law theory. Unlike what the voluntarists (e.g. Ockham) say, God's will is not arbitrary, but it is in accordance with His nature: as you stated, "His opinion will necessarily correlate perfectly with reality". The OP's question cannot be satisfactorily answered without a good understanding of some thomistic metaphysical doctrines. For example, the divine simplicity, the analogy of being, the neoplatonic doctrine of participation and how the eternal and natural laws are connected. Commented Aug 23, 2024 at 21:39
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The existence of an omniscient being implies absolute morality, I'd argue. If the future can be known in principle, that means there exists an optimal sequence of actions, that is known by at least said omniscient being. For any framework that assumes there exists some kind of optimal state of the world.

If one also believes or trusts that the state of the world considered optimal by said omniscient being, and the state considered as optimal by oneself coincide, then it becomes rational to obey said being to reach that state.

Otherwise there is still an objectively right thing to do, but you may not know what that is.

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    "that means there exists an optimal sequence of actions" - How is optimality evaluated? Are you implicitly assuming the existence of an utility function, and therefore, that some form of utilitarianism is true? Commented Aug 22, 2024 at 11:23
  • @user77058 "For any framework that assumes there exists some kind of optimal state of the world." Does that answer the question? Commented Aug 22, 2024 at 12:30
  • I tried to avoid talking about utilitarianism, I am not 100% sure I succeeded though. Commented Aug 22, 2024 at 12:33
  • "If one also believes or trusts that the state of the world considered optimal by said omniscient being, and the state considered as optimal by oneself coincide" ─ this seems, to me, to assume exactly what the question asks. If God exists, does it necessarily follow that what He wants is objectively good? Commented Aug 22, 2024 at 15:43
  • There's an old saying: "When making a ham and egg breakfast, the chicken is a participant, but the pig is committed." We're the pigs here, so it is entirely "the state considered as optimal by oneself" that matters for us. Since we apparently cannot know what God considers optimal, in the smoke and confusion of battle. So we can only 'obey' our own sense of things. Commented Aug 23, 2024 at 2:41
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I am surprised that answers are entertaining the meme of God as "a dictator in the sky" in a serious discussion.

Advanced theology will typically conclude that God created the world from absolute nothing (ex nihilo), which doesn't mean zero raw materials, but in consideration of the concept that there "was" nothing but Him, whatsoever. So the world wasn't even in existence in "potential". There wasn't even a "logical reasoning" for it.

Therefore everything created is definitionally its creator's will, only. This is where objective morality comes from. He is the only, including the only will. His "subjective will" is our "objective reality".

Therefore if we are to say He has preferences of what is considered good, right and proper, and what is not, that's definitionally an objective morality. Our opinions on whether we agree are subjective, and we can't defer to any pre-existing "higher authority" than Him. E.g. we can't say "natural law overrides God's preferences", because God created natural law from absolutely nothing.

I hope that makes sense.

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    So... God brought us into the world, therefore he's allowed to do whatever he wants to us and we must obey him, because... reasons, I guess. Sounds like an abusive parent, who thinks them having given birth to their child given them the right to beat, abuse and torture them, and their child must listen to them for no reason other than because they gave birth to them. It's an atrocious form of morality (if we can even call it that) that's unable to distinguish God telling you to not kill anyone from God telling you to light your child on fire and watch them burn to death. "Advanced theology"... Commented Aug 22, 2024 at 18:27
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    "It sounds to me" is the strawman fallacy @NotThatGuy. Commented Aug 22, 2024 at 18:31
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    @RabbiKaii - Regardless of that metaphor, I think "It's an atrocious form of morality that's unable to distinguish God telling you to not kill anyone from God telling you to light your child on fire and watch them burn to death." If God's Will is Good, then either both of those would be equally good, or at least one of those is impossible. I find the first option contradictory on the face of it (any definition of Good which allows it is incompatible with mine), and arguments for the second option have so far failed to convince me. Commented Aug 22, 2024 at 18:41
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    @TimC Even worse, you have "God works in mysterious ways." On top of that, God can decide something is moral in an arbitrary way. These two things combined imply that even if objective morality, as defined by God, exists, what's right and what's wrong remains unknowable to anyone besides God. Commented Aug 22, 2024 at 20:54
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    @rus9384 - Giving some charity to the argument for God, the claim that "God can decide something is moral in an arbitrary way" might be disputed. Not every theologian necessarily believes in "mysterious ways" and we atheists should do better than assuming that everyone we argue against believes in every position we've ever had to argue against in the past. That field is full of strawmen. My only claim is I don't think the existence of God necessarily implies the absence of Mysterious Ways, and I place the burden of proof on theologians to prove that it does if they want to say God is morality. Commented Aug 23, 2024 at 16:26
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No. Even if he called himself Azu the Almighty and demanded tribute, it would, by definition, be a space alien with sufficiently advanced technology that's indistinguishable from magic.

If the creature created a bubble that expanded and became our universe as an experiment to see what would happen, that's just the kind of thing you'd expect such a creature to do.

Like in Kubrick's movie 2001, I think that evolution appears to be directed by something with intent. But that's all I know, and I don't even know it for sure.

One thing I do know for sure is that these creatures don't appear to want us to worship them. We know this because they could easily make their existence known, like leaving black monoliths in the desert. But they didn't.

I think they want us to have free will and see what happens. = =

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  • It certainly makes for great entertainment! Commented Aug 23, 2024 at 2:45
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No.

To start with, objective morality as in "natural law" could exist even without gods. And then the presence of gods disagreeing with it would trouble objectivity.

Similarly, any number of moral frameworks can be objective, even if they disagree with each other (Objectivity may only require that any two people agree on how to pass judgement given a framework). Similar to Boxing and Grappling rules in sports can both be objective, but different.

Anything having properties to be deserved a god may not have any moral opinion (and I'll declare the absence of any moral judgement as the absence of morality, though that can be debated).

There may also be any number of entities deserving to be called gods by virtue of one definition or another, and those might disagree on any number of issues, proving an objective morality does not necessarily come with gods.

If we narrow the thought experiment to the assumption that there is no independent objective morality, only a single such godlike entity (or something a single Trinity, because complicating things can more easily persuade the illiterate), which does pass moral judgement, the question becomes a bit easier, but still muddy.

Conceptually (though probably not theologically), we can imagine such a god to have horrible judgement, say being racist and promising territorial property of a certain desert-like wasteland to the males of one tribe of people and their male descendants. By virtue of this being the judgement of the single god, it would be an "objective morality". But one should gather from my description that accepting this comes with a number if issues.

A single deity might also be inconsistent about morality, changing rules more often than people change shirts. Which would immediately invalidate their judgement as being objective with respect to passage of time (though technically, it can still be locally objective for any given point in space-time).

So in philosophy and rational debate, no such implication is viable. In theology however things are different, and for historical reasons western philosophic writings on the subject have been influenced/tainted by theology (it's just inconvenient to be burned alive by the inquisition).

So a theological argument would abuse language in such a way that a god can only be a god by being infinitely and perfectly just, and thus the existence of a god implies the necessity of perfect moral judgement and thus objective morality. Or something like that in any case. Such talk avoids logic such as the possibility of multiple contradictory judgements being possibly perfectly just, and other rational objections, and relies more on the threat of said burning stakes to win the argument. That's why historic writings on the subject tread a careful line of trying not to piss off the Pope too much, in the same way modern writers might be wary of openly criticizing Islam.

A more pragmatic approach to this topic might be that even if auch an objective morality existed, it might remain unknowable, no prophet or strangely burning bush can be trusted, and thus for all intents and purposes it does not exist.

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  • I love that phrase, "for all intents and purposes", we don't hear it enough. Commented Aug 23, 2024 at 2:36
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I'm trying to make the question a little more testable. Let us suppose some one climbs a mountain, Sinai would be good, but I'm willing to settle for any mountain, provided there is a Being at the top, Who:

  1. gives out stone tablets with rules written on them;
  2. punishes people who break the rules, preferably by striking them with lightning;
  3. helps those who follow the rules to defeat other tribes;
  4. accepts sacrifices.

In short, we have a credible Torah-grade Deity, or TGD.

How do we leap from the existence of TGD to the idea that whatever He wants is objectively moral?

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No need for assumptions here.

God exists.

Therefore we exist. (God is defined as our Creator).

Existence is good. We get to choose what we will do each day and every hour and minute. We enjoy sunshine, breathing air, wiggling our toes, going for walks, eating watermelon, drinking lemonade, having nachos, eating chicken, thinking, writing, singing, dancing, making things. We love to be creative. Our children bring us joy. We fight. We criticize each other. We hold one another in contempt. Some steal. Some debauch. Some murder. We suffer, we die.

Morality is teaching what is good or right.

Even if God had been totally silent verbally (ignoring the Bible and other ancient and modern revelations from Him), the reward system inherent in living and gaining experience is a great moral teacher.

Therefore yes, objective morality is an inevitable consequence of the existence of God.

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    The reward system that pushes people to alcoholism, gambling, diabetes, CandyCrush and TicToc? Please. The internal reward system moves the masses to join the cults and religions of their parents without any critical thinking involved. For some it will be Christianity, for some Islam, for some Buddhism and for some Charles Manson. All driven by the same reward system. Also this site is not about pushing personal beliefs, so refrain from declaring existence of gods. Commented Aug 24, 2024 at 22:06
  • @tkruse A properly functioning Divinely designed reward system does not incentivize those things. All of those obsessions are indicative of a dysfunctional reward system, among other important acquired defects, complete or near complete amnesia of the suffering that results from alcohol consumption, monetary losses due to gambling, opportunity cost and missing out on life from being addicted to social media and gaming. Commented Aug 25, 2024 at 16:37
  • @tkruse "refrain from declaring existence of gods" Absolutely not. No honest person who claims to love wisdom can deny the reality of the God who gave us life, Who is the Source of all wisdom. You can learn about Him in the Bible and in the Book of Mormon. Commented Aug 25, 2024 at 16:39
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    I mean refrain from doing it on this subsite. We all try to play nice and be inclusive to those who don't believe and those who are cultists, by saying "Assume there is a god", or "Assuming there is no god." It's also just good manners, really. There are other subsites where you declarations of faith will be welcome. But not here. This site is for discussing philosophy, not for cultists to all declare their own gods exist. We'd never hear the end of it. Commented Aug 25, 2024 at 20:21
  • @tkruse we are never hearing the end of atheist dogma as it is. True statements are allowed. Besides which the question asks specifically about the existence of God. You're entitled to your opinion. The Fall happened. There is nothing to blame God for. Divine powers meet fallen natures. We get to choose how to respond. If there were no allure to wrongdoing, life wouldn't be a test. Commented Aug 26, 2024 at 16:10

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