If God were to exist, would he care about morality? That is, would a deity care especially about us so that he’d want to guide our ways of life?
For the sake of argument, let’s assume monotheists are correct and a divine person created the natural universe. According to the scriptures of the God-fearing religions, the answer to the above question is yes, God cares about morality. Indeed, from the religious perspective, that’s practically all God cares about. The religious image of God makes him out to be a micromanaging, puritanical zealot.
But that religious treatment of the question is easily explained away as the projection onto God of human priestly preoccupations. If a priestly class cares about morality, this class might use an image of God as its mascot to scare the flock into obeying prejudicial commandments that are all too human in origin.
Steelmanning Swinburne’s analogy
In “God and Morality,” though, the Oxford philosopher and Christian apologist Richard Swinburne says, “obviously God has good reason to inform us of those moral truths which hold independently of his will but which we are not clever enough to discover.” These truths would include moral principles such as that rape and the breaking of promises are forbidden, and that we’re obliged to please benefactors (like God).
There seem to be two reasons he thinks this is obvious. First, as he says, it’s because we’re not supposed to be smart enough to figure out morality by ourselves, and if we act badly out of ignorance, we can harm ourselves, whereas God knows everything and can inform us and save us from that unnecessary danger.
Second, and underlying that instrumental reasoning, there’s the analogy between God and human parents, which Swinburne presumes. Thus, he says, “Parents care that their children do what they ought to do (for reasons other than the parent’s command). So if there is a God, does God.” And again:
If there is a God of the kind we are considering, he is all-good and all-wise, and truly great, and for that reason alone it is very good to reverence him. But he is also our supreme benefactor. He is so much more the source of our being than are our parents. God keeps us in existence from moment to moment, gives us knowledge and power and friends; and our other benefactors can only provide the benefits which they provide because God sustains in them the power to do so. Hence it becomes a duty to thank him abundantly, and also to obey his commands. If children have limited obligations to obey parents, humans will have obligations far less limited in extent to obey God.
Indeed, throughout his discussion Swinburne falls back on this analogy between human and divine benefactors. But the analogy is weak.
Human parents produce their children, and if they’re in some productive line of work, they might help produce various cultural or technological artifacts too. Meanwhile, God is supposed to have created everything in the universe, including trillions upon trillions of other stars and planets and the uncountable nonhuman organisms that lived on Earth over billions of years.
Human children are dear to their parents because humans aren’t such prolific creators, and because human parents and offspring are genetically and hormonally bonded as part of a natural evolutionary process. None of that would apply to God. To strengthen the religious analogy, then, we’d need to imagine what human parents would do if they produced not just, say, two or three human children, but trillions upon trillions of other things, including countless nonhuman life forms.
In that case, would the human parents go out of their way to educate their human offspring about how they should live? Perhaps the biological bond would still hold, so we’d need to imagine the breaking of that bond to further strengthen the analogy since God wouldn’t be naturally compelled to play favourites with his creations.
Of course, mortal parents would be unable to care for all these trillions of offspring, but we can alter the analogy from the other direction, to make these parents more godlike and thus to test Swinburne’s assurance that God would obviously want to inform us about moral principles. We can assume, then, that superhuman parents might have the lifespan, the knowledge, and the power to aid all their trillions of alien offspring. So, these super-parents have the means and the opportunity, as it were, but would they have the motive?
You see, that latter assumption cuts both ways. Precisely by enabling these superhuman parents to educate all their uncountable offspring, these godlike powers would eliminate the motive to do so by decreasing the value of each of the products. The value of something increases with its rarity, and if it’s oversupplied, its value plummets, according to basic economic reasoning.
If you could create infinitely many offspring, why would you care about any of them? If some perish, you could always produce more. Indeed, why wouldn’t you just produce all possible offspring in infinite worlds? These offspring would include infinite iterations of you, me, and everyone else, including the versions of us that our superhuman parents aid, and the unaided versions too — and the versions that have red hair, and that smell funny, and that are twenty feet tall, and so on.
That’s the completed, steelman analogy between God and human parents. By strengthening the analogy, that is, by making God and human parents more alike, we must imagine that God would lack human limitations. Yet those limits are just what motivate parents’ special concern for their children. It’s because parents have mammalian bodies — bodies that are genetically driven to produce love hormones that bind them to their offspring — that human parents favour their children. And it’s because human parents can’t have innumerable children and couldn’t hope to care for all of them even if they could produce so many, that they devote so much of their attention to the few children they can produce and protect.
(In ecology, this is known as the difference between r- and K-selection strategies, between maximizing the quantity or the quality of offspring. Humans are K-strategists, investing a lot of parental time on relatively few offspring to improve their quality. If God created the whole cosmos, he’s evidently more like such r-strategists as bacteria, insects, grasses, and rats, organisms that have a high quantity of offspring precisely to avoid having to invest much energy in parenting any of them.)
Only a weak form of this theistic analogy provides the illusion that God’s concern for morality is self-evident. Once we lay aside the toy conception of God, the one that depicts him as a limited human parent living in the clouds somewhere, we no longer have any clear reason to assume that God would care especially about our welfare. Maybe he just creates all possible things to see what happens.
God’s lofty expectations
Moreover, if we’re not smart enough to figure out morality by ourselves, why should we be bound to live according to moral principles? Would we punish an average child for not understanding quantum mechanics? Or would we hold an ant to human social standards? Hardly.
According to Swinburne, “God rightly wants humans to be holy,” so he has “reason for imposing obligations on us (by way of commands).” By “holy” Swinburne must mean something like “superhuman.” Thus, God wants us to be something other than what we are. Supposedly, God created higher life forms, too, such as angels. But with us, God is evidently experimenting to see whether one kind of thing can transform into something else.
More precisely, according to the Abrahamic myth, God made our ancestors holy or perfect, but they “fell from grace” and became imperfect. Thus, God is only trying to redeem his creation by showing us how we can atone and overcome the satanic corruptions and our “original sin” of pride that blinds us to what we owe our divine benefactor.
Once again, though, this theology would cut both ways.
If we disregard the Genesis myth and assume that God made us imperfect like all the other animal species that evolve in nature, his expectation that we be holy, perfect, or divine seems bizarre. And if God is bizarre, why should we assume he shares our concern with morality? That is, if God expects blood to flow from a stone, as it were, and punishes stones for not bleeding, maybe God is insane by human standards. Or maybe his sense of fairness is alien to ours. In either case, rather than dutifully obeying God, we’d be obliged to shun him and to regard his commandments as the rantings of someone who’s potentially been corrupted by his omnipotence.
A Christian here would likely point to Jesus, prophets, and saints as proofs that blood can flow from stones, that members of our kind can be morally perfected. There are, however, a few problems with that response.
First, the records of these so-called morally perfected individuals are dubious since they’re typically legendary or even mythical. That’s certainly so in Jesus’s case. Even if we had much reliable knowledge of the historical Jesus — and we don’t, according to the consensus of objective, critical historians — the Christian view of him is that he had the advantage of being a demigod, or the only “begotten” child of God. Again, then, divine bizarreness sets in since Jesus would hardly be a suitable model for non-begotten humans.
We might wonder, too, how Jesus would have demonstrated his moral superiority had he lived long enough to see the devastating Jewish-Roman wars. Presumably, he would have continued to recommend pacifism and would have lamented the wars’ outcome. But would his faith in God have been shattered once he’d seen the Romans destroy Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple? Would that catastrophe have made him more skeptical, perhaps even cynical? Maybe Jesus looks morally perfect only because he didn’t live long enough to lose his naïve, youthful idealism.
Second, the Christian’s heroes may be morally perfect from the Christian perspective, but who’s to say Christianity has the final word on morality? Here Swinburne would face the problem of the multiplicity of religions and of moral philosophies. Specifically, the idealist’s otherworldly principles look naïve when viewed next to the political compromises that are needed to sustain civilization. God’s delay in bringing his final judgment of humanity would have forced us to solve our problems in realistic, secular ways. Indeed, countercultures can be hypocritical in so far as they’re parasitic on morally impure mainstream cultures, in which case the former’s moral superiority would be superficial.
In any case, if instead we adhere to the Genesis myth, we’re left with even less reason to trust God’s sense of morality since God would have allowed his creation to be corrupted in the first place. God would have let the serpent tempt our ancestors, as it were, or been oblivious to what was happening. And he’d have wrongfully blamed our ancestors rather than himself for the corruption. Again, such a deity resembles a corrupted human tyrant, not a flawless judge of what’s right.
The resort to miracle claims
Swinburne makes two other dubious remarks about God and morality. First, he says that
God may issue commands for the purpose of coordination…If God founds an institution which he permits us to join (for example, marriage or the church) where membership involves an obligation to show loyalty to the institution, he needs to tell us how we are to show that loyalty — for example, whose decisions we should obey where there is a dispute (irresoluble by discussion) about what members of the institution should do.
Swinburne’s assuming, then, that something like his Eastern Orthodox Church is especially aligned with God’s intentions, and God’s concern with morality would be a matter of coordinating our societies and protecting the godly institutions from the depravity of the ungodly ones.
But this would amount to divine micromanaging, which is hardly the best explanation of how religions work.
The so-called divine commandments are readily explained in naturalistic terms, arriving as they do based on centuries of societal development and interaction, and on hundreds of thousands of years of evolution of social instincts in animals. The Jewish Mosaic code from the late seventh century BCE, for instance, didn’t really come straight from God on a mountaintop. Those laws were based on the much older Code of Hammurabi, from the eighteenth century BCE, and in either case the laws aren’t miraculous or alien in their meaning, but are human constructs that speak to stages of civilizational development.
Yet Swinburne would likely wish to support his affirmation of the divine micromanagement of human affairs with what he says towards the end of his article:
So (if there is a God) God has reasons to command us to do various acts, and his command to do them would impose on us an obligation to do them. But we need a revelation well-authenticated by a divine signature in order to know what God has commanded. Such a signature would be provided by a miracle (involving a violation of natural laws which God alone can bring about) accompanying the teaching of some prophet who purports to tell what God has commanded, such as the resurrection of that prophet from the dead fulfilling and forwarding the prophet’s teaching.
Yet that’s just to transfer from philosophy to faith-based theology. And this only pushes the question back a step: if we can’t be sure that God cares about morality, how can we know that God performed miracles to get our attention or to protect a religious tradition? What’s more likely, that the God who supposedly created trillions of worlds that evolve by themselves in natural ways would micromanage the lives of some ambitious apes, by miraculously intervening in ways that are at best ambiguous and that can always be rationally doubted? Or that that sort of myth is mere religious propaganda to dazzle the gullible majorities, rendering a tradition sacrosanct with the benefit of hindsight since winners get to write the history?
Those questions are rhetorical since the answer is obvious to anyone who hasn’t been raised from childhood in the religious tradition in question.
Of course, if we had real divine revelation, and if some miracles were obvious for all to see, then we might indeed have reason to think God cares about how we act. But the problems of authenticating miracle claims are legion, especially when the miracle supposedly happened centuries in the past. Again, why would God perform a miracle in one century, knowing that millennia would then pass, during which time the records of the event would be corrupted, or the culture’s standards for evidence would change drastically?
God’s miracle of handing Moses the stone tablets or of Jesus’s incarnation should be compared to the Tibetan Buddhist art of making a mandala out of coloured sand. The Buddhist always ceremonially destroys the finished mandala by sweeping away the intricately laid grains, an act that symbolizes everything’s impermanence. Yet monotheists cling to their tradition as though their creeds were indubitable. The Eastern approach to “divine revelation” is much wiser and more realistic.
Again, it’s easier to explain miracle claims by taking them to be institutional propaganda that buoys the faith of the undereducated, by preserving the religion’s prestige and mystique, than to take these claims at face value. Politically, an orthodox mythos makes sense, as Swinburne says, as a way of coordinating human societies. But philosophically, the partisan defense of any such mythos comes across either as simple-minded or cynical.