The Fallacy of God Implying you must Love Others
Opponents of relativism, the notion that right and wrong are not facts but just what we want them to be, hold that morality is objective or fact-based and that if you use test questions you can help others see that morality is objective and not relative. But what use is this if somebody gets a revelation from the supernatural that he must cook his baby and somehow it will save the world from destruction? You have no way of showing that he is not using an objectively true morality after all. Objective morality demands a morality be workable. Thus it is objectively immoral to believe in the supernatural for it opens the door to such rubbish revelations. Good revelations do not exist. Neither do bad ones. Revelations are just revelations. Electricity is just electricity. It is those who announce revelations or accept them who are the problem.
Revelations from a God and the supernatural are inherently a risk to morality. They contradict the rule that objective morality is practical. We conclude that the concept of God does not help us accept morality but devastates morality.
The Fallacy
Religion that is based on God commits a fallacy.
It argues,
God is love and he loves us
He therefore wants us to love each other.
Therefore we should love each other.
That is wrong. The conclusion does not follow. A fallacy is not only a bad
argument but an irrelevant one. God wanting us to love each other does not mean
we should love each other.
There is no point in believing in God if you are not led to love people through
it.
If believers love, it is in spite of faith!
Religion won't stop preaching the fallacy and doesn't care that it has been
refuted time and time again. It just treats it as a core truth. Thus it is no
example of honesty or morality.
The notion that you need to believe in an ethical God who gives ethical commands
amounts to, "God loves me therefore I must do what God wants." That is
illogical. Doing what God wants does not necessarily imply that God commands. So
""God loves me therefore I must do what God commands" is worse. It is easier to
do what a person wants if they say they want it than to do it if they command
it. Commanding implies you are not trusted to do the right thing.
If God needed to explain good and why we are to be good then he is no use for it is a sin to treat him like a god of the gap. If God deserves to be loved the most and we are treating him like that then how can we be trusted to love anybody else?
Either, 1, you are moral if you have no reason to be or 2, you are moral because you have. The assertion that if atheists can be moral then they have no reason to be if there is no God is very odd. It assumes you can be moral without thinking you need a reason or have one. Then why do believers want others to believe in God so that they can be moral? The notion that you can be moral and have no reason to be is contradictory. It assumes that the atheist regards what he feels is moral to be moral and so instead of believing in real morality he just believes in a feeling. It is the case that believers are only whitewashing over how they think that atheists in fact are never moral but just following feelings like self-indulgent animals. It is buttering the atheists up.
The believers all agree that obedience to God is good. The divine command doctrine - that something is good because God commands it to be and for no other reason - is about obedience among other things and assumes obedience is good. But obedience cannot be good unless good is independent of obedience. It is good that makes obedience good and obedience has nothing to do with making good good.
Trying to make out God commands us to love is going to backfire.
God can make objective morality different for each person
The notion that God grounds objective moral values such as truth and love and justice and mercy but has to create commands to express them is interesting. Moral values are not commands - commands are about the moral values.
God can rig things to make killing somebody the right thing to do. That is why though person a and person b must accept the moral values of truth and love and justice and mercy the commands for a can be totally different from what b is commanded.
For that reason, it might be that Stalin or the monstrous Moses might have being only living up to the innately prescribed sense of right and wrong that God gave him.
The argument is unassailable because moral commands are not the same thing as objective moral values.
Objectivity means "mind-independent" or "judgement-independent". Objective morality means that morality is correct and true no matter who thinks it is wrong for it is not about what anybody thinks but about what is true. But it does not follow that there is no way for that to remain true and for people to be given different moral codes.
If Jesus is commanded to get himself killed on a cross then somebody else could be commanded not to do the same thing. God can plan your circumstances so that virtual suicide can be okay for one and not another. The circumstances may involve things that have nothing to do with this world. The reality is that people already believe moral commands can differ from person to person and that God is responsible. If they didn't believe in it, it is still what they live by and practice.
People want to ground morality in God but they cannot get past moral values being grounded in God. They want moral commands from God but it is not that simple. Grounding moral values in God does nothing to tell us what each person should do. Objective morality only says that values must never be rejected but it does not give you absolute commandments banning say murder or killing or lying. Absolute morality is a separate matter.
Ought and Is
If a baby is better off living that does not prove you ought not to kill the baby. A fact is not about morality. A stone is not about colour. An is does not give rise to an ought. Facts have to be considered when working out morality but that does not mean that facts can create morality.
If God is loving and just and truthful and merciful and wise that does not mean we should be those things too. To say otherwise is to say that because God is a certain kind of God we ought to be the same. It is trying to make an ought out of an is. An is can never be the same as an ought so even "God is loving and just and truthful and merciful and wise so I should be these if I want to be and should not if I don't want to" is the more logical implication. So God in effect not only fails to show us we should be the same but suggests it is okay if we don't choose to be. There is still no moral ought.
1. If God does not exist, then the universe is without
purpose.
2. If the universe is without purpose, then objective
moral values do not exist.
3. Therefore, if God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist.
For, in a universe with no purpose I am not even supposed to be here; I just am,
by accident. The moral argument as such makes no attempt to explain morality’s
grounding in God. It makes only two assertions:
1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and
duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
The two premises imply God’s existence but do not entail
a theory of how moral values and duties relate to God. So the theist who defends
this argument has a range of options open to him.
It seems to me that this theory does derive an “ought”
from an “is,” and justifiably so—though not in the way you imagine. me that this
theory does derive an “ought” from an “is,” and justifiably so—though not in the
way you imagine. The theory does, as you say, ground moral values in God's
unchanging nature. God is the paradigm of goodness. But that is not to say that
“because God is a certain way we ought to behave in certain ways.” No, our moral
obligations and prohibitions arise as a result of God’s commands to us. God’s
nature serves to establish values—goodness and badness—while God’s commands
establish moral duties—what we ought or ought not to do. Grounding moral values
in God no more derives
