Being Good Without God

Can we be good without God? That's a serious question discussed by theologians, philosophers, and even regular people. It is not the most serious question we have to answer - but it is serious enough to be worth giving some consideration because it cuts to the nature of moral philosophy. Personally, I see no contradiction between being godless and being moral - but some do. How strong of a case do they make?

Well, if you are Albert Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, you can't make a very good case at all. Mohler writes in Crosswalk:

Secularization, the process by which a society severs its ties to a religious worldview, is now pressed to the limits by ideological secularists bent on removing all vestiges of the Judeo-Christian heritage from the nation's culture.

I guess it's easier to make a case for immorality of godlessness if one starts out with distortions and half-truths, but it will only end up "convincing" people who already agree with you. Secularization in America is the process by which public institutions are kept in the hands of the public and out of the hands of sectarian religious groups. This is generally considered a good thing, unless you are part of a sectarian religious group eager for more power.

According to the new American secular orthodoxy, no reference to God or faith--no matter how vague or distant--is allowable in public conversation, much less in governmental policy making. The end result is a total collapse of moral conversation.

People can talk about God and faith all they want - indeed, you can hardly maneuver today without finding people talking about God and faith. What isn't quite so proper is the government using some particular vision of God or faith as a basis for the laws that everyone has to follow - even those who have a different vision of God or faith. This is generally considered a good thing unless you are a theocrat who is interested in imposing your vision of God and faith on everyone.

But can Americans be good without God? Can we even entertain the fiction that citizens can create a totally secular morality? Nonsense.

And this is nonsense because... uh.... because... er, um, uh... er... just sit back down in your pew and keep quiet. Reverend Mohler hasn't finished his sermon.

Then again, maybe he is. The entire column consists of a litany of events and ideas he finds outrageous - presumably he thinks that if he lists enough outrageous things, readers will agree that because outrageous things happen in America, more Americans are immoral. If more Americans are immoral, then Americans must not be following the Bible (because the Bible tells you not to do all those immoral things) - and that must mean that the only True Morality must come from reading and using the Bible in the way the Albert Mohler tells you to.

Make sense?

No, it doesn't make sense to me, either - but I can't draw anything more coherent out of the things I have seen him write. The thing I find outrageous is that moral philosophy is a serious subject, but Mohler has reduced it to an intellectual farce. There is a lot of very good and serious work out there on how to best construct a moral system and how to understand moral ideas, much of it quite independent of the premise that a god exists or that gods are necessary to establish moral rules. Mohler, however, evinces absolutely not knowledge or understanding of it.

Granted, perhaps all of those philosophers have been wrong - but Mohler dismisses all of it with a wave of the hand, moving along to simply list a few more things about contemporary America that gets his goat. He didn't write a serious column. He didn't engage in the issues in a serious way. He has, in the end, done his readers a real disservice by leading them to believe that there just isn't much to say on the subject.

Sadly, that's the sort of thing I've come to expect from Mohler's writing.

Read More:

• Guide to Ethics and Morality
• Religious Right
• Southern Baptists
• Southern Baptist Convention
• Evangelicalism