Confronting Christianity (Chapter 4): Doesn't Religion Hinder Morality?

Icebreaker:

Moral dilemma’s

You find a wallet with a significant amount of cash. There's no ID, just money. What do you do?

A friend wants you to lie for them to avoid getting in trouble. What would you do?

You are at your best friend's wedding just an hour before the ceremony is to start. Earlier that day, you came across definitive proof that your best friend's spouse-to-be is having an affair with the best man/maid of honor, and you catch them sneaking out of a room together looking disheveled. If you tell your friend about the affair, their day will be ruined, but you don't want them to marry a cheater. What do you do?

You are an eyewitness to a crime: A man has robbed a bank, but instead of keeping the money for himself, he donates it to a poor orphanage that can now afford to feed, clothe, and care for its children. You know who committed the crime. If you go to the authorities with the information, there's a good chance the money will be returned to the bank, leaving a lot of kids in need. What do you do?

You've been on a cruise for two days when there's an accident that forces everyone on board to abandon ship. During the evacuation, one of the boats is damaged, leaving it with a hole that fills it with water. You figure that with 10 people in the boat, you can keep the boat afloat by having nine people scoop the filling water out by hand for 10 minutes while the 10th person rests. After that person's 10-minute rest, he or she will get back to work while another person rests, and so on. This should keep the boat from sinking long enough for a rescue team to find you as long as it happens within five hours. You're taking your first brake when you notice your best friend in a sound lifeboat with only nine people in it and he beckons you to swim over and join them so you won't have to keep bailing out water. If you leave the people in the sinking boat, they will only be able to stay afloat for two hours instead of five, decreasing their chance of being rescued, but securing yours. What do you do?

Thinking about morality:

How do we know what’s right and wrong?

Does religion hinder morality?

Intro:

Q. Have you ever heard someone say that religion hinders morality?

We can understand why some people would feel that way:

ISIS’s plan to eradicate the Yazidis in Iraw

Actions justified by Questions and Answers on Taking Captives and Slaves

Question : Is it permissible to have intercourse with a female slave who has not reached puberty?

Answer : It is permissible to have intercourse with a female slave who hasn’t reached puberty if she is fit for intercourse.

Question : Is it permissible to sell a female captive?

Answer : It is permissible to buy, sell, or gift female captives or slaves, for they are merely property

Q: Do you think religion inherently leads to violence, or are there underlying issues behind these examples? How can we distinguish between faith-driven morality and extremism?

Read Matthew 5:43-48.

Q. How does Jesus' command to love your enemies challenge us? How does it differ from what we might consider natural morality?

Problems with the Claim That Religion Hurts Morality:

“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

-Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize winner and physicist

Q. What are your thoughts on this quote?

Q. Can we think of examples where religion actually brought out good moral behavior? How might Weinberg’s quote miss these nuances?

Three problems:

Lack of specificity

Evaluate each tradition

Does not fir the data

“‘Hundreds of studies’ link religious participation with better moral outcomes.”

Domestic violence twice as high for men who don’t attend church

Lower rates for other crimes

Donate 3.5 times more money

Volunteer more than twice as much

Assumes universal measuring stick of morality

What about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

Q. Have you heard about this?

Q. If human rights come from a shared sense of morality, where do you think that sense of right and wrong originates? Can secularism provide a firm foundation for moral values?

Read Romans 2:14-15.

Q. What does it mean for people to have 'the law written on their hearts'? How does this connect with the idea that everyone, religious or not, has a basic moral code?

Some people might say that this is a way to get morals without religion

Committee chair was a Christian

A Greek Orthodox theologian

Saudi Arabia did not sign

North Korea and human rights abuses

China and India as well

The Origin of Human Rights

Greek and Roman

Free men’s dignity

Aristotle: “Let there be a law that no deformed child shall live.”

Read Genesis 1:26-27.

Q. What does being made in the image of God imply about the inherent worth of every person? How does this contrast with societies that allowed practices like infanticide?

Jesus and a new moral imagination

“Values that many of us in the West today consider to be universal and independent of religious thought turn out not to have sprung from the ground during the Enlightenment but to have grown from the gradual spread and influence of Christian beliefs.”

Q. How did Jesus' treatment of marginalized people (like children, women, and the poor) challenge societal norms? How can we live out these values today?

Philosopher Ronald Osborn: Scientific naturalism can’t hold up human values

Image of God

God became human

Political scientist Stephen Hopgood: the predicted decline of human rights

“… when it comes to a robust philosophical foundation for human rights from a secular perspective, building materials are hard to come by.”

Christoper Hitchens: I don’t know if human rights exist

Peter Singer’s Accidental Convert

Peter Singer is an atheistic professor at Princeton

“… human beings should be valued according to their capacities: self-awareness, ability to suffer, and so on”

The value of a newborn baby

Read Matthew 25:35-40.

Q. How does this passage show the distinct value Christianity places on every individual, especially the marginalized? How might this challenge our modern views of worth?

Convert:

“I began to realize that the implications of my atheism were incompatible with almost every value I held dear.”

“Sarah discovered that the longing for justice that had drawn her to ‘radical, leftist ideologies’ was ultimately more satisfied by the radical message of Jesus, who abandoned his rights and embraced suffering, humiliation, and death to save others.”

Bad Faith

Paul Offit (professor of pediatrics and vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania)

Measles epidemic in Philadelphia

Refusal of vaccination from churches

Bad Faith: How Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine

Changes his mind after seeing Jesus’ advocacy for children

In Jesus’ time, child abuse was “the crying vice of the Roman Empire”

Jesus is “the single greatest breakthrough against child abuse.”

First Christian emperor outlawed infanticide in 315, welfare in 321

Changed book title to When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine

Atheism Can’t Ground Morality

Two problems:

The world is “overwhelmingly religious”

“If the world were a single democracy in which every human being had a vote and we asked this electorate to nominate a belief system on which to ground morality, Christianity would win.”

“Anything goes”

Alex Rosenberg

“Is there a God? No. What is the nature of reality? What physics says it is. What is the purpose of the universe? There is none. What is the meaning of life? Ditto. Why am I here? Just dumb luck. Does prayer work? Of course not. Is there a soul? Is it immortal? Are you kidding? Is there free will? Not a chance! What happens when I die? Everything pretty much goes on as before, except us. What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad? There is no moral difference between them. Why should I be moral? Because it makes you feel better than being immoral. Is abortion, euthanasia, suicide, paying taxes, foreign aid, or anything else you don’t like forbidden, permissible, or sometimes obligatory? Anything goes”

What About Evolutionary Altruism?

Martin Nowak:

“He argues that humans are fitted by evolution not just to compete but to cooperate;-even, at times, to sacrifice their own interests for the good of others.”

“With a theistic worldview, morality and reality spring from the same source.”

Nowak: “God’s creative power and love is needed to will every moment into existence.... An atemporal Creator and Sustainer lifts the entire trajectory of the world into existence.”

Science, Ethics, and Coherence:

Q. “Do you think morality can exist purely through evolutionary theory? If humans are just collections of atoms, why should we believe in inherent worth or dignity

“… today’s secular humanism offers a worldview in which morality and reality are at odds: Human beings are a collection of atoms laboring under a false belief that they are even moral agents. And yet humans are of immense, equal, and inalienable worth.”

“Faith in a loving, rational God, who created humans in his image and calls us to love both our neighbor and our enemy, is not only the historical source of our beliefs about human equality but also their best justification.”

Read Micah 6:8.

Q. How do justice, mercy, and humility provide a framework for Christian morality? How might these values challenge the 'anything goes' mentality of some secular worldviews?