If God does not exist morality would still be possible, because we have the ability to choose between actions, which may have positive, negative, or positive and negative intentions and effects. Whether one’s definition of morality is based on intentions such as Kant’s, or is based on effects, morality can exist without God. Strictly in the simplest of terms, we can equate positive and negative with good and bad. For example, if life is positive and death is negative, and positive is good and negative is bad: then wanting to put someone to death or actually putting someone to death is bad. What is to be positive and negative is defined by personal experience.
Morality can be based on personal experience, which might explain why different cultures have different morals. People with no sense of religion or God only have past experiences and what they know to base their future actions on. Past experiences use the positive or negative outcome as a basis for the action taken. The experience is positive if the experience led to good health or a feeling of well-being either physically or mentally, and negative if the experience led to bad health and not well-being. For example, if a group of children were only taught how to survive in the wild, and then let them loose on a deserted island with out teaching them about any sort of God, or right and wrong, they could learn what is right and wrong through experience. If one of the children hits another and the other child begins to cry he has created a negative response. Naturally, the children would most likely try to stay away from negative responses to ensure better health of themselves and others. If the child who was hit, child one, became angered by another child, child two, and hit them, most likely child one would refer back to when they were hit and feel bad about what they had done, because the experience they had with being hit was paired with a negative feeling, pain. If child one had not been hit before, then they would have nothing to feel bad about and therefore to them it would be a positive experience, unless child one was then hit by child two, or another child. Then the experience would be negative. Some may argue that for instance, a businessman could consider cheating someone out of money a positive experience, but if he was cheated he would feel it as a negative experience. Therefore, he knows it is wrong to cheat because of the result on the person he cheated, but he does it anyway for personal gain. Even if he was not cheated on before, he might eventually be cheated and see it another way, just as the child saw hitting someone in a different way after they were hit. In this way God is not needed to have morality.
People may contrast that God has to exist for morality to exist, because that is the only way for there to be a standard set of morals. No one understands right and wrong at birth, so how could anyone fathom what that set of morals would be. Even when morality is taught to children by parents, those parents were once naïve children as well. So, morality must have evolved from the experiences of many generations, passed down what they have learned through the actions they have taken. Even though there cannot be a standard set of rules without religion or God, for example the Ten Commandments, does not mean that there cannot be morality. Morality could evolve from experience just like the children on the island. Morality does not have to be standard; it could be a process such as using what you have been through to more adequately judge what is right and wrong. Kant states that morality is based only on pure reason alone and not experience, but to logically deduct what your duty may be you must have some sort of experience to base your logic off of. We are not born knowing we are rational beings, if we are born rational beings at all. Knowing you are a rational being comes through experience. Humans may be born with minds that can logically think through situations, but without any experience how can you logically come to a conclusion on what to do? For example, when children are young they might touch a stove and burn themselves. Unless they were told it is hot in the first place a child has nothing to base there actions off of. Therefore, the effects are much more important than intention of the person, because that intention is based off of past effects, or experiences.
God does not have to exist for morality to exist, because we have the ability to choose between actions. These actions may have positive, negative, or positive and negative intentions and effects. Positive actions promote health and well-being while negative actions promote the opposite. The positive or negative experiences rational beings go through are the building blocks to base what logically would be the right thing to do. Such as the children on the deserted island who learned that hitting others is wrong through trial and error. Therefore, morality can exist without God.

Isn't that common knowledge? I didn't think morality had much of a connection with religion...if any...It's just plain old what's right and wrong, you learn from your mistakes.

I'm not into long posts so I just got to the point.

I agree actually, The balance or the bullet explains itself :) sometimes, hitting someone is good. Only on a long term tho, because people only learn from mistakes if they really think about what went wrong. Ok back to balance, to me, God is balance. For every good thing, there is a bad thing in this world. This is MY believe, nut not everyone agrees because they have different expreiences in their life. I believe, that if I hit someone, I needed to take away some stress and its just to balance myself. Now, the other person feels bad, because I brought him out of balance. His choise, is to return it to me, or to someone else. But.. why was I stressed in the first place? Simple, someone or something brought ME out of balance.

I have to say tho, that this is my own theory, no one tought me this. But it's kinda close to a religion. I'm not mindlessly walking behind some random priest who tells me what to do. And that's the big difference. I actually think the ten commandments are narrowminded, you can't kill if you don't have a reason to. Serial killers don't always seem to have a reason, but they always do. That reason is again balance. They are just trying to find peace, whatever that might take.

So yeah, if you want to call this religion, fine, but in the end morality is created by itself, and it might need religion to support it. Because if your life isn't balanced to you, you try to find answers, but you can't find anything. So you just blame something imaginary to get in balance almost directly, while it might be returned to you later on in a much more useful way than imaginary.

Your post is too long i'll have to read it next time.
:P

and here...

what's the point of a religion if there's no moral values in it?

morality taught people to believe in god, and that's what we did, though it seems people go to the god 1st instead.

in other word, morality comes 1st...something like that.

Because no individual is omniscient (knowing everything), it is impossible for anyone to derive or deduce a perfect structure or definition of morality, as no one has the infinite knowledge required to do so, i.e. being able to predict all the consequences of a single actions and the consequences of those consequences etc etc. For this reason, the morality that imperfect individuals are capable of coming up with will always be dependent on that individuals knowledge and reasoning, meaning that morality is radically subjective (so every individual forms the basis of their own moral system). The only objective morality (absolutely true morality that could be deduced as true by all rational thinkers) would have to come from a God who is all knowing (omniscient) and omnibenevolent (perfectly good). This is because, even if someone were able to think up perfect morality, they would not have the infinite knowledge needed to realize/understand that it is indeed the objective morality as they would not have the infinite knowledge required to reason this. This would mean that, even is someone reasoned the objective morality, no one would recognize it until all individuals were able to deduce the exact same thing.
Basically, an objective (absolutely perfect) morality can't exist without an omnipotent individual to realize/understand that it is indeed the objective morality. Because all humans are rational beings, and we have yet to all agree on a single moral code, we are so far incapable of finding this objective morality and instead form our own radically subjective moralities. While we can't find an objective morality without an omniscient God, morality can still exist in the individual as radically subjective moralities. Furthermore, God's existence is irrelevant to the state of our own moralities, because, as we are not omniscient, we would not be able to rationalize an objective morality as being always true.

Hah.. this is going to be quite a long exposition.. but if you like the possibility of being enlightened about deep philosophical issues... read on!

@DaPlatypus

There are also inherent flaws when considering God and absolute morality. Theologians describe God to be omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent at the same time - in simpler terms: all powerful, all knowing and all good.

If we consider an absolute moral standard as something arbitrary, something that God knows and enforces, we are actually contradicting the God's all powerful nature, since he himself must ascribe to certain moral standards, which may also lead to the question: who sets the standards for God?

However, you could also argue that absolute morality is ordained by God, it is He who imposes this standard upon all of us. Although this may seem sound at first sight, as God's ombibenevolence would guide his enactment of moral laws and ensure that these laws are fair and just, there are also intricate flaws in this argument that casts doubt over the existence of such a moral standard. Apropos, we must call into question God's ombibenevolence: if God is all good, all powerful and all knowing, why do bad things happen? Certainly, if He is benevolent, He would not let thousands perish in the tsunami; if He were all knowing, He would have known the tsunami was going to happen; if He were all powerful, He would have stopped it. Well, experience proves otherwise, we would indeed have to call into question the triumvirate nature of God, and thus call into question as well an absolute morality imposed by God is whether or not, ironically, really moral.

@grick

You postulated that morality could exist even without God, because we have the freedom in making choices, and thus through experience we may generate our own moral code and laws.

The first issue that we should analyze is - do we have a freedom to choose what we do? In other words, do we have free will?

Free will is an utmost important component in morality. Let me give an example. Suppose that there are two people on trial. One dropped a flower pot on the head of his rival out of pure jealousy and hatred, killing him. The other accidentally bumped, unknowingly, unto the flower pot at the edge of the platform and it fell onto the head of his rival, killing him as well. Well, we would have no problems condemning the first person as a murderer, since he had a CHOICE whether or not to commit murder. The second however, had no choice, since everything was caused by his accident, or rather, external factors, and we would happily charge him of accidental manslaughter.

We all experience free will, and would have no trouble acknowledging its presence. The advent of science however, proves otherwise.

Suppose that you decide not to go to school today out of laziness... well, that’s your choice of committing something delinquent. However, it is actually possible to create a causal chain leading to this action (I won't call it decision). Let’s say:

1. you slept very very late the previous night, thus you are tired and your body urges you to slumber on.
2. You were deprived of an early bedtime because you were doing homework.
3. You are doing homework because it is your responsibility as a student
4. You are a student because your parents send you to school
5. You are sent to school because of your particular age
6. ... because you were born
7. ... because your parents were born
8. ... because of the big bang and the birth of the universe.

As I've highlighted.. rather like a slippery slope, that everything could be causally traced back to the birth of the universe. Take for instance the murderer we have cited above: he committed murder because of his personality, which was because of his upbringing, which was because of him being born to these parents.... all the way. Could we then say, our choices are actually caused by something, an external factor that we have no control over (i.e. we were born)?

As I have said before, science aggravates the situation. Newton's laws are deterministic, meaning that if I know everything about a system (the position and momentum of all the particles), I can predict the state of the system at any point in time in the future or in the past. Well, neurology has shown that thought and everything in our brains is just brought about by chemical reactions - interaction of particles. Thus, if I were Laplace's demon (a fictional creature envisioned by Laplace as having lightening fast arithmetic and gargantuan memory - something like the one in Rozen Maiden), I would be able to, given the information about all the particles at the big bang, calculate that certain particles in the murderer's brain would be arranged in such a way at this moment of time, such an arrangement would then trigger the impulses that causes murder. Well, the murderer had no control over the big bang, had he? This is determinism, a view held that everything is already determined long time ago, free will is just an illusion.

Some people claim Quantum Mechanics have come to the rescue of free will, since its basic principles claim about inaccuracies in the finite limit of measurement, such as to say, we cannot determine something for certain. Thus Laplace's demon would not be able to predict anything, as there is a certain amount of randomness in everything. This is indeterminacy, but by no means does it prove free will exists. Everything is just random, you don't have a choice either way.

This is particularly saddening. If we do not have free will, morality would break down. Kant's categorical imperative, Aristotle's nicomachean golden mean, Bentham's utilitarianism, and even Christian ethics - they all collapse. We are not the pilot in our seat, we cannot be blamed for anything. Which brings us to the brink of nihilism... why are we here if everything was already predetermined, we are just a puppet on strings performing on the stage. Life is the stuff of drama.

Yeah, there's no way I'm reading all of that. I'm way too lazy for that.

Anyway, if God didn't exist, would Christians just run around raping, pillaging, and murdering people? It's rather sad that they have to have some dude up the sky threatening them with eternal damnation in order to make them act good (or moral).

What history classes have you taken?? they did that anyways.

Let me put in simpler terms:
Guns don't kill people, people kill people with Guns.

Pretend that people is God
does that mean God and his morals make mankind good and moral abiding?
NO, in fact, it is clearly a statement, made in a solution like way, you choose which grey area you want to stand in and voila.

Your moral = your grey area.
People use guns to defend their nation, does that count as moral greatness and noble means?
People use guns to kill the innocent, is that moral decided by God?
Oh I dunno, according to Moses, you are supposed to kill girls who are not virgins the night of their wedding, so who knows eh?

Hmm. Wow thats a thought. I think that a lot of people would like to say "OF COURSE!" But really, if we all had the knowledge and concrete proof that there was no heaven or God, i think the whole world would be thrown into chaos. Now personally, I think the way we are brought up would have an impact, but that is also influenced by the notion of God in some way.

Most I do not believe would do really evil things, but there are a lot of things people would do, perhaps steal, or have more affairs.

I think there would be a lot less morality without God.

The premise of this question is wrong. "If God didn't exist..." Well, heck, as far as humans are concerned, God doesn't exist in reality. The question should be: "If God didn't exist in your mind..." Now, given that I'm an atheist, and I haven't raped or killed anyone yet, I would have to say that morals have nothing to do with an imaginary idol.

Sorta on topic. and let me say this before hand, i'm in no ways christain. i'm still trying to figure out what i believe in.

anywho.

one of my favorite bands, Zao, did a concept album about a topic similar to this. the concept was what if God just vanished. he got fed up with humanity and said, "you know what, if they don't want to believe in me, fine, i wont exist," and uncreated himself. and what would happen to humanity after God didn't exist anymore. pretty interesting album and concept.

The problem is, according to the law, God doesn't decide or happen to be part of what that governs the people, like it or not, He was not included in the decision that was made say to punish a child rapist an eternity in jail, but it was decided by people who know whats right and wrong and the punishment was legalized and passed on the law book.

In every way, we see this as a morality issue, if you have no morals, I reckon if you are the one writing the law book, you would say "ah, it is just a child, she or he would grow out of it, who cares?" and write 1 year for the sentence, which is wrong in every sense of the word because that would be unfair.

Then, we take the issue of fairness, if we are fair on punishment and rewards, what would we do in the weighing of both wrong and right? What morals do we possess to decide for ourselves, well, we are not going into the church to ask if Jesus would sign the capital bill on abortion whether or not he would approve on it, are we?

If what you say is true, prove it. A proof is a proof until proven false, or is it not a proof until proven true? Either way, human reasoning reaches limits comprehensible by other humans. xD

jasaiyajin

If what you say is true, prove it. A proof is a proof until proven false, or is it not a proof until proven true? Either way, human reasoning reaches limits comprehensible by other humans. xD

Note:
human reasoning percisely that guided what is made into today's law.
The morality of right and wrong is based on reasoning and human judgement, God did not have one part in it.'