Ethics And God Essay

Recently, there have been many arguments over the connection between ethics and religion because people tend to ask themselves, “can we be good without God?” The matter is that theists consider God to be the source of ethical strength and firmness to live our lives decently. On the contrary, atheists regard it to be arrogant and ignorant to call people who do not believe in God unethical. Still there is no definiteness whether there could be ethics without religion during the history of human civilization.
Ethics is not interconnected with God and religion does not condition high ethic of individual principles and conscience in general. First of all, it sounds unconvincing that without divine revelation which humans received from God, a mother would never love and take care of her child or men would never value honesty, loyalty, truth. Just remember animals that risk their lives for their descendants and members of the flock or defend each other from enemies. It is a bright proof that ethic rules are not religion conditioned because even animals are familiar with them and they do not worship God. Secondly, the affirmation that ethic principles would have never been worked out without absolute belief in God sounds improbable because it means that humans would have never discovered the value of honesty and truthfulness. People would have never known the difference between good and bad because it implies ethic judgments.
For nearly 2000 years many people consider religion to be a necessary guide on the way to moral life because theists convinced everybody of moral values being rooted in God. Yet Plato called God’s moral nature “good” or approved by God because God is the locus of diverse moral values such as generosity, faithfulness, kindness and love. On the contrary, human history proves that the moral principles are rooted in customs, feelings, habits, that is why ethical behavior should be grounded on education, social ties, but not a religious basis. The reason for this is that moral beliefs are strong when a person feels accountable for own deeds and it is a conscious choice to act morally rather than an obligation based on the belief in some transcendental powers.
The society of people without religion, but having a morality is easy to imagine because these people have rules against murder, treachery and they act to secure the welfare of the whole community. Secular utilitarian outlook proves the previous idea because according to this ethical position morally right action is the one which brings the greatest happiness and pleasure for the biggest possible number of people. What is more, this action has nothing to do with any transcendental entities because it does not presuppose any appeals outside human nature, no religious reflections as well. Already Socrates refuted the idea of morality demanding religion and these ideas were further developed by many European philosophers who claimed that to consider a person to immoral without belief in God is a prejudice and even discrimination.
Hence, one can come to conclusion that ethics and God itself, constitute two separate and independent value systems functioning in the human society. Numerous facts prove that ethic does dependent on the belief in God to some extent, but at the same time it is more than feasible without God. Therefore, atheists cannot be accused of leading immoral lives because not to believe in God is their personal conscious choice, but very often they lead more moral lives than people being blinded by their faith and overestimating divine laws.