Morality And Religion: Is God The Source Of Morality?

Name:
Instructor:
Course:
Date:
Morality and Religion
No
It seems that god is the source of morality as would be seen in the argument that Kant brings forward. In his argument, Kant is keen to point out the element of autonomy as central to this approach. He points out that the will of a person to do what us ethically correct lies within them. It is an autonomous choice that a person has to make for them to find the right thing to do whenever they are face with an ethical dilemma (Denis, Lara, and Eric Wilson). One can motivate themselves to do the right thing when they are given the choice. At the same time they can constrain themselves where they feel that whatever they are about to do is not ethical. However he is quick to mention that there is close connection between morality and religion and thus the element of God in ethical matters.
It seems that god is the source of morality given the fact that, Plato also points to the existence of the soul. In his argument, there must be another being that controls the rest of the universe in a way that the humans may not see or perceive through general approaches. Plato worked to show that, there are gods which points to the believed that he held about morality (Hare, John).
It seems god is the source for morality as is seen in the argument that Euthyphro. His was a rather strong approach, where if the gods decided that genocide and mass murder was good this would pass the morality test. If they then decided that killing hundreds of thousands of people is wrong, this passes for the moral thing to do. It is a common approach that is used in the Old Testaments, where some of the wars are deemed beneficial as they were supported by God and there are those that were deemed unholy as they were against the will of God. It seems that god is the source of morality especially when considering the view that were held by Aquinas. He had a strong sense of the way that God influenced the decisions that one made (Hare, John).
‘One of the first to do so was none other than Thomas Aquinas. He conceded that something is good because God says so, but this is simply because it is in God’s nature to be good, which guarantees that his commands will in fact be moral. This is the above mentioned caveat: Aquinas was asserting that the Christian God is good by its very nature (unlike, say, those pesky Olympian ones, with all their all-too-human foibles). But even assuming that Aquinas is right about God’s nature (one would have, again, to ignore quite a bit of the Old Testament to agree), this still doesn’t get us far enough away from the second horn: how do we know that God’s nature is good? In order to make that judgment without incurring into a circular argument (and at the same time being impaled by the first horn) it seems like we must have some independent criterion of “good,” i.e., “holy is beloved by the gods [or it is in the gods’ nature] because it is holy.’ (Pigliucci, Massimo)
This is what the author is presenting to the audience in reference to getting them to understand better the mechanics of the concepts.
On the contrary, it seems god is not the source of morality for as Humes argues, this is an element that ther...