Ethics vs.

Morality and The Existence of God

(Reflection Paper)
The most basic principle of the Christian moral life is that every person bears the dignity
of being made in the image of God, he has given us an immortal soul and through the gifts of
intelligence and reason and enables us to understand the order of things established in his
creation. God has also given us a free will to seek and love what is true, good and beautiful, But
sadly because of the fall we also suffer the impact of original sin which darkens our minds
weakens our wills and inclines us to sin baptism delivers us from original sin but not from its but
not from its effects especially the inclination to sin. Within us, then, is both a powerful surge
toward the good because we are made in the image of God and the darker impulses toward evil
because of the effects of original sin.
In morality, animals are not responsible for their actions or the way they behave, this is
different with us humans. There is responsibility or morality only in the context of humanity.
There is no morality outside the context of humanity. We can say there is morality because
there is man. Morality is founded on the natural and eternal laws of God. From the basis of our
experiences we want to be good because of our belief in salvation. Man is indeed a reward-
oriented creature and so we are lucky that God in his wisdom knows how to reward us properly
not only later in heaven but already here on earth, our moral lives can't be fully lived understood
and explained through our reasoning alone. God's self-disclosure is known as salvation history
and this is recorded in the Old Testament (The chronicle of Yahweh is dealing with the Jews)
and is fulfilled in the New Testament, when God's own son Jesus Christ came as God’s final
word, his total self-communication.
Morality is the science of what human ought to be by reason of what he is. It is
concerned with what humans ought to be in the light of what humanity is. It means it is an open-
ended body of study it builds up it develops, it is good to note that the more a person
understands himself, the more refined his behavior will be. It is concerned with what humans
ought to be it focuses on how things should be and how people should act. In the light of what
humanity is morality asks people to be the persons they are meant to be.
Christian faith defines men and women as children of God with basic dignity having an
eternal destiny and is created by God, redeemed by Christ indwelt by the spirit destined to
eternity or God. What is right is to act as a child of God what is wrong is to forget one's basic
dignity. And so in anything a Christian asks, what is the human thing to do?
The terms ethics and morality can be used interchangeably however there is a fine line
that divides the two. Ethics is the systematic study of the rightness and the wrongness of human
actions, it is also known as the science of morals. Morality is the rightness and wrongness of the
human action, we call this one as the practice of ethics. Morality refers to principles of right and
wrong behavior or rightness and wrongness of human actions.
In determining the morality of human actions the moral agent is guided by the broader
rules or principles of ethics. Ethics attempts to provide systems of moral principles and the
reasons why these principles are valid, hence ethics is more concerned with the theories that
can be used to explain why a particular moral principle is valid or not right or wrong. These are
some basic ethical principles that may help determine the rightness or wrongness of a human
action, respect for person’s truthfulness and confidentiality, autonomy and informed consent,
beneficence, non-maleficence, justice. For example, in ethics killing is wrong because it violates
the basic ethical principles of respect for persons or non-maleficence and in morality we do not
kill because it is wrong
Ethics is a philosophical science which deals with the morality of the human acts, while
morality of human acts refers to the goodness or the badness the rightness or the wrongness of
human acts. Ethics as a moral philosophy provides principles on the morality of human acts,
gives a theoretical knowledge of the morality of human acts, makes basis of right or wrong and
good or bad actions, does not necessarily follow that man does what he knows, ethics does not
actually guarantee that man will be moral because one can be moral when one applies ethics or
theory
Morality as a moral theology means the practice of the ethics or theory, properly called
applied ethics actualizes the theory into a real action, the doing of ethics. What does moral
mean? It means customs or habitual ways of doing things, customary ways of doing things can
of course be either right or wrong and good or evil. When we say that something is moral we
generally mean that it is good. In morality the fundamental value is always the human person
and the person in relationship with society, we belong to society and the human community by
the very nature of our birth thus personal morality can never be divorced from our
responsibilities as members of that society, since customs practices habitual ways of doing
things vary from culture to culture, it can be expected that there will be varying approaches to
morality. The major issue in these varying approaches to morality is that people have different
views of what is good or evil.
Every human person has an innate tendency to seek his or her fulfillment and perfection.
The mere fact of being alive and being human means that one has purpose, one has goals, one
seeks meaning in life, also it means that one has needs and desires pursuant to keeping
oneself alive and seeking one's own fulfillment. This fulfillment or perfection, we call the good
hence we can state another fundamental truth. Anything contributing to the full actualization of
human potential and the proper development of the human person is good or moral. Those who
believe in God see and understand God as the final end and purpose of human life the supreme
good, for the believer human development and human perfection are undertaken in accordance
with God's will the guiding principle of which is love, God is love.
Just as anything that contributes to the proper growth and development of the human
person is good, so anything that frustrates or acts against this proper growth and development
is considered to be evil. These are some of the things that frustrate human life and development
in which everyone would therefore consider evil. Death, suffering, pain, disability, deprivation of
freedom, discrimination that deprives one of opportunity to improve one's self, deprivation of
worth and self-esteem. We call these pre-moral evils that is evils in the objective sense before
any moral slant has been added. Human beings may be deprived of what they need for their
growth and development as persons in different ways one way that pre-moral evil may be
caused is by natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, epidemics, accidents and in general
things which are outside of human control. We call such evils physical evils but as we know
quite well most of the evil in the world does not occur in this way. Most evil in the world is
brought on by the free deliberate and unjustified actions of human beings we call such evils
moral evils, and so moral evils occur when we voluntarily and deliberately become involved in
the spread of pre-moral evil.
Morality has to do with who and what we are as human beings and with our legitimate
development as persons. One does not have to be a religious person or express belief in god to
be bound by morality. No society can function properly for the good of its members unless there
is some form of agreed upon moral code that binds everyone right is right and wrong is wrong
apart altogether from religion. Authority does not create morality, things are not wrong because
they are forbidden they are forbidden because they are wrong. Immoral and illegal are not the
same thing. What is legal may not be moral like abortion and prostitution. Doing bodily harm to
oneself may not be illegal but it is almost certainly immoral. Driving through a red light may be
illegal but unless there is a danger of pre-moral evil to the public or to oneself it is not immoral
Man possesses freedom of will. Men experience themselves not merely as instruments
in the hands of higher forces but as creative agents and are able to choose among alternatives,
men are capable of self-determination. Man is accountable to an ultimate value or authority this
ultimate accountability is what gives a moral demand or moral duty its character. Only on this
condition is it possible to speak of moral duties which bind a person in conscience and which he
cannot refuse to obey without becoming guilty. From the commitment to this ultimate value
human life receives its ultimate meaning. The existence of god and man's accountability to an
ultimate value are not two separate presuppositions.
Ethics is the moral code a person uses on how to act, these actions always depend on
the values, principles, beliefs and norms that we follow. Ethics is a way of life, it always ask us
what should we do? How will you deal with this situation? And what makes our life worth living?
Ethics helps us to determine what are the good choices then identify which of those choices are
the best one for us to do.
On facing these moral dilemmas there are always choices we have to make, most of
these choices we can make by following our own principles for the benefit of others or our own
self-interest. Our decisions often rely on what matters to us like our family, justice, knowledge,
equality, etc., for us making the decision we shouldn’t only know what is good, we should also
know what is right. This is where are principles come in, it helps us determine whether the
choice we make is right but there are always going to be ambiguities in these choices and that’s
what makes ethical decision making very complicated. Ethics is what helps us to determine on
what principles to adapt in given situations and how do we make choices if there is a conflict
between our values and our principles, it also helps us to orient our judgement with connection
to our purpose and what guide should we follow.
Am I an ethical person? First what is an ethical person and why do we need ethics. For
me, to be considered ethical you must know what principles and morals you hold dear, you must
follow them when faced with an ethical dilemma, from when we are growing up our family,
teachers and other people teach us empathy and sympathy, we try to connect with other people
and I think these are the basis for our values. Empathy helps us to make a choice considering
our own feelings and others feelings towards the decisions we make and understand what other
people would feel, sympathy helps us to decide for ourselves based on other people’s common
feeling or the other way around, and these are some factors on what shapes our ethical
decision making for us to be ethical people.
We need ethics because it serves as a guide to our moral living and it helps us to judge
whether our actions and behavior can be justified, also ethics is our society’s sense on the right
way of living our daily lives. I can’t say that I’m an ethical person but I also can’t say otherwise
either because I have my own principles and beliefs and always try to live by them but
sometimes I face live with a happy go lucky attitude and it sometimes causes me to defy my
personal beliefs and principles, everyone should be taught ethics because it can make the world
a better place and can make people think before they decide. For me, I always try my best to
follow them and live by them.
Well everybody knows what morality is right? You should not kill should, not steal should
not lie, should not let gays get marriage, should not let women don't swim after eating, Am I
right? Well it might be a little bit more complicated than that. People don't seem to agree on one
universal set of moral rules even religious people who claim that all moral rules come from God
and everything you need to know about morality is written in religious texts don't seem to follow
every example set by God. For example one of the main stories in Christianity is that God the
sole source of morality, sacrificed his son who didn't do anything wrong for the sense of
humanity but we don't see Christians crucifying their children on their front lawns and saying it's
okay my neighbor's killed my dog and that is my way of showing that I forgave them, they don't
do that because they know that it is morally wrong and the fact that God did it does not make it
morally right.
We don't derive our morals from religious texts we simply agree with the messages that
represent our moral views in this regard of the stories as having no moral messages in them, so
if our morality does not come from religion where does it come from? Another popular view is
that people like some things and call these things morally right and dislike some other things
and call them morally wrong. For example some people don't like when their stuff gets stolen so
they say that feeling is morally bad thing to do most of the people don't like to be killed so they
say that killing people is immoral, in other words morality is all about preferences. If you don't
mind someone lying to you and enjoy lying you don't see anything morally wrong about it, if on
the other hand you hate liars you probably think that lying is immoral and you can even have
hypocritical morality. For example if you are male you can think that it is okay for guys to sleep
around but not women or that it is okay for you to express your religious views but not for those
who have different ones and if you are cynical enough you might think that this is how our world
works these days but if that was the case then no one would ever heavy moral dilemma.
Everyone would simply do whatever they want to do and would think that they're the best
person in the world why waste your time or money helping some people or caring about
environment when you can drink and watch TV and still people do that. What's up with that?
And not only they help others but they have discussions about what is the morally right way to
do that why would anyone have a discussion about morality with other people if it was
something personal that everybody decided for themselves.
Well let's make an example and see what we can work out from that imagine that you're
the only person in this universe that there are no other human beings or animals or anyone else
able to make any decisions whatsoever, in such a universe it is pointless to think about morality
since the only person that can be affected by your actions is you. Now imagine that some other
human being comes along now you have to decide whether to continue living alone or to
cooperate in one way or another if you decide to cooperate you have to make some sort of rules
how that cooperation is going to work, you might decide to not kill each other for example since
killing each other kind of defeats the purpose of cooperation.
You might come up with some other rules like not in the stream that you're going to drink
from or anything else that makes it more beneficial for you to live in your tiny societies and to
live alone, you might notice that sharing or exchanging stuff works better than stealing stuff from
each other, so you might come up with no stealing rule. The point is that you would come up
with the rule that would make your tiny society more functional and more pleasant to live in, and
that basically what morality is, a set is of rules that make society more functional and more
pleasant to live in and it doesn't matter if we are talking about a tiny society of two or a huge
society of eight billion, so when we have discussions about morality that is what we should be
talking about what makes our society more functional and more pleasant to live in it should not
matter whether I personally like it or not it should not matter what my religious texts say or even
if it's unnatural to be gay, the question that we should be asking is given the fact that these exist
how can we adjust our moral rules so that our society would work even better and would be
even more pleasant to live in, and the same goes for every other moral argument given the fact
that there are pregnant women who don't want to raise their babies what would be more
beneficial to the society to force women to give birth to these unwanted children or let them
have abortions given the fact that there are people who want to use drugs, what would be most
beneficial to the society, to put them into jail ignore them or maybe come up with some
alternative solution.
I'm not saying that every moral discussion has immediately obvious answered because
that's simply not true but it would be much easier to come up with these answers if we all
agreed on what are we arguing about in the first place. So instead of arguing about our religious
views or personal preferences we should be arguing about how to improve our society and
when we start thinking about that it becomes clear that moral rules change together with our
changing society in the past it made sense to have strict rules about our sexual behavior
because there was no other way to stop sexually transmittable diseases from spreading
because it was extremely difficult for a single woman to raise children without a husband and
birth control did not yet exist now that is no longer the case our living standards and medicine
reached the point where having sex before getting married or changing several sexual partners
before settling down does not threaten the well-being of our society anymore.
So if we decide to have moral rules about our sexual behavior we should think about
what works right now in the society that we have today instead of thinking about old moral rules
that worked in the past and we should also think about new moral rules that made no sense in
the past that makes a lot of sense today for example in the past humanity was not powerful
enough to change the environment and significant enough ways so our morality about
environment was quite literally don't where you eat but now our technology and scientific
knowledge given us so much power that we can easily create or destroy whole ecosystems and
decide which species will survive and which ones will go extinct actions affect the whole planet
so now it makes much more sense to have moral rules about how should we interact with our
environment then who should be allowed to sleep with whom.
Throughout history it is believed that the moral law came from God, but it is undeniable
that you can be good without believing in God. The real question isn't can you be good without
believing in God. The question is, can you be good without God? Here’s the problem, if there is
no God, what basis remains for objective good or bad, right or wrong? If God does not exist,
objective moral values do not exist, and here's why. Without some objective reference point, we
have no way of saying that something is really up or down. God's nature provides an objective
reference point for moral values. It's the standard against which all actions and decisions are
measured. But if there's no God, there's no objective reference point. All we are left with is one
person's viewpoint, which is no more valid than anyone else's viewpoint. This kind of morality is
subjective, not objective. It's like a preference for food; the preference is in the subject, not the
object, so it doesn't apply to other people. In the same way, subjective morality applies only to
the subject. It's not valid or binding for anyone else. So in a world without God, there can be no
evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
God has expressed his moral nature to us as commands. These provide the basis for
moral duties. For example, God's essential attribute of love is expressed in his command to love
your neighbor as yourself. This command provides a foundation upon which we can affirm the
objective goodness of generosity, self-sacrifice, and equality, and we can condemn as
objectively evil greed, abuse, and discrimination. This raises a problem. Is something good just
because God wills it, or does God will something because it is good? The answer is: neither
one. Rather, God wills something because he is good. God is the standard of moral values, just
as a live musical performance is the standard for a high-fidelity recording. The more a recording
sounds like the original, the better it is.
Likewise, the more closely a moral action conforms to God's nature, the better it is. But if
atheism is true there is no ultimate standard, so there can be no moral obligations or duties.
Who or what lays such duties upon us? No one. Remember, for the atheist, humans are just
accidents of nature, highly evolved animals. But animals have no moral obligations to one
another. When a cat kills a mouse, it hasn't done anything morally wrong; the cat's just being a
cat. If God doesn't exist, we should view human behavior in the same way. No action should be
considered morally right or wrong. But the problem is good and bad, right and wrong, do exist.
Just as our sense experience convinces us that the physical world is objectively real, our moral
experience convinces us that moral values are objectively real. Every time you say hey that's
not fair! That's wrong; that's an injustice! You affirm your belief in the existence of objective
morals.
We're well aware that child-abuse, racial discrimination, and terrorism are wrong, for
everybody, always. Is this just a personal preference or opinion? No. The man who says that it
is morally acceptable to rape little children is just as mistaken as the man who says one plus
one equals five. What all this amounts to then is a moral argument for the existence of God. If
God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist. But objective moral values
and duties do exist. Therefore, God exists. Atheism fails to provide a foundation for the moral
reality every one of us experiences every day. In fact, the existence of objective morality points
us directly to the existence of God.
When Nietzsche declared God is dead, it is to sum up the consequences that
the Age of Enlightenment had on the centrality of the concept of God. The
Enlightenment had brought about the triumph of scientific rationality over sacred
revelation; the rise of philosophical materialism and Naturalism that to all intents and
purposes had kept with the belief in or role of God in human affairs and the destiny of
the world.
According to Nietzsche. "When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the
right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-
evident ... By breaking one main concept out of Christianity, the faith in God, one
breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands." This death of God will
lead not only to the rejection of a belief of cosmic or physical order but also to a
rejection of absolute values themselves – to the rejection of belief in an objective and
universal moral law, binding upon all individuals. In this manner, the loss of an
absolute basis for morality leads to nihilism. This nihilism is that for which Nietzsche
worked to find a solution by re-evaluating the foundations of human values. But it is
believed that there could be positive new possibilities for humans without God.
Relinquishing the belief in God opens the way for human creative abilities to fully
develop. The Christian God, he wrote, would no longer stand in the way, so human
beings might stop turning their eyes toward a supernatural realm and begin to
acknowledge the value of this world. That “Death of God” can also be a salvation to
humanity. The Death of God then is not a threat but a necessity, a "clearing of the
ground" if you will, to revealing ethics, Plato says that: “Perhaps there cannot be laws
without a lawgiver” ”But ethical laws cannot be arbitrary whims of personalized gods”
”Maybe instead we can make our own laws”
This statement by Nietzsche is problematic because as said before, If God does
not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist. But objective moral values and duties
do exist. Therefore, God exists. Atheism fails to provide a foundation for the moral reality every
one of us experiences every day. In fact, the existence of objective morality points us directly to
the existence of God. But God did die, We could never a life worthy of God on our own. So
Jesus lived a life without sin on our behalf. And then he died the painful death our sins deserve.
John 3:17 says, “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order
that the world might be saved through him.” By sacrificing himself for us on the cross, he took
the punishment for all of our sins at once. This made him the ultimate sacrifice —once and for
all satisfying the demands God’s justice required. That is why we call Jesus “Lamb of God.”
In the sacrifice of Jesus’ crucifixion we are shown the depths of God’s love for us and
the lengths taken to save us from our sins. And in Jesus’s resurrection we see God’s triumph
over death, pointing toward the promise of eternal life in God’s presence.

Ferreras, Lawrence Emmanuel A.

BSME 3-4