Moral Standards and the Application of the Term “God”: A Response to Kai Nielsen's Ethics Without God

Abstract

N his recent book Ethics Without God' Kai Nielsen does not rest with developing an ethic that has no theistic basis or assumptions. He argues that those who have contended that morality is based in religion have the matter backwards. To the contrary, in Nielsen's words A moral understanding must be logically prior to any religious assent (p. 21). Or, Christianity, Judaism and theistic of that sort could not exist if people did not have a moral understanding that was, logically speaking, quite independent of such religions (p. 10). His contention is that the logic of the term and the logic of moral language is such that even a devout religious believer must already have at his disposal some moral conceptions and standards, and must know how to use them to make moral judgments, in order for him even to assert that there is a in the first place and in order for anything about to pose any moral obligations for him. I want to examine Nielsen's contentions and the reasons he offers in support of them, because I am convinced that they involve a serious misrepresentation of the relation between a believer and what he considers to be his/her so far as this involves anything in the way of moral standards. And further, I believe that, by his concentration on God's will as a moral standard, Nielsen misinterprets the most important sense in which is a moral standard for Christians. Nielsen's argument has three main parts which can be summarized as follows. [This line of argument is based upon the assumption that God is good is analytic, a truth of language. Nielsen says that he regards this as more plausible than the assumption that it is a synthetic, substantive statement (p. 7).] (1) The evaluative character of the application of the term God: in deciding whether or not there is a God, a person decides whether there exists (or could conceivably exist) something Z, described in some manner, such that Z is worthy of worship (pp. 12, 17).