|
|
Article: Morality requires God ... or does it?
- Article from:
- Free Inquiry
- Article date:
- June 22, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
Bad news for fundamentalists and Jean-Paul Sartre
Although Plato demonstrated the logical independence of God and morality over 2,000 years ago in the Euthyphro, the belief that morality requires God remains a widely held moral maxim. In particular, it serves as the basic assumption of the Christian fundamentalist's social theory. Fundamentalists claim that all of society's ills - everything from AIDS to out-of-wedlock pregnancies - are the result of a breakdown in morality and that this breakdown is due to a decline in the belief of God. Although many fundamentalists trace the beginning of this decline to the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species in ...