A Response to A Note About God

In my experience, for people who believe in god, morality comes up a lot, as dependent on or grounded in God’s nature, something like that, so let’s start (and end) there. One thing that I talk about a lot is the “ought implies can“ principle, pointed out by Kant. Meaning that if you are morally compelled to do something, it must at least be possible. Implicitly tied to the principle, is also the fact that some kind or degree of freedom is necessary to attribute us culpability for our moral or immoral acts. Meaning that if we can do something, we can also not do it. So the basis of freedom is the ability to do something or not do something.

For an act to be good, it seems to be that it should be the case that you could also possibly not have done it. For example, if some random person controlled your body and forced you to do some good act, just because in many senses you did it, you are not the one who deserves praise for that good act.

This idea extends to epistemic norms, which in some senses are also moral norms, since to practice the acquisition of ideas in bad ways would possibly also lead to doing bad things, because the information you have about the world is more likely to be false. We should practice good epistemology for moral reasons. If God is to give us free will, and if epistemology also is encompassed by this free will given by God for morality, then we must also have the ability to practice bad epistemology, because the freedom to do something is also the freedom to not do something.

If God gives us freedom to believe or not believe things, this seems to imply that his intervention would remove freedom to whatever degree, and be bad, in the same way that the person who controlled your body to make you do something good, took away the good making property of the act for you, by removing the good will of the agent. If you acquire an idea in such a way that it was not you who freely chose it (by epistemic method), you have not acquired that idea freely in the relevant sense.

Being in a world where people are free to practice bad epistemology means that there will be a variety of beliefs, including, even if God exists, the belief that God does not exist or that the wrong God exists.

The people who believe their religion believe that there are consequences for not believing it and/or benefits to believing it a.k.a. ultimate salvation. It doesn’t really seem like God is the one directing that these churches and pastors and televangelist to do these things, they do them on their own. But that they exist is explained by the internal motivations of the people proselytizing.

Given this, it isn’t mysterious, if God exists, that people don’t believe in him. And it isn’t mysterious, that people proselytize.