Is Morality Grounded in God?
I really enjoyed this debate with my friend, Logan Meyer, who defended moral realism. His viewpoint is interesting and unique, since moral realism seems to be rare amongst agnostics and other non-Christians.
I, on the other hand, defended the Christian position that morality is grounded in God. This includes the classic apologetic that if God does not exist, then objective moral truths do not exist and all discussions of morality are rooted in ever-changing human opinion. As a reference point and context for the discussion on morality, I started with the 10 Commandments as outlined in what Christians recognize as the Old Testament Scriptures and what Jewish people recognize as the Tanakh. I compared the 10 Commandments to some work done in the fields of neuroscience and psychology, with a particular focus on moral foundations theory and social psychologist, Johnathan Haidt. My intent was to show why we are better off following God’s commandments instead of our own preferred consciences.
Matthew Sabatine’s bibliography:
[1] Haidt, Johnathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion
https://www.goodreads.com/.../15992204-the-righteous-mind
[2] Colin Prince wrote an article titled Moral Foundation Theory and the Law, in which he discusses details of Haidt's work.
[3] In the video, I accidentally mentioned John 10:25-30 when I intended to cite John 10:27-29
https://www.bible.com/bible/compare/JHN.10.27-29
[4] Wikipedia article about Hitler’s Positive Christianity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_Christianity
[5] Decety, Jean and Cowell, M. Jason (2016, March 9th). Our Brains Are Wired For Morality: Evolution, Development, and Neuroscience
https://kids.frontiersin.org/arti.../10.3389/frym.2016.00003
[6] Pascual, Leo et. al. (2013, September 12th). How does morality work in the brain? A functional and structural perspective of moral behavior.
https://www.frontiersin.org/.../10.../fnint.2013.00065/full
The author of this blog post is Matthew Sabatine, who was born in the United States and raised as a Christian but left the faith in his early twenties. He returned to the faith midway through 2022. Matthew has some experience in the mental health field as a direct support professional, caring for people with intellectual and development disabilities and people who were in long-term residency/rehabilitation programs. Though Matthew has no formal undergraduate or graduate degree, he has experience co-facilitating therapy groups under the supervision of licensed counselors. Matthew currently works in sales/marketing by day and blogs on his free time at night.
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