What makes ethics different from religion

Donahue James A. Logic vs. This article — and everything on this site — is funded by readers like you. Give Now. Christians also believe God is triune exists as a trinity, including God incarnate.

Given this view of God, it is natural to expect that God would bring into existence and sustain a cosmos in which life emerges, including conscious life with ethical, aesthetic, and religious awareness a sense of the sacred.

The Problem of Evil: If there is an all powerful, all good, and all knowing God, then why is there evil? This is the classical theistic problem of evil that comes in the form of either a deductive or probabilistic argument.

Deductive arguments content that there is a strict logical incompatibility between theism and the existence of evil. Probabilistic arguments usually concede that it is logically possible for God and evil to co-exist, but they argue that, given the amount of evil that exists, it is unlikely or improbable that God exists.

Or do the gods approve of X because X is right? Plato himself seems to hold that the gods love the good because it is good. Abortion: Is the termination of a fetus a violation of the sanctity of human life? The Roman Catholic position is that the personhood of the fetus is established immediately upon conception.

Positions on the issue vary widely among different religions. There is a family of arguments that variously urge that certain features of human moral experience are best accommodated on a theistic worldview. In particular, the common claim is that moralrealism, the view that there are objective or mind-independent moral facts-calls for theistic metaphysical or epistemological underpinnings.

Sorley argued that an objective moral law requires an infinite Mind in which to reside if it is to have full ontological status. Lewis argued that conscience reveals to us a moral law whose source cannot be found in the natural world, thus pointing to a supernatural Lawgiver. Atheist philosopher J. He thus rejected moral realism for a variety of nihilism, privileging metaphysical naturalism over the existence of moral facts.

The argument invites reversal: Insofar as the belief in moral facts seems warranted, we have reason to reject naturalism for something akin to theism. Other arguments focus on the inadequacy of metaphysical naturalism for accommodating any robust form of moral realism. Or one might argue that no adequate theory of normative ethics sits comfortably within the confines of a naturalistic worldview.

The inherent worth of persons, on the other hand, might best be understood within a theistic framework in which the axiological and metaphysical Ultimate is a Person. The philosopher J. Evolutionary Ethics: Ethics as derived from evolutionary theory.

This faces the difficulty that evolutionary theory does not seem to provide a reason to believe that if a form of life survives natural selection, it is ipso facto good or virtuous or more ethical than organisms that perish.

Darwin proposed that in human beings compassion and ideals of justice will tend to promote survivability, but he conceded that it might not do so. Some environmental ethicists claim that Darwinian and neo-Darwinian evolution can provide reasons for thinking that non-human animals deserve greater moral attention given our mutual ancestral descent than if one adopts the view that species are all separately created.

While some philosophers think evolutionary theory and ethics are incompatible with Christianity Richard Dawkins , others Michael Ruse see no essential conflict.

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are called Abrahamic because they trace their history back to the Hebrew patriarch Abraham often dated in the 20 th or 21 st century BCE. According to the classical forms of these faiths, God is the one and sole God they are monotheistic as opposed to polytheistic who both created and sustains the cosmos.

Creation out of nothing means that God did not use or require anything external from God in creating everything. If the source of the light goes out or the singer stops singing, the light and song cease. Traditionally, creation is not thought of as a thing that an agent might fashion and then abandon; the idea of God making creation and then neglecting it—the way a person might make a machine and then abandon it—is utterly foreign to theism.

In these religions, God is said to exist necessarily, not contingently. God is also not a mode of something more fundamental, the way a wave is a mode of the sea or a movement is a mode of the dance. Theists hold that God is, rather, a substantial reality: a being not explainable in terms that are more fundamental than itself. God is without parts, i. Theists describe God as holy or sacred, a reality that is of unsurpassable greatness.

God is therefore also thought of as perfectly good, beautiful, all-powerful omnipotent , present everywhere omnipresent , and all-knowing omniscient. God is without origin and without end, and everlasting or eternal. Because of all this, God is worthy of worship and morally sovereign worthy of obedience. Arguably, the most central attribute of God in the Abrahamic traditions is goodness. The idea that God is not good or the fundamental source of goodness would be akin to the idea of a square circle: an utter contradiction.

Theists in these traditions differ on some of the divine attributes. Some, for example, claim that God knows all future events with certainty, whereas others argue that no being including God can have such knowledge.

Some theists believe that God transcends both space and time altogether, while other theists hold that God pervades the spatial world and is temporal there is before, during, and after for God. His teaching centers on the Four Noble Truths.

These are that: 1 life is full of suffering, pain, and misery dukka ; 2 the origin of suffering is in desire tanha ; 3 the extinction of suffering can be brought about by the extinction of desire; and 4 the way to extinguish desire is by following the Noble Eightfold Path. The Eightfold Path consists of right understanding; right aspirations or attitudes; right speech; right conduct; right livelihood; right effort; mindfulness; and contemplation or composure.

Early Buddhist teaching tended to be nontheistic, underscoring instead the absence of the self anatta and the impermanence of life. In its earliest forms, Buddhism did not have a developed metaphysics that is, a theory of the structure of reality, the nature of space, time, and so on , but it did include belief in reincarnation, skepticism about the substantial nature of persons existing over time, and either a denial of the existence of Brahman or the treatment of Brahman as inconsequential.

This is its clearest departure from Hinduism. The goal of the religious life is nirvana , a transformation of human consciousness that involves the shedding of the illusion of selfhood.

Schools of Buddhism include Theravada Buddhism, the oldest and strictest in terms of promoting the importance of monastic life; Mahayana Buddhism, which emerged later and displays less resistance to Hindu themes and does not place as stringent an emphasis on monastic vocation; Pure Land Buddhism; and Zen Buddhism.

A Chinese philosophy articulated by Laozi in the Daodejing and by Zhuang Zhou in the Zhuangzi that seeks harmony by means of passivity and humility. It is used as both a noun and a verb. One ought not to draw moral good vs. Hinduism is so diverse that it is difficult to use the term as an umbrella category even to designate a host of interconnected ideas and traditions. Hinduism names the various traditions that have flourished in the Indian subcontinent,going back to before the second millennium BCE.

The most common feature of what is considered Hinduism is reverence for the Vedic scriptures, a rich collection of oral material, some of it highly philosophical, especially the Upanishads. Unlike the three monotheistic religions, Hinduism does not look back to a singular historical figure such as Abraham. According to one strand of Hinduism, Advaita Vedanta a strand that has received a great deal of attention from Western philosophers from the 19th century on , this world of space and time is non-different in its essential nature from Brahman , the infinite.

The world appears to us to consist of discreet diverse objects because we are ignorant, but behind the diverse objects and forms we observe in what may be called the phenomenal or apparent world the world of phenomena and appearances there is the formless, reality of Brahman. Advaita does not deny the existence of a diverse world of space and time, but understands the many to be an appearance of the one Brahman.

Shankara — was one of the greatest teachers of this nondualist tradition within Hinduism. Other, theistic strands of Hinduism construe the Divine as personal, all-good, powerful, knowing, creative, loving, and so on. Theistic elements may be seen, for example, in the Bhagavad Gita and its teaching about the love of God. Ramanuja 11 th century and Madhva 13th and 14th centuries are better known theistic representatives of Hinduism.

There are also lively polytheistic elements within Hinduism. If something is bad, ethics tells us we should not do it, if something is good, obviously there is no harm in doing it. The tricky part of life, and the reason that we need ethics, is that what is good and bad in life are often complicated by our personal circumstances, culture, finances, ethnicity, gender, age, time, experience, personal beliefs, and other variables.

Often the path that looks most desirable will have negative consequences, while the path that looks the most perilous for an individual or organization will often result in doing the most good for others. Ethics of people are often found to be reflected in the laws of the land. However, if you are following the laws of the land, you do not become ethical. If homosexuality is permitted by the law, but religion says it is unethical, and you feel the same way too, there is a conflict between religion and laws.

However, despite religion finding objection with abortion, you know that it is ethical to abort as one should have a choice in when they need another member in their family. This is where ethics and religion are found at crossroads. For all practical purposes though, religion and ethics means the same to most of us.