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How can you have morals without God?
Morality in general is broken down into (at least) three branches: Consequentialism, or the belief that the morality of an act is based on the consequences of the action; Deontology, or the belief that the morality of an act is based on whether or not it is compliant with a rule/rules; and Virtue ethics, or the belief that morality should be based on what people 'are', rather than what people 'do'.
Using these definitions, most of today's religions advocate deontology, with the set of rules being ordained by supernatural entities. However, there is nothing inherent in this branches that requires them.
Beyond that, morality can be studied within the fields of psychology and sociology. While both offer explanations of its existence, neither field offers a solution to say that one set of morals is greater than another, but the notion can still be achieved through secular philosophy. This is evidenced by the judicial actions of secular institutions (perhaps the best example is that of secular governments) or prevailing social norms which have no basis in religion or are not held by religious adherents. Examples would include the outlawing of slavery, and the rejection of sexism and racism.
Conversely, dogmatic approaches by religions to establish one solid set of rules, which explicitly state one thing is wrong and the other is not, deter progress in morality.
"But look! The most horrible murderous leaders in history have been atheists! Hitler! Pol Pot! Stalin!"
A common misconception that has been decidedly promoted among the theist community is that each of these evil dictators was evil because they were atheists. The implication is that without a god, people have no 'moral grounding' and are therefore somehow inclined to perform evil acts such as mass murder.
This is completely false. Morals and morality are natural to all humans, and are entirely separate to religious belief. Would a believer in religion suddenly decide to kill and rape if they stopped believing in god? Indeed, if morals are truly determined by religious teachings, then slavery, the stoning of adulterers, homosexuals, misbehaving children, and many of the other atrocities condoned by the Bible would not be considered atrocities at all -- they would be perfectly 'moral' things to do. In practice, morality is better described as being an inevitable result of the Zeitgeist (from the German phrase meaning 'the spirit of the times'), the ever-changing social understanding that we all share that determines what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior within every society.
If a person doesn’t already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won’t discover this by reading the Bible or the Koran -- as these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. We do not get our morality from religion. We decide what is good in our good books by recourse to moral intuitions that are (at some level) hard-wired in us and that have been refined by thousands of years of thinking about the causes and possibilities of human happiness.
We have made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn’t make this progress by reading the Bible or the Koran more closely. Both books condone the practice of slavery -- and yet every civilized human being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination. Whatever is good in scripture, like the golden rule, can be valued for its ethical wisdom without requiring us to believe that it was handed down to us by the creator of the universe.
The argument is also intrinsically wrong for the following reasons:
- The existence of gods is not contingent on who takes a theist or atheist position.
- Causality is crucial in understanding any kind of relationship. The causality between examples of immoral atheists and atheism is borderline non-existent, in most cases -- as much to the point as saying that Hitler and Stalin were both bad because they had mustaches.
- The causality between immoral actions is much greater with religions. Perhaps the purest and most recent example is the attacks on various European cartoonists drawing pictures of Islam's Mohammad. Were the attackers not Muslim, it's doubtful they would take such violent offense.
- It denotes grave misunderstandings of history as will be discussed later in this section
In regards to Hitler, Pol Pot & Stalin, it is important to point out first that Hitler appears to have not been an atheist at all. He was raised as a Catholic, regularly invoked Jesus in his speeches, and spoke often of his and the German peoples' "manifest destiny" -- a decidedly un-atheist position. It is also worth noting that aside from Hitler, the overwhelming majority of Nazi party members were religious, and it was they who committed the crimes of the Nazi party first hand. In addition, the Nazi party also officially banned books that "ridicule, belittle or besmirch the Christian religion and its institution, faith in God, or other things that are holy." Pol Pot was raised Buddhist, later spent eight years in a Catholic seminary, but was more accurately described as a deist as he professed a belief in "heaven" and "destiny." Stalin was born into a very religious household and attended the Tiflis Theological Seminary, from which he was expelled. His personal religious beliefs are hard to pin down exactly, however he did publicly advocate the idea that religions were unnecessary and was likely to have been an Atheist.
Sam Harris provides a typically lucid explanation regarding the actions of these men:
"People of faith regularly claim that atheism is responsible for some of the most appalling crimes of the 20th century. Although it is true that the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were irreligious to varying degrees, they were not especially rational. In fact, their public pronouncements were little more than litanies of delusion--delusions about race, economics, national identity, the march of history or the moral dangers of intellectualism. In many respects, religion was directly culpable even here. Consider the Holocaust: The anti-Semitism that built the Nazi crematoria brick by brick was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, religious Germans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way, the religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued. (The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914.)
Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields are not examples of what happens when people become too critical of unjustified beliefs; to the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of not thinking critically enough about specific secular ideologies. Needless to say, a rational argument against religious faith is not an argument for the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. The problem that the atheist exposes is none other than the problem of dogma itself--of which every religion has more than its fair share. There is no society in recorded history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable, or too accepting of rational inquiry."
Source: http://www.reddit.com/help/faqs/atheism#HowcanyouhavemoralswithoutGod