People often say that morality and religion should not be linked because God cannot create morality. If Goodness is an independent entity, and God commands thing because they are good, irrespective of if it is what he wants, He cannot bring goodness into being apart from the goodness that he can access from outside himself and is therefore not all power full. A God who decides what moral and is the source of all morality can therefore create a command to do something that is intrinsically wrong, but because he has decided that it a good thing to do morally, it becomes so. This is known as the Euthyphro dilemma. If one then asks why is God good? It is because he obeys what he commands, which shows a limited understanding of God. This is often why many people that there should be no link between religion and morality. However Koukl stated that a God who is all loving will always command what is right and what is just because it is in his very nature to do so.
- Religion is not always moral. The Westborough Baptist Church (WBC) is a shows quite plainly how wrong it can go when morality and religion are mixed badly. The WBC attends the funerals of dead service men and women and preaches how the deceased are going to go to hell for what they have done as “God hates America”- which is one of their slogans. Clearly these people are using religious interpretation to vastly abuse their moral calling and most people would agree that this is a bad case of religion mixing with morality. The fact that this group is Christian and is able to do things that most would consider very un-Christian shows that in religion there is a huge scope for interpretation. For this reason, this lack of finite knowledge and structure that is in religion, caused by there being so many different religions, that many feel that religion and morality should have nothing to do with each other.
Religion does not depend upon morality, it is the reason for it, it is too religion that the world turns when it is struck by some new disaters. People are often called to religion after they have done something terrible and are in remorse for it, something that one nevers hears about with atheism. Humans find the faults that are found with morality and religion being dependent upon each other, but neither morality nor religion comes from humans, so the faults are human faults and not faults with morality and religion, as they come to us from God. If as Aquinas said, the goodness that is in humans is merely a reflection of the total and utter goodness that is God, how can any question if God would ever command something to be immoral? Yes, God is Omnipotent and so could command a bad thing be considered good, but what people seem to forget is that he is also all loving and so would never do this. Nor would he ever need to because he is Omniscience. the point that we all feel a moral sense, both theist and atheist, despite a confirmed root of morality does give the sense that our morality is not necessarily our own, shows that it is a reflection of the truer goodness the comes to us from and through God. While a link between morality and religion is not clearly needed, there is a sense that to have one gives a deeper sense of the other. Morality and religion should, therefore, be reflections of each other. They can be separate, but that does not mean that they cannot be the same in substance.