This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Woberton.

Philosophy bites is available at www

philosophy bites.com.

If there's no God there can be no morality. Without God, chaos would rain. Belief in God is

needed to curtail the worst instincts of man. Those who go to church, synagogue and mosque are more ethical than those

who don't. These are all common enough claims and all hogwash, at least according to the author of morality without God, Walter Sinot Armstrong.

Walter Sinot Armstrong, welcome to Prossophy Bites.

Glad to be here. The topic we're going to focus on today is morality without God. How can you

have morality without God? Well it's very simple. Morality is based on harm to other people and

our relations to other people. What makes it wrong to hit

someone is that that person gets hurt. It's not that God told you not to do it and

that's why it's wrong. The entire basis of morality has to do with

human relations to each other, maybe even other species, but causing harm to other creatures.

That's what morality is based on and we don't need religion to tell us that.

But yet the history of humanity is the history of people obeying laws that have apparently been given to them by God.

Religious people like to claim that those rules come from God,

but notice that those same rules about not harming others

in certain crucial

essential ways are shared by many many different religions and

that shows that they're not really based on any particular religious

revelation they're just common sense. Religions have to have a

certain connection to common sense in order to thrive and succeed. So of course

...