...Evaluate the claim that conscience is the voice of God (35 Marks) Conscience can be divided into three theories, one being ‘an awareness of what is good and bad ‘believed by St. Paul, secondly the conscience is the power to distinguish good from evil believed by St. Jerome and thirdly, the conscience is the voice of God, believed by St. Augustine. Thomas Aquinas thought that the conscience is a device for distinguishing our right actions from our wrong ones, he believed that we all obey the synderesis rule which means that we all have a innate awareness of good and bad that cannot be mistaken, this is why he reckoned that people do generally tend towards the good and away from evil. However Aristotle had not realized that mistakes can be made when working out what is good and what is evil, as it would be unlikely for every single human being to agree on what is right and wrong. Our conscience does not command our action of choosing right or wrong, but is ‘reason making the right decision’. In relation to the moral Argument, Immanuel Kant said that we all have a sense of moral law. If we feel we ought to do something, this can prove that we have free will, which allows us and our conscience to make the correct decisions when deciding upon the rightness or wrongness of a situation/outcome. But to be free allows for some mistakes, Aquinas agrees that the conscience is infallible, that it is not the voice of god, but it is part of our God given make up. Joseph Butler agreed with...
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..."The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience" Mahatma Ghandi. There are conflicting beliefs about whether conscience is innate or learned. When conscience is described as being innate, it means that it is inborn within you. From a religious perspective, an innate conscience is one which is God given or the voice of reason as a moral guide to what is right and wrong, whereas if it is argued that the conscience is not innate then it is described as being learned or developed according to psychologists. There are three key approaches to defining conscience psychologically wise. The first one by Freud and developed by Piaget and Fromm, argues that conscience is the result of environmental factors. Freud's definition of conscience is linked to an individual's feelings of guilt and fear of punishment. As such, it could be seen as an unreliable guide to ethical decision-making as it may inspire actions simply to gain approval. There is then the an entirely different approach to conscience, existing within the Christian tradition, is to define conscience as an innate or intuitive sense. This view has perpetuated from the early Christian writings of St Paul to Cardinal Newman's work at the end of the 19th Century. Another important proponent of an intuitive conscience was Joseph Butler, who identified conscience as the ultimate moral decision maker. Placed within us by God, it must be obeyed. However, a main criticism of this is why...
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...‘Conscience is the voice of god’ Discuss. Most people would agree that conscience is the reasoned voice inside us that guides and tells us what we should and shouldn’t do. However peoples views on the origins of conscience can differ a lot; whether people belief its Gods doing or whether it’s innate or even whether it is acquired. In this essay I will be showing the viewpoints of various philosophers with their beliefs on whether conscience is or isn’t the voice of God. Ultimately I believe that conscience is not the voice of God. John Henry Newman believed that conscience was the voice of God, and that following the suggestions of your conscience gives the same significance as to follow God’s laws and values. Newman used conscience as proof for the existence of God. He said that the fact that we feel guilty, even when it is impossible for anyone to know what we have done, for example, having bad thoughts about someone, proves that ‘there is one to whom we are responsible to’. This feeling we have of being accountable was how Newman saw our conscience. He believed that there must be a God that we are accountable to and the reason we feel guilty for wrong thoughts or actions was because we all knew that someone, who Newman believed was God, was looking down on us and we had to impress him in a sense. However there was a flaw to his theory as he didn’t consider people that perhaps don’t ever feel guilty. Also those who don’t believe in God – do they not have a conscience...
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...Most people understand conscience as something which tells us right from wrong, it is generally seen as a moral faculty, sense or feeling which compels individuals to believe that particular activities are morally right or wrong. Many ethical debates have been addressed on whether conscience is innate or developed. When conscience is described as innate, it means that it is inborn within you. From a religious viewpoint, an innate conscience is one which is God given or the voice of reason as a moral guide to what is right and wrong, whereas if it is argued that the conscience is not innate then it is described as being learned or developed according to psychologists. If conscience is innate and God given then does that mean God has told people to act immorally? However if Conscience is not innate then the blame for people acting immorally is shifted to society. St Thomas Aquinas, Joseph Butler and Cardinal John Newman are key scholars who believe that conscience is innate and inborn within a person. Key scholars and psychologists who believe that conscience is not innate are Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Erich Fromm and Humanist. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) did not think of conscience as being the voice of God but as the natural ability of people to understand the difference between right and wrong. He believed that all people aim for what is good and try to avoid evil he called this the synderesis rule. Aquinas said that it was innate to seek good because sin is falling short...
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...Assess the view that conscience should always be obeyed (35 marks). Conscience can be seen as a form of moral judgement of right and wrong. The term is often used in everyday life to refer to thoughts that challenge negative ideas. Philosophers such as Newman and Butler believe that it should strictly be obeyed, obedience being the act of following regardless of the circumstances, as conscience is God-given. However, psychologists such as Freud and Piaget believe otherwise, that conscience is not necessarily from God but is developed from our moral development and the influence society has on us. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, focused on an individual’s past and its subconscious influence in later life, particularly adulthood. He argued that conscience is based around guilt. Freud suggested that our conscience is the voice of our individual desires that must be satisfied. In particular, he emphasised the importance of sexual desires and argued that we feel guilty or dissatisfied as individuals if we go against our conscience. He reasoned that through early developmental years, we learn values that influence our moral awareness in what is right and wrong, which develop for later on in our lives. Freud divided human consciousness into three separate elements: the ego, the id and the super-ego. According to Freud, the id contains our emotional and physical needs and is the more selfish aspect of our personality. On the other hand, the super-ego is the moral aspect...
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...To what extent is the conscience the voice of God? The vast majority of people understand the conscience to be an internal moral source which guides us in situations to the right thing to do. Some believe this is an innate drive we are born with, other believe it is a result of early environment and conditioning. However, whether the belief differs about how we acquire a conscience, many peoples conscience guide them in different moral directions, for example one person may feel that it is morally right to kill someone who is committing homicides themselves, while others feel that it morally wrong to kill in al situations, irrespective of the victims history, for example it would be morally wrong to kill Adolf Hitler regardless of all the people he killed and maimed. The conscience can be argued to be the voice of god as god is believed to be benevolent, omniscient and omnipresent and made us in the image of him, giving us the conscience for us to stay on the moralistically correct side of the spectrum. In the Holy Scriptures the conscience is also called the heart. In the Sermon on the Mount the Lord Jesus Christ likens the conscience to an adversary with whom a man must make peace before he appears before the Judge (who is God) (Matt. 5:25). The Lord also compares the conscience to the eye, by means of which a person sees his moral state (Matt. 6:22). The first comparison reveals the distinguishing characteristic of our conscience, its to oppose our bad actions and intentions...
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...“I have noticed my conscience for many years, and I know it is more trouble and bother to me than anything else I started with.”(Mark Twain) People are often advised to follow their conscience because by definition it is “Our sense of moral right and wrong.”(Oliphant) It is a moral faculty or sense that leads individuals to believe that actions are morally wrong or right. Yet it can lead on person to choose war and another to feel this is morally abhorrent. There is a lot debate regarding where the conscience comes from, whether it be by a God given ability which is pushed forwards by biblical teachings, or from the sense of guilt we feel when we go against our conscience according to Sigmund Freud. “The Conscience is a difficult notion to understand and even more difficult to explain how it operates,” (Richard Gula) therefore there are many definitions of conscience and there are many philosophical theories about conscience and it connection with moral decision making. Firstly an argument for the conscience, which is the voice of God, comes from Augustine of Hippo, who said that “Men see the moral rules written in the book of light which is called Truth from which all laws are copied.” (De Trinitate, Augustine of Hippo). He was a theologian and believed that the conscience is God’s love poured forth to human beings, thus it is when God speaks to the individual, therefore he is arguing that the conscience is the voice of God and it reveals itself in solitary moments thus is not...
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...Evaluate the claim that conscience is the voice of God (35Marks) Conscience is said to be a moral faculty or feeling prompting us to see that certain actions are morally right or wrong; however it does prompt people in different directions which is why it is considered to be inconsistent, although we’d like to think it’s reliable. Where this conscience comes from is a debate many people have been a part of, some say it is acquired through your life while others such as Emmanuel Swedenborg claimed it was innate and described conscience as “the presence of God within man”. Most Religious views on conscience agree with Swedenborg and believe it came from God an example of this would be Augustine. Saint Augustine of hippo was an early Christian philosopher whose writings developed most of modern day theology; he was convinced that our conscience was a voice from God. When we were in a position to make a decision God would show himself to us and guide us to make the correct choice. Considering God is labelled as omnipotent, omniscience and omnibenevolent you would expect every decision you made to be the morally right one, however this cannot be the case as people have been faced with decisions throughout history and made the wrong choice, an example would be Al Qaeda deciding to blow up the twin towers. Why would God guide them into making that decision if he is meant to be all loving? Aquinas says that we all aim for what is good and any sinful act we commit is falling short...
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...analysed Aquinas’ 4th way and devised his proof for God based on morality INNATE MORAL AWARENESS - Kant’s starting point was that we all have a sense of innate moral awareness: ‘Two things fill the mind with ever new increasing admiration and awe… the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’ His argument for the existence of God follows: 1. We all have a sense of innate moral awareness – from this we are under obligation to be virtuous 2. An ‘average’ level of virtue is not enough, we are obliged to aim for the highest standard possible 3. True virtue should be rewarded with happiness 4. There is an ideal state where human virtue and happiness are united – this Kant called the ‘Summum Bonum’ 5. Moral statements are prescriptive – ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ 6. Humans can achieve virtue in a lifetime but it is beyond us to ensure we are rewarded with happiness 7. Therefore there must be a God who has power to ensure that virtue and happiness coincide Kant’s moral argument does not postulate that God is necessary for morality but that God is required for morality to achieve its end ‘Therefore it is morally necessary to assume the existence of God.’ CARDINAL NEWMAN “We feel responsibility, are ashamed, are frightened at transgressing the voice of conscience, this implies that there is one to whom we are responsible.” For Newman, the existence of conscience implies a moral law-giver whom we are answerable to – God. CRITICISMS • Moral laws may not be objective...
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...Kant’s moral argument focuses on the notion that God must exist to provide structure to the moral universe. Technically he did not believe that is was possible to prove the existence of God through rational or empirical means. It is important to outline two key ideas before explaining the details of the moral argument. These ideas centre around his assumptions of the universe: that the universe was fair; and that the world around us is fundamentally rational. He begins with the unspoken assumption that the world is fair, owing to the dominance of the enlightenment belief that the universe was fundamentally knowable through reason. It is important to note that Kant began a new way of looking at knowledge. He believed that we could know the world through reason in a prior synthetic way. This was a complete change from how the world had been view previously and was known as Kant’s Copernican revolution. In essence Kant believed in two separate worlds of knowledge: noumenal and the phenomenal worlds. The noumenal world is the world as it truly is without being observed. It is fundamentally unknowable because the act of observation changes the very thing that we observe. It is as though human beings have a specific set of spectacles that cannot be taken off and like the proverbial rose tinted ones they change our perception of the world around us. This personalised view of the universe is the phenomenal world. However, what is key to explaining Kant’s moral argument is the fact that...
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...Religious Language......................................................………p.1 Religious Experience........................................................…...p.7 Miracles..................................................................…………...p.12 Nature of God............................................................………...p.16 Life and Death.........................................................…………..p.20 G582: Religious Ethics Meta-ethics...........................…………………………………….p.25 Free Will and Determinism………………………………….……p.28 Conscience.......................…………………………………….…p.32 Virtue Ethics………………………………………………………..p.36 Sexual Ethics…………………………………………………...….p.40 Environment and Business Ethics……………………………….p.44 Religious Language Introduction The problems of religious language: • If we use language univocally about God, then we are limiting him / making him like a human • If we use language equivocally about God, we cannot be sure what the word means when applied to God • Are statements about God supposed to be cognitive – if so, what evidence proves / disproves them? • Are statements about God supposed to be non-cognitive – if so, do they have any meaning? The Verification Principle The Vienna Circle This group of philosophers argued that a statement is only meaningful if it can be verified empirically, or if it is a tautology. This idea is...
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...How could a boy knowing only a scant of the Bible have a conscience? Truthfully, all humans are born with a slight conscience for “God created man in his own image.” Therefore, God’s morals and law over right and wrong are naturally instilled in all men and women. “For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them.” Tom Sawyer needn’t the Bible to follow his morals, only the will to do so. When Muff Potter is unjustly imprisoned for murder, Tom Sawyer struggles to listen to that moral voice. To relieve his conscience, he smuggled gifts in prison to the drunkard, yet in the end, he let his holy conscience take over and exonerated Muff Potter. Lastly, as the runaway boys fell to sleep, Tom Sawyer felt sick—he was overcome with the act of stealing from the town and tormenting his Aunt with his disappearance. His conscience was partially satisfied when he promised to never steal again. He felt so sorry for messing with his Aunt that he wrote a simple note of his love. Although he never delivered the note, the act of writing the note demonstrated that he felt guilt’s burden. Tom Sawyer’s conscience, though somewhat muddied, is purified with the...
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...The question as to whether or not conscience is a reliable guide to ethical decision making can be approached in several ways and often only reaches a personal conclusion fueled by opinion. There are a number of ways in which conscience can be defined, one of which comes from Vincent Macnamara and is considered one of the more modern definitions, it is as follows. Macnamara says the conscience is not a voice but an attitude, he criticised Aquinas for referring to it as a “faculty” we possess. Macnamara regarded life as a moral path and said “it is up to us how we follow it”, furthermore he believes the attitude of our conscience shouldn't revolve around pleasure and profit. His belief is similar, in a way, to the virtue ethics approach and unfortunately boasts the same flaws, where it is hard to determine what is a virtue and what isn't, it's equally difficult to determine whether or not the attitude of our conscience is genuine. Another theory, put forward by Freud, and later developed by Piaget and Fromm, argues that conscience is more likely a result of environmental factors. This is typical of Freud's beliefs as he was first and foremost a psychologist and scientist with little time for the supernatural or divine. Sigmund Freud's definition of conscience links closely to a human beings feelings of guilt and fear of punishment, this suggests that people may act in order to get approval and could be easily seen as an unreliable guide to ethical decision making. Freud believed...
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...GCE Religious Studies Advanced GCE Unit G582: Religious Ethics Mark Scheme for January 2011 Oxford Cambridge and RSA Examinations OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA) is a leading UK awarding body, providing a wide range of qualifications to meet the needs of pupils of all ages and abilities. OCR qualifications include AS/A Levels, Diplomas, GCSEs, OCR Nationals, Functional Skills, Key Skills, Entry Level qualifications, NVQs and vocational qualifications in areas such as IT, business, languages, teaching/training, administration and secretarial skills. It is also responsible for developing new specifications to meet national requirements and the needs of students and teachers. OCR is a not-for-profit organisation; any surplus made is invested back into the establishment to help towards the development of qualifications and support which keep pace with the changing needs of today’s society. This mark scheme is published as an aid to teachers and students, to indicate the requirements of the examination. It shows the basis on which marks were awarded by Examiners. It does not indicate the details of the discussions which took place at an Examiners’ meeting before marking commenced. All Examiners are instructed that alternative correct answers and unexpected approaches in candidates’ scripts must be given marks that fairly reflect the relevant knowledge and skills demonstrated. Mark schemes should be read in conjunction with the published question papers and the Report on...
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...Borough of Manhattan Community College City University of New York Department of English Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem by Erich Fromm For centuries kings, priests, feudal lords, industrial bosses and parents have insisted that obedience is a virtue and that disobedience is a vice. In order to introduce another point of view, let us set against this position the following statement: human history began with an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be, terminated by an act of obedience. Human history was ushered in by an act of disobedience according to the Hebrew and Greek myths. Adam and Eve, living in the Garden of Eden, were part of nature; they were in harmony with it, yet did not transcend it. They were in nature as the fetus is in the womb of the mother. They were human, and at the same time not yet human. All this changed when they disobeyed an order. By breaking the ties with earth and mother, by cutting...
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