The Hint of Morality

Describe the image.

What do you think is going on in this painting?

How does it relate to the idea of a conscience?

What is conscience?

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary says the conscience is a state of awareness or a sense that one’s actions or intent are either morally right or wrong. Besides judging our behavior, our conscience tells us that we should do what is right. Virtues and vices describe behavior we feel is honorable or dishonorable. Ideas about what is right and wrong, just and unfair, generous and greedy, are part of what makes us human. We have a sense of how things ought to be now and in the future.

What vices disturb you the most?

What virtues do you most admire?

How do you feel the world ought to be?

Where does the conscience come from?

Some say that our conscience evolved over time as the result of our the desire to survive in community with others. Others find it highly improbable to believe that something like the conscience evolved (unaided) in a strictly material universe. Of course, without observing the process and without fossilized evidence, a theory is a best guess.

What is your theory as to how human beings came to possess a moral conscience?

C. S. Lewis said, “Conscience reveals to us a moral law whose source cannot be found in the natural world, thus pointing to a supernatural Lawgiver” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_morality).

What do you think about this quote?

What about the conscience?

In The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, one of the brothers says that without God, everything is permissible, meaning that one can behave any way one desires if there is no divine accountability—no ultimate source of justice (https://www.abc.net.au/religion/if-there-is-a-god-then-anything-is-permitted/10100616).

Do you think the thought of divine accountability keeps people behaving decently? Why or why not?

If the conscience is God-given, what would be your responsibility to God?