Faith, Morality, and God: How Members of Abrahamic Religions Account for Moral Rules and Natural Disasters

• In Event: Reasoning about Religious Norms Across the Lifespan: Applications, Violations, and Alterations

Abstract

This presentation explores how devout children, and adults within Judaism, Christianity, and Islam coordinate their concepts of morality with religious norms and beliefs. Each religion maintains that God is singular, author of the universe, and has revealed a set of rules to guide human conduct. Each religious system maintains that God is perfect.

Research conducted with Christian and Jewish children and adolescents (Nucci, 2001; Nucci & Turiel, 1993), and with Turkish Muslim adults (Kuyel & Cesur, 2013) has reported that nearly all individuals within these religions across ages judge moral transgressions involving unprovoked harm or injustice as wrong whether or not there is a governing rule from God. Across ages members of all three religions hold that it would also be wrong for non-believers to engage in such moral transgressions. In contrast non-moral rules, such as the day of worship, whether one needs to pray five times a day (Muslims), or follow prescribed forms of dress are no longer binding if there was no regulating command from God. Such rules were not viewed as binding for non-believers or members of other faiths. These non-moral religious rules function within a religious community similar to social convention by coordinating patterns of behavior constituting membership within a social group. Finally, Conservative and Orthodox Jewish and Calvinist Christian children and adolescents were found to reject the possibility that God would establish a commandment that was immoral (e.g., Christians should steal) because to do so would be contrary to God’s perfection and would make worshipping God nonsensical (Nucci, 2001).

This latter finding raises quandaries for the faithful including how a moral and perfect God allows bad things, such as natural disasters, to happen to good people?

To investigate to this question 26 (14 Male; 12 female) Sunni Muslim immigrant adults (M age = 24.8), and three Sunni Turkish College Professors of Divinity (M age = 57.3) were interviewed regarding their views of the relationship between God and natural disasters. Among the questions asked of participants were the following:
1. Some people believe that God punishes sinners through natural disasters. Do you agree or disagree?
2. Do you think it is possible that righteous or innocent people might also die or get hurt during natural disasters?

Findings were that 35% of Sunni adults agreed that God punishes sinners through natural disasters, and 100% agreed that the innocent are sometimes victims. This is accounted for by an assumption that God has a plan for each person; 37% indicated that the innocent would be taken into heaven. In these ways the faithful coordinate their vision of God as moral with the belief that God sometimes allows bad things to happen to good people. None of the professors of divinity agreed with these positions. For the professors, God is not micro-managing events on earth, and is instead seen as providing humanity the capacity to use science and reason to manage such disasters.

Authors

• Larry P Nucci, University of California - Berkeley
  Presenting Author

• Nilay Kuyel, San José State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nadia Sorkhabi, San Jose State University
  Non-Presenting Author