Can You be Good Without Faith?

Mr Holdsworth discuses faith and morality.

A loose transcript:

As a teenager, I can remember a few times in which someone was giving me attention because they knew that I was holding some juicy piece of gossip. I was usually pretty good at keeping secrets, but I had a weakness for pretty girls when they came looking for information. Suddenly my better judgement was blocked by the intoxication of hormones and the next thing I knew I was spilling all my secrets. This analogy helps to illustrate what I think is a very profound definition of faith. Faith describes the conclusions you’ve embraced when you were in a sober state of mind and able to think morally and critically. In this case, the conclusion you might have adopted was that you shouldn’t gossip and that whoever told you this secret placed their trust in you and you need to honor it by keeping it to yourself. Your faith is what is being tested when your hormones cloud your ability to stay committed to those sober conclusions. That’s why we talk about marriage in terms of faithfulness. You make a commitment to marriage when you are thinking clearly and morally but at some point, your commitment will be tested. When nothing is testing your resolve, your reason and good judgement are easily accessible to tell you what is right but at some point, circumstances will conspire against your reason. It might be a conspiracy of alcohol, or hormones, or emotions, or all three and it is in these moments when you have to remember what it is that your reason and good judgement told you when you were not compromised by those things. Your feelings are telling you to disregard those reasonable conclusions. Faith is telling you that even though you don’t feel the strength of those convictions in this moment, you need to trust in those ideas that you embraced when you weren’t compromised.
This is how faith and reason work together and it has huge implications for our moral behaviour. When we’re thinking clearly, good moral ideas seem easy to embrace. Things like you have to keep your promises or you should never lie or cheat someone or you should always help someone in need if you can. But what happens when keeping your promise will cost you something, or telling the truth means you can’t gain some advantage that is within your reach, or that helping a person in need means sacrificing something that you want for your self.
It’s in those moments when your commitment to those values is tested… that commitment is your faith. Compassion is one of those things that almost everyone affirms as being a moral good but it’s also often thought of as an emotion and that’s where we run into a bit of a problem because if it’s an emotion then how can we rely on it to be consistent in our behaviour towards others? The question of whether or not we are good should be measured against our ability to be consistently good. If a person is only good some of the time, then we can’t really say that they are a good person can we? The problem with emotions is that they are subject to a whole range of influences like hormones, sleep, circumstances, the weather, and diet and so many of these influences are beyond our control so emotions just aren’t the kind of thing we can rely on to consistently direct our moral behaviour. If compassion is merely an emotion, then there’s no way any of us are going to be consistently compassionate. What we need are reasons and convictions to behave morally. Those reasons can be found in a variety of ways but whatever the source, a commitment to those reasons is going to be the thing that helps you behave consistently whether your emotions are aligned with them or not… and that commitment is faith. So when we speak of faith in this sense, I think it’s absolutely necessary to have faith and exercise it to be consistently good.
But what about faith in God? Can a person be good if they don’t believe in God? I would say it depends on whether or not God exists. If God does exist, and if, as Christians claim, he is the source of truth and goodness, then cutting yourself off from that source will severely compromise your ability to be good. As a Christian, I believe that God is love and since Love is a disposition of seeking the good of another, I believe that God enables everyone, including non-believers to do good in spite of the fact that they do not seek it from him, but the longer that pattern persists, the harder it will be to remain moral.
Being moral means collaborating with goodness. If God is truth, goodness, and beauty, then it requires us to cooperate with God. If we reject, God, then we are also rejecting goodness which is going to make it a lot harder to be good.