People often ask, ‘Whence does morality derive?’ ‘God’ is the answer on the lips of many. Rabbis, bishops and imams insist religion and ethics are essentially entwined. That insistence receives support well beyond religious authority. Many people, even the non-religious – from politicians to pundits to publicans – casually assume that religion and morality are linked. In contrast, slogans from atheistic humanists emphasize how we can be good without God; a slogan, of course, is no argument, no argument at all.
Earlier chapters have shown the absence of consensus on morality’s grounding and its particular demands. Do appeals to religious belief help resolve the difficulties?
We need to distinguish between the following positions: that morality requires the existence of God; that morality requires belief in God; and that morality requires both. Further puzzles arise: must believers be motivated by the divine will in order to act morally? Need believers of different faiths maintain that they all worship one and the same divinity? Should religion, in the end, amount to no more than ‘to do good’, as Thomas Paine described his religion?
Putting the further puzzles to one side, let us focus on some possible links between religion and morality. Here is one possibility: perhaps moral truths depend upon God, but people fail to believe that they do. Suppose everyone is atheist. They may still observe moral rules valuing life, liberty and fairness – perhaps because they understand those rules and moral motivations as aiding social harmony. That scenario is certainly possible. The people have just made a mistake over morality’s grounds; God constitutes the grounds.
Here is another, very different, possibility: suppose we – everyone, even – believe sincerely in God’s existence. That belief may be necessary, even sufficient grounds for moral behaviour; yet the belief in God, in a divine lawgiver, is false. Here is a modification to that possibility: perhaps religious authorities know that God is a myth, yet encourage religious practices to shore up people’s moral commitment. That modified possibility may be likened to Government House utilitarianism, where only those in the moral know, know – though those authorities at least possess utilitarian justification for the deceit. If authorities wittingly encourage mistaken belief in God, they may have any manner of motivation, perhaps the maintenance of power and prestige. Or, perhaps religion arises as solace, given the world’s material conditions – in Marx’s terms:
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
On this view, religion provides an illusory happiness; alterations to our material conditions are necessary for true happiness.
The existence of mathematical and logical truths, of abstract entities such as numbers, fails to tease atheists from atheism; but morality’s existence leads some atheistically inclined to yield up their atheism. Moral properties, it is argued, cannot emerge from the physical world, but can derive from a non-physical divinity. Morality goes along with obligations from conscience, feelings of duty, sufferings from guilt; they surely, it is said, arise only because of powerful divine demands. Of course, we ought not to rely on deliverances of (seeming) conscience just because they are of such; conscience can lead to horrendous outcomes – think of the sometimes horrendous treatment of heretics and apostates. Adolf Eichmann, on trial for Nazi war crimes, declared that he would have had a bad conscience had he not obeyed orders.
God arrives in moral thinking via two distinct lines. One line, as just noted, takes us from morality’s existence to belief in God. A second line has God’s existence and nature settled in advance of moral considerations. That settlement results from scripture, revelation or non-moral arguments. From that settlement, morality is deduced as flowing from God. Non-moral arguments include design arguments whence the world’s orderliness or complexity points to a divine designer and creator. A variant design argument emphasizes the apparent vast improbability of a universe existing with conscious rational creatures – unless through divine intent. The arguments are open to many challenges, and not just from atheists. Atheist humanists could argue that if God exists, granting us reason, then to respect him, we ought paradoxically not to believe in him, for the arguments to his existence are so poor. Hereafter, we use ‘humanist’ to cover those who do not believe in God, yet who believe in moral values; they are not nihilists.
SPINOZA: THE GOD-INTOXICATED ATHEIST?
Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), a Portuguese Jew, born in Amsterdam, became a fine lens-grinder after trouble with his synagogue. He declined professorships, but was sought after by notable philosophers for his views – and lenses. Spinoza was ascetic, save for pipe-smoking, wine and casting flies into spiders’ webs, laughing at ensuing battles.
‘A book forged in hell’ was an accolade Spinoza’s Treatise received for defending free speech and toleration. His Ethics, a masterpiece published posthumously, reaped similar condemnation for arguing that ‘God’ and ‘Nature’ denote the same one substance, and that nature is not designed with hidden purposes. Explanations ending with refuge in God’s will manifest ‘the sanctuary of ignorance’. Blessedness, love of God, amounts to our understanding natural causes, thus attaining peace of mind.
His apparent pantheism led some to deem him God-intoxicated – God is everywhere – others saw him as atheist: God is just the natural world, viewed in a certain way. He was revered by many, from Goethe to Einstein, for his integrity, humility and rationality.
Excommunication: Spinoza, from youth, questioned Judaism’s claims. In 1656, his Amsterdam synagogue excommunicated him:
Cursed be he by day, and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lieth down, and cursed be he when he riseth up; cursed be he when he goeth out and cursed be he when he cometh in; the Lord will not pardon him; the wrath and fury of the Lord will be kindled against this man, and bring down upon him all the curses which are written in the Book of the Law; and the Lord will destroy his name from under the heavens; and, to his undoing, the Lord will cut him off from all the tribes of Israel, with all the curses of the firmament which are written in the Book of the Law…
This may remind us how intolerant religions can be – yet also how they can change for the good. Today’s Judaic authorities may lift his excommunication. One must not be hasty.
Belief in God is often a faith rather than conclusion of formal arguments. Faith in God is not usually treated as akin to belief in a special grandiose empirical item; it is more a commitment to an external grounding for the universe, radically different from worldly items, yet still appropriately described as ‘loving’ and ‘good’, ‘creator of man in his own image’. God is usually taken as omnipotent (all powerful), omniscient (all knowing) and omnibenevolent (all good and caring for humanity). He is often conceived as omnipresent, yet also eternal and outside of time.
However God arrives on the scene, he is lawgiver. Moral laws – any laws – require an appropriate authority. The moral lawgiver cannot be another human being, the government or the state’s courts. Your parents may tell you not to break promises, but that they tell you is not what makes promise-breaking wrong. That the government prohibits drug use is not what makes it morally wrong (if it is). Only a divine lawgiver, a moral commander, can account for the force of moral duty, of conscience. Sometimes a further moral argument is presented, namely, that God must exist, otherwise there could be no guarantee of ultimate justice, no guarantee that people’s eventual happiness will be proportionate to their moral worthiness. Of course, we may question the belief that there must be such guarantees.
Morality as essentially grounded in natural law, divinely determined, is the typical religious understanding, though many natural law theorists these days dispense with the divinity, arguing that there just are some goods in nature, some natural goods, such as possession of the truth, deep personal relationships, even play; we should pursue them and respect them. Some humanists could endorse that position.
Natural law, divinely grounded, is most famously associated with St Thomas Aquinas, but it is also found in Aristotle and earlier. The thought is that, just as there are laws of nature, of how things do behave – accounting for planetary movements, expansion of gases and so forth – so there are moral laws built within nature directing how human beings ought to behave. Here is John Locke, seventeenth-century philosopher:
The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.
Locke grounds the above in his conviction that men are ‘the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker’. He infers that ‘when his own preservation comes not in competition’ man ought, as much as he can, to:
preserve the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another.
The 1776 American Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson after joint discussions, was probably influenced by Locke’s thinking. It speaks of the Creator endowing men with ‘certain unalienable Rights’ among which are ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’. Natural law, as in that Declaration, is commanded by God, a divine gift. In France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, there is cursory reference to man’s rights being under the auspices of the Supreme Being.
Despite the declarations’ worthy words, implying divine support, the American Congress ensured elimination of reference to slavery, thereby also ensuring that slavery itself would not be eliminated; and France’s National Convention’s members proclaimed their benevolence. About the members, Chateaubriand noted, ‘these devotees of philanthropy had their neighbours beheaded for the sake of the greatest happiness of the human race.’ Morally, on the divine natural law theory, we must follow God’s laws, but how can we tell what those laws amount to – to slaves lacking the rights of others; to beheadings being permissible?
Locke relies on reason; others proclaim moral insight, scriptural persuasion or our sense of humanity. In theory, utilitarianism could hence possess natural law backing. Bentham, as noted, spoke of natural rights – of natural law – as nonsense on stilts, but the natural law, divinely determined, could indeed be to maximize happiness; but for what divine purpose?
What are the underlying duties, the moral contents, set by God? Some believe they must be to act in our own self-interest, that self-interest including concern for parents, children and lovers. Hobbes speaks of reason showing the first law of nature to be: ‘seek peace and follow it’, the second law being the right of nature: ‘by all means we can to defend ourselves’. We may again wonder how such rights are revealed by reason, just as we may question the religious reliance on certain selected texts – ‘the scriptures’ – with certain preferred interpretations or within approved traditions. The dubiety of such reliance is insurmountable for non-believers, but, for believers, faith enables surmounting.
One problem is that ancient scripture, even one particular text, contains factual falsehoods. There are inconsistent biblical accounts of creation and of Jesus’ life; add in the Qur’an and other scriptures, and we have a mishmash of tales, taking us from the Red Sea being parted to God making a mortal virgin pregnant – to the existence of mixed angels. Minimally, inconsistencies show that scripture cannot always be factually reliable. Careful interpretations may not help: some creationists believe the universe was created around six thousand years ago – Earth is young – while others follow current cosmology, the universe being billions of years old, though still divinely created with a purpose.
Factual unreliability need not undermine scripture’s moral value. As Cardinal Baronius wrote, the Bible tells us not how the heavens go, but how to go to Heaven. Scripture offers a valuable and consistent moral code – yet is that true? Texts differ and scholarly interpretations vie with scholarly interpretations over morality relating to sexual relations, slavery, our use of the Earth, and the treatment of non-believers on Earth and in eternity. There can hence be no pure reliance on the texts. The different textural renderings probably indicate the believers’ pre-existing moral sense rather than a divine morality bursting from the pages. Of course, that pre-existing moral sense may yet be divinely inspired.
Believers may determine what is right as that which would be to God’s glory; the questions then become: what is that glory and how is it morally relevant?
True, religious texts provide some appealing injunctions, notably ones that amount to, ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. The injunctions, though, are original to neither the Bible nor the Qur’an; and they are not the preserve of the religious. That apart, they still need justification or explanation. How should we interpret the ‘do unto others’ injunction? Maybe I would like to live in a peaceful mansion with servants and concubines – so must I provide that for others? Perhaps because that is what I should have to provide, I need to quell such grandee desires. If so, it would also transpire that I ought not to want others to engage in life-saving surgery on me, if I do not want to engage similarly on them (given my lack of medical skills). Even with the popular ‘do unto others’, work is thus required to grasp what nuanced version is morally justified.
Injunctions such as ‘do not kill’ are not suddenly easily applied because divinely grounded; believers are as muddled as non-believers regarding when a war is just, when killing civilians is proportionate and whether refraining from killing is wrong if sufferers need help to die. Additionally, scriptural commands gleaned and interpreted still raise the question of whether, morally, they should receive our obedience, our blessing. If the commands are ultimately derived from God, an all-good, loving being – not merely from some ancient authors – then that should carry weight. It should carry weight until we reflect further on the characteristics of God. We shall now reflect.
Doing your duty, through divine commands, is to be obeying orders. If being good and doing the right thing means obeying someone else’s commands, then the commander can himself only be good if also obeying external commands. We run into a regress: God would need further authorities over him. For regressive avoidance, morality must not have ultimate grounds in obedience to independent commanders: God must possess moral characteristics in want of no further authority. How, though, is it known that he does possess such characteristics – and what makes them moral characteristics? Furthermore, why is morality seen as needing an external lawgiver when, finally, a moral rabbit is pulled from a divine hat, a rabbit in no need of an external anything?
We are approaching a much-discussed dilemma, the Euthyphro dilemma, derived from a conversation between Euthyphro and Socrates in the eponymously titled dialogue by Plato. The dialogue’s dilemma addresses piety and what is God-beloved; in current discussions, the dilemma focuses on the good and divine commands.
Is something good purely because God commands it or does God command something purely because it is good?
Which way should we go? A similar dilemma lurked in virtue ethics: is something good because it contributes to human flourishing, or does something contribute to human flourishing because it is good? With divinity to hand, let us muse upon each of the dilemma’s horns.
The first horn is that what is good is determined by whatever it is God commands – be it by definition or other linkage. Goodness cannot, though, be defined as what God commands; it is a significant question whether goodness is what God commands. If God were to command the killing of first-born children, that would surely not make the killing morally right or the outcome good. The response can be that God would not command such things; it is a pity, though, that some believe that God did issue such a command regarding the first-born of Egypt (see Exodus 13:15) and is the cause of other horrors.
Many believers insist that God would not really command horrendous things; the ancient texts need interpretation. Insistence on interpretation again suggests that we possess a moral sense independently of God’s commands. Further, on this horn of the dilemma, if we have no sense of the right and the good independently of what God commands, then to praise God as all good is to praise him for commanding whatever he chooses to command. Furthermore, God’s motivation towards goodness is but a motivation to do anything he decides; on what basis does he decide? Overall, we should reject the dilemma’s horn whereby the right and good are right and good purely because God says so.
The dilemma’s second horn is that God commands certain things because they are right or good; they are not right or good because God so commands. That suggests that goodness is external to God and his commands. In landing on this horn, we are accepting, it seems, the possibility that we humans could have access to what is right and good without reference to God. On the surface, that should be a happy landing. Falling onto the second horn is unwanted only for those committed to morality being essentially constituted by God and his ways.
We need, though, to take our time. The considerations posed by the dilemma’s horns are not as clear as the above conveys. Perhaps goodness can be understood independently of God, yet still necessarily depend upon God. For an analogy, consider the concept of a right angle: it is a necessary feature of a square, yet can be understood independently of the concept of a square.
One intriguing proposal is that God and goodness are identical. In praising God for his goodness, we are simply valuing goodness. For the religious, though, duty, conscience and moral law imply a personal authority, a creator. How is such an authority possible, if the authority is goodness, and not person-like at all? There are attempted answers: maybe our talk of God is our stumbling to see that an ethical requirement – Goodness itself – possesses creative powers, creating the universe which is unfolding towards itself, towards Goodness. Even if that idea makes sense – and we may have serious doubts – it does not follow that it is true.
‘Give your evidence,’ said the King, ‘and don’t be nervous or I’ll have you executed on the spot.’
That line from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland shows how what is said can undermine what is sought through what is said; the witness quakes all the more, given the King’s words. In the BBC’s Dad’s Army, the Captain, telling Private Pike not to disclose his name to the enemy, says, in front of the enemy, ‘Don’t tell them your name, Pike!’ Analogously, if morality requires doing as God commands and such doings – as many maintain – aid the likelihood of eternal bliss, then believing in that bliss may undermine the doers’ moral worthiness. Why?
Morally praiseworthy actions are performed for right reasons; yet those reasons could be quashed, if the aim, through pleasing God, is our own heavenly outcome. Many religious authorities resist offering possibilities of personal eternal life; but undoubtedly numerous believers act ‘because that is what the Bible or the Qur’an says, and is the way to heaven’. The promise of eternal bliss apparently leads some into martyrdom, killing themselves as well as others. Moral behaviour here is nothing more than simple long-term self-interest, be it for eternal bliss or avoidance of eternal damnation.
A related problem arises with the famous Pascal’s Wager. Pascal, a deeply religious seventeenth-century mathematician and philosopher, argued that because of the risk of eternal damnation, compared with the lesser inconveniences of worship and confession, it is prudent to believe in God ‘just in case’. The probability calculations are open to question; should you manifest your belief in God by church attendance – synagogue or mosque? Should you be of the Judaic or Muslim faith? Maybe worshipping the wrong god, or the one God in the wrong way, has worse consequences than worshipping none at all.
Ignoring the calculation, how can we come to believe sincerely in God? We cannot switch on genuine beliefs at will. We cannot believe that God exists or that whatever God tells us is morally right, ‘just like that’. Of course, we may hope that engaging in religious rituals – wanting to believe – is good enough for God. Perhaps being surrounded by godly believers could even lead to genuine belief; perhaps belief is contagious. A second difficulty arises. The self-interested motivation in seeking belief in God could tarnish any belief acquired, preventing us from being true believers in the sight of God.
Even if the religious are not motivated by self-interest – even if conversion motivations do not undermine belief – God’s role can sometimes be used, or misused, throwing the morality of the behaviour into doubt. Here are two throws.
First, when religious believers defend their behaviour as moral, their defence can amount to passing the moral buck, relying on the ‘moral testimony’ of others, notably God: ‘I am behaving thus because God commands me’; ‘I do this because the Qur’an tells me so’. Moral reasons for moral actions should be of the order ‘because the actions are right, or fair, or to prevent those people from suffering’. A well-known, non-religious manifestation of dubious buck-passing is that of combatants, defending their morally questionable actions by announcing that they were ‘just doing their duty, following orders’.
Secondly, when the ‘I defer to authority’ stance is to an authority taken as omnipotent, demanding complete obedience, it is understandable that the deferrer would not dare challenge that authority. Appeals to any authority have dangers – they may be just excuses – but the danger here flows from the authority’s assumed omnipotence; it takes priority over natural compassion and fellow-feeling. Think of Abraham’s preparedness to sacrifice his son; think of horrendous deeds performed supposedly in the name of Allah. Think, indeed, of horrendous deeds performed because of oppressive God-like secular authorities such as the one-time Soviet state or the powerful appeal to many of patriotism, of ‘The Flag’.
FROM NATURE TO… GOD’S GOODNESS?
Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), ‘The First American’ – though his only remaining home is now a museum in London – wrote:
Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, there it enters the roots of the vines, to turn into wine, a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.
Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), of The Leopard, noted in Zibaldone:
Go into a garden of plants, grass, flowers. No matter how lovely it seems… you will be unable to look anywhere and not find suffering. Here a rose is attacked by the sun, which has given it life; it withers, languishes, wilts… That tree is infested by an ant colony, that other one by caterpillars, flies, snails, mosquitoes… The spectacle of such abundance of life when you first enter this garden lifts your spirits… But in truth this life is wretched and unhappy, every garden is like a vast hospital…
Charles Darwin (1809–82) lost his Christian faith, it seems, mainly because of his daughter Annie’s suffering and death, rather than his evolutionary theory. In his Autobiography we find:
That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Some have attempted to explain this in reference to man by imagining that it serves for his moral improvement. But the number of men in the world is as nothing compared with that of all other sentient beings and these often suffer greatly without any moral improvement.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), philosopher of pessimism, in his On the Suffering of the World, rejects God because of:
the misery which abounds everywhere; and the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be…
The conviction that the world and man is better not to have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another. We might well consider the proper form of address to be, not Monsieur, Sir, mein Herr, but my fellow-sufferer… It reminds us of that which is the most necessary thing in life – the tolerance, patience, regard, and love of neighbour of which everyone stands in need, and which every man owes to his fellow.
With God and goodness held as entwined, an outstanding problem comes to the fore, that of the immensity of worldly sufferings, of extreme despairs, terrors and helplessness. It is the Problem of Evil. God, as said, is usually understood as omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. In this world, though, there are considerable (seemingly) unnecessary sufferings, taken as evils, gratuitous evils. People suffer natural evils through earthquakes, volcanoes and other environmental events; there are pains of dental decay, ageing and seeing loved ones suffering and dying. As Mill noted regarding the animal kingdom:
If a tenth part of the pains which have been expended in finding benevolent adaptations in all nature, had been employed in collecting evidence: to blacken the character of the Creator, what scope for comment would not have been found in the entire existence of the lower animals, divided, with scarcely an exception, into devourers and devoured, and a prey to a thousand ills from which they are denied the faculties necessary for protecting themselves!
Additional to natural evils are moral evils. Millions suffer moral evils – evils caused by humans deliberately inflicting harms. Witness the numerous tortures and bombings of civilians in war-torn lands. On a smaller scale, reflect on the unkindnesses we can perpetrate, ignoring people in distress, passing thoughtless comments or lacking generosity of spirit.
Natural and moral evils sometimes combine. Some people are naturally callous and cannot help being so; others may deliberately choose to spread natural diseases, causing immense suffering.
Regarding any and all evils, why does God tolerate them? God could surely have prevented them; that he has not proves that either God is not omnipotent or does not care. Perhaps he lacks omnipotence; perhaps his omniscience does not cover future events. Maybe he lacks care about worldly sufferings, but then he cannot be omnibenevolent; he cannot be morality’s lawgiver. The world’s sufferings thus form a springboard for humanist arguments that God as typically understood in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, cannot exist. In believing that God exists, believers are placing God’s nature in a poor light, given the world’s miseries. Simone Weil, deeply religious – even something of a religious mystic – recognizes evil’s disturbance:
There is only one time when I really know nothing of this certitude of God’s love any longer. It is when I am in contact with the affliction of other people, those who are indifferent or unknown to me as much as the others, perhaps even more, including those of the most remote ages of antiquity. This contact causes me such atrocious pain and so utterly rends my soul that as a result the love of God becomes almost impossible for a while. It would take very little more to make me say impossible – so much so that I am uneasy about myself.
Weil reassures herself of God’s love ‘by remembering that Christ wept on foreseeing the horrors of the destruction of Jerusalem’. She hopes that God will forgive her for her compassion. That, to non-believers, illustrates a danger of belief in divine authority: astonishingly, one may feel bad about one’s compassion.
Life would be bland and boring – unrecognizable as human – were there neither struggles in securing achievements nor failures to be met. There are, though, as briefly listed, many sufferings, pains, distresses that appear highly unwarranted and not at all essential to human lives securing fulfilment; indeed, just the opposite is the case. Some distresses, apparently, result expressly from divine deliberation: for example, God’s treatment of his servant Job, raining down immense sufferings. The Paradox of Job highlights the existence of sufferings undeservedly placed on humans.
One overall response, designed to uphold God with traditional ‘omni’ features, is that what seems gratuitous evil is not really so. The nineteenth-century philosopher Brentano, for example, welcomed his blindness; it prevented him from distractions that would have impeded his work. Evils would be correctly seen not as evils, were we possessed of the divine perspective of eternity; we need sight of the bigger picture. That wildly optimistic stance could receive a wildly pessimistic alternative; perhaps what appears good is not really good – the world is the work of the Devil, once seen from the correct perspective. Were we initially neutral about the nature of any divine designer, the evidence would surely point as much to an evil power as to one of good will.
How may these various problems associated with evil be handled by those who judge morality to be grounded in a supremely good divinity? We humans permit numerous evils and sufferings through ignorance, weakness or nastiness; God, it is believed, lacks such features. God is often said to be Love and Reason.
Some maintain God’s goodness, arguing that without sufferings, there could be no exercise of certain virtues. God must permit some evils – for the greater good of people manifesting compassion and benevolence. The world is a moral training ground, a ‘vale of Soul-making’ to use Keats’ expression. A quick response is that sufferers would probably prefer to forgo the compassion and settle for no suffering in the first place. It is curious that a just God would be so calculating – to make millions of innocent people suffer, so that some others may practise compassion. That is treating the sufferers as means to an end; it hardly respects them.
God, however powerful, cannot do the logically impossible. He cannot create a round square or an immovable boulder; there cannot be compassion without suffering. Maybe for goodness to exist there must be some evil; just as for tallness, there must be shortness. The wise reply is that even were goodness relativistic in that way – a concession open to doubt – that would leave the vast quantity of evils, of sufferings, unexplained. There is a nuanced supplement. Suppose goodness logically requires evil to exist: then, if it is possible for God not to have created a world – as some claim – in such circumstances God could not be good, for there would be no evils. That is a puzzle over God’s own goodness.
Sometimes it is argued that for humans to be aware of the good/evil distinction, good and evil must both exist. Even were that so, may we not learn the distinction through fiction? In any case, the consideration again fails to justify the quantity of evil: presumably, one speck of known evil would suffice.
Being essentially omnipotent and omnibenevolent, God must have created the best of all possible worlds – thus argued the eminent philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, duly ridiculed in Voltaire’s Candide. Perhaps there exist goods unknown to humans, goods that logically require the evils only too well known. Because no known goods, such as compassion, can justify the amount of suffering, it does not follow that no unknown goods can. Perhaps some evils are necessary to a universe. Those approaches presuppose a loving, omnipotent deity; but again, what justifies that presupposition? That question to one side, explanations of the surrounding evil are but appeals to the mystery of unknowns. Mystery is no good answer to a puzzle, but a puzzling repetition of puzzlement.
How to view the world: the garden
The gardener: Today’s scientists do not seek purposes or designs to explain the natural world; the religious do. Here is John Wisdom’s 1944 tale:
Two people return to their long-neglected garden and find among the weeds a few of the old plants surprisingly vigorous. One says, ‘It must be that a gardener has been coming and doing something about these plants.’ Upon enquiry they find that no neighbour has ever seen anyone in their garden. The first man says, ‘He must have worked while people slept.’ The other says, ‘No… anybody who cared about the plants would have kept down these weeds.’ The first man says, ‘Look at the way these are arranged. There is purpose and a feeling for beauty here. I believe that someone comes, someone invisible to mortal eyes… the more carefully we look the more we shall find confirmation of this.’
Religious rituals – on the Sabbath – can offer the world anew, a whole, an eternity. The rabbi says, ‘In the Torah there is no before and after.’ The religious impulse presents the world as a gift. It is more than a mechanical system of causes and effects; it merits piety and awe. Compare with paintings and music. Chemists may explain the pigments and physicists the air vibrations; but those explanations say nothing about the picture’s representation, the music’s melody and beauty. Science does not have the last word.
Wittgenstein (1889–51) showed the importance of what cannot be said:
I was walking about in Cambridge and passed a bookshop, and in the window were portraits of Russell, Freud and Einstein. A little further on, in a music shop, I saw portraits of Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin. Comparing these portraits I felt intensely the terrible degeneration that had come over the human spirit in the course of only a hundred years.
There is more to understanding life and the world than analysis and grasp of nature’s laws. Wise individuals, the mystics who find sense in life, notes Wittgenstein, are unable to say in what that sense lies. He writes:
There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.
The most common attempted solution to the evil problem rests on free will: the Free Will Defence. Free will has its own problems, discussed in the next chapter; but accepting, for now, that the concept of free will makes sense, how does it help? Defence of evil on the basis of free will does not, of course, deal easily with natural evils, unless, as some believe, natural evils arise because of evils emanating from human beings. The defence seeks primarily to solve the problem of moral evils, sufferings inflicted by humans.
Were God to ensure the world evil-free, the world would lack creatures with free will. Instead, there would be robots, human automata, programmed to perform the good. Robotic life necessarily possesses less value than lives of free agents – so it is assumed. God therefore created us as free agents, free then to do wrong as well as right – and, sadly, we often choose the wrong. That freedom provides individuals with opportunities for betterment, to grow morally – in this vale of Soul-making – and the possibility of eternal salvation. Pain, according to some Christians, is a privilege, uniting us with the redemptive suffering of Christ.
Any defence of evil on the basis of free will casts doubt on God’s own goodness. Is God free to choose whether to perform good deeds? If he possesses such freedom, then, it seems, he must be capable of doing bad things. Some religious believers would reject that divine capacity. If he lacks such freedom, then he merits the robotic tag, robotic on a grand scale. Either way, there is once again mystery regarding the relationship between God and morality. Further mystery follows.
On the one hand, if God is a necessary being, whose characteristics are necessary, then the created world and its sufferings necessarily flow from him. Arguably, we ought not then to praise God for acting righteously, if he could do no other. Further, we may doubt whether human beings are ever free, if all their actions are necessitated, emanating from God; and if freedom is lacking, then, it seems, moral praise and blame would be unjustified. If what I choose is already determined by outside causes, how can I be held morally responsible?
On the other hand, if sense can be made of God having freely created this world of free agents, and if God is omniscient, then he would have known what the free agents would do. Free will is not incompatible with foreknowledge. In view of his foreknowledge, we may ask why God failed to create humans he knew would freely act well, instead creating ones who act so badly. It is no good reply that the beings would not then have been acting freely. If God can create free agents who end up behaving badly, he could have created free agents who end up behaving well.
Whichever way believers turn, puzzlements arise regarding God, as traditionally understood, and the evils of the world. For religious believers, that mystery is lived; it needs to be accepted. For humanists, the mystery points to morality’s existence not being god-dependent.
In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche famously made the startling announcement above. With increased scientific understanding of worldly ways, there seemed no place for God. Despite that, God’s shadow lingered in morality, as lawmaker – for example, with continuing references to Christ’s ‘do unto others’. People perhaps felt the need for God; maybe they took leaps of faith, as associated with Søren Kierkegaard. Leaps of faith – hops, skips or jumps – are, though, dangerous; into what may we be leaping? ‘Put your trust in God, in Jesus Christ.’ Is that rational? We must, according to Nietzsche, face up to our own choices, no longer relying on the myth of a Supreme Being as commander.
Nietzsche urges us not to believe ‘those who speak of otherworldly hopes’, but to be ‘faithful to the earth’. That does not mean living according to nature, as per the Stoics. Nietzsche writes:
Think of a being such as nature, prodigal beyond measure, without aims or intentions, indifferent beyond measure, without mercy or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain; think of indifference itself as a power – how could you live according to such indifference? To live – is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature?
With nature of no help, and with God no longer, ‘Everything is permitted’. That nihilistic aphorism is from Ivan, of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: without religion, morality holds no sway. Nietzsche, though, was no nihilist; he urged instead a ‘transvaluation’ of inherited Christian values.
Man is conceived, by Nietzsche, as a rope over an abyss, tied between beast and a being beyond man, the Übermensch, a being who affirms life, who values greatness. Nietzsche asked, indeed, whether anyone can truly flourish surrounded by the numerous miseries of others, even by one person suffering. The forthcoming Übermensch will flourish; instead of drowning in pity, he finds greatness. The nature of the Übermensch remains a mystery. Well, Nietzsche did predict that he would not be understood for two hundred years; we have fewer than a hundred to go.
Contrary to Nietzsche, the rejection of God as moral lawgiver need not establish the vacuity of religion, requiring its demise. Religious belief may help expose errors in viewing human relations as means to ends, as commercial-like. The obligations between parents and children, between lovers, are devalued if seen in that economist way. The marriage ‘contract’, properly valued, is no contract as if between punter and bookie. Religious rituals can also enhance community cohesion and values such as self-sacrifice, humility and providing sanctuary for the hounded. St John Chrysostrom, fourth-century Archbishop of Constantinople, drew attention to how the very wealthy had a moral duty to the poor. Islam promotes Zakat, that is, regular alms-giving.
Of course, religion is far from necessary for appreciating the distinctiveness of human relationships and values; non-believers may grow their moral sensitivities through literature, art, music – through myths, while accepting them as myths; through psychoanalytical interpretations, whether treated as revealing realities or not. Religions, arguably more so than psychoanalytic theories, give rise to some seemingly surreal ideas: for example, atonement, where Christ’s suffering – ‘The cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?’ – makes amends for our sins. According to certain Islamic beliefs, apostates should be killed. Sometimes there are religious endorsements of caste systems.
Those factors mentioned above – from dangerous irrationalities to serious oppression of wrong believers and non-believers to horrendous religiously inspired deaths for blasphemers – lead many humanists to shy completely away from all religion. Those humanists ought not, though, to fall for the idea that the scientific understanding of matters is therefore the only true understanding; there is, as just mentioned, an understanding acquired through the arts.
Neither the scientific view of the world nor religious scripture has the final word. The final word comes down to human interpreters, to human evaluations. Such interpretation and evaluation may rightly see more in the world than that seen through the eyes of science and analysis; and religions give voice to that. Just as we view human behaviour and human faces as indicative of centres of consciousness with their own perspective on the world, so those religiously inclined experience nature – Nature – as the face of a benevolent God, despite the sufferings and horrors.
Here is Wittgenstein on the difficulties:
An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.
It is obviously possible to live the religious life, some ‘hocus-pocus’, commented Maynard Keynes, as it is to live the non-religious, the humanist life – and in both cases to live the good life. Or is it? If a hold on truth, rather than mere sincere belief, is essential to good living, then one of the lives is certainly deficient, if one insists that God is a real presence and the other insists not.
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Even if God exists – or gods exist – and moral values are divinely grounded, we should still need to judge whether, and how, to accept them. If God does not exist, then whatever other moral injunctions we encounter, we need again to judge whether to defy or accept. That responsibility for our own judgements is existentialism’s focus, to which we now turn.
Existentialists do not pass the moral buck to others, even to an Other Divine.