Ethics and Christianity

Keith Ward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317852582
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 2002. This is Volume XII of twelve in the Library of Philosophy series on Ethics. Written in 1970, this book seeks to elucidate the fundamental characteristics of Christian ethics. The main concern has been with what is of most vital concern to the moral philosopher-the exposition of the formal characteristics of a system of morality rather than with the detail of its content and application.

Part One
Duty and the Will of God

I
The Case against Theistic Morality

1. It used to be considered perfectly obvious that human morality depends essentially upon religious belief; so much so that even John Locke, in his famous essay on 'Toleration', decided that atheists were not to be trusted; for, lacking belief in a supreme being, they were presumed to be liable to break their word with impunity.¹ This sort of thinking persists among many if not most ordinary men, who at least expect believers in God to profess higher moral standards than professed atheists, and who associate atheism with immorality and depravity. Thus many people in Britain send their children to Church or Sunday School in order to teach them to be good; they tend not to be so concerned about the truth of the specifically religious doctrines they are taught. And there are even many Christians who believe that the central core of their faith is simply love for their fellow-men rather than belief in certain supernatural facts.

In recent years, however, there has been a rising tide of influential opinion which rejects any such essential connection between morality and religion, which denies that love for others is a specifically religious or Christian virtue, and which advocates the observance of high moral standards without belief in any religious doctrines whatsoever.

The very fact that this can be done at all seems to show that there cannot, indeed, be an essential connection between religion and morality. For there are highly moral individuals who profess no religious belief. If it is said that atheists are people who tend to break their promises, then one should be asked to compare the conduct of theists and atheists in this respect and see which class of men is more trustworthy. It might even be claimed by an impartial observer that the history of the Christian Church leaves little to be said in favour of the trustworthiness of Christians. One rejoinder to this charge might be to say that all who are in the Church are not Christians; but this raises the difficulty of how one can find out who the 'real' Christians are. Presumably it will be said that they are those who sincerely avow Christ as their Lord and Master; but, once again, how can one sort out the sincere from the insincere? The answer, of a sort, is given in the Biblical text, 'By their fruits you shall know them'.² But this means that we call those Christians sincere who show, by their behaviour, that they are trustworthy—and so on. Now if our reason for calling people 'real' Christians is that they are trustworthy, it becomes ludicrous to claim that real Christians tend to be more trustworthy than non-Christians. For the game has been won by definition; one can reply in like manner by defining 'really sincere' atheists as the trustworthy atheists, and then claiming that such atheists also tend to be very trustworthy!

2. But not only do many people claim to be moral, or at least have high moral standards, without having any religious beliefs; it might also be said that attempting to make morality depend upon religion is itself an immoral procedure, and one calculated to undermine rather than support the practice of morality. For such attempts seem to imply that men would not keep their promises unless they could be sure that it would pay them to do so in the long run. They would not be good unless they thought that they would be rewarded for their pains by God; they would not refrain from evil-doing unless they feared the punishment that God would inevitably allot to them. Thus morality is founded on fear and buttressed by intolerance; without fear of punishment no man would strive to do good; without intolerance of atheism the moral fabric of society would collapse.

It is a possible belief that all human morality is based on fear and repression, but I think most people would agree that this is a cynical and warped belief. In the history of mankind there are, fortunately, countless examples of men who have renounced riches, position, comfort or life itself, in order to do what is right, not for hope of reward but just because it is right. And there are countless men who would agree with Immanuel Kant when he said that to do what is right for hope of reward, or fear of punishment, or for any other reason than simply that it is right, degrades morality into prudence and cannot be counted as morally good in any real sense.³ On this view, if a man throughout the whole course of his life does right actions, but only because he hopes to be rewarded by God, then he is not a good man at all. The good man does what is right even if it conflicts with all prudential considerations of his own welfare, both now and in the long run. This is the essence of morality; and since the theory that morality depends on religion seems to undermine it, it undermines morality itself by subsuming it under an appeal to one's own self-interest.

3. However, even if one could accept such a reduction of morality to rational self-interest, it is still not true that the rational self-interested man would not be moral at all without belief in a Divine Judge. On the contrary, it has been a constant theme of political philosophers throughout the centuries that a rational man will, at least on the whole, be moral because it pays him, not in heaven but now on earth, in terms of security and protection from others.

As Thomas Hobbes maintained, the life of a man who is not protected by the laws of a particular society is 'poor, nasty, brutish and short'⁴. He is continually at the mercy of ruthless enemies; and, even if he himself is strong, he must live in constant fear that the weak will band together to strike him down. So it is in man's own interest to accept the rule of law, which provides security at a moderate cost to himself. In other words, it is in the best interests of all men, atheists as well as theists, to support social regulations. If the support of morality is to be prudence, all that is needed is not belief in God, but recognition that social order provides security.

It is true that a man of this opinion will probably have a more restricted view of morality than a theist. He will respect life and property, keep promises and, in general, obey those laws necessary to the preservation of society; but he will not consider it necessary to abstain from lustful thoughts or to refuse to use the law for his own ends as a prudent theist might. For, whereas God is all-knowing and all-powerful and thus punishes even our most secret wrongs, human law has its blind spots and its loopholes which can be taken advantage of.

But the point is that the prudent atheist will not be devoid of all morality. He will always support the existence of law, and advocate that others conform to it, in the interests of his own security—even if he secretly hopes to break the law undiscovered. Under these conditions, the simple concern for social cohesion will suffice to ensure the existence of a large law-abiding body of citizens, even though it will probably also necessitate the existence of an effective law-enforcement organization and of a criminal class.

This, it may be said, is just how things stand with human society and, so far as can be seen, how they have always stood. Belief or disbelief in God is evidently not a sufficient motivating force to affect human morality in noticeable respects.

4. What I have said is that if morality cannot be reduced to prudence, but is a matter of doing right acts simply because they are right and for no other reason, then morality cannot depend upon belief in God. For it cannot depend upon anything except a recognition that certain things are right.

But if one takes a cynical view and asserts that human morality must be founded on prudence, then again belief in God is not necessary for the existence of some social morality, even though this morality may be a restricted and rather makeshift enterprise by theistic standards.

Of course, one may still say that if God does exist, conformity to this social morality will not be good enough to preserve one from the punishments God will later visit on men. And this may be true. But now the argument has shifted its ground slightly. Whereas it began by saying that the existence of morality at all depends upon belief in God, it is now saying that one cannot justify a very rigorous sort of morality on prudential grounds unless God exists. And to this amended argument the atheist can reply, first, that it is not a settled question that we ought to have such a rigorous morality; second, that one would have to be absolutely sure that God exists before one could accept that to obey such a morality was the prudent thing; and third, that since there is no moral worth in doing something because it is prudent, it is a strange, even monstrous, sort of God who will reward us for being prudent and punish us for being imprudent, even when we were not sure that we were being imprudent since we were not sure at the time that God existed.

The point of these objections is that if it were possible to be certain that God existed, and was a scrupulous Judge, then it would be prudent to obey his commands. But since it is generally agreed that one cannot be certain of God's existence, it follows that one cannot be certain that obeying his supposed commands is prudent. We must act in necessary ignorance, and where God has left us in ignorance of what it is prudent to do, it cannot be supposed that he will then proceed to punish us for being imprudent. It would be as though God said: 'I am not going to tell you what you must do. But if you fail to do it I will punish you'.

It is usually agreed that it is just to punish a man only if he does something knowing it to be wrong. But on the view here being considered, 'wrong' just means 'imprudent'; a man cannot know his acts are imprudent unless he already knows that God exists; since he does not know this, it follows that to try to make moral conduct depend upon belief in God undermines the very foundations of morality in at least two ways. First, by turning it into prudence; and second, by making it intrinsically uncertain. For whether or not we act morally on any occasion will depend upon our belief in God—a belief which may vary in strength from one time to another, which never possesses complete certainty, and which often vanishes altogether. Thus the argument that morality depends upon religion, when considered rationally by anyone at the present time, can only produce a continual tension arising from trying to found one's actions on a question of fact—the existence of God—which can never be established with certainty. Far from providing morality with a strong foundation, it will consequently tend to make men less sure of what is right, and less prepared to make a present sacrifice for the sake of an uncertain reward.

5. Moreover, it might even be said that religious belief itself, far from being the foundation of morality, is positively immoral. For it advocates the firm adherence to factual beliefs for which there can be in the nature of the case no sufficient evidence. Since one of the basic moral values is concern for truth for its own sake, wherever it may lead, the advocacy of beliefs which are to be held with a conviction greater than that which the evidence would warrant must be directly opposed to this value, and must therefore be itself immoral. It is indeed not at all difficult to find many instances in which religious leaders have attempted to condemn scientific discoveries on the sole basis that they have been alleged to conflict with Biblical revelation. Such instances display very well the sort of tension that can arise between religious belief and scientific evidence. And they raise the general question of how far considerations of empirical evidence can be allowed, by the believer, to count against his belief.

This question is perhaps the key question of modern theology; for Christians preach that belief in the Lordship of Christ is necessary for man's eternal salvation, and so it is naturally, they believe, of greater importance than any other item of human knowledge or belief. But it is precisely because religious belief has this importance in the life of the believer that a tension can and, it may be held, even must arise in the minds of all scientifically educated Christians. For the basic axiom of scientific method is that one must always seek to test one's beliefs by attempting to find empirical evidence for their falsity. That is not to say that all great scientists spend their time trying to prove their theories false; there is a place for obstinacy and recalcitrance in science as in other spheres of life. But it is to say that the test of a scientific theory is whether it fits all the empirical facts it ought to cover; and that if it finally becomes apparent that it does not, it must be rejected or, at best, amended.

Must not the Christian, then, always bear in some part of his mind the knowledge that one day his religious beliefs—those beliefs which are more important to him than anything else on earth—might be shown to be false? Might it not be shown, for instance by some historical discovery, that Jesus was a political agitator, or that his body was secretly hidden by the disciples, or that Paul was a lunatic? Or in different scientific fields, might it not be shown, by molecular biologists for example, that life can be completely accounted for on mechanical principles, or that survival of bodily death is impossible, or that there is life on other planets with no religious beliefs or with different ones? What would the Christian then say-—that Jesus died for all the Universe or only for the earth?

These are certainly the sorts of questions, however hypothetical, which must be borne in mind in assessing the truth of the Christian claims; and yet it must be admitted that we just have not got the evidence to give a firm answer to them. In such a situation doubt is the only possible option for a man whose concern is wholeheartedly for the truth, whatever it is. Does it not follow then that the Christian who makes a total, unconditional commitment to the truth of his faith does something which is unreasonable? More than that, does he not do something which is fundamentally immoral, because it must undermine his commitment to seek truth by putting preconceived opinions in place of unbiased investigation? The Christian in a scientific age, it might be said, must be either schizophrenic or immoral. For he must either unconditionally affirm some facts which he knows with another part of his mind to be inadequately evidenced; or he must simply refuse to accept evidence as counting against revelation, and thereby set his face against all possibility of finding the truth about the nature of the Universe.

6. This extremely weighty argument does not count against purely moral commitment, of course, because it is generally agreed that empirical evidence about what is the case cannot be used to count against statements about what ought to be the case. Some restriction needs to be put on this formulation, it is true; for one might have to know what it is possible to do before one can assert that something ought to be done. Nevertheless, the fact remains that one can quite reasonably undertake an unconditional commitment to telling the truth, for example; and there can be no fear that the subsequent discovery of new factual evidence about the world could threaten to undermine one's commitment; for it is just not a commitment as to the facts.

In the nature of the case, then, it seems that it is quite possible, reasonable, and desirable to undertake unconditional moral commitments and to be perfectly certain about what one ought to do. So, as far as the logic of the situation is concerned, one must say that moral beliefs are logically more certain than religious beliefs. That is to say, whatever the conviction of the person who holds the beliefs there must always remain a logical possibility of showing religious beliefs to be false, whereas there seems to be no logical possibility of showing moral beliefs to be false. To seek to base morality on religion, therefore, is to attempt to base the more certain on the less certain; and to try to found human duty on the declared will of God is to found what we can be sure of upon what we can never be sure that we know.

7. Faced with such formidable objections as these, some Christians have attempted to deny that Christianity does consist in the acceptance of factual propositions about the nature of the Universe. The very requirement it makes for unconditional acceptance, they say, shows that it is not a set of facts to be believed on authority, but a particular sort of morality or way of life. To be a Christian, on this sort of interpretation, is to commit oneself unreservedly to love as the supreme value. If this move could be accomplished, it would indeed remove the logical difficulties inherent in the claim of religion to unconditional belief in matters of fact. But it also seems to remove religion itself; for why should an atheist not commit himself unreservedly to a life of love?

Again, it seems that, since commitment to a loving way of life is solely the decision to live in a certain manner, it entails or depends upon no factual statements whatsoever—except that such a manner of life is a human possibility. So there is no reason why a person who makes such a self-commitment should call himself a Christian at all.

Two Christian thinkers who have tried to interpret Christianity solely as calling for commitment to a certain way of life are Professors Braithwaite and van Buren,⁵ who agree in specifying this 'way of life' as one of love, or freedom from fear and anxiety, to live wholly for others. But when they attempt to say why such a commitment should be called 'Christian', all Braithwaite suggests is that the Biblical stories about Jesus, whether or not they are true, have a psychological efficacy in helping one to adopt the 'agapeistic' life; while van Buren supposes that the 'agapeistic' life is 'caught' from Jesus or his present-day disciples rather like a psychological infection. In both cases the connection between stories (not even regarded as true by Braithwaite) about Jesus and the present way of life which they recommend is alleged to be some form of psychological causation.

As Braithwaite writes, 'A religious belief is an intention to behave in a certain way (a moral belief) together with the entertainment of certain stories ... in the mind of the believer.'⁶ Any such view, however, that religious stories are just psychological aids to a previously selected policy of life, is incompatible with any claim by the Christian religion to a final or unique revelation in Jesus. For there is nothing to be 'revealed' except a way of life; and Jesus can only be, at best, a perfect example of the morally good man. He may exemplify the good life; but there is no guarantee that he is the only example. Indeed, if his life presents a real human possibility there is no reason why many men should not achieve it, and no reason to suppose that any who do are more than ordinarily human. Moreover, there is no logical reason why the story of the life of a morally good man should help us to live morally good lives. For as long as it does, it could well be said that we have failed to come to moral maturity when we still need fairy-tales to encourage us in well-doing.

But Christians often treat Jesus not just as the perfect example of a previously known morality, but as the one who authoritatively reveals that morality to them. Braithwaite himself appears to waver on this point. For he says that the agapeistic way of life can only be specified adequately by the whole religious scheme; a main function of the stories is actually to outline the policy. Yet if these stories actually tell one what the right policy is by the examples they provide, it is hard to see how one can be free to interpret or discard them in the way one finds most helpful. It is quite a different thing from saying that religious stories are crutches for moral invalids, to say that they provide an authoritative standard for human morality.

On the other hand, how can the life of one man provide an authoritative revelation of morality? It is clear that no authoritative declaration could make something right; at mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE: DUTY AND THE WILL OF GOD
• PART TWO: ETHICS AND CHRISTIAN AUTHORITY
• PART THREE: JUSTICE AND REDEMPTION
• NOTES
• INDEX