Morality beyond God

 | Mary Warnock | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

It is often assumed that religion is the only source of agreed, stable morality. We must therefore either return to literal faith in the existence of God, or we must accept moral "relativism", which is another word for moral anarchy.

Such assumptions, surprisingly common even among those who practice no religion, are, in my view, mistaken; they rest on a false belief about the actual nature of the moral. But before I argue that case, I'd like to ask what recent calls for a return to faith entail. Suppose for a moment you understood Stephen Hawkings's argument that it can be shown mathematically that there is no need to suppose a God as creator of universes; and suppose you rejected it, arguing, like creationists now and in the 18th century, that the universe we live in is such that it constitutes proof of a designer, who is God, what else could you infer about this designer?

The answer, surely, is: nothing. We cannot move from believing that God lit the blue touchpaper to assuming that he made man in his own image, or gave him dominion over other animals in the world. We cannot assume that just because a creator must exist, he must also be a loving father, interested in the wellbeing of his children, and aiming for the salvation of their immortal souls, or, on the other hand, a stern judge, condemning the sinful to eternal damnation.

These beliefs, as David Hume pointed out more than 200 years ago, are quite extraneous to any belief that the world was created by a divine hand. From the need for a creator you can infer nothing but that a creator exists, or did once exist. About the creator's attributes or character you can know nothing. But those who call for a return to faith call for more than a return to the belief in a creator. They want a belief in God as the great and unchanging moral authority, by knowledge of whose commands we can know for certain what it is right and what it is wrong.

However, the enthronement of God as the source not only of the laws of nature but of moral law has its origin not in the argument from design, but in the narrative of the scriptures. In the Jewish tradition, the laws that should regulate life in society, among them the Ten Commandments, were given to Moses by God in the mists of Mount Sinai. In the Christian tradition, the new covenant of love that replaced the old was preached by God himself through his incarnate son. To return to faith is to accept the authority of these narratives and treat them as the literal truth.

But is it now possible for people simply to decide to believe the literal truth of the scriptures? We have become too scientifically and historically sophisticated to accept the story of the Garden of Eden as other than a myth, albeit a powerful and illuminating myth. How can we simply choose to see God's hand in the Ten Commandments? Our historical sense tells us the small, suffering society that was the Jews needed a cement to hold them together contra mundum and that this was provided by their great moral leader Moses and the story of his shortlived private encounter with God, giving supernatural authority to his teaching. Shared legends are cohesive.

Similarly, the genuinely great moral reform that constituted Christianity's break from the rest of Judaism was imbued with the supernatural and acquired power over the imagination as the messianic story was repeated. Religious narrative is the imaginative clothing of morality. Religion is born from moral leaders who are believed either to have seen God or to be God incarnate. So their authority is confirmed.

Has morality, then, in reality none but human authority? I do not believe that it has; but this does not entail it must be completely uncertain or that there is no real difference between how we must and how we must not behave. For human beings alone among animals can envisage a world that is better than their own. They can understand the faults, the hazards and the horrors of their own, even if it is others not themselves who suffer. They have much in common and can sympathise with each other. This is part of human nature, though it needs to be taught.

Morality arises as the predicament of human beings in the world is recognised and their shared responsibility one for another is understood. No human being is exempt from the temptation to make things worse in his own interest, nor from the responsibility not to do so. One way of marking this human commonality is to talk of universal human rights. Another is to call attention to common human needs, and that sympathy with human need that is the foundation of good, rather than bad behaviour.