The Portable Atheist

(a) The Challenge of Nihilism

We may approach our conclusion by considering Hans Küng’s massive work, Does God Exist?[12] Subtitled “An Answer for Today,” this book not only brings together many lines of thought that bear upon this question, but also sets out to interpret our whole present moral and intellectual situation. It displays a fantastic wealth of learning; it is also extremely diffuse. Time and again after raising an issue Küng will slightly change the subject, and often when we need an argument he gives us a quotation, a report of the views of yet another thinker, or even a fragment of biography. I think he is also unduly concerned with contemporary relevance, and is liable to tell us that some statement or argument is out of date, when all that matters is whether it is true or false, sound or unsound. Nevertheless, as we shall find, there is a main connecting thread of argument, and his final answer, at least, is explicit (p. 702):

However, the substance of his discussion is far less satisfactory. One crucial question is whether his final “Yes” is to the god of traditional theism or to some “replacement for God”; but the answer to this question is far from clear. For example, in his Interim Results II: Theses on secularity and historicity of God we find this (pp. 185–186):

And, after rejecting both the “Greek-metaphysical” and the “medieval-metaphysical” concepts of God, he adds (Chapter 26):

Later, for comparison with Eastern religions, he reports and seems to endorse “the Western tradition of a negative theology from Pseudo-Dionysius to Heidegger”: (pp. 601–602):

Later again, in discussing “the God of the Bible,” he says (p. 632):

But also (p. 633):

But, despite all this, Küng also accepts in some sense the God of the Bible who, he says, is wholly and entirely essentially a “God with a human face” (p. 666). It is “overhasty” to dissociate the God of the philosophers from the God of the Bible, but also “superficial” simply to harmonize them. Rather, we should “see the relationship in a truly dialectical way. In the God of the Bible, the God of the philosophers is the best, threefold sense of the Hegelian term “sublated” (aufgehoben)—at one and the same time affirmed, negated, and transcended.” What is more, he “venture[s] without hesitation to declare: Credo in Jesum Christum, filium Dei unigenitum” (I believe in Jesus Christ, the only-begotten son of God) and “can confidently say even now: Credo in Spiritum Sanctum” (I believe in the Holy Spirit) (pp. 688, 699). That is, for all the contrary appearances, he affirms his own orthodoxy.

Küng is obviously fond of having it all ways at once. This is further illustrated by his remarks about miracles (pp. 650–651). Miracles recorded in the Bible “cannot be proved historically to be violations of the laws of nature”; a miracle is merely “everything that arouses man’s wonder,” not necessarily a divine intervention violating natural law. The miracle stories are “lighthearted popular narratives intended to provoke admiring faith.” (If so, we may comment, they have no tendency to support any kind of supernaturalism or theism.) Yet “no one who links belief in God with miracles is to be disturbed in his religious feelings. The sole aim here is to provide a helpful answer to modern man for whom miracles are a hindrance to his belief in God.” That is, if your belief in God is supported by miracles, Küng will endorse them for you; but if you find them an obstacle to belief, he will explain them away! Similarly he quotes with approval Bultmann’s remark: “By faith I can understand an idea or a decision as a divine inspiration, without detaching the idea or decision from its link with its psychological justification” (p. 653).

One main strand in Küng’s thinking brings him close to Hume’s Demea, who stands for an infinite and incomprehensible god against the anthropomorphism of Cleanthes. But then we should recall how Hume uses Demea’s view to prepare the way for Philo’s skepticism. A god as indescribable and indeterminate as the one Küng seems to offer provides no purchase for reasoning, nothing of which argument can take hold in order to support the thesis that such a god exists.

Nevertheless, Küng claims to have given an argument. As we saw, he says that his “Yes” is “justifiable at the bar of critical reason.” Against such writers as Norman Malcolm and D. Z. Phillips, he says firmly that “the question of truth cannot be avoided. And this truth can be tested by experience, as we shall see, by indirect verification through the experience of reality” (p. 505). And again (p. 528):

Part of his case consists of his replies to the various arguments for atheism, essentially various proposed natural histories of religion. As we saw there, despite the weaknesses of some oversimplified theories, a satisfactory natural history of religion can be outlined. Küng’s criticisms come in the end to no more than what we have conceded and stressed, that such an explanation of religious beliefs is not a primary argument against their truth. He still needs a positive argument for theism; and indeed he tries to give one.

He concedes (p. 533) that “There is no direct experience of God.” Equally he explicitly rejects (though for inadequately stated reasons) the cosmological, teleological, and ontological proofs (pp. 534–535). But he says that though “the probative character of the proofs of God is finished today,” yet their “non-demonstrable content” remains important. For the ontological proof, he offers only the (deplorable) suggestion that it should be “understood less as a proof than as an expression of trusting faith”; but, as we shall see, he really uses the cosmological and teleological arguments in an altered form—indeed, in a form that has some resemblance to Swinburne’s, in that he proposes that “belief in God is to be verified but not proved” (p. 536). Küng, however, combines this with echoes both of the moral proofs and of the will to believe: “an inductive lead does not seem impossible, attempting to throw light on the experience of uncertain reality, which is accessible to each and everyone, in order thus—as it were, by way of “practical reason,” of the “ought,” or (better) of the “whole man’—to confront man as thinking and acting with a rationally justifiable decision that goes beyond pure reason and demands the whole person.” Since his argument thus brings together several different strands, we may be able to use discussion of it to introduce the fulfillment of the undertaking… not merely to examine separately the various arguments for the existence of a god, but also to consider their combined effect, and to weigh them together against the various arguments on the other side, before reaching our final conclusion. This conclusion will be reached in section (b) below.

For Küng the question is not whether we can or cannot advance from an already established knowledge of the natural world, or of consciousness, or of morality, to further, specifically theistic, hypotheses or conclusions. His strategy is rather to argue that in present day thought rationality, both speculative and practical, is threatened along with theism by a pervasive tendency to nihilism. This nihilism, of which he finds the most powerful exponent in Nietzsche, is summed up as the denial of the three classical transcendentals: there is no unity, no truth, no goodness. Man deludes himself in thinking he has found any totality, system, or organization in events; he has sought a meaning in events that is not there; there is no absolute nature of things nor a “thing-in-itself”; the world is valueless and purposeless. Nihilism presents itself “as insight into the nothingness, contradictoriness, meaninglessness, worthlessness, of reality” (Chapter 44).

Küng insists that “The thoroughgoing uncertainty of reality itself makes nihilism possible, whether in practical life…or in philosophical or unphilosophical reflection.” Moreover, it is irrefutable: “There is no rationally conclusive argument against the possibility of nihilism. It is indeed at least possible that this human life, in the last resort, is meaningless, that chance, blind fate, chaos, absurdity and illusion rule the world” (Chapter 44). On the other hand, nihilism is not provable. It is not a priori impossible that “in the last resort, everything is nevertheless identical, meaningful, valuable, real” (Chapter 44). Consequently the basic question is, “Can nihilism be overcome, and, if so, how?” (Chapter 44).

The fundamental alternative, Küng says, is between trust and mistrust, “in which I stake myself without security or guarantee…either I regard reality…as trustworthy and reliable—or not”—a choice which he explicitly compares with Pascal’s wager (Chapter 44). Fundamental trust, he adds, is natural to man, it makes us “open to reality,” and “The Yes can be consistently maintained in practice,” whereas the opposite of each of these holds for fundamental distrust (pp. 443–446). There is a “way of critical rationality” which is ‘a middle way between an irrational ‘uncritical dogmatism’ and a ‘critical rationalism’ that also, in the last resort, rests on irrational foundations”; it is a “completely reasonable risk, which, however, always remains a risk” (Chapter 44).

So far so good, though Küng has rather exaggerated the threat. That there is some reality is beyond doubt. The extreme of nihilism would be to deny that reality is discoverable or understandable; but there is no serious case for this denial. Küng differentiates the critical rationality which he defends from the “critical rationalism” which he rejects (and which he finds, perhaps mistakenly, in Karl Popper and Hans Albert), on the ground that the latter dispenses, as the former does not, with any critical examination of the foundations of our knowledge and so involves an irrational faith in reason. We can agree that nothing is to be exempt from criticism, not even the critical method itself, though of course not everything can be criticized at once: while we are examining any one issue, we must take various other things for granted. This precludes the attainment of certainty, and it should exclude the search for certainty. But there is no great mystery about this, nor any great modernity. Some of the essential points…were made by William James in defence of a fallibilist, experimental, but optimistic and risk-taking empiricism. As James says, a risk which gives us our only chance of discovering the truth, or even approaching it, is indeed a reasonable risk.

Further, the assumption that there is some order, some regularity, to be found in the world—not necessarily strict causal determinism—both is a regulative principle which we can and do use in developing and testing other hypotheses and also is itself a hypothesis of a very broad kind, which in turn is open to testing and confirmation.[13] This seems to be the main thing that Küng means by “unity,” so this too is covered by “critical rationality,” that is, by a fallibilistic but optimistic empiricism. Such an approach, whatever name we give it, can thus be seen to be reasonable in itself, and not in need of any further justification or support.

The reply to nihilism about unity and truth is therefore straightforward, and we can agree with the substance of what Küng says about this. His reply to nihilism about goodness or value is trickier and more controversial. He quotes with approval the view of H. Sachsse that there is a present and pressing need for the development of “relevant and practical norms” (Chapter 45). He concedes that “Today less than ever can we call down from heaven ready-made solutions, or deduce them theologically from an immutable universal essential nature of man.” He concedes, too, that “There is in fact what Nietzsche called a ‘genealogy of morals’”—that is, that concrete existing ethical systems have been developed by a socio-historical process—and that today we have to “work out ‘on earth’ discriminating solutions for all the difficult problems. We are responsible for our morality” (Chapter 45). All this is strikingly similar to the main theme of my Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong[14]—and, what is more important, it is in itself an adequate reply to nihilism about value. But then Küng seems to slide to a very different thesis (Chapter 45):

This is radically different. Now Küng is suggesting that we must after all postulate an objective value from which (along with the empirical facts of human needs, and so on) we might deduce specific norms. But this is an error, and in contrast with it we must hold fast to the thesis that value itself is a human and social product. This is not to deny, however, that there is an ethical variety of “fundamental trust” which is needed at the basis of our moral systems. We require, perhaps, a confident hope that we can find principles of co-operation in the midst of competition. This would be a generalization of the practical “precursive faith” of which William James speaks: only if people trust one another before each can be sure that the others are trustworthy will they have a chance of establishing effective cooperation.

There is, then, a reply to nihilism about goodness or value, which again can be seen to be reasonable in itself, and not in need of any further justification or support. But it is significantly different from the reply that Küng gives. Or rather, he both suggests this reply and slides to a different one.

But where, we may ask, does God come into all this? With comic condescension, Küng allows that “On the basis of fundamental trust, even an atheist can lead a genuinely human, that is, humane, and in this sense moral, life,” and that “Even atheists and agnostics are not necessarily nihilists, but can be humanists and moralists” (Chapter 45). Nevertheless, he now makes the crucial step in the direction of theism: “It must now be obvious that the fundamental trust in the identity, meaningfulness and value of reality, which is the presupposition of human science and autonomous ethics, is justified in the last resort only if reality itself—of which man is also a part—is not groundless, unsupported and aimless” (Chapter 46).

No. This is not obvious at all. Indeed it is false, and Küng’s own argument shows it to be false. The kind of fundamental trust that counters nihilism about truth and “unity,” the “critical rationality” of which he speaks, is reasonable in its own right for the reasons he has given. And the same is true of the motives for the invention of value. There is no need to look for or postulate any “ground, support, or goal” for reality. The broad hypothesis that there is some order in the world is one which it is reasonable to adopt tentatively, but also to test; and it has been strongly confirmed by the inquiries which have (implicitly) tested it. Likewise, though the inventing of moral values has gone on mainly spontaneously, it is reasonable in the sense that it is only by having the attitudes which that invention expresses that we are able to live together without destroying one another. Each of these is defensible on its own: neither needs any further support.

But it is upon this utterly unwarranted step that Küng bases his further case for a god. He is seeking not, indeed, a demonstrative proof, but an “indirect verification,” of God as the supposedly required primal ground, primal support, and primal goal of all reality.

He first asserts that “If God exists, then the grounding reality is not ultimately groundless… the supporting reality is not ultimately unsupported… evolving reality is not ultimately without aim… and reality suspended between being and not being is not ultimately under suspicion of being a void.” He adds that while this hypothesis opposes nihilism, it can also explain the appearance of nihilism: reality appears to be ultimately groundless, unsupported, and aimless “Because uncertain reality is itself not God.” Similarly, the hypothesis that God exists can give ultimate meaning and hope to one’s own life; but it can also explain the appearance of meaninglessness and emptiness here “Because man is not God” (pp. 566–568).

By contrast, he thinks, atheism would imply an ultimately unjustified fundamental trust in reality, and therefore the danger of “the possible disunion, meaninglessness, worthlessness, hollowness of reality as a whole” (p. 571).

Küng concludes that “Affirmation of God implies an ultimately justified fundamental trust in reality. If someone affirms God, he knows why he can trust reality.” Hence “there is no stalemate between belief in God and atheism” (p. 572). Though this affirmation “rests, in the last resort, on a decision” (p. 569), because there is no conclusive argument either for or against it, yet “trust in God is by no means irrational… I know… by the very fact of doing this, that I am doing the right thing… what cannot be proved in advance I experience in the accomplishment,” and this provides “a fundamental certainty.” Thus understood, “Belief in God… is a matter not only of human reason but of the whole concrete, living man” (pp. 573–574).

I have summarized Küng’s argument as far as possible in his own words, because a paraphrase would not only detract from its eloquence but also risk distorting a view that contains so many complexities and contrasts. My criticisms must, and can, be briefer.

Küng’s final step seems to claim that the very act of believing in God is self-verifying; but he gives no reason at all for this claim. The act may carry with it a conviction of certainty: the relief of ceasing to doubt is pleasantly reassuring. But this is purely subjective: to rely on this would be merely another form of the assumption that there is a kind of experience which guarantees the objective validity of its content or intentional object which Küng himself has rightly dismissed (p. 533). Alternatively, the suggestion may be that in postulating a god one is postulating that which grounds both itself and everything else. But to claim that the very content of this postulation gives it objective certainty is to employ yet again the ontological argument, and Küng has rightly dismissed this too (pp. 533, 535).

If we delete this unsound final step, Küng’s argument turns essentially upon the confirming of a hypothesis, and in particular upon the relative confirmation of the god-hypothesis as against that of an objective natural world (including human beings) which has no further ground or support or goal. As for the explanation of the appearance of nihilism, the god-hypothesis is in exactly the same position as its naturalistic rival. The one says that though there is a god, this god is not obvious, and “uncertain reality” is not this god, that is, is not its own primal ground, support, or goal; the other says simply that there is no such primal ground, support, or goal. In either case the lack of any obvious primal ground leaves room for nihilism. The two rival hypotheses are equal also in their explanations of the appearance of meaninglessness in human life. But though they are equally able to explain the appearance of nihilism, the god-hypothesis is the less economical. Its merits, if any, must be due to the other aspect, to its allegedly providing reality with a ground, support, and goal, and man with an objectively valid aim. But Küng has said nothing to explain how the god-hypothesis is supposed to do this. Indeed, the Demea-like indeterminacy of his account of God would make it hard for him to do so. But what he hints at is, in fact, a set of suggestions which we have already explicitly stated and examined, especially in Swinburne’s inductive versions of the cosmological and design arguments, in Leslie’s extreme axiarchism. To avoid assuming “the groundlessness and instability of reality as a whole,” Küng suggests that it may be reasonable to assume “a cause of all causes”; and to avoid assuming the meaninglessness and aimlessness of reality as a whole it may be reasonable to assume “an end of ends” (pp. 534–535), or again “a God who will bring to perfection the world and man” (p. 657). “Believing in God as Finisher of the world means coolly and realistically—and even more, without succumbing to the violent benefactors of the people—to work for a better future, a better society, in peace, freedom and justice, and at the same time to know without illusions that this can always only be sought but never completely realized by man” (p. 659).

But the explanations at which Küng hints are completely undermined by the criticisms we have given of the specific arguments in Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8, and 13. As I have said, we have no empirical basis, in a knowledge of direct, unmediated, fulfilments of will, from which we might extrapolate to anything like Swinburne’s personal explanation as a way of using a god to explain the world or its details. Nor, correspondingly, do we have any empirical basis for the axiarchist’s suggestion that value as such may be intrinsically creative. Nor, again, could we find any ultimately plausible account of how moral values might rest upon or be created or sustained by a god. Still less do we need anything like a god to counter the supposed threat of aimlessness. Men are themselves purposive beings. In their own nature they unavoidably pursue aims and goals; they do not need these to be given them from outside. To be sure, their purposes are limited, specific, and above all conflicting: diverse strivings do not automatically resolve themselves into any grand harmonious everlasting Purpose. That is why there is a real and continuing task of inventing norms and principles through which we can achieve some rough approximation to harmony or at least contain within tolerable limits the inescapable conflicts of purpose.[15] We can welcome Küng’s realistic appreciation of this task and his readiness to take part in it. But neither participation in this task, nor the generalization of William James’s “precursive faith” which we may need to bring to it, depends in any way on a belief in “God as Finisher”; rather, their reasonability arises directly out of a human appreciation of the human situation, as Küng’s own argument shows. Nor are the difficult details of this task made any easier by postulating any sort of god.

If the specific suggestions of personal explanation, creative value, and the various forms of the moral argument fail, we are left with the postulation of a god as merely that which somehow supplies a ground, support, or goal for reality. But to postulate an entity as that which does something gives us no real additional explanation. If we say, for example, that reality is supported because there is something that supports it, the alleged explanation merely repeats what was to be explained; at best, we have a place-holder for a real explanation. Moreover, even if this god-hypothesis did somehow explain the world or moral values or human purposes, we should face again the familiar objection: Why is this (uncertain) god not as much in need of further explanation or support as “uncertain reality”? To say that God is introduced by definition as that which explains itself, that which terminates the regress of explanation, is again empty and useless; but any attempt to explain and justify the claim that he has such a special status leads us, as we have seen, to the concept which underlies the ontological proof….

Küng’s strategy, as we have seen, is to incorporate the question of the existence of a god within the wider question of how modern man is to meet the challenge of nihilism, and to suggest that the latter can be solved only by a decision in favour of an affirmative answer to the former. But this is wrong. Ironically, he has himself supplied all the materials for showing that the challenge of both intellectual and moral or practical nihilism can be met in purely human terms, by what Küng calls a “fundamental trust” which is reasonable in its own right—that is, equivalently, by a fallibilist empiricism on the intellectual side and on the practical side by the invention of value. The further postulation of a god, even as indeterminate and mysterious a god as Küng’s, is a gratuitous addition to this solution, an attempted underpinning which is as needless as it is incomprehensible.

(b) The Balance of Probabilities

We can now bring together the many different arguments for theism which we have discussed, and consider their combined effect. But some of them cannot be combined with one another. The thesis that there is a Berkeleian god is so different from any view that adds a god, either immanent or transcendent (or both immanent and transcendent, like Küng’s), to the ordinary material or spatiotemporal world, that arguments for the one cannot assist those for the other. There is a similar discrepancy between Swinburne’s (or Cleanthes’) explicitly personal god and the creative value proposed by extreme axiarchism, though Küng’s god is perhaps so medially placed between these that he could share some arguments with each of them. Moreover, the ontological argument, in all its forms, has been shown to be simply unsound; it can contribute no weight at all to the case for theism. On the contrary, its failure does, as Kant said, though not exactly in the way that Kant thought, undermine the various forms of cosmological argument: even if the concept of a being whose essence includes existence is admissible, such a being would not exist in all logically possible worlds, and its existence in the actual world would not be a priori certain or self-explanatory; it would not terminate the regress of explanation. But there is at least one interesting and important possibility of consilience, namely that which would bring together (1) reported miracles, (2) inductive versions of the design and consciousness arguments, picking out as “marks of design” both the fact that there are causal regularities at all and the fact that the fundamental natural laws and physical constants are such as to make possible the development of life and consciousness, (3) an inductive version of the cosmological argument, seeking an answer to the question “Why is there any world at all?” (4) the suggestion that there are objective moral values whose occurrence likewise calls for further explanation, and (5) the suggestion that some kinds of religious experience can be best understood as direct awareness of something supernatural. These various considerations might be held jointly to support the hypothesis that there is a personal or quasi-personal god.

In evaluating this possibility, we must note how in principle a hypothesis can be supported by the consilience of different considerations, each of which, on its own, leaves the balance of probabilities against that hypothesis. Suppose that there are several pieces of evidence, e₁, e₂ and e₃ each of which would fit in with a hypothesis h, but each of which, on its own, is explained with less initial improbability on some other grounds, say by g₁, g₂, and g₃ respectively. Yet if the improbability involved in postulating h is less than the sum of the improbabilities involved in the rival explanations g₁, g₂, and g₃, though it is greater than each of these improbabilities separately, the balance of probabilities when we take e₁, e₂ and e₃ together will favour the hypothesis h. It is important that it is just the one initial improbability of h that is weighed in turn against the improbabilities of g₁, g₂, g_3, and then against the sum of these.

But the supposed consilience of theistic arguments does not satisfy the requirements of this formal pattern. As we have seen, the first and fifth of these considerations are extremely weak: all the evidence that they can muster is easily explained in natural terms, without any improbabilities worth taking into account. Consciousness and the actual phenomena of morality and valuing as a human activity are explained without further improbabilities, given that the natural world is such as to allow life to evolve, so the only improbabilities to be scored against the naturalistic kind of explanation are whatever may be involved in there being causal regularities, the fundamental laws and physical constants being as they are, and there being any world at all. Against the rival theistic hypothesis we should have to score the (significant) improbability that if there were a god he (or it) would create a world with causal laws, and one with our specific causal laws and constants, but also the great improbability of there being a process of the unmediated fulfilment of will, and, besides, the basic improbability of there being a god at all. For while the naturalist had admittedly no reply to Leibniz’s question “Why is there a world at all?” the theist, once deprived of the illusory support of the ontological argument, is equally embarrassed by the question “Why is there a god at all?” Whatever initial improbability there may be in the unexplained brute fact that there is a world, there is a far greater initial improbability in what the theist has to assert as the unexplained brute fact that there is a god capable of creating a world.

In the end, therefore, we can agree with what Laplace said about God: we have no need of that hypothesis. This conclusion can be reached by an examination precisely of the arguments advanced in favour of theism, without even bringing into play what have been regarded as the strongest considerations on the other side, the problem of evil and the various natural histories of religion. When these are thrown into the scales, the balance tilts still further against theism. Although we could not (in Chapter 9) rule out the possibility that some acceptable modification of traditional theism might enable it to accommodate the occurrence of evils, we saw that no sound solution of this sort has yet been offered; the extreme difficulty that theism has in reconciling its own doctrines with one another in this respect must tell heavily against it. Also, although the clear possibility of developing an adequate natural explanation of the origin, evolution, and persistence of religious belief is not a primary argument against theism, and could be brushed aside if there were any cogent positive case for the existence of a god, yet, since there is no such case, it helps to make the negative case still more conclusive. It removes the vague but obstinate feeling that where so many people have believed so firmly—and sometimes fervently—and where religious thought and organization have been so tenacious and so resilient “there must be something in it.” We do not need to invoke the “higher causes” by which Machiavelli (with his tongue in his cheek) said that ecclesiastical principalities are upheld.[16] The occurrence, even the continuing occurrence, of theism is not, in Hume’s phrase, a continued miracle which subverts all the principles of our understanding.

The balance of probabilities, therefore, comes out strongly against the existence of a god. Chapter 11 has shown that we cannot escape the implications of this result by making a voluntary faith intellectually respectable. The most that we could allow was James’s experimental approach, and, as we saw, it would be very hard for this to yield a favourable result. In Chapter 12 we saw the failure of some popular attempts to free religion from the need to defend its traditional factual beliefs; and in Chapter 13 we considered, but rejected, some replacements for a god of the traditional sort. There is at any rate no easy way of defending religion once it is admitted that the literal, factual claim that there is a god cannot be rationally sustained.

(c) The Moral Consequences of Atheism

But some readers, I know, even some thoughtful and fairminded readers, will not be satisfied. I suspect that the most lasting obstacle to the acceptance of atheism is a lingering notion that such acceptance would be morally and practically disastrous. It may, therefore, be relevant to end with a brief survey of the moral consequences of atheism.

There are four main kinds of view about the general nature and status of morality. The first of these sees moral rules and principles, whatever other functions they may serve, as being essentially the commands or requirements of a god (or gods), backed up by the promise of rewards and the threat of penalties either in this life or in an afterlife. The second (Kantian, rationalist, or intuitionist) sees moral principles as objectively valid prescriptions, formulated or discovered by human reason or intellect, and autonomously authoritative, independently of any god; if someone who holds this view also believes that there is a god, he will see the goodness of this god as consisting in his exemplifying these independent principles. A third view is that which we considered at the end of Chapter 6, according to which there are objectively valid principles as the second view maintains, but they are in some way created and sustained in existence by a god. The fourth (Humean, sentimentalist, subjectivist, or naturalistic) view is that morality is essentially a human, social product, that moral concepts, principles, and practices have developed by some process of biological and social evolution. Their origin and persistence are due somehow to the fact that they enable human beings, whose natural situation includes a mixture of competitive and co-operative forces, and a need for co-operation, to survive and nourish better, by limiting the competition and facilitating the co-operation. But morality is not, on this view, necessarily understood in this light by those who adhere to it: it is possible that its adherents should hold one of the other three views, and yet that a correct description, from the outside, of their thinking and conduct should be given by this naturalistic account.

Now if some adherent to a morality has held either the first or the third of these views, so that he has seen morality as essentially dependent upon some god, then it is indeed possible that if he then ceases to believe in that god his adherence to that morality will be undermined: the immediate moral consequences of his atheism may be deplorable. This is a good reason for not tying morality to religious teaching at a time when religious belief is itself fragile. The point is well made by Richard Robinson’s story of a priest saying to a pair of well-behaved atheists, “I can’t understand you boys; if I didn’t believe in God I should be having a high old time.”[17] But if either our second view (of an autonomous objective ethics) or our fourth (naturalist or sentimentalist) view is correct, there is no reason to suppose that such undermining will be either a lasting or a general effect of the decay of religious belief. Indeed, it is hardly even necessary that either of these views should be correct: it is enough that they are available to the atheist. But in particular if, as I have argued elsewhere, the fourth view is correct, then morality has a genuine causal source of its own.[18] It is basically a matter of feelings and attitudes, partly instinctive, developed by biological evolution, and partly acquired, developed by socio-historical evolution and passed on from generation to generation less by deliberate education than by the automati transmission of cultural traits. Since it has such a source, quite independent of religion, it is certain to survive when religion decays.

However, this may seem to be too abstract, too a priori, an argument. Is there any better, more empirical, evidence about the contrasting moral consequences of theism and of atheism? The only simple answer to this question is that there is no simple answer. Neither theists nor atheists have any monopoly of either the vices or the virtues. Nor is any statistical survey likely to establish a clear causal tendency for religious belief, or the lack of it, to encourage either virtue or vice. This is partly because the determination of what is to count as virtue or as vice, or of the relative importance of particular virtues and vices, is itself relevantly controversial; this is one of the issues on which believers and non-believers are divided. Another reason is that there are indefinitely many degrees of belief and disbelief. But even if we confined our survey to an agreed core of virtues on the one hand and of vices on the other, and to unequivocal samples of theists and atheists, any statistical results would still be indecisive. For if there were, as I suspect there would then be, some positive correlation between atheism and virtue, this would still not establish a causal tendency for atheism as such to promote virtue. It could be too easily explained away by the fact that, other things being equal, there is likely to be a higher incidence of disbelief among the “wise and learned,” for the reason hinted at by Hume in his essay on miracles.[19]

Since there is little prospect of reliable direct empirical evidence, we must fall back on some general considerations. What differences would it make to morality if there were, or if there were not, a god, and again if people associated, or did not associate, their morality with religious belief?

The unsatisfactory character of the first, divine command, view of morality was pointed out by Plato, whose objections have been echoed many times.[20] If moral values were constituted wholly by divine commands, so that goodness consisted in conformity to God’s will, we could make no sense of the theist’s own claims that God is good and that he seeks the good of his creation. However, it would be possible to hold coherently that while the goodness of some states of affairs—for example, of one sort of human life as contrasted with others—is independent of God’s will, it is only his commands that supply the prescriptive element in morality. Or they could be seen as supplying an additional prescriptive element. A religious morality might then be seen as imposing stronger obligations.

Both these variants, however, as Kant pointed out, tend to corrupt morality, replacing the characteristically moral motives—whether these are construed as a rational sense of duty and fairness, or as specific virtuous dispositions, or as generous, co-operative, and sympathetic feelings—by a purely selfish concern for the agent’s own happiness, the desire to avoid divine punishments and to enjoy the rewards of God’s favour, in this life or in an afterlife. This divine command view can also lead people to accept, as moral, requirements that have no discoverable connection—indeed, no connection at all—with human purposes or well-being, or with the well-being of any sentient creatures. That is, it can foster a tyrannical, irrational morality. Of course, if there were not only a benevolent god but also a reliable revelation of his will, then we might be able to get from it expert moral advice about difficult issues, where we could not discover for ourselves what are the best policies. But there is no such reliable revelation. Even a theist must see that the purported revelations, such as the Bible and the Koran, condemn themselves by enshrining rules which we must reject as narrow, out-dated, or barbarous. As Küng says, “We are responsible for our morality.” More generally, tying morality to religious belief is liable to devalue it, not only by undermining it, temporarily, if the belief decays, but also by subordinating it to other concerns while the belief persists.

There is, indeed, a strain in religion that positively welcomes sin as a precondition for salvation. Jesus himself is reported as saying “I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” Luther says that “God is the god of the humble, the miserable, the oppressed, and the desperate,” and that “that pernicious and pestilent opinion of man’s own righteousness… suffereth not God to come to his own natural and proper work.” And William James reports (at second hand) an orthodox minister who said that Dr. Channing (the eminent Unitarian) “is excluded from the highest form of religious life by the extraordinary rectitude of his character.”[21]

It is widely supposed that Christian morality is particularly admirable. Here it is important to distinguish between the original moral teachings of Jesus, so far as we can determine them, and later developments in the Christian tradition. Richard Robinson has examined the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) as the best evidence for Jesus’s own teaching, and he finds in them five major precepts: “love God, believe in me, love man, be pure in heart, be humble.” The reasons given for these precepts are “a plain matter of promises and threats”: they are “that the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” and that “those who obey these precepts will be rewarded in heaven, while those who disobey will have weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Robinson notes that “Certain ideals that are prominent elsewhere are rather conspicuously absent from the synoptic gospels.” These include beauty, truth, knowledge, and reason:

Robinson adds:

Robinson goes on to comment on the morality of the Bible:

Robinson urges us to reject these commands and the associated values of piety, faith, and improvidence. He reminds us that “many of man’s most terrible actions have been done out of piety, and that piety is responsible for our shameful wars of religion.” He also characterizes the view that belief, or disbelief, can be sinful as a “blasphemy against reason.” He says that we should accept the precept to love our neighbours, “extended as Jesus perhaps extended it to love of all humanity, and still further to love of all life, as he certainly did not extend it”(Chapter 21), and such consequential attitudes as generosity, gentleness, mercy, and the observance of the golden rule. However, we might well query (though Robinson does not) the precise command to love your neighbour as yourself. This seems unrealistically to prescribe a degree of altruism that is in general not humanly possible, and so to make of morality a fantasy rather than something that people can seriously try to practise and can ask of one another. Robinson does query the injunction to be pure in heart, and also the call for humility: it is better to make true estimates both of oneself and of others, and not lie about them, though in public “the right choice will usually be to refrain from drawing attention either to our superiorities or to our inferiorities” (pp. 153–154).

The later tradition of Christian ethics has tended to add to Jesus’s teaching some deplorable elements, such as hostility to sex, and many more admirable ones, such as concern with justice and the other requirements for the nourishing of human life in society, and ideals of beauty, truth, knowledge, and (up to a point) reason. But it has in general retained the concern with salvation and an afterlife, and the view that disbelief, or even doubt, or criticism of belief, is sinful, with the resulting tendencies to the persecution of opponents—including, of course, the adherents of rival Christian sects and rival religions—the discouragement of discussion, hostility (even now in some places) to the teaching of well-confirmed scientific truths, like the theory of evolution, and the propagation of contrary errors, and the intellectual dishonesty of trying to suppress one’s own well-founded doubts. Many people are shocked at the way in which the Unification Church (‘the Moonies’) entraps converts and enslaves their minds and emotions; but the same methods have been and are used by many more orthodox sects. Religion has, indeed, a remarkable ability to give vices the air of virtues, providing a sanctified outlet for some of the nastiest human motives. It is fashionable to ascribe the horrors of Nazism to an atheistic nationalism; but in fact the attitudes to the Jews which it expressed had long been established within the Christian tradition in Germany and elsewhere (sanctioned, for example, by Luther’s writing[22]), and the Old Testament itself reports many atrocities as having been not merely approved but positively demanded by God and his spokesmen.[23] And while, following Robinson, I have spoken here particularly of Christian ethics, it is only too obvious that Islamic fundamentalism displays today, more clearly than Christianity has done recently, the worst aspects of religious morality. We do not need to go back in history to illustrate the dictum of Lucretius: Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum (So great are the evils that religion could prompt!)[24] By contrast, there is a long tradition of an essentially humanist morality, from Epicurus to John Stuart Mill and modern writers, including Richard Robinson himself, centred on the conditions for the flourishing of human life and stressing intellectual honesty, tolerance, free inquiry, and individual rights.

There are, then, some marked dangers in a distinctively religious morality. But they are dangers only, not inevitable consequences of associating morality with religion. We can echo, in reverse, Küng’s concession: it is possible—for even a religious believer “to lead a genuinely human, that is humane, and in this sense moral life”; even theists are not necessarily narrow-minded dogmatists, intolerant persecutors, or propagators of timid credulity and a crudely calculating selfish version of morality itself. Even within Islam there have been thinkers who have tried to develop its humane and liberal tendencies, and to tone down its cruelty, intolerance, and its unfairness between the sexes, though at present their influence is in decline.

But are there no corresponding dangers in a distinctively non-religious morality? Admittedly, there are. As Robinson says, the Roman Catholic church is only “The second most intolerant and active body in the world today” (Chapter 28). Communist parties are expressly anti-religious, and profess an overriding concern with human welfare, but they are also intolerant, ruthless, and, once in power, they too make virtues of tyranny and persecution. And one must recognize that the Catholic church, despite its own illiberal tendencies, sometimes contributes significantly to the resistance to tyrannical states, whether communist or not. More generally, humanist moral thinking is prone either to illusions about necessary progress or to an over-optimistic voluntarism—that is, to assuming that “we” (whoever that may be) can make or remake the world as we would wish it to be, forgetting that the interplay of many different purposes is liable to result in the fulfillment of none of them.

An alleged weakness, not of non-religious moralities in general, but specifically of moralities explained and understood in the naturalistic way outlined above, is that different groups of people can develop different moral views, which will produce conflict when these groups are in contact with one another, and that there is, on this basis, no clear way of resolving such conflicts. This is true. But it is not a distinctive weakness of the naturalistic approach. Absolutist and objectivist moralities, including ones with religious attachments, also differ from one another, and there is no clear way of resolving their conflicts either. That each party believes that some one morality is objectively right is no guarantee that they will be able to agree on what it is. Indeed, conflicts between rival absolutists are likely to be less resolvable than conflicts between those who understand morality in a naturalistic way, for the latter can more easily appreciate the merits of compromise and adjustment, or of finding, for the areas of contact, a ius gentium, a common core of principles on which they can agree.

Another supposed weakness is this: it may be thought particularly difficult to derive any respect for non-human life, any valuing of nature in general, from a purely secular, human approach. But it is worth noting that Robinson, for example, specifically includes among his “atheist’s values” a “love of all life” (Chapter 21; see also pp. 186–187). In fact there is no question of deriving a morality from the facts of the human situation. What we can do is to understand how moral thinking can develop and what functions it serves; and we can also understand how it naturally extends itself beyond a quasi-contractual system by the operation of what Hume called “sympathy.”[25]

In contrast with any such real or supposed weaknesses in non-religious morality, we should note its distinctive merits, in particular its cultivation of a courageous realism in the face of the less palatable facts of life—and of death. But we need not dwell on this merit, since, as we have seen, it is dramatically recognized in Phillips’s attempt to take over, in the name of religion, the traditional non-believers’ attitude to the loss of one’s friends, the attitude of coming to terms with such loss without either denying it or suppressing it. The non-believer comes to terms with the inevitability of his own death in a similar way. Küng has likewise tried to take over in the name of religion the traditional non-believers’ view of morality itself: “We are responsible for our morality.” Robinson says that “The main irrationality of religion is preferring comfort to truth”(Chapter 14). Phillips and Küng are implicitly recognizing this traditional weakness in religion, and are proposing that religion should follow atheism in doing without it.

In Phillips, the moral take-over bid is linked with a strong tendency to disguise atheism on the theoretical side, and (Küng’s concept of God is so complex and so indeterminate that his position, too, may not be really so far removed from atheism. Should we then object to such take-overs? So long as the position adopted is, in substance, atheistic, what does it matter if it is called religion? After all, Epicurus was willing to postulate happy and immortal gods safely isolated from all contact with human affairs; Spinoza was willing to speak of Deus sive natura, identifying nature with God; and even Hume proposed a compromise:

Today, however, it is more honest and less misleading to reject such compromises and evasions, which can too easily serve as a cover for the reintroduction of characteristically theistic views both on the intellectual and on the moral side.

Alternatively, is there any merit in Braithwaite’s approach, in retaining the religious “stories” as a psychological support for a morality, while explicitly rejecting any suggestion that they are factually true? This we might allow, provided that the morality they support is not of the kind we have been criticizing as distinctively religious. Apart from their other faults, such moralities have a tendency to be dangerously over-optimistic. Particularly in the field of international affairs, leaders who have too strong or too fundamentalist a faith may pursue policies which they know to be reckless, in the expectation that God will prevent the worst—and, for humanity, final-disasters. Such reliance would be quite different from the “fundamental trust” which Küng has reasonably advocated on purely human grounds. There are inevitable uncertainties in human affairs. Machiavelli speculated that “fortune is the ruler of one half of our actions, but… she allows the other half, or a little less, to be governed by us.”[27] Damon Runyon put it more briefly: “Nothing human is better than two to one.” If so, the only reasonable plan is to do the best we can, taking all possible precautions against the worst disasters, but then to meet the uncertainties with cheerful confidence. “Trust in God and keep your powder dry,” understood as Braithwaite might understand it, may be good practical advice. But to trust God to keep your powder dry for you is the height of folly.