CHAPTER 4

D oes Morality Depend

on Religion?
The Good consists in always doing what God wills at any particular
moment.
Emil Brunner, THE DIVINE IMPERATIVE (1947)

I respect deities. I do not rely upon them.

Musashi Miyamoto, at Ichijoji Temple (ca. 1608)

4.1. The Presumed Connection between

Morality and Religion
In 1995 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued Judge
Roy Moore of Gadsden, Alabama, for displaying the Ten Com-
mandments in his courtroom. Such a display, the ACLU said,
violates the separation of church and state, which is guaran-
teed by the U.S. Constitution. The ACLU might not have liked
Moore, but Alabama voters did. In 2000, Moore successfully
campaigned to become chief justice of the Alabama Supreme
Court, running on a promise to “restore the moral foundation
of law.” Thus the “Ten Commandments judge” became the
most powerful jurist in the state of Alabama.
Moore was not through making his point, however. In the
wee hours of July 31, 2001, he had a granite monument to the
Ten Commandments installed in the Alabama state judicial
building. This monument weighed over 5,000 pounds, and any-
one entering the building could not miss it. Moore was sued
again, but the people were behind him: 77% of Americans
thought that he should be allowed to display his monument.
Yet the law did not agree. When Moore disobeyed a court order
49
50 THE ELEMENTS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY

to remove the monument, the Alabama Court of the Judiciary

fired him, saying that he had placed himself above the law.
Moore, however, believed that he was putting God above the law.
The United States is a religious country. Nearly 80% of
Americans say they believe in God, and another 12% say they
believe in a universal spirit or higher power. The main religion
in America is Christianity; 41% of Americans report believing
that Jesus Christ will return to earth by 2050. In America, mem-
bers of the Christian clergy are often treated as moral experts:
Hospitals ask them to sit on ethics committees; reporters inter-
view them on the moral dimensions of a story; and churchgoers
look to them for guidance. The clergy even help decide whether
movies will be rated “G,” “PG,” “PG-13,” “R,” or “NC-17.” Priests
and ministers are assumed to be wise counselors who will give
sound moral advice.
Why are the clergy regarded in this way? The reason is
not that they have proven themselves to be better or wiser than
other people—as a group, they seem to be neither better nor
worse than the rest of us. There is a deeper reason why they
are thought to have special moral insight. In popular thinking,
morality and religion are inseparable: People commonly believe
that morality can be understood only in the context of religion.
Thus the clergy are assumed to be authorities on morality.
It is not hard to see why people think this. When viewed
from a nonreligious perspective, the universe seems to be a
cold, meaningless place, devoid of value and purpose. In his
essay “A Free Man’s Worship,” written in 1902, Bertrand Russell
expressed what he called the “scientific” view of the world:

That Man is the product of causes which had no previ-

sion of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his
growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are
but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that
no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling,
can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all
the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration,
all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined
to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that
the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be
buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these
things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain
that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.
 DOES MORALITY DEPEND ON RELIGION? 51

From a religious perspective, however, things look very

different. Judaism and Christianity teach that the world was cre-
ated by a loving, all-powerful God to provide a home for us. We,
in turn, were created in his image, to be his children. Thus,
the world is not devoid of meaning and purpose. It is, instead,
the arena in which God’s plans are realized. What could be
more natural, then, than to think of “morality” as part of reli-
gion, while the atheist’s world has no place for values?

4.2. The Divine Command Theory

Christians, Jews, and Muslims all believe that God has told us to
obey certain rules of conduct. God does not force these rules
on us. He created us as free agents; so, we may choose what
to do. But if we live as we should, then we must follow God’s
laws. This idea has been expanded into a theory known as the
Divine Command Theory. The basic idea is that God decides
what is right and wrong. Actions that God commands are mor-
ally required; actions that God forbids are morally wrong; and
all other actions are permissible or merely morally neutral.
This theory has a number of attractive features. It imme-
diately solves the old problem of the objectivity of ethics. Eth-
ics is not merely a matter of personal feeling or social custom.
Whether something is right or wrong is perfectly objective: It
is right if God commands it and wrong if God forbids it. More-
over, the Divine Command Theory explains why anyone should
bother with morality. Why not forget about “ethics” and just
look out for yourself? If immorality is the violation of God’s
commandments, there is an easy answer: On the day of final
reckoning, you will be held accountable.
There are, however, serious problems with the theory. Of
course, atheists would not accept it, because they do not believe
that God exists. But there are difficulties even for believers.
The main problem was identified by Plato, a Greek philosopher
who lived 400 years before Jesus of Nazareth. Plato’s books are
written as conversations, or dialogues, in which Plato’s teacher
Socrates is always the main speaker. In one of them, the Euthy-
phro, there is a discussion of whether “right” can be defined
as “what the gods command.” Socrates is skeptical and asks, Is
conduct right because the gods command it, or do the gods
command it because it is right? This is one of the most famous
52 THE ELEMENTS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY

questions in the history of philosophy. The British philosopher

Antony Flew (1923–2010) suggests that “one good test of a
person’s aptitude for philosophy is to discover whether he can
grasp [the] force and point” of this question.
Socrates’s question is about whether God makes the moral
truths true or whether he merely recognizes that they’re true.
There’s a big difference between these options. I know that the
Burj Khalifa building in the United Arab Emirates is the tall-
est building in the world; I recognize that fact. However, I did
not make it true. Rather, it was made true by the designers and
builders in the city of Dubai. Is God’s relation to ethics like my
relation to the Burj Khalifa building or like the relation of the
builders? This question poses a dilemma, and either way out
leads to trouble.
First, we might say that right conduct is right because God com-
mands it. For example, according to Exodus 20:16, God com-
mands us to be truthful. Thus, we should be truthful simply
because God requires it. God’s command makes truthfulness
right, just as the builders of a skyscraper make the building tall.
This is the Divine Command Theory. It is almost the theory of
Shakespeare’s character Hamlet. Hamlet said that nothing is
good or bad, but thinking makes it so. According to the Divine
Command Theory, nothing is good or bad, except when God’s
thinking makes it so.
This idea encounters several difficulties.
1. This conception of morality is mysterious. What does it mean
to say that God “makes” truthfulness right? It is easy enough to
understand how physical objects are made, at least in principle.
We have all made something, if only a sand castle or a peanut-
butter-and-jelly sandwich. But making truthfulness right is not
like that; it could not be done by rearranging things in the phys-
ical environment. How, then, could it be done? No one knows.
To see the problem, consider some wretched case of child
abuse. On the theory we’re now considering, God could make
that instance of child abuse right—not by turning a slap into a
friendly pinch of the cheek, but by commanding that the slap is
right. This proposal defies human understanding. How could
merely saying, or commanding, that the slap is right make it
right? If true, this conception of morality would be a mystery.
2. This conception of morality makes God’s commands arbi-
trary. We assume that God has good reasons for what he does.
 DOES MORALITY DEPEND ON RELIGION? 53

But suppose God commands truthfulness to be right. On this

theory, he could have given different commands just as easily.
He could have commanded us to be liars, and then lying, and
not truthfulness, would be right. After all, before God issues his
commands, no reasons for or against lying exist—God is the one
who creates the reasons. And so, from a moral point of view, God’s
commands are arbitrary. He could command anything whatso-
ever. This result may seem not only unacceptable but impious
from a religious point of view.
3. This conception of morality provides the wrong reasons for
moral principles. There are many things wrong with child abuse:
It is malicious; it involves the unnecessary infliction of pain; it
can have unwanted long-term psychological effects; and so on.
However, the theory we’re now considering cannot recognize
any of these reasons as important. All it cares about, in the end,
is whether child abuse runs counter to God’s commands.
There are two ways of confirming that something is wrong
here. First, notice something the theory implies: If God didn’t
exist, child abuse wouldn’t be wrong. After all, if God didn’t exist,
then God wouldn’t be around to make child abuse wrong.
However, child abuse would still be malicious, so it would still
be wrong. Thus, the Divine Command Theory fails. Second,
keep in mind that even a religious person might be genuinely
in doubt as to what God has commanded. After all, religious
texts disagree with each other, and sometimes there seem to
be inconsistencies even within a single text. So, a person might
be in doubt as to what God’s will really is. However, a person
needn’t be in doubt as to whether child abuse is wrong. What
God has commanded is one thing; whether hitting children is
wrong is another.
There is a way to avoid these troublesome consequences.
We can take the second of Socrates’s options. We need not say
that right conduct is right because God commands it. Instead,
we may say that God commands us to do certain things because
they are right. God, who is infinitely wise, recognizes that truth-
fulness is better than deceitfulness, and so he commands us to
be truthful; he sees that killing is wrong, and so he commands
us not to kill; and so on for the other moral rules.
If we take this option, we avoid the consequences that
spoiled the first alternative. We needn’t worry about how God
makes it wrong to lie, because he doesn’t. God’s commands are
54 THE ELEMENTS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY

not arbitrary; they are the result of his wisdom in knowing what
is best. Furthermore, we are not saddled with the wrong expla-
nations for our moral principles; rather, we are free to appeal
to whatever justifications of them seem appropriate.
Unfortunately, this second option has a different draw-
back. In taking it, we abandon the theological conception of
right and wrong. When we say that God commands us to be
truthful because truthfulness is right, we acknowledge a standard
that is independent of God’s will. The rightness exists prior to
God’s command and is the reason for the command. Thus, if
we want to know why we should be truthful, the reply “because
God commands it” does not really tell us. We may still ask, “Why
does God command it?” and the answer to that question will
provide the ultimate reason.
Many religious people believe that they must accept a theo-
logical conception of right and wrong because it would be sac-
rilegious not to do so. They feel, somehow, that if they believe
in God, then right and wrong must be understood in terms of
God’s wishes. Our arguments, however, suggest that the Divine
Command Theory is not only untenable but impious. And, in
fact, some of the greatest theologians have rejected the theory
for just this reason. Thinkers such as Saint Thomas Aquinas
connect morality with religion in a different way.

4.3. The Theory of Natural Law

In the history of Christian thought, the dominant theory of eth-
ics is not the Divine Command Theory. That honor instead goes
to the Theory of Natural Law. This theory has three main parts.
1. The Theory of Natural Law rests on a particular view
of the world. On this view, the world has a rational order, with
values and purposes built into its very nature. This conception
derives from the Greeks, whose way of understanding the world
dominated Western thinking for over 1,700 years. The Greeks
believed that everything in nature has a purpose.
Aristotle (384–322 b.c.) built this idea into his system of
thought when he said that, in order to understand anything,
four questions must be asked: What is it? What is it made of?
How did it come to be? And what is it for? The answers might
be: This is a knife; it is made of metal; it was made by a crafts-
man; and it is used for cutting. Aristotle assumed that the last