47 - God and the Good: Does Morality Need Religion?

God and the Good: Does Morality Need Religion?
By Kai Nielsen

"Without religious belief, without the Living God, there could be no adequate answer to the persistently gnawing questions: What ought we to do? How ought I to live?… Is this frequently repeated claim justified?… I shall argue that the fact that God wills something-if indeed that is a fact-cannot be a fundamental criterion for its being morally good or obligatory and thus it cannot be the only criterion or the only adequate criterion for moral goodness or obligation."

IT is the claim of many influential Christian and Jewish theologians (Brunner, Buber, Barth, Niebuhr and Bultmann-to take outstanding examples) that the only genuine basis for morality is in religion. And any old religion is not good enough. The only truly adequate foundation for moral belief is a religion that acknowledges the absolute sovereignty of the Lord found in the prophetic religions.

These theologians will readily grant what is plainly true, namely, that as a matter of fact many non-religious people behave morally, but they contend that without a belief in God and his Law there is no ground or reason for being moral. The sense of moral relativism, skepticism, and nihilism rampant in our age is due in large measure to the general weakening of religious belief in an age of science. Without God there can be no objective foundation for our moral beliefs. As Brunner puts it, "The believer alone clearly perceives that the Good, as it is recognized in faith, is the sole Good, and all that is otherwise called good cannot lay claim to this title, at least in the ultimate sense of the word." "The Good consists in always doing what God wills at any particular moment."

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This "Good" can only "take place in unconditional obedience" to God, the ground of our being. Without God life would have no point and morality would have no basis. Without religious belief, without the Living God, there could be no adequate answer to the persistently gnawing questions: What ought we to do? How ought I to live?

Is this frequently repeated claim justified? Are our moral beliefs and conceptions based on or grounded in a belief in the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam? More specifically still, we need to ask ourselves three very fundamental questions: (1) Is being willed by God the or even a fundamental criterion for that which is so willed being morally good or for its being something that ought to be done? (2) Is being willed by God the only criterion for that which is so willed being morally good or for its being something that ought to be done? (3) Is being willed by God the only adequate criterion for that which is so willed being morally good or being something that ought to be done? I shall argue that the fact that God wills something-if indeed that is a fact-cannot be a fundamental criterion for its being morally good or obligatory and thus it cannot be the only criterion or the only adequate criterion for moral goodness or obligation.

I

By way of preliminaries we first need to get clear what is meant by a "fundamental criterion." When we speak of the criterion for the goodness of an action or attitude we speak of some measure or test by virtue of which we may decide which actions or attitudes are good or desirable, or, at least, are the least undesirable of the alternative actions or attitudes open to us. A moral criterion is the measure we use for determining the value or worth of an action or attitude. We have such a measure or test when we have some generally relevant considerations by which we may decide whether something is whatever it is said to be. A fundamental moral criterion is (a) a test or measure used to judge the legitimacy of moral rules and/or acts or attitudes, and (b) a measure that one would give up last if one were reasoning morally. (In reality, there probably is no single fundamental criterion, although there are fundamental criteria).

There is a further preliminary matter we need to consider. In

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asking about the basis or authority for our moral beliefs we are not asking about how we came to have them. If you ask someone where he got his moral beliefs, he should answer that he got them from his parents, parent surrogates, teachers, etc.¹ They are beliefs which he has simply been conditioned to accept. But the validity or soundness of a belief is independent of its origin. When one person naively asks another where he got his moral beliefs, he is most likely not asking how he came by them; he is, in effect, asking: (a) on what authority does he hold these beliefs?, or (b) what good reasons or justification does he have for these moral beliefs? He should answer that he does not and cannot hold these beliefs on any authority. It is indeed true that many of us turn to people for moral advice and guidance in moral matters, but if we simply do what we do because it has been authorized, we cannot be reasoning and acting as moral agents; for to respond as a moral agent, to treat a principle as one's moral principle, it must be something which is subscribed to by one's own deliberate commitment, and it must be something for which one is prepared to give reasons.

With these preliminaries out of the way we can return to my claim that the fact (if indeed, it is a fact) that God has commanded, willed, or ordained something cannot, in the very nature of the case, be a fundamental criterion for claiming that whatever is commanded, willed, or ordained ought to be done.

II

Some perceptive remarks made by A. C. Ewing can carry us part of the way.² Theologians like Barth and Brunner claim that ethical principles gain their justification simply because they are God's decrees. But as Ewing points out, if "being obligatory" means just "willed by God," it becomes unintelligible to ask why God wills one thing rather than another. In fact, there can be no reason for his willing one thing rather than another, for his willing it eo ipso makes whatever it is he wills good, right, or obligatory. "God wills it because it ought to be done" becomes "God wills it because God wills it"; but the first sentence, even as used by the most ardent believer, is not a tautology. "If it were said in reply that God's

¹ P. H. Nowell-Smith, "Morality: Religious and Secular," The Rationalist Annual, (1961), pp. 5-22.
² A. C. Ewing, "The Autonomy of Ethics," in Prospect for Metaphysics, (ed. Ian Ramsey; London: 1961).

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commands determined what we ought to do but that these commands were only issued because it was good that they should be or because obedience to them did good, this would still make judgments about the good, at least, independent of the will of God, and we should not have given a definition of all fundamental ethical concepts in terms of God or made ethics dependent on God."³ Furthermore, it becomes senseless to say what the believer very much wants to say, namely, "he ought always to do what God wills" if "what he ought to do" and "what God wills" have the same meaning. And to say I ought to do what God wills because I love God makes the independent assumption that I ought to love God and that I ought to do what God wills if I love him.

Suppose we say instead that we ought to do what God wills because God will punish us if we do not obey him. This may very well be a cogent self-interested or prudential reason for doing what God commands, but we hardly have a morally good reason for doing what he commands since such considerations of self-interest cannot be an adequate basis for morality. A powerful being-an Omnipotent and Omniscient being-speaking out of the whirlwind cannot by his mere commands create an obligation. Ewing goes on to assert: "Without a prior conception of God as good or his commands as right God would have no more claim on our obedience than Hitler or Stalin except that he would have more power than even they had to make things uncomfortable for those who disobey him."⁴ Unless we assume that God is morally perfect, unless we assume the perfect goodness of God, there can be no necessary "relation between being commanded or willed by God and being obligatory or good."⁵

To this it is perfectly correct to reply that as believers we must believe that God is wholly and completely good, the most perfect of all conceivable beings.⁶ It is not open for a Jew or Christian to question the goodness of God. He must start with that assumption. Any man who seriously questions God's goodness or asks why he should obey God's commands shows by this very response that he

³ Ibid., P. 39.
⁴ Ibid., P. 40.
⁵ Ibid., P. 41.
⁶ See D. A. Rees, "Metaphysical Schemes and Moral Principles," Prospect for Metaphysics, p. 23.

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is not a Jew or a Christian. Believers must indeed claim that God is wholly and utterly good and that what he wills or commands is of necessity good, though this does not entail that the believer is claiming that the necessity here is a logical necessity. For a believer, God is all good; he is the Perfect Good. This being so, it would seem that the believer is justified in saying that he and we-if his claim concerning God is correct-ought to do what God wills and that our morality is after all grounded in a belief in God. But this claim of his is clearly dependent on his assumption that God is good (a "given" for Jewish and Christian belief). Yet I shall argue that even if God is good, even if God is the perfect good, it does not follow that morality can be based on religion and that we can know what we ought to do simply by knowing what God wishes us to do.

III

To see the rationale for these last "dark sayings" we must consider the logical status of "God is good." Is it a non-analytic and in some way substantive claim, or is it analytic? (Can we say that it is neither?) No matter what we say, we get into difficulties.

Let us first try to claim that it is a non-analytic, that is to say, that it is in some way a substantive statement. So understood, God cannot then be by definition good. If the statement is synthetic and substantive, its denial cannot be self-contradictory, that is, it cannot be self-contradictory to assert that x is God but x is not good. It would always in fact be wrong to assert this, for God is the Perfect Good, but the denial of this claim is not self-contradictory, it is just false or in some way mistaken. The "is" in "God is the Perfect Good" is not the "is" of identity, perfect goodness is being predicated of God in some logically contingent way. It is the religious experience of the believer and the events recorded in the Bible that lead the believer to the steadfast conviction that God has a purpose or vocation for him which he can fulfill only by completely submitting to God's will. God shall lead him and guide him in every thought, word, and deed. Otherwise he will be like a man shipwrecked, lost in a vast and indifferent universe. Through careful attention to the Bible, he comes to understand that God is a wholly good being who has dealt faithfully with his

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chosen people. God is not by definition perfectly good or even good, but in reality, though not of logical necessity, he never falls short of perfection.

Assuming "God is good" is not a truth of language, how, then, do we know that God is good? Do we know or have good grounds for believing that the remarks made at the end of the above paragraph are so? The believer can indeed make a claim like the one we have made above, but how do we or how does he know that this is so? What grounds have we for believing that God is good? Naive people, recalling how God spoke to job out of the whirlwind, may say that God is good because he is omnipotent and omniscient. But this clearly won't do, for, as Hepburn points out, there is nothing logically improper about saying "X is omnipotent and omniscient and morally wicked."⁷ Surely in the world as we know it there is no logical connection between being powerful and knowledgeable, on the one hand, and, on the other, being good. As far as I can see, all that God proved to job when he spoke to him out of the whirlwind was that God was an immeasurably powerful being; but, he did not prove his moral superiority to job, and he did nothing at all even to exhibit his moral goodness. (One might even argue that he exhibited moral wickedness). We need not assume that omnipotence and omniscience bring with it goodness or even wisdom.

What other reason could we have for claiming that God is good? We might say that he is good because he tells us to do good in thought, word, and deed and to love one another. In short, in his life and in his precepts God exhibits for us his goodness and love. Now one might argue that children's hospitals and concentration camps clearly show that such a claim is false. But let us assume that in some way God does exhibit his goodness to man. Let us assume that if we examine God's works we cannot but affirm that God is good.⁸ We come to understand that he isn't cruel, callous, or indifferent. But in order to make such judgments or to gain such an understanding, we must use our own logically independent moral criteria. On our present assumption in asserting "God is good" we have of necessity made a moral judgment, a moral ap-

⁷ Ronald Hepburn, Christianity and Paradox, (London: 1958), p. 132.
⁸ This is surely to assume a lot.

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praisal, using a criterion that cannot be based on a knowledge that God exists or that he issues commands. We call God "good" because we have experienced the goodness of his acts, but in order to do this, in order to know that he is good or to have any grounds for believing that he is good, we must have an independent moral criterion which we use in making this predication of God. So if "God is good" is taken to be synthetic and substantive then morality cannot simply be based on a belief in God. We must of logical necessity have some criterion of goodness that is not derived from any statement asserting that there is a Deity.

IV

Let us alternatively, and more plausibly, treat "God is good" as a truth of language. Now some truths of language (some analytic statements) are statements of identity as in "puppies are young dogs" or "a father is a male parent." Such statements are definitions and the "is" is the "is of identity." But "God is good" is clearly not such a statement of identity, for that "God" does not equal "good" or "God" does not have the same meaning as "good" can easily be seen from the following case: Jane says to Betsy, after Betsy helps an old lady across the street, "That was good of you." "That was good of you" most certainly does not mean "that was God of you." And when we say "conscientiousness is good" we do not mean to say "conscientiousness is God." To say, as a believer does, that God is good is not to say that God is God. This clearly indicates that the word "God" does not have the same meaning as the word "good." When we are talking about God we are not simply talking about morality.

"God is the Perfect Good" is somewhat closer to "a father is a male parent," but even here "God" and "the Perfect Good" are not identical in meaning. "God is the Perfect Good" is like "a triangle is a trilateral" in some important respects. Though something is a triangle if and only if it is a trilateral, it does not follow that "triangle" and "trilateral" have the same meaning. Similarly, something is God if and only if that something is the Perfect Good, but it does not follow that "God" and "the Perfect Good" have the same meaning. When we speak of God we wish to say other things about him as well, though indeed what is true of God will also be

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true of the Perfect Good. Yet what is true of the evening star will also be true of the morning star for they both refer to the same object, namely Venus, but, as Frege has shown, it does not follow that the two terms have the same meaning if they have the same referent.

And even if it could be made out that "God is the Perfect Good" is in some way a statement of identity, (1) it would not make "God is good" a statement of identity, and (2) we could know that x is the Perfect Good only if we already knew how to decide that x is good.⁹ Even on the assumption that "God is the Perfect Good" is a statement of identity, we need some independent way of deciding whether something is good, that is to say, we must have an independent criterion for goodness.

Surely it is more plausible to interpret "God is good" to be analytic in the way "puppies are young," "a bachelor is unmarried," or "unjustified killing is wrong" are analytic. These statements are not statements of identity; they are not definitions, though they all follow from definitions and to deny any of them is self-contradictory.

In short it seems to me correct to argue "God is good," "puppies are young," and "triangles are three-sided" are all truths of language; the predicates partially define their subjects. That is to say -to adopt for a moment a Platonic sounding idiom-goodness is partially definitive of Godhood, as youngness is partially definitive of puppyhood, and as three-sidedness is partially definitive of triangularity.

To admit this is not at all to admit that we can have no understanding of "good" without an understanding of "God," and the truth of the above claim about "God is good" will not show that God is the or even a fundamental criterion for goodness.

Let us first see how it does not show that we could not have an understanding of "good" without having an understanding of "God." We couldn't understand the full religious sense of what is meant by "God" without knowing that whatever is denoted by this term is said to be good, but, as "young" or "three-sided" are

⁹ Finally we must be quite clear that x's being good is but a necessary condition for x's being the perfect good, but what would be a sufficient condition? Do we really know? I don't think we do. We do not know how to identify the referent of "the Perfect Good." Thus in one clear sense we do not understand what such a phrase means.

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understood without reference to "puppies" or "triangles," though the converse cannot be the case, so "good" is also understood quite independently of any reference to "God," but again the converse cannot be the case. We can intelligibly say, "I have a three-sided figure here that is most certainly not a triangle" and "colts are young but they are not puppies." Similarly, we can well say "conscientiousness, under most circumstances at least, is good even in a world without God." Such an utterance is clearly intelligible, to believer and non-believer alike. It is a well-formed English sentence with a use in the language. But here we can use "good" without implying anything about the reality of God. Such linguistic evidence clearly shows that good is a concept which can be understood quite independently of any reference to the Deity and that morality without religion, without theism, is quite possible. In fact quite the reverse is the case. Christianity, Judaism, and theistic religions of that sort could not exist if people did not have a moral understanding that was, logically speaking, quite independent of such religions. We could have no understanding of the truth of "God is good" or of the concept God unless we had an independent understanding of goodness.

That this is so can be seen from the following considerations. If we had no grasp of the use of the word "young," and if we did not know the criteria for deciding whether a dog was young, we could not know how correctly to apply the word "puppy." Without such a prior understanding of what it is to be young we could not understand the sentence "puppies are young." Similarly, if we had no grasp of the use of the word "good," and if we did not know the criteria for deciding whether a being (or if you will, a power or a force) was good, we could not know how correctly to apply the word "God." Without such a prior understanding of goodness we could not understand the sentence "God is good." This clearly shows that our understanding of morality and knowledge of goodness is independent of any knowledge that we may or may not have of the Divine. In fact the very converse is the case. Without a prior and logically independent understanding of "good" and without some non-religious criterion for judging something to be good, the religious person could have no knowledge of God, for he could not know whether that powerful being who

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spoke out of the whirlwind and laid the foundations of the earth was in fact worthy of worship and perfectly good.

From the argument we have made so far we can conclude that we cannot decide whether something is good or whether it ought to be done simply from finding out (assuming that we can find out) that God commanded it, willed it, enjoined it, and the like. Furthermore, whether "God is good" is synthetic (substantive) or analytic (a truth of language), the concept of good must be understood as something distinct from the concept of God; that is to say, a man could know how to use "good" properly and still not know how to use "God." In fact, quite the reverse is the case. A man could not know how to use "God" correctly unless he already understood how to use "good." An understanding of goodness is logically prior to and is, as such, independent of any understanding or acknowledgment of God.

V

In attempting to counter my argument for the necessary independence of morality-including a central facet of religious morality -from any beliefs about the existence or powers of the Deity, the religious moralist might begin by conceding that (1) there are secular moralities that are logically independent of religion, and (2) that we must understand the meanings of moral terms independently of understanding what it means to speak of God. He might even go so far as to grant that only a man who understood what good and bad were could come to believe in God. "Good," he might concede, does not mean "willed by God" or anything like that; and "there is no God, but human happiness is nonetheless good" is indeed perfectly intelligible as a moral utterance. But granting that, it is still the case that Jews and Christians do and must--on pain of ceasing to be Jews or Christians-take God's will as their final court of appeal in the making of moral appraisals or judgments. Any rule, act, or attitude that conflicts with what the believer sincerely believes to be the will of God must be rejected by him. It is indeed true that in making moral judgments the Jew or Christian does not always use God's will as a criterion for what is good or what ought to be done. When he says "flouridation is a good thing" or "the resumption of nuclear testing is a crime" he

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need not be using God's will as a criterion for his moral judgment but where any moral judgment whatsoever or where any other moral criterion conflicts with God's ordinances, or with what the person making the judgment honestly takes to be God's ordinances, he must accept them or he is no longer a Jew or a Christian. Accepting this is a crucial test of his faith. In this way God's will is his fundamental moral criterion.

That orthodox Jews and Christians would reason in this way is perfectly true, but though they say that God's will is their most fundamental criterion (and in the way already referred to it is) it is still plain, from the very way the Christian must argue, that he has a yet more fundamental criterion which he must use in order to use God's will as a moral criterion. Such a religious moralist must believe and thus be prepared to make (be committed to) the moral claim that there exists a being whom he deems to be perfectly good or worthy of worship and whose will should always be obeyed. But to do this he must have a moral criterion (a standard for what is morally good) that is independent of God's will or what people believe to be God's will. In fact the believer's moral criterion-"because it is willed by God"-is in logical dependence on some distinct criterion in virtue of which the believer judges that something is perfectly good, is worthy of worship. And in making this very crucial judgment he cannot appeal to God's will as a criterion, for, that there is a being worthy of the appellation "God," depends in part on the above prior moral claim. Only if it is correct, can we justifiably say that there is a God.

It is important to keep in mind that "a wholly good being exists who is worthy of worship" is not analytic, is not a truth of language, though "God is wholly good" is. It is rather a substantive moral statement (expressing a moral judgment) and a very fundamental one indeed, for the believer's whole faith rests on it. Drop this and the whole works go.

It is tempting to reply to my above argument in this vein: "But it is blasphemy to judge God; no account of the logical structure of the believer's argument can be correct if it says that the believer must judge that God is good." Here we must beware of verbal magic and attend very carefully to exactly what it is we are saying. I did not-and could not on pain of contradiction-say, "God must

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be judged worthy of worship, perfectly good," for God by definition is worthy of worship, perfectly good. I said something quite different, namely that the believer and non-believer alike must decide for himself whether there exists or could conceivably exist a force, a being ("ground of being?") that is worthy of worship or perfectly good; and I further said that in deciding this one makes a moral judgment that can in no way be logically dependent on God's will. In fact it is exactly the reverse that is the case. The moral standard, "because it is willed by God," is dependent for its validity on the acceptance of the claim that there is a being worthy of worship. And, as our little word "worthy" indicates, this is unequivocally a moral judgment for believer and non-believer alike.