Kenan Malik on Morality Without God

Religion is often presented as the guardian of moral values. The problem with this, says the author and broadcaster, is that it diminishes what it means to be human. He draws on Plato and a medieval Arab poet to explain why

Many believers think that the only way to be truly moral is to follow a religion which teaches us morality. How would you respond?

Throughout their history, one of the great selling points of religions – in particular the monotheistic religions – has been their importance as a bedrock of moral values. Without religious faith, runs the argument, we cannot anchor our moral truths or truly know right from wrong. Without belief in God we will be lost in a miasma of moral nihilism. “To remove God,” as the theologian Alister McGrath has put it, “is to eliminate the final restraint on human brutality”.

Looking back on history, one might question just how successful God has been as “the final restraint on human brutality”. What really concerns me, however, is the way that religious concepts of morality degrade what it means to be human by diminishing the importance of human agency in the creation of a moral framework. From a religious perspective, it is the weakness of human nature that ensures that God has to establish and anchor moral rules.

In truth, morality, like God, is a human creation. Even believers have to decide which of the values found in the Torah or the Bible or the Quran they accept, and which they reject. What God provides is not the source of moral values but, if you like, the ethical concrete in which those values are set. Rooting morality in religion is a means of putting certain values or practices beyond question by insisting they are God-given. The success of religious morality derives from its ability to combine extreme flexibility – just look at the degree to which religious morals have changed over the centuries – with the insistence that certain beliefs, values and practices are sacred and absolute because they are divinely sanctioned.

Is it just religious believers who look for ethical concrete?

Not at all, secularists often do too. There is, for example, an increasingly fashionable claim that science will decide which values are good and which are bad. I’m as critical of the false certainties of a morality rooted in science as I am of the false certainties of a divinely sanctified moral code. The desire to set moral values in ethical concrete is a yearning for moral certainty – a fear that without external authority, humans will fall into the morass of moral relativism. But there can be no getting away from the fact that as humans we have to stand on our own feet, think for ourselves, create our values and practices, and bear responsibility for them.

Five Dialogues

By Plato (translated by GMA Grube)

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Your first choice is Plato’s Euthyphro from Five Dialogues. Plato was no atheist, was he?

Unlike earlier Greek philosophers, such as Diagoras and Democritus, Plato believed in the divine, and much of his philosophy flowed from his concept of a transcendental reality. He provided the resources for the later Christian view of goodness as a transcendental quality. But in his dialogue Euthyphro he also provides the classic argument against looking to God as the source of moral values, an argument that still resonates 2,000 years later.

In Euthyphro, Plato sets up a discussion between Socrates and Euthyphro, who is about to prosecute his father for the murder of one of his servants. Socrates is shocked by Euthyphro’s action and wants to know how Euthyphro distinguishes between the pious and the impious, the good and the bad.

And how does he?

Well, Euthyphro provides a series of definitions, each of which Socrates knocks down. Socrates’s key question is this: “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” Unless the gods love something for no good reason, then they must love something as pious because it inherently possesses value. But if it inherently possesses value, then it does so independently of the gods.

Or, as Leibniz asked at the beginning of the 18th century, if it is the case that whatever God thinks, wants or does is good by definition, then “what cause could one have to praise him for what he does if in doing something quite different he would have done equally well?” If, on the other hand, God recognises what is good and promotes it because of its inherent goodness, then goodness must exist independently of God. But God is no longer the source of that goodness, nor do we need to look to God to discover that which is good.

But believers would argue against that.

Yes, a believer might argue that by definition God cannot choose anything but the good. God cannot but be good, so the Euthyphro dilemma is ill formed. If God and the good are one and the same, then we cannot ask whether God chooses good, because it is good – the very question separates that which is inseparable.

But we can restate the Euthyphro dilemma in a different way, to meet such an objection. We can ask: “Is God good because to be good is to be whatever God is; or is God good because He has all the properties of goodness?” If it is the former, then we find once more that goodness is arbitrary, since it would be whatever God happened to be. If, on the other hand, God is good because He has all the properties of goodness, then it means that such properties can be specified independently of God. And so the idea of goodness does not depend upon the existence of God.

Another problem with a religious definition of goodness is that if you look at the Bible, God seems to have condoned many practices which we now see as morally unacceptable.

That’s true. History reveals that God has in the past deemed to be morally acceptable many practices that we now regard as immoral – torture, slavery, the burning of witches, the murder of Jews. Or rather, in the past believers insisted that God had sanctified such practices. Today few believe that. That’s not because God had changed his mind, but because society has. We have come to recognise the moral wrongness of these practices. We live in a very different moral universe from that of 500, 1,000 or 2,000 years ago. And as the moral universe has changed, so have believers’ moral codes. All of us, believers and non-believers, have to define for ourselves, not just individually but collectively, what is good and bad. Believers then attach such moral claims to a God, insisting that he is the source of moral values. Atheists accept that those values are human-created.