Morals need God’s presence

Last month I wrote about the “Ecclesia” pastoral programme that has been launched in the archdiocese of Cape Town to encourage formation through small faith-sharing groups.

Ecclesia is also trying to equip us against the challenges of polemics.

The polemicists (atheists, agnostics, and so on) want to prosecute the intellectual contradictions of our faith lives, whereas the faithful prefer to explore them.

Since the era of the apostles, polemics have looked at the cross as sign of contradiction and foolishness, while the faithful, like St Paul, do so in the wisdom of our unfathomable God.

No matter how many metaphoric approximations we hurl in an attempt to describe God, we only go as far as Aquinas—that is, describing God only by what God is not. Even the word “God” is not enough to describe the “incomprehensible ground of man’s transcendent existence” (as Fr Karl Rahner put it); we use it for our convenience.

The idea of God being unreachable terrifies us, which is why God, in his unfailing grace, reached out to us through incarnation. Beyond that, God refuses to be made into a metaphor or to be subjected to scientific dissection to satisfy our unhealthy curiosities.

But we can still investigate religion (that is the study of how we, as human beings, relate to God); in fact, even Karl Marx said this was the most serious project an intellectual could undertake.

“Any sociologist will agree that religion, true or not, is useful for the solidarity and moral consensus of society,” the contemporary German Marxist Jürgen Habermas argues, echoing the sentiments of most polemics.

“The problem,” her adds, “is that this utility depends on at least some people actually believing that there is the supernatural reality that religion affirms. The utility ceases when nobody believes this anymore.”

So the polemicists see religion only as a convenient weapon for social cohesion. They respect religion only for its useful public function, quite apart from its private consolations (the encounter with a living God).

Everyone agrees that the “colonisation” of society by “turbo-capitalism” has created a cultural crisis that undermines the societal solidarity without which democratic rationality cannot function. Which is why it is agreed that even in the “post-secular society” only the “moral intuition” that religion supplies can hold things together (at least for now, until something more “enlightened” comes along, it seems).

But the polemicists are irritated by the believers who claim that without God, no morality can exist.

Catholics, based on the philosophic arguments of Aquinas, believe that God willed things because they were good, and not that things are good because God wills them. It would seem then that morality, for Catholic Christians anyway, is grounded in reason, not the will of God.

This helps the polemic argument, which probably is why they think Catholicism, “stripped of mambo-jumbo of Mass”, is one of the highest rational religions.

There is, of course, the scenario dramatically demonstrated in Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, which says that without God everything is permissible, and consequently there will be no need for morality.

“If God does not exist, then anything is permitted,” Ivan Karamazov declares. It follows, by modus tollens, that if there are sanctions (such as the apple story in the book of Genesis), then God exists, but in the absence of God the question of morality has no absolute meaning.

It would seem to me that the real importance of God is not that God rewards the good and punishes the evil, but that God grounds the very distinction between good and evil.

Without an objective moral order, good and evil are mere preferences (whether cultural or individual). In the absence of that objective order, for instance, Mother Teresa would be morally equal to Adolf Hitler. There would be no way to adjudicate who of those two is good and who is evil, because the very terms would be meaningless.

That is why I believe that an objective moral order can come only from God. If God does not exist, then we have only our preferences, with nothing beyond consensus to say that my preferences are better than yours. Even our cultural preferences and position on practices—such as female circumcision, slavery, genocide, or honour killing—would depend only on perceived goodness, but without absolute grounds.

For the faithful, the motivation to be good is not fear of hell, but because not to be good is a betrayal of the moral order inherent in creation (reason), hence the loving creator who put it there.

“Love your neighbour as you love yourself”, for example, is not just a Christian moral consensus but a divine rule according to the Bible. And the mere fact that many Christians do not perfectly honour it is not an argument against the absolute goodness of God who created it, but rather serves as an exposure of human moral weakness that is unable to live up to the perfection of the divine absolute.

Without the divine imperative, therefore, morality rests on brittle ground .