Is Nothing Sacred? A (Secular) Philosophy of Incarnation

During his Papal Visit to the United Kingdom in September 2010 Pope Benedict XVI gave an Address in Westminster Hall[1] in which he expressed his concern ‘at the increasing marginalisation of religion, particularly of Christianity’. He went on to say that ‘There are those who would advocate that the voice of religion be silenced, or at least relegated to the purely private sphere’. Using strikingly similar language the Catholic philosopher John Haldane has remarked in a recent collection of essays on ‘the exclusion or ‘silencing’ of religion within philosophy’. ‘Religion has become an unwelcome presence’, he says, ‘and efforts to introduce it are generally resisted’.[2]
Meanwhile, In a recent interview (July 2010) in the New Statesman[3] the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was invited to respond to the question, Can we make sense of morality without a religious notion of a transcendent or supernatural being? He resp0nded to this question in the following terms:
I think that to make sense of unconditional rights or claims, we need to be clear that there is such a thing as universal human nature and that this has some intrinsic dignity or worth. To try and ground this independently of the idea of a transcendent source of value seems to me not finally feasible. People do, of course, make such claims, and do so in good faith, but I don’t see how you can define a universally shared, equal, independent-of-local-culture-and-habit conception of human flourishing without something more than a pragmatic or immanent basis.
In other words, I think morality ultimately needs a notion of the sacred—and for the Christian that means understanding all human beings without exception as the objects of an equal, unswerving, unconditional love.
And, echoing this talk of the necessity of reference to ‘the sacred’ the philosopher Gordon Graham has written in the following terms[4]:
(I)f we characterise ‘the sacred’ in terms of absolute requirements and prohibitions, it appears that something more needs to be said about the authoritative nature of these absolutes. Since ‘absolute’ here contrasts with dispensable or negotiable, and nothing that arises from human will or inclination alone … is non-negotiable, we need some further step that makes submission of the will intelligible. In most religions the further step is evident, because encounters with the sacred are encounters with a divine or supernatural realm, a different order of reality that is (in some sense) beyond or greater than the natural world of human pleasure and welfare. Anyone who wishes to retain sacred value while abandoning the supernatural must therefore explain what it is that enables the sacred to require veneration, to forbid desecration and so on.
Pope Benedict went on to urge his audience ‘to seek ways of promoting and encouraging dialogue between faith and reason at every level of national life.’ He remarks that ‘the world of reason and the world of faith—the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief—need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilisation’. The Pope supports this contention with the following brief outline of a position:
The Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation. According to this understanding the role of religion in political debate is not so much to supply these norms, as if they could not be known by non-believers … but rather to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles, this “corrective” role of religion vis-à-vis reason is not always welcomed … partly because distorted forms of religion … can be seen to create social problems themselves. And in their turn, these distortions of religion arise when insufficient attention is given to the purifying and structuring role of reason within religion. It is a two-way process. Without the corrective supplied by religion, though, reason too can fall prey to distortions, as when it is manipulated by ideology, or applied in a partial way that fail to take full account of the dignity of the human person.
Benedict talks about his Church’s ‘overriding concern to safeguard the unique dignity of every human person, created in the image and likeness of God’, and he remarks in terms that echo those of Rowan Williams, that ‘if the moral principles underpinning the democratic process are themselves determined by nothing more solid than social consensus, then the fragility of the process becomes all too evident.’
Benedict’s measured remarks take the form of an invitation to a dialogue with ‘secular rationality’ in a cultural atmosphere, as he perceives it, and not without grounds, of indifference or hostility to religion. It is certainly true that the more populist exponents of secularism have sometimes been intemperate in the expression of their opposition to religion, and usually in ways that identify it with the distorted forms that Benedict refers to, those of fundamentalism and sectarianism. However, the irony of popular polemic and public pronouncements on both sides is that each views the other as the harbinger of moral catastrophe.
But the conditions for the possibility of a dialogue between religion and secularism are not unavailable. They do, however, involve a frank assessment by both parties of the terms in which they and their partners in the dialogue conceive the terms of the discussion. The way that Benedict casts those terms naturally reflects his own understanding of the world of faith or religious belief, but it also reflects his understanding of the world of reason. Although the Catholic Church has a tradition of vindicating the reasonableness of faith, it is noteworthy that in referring to the way in which reason and faith need each other, and after he has glossed ‘reason’ as ‘secular rationality’, Benedict talks about ‘the purifying and structuring role of reason within religion’ (my italics). This is an unlikely role for ‘secular rationality’ and suggests some suppressed scepticism about the reality of the mutual need—‘secular rationality’ can be ‘corrected’ by religion, whereas the latter has nothing to learn from the former. The context here is the very specific one that related to the traditional Catholic view that ‘objective norms’ can be discerned through the use of reason. ‘The “corrective” role of religion is to help to purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles’. But why can religion offer this “corrective” role?—because although reason has access to ‘objective norms’ prescinding from revelation, these norms are nevertheless also revealed and so religion is in a privileged position: it can determine whether or not ‘secular rationality’ gets it right. Secular thinkers may agree that reason can fall prey to distortions in the form of ideological manipulation, for instance, without agreeing that reason is to be saved from this by the corrective supplied by religion—though this is not to say that the religious tradition cannot be one of the sources by which distortions of reason can be corrected. For one thing, distortions in the particular uses of reason can be corrected by further particular uses of reason, as any good Marxist would tell us.
But now, although the doctrine is that reason has access to ‘objective norms’ independently of revelation, it does not follow from this that the objectivity of these norms can be grounded independently of revelation—as reflecting God’s will, for instance. There seems to be a convergence here in the thinking of Benedict XVI, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the philosopher Gordon Graham, a convergence on the idea of the necessity of ‘the sacred’ as a transcendent grounding. There is a further convergence on the idea of the special role of religion in protecting the dignity of the human person, in the absence of which this dignity is in jeopardy.
2
In casting ourselves in the roles of partners in dialogue we need to articulate at some point not only our general sense of our own position but also our sense of our interlocutor’s—both parties need to stand ready to be corrected in their version of the other. As we have seen, Gordon Graham has offered a challenge to the secular thinker about the nature of their commitment to ‘sacred value’ and this provides a convenient starting-point, since he makes certain assumptions about what must be a difficulty for such a person, a difficulty he expands on as follows[5]:
Distinctive attitudes separate moral and religious absolutes, however, the latter being more naturally characterised by the language of veneration and desecration. The difference enables us to explain the following sort of example … if circumstances were to bring it about that you were driven to steal from your mother, it is sufficient (perhaps) to explain the wrongness of doing so in terms of quite general moral obligations and prohibitions and/or her well being. But suppose you are invited to trample on a photograph of your dead mother. What exactly is objectionable about doing this? There is no obviously moral dimension—since no right is violated and you could not be doing her harm in any obvious sense …. Yet at a minimum most people would be deeply reluctant to do this, and need some very strong reason to counter this reluctance. Anyone who finds this reluctance puzzling and thinks there is no real objection because ‘it’s only a picture’ reveals themselves as oddly inhuman … to this extent they lack any sense of the sacred; which is to say, while they can judge what is useful and beneficial, they have no place for the veneration of things.
There are several things I want to draw attention to here. The first is the idea that if we are to talk of the absolute we need an account of its ‘authority’ which will render intelligible submission of the will; the second is that whatever can properly be called ‘absolute’ cannot derive from human will or inclination alone; the third is that there is a distinction between a sense of the sacred and ‘morality’; and the fourth is that in talking of the sacred we are talking of absolute requirements and prohibitions.
The direction of thought, if I understand Graham correctly, is that someone can practise ‘morality’ without having any sense of ‘the sacred’. But it is the sacred which gives morality its absolute force in the form of requirements and prohibitions which compel the will’s submission—and in the absence of any such source ‘morality’ would become no more than a negotiable product of the will. A religiously-minded person will refer ‘sacred value’ to a supernatural source—and the challenge to the secular thinker is that they need to give an alternative account of the sacred—if they wish to retain the notion—if they wish, that is, to resist the thought, as they surely should, that morality is a dispensable product of the will, They need, in other words, to explain
what prevents it from collapsing into a mere affirmation of the Ubermensch, in itself groundless and without implications for others (as Nietzsche acknowledged). We can interpret Kant’s Groundwork as an attempt to attach veneration to morality (through ‘reverence for the moral law’) and this is a move that contemporary thought often makes in its assertions that human life is ‘sacred’ and human rights ‘inviolable’.[6]

Graham goes on to remark that ‘the secular aspiration to retain sacred value without supernatural warrant has more work to do’ and voices the suspicion that ‘any purely naturalistic account of the sacred will reveal a philosophical instability that can only be resolved when the supernatural is invoked as its ground’.
When we make claims as philosophers there is usually something that we wish to resist through the contrary force of what we assert. I am sympathetic to Graham’s resistance to the idea that morality can be grounded in the bare affirmation of the will, but am not so sure that I want to turn in the same direction as he does—I suppose, indeed, that I should want to offer a purely naturalistic account of the sacred, if I were convinced that it had any (grounding) role to play at all.
It looks as though the thought is that if we cannot locate the ground of morality in the human will then there is nowhere to go but the divine. I say it looks as though this is the thought, but it is rather the case that Graham is re-asserting the status quo ante in the form of a very specific theology—that the source of the good is to be found in God’s will. The peculiar thing is that Sartre’s atheistic existentialism shares that theology: if God does not exist then the source of the good must lie not in his will but in the will of human beings. I agree with Graham that this will not do and that we must find something that informs and compels the will. It is significant that in his lecture Sartre does make a significant concession and offers us just that—the consideration that in choosing for myself I choose for all. We have to ask the question, with what does he thereby seek to inform the will, what is the essential guiding information? By the same token philosophers have been dissatisfied with Kant’s appeal to reverence for the moral law since it raises the question what is it about the moral law that merits reverence and if we seek an answer to that question we go outside the terms of Kant’s own discussion. My problem with Graham’s position, though, is that it moves too quickly back to the default theology, to the thought that if we cannot ground absolute value in the human will then we must return to the original position and locate it in the divine. It is not that we cannot have something that we call morality in its absence—though it is most likely to be the tense negotiation of power and interest that belongs to the state of nature or as commended by the hard men of Plato’s Republic—but what we cannot have is the idea that human life is ‘sacred’ or that human rights are ‘inviolable’. We might have a brief consensus, to use Benedict’s word, in favour of treating human rights as ‘inviolable’ but that is not what makes them such and is no kind of ground.
I want to look more closely at the way in which Graham is using this term ‘morality’ as it emerges in his discussion of the case of the photograph. Here someone is invited to trample on the picture of their late mother. It seems to me that the repugnance most of us would feel is a moral repugnance. But Graham remarks that there is ‘no obviously moral objection’ and does so on the grounds that since she is now dead no harm is done to her and no rights have been violated. But this position relies on a deracinated notion of morality in which judgment and action are cut off from their own moral grounds and distinctive reasons. It is obvious that many people will want to say that to trample on her image would be an act of ‘desecration’, and also that in using this expression we reach into a religious lexicon, and in doing so register our sense of the gravity of the act. The invitation is to an expression of contempt towards a representation of the mother and therefore of the filial bond that grounds concern for her well being. The photograph is a representation in both senses of that term: it pictures the mother but also serves as a concrete universal, evoking the parental relationship more generally. If you say, but you don’t harm her, I reply that you have been invited to show contempt for a moral idea. It is inviting someone to express an attitude that is contrary to that which would inform their conduct.
Part of the problem is that the notion of morality has been reduced to a system of requirements and prohibitions, which thus understood would always be thought of as an external constraint upon one’s freedom rather than an expression of inner necessity—and if that is a false impression the language needs to be altered. Paradoxically, the focus is not exclusively on requirements and prohibitions, but also on judgments of harm or well being. But such judgments are an expression of our moral intelligence in the presence of which it is difficult to see the function of the language of requirement and prohibition. The motivation to avoid what one sees will harm someone is different from the motivation to avoid what is prohibited. It is true that we are unreliable and double-minded beings and there is room for the imperative voice within a divided self—but such an imperative is self-addressed to a recalcitrant but morally responsive intelligence. By contrast, the motivation to do what is required and avoid what is prohibited must presumably be obedience to the authority that such language presupposes, in this case the will of God. But it seems strange to think that the source of one’s reluctance to trample on the image of one’s own mother is that it is against God’s will.
Graham’s challenge had been that anyone who wished to ‘retain sacred value while abandoning the supernatural must therefore explain what it is that enables the sacred to require veneration, to forbid desecration and so on’. The qualification of ‘value’ by the term ‘sacred’ is intended to mark our readiness to talk of human rights, say, as ‘inviolable’, or of human life as ‘sacred’, so that this inviolability is properly an object of veneration and can be desecrated. What I have sought to resist is the introduction of the language of requirement and prohibition here on the grounds that they are external to what is venerated or desecrated, so that we are looking for reasons for action that are external to the nature of the acts themselves, reasons connected with obedience to authority. We have by contrast to find an aspect of the object that is venerated that compels or draws out our veneration, not as a requirement but as an expression of necessity. The theistic version of this is that ideally the believer is conformed to God’s will and falls in with it (love God and do what you want), but not for the sake of obedience to that will.
3
As far as the silencing or exclusion of religion in philosophy is concerned many would respond, perhaps too precipitately, that it is not suppression but ennui: it is a story we have stopped listening to. The New Statesman interviewers had asked Rowan Williams whether we can make sense of morality without a notion of a transcendent or supernatural being and although this question lacks definition I would hazard that most philosophers would say that of course we can make sense of morality without this religious notion. The trouble is that we are not operating with a single and commonly understood notion of morality and even those who wish to give a religious account might differ in their view of how we should understand morality. I said ‘too precipitately’ because we might not have got the story right and, to return to the theme of the responsibility of partners in a dialogue, some religious thinkers may protest that indeed the secular thinker has not understood the story. My concern in what follows is to explore whether there is a religious account that a non-theistic, secular thinker can do business with. I believe that Rowan Williams offers the sketch of such an account, but first I want to examine a popular picture of what is involved in bringing God into morality, and the discussion will continue themes from Graham’s account of sacred value.
But God torments me. That is the only thing that is tormenting me. What if he doesn’t exist? What if Rakitin is right, that it’s a fiction created by mankind. For if he doesn’t exist, then man is the master of the earth … But how can he be virtuous without God? That’s the question. For whom will he love then? Man, that is … Rakitin says that one can love humanity without God. Well, only a little snivelling half-wit can maintain that. I can’t understand it.[7]
These remarks of Dmitry Karamazov (Mitya) repay attention, of course, but the comment that has received popular philosophical attention through Sartre’s treatment of it is his brother Ivan’s reported comment that if there isn’t a God then everything is permitted. As Mitya puts it, ‘if there is no God and no afterlife, you can do what you like. Everything is allowed.’[8] Sartre’s purpose is to underline our abandonment and our responsibility, and, indeed, the real apodosis is not that everything is permitted but that we should stop thinking in terms of permission—which is only dubiously a moral category at all, implying, rather, a Kantian heteronomous subject. The common nineteenth century anxiety about the consequences of the loss of belief was partly about social control. In terms of the moral education of the species, sapere aude notwithstanding, the general population is not only incapable of making moral judgments independently but the loss of belief removed the significant sanction of eternal punishment.
The description of Mitya’s perplexity reflects this background. The object of his anxiety is the loss of a moral compass and of sanctions. But this alarm is driven by the standards themselves. His concern that if there’s no God then you can do what you like posits a rampant human subject who lacks moral discernment and instruction and can act with impunity. It would be self-defeating to claim that this is the condition of the human subject as such, since it is a description offered by a human subject from a position that transcends what it describes. But the anxiety about moral heteronomy thus conceived tends to conflate the idea that an action is wrong with the idea that it is prohibited, with the result that the idea of transgression, which is always prompted by the forbidden, strays into the ethical. Indeed it would be bizarre if the protest against their father’s murder was that it’s not allowed rather than that it’s an act of murder. We act morally when we refrain from an action because we have some reason to judge that it is wrong, not because we believe it to be prohibited. An action’s being wrong is one reason for public prohibitions and sanctions imposed on unreliable moral agents, but if we can see the reason then the prohibition is redundant. If there were no God, to continue with this simplistic theology, the reasons we have for judging that certain actions are wrong would still obtain, even if God wasn’t around to ban them as it were.
But Dmitry’s anxiety thus expressed locates the motivation for moral action outside of what otherwise might be counted as a moral reason for acting. The grossness of the idea that someone would refrain from murder because it is not allowed rather than because it is murder shows, even as we multiply examples of people thinking in just this way, that motivation is being sought outside morality. Someone may be moved to refrain from violent action through the threat of dire consequences. But this is precisely a motivation outside morality itself and it depends upon a notion of effective authority. By the same token, and to repeat, we have a similar problem with the language of moral requirements and prohibitions. If we think of it as a moral requirement that we should do no murder we are already locating our motivation for this outside reflection on the nature of the act itself and we should have to ask what it is that would move us to act according to a requirement. If we simply refer back to the nature of the act then we have already cancelled the need to talk in terms of requirement and prohibition. Otherwise we should have to locate it in obedience to authority: we are moved to do what is required of us, to refrain from what is prohibited, and we as a human subjectivity stand over against what is thus perceived as a restraint, rather than invoking the internal language of what we might feel compelled to do or what we might recoil from.
I labour this point about the language of requirement and prohibition because, if we persist in using it, there are consequences for how we understand the motivation for moral action. It would have to be understood as a motivation for not doing what is prohibited and it is hard to see how this could be grounded in anything other than obedience to authority. If God is conceived as the source of what is permitted and what is prohibited then if we stop thinking theistically we need also to abandon talk of permission and prohibition at all, unless we can show that there is some alternative basis for that talk, some alternative basis for the notion of authority that is implicitly appealed to. But it is not so easy to disentangle oneself from the theological conception and the forms of language we inherit from it. I have heard a well regarded philosopher declare that the fundamental question in moral philosophy is ‘what may we do?’—and philosophers routinely talk of ‘moral requirements’ and ‘moral prohibitions’. But this seems to reflect a particular experience of ‘morality’, one which sees it as a constraint upon rather than an expression of one’s human freedom. The model is too obviously that of political obligation, the necessity of obedience and the threat of sanctions, a language which is superimposed upon and then distorts the theistic doctrine of love.
When we start to reflect philosophically upon morality we are all too likely to find a moral language ready to hand and we enter it unthinkingly and systematise and rationalise what is thus presented as a given, but which for all that determines a conception of moral life which ought really to have been brought into question. Nevertheless, with the language of requirement and prohibition ready to hand, it is relatively easy for a theorist to transfer the source of the authority from the will of God to the consenting will of human beings who see such an arrangement as in their interest. Whether this is adequate to the complexity of moral psychology is another matter.
4
How else can we understand the question raised by Rowan Williams’ interviewers—Can we make sense of morality without a religious notion of a transcendent or supernatural being? Surely they can’t be asking whether morality tout court would be possible without such a notion—but what conception of morality can we sustain if we break the connection? This indeed is the thrust of Graham’s challenge to the non-theistic thinker. Perhaps we can frame the question in this way: is the idea of an ‘absolute’ morality an essentially theological conception that is unavailable to the secularist? I shall in what follows contend against this ‘essentially’ and suggest instead that this idea has one of its settings within a theistic culture but is not limited by that setting.
It is time to consider Rowan Williams’ response to the original question, which I shall reproduce here for convenience:
I think that to make sense of unconditional rights or claims, we need to be clear that there is such a thing as universal human nature and that this has some intrinsic dignity or worth. To try and ground this independently of the idea of a transcendent source of value seems to me not finally feasible. People do, of course, make such claims, and do so in good faith, but I don’t see how you can define a universally shared, equal, independent-of-local-culture-and-habit conception of human flourishing without something more than a pragmatic or immanent basis.
In other words, I think morality ultimately needs a notion of the sacred—and for the Christian that means understanding all human beings without exception as the objects of an equal, unswerving, unconditional love.
Instead of taking up the generic and opaque ‘morality’ Williams refers to the ‘intrinsic dignity’ of human beings and of unconditional rights or claims in terms which echo the reflections of Gordon Graham and Pope Benedict.
To seek to ground these ideas independently of a transcendent source of value is, he thinks, ‘not finally feasible’. This is a brief answer at the opening of a more wide ranging interview and we cannot expect any further elaboration. The idea of a ‘source of value’, transcendent or otherwise, is not quite clear as it stands but I shall seek to concur in one possible interpretation, viz that we are talking about the idea of a source of our moral evaluations, though whether we can think of that source as ‘transcendent’ is another matter.
I take it that Williams is insisting that in the absence of such a ‘transcendent source of value’ we cannot sustain or are not entitled to the idea that the ‘dignity’ or ‘worth’ we accord human beings is ‘intrinsic’ or that human rights, for instance, are properly to be thought of as ‘unconditional’. To a secular mind, as Williams knows full well, this does not seem remotely plausible. Surely, we might say, if we talk about human rights as ‘unconditional’ we simply imply a determination not to allow any other consideration, such as expediency, to take precedence—and, since we let such considerations take precedence rather frequently, imply that at least when other people override them it is a crime. We do not allow their possession to be determined by any specific privilege of status or citizenship, for instance. When we say that a human being’s dignity or worth is ‘intrinsic’ we imply that it belongs to them simply as a human being (and then, of course, we owe an account of what a human being is in virtue of which we accord them this dignity). And we deny that a particular way of treating other human beings (‘never merely as a means’) depends upon privilege or social status, race, gender or sexual orientation. To use a phrase deployed by Gordon Graham, we are simply insisting that these things are non-negotiable, that you need to meet no further condition to be the recipient of such a right than that you’re a human being.
But to say that these values are ‘non-negotiable’ does not mean that we cannot betray them; when we talk about human rights as ‘inviolable’ we do not mean that they cannot be violated because we violate them all the time, that is why there are rights:—the ‘cannot’ here is that of moral impossibility. We do not give expression to a metaphysical truth but to a moral ideal towards which we are determined to strive—and the significant thing for our purposes lies in the source of that determination to strive. The point is that if we ‘negotiate’ over something non-negotiable we do not register a simple alteration in the direction of the will but a betrayal … of those for whose sake we conceived the ideal.
If we are not to ground our claim that human rights or other moral claims are unconditional or absolute in the bare act of our so willing—because this is no kind of ground at all—it must lie in something that informs and governs the direction of the will and only those who are already theistically inclined will see God’s will as the conceptual alternative ready to hand, though it is a popular error to suppose that this is to replace one arbitrary will for another, since God’s will is that of a being whose essence is goodness. This is not to deny that wicked things are done in the name of this will. Nevertheless Williams’ thought does seem to be that we are not entitled to this unconditionality unless we can refer it to a divine or transcendent source, that if we cannot draw on the divine will to secure it then nothing is unconditional. If we insist that values are absolute then we are committed to a transcendent source, committed to the ‘sacred’. Otherwise all we have left as it were is a morality or, better, a politics of expediency, calculation, advantage, the state of nature. The secularist is unwittingly drawing on a theological view of the world when they seek to defend an absolute conception and since they have rejected that view they have lost the support that secures such claims.
Part of the problem with coming to address this position lies in the opacity of the idea of a source of value, as opposed to a source of moral evaluations. The metaphor of setting a value on something leads us to think that it is something that we confer and that this intentional act is an act of choosing and it all looks like a bare act of will or affirmation again—and, again, the thought is then that if it is we who thus confer value on an object the act is defeasible. Whereas the real point is to see what reasons bring us to attach importance to the object since it is these reasons that inform and direct the will. If we were to talk about what we attach importance to rather than about what we attach value to the voluntaristic language would have less of a foothold and we could replace it by talk of what compels us and what we recoil from. We do not so much confer value as find it and to say that we don’t confer it does not imply that another, divine, will does so confer value, as in conferring dignity on human beings. We do not choose that one kind of reason governs our thinking rather than another.
5
However, it seems to me that Williams himself is thinking in rather different terms, terms which depend upon the idea that would anyway be endorsed by Graham—that it we are to talk of God’s Will we are also talking about the God of Love. The issue for us is not whether as non-theistic thinkers we should steal quietly away, but to see whether there is the possibility of common ground, the possibility of dialogue.
Although it may be misleading to talk in terms of a ‘source of value’ it does make sense to talk about a source of our moral evaluations, or, more to the point, about a source of a language and tradition of recognisably moral evaluation. The root question in all of this is why anyone would care, except for the sake of their own self interest. What is the source of or the motivation for our readiness to accord any human being a dignity that is intrinsic to their being a human being at all, so that the reduction of anyone to ‘bare forked animal’ is a reduction and a violation? The poignancy of the question is marked by the limited scope of the first person plural here. It must have something to do with a view of and an attitude towards what it is to be human at all. The attainment of such a view and such an attitude depends upon the development of a particular formation of subjectivity that is itself what we seek to protect when we seek to protect humanity ‘as an end’.
In order to get a sense of this we need to start with the formation of human solidarity that depends upon a widening of our sympathies, of what david Hue called the natural sentiments of humanity. A condition of such widening is the achieved access to reflection upon one’s situation as that of a human being, rather than, say, as a member of a slave class or warrior caste. An example of this would be the first person plural reflections we might come to have when we confront affliction, mortality or contingency—‘For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out’ or ‘as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods ….’. the solidarity here is of recognised common human experience.
David Hume’s comments about the natural human sentiments are made already from such a position of human solidarity:
Tho’ there was no obligation to relieve the miserable, our humanity would lead us to it; and when we omit that duty, the immorality of the omission arises from its being a proof, that we want the natural sentiments of humanity. (Treatise (Book III Section V)
The remark is made from a position of solidarity (‘our humanity would lead us to it’) which already represents a widening of natural sympathy to human beings generally and it is from this perspective that Hume criticises indifference as wanting the natural sentiments of humanity since such indifference afflicts the miserable. But it is out of the formation of such an educated sense of common human experience that the possibility of human solidarity begins to form, as when one starts to recognise one’s own adversity as an instance of human affliction. To put it another way, to see oneself as one person among others is a moral achievement rather than a demand of rationality. Sympathy , however, is not enough.
Now Williams claims that the idea of the intrinsic worth of a human being cannot be merely ‘pragmatic’. I take him to mean that such a notion makes no sense as a matter of policy or strategy, for instance, that might be altered if our interests change and it becomes an inconvenient burden. He also says that the grounds cannot be ‘immanent’, a term he doesn’t explain in his interview, but which I take to imply that the notion cannot simply be left ungrounded, as when we might say, this is just what we do, this is our practice, it is self evident that human rights are sacred, and so forth. What he is saying, rather, is that love is the source of the dignity we accord any human being. Williams is not talking about sympathy or solidarity here, but refers to God’s love, and I think this is instructive and helpful, as introducing an additional and necessary dimension which, however, I should prefer not to treat theistically:
I think morality ultimately needs the notion of the sacred—and for the Christian this means understanding all human beings without exception as the objects of an equal, unswerving, unconditional love.

This position seems to come close to Graham’s—morality needs a transcendent source of value—a notion of the sacred—and for the Christian this is the unconditional love of God … if you are not a believer you need some other notion of the sacred, some other notion of what would constitute a transcendent source of value. What is there to commend itself to a non-theistic humanist in this position?
It is worth pointing out that there is indeed a non-theistic analogue of this claim, in the sense of a perspective on humanity—in the form of the Bodhisattva who weeps in compassion for the state of suffering humanity. It is important to repeat that this is not an instance of human solidarity, which is a matter of a sympathetic response to fellow human beings rather than compassion for the state of humanity as such. This looks as though it is a perspective on humanity from a position beyond it, an idea suggestive of some kind of ‘transcendence’. (The Buddhist version of ‘love’, metta or loving-kindness, expresses itself as mudita or sympathetic joy when it encounters well being and karuna or compassion when it encounters suffering or distress).
But isn’t a secular thinker going to look askance at this implied claim that their passion for justice, say, ‘needs the notion of the sacred’? I think that they might want to reply that ‘morality’ understood as moral action needs a source—precisely the passion for justice, they may say, and may go on to say that we can dispense with the idea of the ‘sacred’, though someone may want to say, perhaps, that this passion is ‘sacred’. Some people may use this term to register our proximity to that whose loss would destroy our humanity. But wouldn’t it be a mistake to regard, say, the passion for justice as the candidate here? Is there not an additional dimension which makes sense of the passion for justice, the compassion of the Bodhisattva, for instance, which drives that passion? In that case it is this self-conscious vision of what it is to be a human being at all and the perspective on humanity, whose loss is to be feared. The fear of such a loss is the fear of our losing what may be regarded as most precious—not a self-regarding, individualist fear but a moral fear about the loss of a perspective in whose absence humanity would destroy itself.
What is crucial here is the idea of humanity as a possible object of attention in the first place. we are familiar with the mythological representations which provide the means of looking at humanity from afar, as it were, whether this is the archetypal Buddhas and Bodhisattvas whose gaze and intervention is incorporated into the Wheel of Life which turns around the greed, hatred and delusion of humanity, or the Olympian gods looking down satirically, though sometimes with concern, on the dealings of human beings, or the God of Genesis regarding the waywardness of his own creation. All of these represent ways in which humanity becomes an object of attention for us, an object of attention from a perspective that regards us with love and concern. So that we can come to ‘love’ humanity, see the humanity that we are part of, with an attitude of love, pity, compassion for the human struggle, for the conflicted human animal, for the species that is destroying itself, and so forth.
I suggest that in this perspective we have a source of morality—or at least, one way of understanding it is as humanity regarding itself from a position beyond what we might call the state of nature—humanity regarding the turmoil of the all too human world. The way we understand Hume’s talk of ‘wanting the natural sentiments of humanity’ is instructive here since it has a double aspect. On the one hand we can feel sympathy for someone on the wrong end of this indifference, who is adversely affected; but we can also feel pity for mankind and its progress, vitiated by the prevalence of its indifference and cruelty, and so forth—a compassionate diagnosis of our condition which, as such, is the object of a particular kind of distress whose disposition is to intervene.
These representations of humanity come from a position ‘beyond’ it as it were and from a perspective of which it is largely unaware, from the point of view of which, however, humanity needs to be ‘saved’ from itself. But the ‘beyond’ is of course misleading. The perspective depends upon a capacity I have already mentioned, that of seeing the universal in the particular, seeing the particular as representative—so that we can suddenly stand back from some tribal skirmish, say, and see the epitome of human folly, the pity of war.
What Williams says puts him in a position of dialogue with this non-theistic humanism. He does after all talk about understanding all human beings as the objects of unconditional love. What we can share is the vision of, the brief participation in, such a fugitive perspective, and the common task of embodying it in a naughty world. Now it is natural to take his comments as a form of the assertion (the ‘faith claim’) that we are all God’s creatures and that each of us is the object of an enduring divine love. But Williams doesn’t quite make this traditional claim, or at least not explicitly, and it is this reticence that puts him in dialogue. The explicit reference to deity is omitted. Disagreement would arise at the point at which those of us who are non-theistic humanists would take the view that the faith claim that we are all the creatures of a loving God is one, culturally determined, expression of a vision, aspects of which can be shared. I emphasise the word ‘vision’ because what we have here, whether it is contemplation of the wonder of the world or of the universal in the particular, is a rare, fugitive experience of a nevertheless potent perspective inhabited briefly by exemplary human beings whose representations of that vision have entered the written and oral traditions, influencing the forms of culture and language, including the forms of expression of practical imperatives that derive from the perspective but which are in competition with the instincts and imperatives of our ‘lower’ nature, the gredd, hatred and delusion that keep the Wheel of Life turning.
Humanism can share aspects of this vision, though they may prefer other forms of imaginative representation than those of the traditional scriptures. But it seems to me that reference to the vision or the perspective thus disclosed is a conceptual necessity.
We might talk, in shorthand, as Richard Norman has done, about the ideal of universal benevolence that we have inherited from Christian and other traditions. And we might add that the ideal has generally been expressed in the midst of the countervailing forces of tyranny and arbitrary power. Against this background, in the midst of which the ideal is conceived and into which it is thrown, talk of universal benevolence sounds both benign and bloodless, lacking battle experience as it were, and as a phrase it fails to catch the passionate note which belongs to its barely heard and self-sacrificing presence in our bloody histories—Christ before Pilate is the enduring image of the meeting of spiritual and worldly power. So we need to make a distinction between this perspective on humanity and the ‘love of humanity’ that Dmitry Karamazov refers to:
But how can he be virtuous without God? That’s the question. For whom will he love then? Man, that is … Rakitin says that one can love humanity without God. Well, only a little snivelling half-wit can maintain that. I can’t understand it.
I imagine that part of the point of this dismissive gesture is that to a believer like Mitya engaged in his own spiritual struggle, it must look like an attenuation and parody of the great commandment of the New Testament, whose spirit subverts the whole idea of commandment—to love God with your whole strength and to love your neighbour as yourself. The energy, as it were, goes into loving God and the love of the neighbour is an expression, a natural outflowing of this. Or at least it is if we conceive loving God as participating in the life of love that constitutes his nature. In its absence the love of the neighbour must appear effete and ungrounded, nerveless and abstract, since it has lost its driving, motivating force. But perhaps there is a clue here and the scepticism is itself suspect.
It insinuates that love of the neighbour could not become the commanding passion of subjectivity. Nevertheless, if we are to talk about a passion in such terms then we need an objective correlative in the form of a representation of humanity that makes it an intelligible object of that passion, so that love of the neighbour continues to be an expression, but of a love of humanity that sees it for what it is, and sees it with compassion, a commanding perspective that reveals the plight of the neighbour—as a member, like ourselves of a self-conscious species, riven by division and inner conflict, which needs to be saved from its own excesses, is capable of cruel tyranny and heroic self-sacrifice.
This is a God’s eye or Bodhisattva’s view of humanity: a species in need of salvation, a conception of it as a whole and from a great height, from a position beyond it, a view imbued with pity and delight. But these high attitudes, once refracted in the dense obscuring light of human life, express themselves in our evaluations of and responses to human conduct—including our own. The perspective on humanity is one thing, but if it compels action it needs to find forms of expression in the transformation of the human community, saving ourselves. This necessary duality of perspective, the global vision and the immersion in action, may be one of the insights that a non-theist may find in the myth of the Incarnation. How does the pity for the human world express itself in the world, make its voice heard. Seeing the plight of humanity God sends his only begotten son into the world … the world knew him not, and so on … and even the Olympian gods were sometimes oved to intervene in human folly, the Buddha draws quiet attention to the diagnosis and the remedy.
We are at once capable of this vision and go on to act in the world in ways that reflect or neglect it, with Jesus as the exemplar or ideal embodiment of a life and mind wholly ordered by this vision and impulse of sacrificial love. However, the picture is of a human duality that ‘morality’ both confronts and represents in its own language. It has to be added that the representations of this vision, the forms of its reception, coming into the world, are perverted by virulent movements that appropriate this language to their own ends; and that it can become an oppressive ideological tool.
I can see, then, that a Christian might want to say that to the extent that we live this kind of life we participate, although imperfectly, in the life of God, and that loving God is this participation, whose natural expression is love of the neighbour. And to this extent they will want to say that God’s love for his creation is the transcendent source of value. What a humanist can find here is a more muted form of transcendence: this perspective is rarely achieved and is usually beyond the horizon of, even as it is the condition of, recognisably moral evaluations.
Those of us whose thinking is secular or at least non-theistic have the same evanescent experience of or access to this revelatory perspective on humanity and the conceptual point is that to the extent that it has been culturally received, it determines a recognisably moral outlook and sense of justice. We can call this a source of value if we like.
Seeing love as the source makes good sense of moral scepticism in the spirit of the hard men of the Republic, who do not think in these terms. Someone who demands to know why they shouldn’t use violence to achieve their ends is not, as was sometimes claimed by philosophers, ignorant of the meaning of their own words but, rather, express their alienation from and contempt towards the evaluation that is inscribed in the language. You might say they don’t understand the real nature of the evaluation. The point here is that we should not be thinking of this fundamental perspective as embodied or active in any particular individual or set of individuals: they may be wanting in the natural sentiments of humanity, and unaware of or contemptuous of the spirit of Hume’s description. Its penetration into human life is variable, unstable, ‘fragile’. What does have to be assumed, however, and this is a feature of the intrinsic dignity we have referred to, is a capacity for responsiveness in these terms. The idea of a moral appeal is an appeal to care, to love, embedded in the culture (it has ‘taken’) but the appeal is to an individual, is made by someone on behalf of someone to someone else. As an appeal it seeks a response that it may not find. But the form of the appeal is crucial because it shows the connection with love. It is not to the fact of a requirement or a prohibition, or to the rightness or wrongness of an action, but is rather made by or on behalf of someone in terms of how they are to be affected. The action or restraint that is called for, in other words, is for someone’s sake. If we were to talk of sympathy here we should recall that sympathy is precisely for someone and towards remedial action. It does not engage abstractly with ‘distress’ but with ‘someone’ who is in distress.
6
I have to acknowledge that these reflections are inchoate and theologically unsophisticated. But they are intended as an opening of a conversation, on the part of a non-theistic humanist, a Buddhist, with religious thinkers who have challenged the coherence or ultimate feasibility of an absolute conception of ethics without a transcendent or supernatural grounding. I take that challenge as the expression of an honest anxiety about the consequences of a failure to understand the world aright, as it were. That is a matter for serious conversation, not for cheap polemic. What I have sought to make sense of as a necessary aspect of what we call morality is the translation of pity for the world into the way that such pity might express itself in the world. Moral philosophers tend not to discuss such topics, leaving it to the theologians, but it seems to me that if we can indeed make sense of the idea of pity for the world then our thinking needs to be incarnational, at least in the sense that we need to arrive in our own world and save ourselves from further disaster.
St Tredwell’s House
Papa Westray
Orkney, UK
KW17 2BU
mcghee@liv.ac.uk
[1] http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2010/09/17/papal-visit-2010-the-popes-speech-in-westminster-hall-full-text/
[2] Haldane, J. 2010. Reasonable Faith. Abingdon, Routledge, p 4f
[3] http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2010/07/interview-religious-human
[4] Graham, G. 2009. ‘Religion and Theology’ in Cornwell, J & McGhee, M. (eds) Philosophers and God, London, Continuum, p 229
[5] Ibid p 228
[6] Ibid p 230
[7] Dostoyevsky, F. (1880) trans Magarshack, D. 1958. The Brothers Karamazov. Volume 2. Harmonsworth, Penguin, p 695 (Part Four Book 11)
[8] Ibid p 691

It is a long time since I recorded any thoughts on this blog ... I may have more time now that I have finally 'retired'. I am certainly glad to be free of the often absurd burdens of administration in the higher education sector, to be free of its institutional anxieties and tiresome neuroses. On the other hand, I miss teaching, which I enjoyed.

I wrote something for a Guardian discussion a couple of weeks ago, about whether a university can have a soul .... Meanwhile I have undertaken a salutary exercise, copying out by hand a series of recently published papers which I want to form into a book length study of the idea of philosophy and its relation to religion and spirituality.

Once you start to write out what was once a finished piece it becomes fluid again, and you see what was tentative and what was wrong and, occasionally, what makes good sense. The other advantage is that you gain a panoramic view of a set of preoccupations that are not as it were finished with you, you see yourself circling round the same points, again and again, see the same metaphors at work, the same dependence on a key phrase or trope ...

There are six rams in the garden, obligingly munching away at the grass ... three Shetlands, a Texel and a couple of Suffolks.

Here is a link from the Facebook page of the Cardiff Humanist Group. It is by Julian Bennett:

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=33780953675&topic=14097


It is probably a bit obsessive on my part to go on about the issue of Belief, but I am struggling to get something right, to not misrepresent what we call religious belief, which is not the same as being blandly uncritical. Anyway, here is my response below, which Julian has seen:

The main thing for me is to get a clear sense of what is really involved in theism and to avoid misrepresentations of it. This is not of course the same as ‘defending’ it, as I’m sure you will agree. On the other hand, I find it quite difficult to get a clear sense of what an accurate representation might be, I find the work difficult.

I was disappointed that so many people took me to be saying that someone could believe in God without believing that there is a God when in fact I was questioning whether ‘belief’ is the right category, whether that there is a God is the proper object of a belief.

Now questioning whether ‘belief’ is the right epistemological category is not to rule out theological realism, so isn’t by itself reductionist and certainly doesn’t imply that the alternative is ‘commitment to a way of talking’. This latter is pretty sub-Wittgensteinian in my view, even worse than ‘commitment to a way of thinking’: commitment is a matter of making a decision and I don’t believe a person chooses how they (should) think.

Anyway, the crucial part of what you wrote, as far as I am concerned, is the gloss you put on my alternative suggestion, that believers (come to) conceive or see the world as contingent etc., Your gloss on ‘conceive’ is in brackets: ‘aka believe that’.

First, though, notice that I just referred to ‘believers’. I use that term to refer to those in the Abrahamic tradition, where to be a believer is to trust in God or Jesus or the Prophet or whatever.

I think that the way we have come to reflect upon what we call ‘religious belief’ sits uneasily between this form of discourse (which naturally tends towards talk of commitment and choice because it is about trust and fidelity) and that of empirical inquiry. Critics and defenders of ‘religion’ alike generally seem to me to bring that language of trust and fidelity to bear upon this disputable notion of belief that there is a God and at this point most critics and some defenders of religion also assimilate this to the language of hypothesis formation. The defenders say it is all about committing yourself; the critics say, how can you talk like that when we need evidence. (Some defenders probably say, well we talk about commitment because there is no evidence; others say, well there is evidence, and so it goes on, interminably). And of course there is no evidence, but to think that there should be is an intellectual error. And no one gets away with anything. My point is that we shouldn’t be thinking in terms of belief here at all. ‘Archaeologists now believe that Stonehenge was a centre of healing’. This is a hypothesis that needs to be tested, they need to find evidence to see whether what they believe is actually true or to be rejected: and so they start digging. We can understand this readily enough. That isn’t the whole story about belief but it is a good part of it, and the obvious point is that this archaeological enterprise depends upon an epistemological context of inquiry with a whole series of presuppositions already written in. The religious viewpoint doesn’t lack all this, as though it ought to have all this background. I’d say it is a different game, but you might say, I knew he was a Wittgensteinian! This is why it is more appropriate to think of it in terms of conceiving the world, or, even better, as deriving from a leap of religious imagination. Now this is not to deny that this conception has ‘cognitive content’ or that it can be expressed in terms of particular propositions, but a proposition is not the same as a belief, even though some propositions can be believed. I wanted to say that it is a matter of conceiving the world as contingent, etc., rather than forming a hypothesis about the world or about some higher existence. It is an act of imagination that comes from contemplating the world as a whole. Now forming a hypothesis is also of course an act of imagination, but it is a matter of a conjecture of how things might be in the world, which we can then find out. The leap of religious imagination is seeing the world itself as the handiwork of God, or as God’s gift, or whatever.

As to realism: as far as the believer is concerned it seems to me that the phenomenology is, as it were, one of ‘disclosure’. The image of the spirit of God moving over the waters presents itself in the form of a revelation of how things really are. There is no ‘evidence’ for this, nor is it therefore ‘arbitrary’—as it would be if there ought to be evidence. The crucial thing, though, is that it conceives the world as a whole in the first place. But to talk of disclosure or revelation does not amount to any form of endorsement of the content of the vision. All the believer can say here, it seems to me, is that this is my faith, and it comes from a transformative moment. A realist is someone who takes it that statements about God are true or false, and this quite independently of our powers of verification. But there is no such thing as verification in this context. All the believer has is the vision and if we talk of commitment at all then it would be a matter of committing oneself to keeping the vision alive, say.

Those of us who do not share this vision can at least see that it is just that—a vision that presents itself as a disclosure. The interest for us then is what it seems to secure for believers: we want to know their conception of justice, etc. And, as you say, they have the intractable problem of evil to deal with.

Guardian Comment is Free

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/may/28/theology-philosophy-theodicy

Lord Jim's Dad

I'm getting round to thinking about an essay on the theme of religion and morality. I'm supposed to provide a Buddhist perspective ... Coincidentally, though, I have been reading Conrad's Lord Jim, a sobering novel when it is not terrifying. Here first, though, is a sentence from Conrad which must effectively set the scene:

Few men realise that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings (Conrad)

Near the end of Lord Jim Marlow writes to a friend explaining the contents of a package he has sent him. It includes an old letter from Jim’s father, who was a country parson. Marlow says of Jim:

He had treasured it all those years. The good old parson fancied his sailor-son. I’ve looked in at a sentence here and there. There is nothing in it except just affection. He tells his ‘dear James’ that the last long letter from him was very ‘honest and entertaining’. He would not have him ‘judge men harshly or hastily’. There are four pages of it, easy morality and family news … the old chap goes on equably trusting Providence and the established order of the universe, but alive to its small dangers and small mercies. One can almost see him, grey-haired and serene in the inviolable shelter of his book-lined, faded, and comfortable study, where for forty years he had conscientiously gone over and over again the round of his little thoughts about faith and virtue, about the conduct of life and the only proper manner of dying; where he had written so many sermons, where he sits talking to his boy, over there, on the other side of the earth. But what of the distance? Virtue is one all over the world, and there is only one faith, one conceivable conduct of life, one manner of dying. He hopes his dear James’ will never forget those ‘who once given way to temptation in the very instant hazards his total depravity and ever-lasting ruin. Therefore resolve fixedly never through any possible motives, to do anything which you believe to be wrong’

Marlow remarks that this letter was never answered but

who can say what converse he may have held with all those placid, colourless forms of men and women peopling that quiet corner of the world as free of danger and strife as a tomb, and breathing equably the air of undisturbed rectitude. It seems amazing that he should belong to it, he to whom so many things ‘had come’. Nothing ever came to them, they would never be taken unawares and never be called upon to grapple with fate. Here they are all evoked by the mild gossip of the father … gazing with clear unconscious eyes …

I suppose Jim's father is not the exemplar I would propose for an account of the relationship of morality and religion. The 'serenity', the 'equability' and so on go with the inviolable shelter. It is that and the 'clear unconscious gaze' that is frightening. If I have been there, it has always also been with a sense of something stirring beyond the periphery, a sense of foreboding ... Marlow is perhaps not entirely just but, he sees the old parson from a position unavailable to him and his offspring, Jim's siblings. He knows just what they are unaware of and what makes them unaware. These people are also in Plato's Cave, but to leave the cave is in effect to be expelled from Eden ...

I wrote a piece for the Guardian's Face to Faith column the other day:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/apr/17/this-tedious-fixation-on-belief

Perhaps it was a strategic error: with such a small word limit one can only offer an impression, cannot spell things out or correct misunderstandings. Perhaps it is the start of a conversation, though.

I found this entry in a blog by Norman Geras:
http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2010/04/me-and-michael-mcghee.html

Norman seems to think that I am telling people that they can believe in God without believing that there is a God, and he is surely right to dismiss such a position. He says, moreover, that I ‘out-Armstrong [Karen] Armstrong’, though I have not read her on these issues and so cannot comment on this. I take it that what he has in mind is a facile non-realism of some sort, though whether she is guilty of that I have yet to investigate.

In fact what I was trying to communicate was the thought that there is a distinction between 'believing in God' (the Abrahamic venture of trusting God) and 'believing that there is a God'. Thus Abrahamic trust is not itself a matter of believing that there is a God.

Indeed I was casting doubt on the good sense of this latter notion, which some have said is a philosophical construct. But to cast doubt on this notion is to cast doubt on the idea of a belief that there is or that there isn’t a God. Now this is to imply that whatever our view of the existence of God it is not a matter of believing something. The trouble is that talk of belief has a particular conceptual identity within empirical discourse but also another conceptual identity within religious discourse and it seems to me that we confuse them.


This will irritate some people, who will want to say that believing that God exists is surely implied or presupposed by believing in God's Word ... and they are likely to go on to say that we need to justify this existential claim before we can be said to be justified in 'believing in God's word'—if believers can’t prove this existential claim then their faith is ‘blind’.

(It might be worth saying here that I am not seeking to 'defend' religious belief or to ‘immunise it against criticism’ (the identikit picture of ‘the Wittgensteinian approach’). It seems to me, however, that we need an accurate account of the phenomena and if we are non-believers we should be clear about what it is we seek to deny): we should give the Devil his due, but also God.

What I have suggested as an alternative is that the believer conceives (or comes to conceive) the world as contingent upon a transcendent creative agency.

Thus they do not, for instance, form a belief that there is a transcendent being, and then conclude that the world must be dependent upon his creative activity. Nor, pace many theistic philosophers, do they conclude that the world must be contingent, and that therefore it must be contingent upon a transcendent agency.

It is rather that they see or come to see the world as a limited whole … dependent upon a transcendent cause—which is to express philosophically what is represented pictorially in various scriptures. The point about this is that it amounts to (conversion to) a total vision of the world itself, a vision of how things are that is ungrounded but which is experienced as compelling assent.

This conception of things is not a hypothesis to explain the way things are, nor do I think that it offers an explanation of why there is anything rather than nothing. It seems to me by contrast that it arises in the context of the experience of wonder at the beauty of the world and the image of the creative artist is taken as an intimation of a truth. However, those who respond in terms of this vision must then confront it with the more dreadful aspects of nature, including our human nature, which is to say, the problem of evil rears its head again. Indeed all the familiar problems apply. How can we verify such a claim, how can we know that it is true? Well we can’t know that it is true, and it cannot be verified, is beyond the scope of any possible verification. But it doesn’t follow that it is an arbitrary vision or that it is blind. As for the latter a ‘belief’ is blind only if there are reasons for or against it that are disregarded. Some believers will want to insist that this vision represents a metaphysical commitment, and that does not seem to me to be particularly problematic. It doesn’t get us any further than denying, rightly, that we are involved in an anti-realist position here. Things go wrong, however, when believers try to insist that they are right (which is slightly different from insisting that they have a conception of how things are). One thing more, this is not a belief about the world, it is rather a world picture, a picture within the terms of which beliefs may be framed, and it is also important to note that the form that conversion to this picture, this conception, takes is that of submission or worship. Yes, it is a conception of how things are, that the world and humanity is dependent upon a creative power beyond our conception .. There follow, of course, all the virtues and vices of what we know about organised religion: which is why I referred to our treacherous and mutual duality .... As a secular humanist there are believers I can as it were do business with and others who are beyond any dialogue I could think of myself as having.

However, some theists wish to tie morality to this conception of the world’s contingency upon a divine being. It seems to me, though, that the sense of a brooding care for the world which is imaged by the idea of a divine being that sees that its creation is ‘good’ comes from a profound contemplative sense just of the world as a whole, a vision which itself must now contend with our inner duality, our divided self.

This is an attempt to represent what it is to think theistically. I don’t think in these terms myself … and maybe believers will tell me that I have got it all quite wrong. But my complaint about the tedious fixation on belief is that it is a conversation that is almost completely sterile and that real dialogue has to be about the interior conditions of action.

*******************
Here is an extended version of what I have been trying to say

Spirituality for the godless
Michael McGhee
University of Liverpool

1. How to be spiritual without being religious

‘Godless’ was never a neutral term: in 1528 William Tindale talked of ‘godlesse ypocrites and infidels’ and a ‘godless generation’ is one that has turned its back on God and the paths of righteousness. An atheist, by contrast, a new and self-conscious atheist perhaps, might now wear the term as a badge of pride, to indicate their rejection both of belief and the implication of moral turpitude. Traditionally, though, those who declared themselves ‘atheist’ had a hardly better press than the ‘godlesse’, since ‘atheism’ was and in some cases still is considered a form of intellectual and moral shallowness: thus Sir Francis Bacon offers a bluff refinement of the Psalmist’s verdict on the fool who says in his heart that there is no God:
The Scripture saith, The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God; it is not said, The fool hath thought in his heart; so he rather saith it, by rote to himself, as that he would have, than that he can thoroughly believe it, or be persuaded of it.

In these sentences from his essay On Atheism Bacon expresses the irritated commonsense one associates with a certain kind of believer, who cannot take non-belief quite seriously, but treats it as a kind of wishful thinking or self-deception. Bacon, however, goes further: ‘as atheism is in all respects hateful, so in this, that it depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself above human frailty’.
I shall in what follows speak up for the secular humanist project and defend it against the charge of shallowness and the charge that it leaves us without the resources to overcome our human frailty—though I shall also suggest that the plausibility of the defence depends upon the appropriation of some of the phenomena covered by the term ‘spirituality’. This may seem at first sight incompatible with the project, which is to develop and promote a conception of ethics independently of religious belief, and surely, it will be said, ‘spirituality’ cannot be disentangled from such belief since it has to do with our relationship with God or the things of the spirit—though the clue to what can be retrieved lies in the implicit opposition, viz., with the things of the world or the flesh: an opposition which reveals an ethical estimate of two ways of living from the point of view of one of them. I wish to recommend the notion as a repository of wisdom and experience as we seek to understand and confront the conflicted moral condition which gave rise to that distinction between spirit, world and flesh in the first place. Some secularists have a faintly absurd antipathy to anything that sounds ‘religious’ and may react against my suggestion. Such reactivity, though, is to be found also in their opponents, and it would be unfortunate if all believers and non-believers had in common was an unjust and inaccurate estimate of each other’s position. If dialogue between believers and non-believers is to prosper, then it must be premised on the correction of false perceptions.

ii

The opening verses of Genesis draw on the imagery of artistic production and appreciation and convey a judgment of artistic success. They draw on our experience of the moment when the artist knows their work is achieved and loves it as their offspring—God saw that what he had made was good. But the image of an artist or creator expresses a sense of wonder and delight in the earth’s beauty and, crucially, in the original beauty and innocence of humanity. This sense of wonder, at the earth and at ourselves, takes the imaginative form of delight in what the artist has created and represents the impulse of protective care towards it—towards humanity and the earth. It is the sense expressed in Blake’s thought that ‘everything that lives is holy’. The verses express, but also promote, a common but fugitive human experience, that of inclusive love and benevolence, and this universal sense becomes the half-remembered measure of moral endeavour. It is the felt Sorge that motivates the diverse phenomena that we collect under the term ‘morality’, an experience of the moral sentiments in their universal expression. Now it is certainly true that this is a suspect way of talking—‘he loves humanity but doesn’t like people’—but, as I shall suggest in the conclusion, this inclusiveness or universality may be expressed in and precipitated by the particular, and doesn’t so much embrace all as any. Nevertheless, and this is really our theme, there is a gulf between the acknowledgment, even the love, of the ideal or measure, and the ability to live by that standard.
These moral sentiments are not only independent of ‘religious belief’, but they inform its narratives, and, in the case of the theistic traditions, therefore, have determined (changes in) how God has been conceived in those narratives, both in terms of what he commands and what he sanctions, as exemplified in the familiar difference in conception between the wrathful Jehovah and the ‘still small voice’. Some theists may want to say that we have over time come to a better understanding of God’s will because he has disclosed it gradually and according to our lights, but secularists will simply note the moral improvement enshrined in how that will has been conceived.
In any case, that we describe the moral sentiments as ‘moral’ in the first place indicates our cultural approval of them, and it will be asked what the grounds of that approval might be. It is not as though we exist as a neutral consciousness impartially judging the merits of opposing tendencies: we find, rather, that we have already taken sides. Our approval seems to rest in this underlying but evanescent attitude of inclusive benevolence which I suggested informed the opening of Genesis. It is a fundamental orientation that is, however, often overlain, though its bass note is audible even when most muffled or distant, in the form of disquiet or remorse. I would call it a primal and ungrounded moral vision or perspective, an internal moral ideal, a conscience, perhaps, though I use that term with caution since ‘conscience’ is liable to manipulation and perversion, particularly by what John Buchan called dogmatic enthusiasm, and by creeds that attract (because they express) intemperate mentalities in conflict with this moral ideal. Certainly we cannot give an account of the moral sentiments independently of critical scrutiny of their proposed intentional objects—and the moral sentiments are not, alas, the only human sentiments or impulses to inform the scriptural narratives.
But if we have already taken sides, what are we to make of the idea of metanoia or moral conversion? Surely this is the idea of a ¬re-orientation from a life of crime, as it were, and towards the good. In one sense this is right—in the sense that it represents a self-conscious renunciation of the inner forces that stand in the way of the good, a renunciation motivated by concern for the good, not as an abstract entity, however, but in the sense of concern to avoid the harm and damage one finds oneself doing. The metaphor of the ‘still small voice’ is an apt representation of the phenomenology. Metanoia represents a moment of self-conscious commitment and renunciation that strengthens an orientation that is already in place and is its motivating force. This commitment is activated by the vivid sense of what is endangered by what needs therefore to be renounced. To put it another way, and to draw on diverse sources, metanoia takes the form of a commitment to the processes of self-overcoming or inner jihad—commitment, in other words, to the disciplines of a spiritual life.
To use the language of the state of nature, human beings are capable of sympathy, benevolence and generosity of spirit, though these are limited in scope and force by contending impulses of cruelty, vindictiveness and the ruthless pursuit of power and territory at the expense of others. The antagonism between these fundamental attitudes is also part of the scriptural narrative, though as we shall see the narrative often enough compounds what its history has also sought to resolve. Nevertheless it is a narrative that has plenty to recommend it to humanists since it represents the progress of moral struggle, and spirituality is as it were a body of knowledge that treats of the contours and limits of that struggle. As I have already indicated, and to reassure the more suspicious secularists, the moral sentiments, albeit in contention with our darker nature, are not only independent of religious belief but also inform it, so that religion might be thought of as in debt to morality rather than the reverse.

iii

However, there are two things that the promoters of a humanist ethic would quite rightly dissociate themselves from. The first is that form of allegedly ‘religious’ consciousness and practice which reflects, reinforces and seeks to justify conduct that flows from the dark side of our nature . Recent secularist writers have done this emphatically, but have tended, with a lamentable absence of critical judgment, to tar all religion with the same brush. The second is those ‘moral beliefs’ or ‘moral convictions’ that are determined by credal beliefs or ‘metaphysical commitments’. Needless to say, certain creeds, particularly those which operate with a simple-minded cosmogony, can so represent things that an act of torture becomes a sort of higher kindness and requires one to ‘overcome’ the natural human sentiments even as they appeal to them—they appeal to them, but alter and pervert their objects. One needs to make a distinction here. Humanists would not wish to be associated with a certain kind of justificatory theology or metaphysics even though it endorses moral positions that they hold independently. But nor would they associate themselves with casuistic moral beliefs that are determined by a particular theological or metaphysical position. One thinks for instance of the alleged (but not often self-ascribed) ‘objective disorder’ of homosexuality, and of certain other precise delineations of sexual and reproductive ethics that one associates with the official teaching of the Catholic Church, and to which a rhetoric of moral sentiment is often attached, even though the objects of these sentiments are metaphysically determined and remote.
There is another side to this story, however. In the first instance, ‘being religious’ is quite obviously not all one thing and the resources for a critique of its malformations are available within the history of the traditions themselves, as we have seen and as evinced in Buchan’s wry remarks about the Seventeenth Century Kirk—available even if they are occluded or perverted in certain cultural and political contexts (giving rise to protests and reactions later recognised as ‘movements of renewal’). But even religiously-minded people who would join in the secularist repudiation of religious zealotry will complain that secularists who express admiration for some of the moral teachings of the Bible can in the nature of the case appropriate those teachings only in an incomplete form, and that it is an error to minimise the sharp differences between secularists and ‘people of faith’. It is indeed an error, but there is plenty of common ground, if not about what ultimately constitutes human well being, at least about the justice of striving to establish and maintain the conditions for the possibility of any kind of flourishing at all, and if secularists do not share the hope of eternal life and the conquering of death, they will also note the promise that such a life can be tasted here.
There is, then, a moral content independent of ‘metaphysical commitment’ and ‘religious belief’ that plays an original and determining role in the formation of religious narrative and theology, and is not their outcome—and this notwithstanding the pitiless vein of Realpolitik that also runs through the scriptures, and sometimes distorts and sometimes overwhelms the moral vision. But the articulation and expression of this moral vision requires an account of the conditions for its fulfilment, conditions which are both interior and intersubjective, and I suggest that the concept of spirituality belongs to such an account. Now, the same religiously-minded people who insist that secularists can only partially appropriate the New Testament message will also routinely charge them with a ‘shallow’ and optimistic view of human nature and the possibilities of human progress. This criticism is well-deserved in some cases. It applies to certain polemical writers who have expended their intellectual energies in the refutation of belief and are then too tired or ill-equipped to offer more than a glad gesture towards a glorious future. Nevertheless, the moral vision that the older generation of secular humanists endorsed is precisely a humanist one in its passion for justice and its condemnation of hypocrisy and corruption. But, to return to the issue of spirituality, the humanist movement needs not only to re-endorse this defining moral vision, but also to take seriously the reality of a divided self by incorporating an account of the kind I have just mentioned of the conditions for the fulfilment of that vision.

iv

In his Treatise (Book III Section V) David Hume remarks that
Tho’ there was no obligation to relieve the miserable, our humanity would lead us to it; and when we omit that duty, the immorality of the omission arises from its being a proof, that we want the natural sentiments of humanity.

Hume makes the want of these ‘natural sentiments of humanity’ an object of moral criticism and you might think that he relies in that case on what appears to be the moral judgment that we ought to have them. I have elsewhere tried to defend the view that this kind of ought judgment is an epistemic rather than a practical one—roughly, ‘being possessed of certain sentiments’ describes a condition rather than an action, and there is a shift in the logic of ought as it applies to the two kinds of case. A practical ought judgment is one which implies that there is a reason to do something, whereas an epistemic ought judgment is one which implies that there is a reason to believe something. In the present case the judgment that someone ought to have the ‘natural sentiments of humanity’ implies that there is reason to believe that they will have them, on the grounds that human beings generally do. To have this expectation, though, is relatively naïve since experience shows us all too well that human beings often don’t. But it still makes sense in the face of their absence to insist that they ought to be there—and we thus imply that there must be a special explanation of their absence—and indeed we are usually ready to offer such explanations, usually of a psycho-social nature. But the tone of these judgments depends upon disappointed empirical expectations which have a practical impact—if someone lacks these sentiments then they are dangerous or frightening. There are probably only very few who want these natural sentiments entirely, but we now know well enough how easily they are subverted and overlain or stifled, and not simply by ‘selfishness’ which we have traditionally thought of as the natural contrary of benevolence or sympathy. As we now know a bureaucratic conscientiousness as well as deference to voices of authority can cancel these sentiments in the sense that they cancel awareness of what naturally attracts their attention, and have disastrous consequences for human well-being.
But the idea of ‘having’ or ‘possessing’ the moral sentiments is ambiguous. One can have them in the sense that at least intermittently they provide a perspective on the world, or one can have them in the sense that they dominate consciousness and action in their light flows naturally and without effort. The transition from the one state to the other represents the programme for spirituality.
The problem with the moral sentiments has always been their reliability and their scope since if we are naturally benevolent we are also naturally selfish, fearful and deferential and we anyway exhibit in our sympathy a bias to the near. But, as Hume indicates, we are wanting in the natural sentiments of humanity if we are indifferent to the plight of the miserable, whoever they may be. To be moved to act in the presence of human or other animal misery indicates a widening of the scope of the relevant sentiment of sympathy or compassion. Indeed the very idea of universality as a necessary and ‘objective’ component of morality is in reality a reflection of the internal moral ideal that represents our collective memory of protective care such as informs the opening verses of Genesis. The significant point about them from the point of view of spirituality is that the perspective is easily lost and even when lost we are too full of human frailty to act in its light.
As I have said, we don’t stand over against these opposing forces as a neutral consciousness wondering how to choose, but are, rather, constituted by the struggle—and precisely haunted by one pole of the opposition. The sense of the whole and of an inclusive rather than partial benevolence is not a possibility of our nature that stands on all fours with our appetites, for instance. The latter present themselves already in the form of temptations. The sense of the whole expresses an orientation that determines what we take our nature to be and in the light of which we make judgments about what our demeanour in particular circumstances ought to be, and we explain the absence of that demeanour in terms of desires that we count as wayward just to the extent that they are obstacles.

v

It may be helpful here to consider a suggestion made by the Catholic theologian, Nicholas Lash, to the effect that we should think of the various religious traditions as ‘schools’:
…we would do well to think of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, of Buddhism and Vedantic Hinduism, not as ‘religions’ but as schools, schools whose pedagogy … ‘has the twofold purpose—however differently conceived and executed in the different traditions—of weaning us from our idolatry and purifying our desire’.

I want to suggest that secular humanism is also a school in this sense, one whose pedagogy would also in that case have ‘the twofold purpose … of weaning us from our idolatry and purifying our desire’. You do not need to be a theist to warn against idolatry, and not all the ‘schools’ mentioned here by Lash are theistic. Theologians and religious leaders often warn us against the worship of false gods, and there is a long tradition, already invoked in this paper, that laments the unconscious propensity of believers to fashion God in their own (unregenerate) image, and it is often just these conceptions of deity that are the target of secularist criticism (though some secularists are justly criticised in turn by theologians who think that the real nature of theism has eluded them). But the notion of idolatry also has a moral content: it involves turning away from the paths of righteousness.
In suggesting that secular humanism is also a school, I imply that it is more than an intellectual position, and humanists in any case think of themselves as involved in a movement defined by its concern for human flourishing. Richard Norman, for instance, has talked of the need to give an account of how we should live, but without religion, and he sees humanism as ‘the positive affirmation that human beings can find from within themselves the resources to live a good life without religion’. Notice, however, the collision between Norman’s talk of finding the resources within ourselves and Bacon’s complaint that atheism ‘depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself above human frailty’. We shall have to return to this, though I think the issue turns on an equivocation about what we are calling human nature, about what belongs to our nature and what belongs to ‘the means’ that exalts it above frailty.
The idea of the purification of desire does not present itself in a vacuum and without context. The premise is that unless desire is purified it is inimical to our ends, eclipses our vision, undermines our power of action—the moral notion of purification is predicated on the lived experience of a divided self. This gives us the agenda for the training and ascesis of the spiritual life. In bringing secular humanism into connection with the religious traditions through the common notion of a school I do not seek to assimilate it to religion any more than I should wish to do in the case of the ancient Stoic or Epicurean schools that Lash no doubt draws his inspiration from. But once we take seriously the idea of secular humanism as a movement and as a school, we introduce the notion of the cure of souls, the well being of its members, and all this invites the question whether humanism should see itself, not as a religion among other religions, but at least as a spiritual community (the suggestion is probably too close to the idea of a church or sangha for some humanists to stomach, though it might also give them reason to reconceive such institutions). In any event, I suggest that what we are talking about are schools of spirituality.
For quite different reasons secularists and religionists will resist this term as applied to a humanist movement. But secular humanists can appropriate an operational notion, not only of spirituality, but also of ‘transcendence’, without being committed in either case to religious belief. Both notions can be understood in moral terms, though they also put pressure on our notion of what it is to be moral at all. Transcendence may be understood in the light of our experience of inner conflict and the state of our self-knowledge. This is important because it lies at the heart of doctrines of grace and accusations of humanist pride. Thus we tend to identify ourselves with our familiar ‘unregenerate’ impulses (we make our frailty our nature, if I might contend against Bacon), impulses which determine the horizon within which our attention ranges—and our more regenerate ones are therefore experienced and received as visitations from beyond that horizon, as opposed to being thought of as the promptings of a ‘higher’ but not yet integrated self. This is the point at which believers invoke the notion of grace and Spirit, both of which are attempts, in a theistic setting, to make sense of the phenomena of metanoia, that switch in the balance of forces when we identify with universal and disinterested ends but find that they are not under our conscious control, or part of our conscious repertoire, part of the habitual and therefore effortless formation of our will. Richard Norman’s talk of humanism as ‘the positive affirmation that human beings can find from within themselves the resources to live a good life without religion’ needs to be qualified by integrating into that conception precisely this experience of transformation as included within what we take our resource to be.
Nicholas Lash is surely correct in his criticism of some talk of ‘spirituality’, and he puts his finger on the reason that makes me at least feel uneasy about using the term at all:
Nor is it surprising that, since the term [religion] nevertheless still carries ancient overtones of public life and conduct, of established norms and practices, many people prefer to describe the games they play in the private playgrounds of Cartesian consciousness not as religion but as “spirituality”.

However, what Lash draws attention to is a profound misunderstanding of the term. Spirituality does not properly belong within a private inner space but has an essentially public application. It relates precisely to ‘public life and conduct’ rather than to a Cartesian consciousness, and, although it is concerned with the development of the conditions for both vision and action, as a moral category it governs the nature of the relationships within and between communities. When St Paul distinguished between the gifts of the flesh and the gifts of the spirit he was referring to the sentiments and impulses that governed the conduct of an allegedly exemplary community.


2. How to be godless without being shallow
‘I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran’, declares Sir Francis Bacon, as his producer turns down the sound on his Elizabethan cultural perceptions, ‘than that this universal frame is without a mind … God never wrought miracle, to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it …’
The atheist will notice the sleight of hand in the invitation to look upon the world as someone’s ‘work’ in the first place, even though, as we have seen, in a contemplative mood a person’s mind might well turn towards the imagery of making, to the image, indeed of a wonderful artist. But the vivacity of an image, and even the state of wonder induced by good story-telling, can mislead us into taking it ‘literally’—and yield what we now call ‘creationism’, though when we say that creationists take the text ‘literally’ we actually mean, I think, that they read it as belonging to the language game of information, historical reportage, rather than as the narrative which is creatively derived from and takes the form of that language game. However, to claim, by contrast, that we are dealing with metaphors and stories does not by itself imply that they are about us as opposed to a transcendental reality, dimly thus apprehended. And so we come to the very edge of the common ground between secularists and believers.
The idea of a maker comes from a movement of the imagination, and to conceive it or hold the image in one’s mind is hardly by itself to be ‘convinced’ that there really is a wonderful artist at work. To return to Bacon, it is this image of ‘work’, mediating between the world and our wonder, rather than the world itself, that might ‘convince’ someone, who might see in it a revelatory symbol of our dependence on God.
Now, in defence of believers, I should want to deny that this kind of conviction is ‘blind’ and I do so because the linguistic stage-setting that would support that adverse judgment is absent. A belief is ‘blind’ when someone holds it without reference to evidence, whether confirming or disconfirming, and the judgment is adverse just because evidential avenues are open and determining. But where we are talking about the world as such rather than about contingent features within the world, then talk of evidence, or indeed of explanation, is misplaced. This is one reason why some philosophers have claimed, without adverse judgment, that such beliefs are ungrounded rather than ‘blind’, though I would myself rather not call them beliefs at all, mostly because of the way we conflate the notion with that of empirical belief and then confuse this with the quite separate notion of ‘trust’.
‘It is true’, Bacon goes on, ‘that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion’:
For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity.

But is it true that ‘the mind of man’ must ‘fly to Providence and Deity’? I think that the obvious answer is no, and that Bacon fails to see a middle position between his shallow atheist who rests in second causes and the deeper philosopher who flies to Providence and Deity—viz that of someone who beholds the chain of causes confederate and linked together but does not fly to Providence and Deity.
However, the ethical form of the impulse to fly thither can be shared by the atheist. As we have seen, part of the interest of the Creation story is that it presents the Creator in terms that rely on the experience of aesthetic achievement and protective care, a natural widening of the moral sentiments, a universal benevolence. What informs the narrative is, if you like, an ethic of care—except that patriarchy enshrines a contaminated conception of protective care that we have still not overcome. The story embodies a conception of its subject-matter—it expresses an ethical perspective, endorses the providential care that it narrates, and informs us that we are made in the image of the God who extends to us that providential care, and thus commends this attitude to its hearers. It then laments our moral failure, and our tendency to live lives in conflict with this ideal, lives that are destructive and careless rather than creative of this care. The theologian James Mackey has written very powerfully about how the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament together testify to the history of this struggle between the contending impulses of benevolence and ruthlessness—contending impulses with which the history of philosophy is also familiar.
But the particular interest of Mackey’s analysis lies in his insistence that this heterogeneous collection of writings testifies to the progress of these contending impulses in more than one way:—they give expression to and celebrate the original ideal; they record, from the point of view of that ideal, its conflict with our tendency to self-aggrandisement, to use Mackey’s word, but they are also in many places contaminated and overwhelmed by that tendency and its distortions of vision. In other words, the scriptures reveal the divided self, in the sense of exposing it but also in the sense of betraying it.

ii

But now, before reflecting further on spirituality and ethical ideals, I want to say more about the role of wonder in philosophical theism, since the idea of the world as God’s creation is already an imaginative expression of wonder: some god has done this! Bacon’s complaint was that atheists are shallow because they do not press their questions far enough, and this sentiment is frequently echoed by theistic philosophers. But though it might be thought that the very existence of things is as plausible an object of wonder as the suchness of things, wonder at the existence of things does not naturally take the form of or lead to the question why there is anything at all. It is not even clear that the idea of wonder at the existence of things isn’t simply a variant expression for wonder at what exists rather than at that it exists. Wonder at the suchness of things, by contrast, can express itself in the form of the idea of an artist Creator. Theistic faith consists in taking this image as a revelation or intimation of the nature of things. However, it is only in the light of this idea, already formed and furnishing the mind, that it makes sense to raise the question why is there anything at all—and it makes sense to raise it, the question suggests itself, because we now have an answer ready to hand. To someone who is not already a theist, however, it is not obvious that the question is well-formed.
The late Fr Herbert McCabe is associated with a revival of interest in the question—and he certainly thought, in the spirit of Francis Bacon, that it is a failure of rationality not to raise it. Those who pursue this line of inquiry tend to treat the question as though it were the most general form of—and had the same logic as—the question, why are things thus rather than so, where the implication is already that things could have been otherwise, and are as they are because of the nature of the conditions which have given rise to them. But the latter kind of question is raised in the context of, and is predicated upon, an already acknowledged experience of contingency: that things come into existence that might not have done if the conditions had been different, that things fall out in a particular way and we can find an explanation for this by inquiring into the conditions. The significant thing in such cases is that we presume, take ourselves to be justified in assuming, that there is an explanation even if we do not yet know what that explanation is. But such a presumption applied to the existence of the totality of contingent things lacks its original conditions of intelligibility and simply begs the question, though it is the conclusion that the line of questioning invites.
However, I am inclined to think that the real point of this line of questioning is not so much to compel us to a conclusion as to invite us to think in a way congenial to a confession of theistic faith. In other words, it invites us to think the possibility that the totality of contingent things—‘creation’—is contingent upon the activity of a creator, to think the possibility that there might be an explanation even if we cannot assume in advance that there must be. Someone who professes belief in God already sees humanity and the world we live in as dependent creation, as contingent upon God’s sustaining and creative power, but there is no rational failure in not thus flying to Providence and Deity. But, to repeat, whereas in the case of an empirical feature of the world that we seek to explain we presume that there must be an explanation even if we do not know what it is, this presumption is not available to us in the case of the world itself—we cannot presume that there must be an explanation. This does not imply that there isn’t one, but the question is pressed by those who think there is one—but not because they originally asked this question themselves.
A more plausible route to theism derives from wonder at the suchness of things. Thus we might have a sense of wonder at the immensity of the starry heavens or at the loveliness of a meadow in early May, or at the charm of a young child. And the point about the wonder is that it is an experience associated with rejoicing and care. Genesis expresses wonder, not at the existence of things but at the suchness of things, the glory of Creation, and tells of its fashioning. It is a story about how things came to be as they are rather than about how anything came to be at all—specifically a story about how we came to be as we are, and how we became divided and wayward beings. The categories are moral and aesthetic. The story invokes divine agency but does not argue to (the very idea of) a divine agent. In the face of wonder at the beauty of the world the idea of the work of a creative intelligence suggests itself as a natural metaphor, as I said earlier. So, then, what is in favour of Bacon’s claim that God’s ordinary works ‘convince’ atheism?
I have no doubt that the original Genesis story can strike a person with what we call ‘the force of truth’ and change their lives. It does the latter partly because its conception of Deity already embodies a conception of human ideals, and it can awaken or recall the hearer to their deepest impulses. But there are two things here. In certain contemplative moods the image of a maker naturally suggests itself, and might do so for anyone because we are naturally anthropomorphic. But, as I just suggested, it can also strike someone as a revelation or intimation of the ultimate nature of things.
I use the phrase ‘strike with the force of truth’ to imply that for those who are struck in this way, the story, at least initially, compels assent and this is what is called ‘Faith’—which is also the natural arena of religious doubt. Those who struggle with this doubt struggle precisely with whether what was received as a revelation is genuinely so. However, the reference to an assent that is ‘compelled’ implies that there is no voluntarism involved here (as distinct from the theological virtue of ‘belief in God’ that consists in an attitude of trust in God’s saving power). The story impresses itself upon someone as a revelation of how things are, whether it is understood as a mythopoeic or symbolic representation of the providential care of an eternal being, or, more naively, as a likeness of what it represents. Thus, if I might repeat my earlier remarks about ‘blind’ belief—it might be objected that just because something strikes you as true it doesn’t follow that it is true! That is surely right, but the model invoked by the objector is that of a hunch about a particular, contingent feature of the world that actually stands in need of independent verification, and where this necessity is being disregarded. But there is no such empirical context here, only an ungrounded vision of the world seen as a whole. I do not share this vision, but calling it a vision, or a picture’, does not imply that it cannot be a revelation of how things ultimately are—but ‘faith’ is the bottom-line, faith in the form of a compelled assent. The assent can wax or wane, can appear less than compelling, and then be restored—or dissipate entirely. As far as religious doubt is concerned, it can take the form of a scepticism directed at a literal interpretation in favour of the symbolic, or, more radically, of the symbolic representation also. In either case doubt, like assent, dawns over the whole system of propositions and doubting the existence of God in that case should not be construed on the model of doubting the truth of a single existential proposition—doubt is cast on the revelatory nature of the whole vision.

3. Conclusion

Bacon’s ancestral voice lingers on, but it is worth seeking to accommodate it to some degree. There is a sense in which attention only to ‘second causes’ is in some way shallow, and that to behold them confederate and linked together requires reflection and depth. The shallowness Bacon complains about is that of someone who lives a life of unreflective immediacy, resting in second causes, immersed ‘in the world’, which expression implies moral criticism of the associated formation of subjectivity—one that determines the horizon within which one ranges. Depth, by contrast, is found in the contemplation of the world as a whole that belongs to wonder and its associated attitudes. Our immersion in what we call the world distracts us from what lies beyond that horizon of interest, and when we do see beyond it this comes, as I said earlier, in the form of a visitation, and traditionally, and following Paul, the visitation has been taken to be from the Spirit and its influence. Spirituality is the derived term that refers to the discipline of protecting the conditions for the possibility of that distinctive perspective on the world.
I should like to be more precise and emphatic about this idea of contemplating the world as such. Elsewhere I have described it as ‘aesthetic perception’ and have cited Paul Valery’s remark about how poetry gives us ‘the sense of a universe’. I have also cited Kant’s notion of aesthetic ideas in order to indicate the interplay between universal and particular. The thought is that in both art and nature universals can be evoked in and by particulars which are their instantiations. So the beauty of this landscape may sometimes be perceived in its exemplary as well as individual presence as disclosing the beauty of the world itself. The terrified face of this child in Gaza evokes in its particularity the dreadful political world in which it is trapped, and all such worlds. But the interesting thing here is that one is at once moved by the plight of the individual child and by the state of the world that its plight discloses. These kinds of aesthetic perception can be startling because they happen to us and change our mood. By contrast, under the influence of Hamlet’s depression, this goodly frame the earth becomes a stale promontory, this most excellent canopy the air becomes a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What we have here is an example of Nietzsche’s symptomatology of emotions. It is not so much that here are two equal options as that here are two aetiologies, a condition in which one’s inner disposition determines how one sees the world—as precisely contaminated by that disposition—and one in which the sight of the earth’s glories determines one’s inner condition, or, more realistically, gives one a sense of that possibility.
What I have tried to do is present a picture of a moral vision that informs the religious picture we associate with the Abrahamic religions. I suggested that this moral vision informs theology, and I should like to end with a few comments on that.
It is hardly surprising that the scriptures reflect the moral attitudes and self-understanding of their authors, though we know that in so doing they also endorse and justify some of our most brutal tendencies. But nor is it surprising that the engulfing urgency to revenge that follows carnage and slaughter and is perceived as justice, should give way to calmer reflection on the atrocious consequences of escalation, reflection that engages compassion for the human condition. It is hardly surprising, in other words, that what we think of as the ethical development of human beings and the changing conceptions of Deity that reflect that development, should be expressed and even worked out in the history of scriptures that represent some of our earliest forms of self-consciousness. These latter changes are the product of creative imagination and calm reflection, this time on the perceived dissonance between our conceptions of the divine and our experience of dreadful realities. Thus the Lisbon Earthquake in the eighteenth century and the Holocaust in the twentieth have occasioned creative but existentially fraught theological renewal as thinkers have tried to make sense of the problem of evil. But these reflections are arenas for the development of moral insight. Thus the question where was God in the Holocaust finds resolution for some in the thought that God can only act through human hands, a reflection which turns (deflects?) the attention of the believer to the moral condition of humanity. It seems to me that the doctrine of kenosis, the doctrine of God's 'self-emptying', or of Christ's making himself powerless, is precisely a way of fixing or projecting a moral insight about the nature of power, specifically power over others. When we have someone in our power, so that we can do with them just what we want to do, or when we know that they are eclipsed by our power, then that power needs to be renounced if compassion, or any other moral virtue that allows others to be, is to emerge or flourish. The religions are, then, among other things, expressions of the state of moral insight, and it is obvious that moral reflection can be disconnected from what we call religious belief. But a religious picture that belongs to story-telling about origins can be undermined when it is confronted by the phenomena of natural and human evil, and theologians seem to be people who make adjustments to the story in the light of events and in accordance with their own moral judgment.
A moral philosopher will typically defend an intellectual position, make distinctions that are liable to be overlooked, describe and seek to resolve conceptual difficulties and confusions, and then stand aside. However, as I said in the body of this paper, secular humanism presents itself as more than an intellectual position about the independence of ethics from religion. It also seeks, as a movement, to promote a moral vision. In that case it needs to take seriously the responsibilities of its role as a school of (godless) spirituality.

References
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