Source: Rachels, J., & Rachels, S. (2023).

The elements of moral philosophy

(10th ed.​). McGraw Hill.

CHAPTER 4
page 50

Does Morality Depend on Religion?

The Good consists in always doing what God wills at any particular
moment.
EMIL BRUNNER, THE DIVINE IMPERATIVE (1947)

I respect deities. I do not rely upon them.

MUSASHI MIYAMOTO, AT ICHIJOJI TEMPLE (ca. 1608)

4.1. The Presumed Connection between Morality

and Religion
In 1995, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued Judge Roy
Moore of Gadsden, Alabama, for displaying the Ten Commandments in his
courtroom. Such a display, the ACLU said, violates the separation of church
and state, which is guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. The voters,
however, supported Moore. In 2000, Moore was elected Chief Justice of the
Alabama Supreme Court, running on a promise to “restore the moral
foundation of law.” The “Ten Commandments judge” thus became the most
powerful jurist in the state of Alabama.
Moore was not through making his point, however. In the wee hours of
July 31, 2001, he had a granite monument dedicated to the Ten
Commandments installed in the Alabama state judicial building. This
monument weighed over 5,000 pounds, and nobody entering the building
could miss it. So, Moore was sued again, and again the people stood behind
him: 77% of Americans supported his right to display the monument. Yet
the law disagreed. When Moore ignored a court order to remove the
monument, the Alabama Court of the Judiciary fired him, saying that he
had placed himself above the law. Moore, however, believed that he was
recognizing God’s rightful place above the law.
In 2012, Moore was again elected Chief Justice of the Alabama page 51
Supreme Court. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that same-sex
couples have the right to marry, Moore told Alabama judges that they had a
“ministerial duty” to ignore the ruling. Thus, in 2016, he was again
removed from office, in what he called “a politically motivated effort by
radical homosexual and transgender groups.” In 2017, Moore almost
became a U.S. senator, winning the Republican primary in a deeply
conservative state. But then he lost to the Democratic candidate after
several women accused him of having molested them when they were
teenagers.
Few Americans describe themselves as “atheists,” but this may be due to
the social stigma attached to non-believers; some people might not want to
admit it. In 2017, a study that measured religious belief without asking
people directly about God, found that 26% of Americans are atheists. Even
so, the United States is a religious country. The stigma that exists is directed
at atheists, not at believers. When asked directly, most Americans say that
religion is “very important” in their lives, and three-quarters say they’re
Christians.
Members of the Christian clergy are sometimes treated as moral experts
in America: Hospitals ask them to sit on ethics committees; reporters may
interview them on the moral dimensions of a story; and churchgoers look to
them for guidance. The clergy even help decide whether movies will be
rated “G,” “PG,” “PG-13,” “R,” or “NC-17.” Priests and ministers are
assumed to be wise counselors who often give sound moral advice.
Why are the clergy viewed in this way? The reason is not that they have
proven themselves to be better or wiser than other people—as a group, they
seem to be neither better nor worse than the rest of us. There is a deeper
reason for this. In popular thinking, morality and religion are inseparable;
people believe that morality can be understood only in the context of
religion. Thus, the clergy are assumed to be authorities on morality.
It is easy to see why people think this. When viewed from a nonreligious
perspective, the universe seems to be a cold, meaningless place, devoid of
value and purpose. In Bertrand Russell’s essay “A Free Man’s Worship”
(1903), he expresses what he calls the “scientific” view of the world:
page 52
That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his
origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental
collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an
individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration,
all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar
system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris
of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no
philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

From a religious perspective, however, things look very different.

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

4.2. The Divine Command Theory

Christians, Jews, and Muslims all believe that God has told us to obey
certain rules of conduct. God does not force these rules on us. He created us
as free agents; so, we may choose what to do. But if we live as we should,
then we must follow God’s laws. This idea has been expanded into a theory
known as the Divine Command Theory. The basic idea is that God decrees
what is right and wrong. Actions that God commands us to do are morally
required; actions that God forbids us to do are morally wrong; and all other
actions are morally neutral.
This theory has a number of advantages. For one, it immediately solves
the old problem of the objectivity of ethics. Ethics is not merely a matter of
personal feeling or social custom. Whether something is right or wrong is
perfectly objective: It is right if God commands it and wrong if God forbids
it. The Divine Command Theory also explains why any of us should bother
with morality. Why shouldn’t we just look out for ourselves? If immorality
is the violation of God’s commandments, then there is an easy answer: On
the day of final reckoning, you will be held accountable.
There are, however, serious problems with the theory. Of course, page 53
atheists would not accept it, because they do not believe that God
exists. But there are difficulties even for believers. The main problem was
identified by Plato, a Greek philosopher who lived 400 years before Jesus
of Nazareth. Plato’s books were written as conversations, or dialogues, in
which Plato’s teacher Socrates is always the main speaker and always wins
the argument. In one of them, the Euthyphro, there is a discussion of
whether “right” can be defined as “what the gods command.” Socrates is
skeptical and asks: Is conduct right because the gods command it, or do the
gods command it because it is right? This is one of the most famous
questions in the history of philosophy. The British philosopher Antony Flew
(1923–2010) suggests that “one good test of a person’s aptitude for
philosophy is to discover whether he can grasp [the] force and point” of this
question.
Socrates’s question is about whether God makes the moral truths true or
whether he merely recognizes their truth. There’s a big difference between
these options. I know that the Burj Khalifa in the United Arab Emirates is
the tallest building in the world; I recognize that fact. However, I did not
make it true. Rather, it was made true by the designers and builders in the
city of Dubai. Is God’s relation to ethics like my relation to the Burj Khalifa
building or like the relation of the builders? This question poses a dilemma,
and each way out leads to trouble.
First, we might say that right conduct is right because God commands it.
For example, according to Exodus 20:16, God commands us to be truthful.
Thus, we should be truthful simply because God requires it. God’s
command makes truthfulness right, just as the builders of a skyscraper
make the building tall. This is the Divine Command Theory. It is almost the
theory of Shakespeare’s character Hamlet. Hamlet said that nothing is good
or bad, but thinking makes it so. According to the Divine Command
Theory, nothing is good or bad, except when God’s thinking makes it so.
This idea encounters several difficulties. page 54
1. This conception of morality is mysterious. What does it mean
to say that God “makes” truthfulness right? It is easy enough to understand
how physical objects are made, at least in principle. We have all made
something, if only a sand castle or a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. But
making truthfulness right is not like that; it could not be done by
rearranging things in the physical environment. How, then, could it be
done? No one knows.
To see the problem, consider some wretched case of child abuse. On the
Divine Command Theory, God could make that instance of child abuse
right—not by turning a slap into a friendly pinch of the cheek, but by
commanding that the slap is right. This proposal defies human
understanding. How could merely saying, or commanding, that the slap is
right make it right? If true, this conception of morality would be a mystery.
2. This conception of morality makes God’s commands arbitrary.
Suppose a parent forbids a teenager from doing something, and when the
teenager asks why, the parent responds, “Because I said so!” Here the
parent seems to be imposing his will arbitrarily. Yet the Divine Command
Theory sees God as being like such a parent. Rather than offering a reason
for his commands, God merely says, “Because I said so.”
God’s commands also seem arbitrary because he always could have
commanded the opposite. For example, suppose God commands us to be
truthful. On the Divine Command Theory, he just as easily could have
commanded us to be liars, and then lying, and not truthfulness, would be
right. After all, before God issues his commands, no reasons for or against
lying exist—because God is the one who creates the reasons. So, from a
moral point of view, God’s commands are arbitrary. He could command
anything whatsoever. This result may seem not only unacceptable but
impious from a religious point of view.
3. This conception of morality provides the wrong reasons for moral
principles. There are many things wrong with child abuse: It is malicious; it
inflicts pain unnecessarily; it makes the child fearful and anxious; and so
on. However, the Divine Command Theory does not care about any of that;
it sees the maliciousness, the pain, and the psychological trauma as being
morally irrelevant. All it cares about, in the end, is whether child abuse runs
counter to God’s commands.
There are two ways of confirming that something is wrong here. page 55
First, notice something that the theory implies: If God didn’t exist,
then child abuse wouldn’t be wrong. After all, if God didn’t exist, then God
wouldn’t have been around to make child abuse wrong. However, child
abuse would still be malicious, so it would still be wrong. Thus, the Divine
Command Theory is false. Second, bear in mind that even a religious
person might be unsure as to what God has commanded. After all, religious
texts disagree with each other, and sometimes there seem to be
inconsistencies and unclarities even within a single text. So, a person might
be in doubt as to what God’s will really is. However, a person need not be
in doubt as to whether child abuse is wrong. What God has commanded is
one thing; whether hitting children is wrong is another.
 There is a way to avoid these troublesome consequences. We can take the
second of Socrates’s options. We need not say that right conduct is right
because God commands it. Instead, we can say that God commands us to do
certain things because they are right. God, who is infinitely wise,
recognizes that truthfulness is better than deceitfulness, just as he
recognizes in Genesis that the light he sees is good. For this reason, God
commands us to be truthful.
If we take this option, then we avoid the consequences that spoiled the
first alternative. We needn’t worry about how God makes it wrong to lie,
because he doesn’t. God’s commands are not arbitrary; they are the result of
his wisdom in knowing what is best. Nor are we saddled with the wrong
explanations for our moral principles; instead, we are free to appeal to
whatever justifications of them seem appropriate.
Unfortunately, this second option has a different drawback. In taking it,
we abandon the theological conception of right and wrong. When we say
that God commands us to be truthful because truthfulness is right, we
acknowledge a standard that is independent of God’s will. The rightness
exists prior to God’s command and is the reason for it. Thus, if we want to
know why we should be truthful, the reply “because God commands it”
does not really tell us. We may still ask, “Why does God command it?” and
the answer to that question will provide the ultimate reason.
Many religious people believe that they must accept a theological page 56
conception of right and wrong because it would be sacrilegious not
to. They feel, somehow, that if they believe in God, then right and wrong
must be understood in terms of God’s wishes. Our arguments, however,
suggest that the Divine Command Theory is not only untenable but
impious. And, in fact, some of the greatest theologians have rejected the
theory for just these reasons.

4.3. The Theory of Natural Law

In the history of Christian thought, the dominant theory of ethics is not the
Divine Command Theory. That honor instead goes to the Theory of Natural
Law. This theory has three main parts.
1. The Theory of Natural Law rests on a particular view of the world. On
this view, the world has a rational order, with values and purposes built into
its very nature. This idea comes from the Greeks, whose worldview
dominated Western thinking for over 1,700 years. The Greeks believed that
everything in nature has a purpose.
Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) built this idea into his system of thought. To
understand anything, he said, four questions must be asked: What is it?
What is it made of? How did it come to be? And what is it for? The answers
might be: This is a knife; it is made of metal; it was made by a craftsman;
and it is used for cutting. Aristotle assumed that the last question—What is
it for?—could be asked of anything whatever. “Nature,” he said, “belongs
to the class of causes which act for the sake of something.”
Obviously, knives have a purpose, because craftsmen build them with a
purpose in mind. But what about natural objects that we do not make?
Aristotle believed that they have purposes, too. One of his examples was
that we have teeth so that we can chew. Biological examples are especially
persuasive; each part of our bodies does seem, intuitively, to have a special
purpose—our eyes are for seeing, our ears are for hearing, our skin exists to
protect us, and so on. But Aristotle’s claim was not limited to living things.
According to him, everything has a purpose. To take a different sort of
example, he thought that rain falls so that plants can grow. He considered
alternatives. For example, he asked whether the rain might fall “of
necessity,” which helps the plants only “by coincidence.” However, he
considered that unlikely.
The universe, Aristotle thought, is an orderly, rational system in page 57
which each thing has a proper place and serves its own special
purpose. There is a neat hierarchy: The rain exists for the sake of the plants,
the plants exist for the sake of the animals, and the animals exist—of course
—for the sake of people. Aristotle says, “If then we are right in believing
that nature makes nothing without some end in view, nothing to no purpose,
it must be that nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man.”
This worldview is stunningly anthropocentric, or human-centered. But
Aristotle was hardly alone in having such thoughts; almost every important
thinker in human history has advanced such a thesis. Humans are
remarkably vain.
The Christian thinkers who came later found this worldview appealing.
Only one thing was missing: God. Thus, the Christian thinkers said that the
rain falls to help the plants because that is what God intended, and the
animals are for human use because that is what God made them for. Values
and purposes were thus seen as part of God’s plan.
 2. A corollary to this way of thinking is that the “laws of nature” describe
not only how things are but also how things ought to be. The world is in
harmony when things serve their natural purposes. When they do not, or
cannot, things have gone wrong. Eyes that cannot see are defective, and
drought is a natural evil; the badness of both is explained by reference to
natural law. But there are also implications for human conduct. Moral rules
are now viewed as deriving from the laws of nature. Some ways of
behaving are said to be “natural” for human beings while others are
regarded as “unnatural”; and “unnatural” acts are seen as morally wrong.
Consider, for example, the duty of beneficence. We are morally required
to care about our neighbors. Why? According to the Theory of Natural Law,
beneficence is natural for us, given the kind of creatures we are. We are by
nature social and need the company of other people. Someone who does not
care at all about others—who really does not care, through and through—is
seen as deranged. Modern psychiatry says that such people suffer from
antisocial personality disorder, and such people are called psychopaths or
sociopaths. A callous personality is defective, just as eyes are defective if
they cannot see. And, it may be added, this is true because we were created
by God, with a specific “human” nature, as part of his overall plan.
The endorsement of beneficence is relatively uncontroversial. page 58
Natural-law theory has also been used, however, to support more
questionable ideas. Religious thinkers often condemn “deviant” sexual
practices, and they usually justify this by appealing to ideas from the
Theory of Natural Law. If everything has a purpose, what is the purpose of
sex? The obvious answer is procreation. Sexual activity that is not
connected with making babies can, therefore, be seen as “unnatural,” and
practices like masturbation and gay sex may be condemned for this reason.
This view of sex dates back at least to Saint Augustine (A.D. 354–430) and
is explicit in the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). The moral
theology of the Catholic Church is based on natural-law theory.
3. The third part concerns moral knowledge. How can we tell right from
wrong? On the Divine Command Theory, we must consult God’s
commandments. On the Theory of Natural Law, however, the “natural
laws” of morality are just laws of reason; so, what’s right is what’s
supported by the strongest arguments. On this view, we can figure out
what’s right because God has given us the ability to reason. Moreover, God
has given this ability to everyone, putting the believer and nonbeliever in
the same position.

Objections to Natural-Law Theory. Outside the Catholic Church, the

Theory of Natural Law has few advocates today. It is generally rejected for
three reasons.
First, the idea that “what’s natural is good” seems open to obvious
counterexamples. Sometimes what’s natural is bad. People naturally care
much more about themselves than about strangers, but this is regrettable.
Disease occurs naturally, but disease is bad. Hurricanes, earthquakes,
droughts, tornadoes, and volcanic eruptions occur naturally, but these are
bad things. Children are naturally self-centered, but their parents aren’t
pleased by this.
Second, the Theory of Natural Law moves too easily from “is” to
“ought.” In the 18th century, David Hume pointed out that what is the case
and what ought to be the case are logically different notions, and no
conclusion about one follows from the other. We can say that people are
naturally disposed to be beneficent, but it does not follow that they ought to
be beneficent. Similarly, it may be true that sex produces babies, but it does
not follow that sex ought or ought not to be engaged in only for that
purpose. Facts are one thing; values are another.
Third, the Theory of Natural Law is now widely rejected because page 59
its view of the world conflicts with modern science. The world as
described by Galileo, Newton, and Darwin has no need for “facts” about
right and wrong. Their explanations of nature make no reference to values
or purposes. What happens just happens, due to the laws of cause and
effect. If the rain benefits the plants, this is because the plants have evolved
by the laws of natural selection in a rainy climate.
Thus, modern science gives us a picture of the world as a realm of facts,
where the only “natural laws” are the laws of physics, chemistry, and
biology, working blindly and without purpose. Whatever values may be,
they are not part of the natural order. As for the idea that “nature has made
all things specifically for the sake of man,” well, that is only vanity. To the
extent that one accepts the worldview of modern science, one will reject the
worldview of natural-law theory. That theory was a product, not of modern
thought, but of the Middle Ages.
4.4. Religion and Particular Moral Issues
So far, our discussion might seem too abstract. Many religious people don’t
care whether God determines right and wrong, or whether purposes are part
of nature. For them, the connection between morality and religion centers
on particular moral issues. What matters are the moral teachings of one’s
religion. The Scriptures and the church leaders are regarded as authorities;
if one is truly faithful, one will accept what they say. Many Christians, for
example, believe that they must oppose abortion because the church
condemns it and because (they assume) the Scriptures do too.
Are there distinctively religious positions on major moral issues that
believers must accept? The rhetoric of the pulpit suggests so. But there is
good reason to think otherwise.
For one thing, it is often difficult to find specific moral guidance in the
Scriptures. We face different problems than people faced 2,000 years ago;
thus, the Scriptures may be silent on matters that seem pressing to us. The
Bible does contain a number of general precepts—for example, to love
one’s neighbor and to treat others as one wishes to be treated. And those are
fine principles, which pertain to our lives. However, it is not clear what they
imply about the rights of workers, or the extinction of species, or the
funding of medical research, and so on.
Another problem is that the Scriptures and church tradition are page 60
often ambiguous. Authorities disagree, leaving the believer in the
awkward position of having to choose which part of the tradition to accept.
For instance, the New Testament condemns being rich, and there is a long
tradition of charity and self-denial that affirms this teaching. But there is
also an obscure Old Testament figure named Jabez who asked God to
“enlarge my territories” (1 Chronicles 4:10), and God did. One book urging
Christians to adopt Jabez as their model became a best seller.
Thus, when people say that their moral views come from their religion,
they are often mistaken. Really, they are making up their own minds about
the issues and then interpreting the Scriptures, or church tradition, in a way
that supports the conclusions they’ve already reached. Of course, this does
not happen in every case, but it seems fair to say that it happens a lot. The
question of wealth is one example; abortion is another.
Religious conservatives sometimes say that all human life is sacred. The
fetus, they think, is not merely a potential person but is an actual person,
possessing a full-fledged right to life from the moment of conception. On
their view, abortion is always murder. Is their view the Christian view?
Must Christians condemn abortion? To answer those questions, we might
look either to the Scriptures or to church tradition.

The Scriptures. The Jewish and Christian Scriptures never denounce

abortion by name. Certain passages, however, are often cited in support of
the conservative position. One of them is from the first chapter of Jeremiah,
where Jeremiah quotes God as saying, “Before I formed thee in the belly I
knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee.”
These words are often presented as God’s condemnation of abortion: it is
wrong to kill the unborn because the unborn are consecrated to God.
In context, however, these words obviously mean something page 61
different. Suppose we read the whole passage in which they occur:
Now the word of the Lord came to me, saying, “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and
before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the
nations.”
Then I said, “Ah, Lord God! Behold, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth.” But the
Lord said to me,
“Do not say, ‘I am only a youth’; for to all to whom I send you, you shall go, and whatever I
command you, you shall speak. Be not afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you.”

This passage has nothing to do with abortion. Instead, Jeremiah is

asserting his authority as a prophet. He is saying, in effect, “God told me to
speak for him. I tried to say no, but he insisted.” However, Jeremiah puts
this point poetically; he says that God selected him to be a prophet even
before he was born.
The pattern here is familiar: Someone who is advocating a moral position
quotes a few words from the Bible, out of context, and then declares that
the passage supports their position; yet those words mean something else
entirely when taken in context. When this happens, is it accurate to say that
the person is “following the moral teachings of the Bible”? Or is it accurate
to say that he has searched the Bible to find support for something he
already believes, and has interpreted the Bible with this in mind? The latter,
when true, suggests an especially arrogant attitude—that God himself must
share one’s opinions!
Some other biblical passages support a liberal view of abortion. A
woman who has recently had sex might be pregnant. Yet three times the
Bible recommends executing women who have had sex outside of marriage,
without ever saying that the execution should wait until we know that the
woman isn’t pregnant (Genesis 38:24; Leviticus 21:9; Deuteronomy 22:20–
21). These passages suggest that the death of the fetus doesn’t matter—
presumably because the fetus has no right to life.

Church Tradition. Today, the Catholic Church strongly opposes abortion.

In many Protestant churches, too, abortion is routinely denounced. Many
people of faith, therefore, believe that they must condemn abortion “for
religious reasons,” no matter how Scripture is interpreted. What lies behind
the Church’s anti-abortion stance?
To some extent, the Vatican has always opposed abortion for the page 62
same reason that it condemns condoms, birth control pills, and other
forms of contraception: All of these activities interfere with natural
processes. According to natural-law theory, sex is supposed to lead to the
birth of a healthy baby. Condoms and birth control pills prevent this from
happening by preventing pregnancy; abortion prevents it by killing the
fetus. Thus, by the lights of traditional Catholic thinking, abortion is wrong
because it disrupts a natural process. This type of argument, however, can
hardly show that Christians “must” oppose abortion. It depends on natural-
law theory, which, as we have seen, conflicts with modern science. Yet
Christians today need not reject modern science—even the Catholic Church
dropped its opposition to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution back in
1950. Presumably, then, Christians are not required to oppose abortion
based on natural-law considerations.
At any rate, to say that abortion interferes with a natural process is to say
nothing about the moral status of the fetus. Recent popes have not merely
believed that abortion is immoral, like using a condom; they have viewed it
as murder. How did this position become dominant within the Catholic
Church? Have Church leaders always regarded the fetus as enjoying a
special moral status?
For most of the Church’s history—until around 1200 A.D.—little is
known of relevance. Back then, there were no universities, and the Church
was not especially intellectual. People believed all kinds of things, for all
kinds of reasons. But then, in the 13th century, Saint Thomas Aquinas
constructed a philosophical system that became the bedrock of later
Catholic thought. The key question, he believed, is whether the fetus has a
soul: If it does, then abortion is murder; if it does not, then abortion isn’t
murder. Does the fetus have a soul? Aquinas accepted Aristotle’s idea that
the soul is the “substantial form” of man. Let’s not worry about exactly
what that means; what’s important is that human beings are supposed to
acquire a “substantial form” when their bodies take on human shape. So the
key question is: When do human beings begin to look human?
When a baby is born, anyone can see that it has a human shape. In
Aquinas’s day, however, nobody knew when fetuses begin to look like that
—after all, fetal development occurs out of sight, in the mother’s womb.
Aristotle said, for no good reason, that males acquire a soul 40 days after
conception and females do after 90 days. Presumably, many Christians
accepted this view. (Aquinas so respected Aristotle that he always referred
to him as simply “the Philosopher.”) At any rate, for the next several
centuries, most prominent Catholic thinkers strongly opposed abortion
throughout pregnancy, probably because the fetus might, for all they knew,
acquire human shape very early on—and so, killing it might always be
murder.
Contrary to popular belief, the Catholic Church has never page 63
officially maintained that the fetus acquires a soul at the moment of
conception. Around 1600, however, some theologians began to say that the
soul enters the body a few days after conception, and so abortion is murder
early on. This monumental change in Catholic thinking apparently occurred
without much debate. Maybe the issue seemed unimportant because the
Church already opposed early-term abortions. Anyway, we know little
about what happened.
Today we know a lot about fetal development. We know, through
microscopes and ultrasounds, that fetuses do not look human until several
weeks into the pregnancy. Thus, a follower of Aquinas should now say that
fetuses have no soul during the first month or two of pregnancy. However,
there has been no movement inside the Catholic Church to adopt that
position. For reasons that remain murky, the Church adopted a conservative
view of the fetus in the 1600s, and it has maintained that view ever since.
The purpose of reviewing this history is not to suggest that the
contemporary church’s position is wrong. For all I have said, it may be
right. The point, rather, is this: every generation interprets its traditions to
support its favored moral views. To illustrate this, we could have also
discussed the church’s shifting views on slavery, or capital punishment, or
the status of women. In each case, the moral stance taken by the Church
doesn’t seem derived from the Bible so much as imposed on it, in different
ways at different times. If we look at the whole history of Christianity, then
we find little reason to oppose abortion.
This chapter has argued for several conclusions: that right and wrong are
not to be understood in terms of God’s will; that morality is a matter of
reason and conscience, not religious faith; and that, in any case, religious
considerations do not provide definitive solutions to many of the moral
problems we face. Together, these conclusions point to a larger thesis: that
morality and religion are, in a word, different.
Of course, religious beliefs can bear on moral issues. Consider, page 64
for example, the doctrine of eternal life. If some people go to
heaven when they die—and so, death is a good thing for them—then this
might affect the morality of killing these people. Or suppose we believe,
upon studying ancient prophecies, that supernatural forces will soon bring
the world to a fiery end. If so, then this might reduce our fear of climate
change. The relationship between morality and religion is complicated, but
it is a relationship between two different subjects.
This conclusion may seem antireligious. However, it has not been
reached by questioning the validity of religion. The arguments we have
considered do not assume that Christianity or any other theological system
is false; they merely show that, even if such a system is true, morality
remains a separate matter.

Notes on Sources
77% of Americans support Judge Roy Moore: Gallup Poll, September
2003. For Moore’s remark about the alleged homosexual and transgender
conspiracy, see Campbell Robertson, “Roy Moore, Alabama Chief Justice,
Suspended over Gay Marriage Order,” The New York Times, September 30,
2016.
26% of Americans might be atheists: Will M. Gervais and Maxine B.
Najle, “How Many Atheists Are There?” (last edited on March 31, 2017) at
psyarxiv.com.
53% of Americans say that religion is “very important” in their lives, and
74% identify as Christian: Gallup Poll, December 2016.
On the clergy’s role in assigning movie ratings, see the documentary This
Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006). Although this documentary is more than 15
years old, it is still the best source of information about how films are rated,
due to the Motion Picture Association of America’s continuing secrecy
regarding the process.
Bertrand Russell is quoted from “A Free Man’s Worship,” which first
appeared in the Independent Review in 1903.
Antony Flew’s remark about philosophical talent is on p. 109 of his book
God and Philosophy (New York: Dell, 1966).
Hamlet’s exact words were: “Why, then ’tis none to you; for there is
nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison”
(act 2, scene 2, lines 254–256 of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of
Denmark, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare [USA: Octopus
Books, 1985, p. 844]).
Aristotle is quoted from The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by page 65
Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 249
(“Nature belongs to the class of causes”: Physics 2.8, 198b10–11), and from
The Politics, translated by T. A. Sinclair (Harmondsworth, Middlesex:
Penguin Books, 1962), p. 40 (“If then we are right in believing”: I.8,
1256b20).
Saint Thomas Aquinas is quoted from his Summa Theologica, III
Quodlibet, 27, translated by Thomas Gilby in St. Thomas Aquinas:
Philosophical Texts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960; originally
written around 1270).
The passage supposedly about abortion is Jeremiah 1:4–8. I quoted the
King James translation of The Holy Bible.
On the history of Catholic thought, see John Connery, SJ, Abortion: The
Development of the Roman Catholic Perspective (Chicago: Loyola
University Press, 1977) (the Church has never said that the fetus acquires a
soul at conception: p. 308). I am grateful to Steve Sverdlik for tutoring me
in this area.
The Catholic Church officially softened its stance on evolution with Pope
Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis (1950).