It's popular for religious believers to insist that their religion, or even just religion generally, is critical for the existence of good morals. Why? Perhaps it's because in the modern world there simply isn't much of anything left for religion to do. There once was a time when religion organized all of a person's life; today, religion is relegated to the dusty corners of society.

In God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong, S. T. Joshi writes:

My own judgment is that religion continues to stake a claim to ethical supremacy by an appeal to what might be called the ghost of its former metaphysical supremacy; that is, even those theists who are no longer particularly vocal about the metaphysical truth of the central tenets of their religion (the existence, omnipotence, and benevolence of God; the existence and nature of the soul and the afterlife; the divinity of Jesus Christ) still rely upon the prior acceptance of these tenets as a purely rhetorical means of vaunting their own moral systems over those of such horrible people as “secular humanists” or (still worse) “moral relativists.”

I will go further and say that with the demise of the metaphysical claims of religion and, in the last two centuries, its ejection from political and military power in most of the Western nations, the coopting of morals is the only function left to religion if it is not to be entirely irrelevant to present-day concerns, regardless of whether it has any legitimate claim to this office or whether its prior conduct warrants it; so that it is understandable that religions cling to their role as moral guardians with the tenacity of desperation.

In the past, religion provided the metaphysical backdrop for politics, social organization, power and familial relationships, a person’s place in society, military endeavors, and so forth. The metaphysical ideas behind religion were also the metaphysical ideas behind everything else: religion gave everyone the ingredients for organizing and structuring life generally, not just the religious life.

Today, though, that’s simply not the case anymore — at least not for the majority of people. Religion no longer provides a metaphysical backdrop for politics, commerce, science, technology, or any other major facets of most Western societies. Morals and values is just about all that’s left — and it’s not an irrelevant issue, either, because morals and values inform what we do in all the various spheres of our lives.

Part of what Joshi is pointing out, though, is the fact that accepting the role of religion in constructing our morals or values assumes the validity of the metaphysical ingredients of religion which we no longer incorporate into the rest of our lives. We we dismiss or ignore religious metaphysics generally, why insist on its inclusion when it comes to morality?

 

Read More Book Notes from the Book Reviews on this site.