Earlier this year the “In Good Faith” column of the Independent newspaper included a rather paradoxical observation by Focus on the Family president Jim Daly, as he answered the question: “Does morality require a religious foundation?” Daly referred to lay theologian and novelist C.S. Lewis who, he said, held the notion that “a sense of right and wrong is innate to human nature.” Daly went on to say this very notion is evidence for God’s existence and said “without Him [God] there would be no such thing as goodness.”

So is goodness “God’s nature” or “human nature”? Daly’s conclusion assumes God is intrinsic to human nature and thus gets credit for the goodness human nature holds. But this is a circular argument that ends up casting a premise as a conclusion in attempting to answer the question of whether or not morality requires a religious foundation.

Suppose instead that human nature has an existence of its own apart from any god. Couldn’t it still possess innate goodness? The Humanist Manifesto, a wholly secular statement of the American Humanist Association, embraces the position that “humanism…without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives.” The Manifesto states that humans are an integral part of nature and ethical values are derived from human interest. In this the Manifesto largely echoes the same C.S. Lewis notion that we as humans have an inherent moral sense, without demanding God as prerequisite.

In fact, belief in God at times can actually diminish “human morality” as it’s commonly understood. In the civil rights struggle of the 50s and 60s, secular and freethinking persons were statistically more likely to denounce injustice than were those holding religious beliefs. Religious beliefs were even used at times to defend discrimination rather than oppose it. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” specifically critiqued white Christian clergymen who urged him to be more restrained in his quest for justice. So “religion” and “morality” can indeed be at odds. A consistently positive nexus between the two is called further into question when one remembers the atrocities, both past and present, committed specifically in the name of various faiths.  

Greg Epstein, a Humanist chaplain who holds post-graduate degrees in theological studies from the University of Michigan and Harvard University, goes so far as to say human nature’s inherent goodness may be a source for religious precepts rather than derived from them. He cites what’s known as “the golden rule,” ubiquitously accepted and observed even in the absence of religion, and notes that diverse theological beliefs have been built upon this common ethical basis.

“You can have a society that doesn’t have Krishna, Jesus, or Buddha and it will be fine,” Epstein writes in his book Good Without God. “But if you have a society that lacks this principle [golden rule] then all hell really will break loose.” Still, he notes, nothing about the golden rule requires a god.

Epstein says goodness is simply a human choice, “the most important choice we can ever make, and we have to make it again and again, throughout our lives.” We have to look inside ourselves, understand what we see there, and use this information when deciding how to treat others. “If we can accept that reality and act with courage,” he says, “we can be very good indeed.”

By Ken Burrows

Published April 22, 2015, with the quotation below:

“The World is my country . . . and to do good is my religion.”  - - - Thomas Paine