CHAPTER 4

D oes 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 successfully campaigned to
become 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 to the
Ten Commandments installed in the Alabama state judicial
building. This monument weighed over 5,000 pounds, and
anyone entering the building could not miss it. Moore was
then sued again, but the people were still behind him: 77% of

49
50 THE ELEMENTS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY

Americans supported his right to display his 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 merely recognizing God’s
rightful place above the law. In 2012, he was again elected
Chief Justice of the state of Alabama.
The United States is a religious country; 92% of Americans
say they believe in God, and 56% say that religion is “very
important” in their lives. The main religion in America is
Christianity; 41% of Americans report believing that Jesus
Christ will return to earth by 2050. In America, members of the
Christian clergy are often treated as moral experts: Hospitals
ask them to sit on ethics committees; reporters interview them
on the moral dimensions of a story; and churchgoers look to
them for guidance. The clergy even help decide whether mov-
ies will be rated “G,” “PG,” “PG-13,” “R,” or “NC-17.” Priests
and ministers are assumed to be wise counselors who will 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 why they
are seen as having special moral insight. In popular thinking,
morality and religion are inseparable; people commonly believe
that morality can be understood only in the context of religion.
Thus, the clergy are assumed to be authorities on morality.
It is not hard 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 his
essay “A Free Man’s Worship,” written in 1903, Bertrand Russell
expresses what he calls the “scientific” view of the world:
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
 DOES MORALITY DEPEND ON RELIGION? 51

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 cus-
tom. Whether something is right or wrong is perfectly objec-
tive: It is right if God commands it and wrong if God forbids
it. Moreover, the Divine Command Theory 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 com-
mandments, 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, atheists would not accept it, because they do not
52 THE ELEMENTS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY

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. 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 com-
mand it, or do the gods command it because it is right? This
is one of the most famous questions in the history of philoso-
phy. The British philosopher Antony Flew (1923–2010) sug-
gests 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 building 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 rela-
tion of the builders? This question poses a dilemma, and each
option 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 sim-
ply because God requires it. God’s command makes truth-
fulness 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. Accord-
ing to the Divine Command Theory, nothing is good or bad,
except when God’s thinking makes it so.
This idea encounters several difficulties.
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 truthful-
ness right is not like that; it could not be done by rearranging
 DOES MORALITY DEPEND ON RELIGION? 53

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 arbi-
trary. Suppose a parent forbids a teenager from doing some-
thing, and when the teenager asks why, the parent responds,
“Because I said so!” In such a case, the parent seems to be
imposing his will on the child arbitrarily. Yet the Divine Com-
mand 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, sup-
pose God commands us to be truthful. On the Divine Com-
mand Theory, he could have just as easily 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. And 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 involves the unnecessary infliction of pain; it
can have unwanted long-term psychological effects; and so on.
However, the Divine Command Theory does not care about
any of those things; it sees the maliciousness, the pain, and the
long-term effects of child abuse 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. 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
54 THE ELEMENTS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY

make child abuse wrong. However, child abuse would still be

malicious, so it would still be wrong. Thus, the Divine Com-
mand Theory fails. Second, bear in mind that even a religious
person might be genuinely in doubt as to what God has com-
manded. After all, religious texts disagree with each other,
and sometimes there seem to be inconsistencies 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 may say that God commands us to do certain things because
they are right. God, who is infinitely wise, recognizes that truth-
fulness 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 wis-
dom in knowing what is best. Also, we are not 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 draw-
back. 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 stan-
dard 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 conception of right and wrong because it would
be sacrilegious not to do so. 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
 DOES MORALITY DEPEND ON RELIGION? 55

the Divine Command Theory is not only untenable but impi-

ous. And, in fact, some of the greatest theologians have
rejected the theory for just these reasons. Such thinkers as
Saint Thomas Aquinas connect morality with religion in a dif-
ferent way.

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 think-
ing for over 1,700 years. The Greeks believed that everything
in nature has a purpose.
Aristotle (384–322 bc) 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 quite 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 organic beings. According to him, every-
thing 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.
56 THE ELEMENTS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY

The world, Aristotle thought, is an orderly, rational sys-

tem in 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 spe-
cifically 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 a
remarkably vain species.
The Christian thinkers who came later found this world-
view 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 con-
duct. Moral rules are now viewed as deriving from the laws of
nature. Some ways of behaving are said to be “natural” 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? Accord-
ing 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 commonly 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
 DOES MORALITY DEPEND ON RELIGION? 57

created by God, with a specific “human” nature, as part of his

overall plan.
The endorsement of beneficence is relatively uncon-
troversial. Natural-law theory has also been used, however,
to support more questionable ideas. Religious thinkers
often condemn “deviant” sexual practices, and they usu-
ally justify this by appealing to 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
best 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.

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. Children are naturally self-centered, but par-
ents don’t think this is a good thing.
Second, the Theory of Natural Law seems to confuse
“is” and “ought.” In the 18th century, David Hume pointed
out that what is the case and what ought to be the case are logi-
cally 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
58 THE ELEMENTS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY

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 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 hap-
pens 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 with-
out 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 van-
ity. 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

Some religious people will find the preceding discussion
unsatisfying. It will seem too abstract to have any bearing on
their actual lives. For them, the connection between morality
and religion is an immediate, practical matter that centers on
particular moral issues. It doesn’t matter whether right and
wrong are understood in terms of God’s will or whether moral
laws are laws of nature. 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 must 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.
 DOES MORALITY DEPEND ON RELIGION? 59

For one thing, it is often difficult to find specific moral

guidance in the Scriptures. We face different problems than
our ancestors 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 have practical application
in 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 tra-
dition are 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 Testa-
ment condemns being rich, and there is a long tradition of
self-denial and charitable giving 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. A recent 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 mak-
ing up their own minds about the issues and then interpret-
ing 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 hap-
pens a lot. The question of wealth is one example; abortion
is another.
In the debate over abortion, religious issues are never far
from the discussion. Religious conservatives hold that the fetus
is a person from the moment of conception, and so abortion
is murder. The fetus, they believe, is not merely a potential
person but is an actual person, possessing a full-fledged right
to life. Liberals, of course, deny this—they say that the fetus
is something less than that, at least early in the pregnancy.
The abortion issue is complex, but we are concerned
only with how it relates to religion. Conservatives sometimes
say that fetal life is sacred. Is that the Christian view? Must
Christians condemn abortion? To answer those questions, one
might look to the Scriptures or to church tradition.
60 THE ELEMENTS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY

The Scriptures. It is difficult to derive a prohibition against

abortion from either the Jewish or the Christian Scriptures.
The Scriptures never condemn abortion by name. However,
conservatives sometimes quote certain passages that seem
to suggest that fetuses have full human status. One of the
most frequently cited passages is from the first chapter of
Jeremiah, in which Jeremiah quotes God as saying, “Before
I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were
born I consecrated you.” These words are presented as
though they were God’s endorsement of the conservative
position: it is wrong to kill the unborn because the unborn
are consecrated to God.
In context, however, these words obviously mean some-
thing different. Suppose we read the whole passage in which
they occur:
Now the word of the Lord came to me, saying, “Before
I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you
were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet
to 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 interprets them in a way that supports their
position; yet those words suggest something else entirely when
read 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 sup-
port for something he already believes, and has interpreted
the Bible with this in mind? The latter, when true, suggests
 DOES MORALITY DEPEND ON RELIGION? 61

an especially arrogant attitude—the attitude that God himself

must share one’s opinions!
Other biblical passages support a liberal view of abor-
tion. Three times the death penalty is recommended for
women who have had sex out of wedlock, even though kill-
ing the woman would also kill her fetus (Genesis 38:24;
Leviticus 21:9; Deuteronomy 22:20–21). This suggests that
the fetus has no right to life. Also, in Exodus 21, God tells
Moses that the penalty for murder is death; however, the
penalty for causing a woman to miscarry is only a fine. The
Law of Israel seemed to regard the fetus as something less
than a person.

Church Tradition. Today, the Catholic Church strongly

opposes abortion. In many Protestant churches, too, abor-
tion is routinely denounced from the pulpit. It is no surprise,
then, that many people feel that they must condemn abor-
tion “for religious reasons,” regardless of how Scripture is
interpreted. What lies behind the Church’s current position
on abortion?
To some extent, the Vatican has always opposed abor-
tion for the same reason that it condemns condoms, birth
control pills, and other forms of contraception: All of these
activities thwart 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. The argu-
ment depends on natural-law theory, and, as we have seen,
natural-law theory is based on a worldview that predates
modern science. Christians today need not reject modern
science—even the Catholic Church dropped its opposition
to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution back in 1950. Thus,
Christians are not required to oppose abortion based on
natural-law considerations.
At any rate, to say that abortion disrupts a natural pro-
cess is to say nothing about the moral status of the fetus. The
pope does not merely believe that abortion is immoral, like
62 THE ELEMENTS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY

using a condom; he believes that abortion is 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 a.d.
1200—little of relevance is known. 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 in the 13th century, Saint Thomas Aquinas constructed a
philosophical system that became the bedrock of later Catholic
thought. The key question, Aquinas believed, is whether
the fetus has a soul: if it does, then abortion is murder; if
it doesn’t, then abortion is not 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 what that
means, exactly; what’s important is that human beings are sup-
posed to acquire a “substantial form” only when their bodies
take on human shape. So now the key question is: When do
human beings first 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 human—after all, fetal development occurs
in the mother’s womb, out of sight. Aristotle had believed,
for no good reason, that males acquire a soul 40 days after
conception and females do after 90 days. Presumably, many
Christians accepted his view. At any rate, for the next several
centuries, it was natural for Catholics to strongly oppose abor-
tion at any stage of pregnancy, because the fetus might have
already acquired a human form, and so abortion might be
murder.
Contrary to popular belief, the Catholic Church has
never officially maintained that the fetus acquires a soul at the
moment of conception. Around 1600, however, some theolo-
gians began to say that the soul enters the body a few days
after conception, and so abortion is murder even at an early
stage. This monumentally important change in Catholic think-
ing occurred without extended theological debate. Perhaps
it seemed unimportant because the Church already opposed
early-term abortions. Yet we understand little about why the
Church adopted this position.
 DOES MORALITY DEPEND ON RELIGION? 63

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 do not have a soul dur-
ing 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 status of the fetus in the 1600s, and
it has held fast to 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 gen-
eration interprets its traditions to support its favored moral
views. Abortion is but one example of this. We could also have
discussed the church’s shifting views on slavery, or the status
of women, or capital punishment. In each case, the moral
stance taken by the Church seems not to be derived from the
Bible so much as imposed on it.
The arguments in this chapter point to a common con-
clusion: Right and wrong are not to be understood in terms
of God’s will; morality is a matter of reason and conscience,
not religious faith; and, in any case, religious considerations
do not provide definitive solutions to most of the moral prob-
lems that we face. Morality and religion are, in a word, differ-
ent. Of course, religious beliefs do sometimes bear on moral
issues. Consider, for example, the doctrine of eternal life. If
some people go to heaven when they die—so that dying 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 the world is about to end. This might
diminish 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 Christian-
ity or any other theological system is false; they merely show
that, even if such a system is true, morality remains a separate
matter.