Overview of Chapter 4
4
Late Moderns
Often the start of late modernity is marked by the French Revolution of 1789. This chapter will direct attention to a couple dozen important moral apologists born in the nineteenth century. Some of these thinkers did work relevant to the moral argument in the early twentieth century, but this is quite all right since the modern period often extends to the end of World War II in 1945. We will not greatly elaborate on each figure; we will discuss a few at greater length (namely, John Henry Newman and A. E. Taylor), and we will have quite a bit more to say about Henry Sidgwick in part 3.
John Henry Newman
John Henry Newman (1801–1890) was a significant British figure during the nineteenth century. He exemplified the fact that the history of apologetics is very much a story about epistemology. His rich epistemological insights served as the foundation of his moral argument. His broad epistemology and expansive empiricism recognized that we are more than narrow logic choppers. He likened the quest for truth to a vaulted ceiling that ingeniously throws its weight in a variety of directions. We gradually come to the conclusions we do through a complicated process of considering a great number of evidences, not just through tight discursive analyses. He wrote against the background of British empiricism, particularly that of Locke, Hume, and Mill, all of whom, by Newman’s lights, insisted on too restrictive a range of evidence in their theorizing.
Newman thought that a broader empiricism would take into account the phenomenology of conscience, in particular, which can prove telling, making possible what he called a real assent and sense of deep assurance. His most important work containing his moral argument is An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, published in 1870.1 Selecting conscience was strategic, largely attributable to the nineteenth century, as he claimed in a letter to William Brownlow. It was a potentially persuasive starting point in his argument, tactically chosen in order to get the argument off the ground, since he figured it was something that most would admit. Newman desired to make an impact and be persuasive, and he didn’t think it would be effective to offer evidential considerations that were nonstarters. A practitioner at heart, Newman was careful not to ignore widely accessible evidence that’s really there, and he also wished to cast an argument that can appeal to the unlearned just as much as to the scholar.
Put succinctly, he argued that our consciences, particularly our feelings of guilt, lead us to conclude that God exists. Feelings of conscience are often directed toward fellow human beings, but sometimes our feelings of guilt or shame, which we take as evidence to suggest that we have offended someone, lack an appropriate human target. If such feelings are appropriate, they must then have a nonhuman target. Our feelings of responsibility, shame, and fear emanating from our conscience imply that there is one to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims on us we fear. Guilt sensitizes us to the impediment of sin in the way of fellowship with others, including God.
Like other luminaries from the history of the moral argument, Newman thought that a vitally important way in which to become aware of the divine is our sense of moral obligation. Human beings seem epistemically equipped to identify intimations of conscience and their source as an external admonition. Conscience is less a rule of right conduct than a sanction of right conduct, and this feature of its phenomenology makes morality personal:
Conscience has an intimate bearing on our affections and emotions leading us to reverence and awe, hope and fear, especially fear. Wrongdoing generates a lively sense of responsibility and guilt. These various perturbations of mind which are characteristic of a bad conscience, and may be very considerable—self-reproach, poignant shame, haunting remorse, chill dismay at the prospect of the future—and their contraries, when the conscience is good, as real though less forcible, self-approval, inward peace, lightness of heart, and the like—these emotions constitute a specific difference between conscience and our other intellectual senses—common sense, good sense, sense of expedience, taste, sense of honour, and the like.2
He thought the moral deliverances of general revelation are predominantly negative, making the gospel of Christ such good news. He also took the emotional dimensions of moral phenomenology to point to a personal Agent behind the moral law. What stirs emotions are not inanimate things but persons. “If, as is the case, we feel responsibility, are ashamed, are frightened, at transgressing the voice of conscience, this implies that there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear.”3
For Newman, conscience functions as the aboriginal Vicar of Christ. Special revelation amplifies and augments the truths at which natural religion hints. In the fullness of time, he thought, God finally revealed the fuller truth, effecting a glorious inversion, making the minor note the major theme: the possibility of forgiveness, the prospect of moral transformation, and hope for salvation. God is not just a Judge but a loving Father. The Holy is not merely, to use Rudolf Otto’s later language, mysterium and tremendum—dark, mysterious, unapproachable—but also fascinans: lovely, beautiful, gracious, charming.4 For Newman, then, the moral argument functions impeccably as a prelude and prolegomenon to proclamation of the gospel of Christ.
Henry Sidgwick
Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900) would identify the “dualism of practical reason” as a problem confronting the ethical enterprise. This is the tension between one’s own happiness and the happiness of others, or between rational self-love and rational benevolence. Sidgwick thought these impulses equally legitimate, yet on occasion they encounter an intractable tension. The full rationality of morality requires the resolution of this dualism, but Sidgwick did not see such a rapprochement as forthcoming. The only potential solution he could see was a theistic one, according to which a providential God ensures their harmony, but Sidgwick himself refused to follow this path. Nevertheless, his writings include the seeds for such a moral argument, predicated on the full rationality of morality.5 We will lay out much more of Sidgwick’s view in chapter 15.
William James
Born four years after Sidgwick was William James (1842–1910), whose work would eventually offer several resources that a moral apologist can deploy. He saw it as irrational to embrace a rule of reasoning that precludes finding truth that is really there to be found, and he argued that the category of moral regret is a bad fit with a naturalistic worldview. Like Newman and others, his was an expansive empiricism that included considering the evidential value of relational, aesthetic, and ethical deliverances. Concerning moral skeptics, for example, he had this to say:
The question of having moral beliefs at all or not having them is decided by our will. Are our moral preferences true or false, or are they only odd biological phenomena, making things good or bad for us, but in themselves indifferent? How can your pure intellect decide? If your heart does not want a world of moral reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one. . . . Moral skepticism can no more be refuted or proved by logic than intellectual skepticism can. When we stick to it that there is truth (be it of either kind), we do so with our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The skeptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows.6
Arthur Balfour
British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour (1848–1930), a contemporary of James, also gave Gifford Lectures that touched on the moral argument, and he similarly recognized the moral deficiencies of naturalism. He was particularly intent on underscoring the ways in which deflationary analyses of moral values and duties are better at explaining them away than at actually explaining them. The published version of his first Gifford Lectures, Theism and Humanism, was one of C. S. Lewis’s ten favorite books.7
William Sorley
This section slows down and zeroes in on William Sorley (1855–1935) specifically and his work’s broad application to our current cultural and apologetic milieu. In 1900, Sorley succeeded his old professor Henry Sidgwick at Cambridge, a post he held until his retirement in 1933. Not a Christian himself, Sidgwick said it was a relief to have a Christian philosopher replace him. Sorley gave his Gifford Lectures in 1914 and 1915. They were later published under the title Moral Values and the Idea of God. J. H. Muirhead wrote of this volume that he could remember the sense of freshness and power the book gave them all at the time.8 Sorley represents a philosophy and apologetic approach that is gentlemanly, rigorous, scholarly, and irenic. By examining his unique approach, we discover a model of excellence to follow in thinking through evidential questions about God’s existence.
A Moral Philosopher
As an apologist, Sorley argued that there are good philosophical reasons to take belief in God seriously. Yet, like British idealist philosopher A. E. Taylor in this regard, he wasn’t likely to call himself an apologist, preferring instead to be known as simply a philosopher. Even then, perhaps, apologetics carried unpalatable implications in certain quarters, such as the ranks of professional philosophers who saw apologetics as more about advocacy than reason. Sorley wanted to be known more as a truth seeker than a partisan, and he saw arguments more as lifelong friends than as tools in an arsenal for purposes of persuasion. Because he took evidence and argument seriously, he was averse to seeing them reduced to divisive weapons of intellectual warfare.
What struck those closest to Sorley was how seriously he took ethical issues, not just as a theoretician but also as a practitioner. G. F. Stout depicted Sorley with descriptions of his vigor, ability, cordial friendliness, and lively wit—a “most loyal and devoted friend,” a man of “strong and warm feelings.” What struck Stout most in Sorley’s character was “the consistent way in which he was guided both in his private and public life by moral standards and practices.”9 This ensured a resonance between Sorley’s life and work, because so much of his professional work revolved around issues of ethics and morality. For Sorley, morality provides a touchstone of reality, and his life demonstrated that he took the moral project seriously, not only investigating the moral argument but also embodying it.
What Is Good?
Much of what preoccupied Sorley’s attention was the issue of moral values, and a question that arises concerning moral goodness is, What sorts of things can be called “good”? Nowadays, a secular trend is afoot to explain morality by implicitly blurring lines between moral and nonmoral goodness. Atheist Sam Harris suggests that since we know pain is bad and pleasure is good, on this foundation we can construct our ethical systems. DePauw University philosopher and atheist Erik Wielenberg speaks of how the intrinsic nature of intense suffering renders it “bad,” offering us all the moral reasons we need to avoid it for ourselves and others. This way of explaining ethics, however, risks explaining away some of its most important features.
Sorley recognized with prescience that the category of intrinsic moral value rightly applies only to persons. Surely it’s bad to experience excruciating pain, but it’s not morally bad as such. The distinction here is between nonmoral badness and moral evil. Kant recognized this distinction, insisting that the latter is the more distinctively moral category, which is closely related to his insistence that the only truly good thing is a good will—a feature of persons—and also related to his point that morality is less about happiness per se than about deserving to be happy. To conflate nonmoral badness with moral evil contributes to quite a bit of confusion nowadays and is a real weakness in a number of contemporary efforts to construct a moral theory, however rhetorically effective at garnering adherents.
Sorley, to his credit, saw clearly the need to avoid this mistake, keep alive the vital organic connection between moral goodness and persons, and allow moral values in all their profundity and mystery—their authority, their beauty, their compelling nature—to do their work.
Lotze’s Dictum
Sorley arguably developed one of the most sophisticated moral arguments prior to recent times. Much of what empowered Sorley’s analysis was that he thought it incumbent to make the basis of our theory of reality as broad as possible and to realize that it will lack breadth and completeness if moral facts and ideas are excluded from the outset. The result is a truncated picture of reality. Sorley thus argued strongly for attentiveness to such data and a deep inquiry into its evidential significance.
In most systems of philosophy, ethical inquiry gets postponed until questions of metaphysics—What is the nature of reality?—are settled, but Sorley thought this to be a radical mistake. Instead, he sided with “Lotze’s dictum,” which says the true beginning of metaphysics lies in ethics. Hermann Lotze’s conviction here is that ethical ideas about value or worth hold a certain primacy for the interpretation of reality—metaphysics ought to be founded on ethics, objectively construed.10
On this point, Sorley stood foursquare against the stance of atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell, who warned against any strategy that aims to figure out the nature of reality by considering morality:
Driven from the particular sciences, the belief that the notions of good and evil must afford a key to the understanding of the world has sought a refuge in philosophy. But even from this last refuge, if philosophy is not to remain a set of pleasing dreams, this belief must be driven forth. It is a commonplace that happiness is not best achieved by those who seek it directly; and it would seem that the same is true of the good. In thought, at any rate, those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.11
Here, Russell’s dismissal of the evidential significance of morality was more than a little premature. The idea residing at the very foundation of moral arguments for God’s existence is that morality provides a veridical window of insight into reality.
The moral argument is based on this powerful idea: A close examination of morality in its distinctive features, true to our rich moral experiences, functions evidentially to provide reasons to think the merely temporal and finite goods of this world are neither the only nor the most important goods there are to secure. Moral values and duties radically impinge on us and this world by, it would seem, pointing beyond this world. They suggest the way the world ought to and one day will be, most assuredly not the way it already is. Sorley embraced the evidential value of ethics to inquiries into metaphysics.
An Imaginative Apologetic
As a philosopher, Sorley had a refined aesthetic and imaginative taste. His reading wasn’t myopic or provincial; it included not only philosophy but also a wide range of great literature. Moreover, he possessed prodigious literary ability himself, a trait he passed down to his son Charles. Sorley and his wife, Janetta, would have four children, two sons and two daughters. Their highly gifted eldest son, Charles Hamilton Sorley, was a noted World War I poet. William once compared his own achievements with those of his son’s: “He will be remembered when I am a dead and forgotten scholar—there is in his poetry the truth I sought, and beauty such as I have never found.”12
Sorley knew that human beings aren’t merely mechanically rational, which likely contributed to his draw to an argument that appeals to both the intellect and the affect—the full range, in fact, of our relational, aesthetic, and imaginative faculties. Nor was he alone in this regard; the fertile history of moral apologetics is filled with profound thinkers who could see that our efforts to apprehend reality in all of its fullness require a broad approach to knowledge and keen, intentional attentiveness to the expansive array of evidence on offer—moral and relational, aesthetic and discursive. John Henry Newman, Clement Webb, William James, and others saw that this requires openness to an interdisciplinary approach. A. E. Taylor echoed this insight:
Plato was so much more than the author of a philosophical theory; he was one of the world’s supreme dramatists, with the great dramatist’s insight into a vast range of human character and experience, an insight only possible to a nature itself quickly and richly responsive to a world of suggestion which narrower natures of the specialist type miss. By moralists I do not mean primarily men who have devoted themselves to the elaboration of ethical systems, the Aristotles, or even the Kants, but men who have lived richly and deeply and thought as well as lived, the Platos, Augustines, Dostoevskys, and their fellows.13
Sorley, like Taylor, like John Henry Newman, like Clement Webb, could see that the head and heart must come together, that philosophy and literature must converge, that an inquiry into truth requires the full panoply of our resources.
The Problem of Evil
When Sorley said we must be attentive to the moral evidence, he wasn’t blind to the suffering of the world. He saw it clearly as a sign that something was awry and in desperate need of fixing. There was nothing Pollyannaish about his approach. He wrote his Gifford Lectures in the throes of World War I, sending early chapters to his son Charles, who was in the middle of the fight. Sorley acutely recognized that ignoring the sufferings and evils in the world wasn’t an option. He couldn’t merely speak of the evidential power of the moral law; he had to acknowledge and somehow come to terms with the broken and dysfunctional (dysteleological) elements in the world, the sense in which the world clearly isn’t yet what it ought to be.
Then something happened that brought the problem of evil home in the most personal way possible. The horrific news arrived that Charles had been killed in the Battle of Loos. There was already an inextricable connection between Sorley’s work and life, but now it became a dramatic, dynamic collision of heartrending loss and his life’s work. His abiding faith despite grieving his son’s tragic premature death resonates on every page of Moral Values. The problem of evil was no mere academic discussion for Sorley; it couldn’t have been a more gripping existential reality. The moral law is real, he was convinced, but equally undeniable is evil. The moral evidence vividly contains both intractable realities.
Sorley came to see that this very recognition makes sense of a dispute between Kant and Hume. Kant’s formulation of the moral argument suggests that the moral law (the inexorable fact of duty) requires us to assume the being of God as what he calls a practical postulate necessitated by moral reason. But of course the facts of morality have also been used to argue against theism, especially in the form of the problem of evil, a point Hume pushed vociferously. How could reflection on good and evil lead Kant and Hume in such opposite directions? Sorley realized they were approaching the question from different points of view. Hume directed his attention to the struggle of mankind, what men suffered, the cruelty of the world, and the havoc of life. Kant, though, wasn’t looking at outward performance but at the inward law of goodness and the power it reveals in the mind that is conscious of it.
Might nature after all be regarded as a fitting field for the realization of goodness? The question Sorley was considering is not what a perfect world looks like but what a world might need to look like in order to make growth in goodness possible and likely. Real agents, rather than marionettes and automatons, require the possibility of missing the mark; only by this means might they come to have goodness and consciousness of the good—not to mention communion with God himself.
On the evidential role of evil and the difference between Kant and Hume, Sorley agreed with Kant and used the very fact of evil as the foundation for a theistic argument. He argued that both the moral order and the order of nature belong to the essence of reality, and if it’s synthesis and rapprochement we seek, they can be harmoniously united in one universe only when nature is understood not merely in its present appearance but as working out the purpose of making moral beings. The problem of evil, Sorley thought, is often cast in a way that overlooks the creation of beings who will achieve goodness only freely, requiring experience of all sorts of circumstances that it may develop into secure harmony with the moral order.
Sorley’s argument wasn’t a straightforward inference from morality to God but instead a bit more circuitous, with a wider range. It is little surprising that Sorley’s moral argument, forged in the crucible of unspeakable personal loss, insisted on neither trivializing this world’s travails nor allowing them the final word.
An Integrative Mind
Charles Taylor writes that the secular age into which we’ve entered features exclusive humanism, a vision of life in which the immanent takes primacy, a humanism accepting “no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing. Of no previous society was this true.”14 In contrast with this remarkable trend, Sorley gave extended arguments that morality functions semiotically—as a sign—by pointing beyond itself to eternal goods that, rather than trivializing or devaluing earthly or temporal goods, imbue them with sacramental significance.
A close look reveals that Sorley’s approach, rather than being dated, remains a lively, instructive, and relevant model to follow. He demonstrated what long and intimate acquaintance with the world of ideas can produce, and his enduring paradigm can serve as an inspiration and corrective to much of what passes for apologetics today.
Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison
Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison (1856–1931) struck a number of the same chords as did other notable moral apologists, while distinguishing himself in a few salient respects. He lauded Kant on the issue of value, tracing that line of argument to focus on the principled reason to side with Kant over Hume on the problem of evil. Still, he was critical of Kant in other respects, thinking Kant paid God’s immanence inadequate attention. Pringle-Pattison saw clearly various implications of the moral argument for the character of God, not just the matter of God’s existence, and he intentionally launched criticisms at Hume’s narrow empiricism.
Rebelling against the absolutism of Hegel and of such Hegelians as F. H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet, for whom the individual is merged with the universal, he insisted on the uniqueness of the individual person. He thus assigned primacy to personality—an influence that would later affect William James, George Santayana, Bertrand Russell, and George Herbert Mead. He thought that both British empiricism and Anglo-Hegelianism degraded the independence of the individual, and he described his philosophy as a “larger idealism” that reconciles the dictates of morality and religion with the findings of science, purpose being the supreme category.
His book most relevant to moral apologetics was The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy, comprising his Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen in 1912 and 1913.15 His principal purpose in this work was to engage with the long-standing debate about the significance of Enlightenment philosophy and nineteenth-century scientific developments for the coherence and plausibility of Christian theism by setting these debates within the context of the idealist philosophy to which he himself was a major contributor.
As a native of Edinburgh, he must have grown up accustomed to hearing quite a bit about his town’s most famous philosophical son, the towering eighteenth-century philosopher, economist, essayist, and historian David Hume, whose Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion dealt primarily with who God is rather than whether God exists. Whereas Hume argued we could have at most a vague sense of who God is based on the available evidence, Pringle-Pattison demurred, arguing that Hume’s conclusions were determined by the restricted nature of his premises. Hume looked to nature, not to the incessant hopes and fears that actuate the human mind. We should instead direct our gaze at the sentient creation and the facts of human history, the center and foreground of the whole picture, a broader array of evidence than Hume considered.
The right analysis of the world’s evils can be rightly judged only in the light of what we take to be the end in view. Pringle-Pattison was drawn more to Kant’s fixation on the idea of an ultimate end through the idea of value or worth than to Hume’s focus on the less-than-optimal conditions of the world. If there is reason to think that the world is, as John Keats put it, a “value of soul-making,” or, as Gotthold Lessing put it, a “divine education,” rather than a context aimed at maximizing hedonistic delights, there is no particular reason to think the world shouldn’t feature a measure of evils.
Steeped in the tradition of idealism, Pringle-Pattison suggested that the entirety of the latter half of the nineteenth century was dominated, among philosophers, by a battle between naturalists and idealists. The crux of their debate was this: Is the universe the expression of a transcendent Greatness and Goodness, or is it, in the ultimate analysis, a collection of unknowing material facts? Is the essence and cause of all things “only dust that rises up and is lightly laid again, or is it the Eternal Love with which Dante closes his vision, the Love that moves the sun and the other Stars”?16 He was convinced that “beauty and goodness are not born of the clash of atoms; they are effluences of something more perfect and more divine.”17
He wrote that “reverence for the moral law, the self-humiliation caused by failure to fulfill its demands, the sense of sin, the attitude of worship and utter self-surrender, are possible only if the subject feels himself in presence of a Reality beside which all else pales into insignificance. And it is to the moral and religious man himself that we must go, not to the philosopher weaving theories about him, if we are to understand his experience aright.”18 He thought the conception of intrinsic values is the clue to the ultimate nature of reality, and that divine omnipotence consists in the all-compelling power of goodness and love to enlighten the grossest darkness and to melt the hardest heart. “We needs must love the highest when we see it.”19 Contra Hume, the God to which the truths of morality point is not an amoral deity indifferent to us but rather a God whose very nature is self-giving love more powerful than death.
Hastings Rashdall
Anthony Thiselton writes that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the most convincing advocate of the moral argument was perhaps Hastings Rashdall (1858–1924). Rashdall was critical of Sidgwick’s inability to see that rational benevolence has primacy over rational self-love, so while recognizing the dualism of practical reason, Rashdall underscored the strength of at least certain versions of theism to account for the priority of benevolence and altruism. We will return to this discussion in part 3.
As both a moral apologist and a kind of utilitarian, Rashdall also demonstrated that agreement on normative ethical theory is not a prerequisite for proponents of the moral argument. What is needed more centrally is recognition of an essential dependence relation of morality on God, not agreement on the peripheral matter of fine-grained normative analysis. Rashdall argued that a generous empiricism will not domesticate morality, watering down its authority, but instead insist on allowing the deliverances of morality, the binding nature of the moral law, and the transcendent implications and aspirations of the moral good to inform metaphysics. Like many others, he thought the moral argument works best when combined with other pieces of natural theology.20
What seemed obvious to Rashdall is that the moral law or ideal cannot be found wholly in individual human consciousness:
Only if we believe in the existence of a Mind for which the true moral ideal is already in some sense real, a Mind which is the source of whatever is true in our own moral judgments, can we rationally think of the moral idea as no less real than the world itself. Only so can we believe in an absolute standard of right and wrong, which is as independent of this or that man’s actual ideas and actual desires as the facts of material nature. The belief in God, though not (like the belief in a real and an active self) a postulate of there being any such things as Morality at all, is the logical presupposition of an “objective” or absolute Morality. A moral ideal can exist nowhere and nohow but in a mind; an absolute moral ideal can exist only in a Mind from which all Reality is derived. Our moral ideal can only claim objective validity in so far as it can rationally be regarded as the revelation of a moral ideal eternally existing in the mind of God.21
If we refuse to deflate morality and its demands, “the belief in God, if not so obviously and primarily a postulate of Morality as the belief in a permanent spiritual and active self, is still a postulate of a Morality which shall be able fully to satisfy the demands of the moral consciousness. It may conveniently be called the secondary postulate of Morality.” The very idea of morality implies action directed toward an end that has value. If the value of “good” has its counterpart in the divine mind, the course of events is itself governed by that same mind that is the source of our moral ideas and must be ultimately directed toward the true moral idea, disclosed however imperfectly in the moral consciousness of man. What valid human judgments deem good must be part of the divine end.22
Clement Webb
In 1922, John Baillie wrote the following:
The last decade has witnessed several notable additions to the literature of that peculiarly English philosophical movement which seems to have appropriated for itself the name of Ethical Theism and which goes back very largely to the writing of Campbell Fraser and Martineau. We have had especially Mr. Balfour’s Theism and Humanism, Professor Pringle-Pattison’s Idea of God, Professor Sorley’s Moral Values, and Professor Clement Webb’s God and Personality—all of them Gifford Lectures delivered in the Scottish universities and representing, on a broad view, the same general tendency of thought. There seems no doubt that these volumes, and the very considerable literature of which they are but the most important examples, are indicative of a reaction against the very confident English Hegelianism so widely sponsored in the previous generation.23
Clement Webb (1865–1954) usually did work on the moral argument in the context of his wider theological interests. He primarily looked to Plato for inspiration on the nature of moral goodness and to Kant on the nature of moral duties. Although he initially thought Kant had reduced religion to morality, he eventually softened on that conviction.24 As empirical experience justifies belief in an external world, he took our moral experience as solid justification for belief in moral duties. Inspired by Martineau,25 Webb argued that the phenomenology of moral duties (that Kant explained so well) warranted belief in departing from an overly ambitious kind of Kantian autonomy that precludes belief in a “Higher than ourselves” that gives us the moral law. For Webb, sanction for belief in such an ultimate source is found in morality, a source both immanent and transcendent.26
W. G. de Burgh
Born in 1866, W. G. de Burgh did not think moral evidence entailed theism but that it did incline toward it. Such evidence includes both goodness and rightness, and he endorsed a cumulative case for God’s existence. He thought it took Kant’s work on obligations to give the moral argument its teeth and momentum. Consciousness of moral obligations implies the reality of a moral order, which then implies God as its author and sustainer. Likewise with moral values, which are better explained by a personal God than by an impersonal Platonic realm. When it came to God’s love, he departed from the tradition of analogical predication at points, thinking it inadequate for a full appreciation of the incarnation.27 He also argued that divine holiness without divine love would call into question God’s goodness.28
A. E. Taylor
A. E. Taylor (1869–1945), in an effort to carve out evidential space for morality, argued at length against an artificial dichotomy between fact and value. Divorcing facts and values is like trying to separate the sounds of a great symphony from its musical quality. More important than what we do is who we are, he thought, and what is needed is an adequate account for the sort of external assistance we desperately require to be radically transformed—after all, we can’t pull ourselves up by our own hair. Echoing Newman, he argued that the inherent features of moral guilt point in the direction of a personal and perfectly loving God as our First and Final Cause. He counseled close and sustained attentiveness to moral evidence and modeled a laudably expansive epistemology.29
What were the telling features of moral guilt that Taylor identified? First, it is characteristic of the human sense of guilt that it always involves condemnation of our own selves and our own doings and is thus radically different from any disconnect with our surroundings.
Second, nothing is more characteristic of the human sense of guilt than its indelibility, its power of asserting itself with unabated poignancy in spite of all lapse of time and all changes in the self and its environment. Old misdoings can haunt and torment us all through life. And this is no recent phenomenon; even the poetry of Homer reveals there are some kinds of conduct regarded as especially abysmal and atrocious and sure to provoke the anger of the unseen guardians of the moral law.
Third, recognition of our guilt is regularly attended by a demand for punishment. We recognize the justice of a social penalty decreed on us only when and if we have already sat in judgment on ourselves. The gravity of forgiveness attests to this demand for judgment.
Fourth, there is a recognition of the peculiarly polluting quality of moral guilt. All languages use the same words for what offends the conscience as bespeaking that which is defiling and loathsome to sight, touch, or smell. Wrongdoing is intuitively cast as filthy, dirty, stinking; it is the same specific emotional reaction characteristic of humanity in all ages and all levels of civilization. An occupational hazard of contemporary ethicists is thinking of morality only as obligations and thinking too little about the association between sin and uncleanness. In the realm of sense, dirt is a vehicle for infection and danger.
Fifth, what do we feel to be defiled and polluted by contact with what awakens our sense of guilt or wounds our sense of honor? The sense of both is itself a product of the moralizing process. Truly returning to nature would require giving up shame, honor, and chivalry. What is amiss in all of us is not just what we have done but also that the fountain of our moral personality is poisoned. We are fallen creatures, and we know it. Our moral task is no mere business of canalizing or embanking the course of a stream; it has to begin higher up with the purification of the bitter waters at their source. We have not just broken moral rules; we have insulted or proved false to a person of supreme excellence, entitled to wholehearted devotion.
Taylor was convinced that, in the light of such a dire prognosis, only God’s love and grace are enough to provide the cure. He argued that it’s because so many modern moralists are afraid to make the idea of God central in their theories of conduct that their treatment of guilt is inadequate to the actual moral experiences of men with any depth of character. There is no replacement for close, careful attentiveness to the moral evidence in need of explanation, of which objective moral guilt is a central example. “Thus once more I find myself forced back on the conclusion that, to be truly itself, the moral life must have as its last motive love to God, and so become transfigured into the life of religious faith and devotion.”30
Language of transfiguration was intentional; we need more than a tweaking of our moral character. We need to be made new, to be radically transformed into something of which we have an inkling, an inkling of the most valuable good there is. Or to alter the analogy, we need to be transported into a whole new country—though no strange land, but rather home. Although the world is not enough, God is.
Of course, yet again, all of this is all too brief, but perhaps it will whet your appetite to read Taylor’s Faith of a Moralist for yourself. It’s a beautifully labyrinthine work featuring a plethora of moving parts in Taylor’s architectonic system. It’s virtually impossible to reduce it to a few pithy ideas, and the demand for such a reduction is impracticable, unfair to the breadth and texture of Taylor’s expansive work. As readers we shouldn’t insist that an author always answer our questions on our terms; instead, we need to be willing to be patient and learn the artistic rhythms, systematic approach, and skillful dance steps of the author. Consider this introduction to Taylor your invitation to do so.
W. R. Matthews
Walter Robert Matthews (1881–1973) found the moral argument (along with the teleological argument) the most persuasive of all the theistic arguments. When reflecting on the moral evolution of mankind, he asked what it implies concerning the nature of the universe. When discussing the conscience, he inquired into the grounds of its characteristic property, and when pondering the nature of the good, he asked, “What is the place of the Good in the general structure of the universe?”31 In each case he was led to the theistic hypothesis.
C. S. Lewis
Probably the most famous moral argument of all is the popular version that C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) developed at the beginning of his enormously influential book Mere Christianity. Lewis started with the commonsense observation that we make moral judgments about right and wrong that we take to be objectively true. This suggests a reality beyond and behind the moral law that Lewis went on to argue is like a mind, which points ultimately to a theistic explanation. That there is such a law is one of two basic realities that Lewis thought gave us an important clue about reality. The other clue is that we invariably fall short of such a standard, which points the way to the sort of performative moral argument we have already briefly considered and will consider again later on.
Around the same time that Lewis articulated this argument, he spelled out an elaborate argument for a more academic audience that we must take our basic moral judgments as self-evidently true. This is, properly understood, an argument for objective moral truth, the topic of the second major part of this book, so we will defer further discussion of it until then. Lewis also developed other variations of the moral argument in his essays “The Poison of Subjectivism” and “De Futilitate,” the latter of which argued that our condemnation of cruelty and indifference gives us the substance of a moral argument.32
Overview of Chapter 4
This chapter canvassed a range of late modern thinkers—Newman, Sidgwick, James, Balfour, Sorley, Pringle-Pattison, Rashdall, Webb, de Burgh, Taylor, and Matthews—and culminated with C. S. Lewis, as much a contemporary as a late modern. Newman’s expansive epistemology directed attention especially to the phenomenology of conscience, giving us direct experience of One to whom we’re responsible, before whom we’re ashamed, whose claims on us we fear, making possible what he called a “real assent” and a sense of deep assurance.
Sidgwick provided the ingredients for a theistic argument based on the dualism of practical reason. As a radical empiricist, James took moral and religious experiences seriously as potentially veridical, insisting that a rule of reason that doesn’t allow us to find truth that is there is irrational. Balfour explored the deficiencies of naturalistic accounts of morality. Whether Sorley was integrating or reconciling life and work, finite and infinite goods, the temporal and transcendent, the moral law and evil, philosophy and poetry, or morality and metaphysics, his was an expansive and integrative mind and an open and capacious heart whose prescient insights have endured the test of time.
Pringle-Pattison saw clearly various implications of the moral argument for the character of God, not just the matter of God’s existence, and he intentionally launched criticisms at Hume’s narrow empiricism. Rashdall argued for an essential dependence relation of morality on God, and he thought the moral argument works best when combined with other pieces of natural theology. Webb asserted that the phenomenology of moral duties (that Kant explained so well) warranted belief in departing from an overly ambitious kind of Kantian autonomy that precludes belief in a “Higher than ourselves” that gives us the moral law. De Burgh maintained that moral values are better explained by a personal God than by an impersonal Platonic realm. Taylor argued that what is needed is an adequate account for the sort of external assistance we desperately require to be radically transformed and that the inherent features of moral guilt point in the direction of a personal and perfectly loving God as our First and Final Cause. Matthews found the moral argument (along with the teleological argument) the most persuasive of all the theistic arguments, and Lewis popularized the moral argument in his BBC talks during World War II and in book 1 of Mere Christianity.
1 See John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870; repr., University of Notre Dame Press, 1979). For an excellent contemporary application of a Newmanesque explication of moral phenomenology, especially in conversation with William May, Germain Grisez, and John Finnish, see John F. Crosby, “The Personal Encounter with God in Moral Obligation,” in Personalist Papers (Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 64–92. It is an application that insists on closely attending to the datum of moral obligation and, in the process, defending a central thesis of Spanish philosopher Francisco Suárez (1548–1617).
2 Newman, Grammar of Assent, 100.
3 Newman, Grammar of Assent, 101.
4 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford University Press, 1958), esp. chap. 4.
5 Readers can probably detect that this is part of the ongoing discussion of the coincidence thesis. See Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (Hackett, 1981).
6 William James, “The Will to Believe,” in Essays in Pragmatism (Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1948), 103–4.
7 Arthur James Balfour, Theism and Humanism (Hodder and Stoughton, 1915). See C. S. Lewis, “Ex Libris,” Christian Century 79 (June 6, 1962): 719.
8 J. H. Muirhead, “In Memoriam: William Ritchie Sorley,” Philosophy 11, no. 41 (1936): 120.
9 G. F. Stout, “W. R. Sorley (1855–1935),” Mind 45, no. 177 (1936): 124.
10 Thanks to Nick Hadsell for pointing out this article: Michele Odisseas Impagnatiello, “Ethics vs. Metaphysics,” accessed July 12, 2025, https://philpapers.org/archive/IMPEVM.pdf. It encapsulates a conviction at odds with Lotze’s dictum, suggesting that it’s generally irrational to infer metaphysical theories from what we think we know about ethics. Obviously, this is a view at great variance with Sorley’s (and our) understanding of these matters, although we cannot discuss it further here.
11 Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic (Longmans, Green, 1919), 30–31.
12 Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Charles Hamilton Sorley: A Biography (Cecil Woolf, 1985), 12.
13 A. E. Taylor, Faith of a Moralist (Macmillan, 1930), 16.
14 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007), 18.
15 Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy: The Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Aberdeen in the Years 1912 and 1913, 2nd ed. (1917; repr., Oxford University Press, 1920).
16 Pringle-Pattison, Idea of God, 40.
17 Pringle-Pattison, Idea of God, 42.
18 Pringle-Pattison, Idea of God, 252.
19 Pringle-Pattison, Idea of God, 411.
20 Hastings Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil: A Treatise on Moral Philosophy, vol. 1 (Clarendon, 1907).
21 Rashdall, Theory of Good and Evil, 212.
22 Rashdall, Theory of Good and Evil, 213.
23 John Baillie, review of Studies in Christian Philosophy, by W. R. Matthews, Philosophical Review 31, no. 181 (January 1922): 191. See Alexander Campbell Fraser, Philosophy of Theism (London and Edinburgh, 1895).
24 A vindication of Kant on this score can be found in Stephen Palmquist, “Does Kant Reduce Religion to Morality?,” Kant-Studien 83, no. 2 (January 1992): 129–48.
25 James Martineau, A Study of Religion: Its Sources and Content, vols. 1–2 (Oxford, 1888); Types of Ethical Theory, vols. 1–2 (Cosimo, 2006).
26 See Clement Chares Julian Webb, Studies in the History of Natural Theology (1915; repr., Clarendon, 2012); Divine Personality and Human Life (University of Aberdeen, 1920); and Kant’s Philosophy of Religion (Clarendon, 1926).
27 This issue is at the heart of one of the debates between classical theists and theistic personalists.
28 W. G. de Burgh, From Morality to Religion: Being the Gifford Lectures, Delivered at the University of St. Andrews, 1938 (Kennikat, 1938); The Legacy of the Ancient World, 2 vols. (Penguin Books, 1955).
29 A. E. Taylor, Socrates (Beacon, 1951); Faith of a Moralist (Macmillan, 1930); and Does God Exist? (Macmillan, 1947). In Does God Exist?, Taylor ends with an argument for the resurrection of Jesus to augment his earlier popular version of the moral argument, their conjunction facilitated without the constraints and confining strictures of the Gifford Lectures.
30 Taylor, Faith of a Moralist, 209.
31 Alan P. F. Sell, Four Philosophical Anglicans (Ashgate, 2010), 102–3. See W. R. Matthews, Studies in Christian Philosophy (Macmillan, 1921).
32 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (HarperSanFrancisco, 2001); “De Futilitate” and “The Poison of Subjectivism,” in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (Eerdmans, 1995). Lewis was also strongly influenced by G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936). T. J. Gentry, in personal correspondence on January 1, 2019, wrote this about Chesterton:
There is a nexus of the rational, affective, and imaginative in Chesterton’s apologetic writings, cultural critiques, and fiction by which he presses readers with the sense of both the intuitiveness and logic of belief in God based on morality and other considerations. Chesterton’s use of imaginatively fired passional reason helps build a bridge between the good God and human perceptions of goodness, joy, and so on. While he does not offer a moral apologetic argument for God’s existence, per se, Chesterton provides breadcrumbs—moral clues and segues—along the path. His is a rational-affective-imaginative triad of apologetic method that is at once cumulative and teleological, while at the same time rooted in common sense and human experience. What may be true of Chesterton is that his moral apologetic intent is a culmination of his other implicit arguments for God’s existence. All of these means, and possibly others found in Chesterton’s works, reveal an undercurrent of morality and goodness that make Chesterton at least a support and cohort in moral apologetics, even if he is not a moral apologist particularly.