When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. – Friedrich Nietzsche, from Twilight of the Idols (1888)
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philologist and atheistic, nihilistic philosopher.
When [Charles] Darwin was asked what he, himself, believed to be the implications of his theory for religion and morality, he said that the idea of God was “beyond the scope of man’s intellect,” but that man’s moral obligation remained what it had always been: to “do his duty.” Leslie Stephen, after abandoning the effort to derive an ethic from Darwinism, finally confessed: “I now believe in nothing, but I do not the less believe in morality…I mean to live and die like a gentleman, if possible.” Frederic Harrison, the archpriest of English Positivism and agnosticism, when asked by his son what a man should do if he fell in love and could not marry, replied indignantly: “Do! Do what every gentleman does in such circumstances.” And, when his son persisted in wanting to know why love was proper only in marriage, Harrison could barely contain himself: “A loose man is a foul man.” He is anti-social. He is a beast…It is not a subject that decent men do discuss.” Harrison had only Comte to depend upon, but George Eliot, drawing upon the combined resources of Comte, Strauss, and Feuerbach, emerged with nothing more substantial than “the recognition of a binding belief or spiritual law, which is to lift us into willing obedience and save us from the slavery of unregulated passion or impulse.” God, she is reported to have said, was “inconceivable,” immortality was “unbelievable,” but duty was, nonetheless, “peremptory and absolute.”
Utilitarianism, Darwinism, Positivism, Rationalism, Biblical Criticism, and Atheistic Humanism – none of these succeeded either in undermining morality, as some had feared, or in providing a “new motive” for morality, as Macaulay and others had hoped. In the end, what sustained the Victorian ethic was, essentially, what had first inspired it – an unsectarian, latitudinarian evangelicalism.
From: Victorian Minds by Gertrude Himmelfarb (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), pp. 290-291. Ellipses in the original.
Morality severed from God. Is that possible?
Finally, then, it is seen that the religious problem is basic. The denial of a supernatural world of unchanging spiritual reality involves also the objective validity of any pronouncements in those very areas in which man is supposedly unique, especially religion and morals. To deny that an external world of reality corresponds to his religious beliefs means to shift the center of religious experience from intellection to emotion or volition – that is, once again, it involves a reduction of the very rationality by virtue of which man is made aware of his own predicament.
But, on the other hand, it is not sufficient merely to recognize that truth, goodness, and beauty do not evolve and are objectively fixed. For this merely intensifies the need of the power that makes for righteousness, without which ancient classic civilization collapsed amidst its ideals. The demand by God and the redemption of God stand together in any effective attack on the problem of morality.
Carl F. H. Henry (1913-2003), Remaking the Modern Mind (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1946), p. 255.
