Letters | 20 June 2013

Being good without God

Sir: It is a rash person who tangles with the Chief Rabbi, but his piece on ‘Atheism and barbarism’ (15 June) shocked me. After championing until his last paragraph the old lie that religious belief is a necessary foundation for morality, he suddenly says he doesn’t believe ‘that you have to be religious to be moral’, which effectively contradicts his whole thesis. But there are several derailments before that.

He questions the ability of society ‘to survive without the rituals, narratives and shared practices that create and sustain the social bond’. Rituals and practices, OK, so long as they don’t entail any indefensible beliefs, but narratives have to stand up to empirical testing, and their supposedly unique sustenance of the social bond would not be evidence of their truth.

He declares that ethics ‘manifestly isn’t’ natural. But the strong case for the opposite view espoused by humanists is too important to be dealt with by mere declaration. This is an insult to innumerable ethically sophisticated unbelievers, as is his closing observation that he has not found an adequate secular ethic.

He twice implies that without religion we are stuck with relativism. But religious believers have no monopoly on ethical objectivism, which has many persuasive secular adherents. Secular humanist objectivists ground morality on human nature rather than on the dispensations of an alleged deity. Life is sacred for them too, contra Dr Sacks; they too reject materialism and selfishness.

He is of course right to decry religious fundamentalism. As he says, ‘religion has social, cultural and political consequences’, and the support religion can offer to terrorism and political intransigence is part of the case against religious belief that he does not consider.
Henry Hardy
Wolfson College, Oxford

Who teaches the teachers?

Sir: Although your leading article (15 June) provides evidence as to how improvements in teaching would raise living standards, and Toby Young (‘The best leader Labour never had’, 15 June) lavishes well-deserved praise on Michael Gove’s reforms, neither mentions the key to future success.