Spring 2009Vol. 4, No.

This article is from TOS Vol. 4, No. 1. The full contents of the issue are listed here.

Religion vs. Subjectivism: Why Neither Will Do

Author’s note: This is Chapter 1 of my book Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the
Facts that Support It (Richmond: Glen Allen Press, 2002). The book is an introduction to
Ayn Rand’s morality of rational egoism.

“If there is no God, anything goes.” This popular claim is an eloquent distillation of a deep-
rooted false alternative wreaking havoc on human life and happiness. The adage
compresses into a few words the age-old debate over whether morality is a matter of
“divine commandments” or “human sentiments.” Whatever their disagreements, both sides
of this argument accept the idea that your basic moral choice is to be guided either by faith
or by feelings. In other words, both sides agree that your choice is: religionor subjectivism.
But if you want to live and enjoy life, neither of these will do. Neither religion nor
subjectivism provides proper guidance for human action; each calls for human sacrifice and
leads to human suffering—both physical and spiritual. To see why, we will look first at the
theoretical essence of each of these doctrines; then we will turn to the practical
consequences—historical and personal—of accepting them.

Let us begin with religion.

Religion holds that there is a God who demands your faith and obedience. He is said to be
an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good being who is the creator of the universe, the source of
all truth, and the maker of moral law. Religion’s basic moral tenet is: Don’t place your self,
your personal values, your own interests, your will, above those of God. Rather, you should
live to glorify Him, to obey His commands, to fulfill His higher purpose. To do otherwise—
to act on behalf of your own selfish concerns as if your life were an end in itself—is to “sin.”
As the religious scholar Reverend John Stott declares: “God’s order is that we put him first,
others next, self last. Sin is the reversal of the order.”1

According to religion, being moral consists not in pursuing your own interests, but in self-
sacrificially serving God. Theologian and rabbi Abraham Heschel expresses this tenet as
follows: “The essence and greatness of man do not lie in his ability to please his ego, to
satisfy his needs, but rather in his ability to stand above his ego, to ignore his own needs; to
sacrifice his own interests for the sake of the holy.”2

Now, you might argue that to ignore your own needs and sacrifice your own interests is
contrary to the requirements of your life and happiness. But according to religion, that is no
ground for complaint, because, as theologian Walter Kaiser puts it: “God has the right to
require human sacrifice.”3
Disturbed by such an assertion, you might ask: What about God’s love for man? If God loves
us, why would he call for us to sacrifice? To which Dr. Stott answers: “Self-sacrifice is what
the Bible means by ‘love.’”4

Taking yet another angle, you might argue that self-sacrifice leads to suffering. But this fact
is no ground for complaint either, because, according to the Bible, Adam disobeyed God by
eating some forbidden fruit; therefore, you and I and all of Adam’s descendents deserve to
suffer.5 As Saint Augustine put it: “We are suffering the just retribution of the omnipotent
God. It is because it was to Him that we [by way of Adam] refused our obedience and our
service that our body, which used to be obedient, now troubles us by its insubordination.”6

The “insubordination” to which Augustine refers has to do with the aversion many people
have to ignoring their own needs and sacrificing their own interests. After all, self-sacrifice
can be extremely painful, both physically and spiritually. It can even be fatal. But, according
to religion, if God tells a person to do something, the person is morally obligated to do it—
regardless of the difficulties or consequences involved.

For a biblical example of what such obedience can mean in practice, consider the case of
Abraham and Isaac. According to the story, God told Abraham: “Take your son, your only
son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and sacrifice him there as a burnt
offering.”7 Needless to say, it would be very painful for a man to kill his son, whom he
loves. Nevertheless, because Abraham was faithfully committed to obeying the will of God,
he set out to do just that.

Was Abraham’s choice moral? Should he have done it? Would you do it? What do
religionists say about this? According to Saint Augustine: “The obedience of Abraham is
rightly regarded as magnificent precisely because the killing of his son was a command so
difficult to obey. . . .”8

Magnificent?

As shocking as Augustine’s position may be, it is the only stance a dedicated religionist can
take on the issue, because the only alternative is to challenge the alleged authority of God,
and that is the cardinal religious no-no. “Above all,” writes the devoutly religious René
Descartes, reminding us of the applicable tenet, “we ought to submit to the Divine authority
rather than to our own judgment even though the light of reason may seem to us to
suggest, with the utmost clearness and evidence, something opposite.”9

According to religion, God’s will, however objectionable, is by definition good; and human
judgment to the contrary, however rational, is by definition bad. The “real distinction
between right and wrong,” explains Bishop Robert Mortimer, “is independent of what we
happen to think. It is rooted in the nature and will of God.”

When a man’s conscience tells him that a thing is right, which is in fact what God wills, his
conscience is true and its judgment correct; when a man’s conscience tells him a thing is
right which is, in fact, contrary to God’s will, his conscience is false and telling him a lie.10
Thus, if God wills that a man should kill his son, then, regardless of what the man thinks, he
should do it.

But, you might ask, isn’t human sacrifice wrong on principle? Not according to religion. As
Dr. Kaiser reminds us, the religious point of view is precisely that “human sacrifice cannot
be condemned on principle. The truth is that God owns all life and has a right to give or
take it as he wills. To reject on all grounds God’s legitimate right to ask for life under any
conditions would be to remove his sovereignty and question his justice. . . .”11 Bishop
Mortimer elaborates the religious position as follows:

[God] has an absolute claim on our obedience. We do not exist in our own right, but only as
His creatures, who ought therefore to do and be what He desires. We do not possess
anything in the world, absolutely, not even our own bodies; we hold things in trust for God,
who created them, and are bound, therefore, to use them only as He intends that they
should be used.12

In short, the basic moral tenet of religion is that obedience to God must be absolute—calls
for human sacrifice and all.

Granted, religion does not call for everyone to murder his child. But it does call for
everyone to sacrifice his judgment and interests for the sake of an alleged God; and in order
to uphold this tenet consistently, a person must be willing to do just that. If he claims to
accept the moral tenets of religion but fails to uphold them consistently, then, on his own
terms, he is guilty of “sin”—and on anyone’s terms, he is guilty of hypocrisy (the
consequences of which we will get to shortly).

Given the sacrificial nature of religion, it is not surprising that many people reject it and
embrace its alleged opposite: subjectivism. But if human sacrifice is the problem,
subjectivism is no solution.

Whereas religion holds that God creates truth and moral law, subjectivism holds that
people do; it is the view that truth and morality are not objective, but “subjective”—not
discovered by the human mind, but created by it. This creed comes in several varieties, two
of which are: personal subjectivism and social subjectivism.

Personal subjectivism is the idea that truth and morality are creations of the mind of the
individual—or matters of personal opinion. Social subjectivism is the notion that truth and
morality are creations of the mind of a collective (a group of people)—or matters of social
convention. Personal subjectivism has been around for thousands of years; its father was
Protagoras of ancient Greece.13 Social subjectivism was born in the late eighteenth
century; its father was the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.14

These two versions of subjectivism have been accepted over the years in varying degrees
and with numerous twists. What is important for our present purpose is that, in some form
or another, the notion that people create (rather than discover) truth and morality has
been prevalent among intellectuals for almost a century. As sociologist Michael Schudson
notes: “From the 1920s on, the idea that human beings individually and collectively
construct the reality they deal with has held a central position in social thought.”15 And the
dominant views on morality have been shaped accordingly. Let us look first at the ethics of
social subjectivism. . . .

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Endnotes
1 John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity (London: InterVarsity Press, 1971), p. 78.

2 Abraham Heschel, God in Search of Man, A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1983), p. 117.

3 Walter C. Kaiser Jr. et al., Hard Sayings of the Bible (Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1996), p.
127.

4 Stott, Basic Christianity, p. 79.

5 See Genesis, 2–3.

6 Saint Augustine, City of God, trans. Gerald G. Walsh et al. (New York: Doubleday, 1958), p.
314.

7 Genesis, 22:2.

8 Augustine, City of God, p. 313, emphasis added.

9 The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (London:
Cambridge University Press, 1973), Vol. I, p. 253.

10 Robert C. Mortimer, Christian Ethics (London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1950), p.

11 Kaiser, Hard Sayings of the Bible, p. 126.

12 Mortimer, Christian Ethics, pp. 7–8.

14 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1929), esp. pp. 22–25; Prolegomena, trans. Paul Carus (Chicago: Open Court,
1997), esp. pp. 79–84; and Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), esp. pp. 40–41, 58–59.

15 Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 6.