Saints, God, and Morality

“It may not, in other words, be so easy to have a satisfactory conception of morality without religion – that is, without belief in an appropriate object of maximal devotion, an object that is larger than morality but embraces it.” - Robert Adams, "Saints"

"He speaks out of love for his friend. Perhaps that love in his heart is God."

"Oh, how convenient—a theory about God that doesn't require looking through a telescope. Get back to work!" - Futurama, "Godfellas"

As I tend to believe that David Hume is right about, well, pretty much everything, I take a Humean approach to moral motivation. Reason is, and must be, the slave of the passions. As I have discussed elsewhere at great length, moral action requires moral motivation, and moral motivation requires moral passion. Psychopaths can understand and describe the rules of morality, but they do not follow them, due to deficits in their "emotional brain," broadly construed.

Consider some famous “saints” of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Mother Theresa was devoted to a religious life. Dr. Paul Farmer, who has devoted his life to treating disease in developing nations, subscribes to a particular school of Christian theology. As Adams notes in an article on moral saints, the rhetoric of Mohandas Gandhi was deeply inspired by his faith in God. Zell Kravinsky, the man who has donated $45 million—and one of his own kidneys—to charity, is driven by a strong belief in God as a guiding ethical principle.

Why are so many good people so deeply religious? The answer is simple: because religion—because God—provides such a strong motivation for action. People who believe in God can be passionate about God as an ethical ideal.

As I described in my previous post, I have taken up the moral mantle because I believe it follows from my considered ethical beliefs. But is this enough? Can my logic-derived philosophical precommitments really translate into true moral passion? Can I, as an atheist, ever be as passionate about morality as someone whose moral motivation derives not from philosophical exercise, but from religious conviction? Must one feel the presence of the logos in order to move toward saintliness? Is a philosophical belief in existentialism and equality enough to provide an "object of maximal devotion"?