Morality, Religious Experience and Overall Probability

Abstract

The ethical circumstances which have been seen as pointing to the existence of God include both the general fact that we are conscious of moral ideals as exercising a claim upon us, and the particular sense of a demand to perform or refrain from performing this or that act or type of act as morally obligatory or forbidden. We can treat these two ethical realities - general ideals and specific obligations - together and ask whether they require us to postulate a deity as their source or ground. It is the felt absoluteness of the claim upon us that has suggested this inference. When I am conscious that I ought to do something, particularly if it is something that I do not want to do, I feel what can only be described as a pressure upon me as a moral being, a pressure which is real and of which I cannot but take account. It imposes a magisterial demand, confronting me as, in Kant’s terminology, a categorical imperative, an absolute claim that can be defied but cannot be wished away. The question then naturally arises, in what is this moral obligation grounded?

To say [God] hath spoken to [someone] in a dream, is no more than to say he dreamed that God spake to him!

(Thomas Hobbes)¹