Religion and Ethics—I

Extract

It was, I believe, Thomas Arnold who wrote: ‘Educate men without religion and all you make of them is clever devils’. Thus the Headmaster of one famous school summarized pithily the view of the relationship between religion and ethics which informed educational theory and practice in this country for at least a further century. There is a confusion of two different assumptions usually to be found in this context. The first is that religious belief can provide an intellectual foundation (logical, or epistemological, or sometimes both) for moral belief; the second is that the effect of religious teaching is to improve behaviour according to the norms of some particular set of moral beliefs.