I was travelling by train into the city to speak on this very topic: “What is the foundation for ethics?” The soft sun shone through the train window, as I tried to finish off a book I was reading. Before I was fully aware of it, I was drift­ing between reading and dozing, until the train stopped at one of the stations before my destination. I vaguely looked outside, and the train began to depart. For a second, it seemed to me that the platform was moving, not the train.

Then the brain kicked in rather more decisively, and I realised, of course, that it was the train that was moving. It is because there is a point of reference — an immovable platform — that we can be sure that it is the train that is moving. This illustrates the ethical problem of today: How do we find an immovable standard by which to judge all other standards? To change the imagery, Blaise Pascal asked in the age before railways and trains: “Where are we going to find a harbour in morals?”

Today’s problems have a long pedigree. In the year 1875 an Anglican clergyman, Leslie Stephen, decided that he had lost his faith completely, so he solemnly renounced his Anglican orders in the pres­ence of Thomas Hardy, the novelist. Stephen wrote: “I now believe in nothing, to put it shortly; but I do not the less believe in morality ... I mean to live and die like a gentleman if possible.” That raises a most important issue. If we do not believe in a God who has made known His will, how can we believe in a morality that is beyond mere opinion? And what does it mean to live and die like a gentleman? In short, can faith be replaced by moralism, and people still live and die morally?

The fiercely anti-Christian philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who died in 1900, lampooned those whom he called the “English flatheads” who thought that they could have morality without faith. He went insane but was sometimes full of insight, as when he wrote:

When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality ... Christianity is a system, a consistently thought out and complete view of things. If one breaks out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces: one has nothing of any consequence left in one’s hands.

Leslie Stephen was saying that one could “jump off the platform”, and still be a gentleman. Of course, that can be true in a sense in some cases. But at the more fundamental level, Nietzsche was correct: if you abandon the Christian faith, you abandon the right to Christian ethics. If you reject the Christian view of God, you logically reject the Christian view of man, and there is no necessary reason why you should try to love your neighbour as yourself.

If there is no absolute platform on which to stand, then all is relative. If all is relative, then it is offensive to say that there are absolutes. The one absolute left is that there are no absolutes! The one offence left to relativism is discrimination — saying that another group is wrong and should be deprived of some rights for being wrong. If everything is relative, only discrimination is wrong. Those who believe that there is no immovable plat­form in ethics tend to become rather lame at times when they come to evaluating right and wrong. Bertrand Russell, for example, argued that Hitler was wrong “by my own feelings”.

For generations now, Western society has mocked the notion that there is a God who has made His will known in His Word. The result is as C. S. Lewis said:

We make men without chests and we expect of them virtue and enterprise ... We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Can we live easily on a movable plat­form? If sexual discrimination is not allowed, then what is wrong with pae­dophilia or with national service applica­ble to men and women, serving in equal numbers on the front line? What about Peter Singer who argues for no discrimi­nation, even against animals? To favour your child over your dog is to be guilty of “speciesism” in Singer’s view. Furthermore, there is no real distinction between human beings and rabbits. Hence a child who lacks the so-called indicators of personhood — freedom, self-determination, rationality, the ability to choose either means or ends, knowledge of circumstances, the use of language, and autonomy — has no inherent right to life. Therefore, Singer argues that “infanticide is compatible with a stable, well-organised human society”, and considers that it ought to be allowed until the infant is 28 days old. Since self-awareness is part of the definition of personhood, Singer com­placently asserts that “Infanticide threat­ens none of us, for once we are aware of it, we are not infants”.

Yet Singer could not live with his own philosophy. When his mother came down with dementia, Singer refused to consider euthanasia for her. The point is this: once we get off the platform, where we end out is anybody’s guess, and the result is inconsistency and/or inhumanity of some kind or another.

To return to the story of Leslie Stephen, his daughter was the novelist Virginia Woolf. She records that after his renunciation of faith, Stephen’s friends feared that, such was his deep depression, he would commit suicide. The outcome was more tragically ironic than that. It was, of course, Virginia Woolf herself who committed suicide. To get off the plat­form of revealed truth is to wander, lost in the woods of a culture of death. That is where we are today.