If these examples accurately describe the problem, then the question is, where do we look for the answer? Where do we find a solid basis for teaching morals, even if we can agree on what those morals should be?

It is significant to note the extent to which some people, who believe that we are the chance product of an evolutionary process in which God has had no say, go to find some basis for 'moral' behaviour. Well-known writer, Philip Yancey, in a recent article in Christianity Today, describes today's evolutionary psychologists as society's new prophets. He quotes Robert Wright, one of the best-known expositors of evolutionary psychology to the general public:

We believe the things - about morality, personal worth, even objective truth - that lead to behaviours that get our genes into the next generation...What is in our genes' interest is what seems 'right' - morally right, objectively right, whatever sort of rightness is in order.

Such people would describe all behaviour, even a mother's love or the sacrificial life of a Mother Teresa, in terms of our genes' programming for survival. As Yancey comments:

Carry the logic far enough, and any notion of good and evil disappears. In essence, the evolutionary psychologists have devised a unified theory of human depravity that would make John Calvin blush. Hard-wired for selfishness, we have no potential for anything else.

Hitler was being realistic when he said, "I cannot see why man should not be just as cruel as nature." As an evolutionist with no belief in God, he had no basis for saying anything else. Artificial-intelligence guru, Marvin Minsky, likes to say that we are just machines made out of meat!

Some evolutionary biologists cheerfully acknowledge the problem. Wright himself says, "The question may be whether, after the new Darwinism takes root, the word moral can be anything but a joke."

Communism has nothing to offer in this respect. The sight of top Russian officials appealing to Western Christian evangelicals to fill the moral gap left by seventy years of atheistic teaching in Russia has highlighted only too clearly the moral bankruptcy of this system.

New worldviews and ways of thinking that have been around over the past generation, such as New Age and postmodernism, don't seem to be much help either, as they differ amongst themselves as to whether there is any basis for morality at all (1). Does it all depend on our personal feelings? Ernest Hemingway, in Death in the Afternoon, defined morality this way: "What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after."

The human rights movement is limited in what it can offer us here. Disenchantment with what has been done in the name of human rights since the United Nations issued its Declaration on the subject 50 years ago has led an international committee, headed by former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, to draw up a "Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities". A particularly strong paragraph states:

No person, no group, no organisation, no state, no army or police stands above good and evil; all are subject to ethical standards. Everyone has a responsibility to promote good and to avoid evil in all things.

The problem is, however, who decides what is good and what is not? And to whom are we accountable?

The Greek philosophers focused on deciding what they considered to be the "Good Life" and then sought to promote those qualities and virtues that would result in this good life. They relied heavily on their faith in human reason, as did the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in order to determine what this "Good Life" and these virtues should be. The problem with this approach is that you will never get everyone to agree on what that good life is and what virtues we need to get it.

Any view that is based on human reason alone takes us back to what we think the good life is meant to be. There are no ultimate criteria by which our view can be judged. Many philosophical ethicists have noted this. Nowell-Smith, for example, concluded his lengthy treatise on ethics with a blatant acknowledgment that his ethical reflections in the end bring him back to the individual human person:

What sort of [ethical] principles a man adopts will, in the end, depend on his vision of the Good Life, his conception of the sort of world he desires, so far as it rests with him to create. Indeed his moral principles just are this conception.

To rightly use the term "moral", then, it is important to decide who we are ultimately accountable to. The very fact that we appoint judges and courts (though some, no doubt, wish we didn't) points to the fact that we are not happy with the idea that everyone should make their own rules about what is right or wrong. However, if we don't approve of that, there are only two alternatives: either we are accountable to other human beings, which usually, though not always, means the majority (Marshall McLuhan has suggested that ethical norms could be established by a computer which would record simple majority decisions), or, if God exists, and if he is interested in our behaviour, we are ultimately accountable to him.

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(1) I have given a brief summary of New Age and postmodern views and compared them with Christian views in the booklet What Is Truth and Does It Matter?