Wiping Away the Face of God

In these opening remarks from his 2010 Gifford Lectures, Roger Scruton suggests something more, and more worrisome, than mere changes of prevailing belief are  impelling the West’s current headlong rush towards ever greater secularity. What lies behind it, he intimates, is not simply the intellectual repudiation of God’s existence, but rather an attempt by many to evade the moral corollaries attendant upon its acknowledgement. Among these corollaries, the one from which many are seeking to escape, Scruton is claiming, is the consciousness of always being scrutinized by an all-seeing eye who discerns and judges our every thought and deed. The salutary moral influence of such a form of consciousness was well described by Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, when he wrote: