 In line with his concern for accurate moral phenomenology, Smith also tries to make sense of the role that religion and culture play in our moral lives. He handles the first of these by explaining why people who come to believe in higher powers will naturally attribute virtues, and a concern for our virtue, to those powers (163–6). He also says that it adds to the sacredness we attribute to moral rules to see them as laws of the Deity, and to the importance of morality as a whole to see it as a way of “co-operat[ing] with the Deity” in the governance of the universe (166). And he shows how a belief in an afterlife may be necessary if we are to see the universe as just, which in turn is important if we are to maintain our commitment to the value of acting morally (168–70). In all these ways, but especially the last, he anticipates Kant’s moral argument for belief in God, without ever quite saying that there is a God. At the same time, he makes clear that any religion that gives priority to ritual or creed over morality is baleful, and poses grave dangers to a decent and peaceful society (TMS 176–7; cf. WN 802–3).