"If there is no God, then anything is permitted."

AgnosticBoy · May 23, 2022

Moderator Comment: It was brought to my attention that the website I quoted the article from no longer works or even leads to another website. The website I quoted this from when I first made this post was this: http://www.anselmphilosophy.com/read/?p=449

Since it no longer works, I'm removing it as a source... I'll leave the quote up for now.

The lack of an objective basis or authority for morality/ethics is often used to argue against atheism and secularism. Many presume that if there is no God, or perhaps if we don't live as if there were, then mankind would decline into mass chaos and no one to put order.

Here's some background on that from (site url that quoted this no longer works

)

There’s a famous passage from “The Grand Inquisitor” section of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in which Ivan Karamazov claims that if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. If there is no God, then there are no rules to live by, no moral law we must follow; we can do whatever we want. Some philosophers, like Jean-Paul Sartre, have assumed that Ivan is right; without God there is no moral law that tells us what we ought to do. But is Ivan right? If God does not exist, then can we do what we wish? Another way to put the question is, does ethics require God?

It is important to recognize that there are at least two distinct interpretations that could be offered for Ivan’s claim that if God does not exist, then everything is permissible. First, it could be read to mean that without God we would have no motivation to be ethical. Unless we had the motivation of divine judgment or divine approbation, then we would not really care about being ethical because we would not face any ultimate accounting for our actions, neither on earth nor in heaven.

However, Ivan’s claim could also be taken to mean that God serves as the source of our ethical obligation. That is, without God, everything is permitted because there would be no ethical obligations without God. The only reason we must follow the moral law is because someone (God) says that we must.

Your thoughts, please!

I won't say that morals require God because anyone can come up with any standard. So let's get that out of the way.

Instead I want your view on the following:
1. Do objective morals require God's existence?
2. Can society function without objective morals?

Let's debate!

rebel · Aug 22, 2025

AgnosticBoy said:
. Can society function without objective morals?

We come across these morals by seeing what works -- Utilitarianism.

They were not handed to us on stone tablets. Religion was invented to control the masses. It uses a higher authority as a tool to scare people into following a set of beliefs.

Multicolored Lemur · Sep 3, 2025

AgnosticBoy said:
Many presume that if there is no God, or perhaps if we don't live as if there were, then mankind would decline into mass chaos and no one to put order.

but look, religious people do horrendous actions, in wartime and otherwise

Multicolored Lemur · Sep 3, 2025

If we want to embark on the dismal task of comparing the numbers of human beings killed in (1) Nazi Germany, and (2) Soviet Union,

The Soviets probably killed more, but they were around for longer.

Yes, the Soviets were atheists, and I think that was official policy. But if we look at the different contributing causes to the killing, were they being an atheist one of the big ones?

Actually, the Soviets were big into cheating. Other groups have done this. For example, the Oakland Raiders football team had a saying back in the day — “If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.” The Soviets also had a phrase for a subset of the middle-class which was a term of contempt.

So, yeah, it may have been a contributing factor. They weren’t my type of atheism.

—————

With the Soviets, I think the biggest killing was the starvation in the Ukraine in the 1930’s in which an already occurring famine was wesponized. It was an “accidentally on purpose”-type of thing, with an emphasis on the purpose part!

rebel · 2025-09-09T13:02:27-0400

Multicolored Lemur said:
Yes, the Soviets were atheists, and I think that was official policy. But if we look at the different contributing causes to the killing, were they being an atheist one of the big ones?

Surprise surprise, there are good and bad atheists just as there are good and bad Christians. Besides, there are no atheist morals to abide by so I don't buy that atheism could cause for anything.

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"If there is no God, then anything is permitted."

AgnosticBoy

Open-minded Skeptic

rebel

Apathetic Agnostic

Multicolored Lemur

Well-known member

Multicolored Lemur

Well-known member

rebel

Apathetic Agnostic

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