"If there is no God, all is permitted" is a famous philosophical, often-quoted phrase linked to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov.
Sounds simple doesn't it? For if there is no divine law-giver, than each of us is free to discern our own moral conduct. And if there is one thing I know to be true, the human heart is unparalleled when it comes to the ability to rationalize our own behavior.
The Russian novelist Dostoevsky in “The Brothers Karamazov” was deeply right when having another character comment on the skeptical Ivan Karamazov's intellectual position: "Crime must be considered not only as admissible but even as the logical and inevitable consequence of an atheist's position." Elsewhere, Dostoevsky has another character say: "Then, if there is no God, man becomes master of the earth and of the universe. That's great. But then, how can a man be virtuous without God? That's the snag, and I always come back to it. For whom will man love then? Whom will he be grateful to? . . . We, for instance, may think that virtue is one thing while the Chinese may believe it's something quite different. Isn't virtue something relative then?" The bloody history of the religiously skeptical yet politically fanatical 20th century shows this snag indeed caught atheists and agnostics: Wasn’t the Europe of the Nazis and Communists even morally darker than that of Medieval Catholicism at its collective worst?
This discussion naturally leads in to the related “problem of evil” that’s long been used to deny the existence of a loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God: Could God exist and care while allowing all these moral atrocities to occur? Atheists and agnostics, however, can't condemn God for allowing evil to exist without believing in moral absolutes also. But since atheists and agnostics (mostly) uphold moral relativism, they can't use the problem of evil to deny God's existence logically! If you don't believe in evil, you then can't condemn God for allowing it!
For if we believe all is relative, that there are no absolutes, in a world without God, how can we condemn God for (say) allowing the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, or the Ukrainian terror famine?
We can’t.
We cannot judge God unless we believe we can derive some kind of system of moral absolutes separately by human reason without recourse to Him or religious revelation. Cornelius Hunter, “Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil, p. 154, exposes the evolutionists’ moral conundrum, after citing Richard Dawkins’ comment about the universe having no design, purpose, good or evil, “nothing but pointless indifference” thus: “Since there is no evil, the materialist must, ironically, not use the problem of evil to justify atheism. The problem of evil presupposes the existence of an objective evil—the very thing the materialist seems to deny.”
In other words, if we can’t derive natural moral law separately from God by human reason, we can’t condemn God for allowing evil, now can we? If indeed all is relative, and one person’s good is another’s evil, such as female genital mutilation or Chinese foot binding, which traditional societies affirmed but feminists condemn, on what basis can we criticize God for being a permissive libertarian about the actions resulting from His creatures’ freely chosen moral decisions?
If indeed there are no moral absolutes, the ideologies that led to gulags and concentration camps are just as ethical as the ideologies that eliminated them. Which leads us to assume upon our innate moral sense, although it may manifest itself differently from culture to culture and person to person, to constitute moral law. Since I’m a natural law theorist, I am sympathetic to such attempts to derive morality from the world around us, which implicitly and indirectly try to find moral principles that God originally in-built into human beings’ psychology (i.e., Romans 2:14-15).
So a powerful reason for God's existence ultimately arises ironically from the sins of atheists and Christians? As C.S. Lewis argued in "Mere Christianity," our moral sense is derived indirectly from God even when we aren't believers in the Bible, as part of our created human nature. (See his "Abolition of Man" for more related material on this general subject). We can't condemn others' actions without believing in moral absolutes. But almost all atheists and agnostics deny moral absolutes. (Ayn Rand and her band of Objectivists are an interesting exception to this generalization, but since they deny the need for self-sacrifice for other people, we Christians would see their moral system as distinctly minimalistic at best).
But unless atheists and agnostics discard their moral relativism, they can’t use the existence of evil to discard God. However, one of the main attractions of unbelief is the rejection of moral absolutes and to erect some kind of self-made subjective, relativistic moral system in its place. However, if “anything goes,” “there are no absolutes,” and “all is relative,” then atheists can’t judge and condemn God for anything. And there lies the great paradox.
