One of Dostoevsky’s characters famously claims that if there is no God, then everything is permitted.  Dostoevsky himself believed in God, but millions of atheists have taken comfort from his character’s line.  They reason that since God isn’t there to judge me, I can do what I want.

The statement is a queer one.  In at least three ways it is false, and in only one sense sort of true.  Even that sort-of-a-sense depends on an impossibility.

The speaker supposes that things are permitted and forbidden only because God has arbitrarily decreed them so.  Thus, he imagines that if there is no God, everything is just the same as if He exists -- except that there are no divine commands or prohibitions.  This being the case, everything is permitted.

The first flaw in this reasoning – and so the first sense in which the statement is false -- is that God’s decrees are not arbitrary.  They correspond to the natures of things that He has brought about.  We can’t create ourselves, any more than we can create another sky; He has done it already.  By nature, a lion eats lambs and is exempt from culpability.  By nature, human beings are responsible for their actions, and innocent human beings are inviolable.  By nature, children need and have a right to their parents’ care, and parents have the right and duty to care for them the best they can.  All this would be true – and we could tell that it is -- even if no one had told us.

The second flaw in this reasoning – and so the second sense in which the statement is false -- is that we don’t believe in God, and then, from this belief, derive a conscience.  Rather we are endowed by Him with conscience from the beginning, and this conscience testifies to us of God.  It presents itself to us as His voice.  If I stop believing in God, I don’t cease to have a conscience, any more than I can unmake my own nature.  What happens instead is because I no longer believe in God, I can no longer explain my conscience.  I have to make it out to be something other than a conscience.  For example, I might take it to be merely an instinct, or a residue of how I was brought up, or even me talking to myself.  Actually it couldn’t be any of those things.  The first hypothesis can’t explain how I can ever think it right to resist my instincts; there cannot be an instinct to resist instinct.  The second one can’t explain why I may think it right to go against some element of my upbringing; if I am how I was taught, that’s the end of it.  And the third one can’t explain how what I say to myself somehow becomes a law which I can’t change to suit myself.

The third flaw in this reasoning – and so the third sense in which the statement is false -- is that the universe requires an ultimate explanation, a First Cause.  An infinite regress of explanations is no explanation at all; a chain of causes with no beginning is no cause at all.  Since the universe does not have to exist, if there were no cause, there would be no universe, and so there could be no moral evaluation of acts whatsoever.  It would not be that all human acts would be permitted rather than forbidden, but that there would be neither acts nor actors, therefore no permitting or forbidding at all.  There would be nothing.  In fact, there would be less than nothing, because the something of which nothing is the absence could not be conceived, and there would be no one to conceive it.

Now in a fourth way, the statement might be called true, but this way would require us to believe something impossible – that the universe could exist without God having brought it into being and endowed it with order.  Such an existence would make no sense of any kind, neither logical, nor causal, nor moral.  Nothing could be forbidden, simply because there could be no ultimate explanation for anything.  This is the supposition of existentionalists, who say existence is absurd.

Then again, the fact that nothing could be forbidden wouldn’t really mean that everything would be permitted.  In a world in which everything were meaningless, both permitting and forbidding would be meaningless, and the statement “everything is permitted” would make no more sense than “everything is required,” or for that matter “everything is Kltpzyxm.”  We would not even declare existence absurd, because the idea of absurdity makes sense only against the frustrated expectation of meaning.  To be appalled that we have no meaning, we have to know what meaning is, and in such an impossible world, we couldn’t know what it is.  Meaning itself would be meaningless.

So the idea that if there is no God, then everything is permitted, leads to absurdities

But now turn this around:  If the universe does make sense, then as we saw above, there must be a First Sense -- a First Cause, a First Origin of whatever sense it does make – and this is what we call God.  In this case, we have no more reason to reject the moral order we see in things than to reject their logical order, their causal order, the order of ends to means, or the order of our minds.

Thus, among other things, created beings have natures.  Some things make our natures flourish, and others are inimical to them.  Therefore there are a good and evil.  Moreover some things can be rightly directed to our highest good in Him, and other things cannot.  Therefore there are an intrinsic good and evil.  Therefore not everything is permitted.