If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted?

Guenter Lewy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351513692
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Dostoevsky's dictum that when God is dead everything is permitted can have several meanings. It can refer to the behavior of individuals suggesting that someone who is or becomes an unbeliever will conduct himself immorally. Alternatively, the saying can pertain to the moral character of an entire country and mean a society that rejects God is doomed to moral decay. Guenter Lewy presents a few of the major arguments of those who question the relationship between morality and religion, and examines the case for the continuing dependence of morality upon religion.Beginning with Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov Lewy introduces the reader to the position that morality depends on religious belief. He then follows the idea throughout history, from its origin, to its extension during the Enlightment, to the Victorians, to the roots of atheism. Lewy then presents a critical discussion of Sweden as a model of a secular nation where morality is retained although most of the population is not religious. He shows that Sweden offers a serious and unique illustration of how democracy and morality can flourish in a post-modern environment.If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted? as the author acknowledges, is more of an essay than a seemless history of the relationship of religion and morality. Lewy's fascination with the intersection and influence of religion on morality is not a new topic. Indeed the discussion is important and alive today in light of new technological and scientific advances. Although Lewy may not put closure to the debate about whether morality is dependent on religion the evidence presented here sheds light on the morality of today by examining its historical past.

1
Introduction: Dostoyevsky’s Proposition

If there is no God, Dostoyevsky’s character Ivan is said to assert in The Brothers Karamazov, then everything is permitted. Dostoyevsky never has Ivan make this statement directly, but it is mentioned several times by several other figures in the novel who report hearing it from the mouth of Ivan. Once, Ivan acknowledges: “There is no virtue if there is no immortality.”¹

With Ivan’s saying that if God is dead everything is lawful, Camus has argued, “the history of contemporary nihilism really begins.”² And yet this reading of Dostoyevsky’s famous statement is incomplete and ignores its multifarious meaning. For one, Ivan is a reluctant atheist who is far from comfortable with his unbelief. He is a spiritually tortured person who doubts God because the world is full of suffering and pain. Ivan is not a nihilist, but a person of high principle whose conscience makes him reject the unjust world God has created. “It’s not that I don’t accept God, you must understand,” Ivan tells his brother Alyosha, “it’s the world created by Him that I don’t and cannot accept.”³

Moreover, Ivan eventually acknowledges the destructive consequences of a rejection of God. This insight comes to him after his half-brother Smerdyakov kills their father. At this point, Ivan at last agrees that in a world of fallen men belief in God and immortality are a necessary basis for morality. If God does not exist, Ivan had surmised, humans are free to create their own morality and can make their own choice of good and evil. But this theoretically ennobling idea that makes man the proud master of his destiny and moral conduct is used by Smerdyakov as an excuse for killing the elder Karamazov. “You said ‘everything was lawful,’” Smerdyakov tells Ivan, “For if there’s no everlasting God, there is not such thing as virtue, and there is no need of it.”⁴ As William Leatherborrow points out, Ivan now realizes “that the morality embodied in the statement ‘all is permitted’, far from dignifying man, allows him instead to exercise his dark and criminal instincts without fear of divine retribution.”⁵ When Ivan is told by Smerdyakov that he killed their father because of Ivan’s atheistic ideas, he comes to see the horror of his doctrine and goes mad.⁶

Czeslaw Milosz has called The Brothers Karamazov “the most extraordinary philosophical novel in world literature.”⁷ This praise is probably based in part on what Mikhail Bakhtin has called the “polyphonic” character of Dostoyevsky’s novels. As in a Platonic dialogue, Dostoyevsky’s characters defend different positions, and their disagreements in this pluralistic universe are not resolved by the narrator. And yet Dostoyevsky’s message in The Brothers Karamazov is clear, and it is made known to the reader by the novel’s chain of events: Atheism leads to crimes such as Smerdyakov’s murder of his father, and the only way to prevent such terrible violations of the moral order, Dostoyevsky urges, is the Christian religion in its Orthodox form as practiced by the monk Zosima in the local monastery. Only active and indefatigable love of one’s neighbor, Zosima maintains, enables us mortals to perceive the divine mysteries beyond the natural world—the reality of God and the immortality of the soul—and to lead a truly moral life on this earth.⁸

Dostoyevsky considered the Enlightenment’s strong faith in the natural goodness of man a dangerous fallacy. Man could not be good without the help of God. The emphasis of nineteenth-century intellectuals on unaided reason and science was undermining religious belief and threatened not only Russia but civilization itself. Tormented by his own doubts and religious skepticism, Dostoyevsky fervently clings to Christ and the spirituality of the common people. His most sympathetic characters include Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov who, after experiencing agonizing spiritual suffering and passing like himself through “the furnace of doubt,” finally become believers.⁹

Thus for Dostoyevsky the saying when God is dead everything is permitted means not what it means for the atheist who celebrates man’s liberation from religion and superstition. Without belief in God and in punishment in the next life for evil deeds committed in this life, Dostoyevsky argues, man will engage in such acts whenever they appear to him advantageous. The denial of God leads not to man’s moral autonomy but to his ruin. When there is no God there is no morality.

Is it possible to test the validity of this proposition, to establish its truth? Are Christians acting morally only out of fear of God and hellfire? Probably not. The often-told story of the Catholic priest who said to a pair of well-behaved atheists, “I can’t understand you boys; if I didn’t believe in God I should be having a high old time,” clearly represents a caricature rather than a typical Christian believer. In his monumental history of materialism, the nineteenth-century scholar Friedrich Lange expressed the hope that “the annals of criminal law and the statistics of morality” will “supply us with facts that may perhaps be some day collected into practical demonstration” of the importance of religion for morality.¹⁰ By now we do have empirical evidence showing that true religiousness can produce beneficial consequences for such social problems as juvenile delinquency, prejudice, teenage pregnancy, and divorce.¹¹ However, the finding that in certain situations religion can deter asocial behavior is not the same as Dostoyevsky’s sweeping dictum that moral behavior is dependent upon religious belief.

My aim in this book therefore will have to be a bit more modest. My analysis of the experience of secular Sweden will tell us quite a lot about contemporary Sweden, but it cannot predict the shape of things to come. Similarly, data from the European Values Survey, upon which I rely extensively, provide us with a good picture of European society today, but have little predictive value. In short, it is possible to determine whether the empirical evidence available about present-day society supports or contradicts Dostoyevsky’s proposition. However the future of the human race necessarily remains hidden from us, and it may confirm or completely refute our conclusions today.

2
The Enlightenment: From Skepticism to Unbelief

The age-old notion that religious belief is essential for moral virtue underwent its most radical questioning during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, especially in France, but of course this was not the first time that such a challenge had been put forth. Back in classical antiquity, Plato had insisted that atheists had to be punished because of the danger they posed to society, but at the same time he had acknowledged that among the different kinds of the impious there existed he “who does not believe in the Gods, and yet has a righteous nature, hates the wicked and dislikes and refuses to do injustice, and avoids unrighteous men, and loves the righteous.”¹ During the Renaissance, the writings of Plato and other ancient classics became a foil for challenging and undermining the prevailing Christian orthodoxy, and the same role was played by the missionary and travel literature that described highly civilized non-Christian societies composed of virtuous atheists. The finding that there existed morally upright nonbelievers in various parts of the world could not but weaken the accepted conviction that the only and essential safeguard of morality was the Christian religion.

The question of atheistic virtue was raised during the debate among French theologians on the issue of Chinese philosophy and religion. Between 1660 and 1714, the “Chinese rites” controversy produced more than 130 books in France alone; many others were published in Amsterdam, Cologne, and other centers of publishing.² The controversy initially was not about Chinese atheism. It concerned the question of whether Confucianism reflected some original Chinese understanding of divine revelation and whether the Jesuits therefore could build upon Confucian moral philosophy and rituals in the process of seeking to convert the Chinese to Christianity. The prolonged controversy involved all of the different parties in French Catholicism—Dominicans, Franciscans, Jansenists, Gallicans. It ended with the official verdict by both the Sorbonne and Rome that Confucianism was atheistic and that Christian and Confucian beliefs and practices were incompatible. The admixture of Christian and Confucian elements created by the Jesuits’ tactics of proselytizing was held to threaten the very foundations of the creed. The wider implications of this verdict were unintended and yet could not be ignored. Since all were agreed that Confucian ethics were indeed excellent, this finding meant that the Chinese nation of atheists was virtuous.³

The ground was thus well prepared for the proposition that morality could exist, and indeed flourish, independently of the Christian faith. Various writers over the years had explored the idea. However, the person who more than anyone else developed a full-fledged argument supporting this notion and helped spread it all over Europe was the French philosopher Pierre Bayle.

Pierre Bayle—“Father of the Philosophes”

Born in 1647 as the son of a Calvinist minister, Bayle was appointed professor of philosophy at the Protestant academy of Sedan in 1675. After the suppression of that academy in 1681, he went to Rotterdam where he became a professor of philosophy and history. It was in Rotterdam that Bayle published in 1682, anonymously, his Pensées diverses sur la comète (Miscellaneous Thoughts on the Comet), a work he had composed in 1680 but had failed to get published in France. The book rejected as a superstition the widespread belief that comets presaged catastrophes, but its most interesting and influential part dealt with the morality of atheists. Chapter 33 carried the title “Atheism does not necessarily lead to corruption of morals,” and here Bayle argued that the behavior of Christians, and indeed of all men, is not governed by abstract principles or religious beliefs but rather by the passions and inclinations of temperament. “People are persuaded only by a false preconception concerning the light of conscience that atheism is the most abominable state into which anyone may fall, for not having discerned our true motives, they imagine that our beliefs determine our acts.”⁴ Christians could be firmly convinced of the truth of their religion and yet live a sinful and immoral life, and the same held true for idolaters or atheists. Infidelity was not a source of the corruption of manners which everywhere was caused by the same passions of ambition, avarice, envy, and revenge. Some atheists acted immorally, but they did so because they were depraved; they were not depraved because they were atheists. The fact that Christians committed all sorts of crimes showed that

the inclination to do evil does not come from the ignorance of God’s existence and that it is not corrected by acquiring the knowledge of God who punishes and rewards. One may conclude therefrom that the inclination to do evil is not any greater in a soul destitute of the knowledge of God than in a soul which knows God.⁵

According to Bayle, for the great majority of men, it was the prospect of punishment here on earth rather than fear of transgressing God’s commandments that made them conduct themselves in accordance with moral principles. A commonwealth of atheists required laws repressing crime no less and no more than a Christian state.

We can now see how apparent it is that a society of atheists would practice both civic and moral actions just as other societies practice them, provided that crimes were severely punished and that honor and shame were associated with certain acts. Ignorance of a Supreme Being, the Creator and Preserver of the world, would not make the members of this society impervious to glory and scorn, to reward and punishment, and to all the passions which are seen in other men, nor would it extinguish in them the light of reason.⁶

Bayle was a great admirer of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), the exponent of Protestant natural law, who had taught that basic moral values were derived from human nature, were knowable through man’s reason, and had a degree of validity even if one were to grant that which could not be granted without the greatest wickedness—that there is no God.⁷ For Bayle, similarly, the most important moral precepts were rational and universal, predated both the Old and the New Testament, and were engraved on the human mind so deeply that even atheists who were good and upright could not ignore them.⁸

In his Dictionnaire historique et critique, the first edition of which was published in 1697, Bayle described how atheists were often men of natural virtue. The roster of such virtuous nonbelievers included Diagoras, Theodorus, Pliny the Elder, Epicurus, Lucretius, and many others whose moral excellence owed nothing to the Christian religion. On the other hand, he noted, well-known Jews and Christians had committed all sorts of crimes. All of this information again was used to support Bayle’s basic insight that atheists could be moral.

In January 1693, a Dutch consistory condemned several passages in Bayle’s Pensées diverses on the morality of atheists, and in October of that year Bayle was stripped of his professorship in Rotterdam. His writings provoked an avalanche of criti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Dostoyevsky’s Proposition
• 2 The Enlightenment: From Skepticism to Unbelief
• 3 The Religion of Humanity
• 4 The Victorians: Disbelieving Religiously
• 5 Atheism: Proclaiming the Death of God
• 6 Christian Morality: God and Moral Truth
• 7 Is Modern Totalitarianism the Result of the Abandonment of God?
• 8 The Case of Secular Sweden
• 9 Unbelief and the Future of Morality
• Notes
• Index