There's a popular conception current today that one doesn't need to believe in God to have moral values or to be good, and of course, in one sense that's true. Anyone can hold whatever moral principles one wishes, but the problem for moderns is that without an objective standard of morality or goodness no values one chooses to live by are any more "right" or "wrong" than any others.
If atheism is true a man can choose to always tell the truth, but had he chosen instead to always lie he wouldn't have been morally wrong, he'd just be different. Without a transcendent, objective standard of right and wrong morality is just a set of subjective preferences, and no one's subjective preference is any more authoritative than anyone else's.
Moreover, without a transcendent moral lawgiver there can be no ultimate accountability for the moral choices we make. Thus, when Adolf Hitler and Mother Teresa both died their fates were the same - extinction. There was no real accountability for their choices so what does it matter whether one chooses the path of a tyrant or a saint?
Nietzsche saw all this clearly. In his 1889 book Twilight of the Idols he wrote:
[The English] are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. . . . In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing . . . what a moral fanatic one is. . . .We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. . . .It might be noted that Nietzsche wasn't denying that people can hold certain values without God, he was saying that Christian moral values have no purchase in the absence of belief in God. This is true, but what values do we hold in society that we do not owe to a Christian worldview?
Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole. . . . Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him, [nor] what [is] evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth—it stands and falls with faith in God.
When the English actually believe that they know "intuitively" what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt.
For the English, morality is not yet a problem.
Our belief that all people are equally valuable and that racism is wrong derive from the belief that we are all created in the image of God and that God loves each of us equally.
Our moral repugnance at the sexual abuse of vulnerable women stems from the Christian belief that women are not second class in the eyes of God but have dignity and worth in their own right.
Our alarm at reports of children being separated from their families at the Mexican border stems from the Christian belief that families are instituted by God as the basic unit of society and that it's wrong to interfere with the family without good reason.
Our moral horror at acts of cruelty stems from the Christian belief that we are enjoined by God to treat others with dignity, respect and kindness because God loves them.
None of these beliefs are the products of pagan philosophy nor of what's called evolutionary ethics. Neither racism nor abuse of women nor cruelty to others is "wrong" on either view. In fact, it's difficult to understand what it even means to say that something is wrong if there's no accountability. To say that something is "wrong" is to say little more than that "most people don't like it."
But what does Nietzsche mean by that enigmatic last sentence, "For the English, morality is not yet a problem"?
Western society has built up a certain moral momentum. Even though the train has gone over the cliff it still continues to hurtle forward for a time, but it can't last. When Nietzsche wrote these words the moral consequences of the "Death of God" had not yet been realized. Things were going on as before. People just assumed that some things were right and others were wrong even though they no longer had any basis for making these judgments.
Like a dissolute heir they were living off their Christian inheritance, but the moral capital accumulated during the centuries of Christian hegemony won't last forever.
As Dostoyevsky wrote a bit earlier than Nietzsche, "If God is dead then everything is permitted." If there's no God watching, there's no reason why the Nazis shouldn't seek to exterminate the Jews. If there's no God watching, there's no reason why the Hutus shouldn't slaughter the Tutsis. If there's no God watching there's no reason why anyone with power should refrain from imposing his will on other human beings - to cheat them, degrade them, torture them, or kill them - if he so desires.
Perhaps we are slowing waking up to the fact that by abandoning God we're abandoning the only foundation we can have for what we call morally good behavior. We're dissolving the fabric that holds our society together. Perhaps we're beginning to realize that morality is becoming a problem. Modern man has no good answer to these questions.
