There can be no morality, no “objective moral values,” apart from God, so argue Christians like William Lane Craig in his scores of debates and books and articles and Frank Turek in his books and articles and debates with Christopher Hitchens and others.
Since there is no God, Christian, Islamic, Judaic, etc., since no God exists, what they’re actually contending is that there can be no morality, no “objective moral values,” apart from the belief in a God, for them the Christian God, the “Holy Trinity,” which doesn’t exist, objectively and empirically, but only in their fantasies.
But the Old Testament and its God sanction genocide, slavery, the subjugation and abuse of women and girls, and other acts that most people, today, and many even long ago, would deem or would have deemed immoral.
So if morality can only exist and be sanctioned by a God and his/its prescriptions and commandments, then slavery, genocide, and the subjugation and abuse of women and girls are “moral” under the God of the Old Testament.
But according to the likes of Turek and Craig, one has to believe in a God who sanctions genocide and slavery to argue and believe that slavery and genocide are immoral. They argue, ludicrously and invidiously, that people who don’t believe in a God who sanctions genocide and slavery in the Old Testament, and who don’t believe that Jesus, if he existed, was the son of this God who was born of a virgin and resurrected after his death by crucifixion, have no basis and grounds on which to decry and condemn as evil and immoral such evils and outrages and atrocities as genocide, slavery, the holocaust, the Soviet gulag, mass murder and the crimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, torture, the Wichita massacre, the Knoxville horror, and many other evils.
Islam and the Koran and its God sanction female genital mutilation, the honor killings by fathers and husbands of wives and daughters who dishonor their families and marriages (even if fathers and husbands believe that they might have done so albeit they’re in fact innocent), the rape and gang-rape of women and girls who leave their homes with no male supervision, the execution of adulterers and homosexuals, terrorism and the murder of infidels as in and on 9/11. So if morality can only exist and be sanctioned by a God and his/its prescriptions and commandments, and the God of Islam is the one true God, then all of the above (murders, rapes and gang-rapes, misogyny, torture, mutilation, terrorism.) is “moral” under Islam, objectively so if Allah is the one true God.
“If God does not exist, everything is permitted,” so exclaimed a stupid and deluded character in “Crime and Punishment” I suggest that those who believes this commit murders, rapes and/or gang-rapes, robbery, aggravated assault, and other violent and mala in se felonies, and also sundry misdemeanors, and see if it’s true in the US and all other nations, with some exceptions in Muslim nations under some circumstances (see above).
If so, in regard to felonies, even in the US and UK and the nations of Europe, societies that are lenient by historical standards, perpetrators of such crimes will almost surely or likely be arrested and prosecuted, depending on the crimes and the politics and ideology of the DA and his prosecutors -and, if convicted, sentenced to months in jail or years or decades in prison or, in the US in regard to first-degree murder, possibly sentenced to death in most states or under federal jurisdiction, and executed in most cases if all their appeals are denied by state and/or federal courts.
At least, in most cases, if prosecuted and convicted of a nonviolent and often victimless and malum prohibitum felony, or of a violent and mala in se crime if the felon is black and the DA is a leftist and/or black, the perpetrator will be fined and sentenced to years of probation and surveillance.
If convicted of nonviolent and victimless and mala prohibitum sex crimes, however, even if a first-offender, including adult women who have love affairs or mere trysts with biological men under the age of consent and even if the “victim” was the aggressor and initiator of his phantasmal and theoretical victimization, perpetrators will be sentenced, almost invariably, to months in jail or years (for some even decades) in prison and then subjected to 20-30 years or a lifetime of draconian and Orwellian persecution.
As for DUI and other misdemeanors, one will be fined, if convicted, and possibly sentenced to months or weeks in jail and to months or years of probation and surveillance.
Obviously, as Hitchens has contended, repeatedly, in his debates, no society and nation could survive if it didn’t morally denounce, prohibit, criminalize, and punish violent and other mala in se felonies: murder, rape and gang-rape, robbery, aggravated assault, theft, vandalism, etc. The existence or belief in a God who doesn’t exist is not exigent and imperative.
Ironically, a totally atheistic and secular nation would punish rapists and murderers more severely than rapists and murderers are punished under Sharia law in Islamic countries where such acts are not only legal but obligatory in regard to “honor killings” and the rapes and gang-rapes of women who leave the home with no male supervision.
As mentioned above, murder, rape and gang-rape, terrorism, and other crimes are not only permitted under the God of Islam and in Muslim nations but enjoined and glorified if the victims are women and girls who dishonor their husbands and families, infidels murdered by terrorists and other devout Muslims, homosexuals pushed off the roofs of tall buildings or shot to death in “gay” nightclubs, and so forth.
In conclusion, the contention and belief that morality can’t exist apart from a God who doesn’t exist -and if it did exist, what God?- is not only false, demonstrably and transparently so, but absurd and invidious in its defaming of atheists and their moral actions and beliefs as not “objective,” whatever that means in this context, and legitimate.
Atheism Simplified 