But, if life ends at the grave, it makes no difference whether one has lived as a Stalin or as a saint. As the Russian writer Feodor Dostoevsky rightly said: “If if there is immortality, then all things are permitted.” Given the finality of death, it really does not matter how you live.

William Lane Craig, of course, repeats an oft misquoted passage from The Brother Karamazov and for a professional philosopher, as he routinely claims to be, one would think he’d know better; likewise, there’s something about Mr. Craig’s suggestion that ‘professional’ legitimatizes ‘philosopher’ that leads me to believe that he shouldn’t be the former and isn’t the latter. It’s difficult to attribute an author the philosophical views of the characters he creates, but Mr. Craig probably depends less on the person of Dostoevsky than the content of the sentence, the philosophy itself. Ivan Karamazov was certainly concerned with the implications of immortality of the soul, both as a matter of metaphysics and as a matter of belief, as Constance Garnett’s translation suggests: “If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover,” Karamazov continues, “Nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism. [...] For every individual [...] who does not believe in God or immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately be changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law, and that egoism, even to crime, must become not only lawful but even recognised as the inevitable, the most rational, even honourable outcome of his position.” For the sake of drawing the distinction, if Karamozov, in this passage, is concerned with belief in existence of God or the non-existence of God as the cause of moral actions, then we can allay his concerns with empirical certainty: atheism does not cause immorality. But, this concern about the belief in God suggests to me that Karamazov might imagine that there would be no difference between believing in God in a universe in which God happens to exist or believing in that same God as matter of actual fiction; in either universe, whether there is actually a God, belief in God is what actually fosters moral behavior, which I don’t think is Mr. Craig’s contention, nor would it stand to evidence. Rather, I think Mr. Craig and those others who misuse this quote from Dostoevsky are suggesting that, considering those two universes, the universe without a God may contain moral actions, but those moral actions are arbitrary and meaningless and the people in that universe without a God might just as well go around killing each other – it doesn’t really matter. I’ve never entirely understood this argument beyond reading it as a brute assertion; it seems like the meaningless of moral actions in a universe without a God in part stems from the fact that moral laws would then simply be contrived through the power of the few or the many, but also from the fact that any sort of consequence we might experience can be escaped through death into annihilation. I’m not sure why agreed upon rules are meaningless and, more importantly, I’m not sure why Karamazov, and Craig, I would imagine, would suppose that people, left to our own devices without God to give us rules and reward us eternally for following them or breaking the slightest among them, would descend into cannibalism and then what… dogs and cats living together. (more…)