If God is Not, Is Everything Permissible?

If you struggle with belief, is it because you're secretly a moral monster?

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I came across a Fulton Sheen meme today, and it got me to thinking. Here’s the meme:

Archbishop Sheen was a brilliant rhetorician, but he knew his audience, and that they would just eat up this idea.

But considered objectively, it’s unjust.

Catholicism tells us that faith is a gift, a supernatural virtue God gives as he wills. We can correspond to the gift, but we cannot summon it. “Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven." (Mt. 16:17)

People can't just manufacture faith.

St. Thomas argued that natural reason could lead us, via syllogistic thinking, to the understanding that God exists, but not WHO God is. (I’m not sure I agree with him, but that’s another post.)

As the Sheen quote above demonstrates, there is a theme in Catholic thought that if a person is an atheist, or an agnostic, it's because of some malice towards being beholden to moral authority, or some besetting sin. And while it's certainly true that an atheist or an agnostic is unlikely to concern himself with strict observance of the Church's precepts and moral law, it doesn't mean that he is an atheist or an agnostic because he is a moral monster.

About 12 years ago, I had a coworker who was a very intelligent and very intentional atheist. It was a small office, and he and I worked mostly alone in the same space. When we had downtime, we'd sometimes spar from our respective desks, him with his atheistic arguments, me with my Catholic ones. We seemed fairly evenly matched; he complimented me as the most capable apologist he'd met, I knew him to be probably my superior in intellect and logic. One time I asked him about the old Dostoyevskian proposition, “If God is not, then everything is permissible.”

“That’s not how it works, man.” He told me. “I still have people I love. I don’t want to hurt them. I have to function in a society, so I can’t murder or steal. There may not be eternal consequences for my choices, but there are consequences.”

For the longest time, I didn’t believe him. I thought it was impossible. If you weren’t going to get in trouble for what you did wrong in this life, it was party time.

Much later, when my own faith first started to slip through my fingers against my will — something I’ve had other Catholics tell me was impossible — I was afraid. I begged God to help me not to lose it. To help me to understand. To believe, to figure out how to love him, all of it. I still ask him for a lot of these things today, if less frequently, and less fervently. I’m not sure, after years of pleading with someone who never answers, if I’m just talking to myself.

When I hit a low point, living separated from my wife, trying to drink away the pain, not actively living a debauched life but also not making any effort within my limited circumstances to observe the precepts of the moral law, I thought I was sliding inexorably towards the exact kind of moral monster I always thought I was going to be without faith. Someone who sinned gravely, habitually, without compunction.

But then, something happened.