Why I Am Not a Christian

theists have made in their arguments, and we come to what are called the moral arguments for the existence of God. You all know, of course, that there used to be, in the old days, three intellectual arguments for the existence of God, all of which were disposed of by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), German philosopher; his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) critiqued traditional proofs for God.. But no sooner had he disposed of those arguments than he invented a new one—a moral argument—and that quite convinced him. He was like many people: in intellectual matters, he was skeptical, but in moral matters, he believed implicitly in the maxims he had imbibed at his mother's knee. That illustrates what psychoanalysts emphasize: the immensely stronger hold our very early associations have on us compared to those of later life.

Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, and that, in varying forms, was extremely popular during the nineteenth century. It takes all sorts of shapes. One form is to say that there would be no right or wrong unless God existed. I am not, for the moment, concerned with whether there is a difference between right and wrong or not; that is a separate question. The point I am concerned with is that if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, you are then in this situation: Is that difference due to God's decree fiat fiat: a formal authorization or decree., or is it not? If it is due to God's decree, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a meaningful statement to say that God