Respecting the signs of the Omniscient and Omnipotent God is the only emotional and intellectual anchor that mankind has to prevent it from flying away into barren wasteland of misguidance.  This is described in the following verses of the Holy Quran:

And whoso associate anything with Allah, falls, as it were, from a height, and the birds snatch him away or the wind blows him away to a far off-place. The truth is that whoso honors the sacred Signs of Allah – that, indeed, proceeds from the righteousness of hearts. (Al Quran 22:32-33)

If life ends at the grave, then it makes no difference whether one has lived as a villain or as a saint. Since one’s destiny is ultimately unrelated to one’s behavior, you may as well just live as you please. As Dostoyevsky put it: “If there is no immortality then all things are permitted,” or in the words of Zaheer Ud Din Babar, a Mughal Emperor of India, “Enjoy this life to the utmost as there is no being after this one.”  On this basis, a writer like Ayn Rand is absolutely correct to praise the virtues of selfishness. Live totally for self; no one holds you accountable! Indeed, it would be foolish to do anything else, for life is too short to jeopardize it by acting out of anything but pure self-interest. Sacrifice for such a person would be stupid! Most atheist philosophers will agree that they have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view.  Kai Nielsen, an atheist philosopher who attempts to defend the viability of ethics without God, in the end admits, ‘Pure practical reason, even with a good knowledge of the facts, will not take you to morality.’”[i]

The Islamic teachings establish the respect and awe of the House of God or Kaaba to inject Monotheism and discipline that goes with this into human affairs.  Regardless of human immortality, if there is no God, then there can be no objective standards of right and wrong. All we are confronted with is, in Sartre’s words, ‘the bare, valueless fact of existence.’ Moral values are either just expressions of personal taste or the by-products of socio-biological evolution and conditioning. In the words of one humanist philosopher, “The moral principles as govern our behav­ior are rooted in habit and custom, feeling and fashion.”[ii] In a world without God, who is to say which values are right and which are wrong?” Who is to judge that the values of Adolf Hitler are inferior to those of a saint? The con­cept of morality loses all meaning in a universe without God. As one contemporary atheistic ethicist points out, “to say that something is wrong because. . . it is forbidden by God, is . . . perfectly understandable to anyone who believes in a law-giving God. But to say that something is wrong. . . even though no God exists to forbid it, is not understandable. . . .”  “The con­cept of moral obligation [is] unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain but their meaning is gone.”[iii] In a world without God, there can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments. This means that it is impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil. Nor can one praise brotherhood, equality, and love as good. For in a universe without God, good and evil do not exist­ — there is only ‘the bare valueless fact of existence’, and there is no one to say that I am right and you are wrong.

“The universe we observe,” writes Dawkins, in his book ‘Selfish Gene,’ “has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference.”

Here is a good debate between a Christian William Lane Craig, arguing my position of this article that objective moral values do not exist, if there is no God and Sam Harris trying to confuse the audience:

I would, however, agree that any set of moral values, as Sam Harris proposes, should have utilitarian value for the humans; Islamic teachings do but many of the Christian teachings do not and that is examined in a separate article: March 2010 Al Islam – eGazette: Utilitarian purpose of Islamic teachings.

Herodotus, the Greek historian of the 5th century BC, advanced the view of relativism when he observed that different societies have different customs and that each person thinks his own society’s customs are best. But no set of social customs, Herodotus said, is really better or worse than any other. According to Encyclopedia Britannica on the subject of ‘relativism’, “If practices such as polygamy are considered right within a society, then they are right “for that society”; and if the same practices are considered wrong within a different society, then those practices are wrong for that society. There is no such thing as what is “really” right, apart from these social codes, for there is no culture-neutral standard to which we can appeal to determine which society’s view is correct. The different social codes are all that exist.” Many of these relativistic thoughts will hold water if there was no creator of the world and human presence is only an accident a shere chance. Who is then to argue whether polygamy if practiced with limitation is a virtue or an evil! From this perspective, it would continue to be a heinous crime in USA and a relative virtue in Saudi Arabia. However, the mystery is solved when we note the double standard in how Western civilization will condone male behaviour of keeping multiple mistresses, but, would suggest jail term for any polygamist!

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