Can morality exist without God?

“The universe is but a vast assemblage of laws under which every being, every creature, every particle of matter acts, moves, and exists. These laws are immutable, and nothing can deviate from them.” Baron d’Holbach

While Newton remained faithful to his religion, believing that he had only described an aspect of God’s genius, his followers ran with determinism to its logical end. Voltaire saw a clockwork universe ticking in harmony with only natural laws intrinsic to its structure, so denied claims of deistic intervention. If God existed at all, He was a distant force of ages past, an irrelevant entity unconcerned with the struggles of the present. Baron d'Holbach agreed, finding no room in airtight mathematics for metaphysical intrusion. The gears of the cosmic clock were fit too closely and its springs wound too tightly for anything extraordinary to penetrate the system. Thomas Paine was so overwhelmed by the flawless complexity of calculated reality that he chastised his Christian compatriots for daring to claim any understanding of the ineffable power that set the world in motion. Kant split existence into knowable and unknowable realms to reconcile the floods of science and philosophy overflowing the era’s expanding zeitgeist. When our familiar guide, Laplace, was asked by Napoleon why he didn’t include God in his explanation of the cosmos, he flatly replied, “I had no need of that hypothesis.”

“A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills.” Schopenhauer

First falling apples, then all objects in motion, finally human bodies were added to the technical brew. They were an unsettling addition to the rhythmic system but not beyond description by indifferent laws of nature. Flesh and bones, too, obeyed inertia and gravity, only objecting when compelled by other integral influences. Hunger and safety pulled puppet strings just as certainly as matter was compelled by magnetism. Morality, it appeared, was another naive delusion of yesteryear, an antiquated outlook alongside obsolete deistic oversight. Who could say what behavior was right or wrong when every gear in the universal clock turned solely according to preordained trajectory? Only arbitrary and irrelevant rules could possibly be broken when energy and matter bound by natural law spun impeccably across the universe toward their inevitable destiny.