W
hat if there were no God? This is a very difficult question to answer, since I hold that whatever the cause of existence is, should be called God -- our universe is not the kind of thing that can exist uncaused. I will admit to debate about the precise nature of God, but not about His existence simpliciter.
But, it is certainly true that some people do no believe in God; and I wonder what the best attempt at a consistent ethic looks like for the true atheist.
Atheists have a tendency to believe that religious morality is a sort of "false morality", as it is predicated on reward and punishment, rather than on interior disposition. This is a crude generalization, right off the bat; but the more important issue at stake is that theists believe that there is accord, or harmony in the laws of morality, and in the essence of Creation itself. What it means to call God the root of moral action is that morality and existence have one and the same cause; and that both are thus mutually reinforcing echoes of that primordial goodness that orders the cosmos.
The atheist does not hold this same view of harmony -- or if he does, he is much closer to being a theist than he realizes. In my view, a good atheist thinks that moral laws are either fundamentally arbitrary, the result of random historical events; or fundamentally the playing out of
power dynamics, in which the competition for raw existence occasionally engenders certain "rules" that reinforce or subvert power structures on various levels.
A "nice nihilist" might conclude that morality is inescapably programmed into their essence, regardless of its dubious provenance, and decide to act roughly as a "moral entity" to soothe their own animal consciousness and gain social acceptance. On the other hand, a "total" nihilist would reject any moral judgements on their actions whatsoever as either a power play to be beaten, or an irrelevant non sequitor. There are blessedly few true nihilists, but they can be very destructive where they pop up.
My point overall is this -- without being able to root morality in the structure of the universe (and without being able to call both of them "good") one very quickly loses the ability to talk about these matters with anyone who doesn't already agree with them in basically all particulars. When we disagree about the morality of certain actions, the appropriate move to take is to step backwards and find some basic common goodness on which we agree. The atheist, however, is always going to struggle to "step back" in this way, because the ability to do so presupposes a "foundational goodness" that we are stepping back towards. The atheist's universe is arbitrarily heterogeneous, with no foundational cause binding all things together. The causal thread of morality runs out very quickly in this chaotic and diminished perspective.