If there was no God????

Dostoyevsky, the great Russian writer, wrote in the classic novel, The Brothers Karamazov this great statement, he said this, "If there is no God then everything is permitted." And what he meant was if there are no standards and there are no rules, then it doesn't matter what you do. If there is no God,

then everything is permitted. There can be no justice, there can be no laws, there can be no anything.

And, The Brothers Karamazov, I don't know if you've read it, but the story is the story of murder in a small Russian town. The murder of a Russian landowner and the terrible results, when a man who tried to believe that everything was o.k. found out that he couldn't live like that. That he had to face the fact that murder was evil. It was vile, it was wrong, and guilt was heaped in upon him. 

And the conclusion of Dostoyevsky was you cannot eliminate God. You cannot eliminate ethical standards, you cannot eliminate morality. If you do, then you come up with a terrible fact that if there is no ethic, then there is no God, and if there is no God, then everything is permitted, and if everything is permitted, existence is a disaster. For that eliminates laws and justice and standards of every kind.

And so Dostoyevsky's conclusion was there must be a God.