Last week, one of our professors told us about the result of a survey that showed that 47% of Americans agreed with the following statement: It is necessary to believe in God to be moral and have good values. I do not know about the reliability of this survey, but I think it is a quite interesting question: Is it necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values? In my opinion, an individual does definitely not have to believe in God to have good values.
However, I happened to read another statement that describes a scenario in which no one believes in God and such a thing as religion does not exist. What this person says is that without God (or people believing in God), there would also be no morals and no good values because people would not believe in a higher judgement after death. But is this really true? (Note that this is not a discussion about whether a God exists; this is rather about what would happen if people didn’t believe in his existence, if there didn’t exist any religion at all.)