It could be argued that with God, everything is permissible. You could make that claim on the ground that every society has incorporated the idea of God, and many of them have permitted horrendous acts, and even incorporated what we would consider evil rituals or acts in honour of or compliance with a God. God is simply that which is considered the absolute authority, or that which validates an action in the minds of those who believe such an authority actually exists, or otherwise use the concept to force their will on others. Without God, it is we who decide what is permissible, and we can revisit previous decisions and change them.
From my very humble view as a hobby-philosopher, I’m not sure about this. Let's talk about it :)
The core of the argument seems to be that societies that have had a religion as their form of ruling have done things we would consider horrible, I agree. However, that does not mean that religion was necessarily the cause of the bad actions, at least not more than democracy is the cause of bad actions in democratic countries. It is possible for a person who ascribes themselves to a religion to do things that the religion does not permit. Therefore, bad actions of countries who ascribe themselves to God do not necessarily mean God makes everything morally acceptable, it could just mean that these people chose to go against the moral rulings of God. People can use God as a shield, but that does not mean God endorses it. Please keep in mind, I’m not anywhere near an expert on this - these are just my thoughts around it :)
With god all things are possible because god is untethered from reality and there are as many versions as there are people who have thought about it, and those Imaginations produce infinitely varied ethical mandates.
Since god remains firmly silent and uninvolved in worldly matters, escaping scientific modes of knowledge, all we are left with is his shield function. Using such god to advancing any kind of human-conceived idea is the ultimate appeal to authority.
Moral rulings of god which is beyond any means of human understanding are, well, beyond human understanding. We might guess right, we might fail to guess what he deems right and wrong. Isn't it just waste of precious time and energy to try to argue what's dear to his heart or why he is on our side in any particular debate? Instead of focusing on all the issues related to building the best of possible worlds without appeal to spooks, friends, without soma, without opium?
Got it, that makes sense. Rereading the original statement I can see your reasoning for why it’s about God as a human invention. I assumed it was God as a being, and if that were the case I’d stand by my point, but I get your point of view if we see God only as an invention 😁
a bit off topic: could god whose will remains unknown/unknowable to humanity, matter at all as a potential source of ethics? in other words: it context of ethics, would it matter whether god is or isn't, if there is or isn't a divine being?
if so, why?
how could such an impenetrable god have any influence over our ethics? how could we say that something is permitted or forbidden? in order to state that 'without god everything is permitted', we must suppose not only that god exists but also that it is somehow cognitively accesible to us. with god that merely exists we can only guess what is and what isn't permitted. such a god is useless as a source of ethics/with such a god everything is both permissible and forbidden. with such a god when you ask for a map/of meaning/ you get a blank piece of paper. I don't think Dostoyevsky would care much about loosing such a 'map' ;)
My view on this is that, for our ethics - a lack of a God is the same as a God with unkowable rules. No matter which of the two it is, we do not have guidence from God on what to do. If we do not know what God wants, we cannot say either that everything or nothing is permitted with or without God - basicly, we can't make statments of what God permits or does not permit. What is your view on these questions?
If we truly don’t know anything about God, then claiming to know what He thinks is obviously a stretch. Sure, people can do it — but it’s a major logical misstep. That’s why I don’t think appealing to God is a real issue in academic or critical discussions — it would just get called out as an appeal to authority and dismissed. In that context, God doesn’t really function as a “shield.”
But I do see your point from a societal angle. If people don’t question whether anyone actually knows what God wants, then God can become a kind of untouchable authority — used to justify all sorts of things in the name of “divine will.” Like you said, it becomes a tool for advancing human-made ideas, and that is dangerous.
Eisler’s original statement seemed to suggest that if God exists, then anything is permissible — and I assumed that meant God as an actual being, not just a human concept. If that’s the case, I’d still stand by my original point. But I might’ve misread the framing.
Imo, what Eisler talks about is the concept of God as the ultimate or absolute moral authority used as a tool for advancing human-conceived moral systems also known as religions. With /silent, passive/God on our side we make anything we want permissible AND non-negotiable.
in short: god becomes mean to our ends, that shield of objectivity used to defend/promote purely subjective assessment of right and wrong.
I don't see her saying anything regarding god's existence or will.
I love a good post that makes me think. In the South (North American) people will almost always think you're evil if you don't believe in God. So this has given me brand new questions and stances to defend myself.
Kant does a good job of it even though he was a theist. It seems so obvious to me that what makes a person good has little to do with what say they believe or whether they practice anything at all. We can easily make that part up and a lot of people do, but at the end of the day it's about how you treat other people.
Jake Wagner, the son in a family who murdered a whole other family because of a custody dispute over his child actually told people beforehand that he could kill whoever he wanted because Jesus would forgive him. He still talks that way from prison. Maybe you heard about it.
I'm a psychology student (first year) with only a small interest in philosophy so I'm not versed in Kant's work, but I've been interested. Also I have not heard that? It's crazy how some, if only a small amount of, theist can contort their mind to think that way.
حنين الفطرة الأولى التي فطر الله الناس عليها تقود المؤمن والملحد إلى ضرورة القيم الاخلاقية بين الناس وعندما نسترجع حياة الانبياء والرسل مع اقوامهم نجد ان غاية كل رسالة تصحيح مسار انحراف اخلاقي معين كالغش والظلم وغيرها من الانحرافات
وأردأ امة هي التي تحتاج الى وحي ونبي لتقويم اخلاقها كتلك الانحرافات التي سادت في قريش قبل الرسالة.
وكم نبي ارسل إلى اليهود ومع ذلك ما زال الانحراف متجذر ومع ادعائهم الايمان بالله
القيم الاخلاقية صوت الفطرة الذي جعل اثنين مليار صيني لا يومنون بوحي يعمرون حياة الناس بمنتجاتهم
بينما حثالة من اللقطاء يسفكون الدم في غزة امام عدسات البث المباشر.
This is a very good argument to invalidate the claim that morality solely rests on God. I think that many theists often assume that without authority there will be no compliance with morality, so an atheist can do whatever they please because there will be no punishment. However, this claim fails to realize that people themselves can be an authority and hold themselves to their own standard without and still have the will to do good and the checks and balances to uphold that will.
This was very good and definitely makes you think! Have you made a video on this topic? I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on these systems and the argument itself as well!
Hey Joe! Not sure if you'll see this but I had a quick question.
You offer three examples for a non-theistic morality. You then say that each one regards something as "good" without justification at its foundation. For Plato, you say it's the form of the good. For the Buddha, you say it's enlightenment. But you don't say what the thing is for Korsgaard. Is it consistency? I feel like it's probably consistency, but I'd like to know for sure before I adopt it as my Personal Moral System (TM).
Bonus question now that I've finished reading the post: If all moral systems rely on assigning something irreducible goodness, does it matter what thing you assign it to? Is it entirely arbitrary?
Morality is a personal understanding of best practices when dealing with other creatures. Ethics is formalized, usually shared, morality. Both are contingent on priorities.
The core premise of the essay, that we can preserve moral meaning while abandoning God, demands a far deeper interrogation than it has been afforded here. It assumes that “goodness” is intuitively grasped by humans and, therefore, sustainable even in a post-theistic framework. This assumption, while comforting, collapses the moment we introduce historical and current moral catastrophes that were also justified in the name of “good.”
Take the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The collective West, with its secular democracies, human rights institutions, and presumed moral leadership, has either sponsored or silently sanctioned the killing of children, the bombing of hospitals, the flattening of homes. The United States, which vetoed nearly every resolution for a ceasefire, continues to send arms while repeating the mantra of self-defense. Are we to believe that this, too, emerges from some latent human sense of “goodness”?
If morality can be reshaped by interests, propaganda, or political consensus, then the same logic applies to any oppressor. Hitler thought he was preserving a noble race. Stalin believed he was purging society for the greater good. If moral definitions are democratically decided or intuitively sensed, then every regime—from totalitarian to liberal—has the same right to define “goodness” on its own terms.
This is not a theoretical collapse. It is a real and present one. Once “good” is no longer anchored in an Absolute, it becomes, by definition, contingent—subject to revision by culture, convenience, or power. To argue that “we all know what good is” while living in a world where hospitals are bombed in daylight by the very champions of Enlightenment values is, frankly, naive.
The Qur’an makes no such mistake. It grounds morality in two firm principles:
1. Fitrah—an innate recognition of truth, planted within every soul.
2. Revelation—a divine communication that preserves moral clarity when the fitrah is corrupted by ego, desire, or social forces.
The Qur’an warns precisely of this phenomenon: people who claim righteousness while committing corruption (Qur’an 2:11), those who take Satan as a moral authority (Qur’an 7:30), and those whose deeds are evil yet think they are doing good work (Qur’an 18:104).
In other words, the human being is not a blank slate of intuitive virtue; he is vulnerable to inversion—where evil becomes moral, and virtue is criminalized.
So, to return to the original premise: Can moral meaning survive without God?
The Gaza genocide answers that with blood. The moral relativism of modern power structures proves that without God, “good” is just a floating symbol—ready to be filled by whatever ideology dominates the moment. If this essay is an attempt to salvage secular morality, it must first account for the failure of that morality to protect even the most basic right: the right not to be slaughtered in plain sight.
Until then, the claim that we can retain the idea of Good without God remains not only philosophically fragile, but historically and morally bankrupt.
I like that your moral views seem to show a preference for natural law, which is something I agree with. I’m pleasantly surprised that an atheist would want to take this route, so I’m excited to see where this leads you. I like Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Grotius, Leibniz, and a bit of Kant. I think the goals of Buddhism are noble—namely, to cease suffering. To cease suffering and do no harm are things I believe can be inferred naturally as part of natural law.
So I have a problem when you say that God’s essential nature—what I take to be the true form of the good—is a mere stipulation. You also seem to think that it must be a stipulation. But isn’t this to deny that one can have natural knowledge of “the good” at all? If this idea of something’s intrinsic value is a mere stipulation, then that would mean we have no true knowledge of the good at all.
You further say that an atheist would also have access to these properties. You seem to think this is a problem for theistic natural law ethics, but I don’t think that’s a misunderstanding. To believe in natural law is to believe that we can have natural knowledge of said law. So in fact, atheists having knowledge of natural law does not falsify anything.
I think the cultural blind spot you speak of is caused by theological voluntarism, which leads to a confusion between divine command theory and theistic natural law ethics. But I thoroughly hope you continue building up your own personal thoughts on natural law. In particular, I think you should meditate on the nature of intrinsic value, as Aristotle does. Then as you think of intrinsic value, reread Anselm, but instead of focusing on his argument for the existence of God, focus on his ideas about the divine attributes which is his truest and most lasting contribution to theology. You have a large enough influence, I think it warrants doing a much deeper dive on these subjects to avoid confusion for your audience. As Socrates says in the republic, “let us follow the argument wherever it leads”.
You say: "The truth conditions of such a conditional are simple: if there is a single counter-example of a philosophical system where there are moral facts, and yet God does not ground them, then the conditional is refuted, and we must dismiss the motion"
I think this remark could be slightly clarified. Such systems need to be possible. It wouldn’t be enough merely for people to have put forward systems of this kind. There is a difference between someone putting forward a system, and whether that system is possible. Suppose it is not possible for there to be stance-independent moral facts at all. If so, then technically it’s true that if God does not exist, then stance-independent moral facts don’t exist, for the simple reason that stance-independent moral facts wouldn’t exist either way.
While theists who insist that you need God for moral realism may have to contend with secular accounts of moral realism if they want their claim to be taken seriously, the mere fact that such accounts exist does not refute the claim that moral realism requires God.
This may seem moot. At least some moral antirealists would concede that secular accounts of moral realism are possible, only false. If we count naturalist accounts of realism among them, I might concede the point myself. But at least some secular accounts of moral realism may not be possible because they may not even be intelligible. An underappreciated consideration behind disputes about moral realism is whether moral realists have offered a meaningful account of what it would mean for something to be morally right or wrong, good or bad, and so on. While naturalists can identify moral facts with various natural facts, non-naturalists are consigned to conceptually mysterious notions, and often defend the notion of irreducible normativity.
I also disagree with this claim at the end: “But what you cannot say is that God is the only way to ground morality.” You can if what you mean is that none of these accounts are true.
You also say this: “It is not true that without God, everything is thereby permitted.” This has not been shown. It’s possible that it is true if all secular accounts of moral realism are false. There may be some lack of clarity in these remarks about what's true and what's possible that it would be helpful to explicitly disambiguate.
It could be argued that with God, everything is permissible. You could make that claim on the ground that every society has incorporated the idea of God, and many of them have permitted horrendous acts, and even incorporated what we would consider evil rituals or acts in honour of or compliance with a God. God is simply that which is considered the absolute authority, or that which validates an action in the minds of those who believe such an authority actually exists, or otherwise use the concept to force their will on others. Without God, it is we who decide what is permissible, and we can revisit previous decisions and change them.
From my very humble view as a hobby-philosopher, I’m not sure about this. Let's talk about it :)
The core of the argument seems to be that societies that have had a religion as their form of ruling have done things we would consider horrible, I agree. However, that does not mean that religion was necessarily the cause of the bad actions, at least not more than democracy is the cause of bad actions in democratic countries. It is possible for a person who ascribes themselves to a religion to do things that the religion does not permit. Therefore, bad actions of countries who ascribe themselves to God do not necessarily mean God makes everything morally acceptable, it could just mean that these people chose to go against the moral rulings of God. People can use God as a shield, but that does not mean God endorses it. Please keep in mind, I’m not anywhere near an expert on this - these are just my thoughts around it :)
With god all things are possible because god is untethered from reality and there are as many versions as there are people who have thought about it, and those Imaginations produce infinitely varied ethical mandates.
Since god remains firmly silent and uninvolved in worldly matters, escaping scientific modes of knowledge, all we are left with is his shield function. Using such god to advancing any kind of human-conceived idea is the ultimate appeal to authority.
Moral rulings of god which is beyond any means of human understanding are, well, beyond human understanding. We might guess right, we might fail to guess what he deems right and wrong. Isn't it just waste of precious time and energy to try to argue what's dear to his heart or why he is on our side in any particular debate? Instead of focusing on all the issues related to building the best of possible worlds without appeal to spooks, friends, without soma, without opium?
Got it, that makes sense. Rereading the original statement I can see your reasoning for why it’s about God as a human invention. I assumed it was God as a being, and if that were the case I’d stand by my point, but I get your point of view if we see God only as an invention 😁
a bit off topic: could god whose will remains unknown/unknowable to humanity, matter at all as a potential source of ethics? in other words: it context of ethics, would it matter whether god is or isn't, if there is or isn't a divine being?
if so, why?
how could such an impenetrable god have any influence over our ethics? how could we say that something is permitted or forbidden? in order to state that 'without god everything is permitted', we must suppose not only that god exists but also that it is somehow cognitively accesible to us. with god that merely exists we can only guess what is and what isn't permitted. such a god is useless as a source of ethics/with such a god everything is both permissible and forbidden. with such a god when you ask for a map/of meaning/ you get a blank piece of paper. I don't think Dostoyevsky would care much about loosing such a 'map' ;)
My view on this is that, for our ethics - a lack of a God is the same as a God with unkowable rules. No matter which of the two it is, we do not have guidence from God on what to do. If we do not know what God wants, we cannot say either that everything or nothing is permitted with or without God - basicly, we can't make statments of what God permits or does not permit. What is your view on these questions?
same as yours, with a hint of feeling burdened with this freedom yet rebelling against those who 'know' god.
Interesting! here's my point of view:
If we truly don’t know anything about God, then claiming to know what He thinks is obviously a stretch. Sure, people can do it — but it’s a major logical misstep. That’s why I don’t think appealing to God is a real issue in academic or critical discussions — it would just get called out as an appeal to authority and dismissed. In that context, God doesn’t really function as a “shield.”
But I do see your point from a societal angle. If people don’t question whether anyone actually knows what God wants, then God can become a kind of untouchable authority — used to justify all sorts of things in the name of “divine will.” Like you said, it becomes a tool for advancing human-made ideas, and that is dangerous.
Eisler’s original statement seemed to suggest that if God exists, then anything is permissible — and I assumed that meant God as an actual being, not just a human concept. If that’s the case, I’d still stand by my original point. But I might’ve misread the framing.
Imo, what Eisler talks about is the concept of God as the ultimate or absolute moral authority used as a tool for advancing human-conceived moral systems also known as religions. With /silent, passive/God on our side we make anything we want permissible AND non-negotiable.
in short: god becomes mean to our ends, that shield of objectivity used to defend/promote purely subjective assessment of right and wrong.
I don't see her saying anything regarding god's existence or will.
I love a good post that makes me think. In the South (North American) people will almost always think you're evil if you don't believe in God. So this has given me brand new questions and stances to defend myself.
Kant does a good job of it even though he was a theist. It seems so obvious to me that what makes a person good has little to do with what say they believe or whether they practice anything at all. We can easily make that part up and a lot of people do, but at the end of the day it's about how you treat other people.
Jake Wagner, the son in a family who murdered a whole other family because of a custody dispute over his child actually told people beforehand that he could kill whoever he wanted because Jesus would forgive him. He still talks that way from prison. Maybe you heard about it.
I'm a psychology student (first year) with only a small interest in philosophy so I'm not versed in Kant's work, but I've been interested. Also I have not heard that? It's crazy how some, if only a small amount of, theist can contort their mind to think that way.
Another excellent read, Foe Jolley
So, whether with or without God, is there any act which would be absolutely "wrong" (or at least "not good") under all circumstances?
i don't think there would be any, even purely destructive and sadistic acts could be exonerated, salvaged within some theories.
حنين الفطرة الأولى التي فطر الله الناس عليها تقود المؤمن والملحد إلى ضرورة القيم الاخلاقية بين الناس وعندما نسترجع حياة الانبياء والرسل مع اقوامهم نجد ان غاية كل رسالة تصحيح مسار انحراف اخلاقي معين كالغش والظلم وغيرها من الانحرافات
وأردأ امة هي التي تحتاج الى وحي ونبي لتقويم اخلاقها كتلك الانحرافات التي سادت في قريش قبل الرسالة.
وكم نبي ارسل إلى اليهود ومع ذلك ما زال الانحراف متجذر ومع ادعائهم الايمان بالله
القيم الاخلاقية صوت الفطرة الذي جعل اثنين مليار صيني لا يومنون بوحي يعمرون حياة الناس بمنتجاتهم
بينما حثالة من اللقطاء يسفكون الدم في غزة امام عدسات البث المباشر.
This is a very good argument to invalidate the claim that morality solely rests on God. I think that many theists often assume that without authority there will be no compliance with morality, so an atheist can do whatever they please because there will be no punishment. However, this claim fails to realize that people themselves can be an authority and hold themselves to their own standard without and still have the will to do good and the checks and balances to uphold that will.
This was very good and definitely makes you think! Have you made a video on this topic? I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on these systems and the argument itself as well!
i sure hope not
Hey Joe! Not sure if you'll see this but I had a quick question.
You offer three examples for a non-theistic morality. You then say that each one regards something as "good" without justification at its foundation. For Plato, you say it's the form of the good. For the Buddha, you say it's enlightenment. But you don't say what the thing is for Korsgaard. Is it consistency? I feel like it's probably consistency, but I'd like to know for sure before I adopt it as my Personal Moral System (TM).
Bonus question now that I've finished reading the post: If all moral systems rely on assigning something irreducible goodness, does it matter what thing you assign it to? Is it entirely arbitrary?
If you are a politician Yes!
Morality is a personal understanding of best practices when dealing with other creatures. Ethics is formalized, usually shared, morality. Both are contingent on priorities.
There are ethical universals to the extent we share priorities; survival, truth, sustainability, and reciprocity: https://kaiserbasileus.substack.com/p/the-mandate-of-libertarian-fascist
No ofc not
Nothing is true, everything is absurd.
If everything is absurd, nothing is certain.
And if nothing is certain; we must necessarily reconsider what should be permitted
The Crisis of Morality Without God
The core premise of the essay, that we can preserve moral meaning while abandoning God, demands a far deeper interrogation than it has been afforded here. It assumes that “goodness” is intuitively grasped by humans and, therefore, sustainable even in a post-theistic framework. This assumption, while comforting, collapses the moment we introduce historical and current moral catastrophes that were also justified in the name of “good.”
Take the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The collective West, with its secular democracies, human rights institutions, and presumed moral leadership, has either sponsored or silently sanctioned the killing of children, the bombing of hospitals, the flattening of homes. The United States, which vetoed nearly every resolution for a ceasefire, continues to send arms while repeating the mantra of self-defense. Are we to believe that this, too, emerges from some latent human sense of “goodness”?
If morality can be reshaped by interests, propaganda, or political consensus, then the same logic applies to any oppressor. Hitler thought he was preserving a noble race. Stalin believed he was purging society for the greater good. If moral definitions are democratically decided or intuitively sensed, then every regime—from totalitarian to liberal—has the same right to define “goodness” on its own terms.
This is not a theoretical collapse. It is a real and present one. Once “good” is no longer anchored in an Absolute, it becomes, by definition, contingent—subject to revision by culture, convenience, or power. To argue that “we all know what good is” while living in a world where hospitals are bombed in daylight by the very champions of Enlightenment values is, frankly, naive.
The Qur’an makes no such mistake. It grounds morality in two firm principles:
1. Fitrah—an innate recognition of truth, planted within every soul.
2. Revelation—a divine communication that preserves moral clarity when the fitrah is corrupted by ego, desire, or social forces.
The Qur’an warns precisely of this phenomenon: people who claim righteousness while committing corruption (Qur’an 2:11), those who take Satan as a moral authority (Qur’an 7:30), and those whose deeds are evil yet think they are doing good work (Qur’an 18:104).
In other words, the human being is not a blank slate of intuitive virtue; he is vulnerable to inversion—where evil becomes moral, and virtue is criminalized.
So, to return to the original premise: Can moral meaning survive without God?
The Gaza genocide answers that with blood. The moral relativism of modern power structures proves that without God, “good” is just a floating symbol—ready to be filled by whatever ideology dominates the moment. If this essay is an attempt to salvage secular morality, it must first account for the failure of that morality to protect even the most basic right: the right not to be slaughtered in plain sight.
Until then, the claim that we can retain the idea of Good without God remains not only philosophically fragile, but historically and morally bankrupt.
I like that your moral views seem to show a preference for natural law, which is something I agree with. I’m pleasantly surprised that an atheist would want to take this route, so I’m excited to see where this leads you. I like Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Grotius, Leibniz, and a bit of Kant. I think the goals of Buddhism are noble—namely, to cease suffering. To cease suffering and do no harm are things I believe can be inferred naturally as part of natural law.
So I have a problem when you say that God’s essential nature—what I take to be the true form of the good—is a mere stipulation. You also seem to think that it must be a stipulation. But isn’t this to deny that one can have natural knowledge of “the good” at all? If this idea of something’s intrinsic value is a mere stipulation, then that would mean we have no true knowledge of the good at all.
You further say that an atheist would also have access to these properties. You seem to think this is a problem for theistic natural law ethics, but I don’t think that’s a misunderstanding. To believe in natural law is to believe that we can have natural knowledge of said law. So in fact, atheists having knowledge of natural law does not falsify anything.
I think the cultural blind spot you speak of is caused by theological voluntarism, which leads to a confusion between divine command theory and theistic natural law ethics. But I thoroughly hope you continue building up your own personal thoughts on natural law. In particular, I think you should meditate on the nature of intrinsic value, as Aristotle does. Then as you think of intrinsic value, reread Anselm, but instead of focusing on his argument for the existence of God, focus on his ideas about the divine attributes which is his truest and most lasting contribution to theology. You have a large enough influence, I think it warrants doing a much deeper dive on these subjects to avoid confusion for your audience. As Socrates says in the republic, “let us follow the argument wherever it leads”.
You say: "The truth conditions of such a conditional are simple: if there is a single counter-example of a philosophical system where there are moral facts, and yet God does not ground them, then the conditional is refuted, and we must dismiss the motion"
I think this remark could be slightly clarified. Such systems need to be possible. It wouldn’t be enough merely for people to have put forward systems of this kind. There is a difference between someone putting forward a system, and whether that system is possible. Suppose it is not possible for there to be stance-independent moral facts at all. If so, then technically it’s true that if God does not exist, then stance-independent moral facts don’t exist, for the simple reason that stance-independent moral facts wouldn’t exist either way.
While theists who insist that you need God for moral realism may have to contend with secular accounts of moral realism if they want their claim to be taken seriously, the mere fact that such accounts exist does not refute the claim that moral realism requires God.
This may seem moot. At least some moral antirealists would concede that secular accounts of moral realism are possible, only false. If we count naturalist accounts of realism among them, I might concede the point myself. But at least some secular accounts of moral realism may not be possible because they may not even be intelligible. An underappreciated consideration behind disputes about moral realism is whether moral realists have offered a meaningful account of what it would mean for something to be morally right or wrong, good or bad, and so on. While naturalists can identify moral facts with various natural facts, non-naturalists are consigned to conceptually mysterious notions, and often defend the notion of irreducible normativity.
I also disagree with this claim at the end: “But what you cannot say is that God is the only way to ground morality.” You can if what you mean is that none of these accounts are true.
You also say this: “It is not true that without God, everything is thereby permitted.” This has not been shown. It’s possible that it is true if all secular accounts of moral realism are false. There may be some lack of clarity in these remarks about what's true and what's possible that it would be helpful to explicitly disambiguate.