If God is not, then the existence of all that is beautiful and in any sense good, is but the accidental and ineffective byproduct of blindly swirling atoms, or of the equally unpurposeful, though more conceptually complicated, mechanisms of present-day physics.  A man may well believe that this dreadful thing is true.  For to wish there should be not God is to wish that the things we love and strive to realize and make permanent, should be only temporary and doomed to frustration and destruction.  If life and its fulfillments are good, why should one rejoice in the news that God is dead and that there is nothing in the whole world but our frail and perishable selves that is concerned with anything that matters?  Not that such a prospect would diminish the duty to make the best of what we have while we have it.  Goodness is not made less good by a lack of cosmic support for it.  Morality is sanctionless and can never derive its validity from what is external to itself and to the life whose fulfillment it is.  Atheism leads not to badness but only to an incurabe sadness and loneliness.

-W.P. Montague

Quoted in Lowell Bennion, Religion and the Pursuit of Truth pg. 112