If God had intended that people should go naked, we would have been born that way.

The line is used as a humorous, mock-moral objection to nudism, flipping an “appeal to nature” argument into a joke: if nakedness were intended, people would supposedly be born already that way. The wording appears in multiple anonymous quip contexts by the late 1960s, alongside earlier, differently-aimed versions used both to defend nudity and to criticize it.

It satirizes reasoning that treats what is “natural” as automatically right. By pretending that birth conditions reveal divine intent, it exposes how simplistic that logic is, while also functioning as a punchline about clothing and modesty.

If God had intended that man should go naked, he would have been born that way.

If God had meant for us to run around without any clothes on, we would all have been born naked.

If God had meant us to walk around without clothes, we would have been born naked.