Foundations

At this point many people, both at the popular and scholarly levels, have this intuition that, if God does not exist it is difficult to see how there could be any objective foundation, any universal standard for good and evil. How do you get ethics from different arrangements of space, time, matter and energy? A purely materialistic universe would be morally indifferent. Moral judgments would be just relative and subjective, merely expressions of personal tastes. Or they might be just social conventions that society has agreed upon so that people can live together without chaos. But in neither case would they be objectively binding moral obligations! The atheistic ethicist, Richard Taylor, captures this intuition when he writes,

“To say that something is wrong because... it is forbidden by God,
is... perfectly understandable to anyone who believes in a law-giving God.
But to say that something is wrong... even though no God exists to forbid it,
is not understandable. The concept of moral obligation [is] unintelligible apart
from the idea of God. The words remain but their meaning is gone.”^vi

There would be no real objective right and wrong! The concept of objective morality loses all real meaning in a universe devoid of God.

The brilliant philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein candidly admitted that if there are ethical absolutes they would have to have come to man from outside the human situation - "Ethics, if it is anything," he wrote, "is supernatural..."^vii

J.L. Mackie, one of the most outspoken atheists of this century agrees, "Moral properties are most unlikely to have arisen without an all-powerful god to create them."^viii

The atheist philosopher of science, Michael Ruse, confirms this point:

"The position of the modern evolutionist is that humans have an awareness
of morality because such an awareness is of biological worth. Morality is a
biological adaptation, no less than our hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory.
I appreciate that when someone says, "love thy neighbor as thyself," they think they
are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless such reference is truly
without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, and any
deeper meaning is illusory."

But if Ruse is right, then our strong intuitions that rape, selfishness, discrimination and hate are objectively wrong, even outrageously immoral, are just delusions. So, unfortunately for the atheist, there is no basis for objective morality in a universe without God. As the Russian author Dostoyevsky put it, "If there is no God, then all things are permitted."^ix