A common criticism of the so-called “new atheists” (who I prefer to call the "new anti-dogmatists") is the "problem of morality": how, many religious critics ask, can we be good without God? Isn’t the fact that people are good, that people can tell good from evil, evidence for the existence of God? Even if God is a myth, isn’t He necessary to inspire people to acts of goodness and to keep them from falling into immorality? And in any case, don’t we get our morals from our religious traditions?

A key problem here is that this “good without God” criticism is really at least five different arguments jumbled together.

The argument from scripture

First comes the argument from scripture: “how can we know what's good without a book of rules, like the Bible?” This is the one that Richard Dawkins so ably rebuts with his "cherry picking" point in his recent best-seller, The God Delusion. The Bible is full of horrible acts and recommendations. It also contains some very kind and good acts and rules. Most Christians don't follow the former any more, but continue to follow the latter. How do they chose? What do they use to “cherry pick” the Bible in this way? It's not something in the Bible, it's something in the reader. If this moral sense exists in us and allows us to pick the good bits of the Bible from the bad, what do we need the Bible for, except as one among many anthologies of moral propositions on which to practice our moral sense?

The platonic argument

Second, there's the Platonic “by what standard” argument: “granted we have an innate moral sense, but how can we know what's right and wrong if there is no absolute standard of right in the universe?”, says the theist. “Doesn't our ability to recognise that some acts are good and others evil imply that there must somewhere exist a perfect thing of goodness to be the standard? Doesn't our moral sense itself act as evidence of the existence of God?”

Here the error is epistemological: of course we can judge degrees of something even though a perfect sample of that something does not really exist. Nowhere in reality is there such a thing as a perfectly straight line. Yet we are easily able to judge and even rank the straightness of connections between two points in the real world with relative ease - this hand-drawn line on this piece of paper is straighter than that one; this rooftop is straighter than that one; the path of this meteor is straighter than that one, and so on.

The argument from the mysterious origin of morality