Leaving Christianity can turn a familiar moral question into an urgent one. If right and wrong are not commands from God, are they only opinions? If morality emerged through evolution and culture, why treat it as more serious than taste in music?
A 2024 New Yorker essay, “Are Your Morals Too Good to Be True?”, gives this anxiety a personal form. Its author describes how evolutionary accounts of cooperation, reputation, and moral behavior made his ideals feel like self-interest wearing respectable clothes. The essay is not evidence that morality is an illusion. It identifies the deeper fear: if we can explain where values came from, perhaps they lose their authority.
What does objective mean?
In metaethics, objective usually means stance-independent. A moral fact would remain true regardless of what any person or society approved. Genocide would still be wrong even if its perpetrators prevailed and persuaded everyone else to praise it.
That definition does not tell us what makes the fact true or how we know it. A moral realist might ground moral facts in God, rational requirements, facts about flourishing, or natural features such as suffering. A moral anti-realist might treat moral judgments as expressions of commitment, rules constructed through reflection, or claims that depend on human evaluative attitudes. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s overview emphasizes, anti-realism is not one position, and it need not collapse into relativism, skepticism, or indifference.
The disagreement is real even among specialists. In the 2020 PhilPapers survey, about 62 percent of 1,719 respondents accepted or leaned toward moral realism, while about 26 percent accepted or leaned toward anti-realism. That does not settle the issue by vote. It does show that secular philosophy has not reached a consensus that morality is either objective or imaginary.
The strongest Christian argument
William Lane Craig presents a clear version of the moral argument: if God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist; objective moral values do exist; therefore God exists. In his explanation of the argument, Craig defines objective values as binding whether or not anyone believes them. God supplies a transcendent anchor for human worth and obligation.
The argument is valid if both premises are true. The dispute concerns the premises. A secular moral realist can deny the first one. Moral naturalism, for example, holds that stance-independent moral facts are natural facts that fit within a scientific picture of the world. The Stanford Encyclopedia’s 2024 account of moral naturalism describes it as a form of realism opposed both to supernatural grounding and to anti-realism. A person can therefore reject God without treating cruelty as a preference.
The theist can ask why facts about suffering or flourishing generate obligations rather than merely describing outcomes. That is a serious challenge. But appealing to God raises another question: does an act become good because God approves it, or does God approve it because it is good? Many Christian philosophers answer that goodness is grounded in God’s nature rather than arbitrary commands. That reply avoids a capricious deity, but it still requires an account of why that nature is the standard of goodness and how humans reliably recognize it.
Does evolution debunk morality?
Explaining a belief’s origin does not automatically show that it is false. Our ability to reason mathematically also has an evolutionary history. The stronger challenge is about reliability. In “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value”, Sharon Street argues that natural selection shaped our evaluative tendencies toward survival and reproduction, not toward detecting stance-independent moral truths. If those forces have no relation to moral truth, it may be a remarkable coincidence that our intuitions track it. If evolution selected us for tracking moral truth, the realist owes a scientific account of that connection.
Street’s argument is influential, not decisive. Realists reply that reflection can correct evolved impulses, just as reasoning can correct perceptual errors. They may also identify moral facts with natural facts about reasons, interests, or flourishing. Still, the challenge prevents an easy move from “this feels obviously wrong” to “my intuition detects an independent moral fact.” Our moral confidence needs scrutiny whether it comes from scripture, conscience, or secular philosophy.
What makes morality matter?
There are at least three different questions hidden in the word matter. Does morality describe stance-independent facts? Does it give people reasons to act? Does it organize practices that protect lives, relationships, and communities? The first is a metaphysical question. The other two do not wait for it to be solved.
Pain matters to the person in pain. Betrayal damages trust. Deception interferes with another person’s ability to choose. Violence destroys bodies, projects, and relationships. These are not made trivial by having natural histories. Hunger is evolved, but food still matters. Attachment is embodied, but loss is still real. Human dependence gives us reasons to care about institutions that reduce arbitrary harm and allow people to live together.
An anti-realist can also distinguish considered values from passing preferences. A rule chosen under conditions of accurate information, reciprocity, and equal consideration carries more authority than an impulse adopted to benefit oneself. People can expose inconsistency, uncover hidden consequences, widen the circle of whose interests count, and revise inherited norms. None of that guarantees agreement, but objective moral realism does not guarantee agreement or reliable access either.
What anti-realism cannot honestly offer is a view from nowhere. If every valuing creature disappeared, human reasons and commitments might disappear with them. For some readers, that consequence is unacceptable. For others, it resembles meaning: a friendship need not exist independently of minds to be real, binding, and worth protecting.
The cost of demanding certainty
Objective morality would matter philosophically. If stance-independent moral facts exist and we can know them, they could show that an entire society is wrong even when no dissenter remains. But moral action has never waited for a completed theory of moral reality. Christians disagree about war, punishment, sexuality, wealth, and political power despite sharing a divine lawgiver. Secular people disagree too. In both cases, the work involves evidence, empathy, consistency, consequences, and criticism.
A person leaving Christianity does not have to settle metaethics before opposing cruelty or keeping a promise. The immediate task is more concrete: identify what and whom you value, ask whether your principles survive when roles are reversed, examine the harm your choices create, and remain willing to revise your judgment.
Morality does not become weightless merely because its ultimate foundation is disputed. The dispute changes what can be claimed about its authority. It does not erase suffering, dependence, or the reasons people can give one another. Whether those reasons are discovered in an objective order or constructed through honest reflection, they still have to answer to the lives affected by them.