According to this article, atheist philosopher and famous utilitarian ethicist Peter Singer admits that only belief in a good God finally secures the conviction that living morally coincides with living well.This is an astonishing concession for a so renowned ethicist and atheist philosopher like Peter Singer.
People unfamiliar with moral philosophy and meta-ethics has problems to understand why the existence of God makes a great difference regarding morality. In a very superficial level, they cannot see why the existence of God would be relevant to morality (moral values, moral responsability, moral accountability, moral duties, etc.).
I think a reason for that is that most people have a wrong understanding of what God is supposed to be from an ontological point of view. They think of God like a kind of cosmic dictator which, arbitrarily, prescribes what is good or bad, and will punish you if you don't follow such rules. This view is actually the caricature created by atheistic ideologues and charlatans, a caricature which has been very influential in the Western world.
However, no contemporary theistic ethicist would defend such position.
Ontologically, God is supposed to be the ground of all reality and existence. Therefore, if God exists, then everything is dependent on Him for its existence.
In the case of morality, the most important question is the ontological foundation of the existence of moral values, moral duties, moral responsability and moral accountability. If you reflect on this carefully and unprejudiced, you'll realize that in the metaphysical naturalistic-materialistic worldview (i.e. in a purely atheistic worldview) no plausible grounds exist for morality:
1-If the naturalistic-materialistic worldview is true, then physicalism and determinism are true. But moral values (e.g. "love", "compasion", "justice" and so forth) are not physical objects (they have no mass, no energy, no position in the space, etc.). Therefore, if they exist objectively (as a mind-independent reality), physicalism is false (and hence naturalism too).
2-Even if objective moral values could exist in a naturalistic worldview, the determinism implied by the latter would utterly destroy moral responsability. "Ought implies can", in the sense that I cannot be morally responsible for something which I cannot avoid. If I'm fully determined to do P (e.g. socially discriminate or being intolerant of atheists) and I cannot avoid to do such a thing, am I responsible for that action? Which is the meaning of the concept of "moral responsability" in this context?
Therefore, if "ought" exists, then "can" exists, and this implies the falsehood of determinism, and therefore of naturalism. But if naturalism is true, then our concepts of "ought" and "can" are mere illusions, not grounded on reality.
Now if God exists, then we can make sense of the existence of a morally ordered world (since God is a moral agent and a moral being) and of finite moral agents (all of us) capable of recognizing such moral order, having the enough freedom in order to respect such duties and being responsible for them.
On the other hand, the existence of such moral order which rules our conduct is consistent with God's plan for his creation. If He created the world, he did for some reasons (e.g. the love and perfecting of our spiritual nature). And this make sense to think the evolution of our spritual nature implies having certain beliefs, dispositions and behaviours consistent with the moral rules created as part of God's creation. (In a crude analogy: Just think about the rules of conduct that you give to your sons: you create such rules in order to enable your sons to be developed according to a plan that you consider good for them, regardless of whether they understand the plan or not).
But if naturalism is true, which is the ultimate purpose of an objective moral order? Human beings are accidental by-products of evolution. No afterlife exists. No free will exists. The universe as a whole is going to dissapear in the future. No spiritual reason for the universe, or for our specific existence, exists at all. All is part of a mere accident of a purposeless and blind material evolution, in regards to which we have zero importance. What's the ultimate purpose of obeying the moral rules in a purely naturalistic universe? In such naturalistic universe, only utilitarian and pragmatic reasons could be offered to being moral (i.e. it is useful or strategically conventient to be moral), but not ultimate purpose or trascendent consequence exists for such behaviour. And no explanation exists for an objective (human mind-independent) existence of such moral order in a purely materialistic universe.
3-Very commonly it is replied that the objective existence of moral values are not dependent on God, because morality is, by definition, intrinsic to sentient or conscious beings. This view is question-begging and a non-sequitur, since it assumes that sentience and consciousness don't depend on God and can exist in an atheistic-materialistic universe (which is highly unlikely).
This view is also seriously confused.
Firstly, what could be intrinsic to sentient or conscious beings are moral BELIEFS (i.e. beliefs about moral values, responsability, etc.), but an objective moral order is, by definition, independent of the subjectivity of sentient or conscious beings (otherwise, the term "objective" would lack any meaning). Something exists objectively precisely when its existence is not dependent on the subjectivity (e.g. consciousness, mind, beliefs, opinions, mental framework, etc.) of human beings.
Secondly, this view could be interpreted more charitably as the view that conscious beings are the locus of objective moral values (or more exactly, that conscious beings have objective moral value). Again, the ontological question arises: in which worldview (theistic or atheistic) is more likely that conscious beings would emerge and be the locus of objective moral values?
According to naturalism, consciousness is at most a mere by-product or epiphenomenon of brain processes. If naturalism were true, then there is no reason to think that a mere epiphenomenon of purely neurophysiological brain proceses will give rise to moral value. No physical, neurophysiological or natural law predicts the existence or emergence of moral values. At most, they could explain the existence of moral BELIEFS, but what is in question is the ontological existence and foundation of moral values, not the origin of a particular belief. In which physical or natural law can you ground moral value?
In fact, if naturalism is true, we wouldn't expect that consciousness would appear at all. But in a theistic universe, consciousness (God's consciousness) is primary and fundamental, and we would expect that other finite consciousness (like ourselves) would appear and devolop in a theistic universe.
It is sometimes suggested that consciousness, by definition, has moral value. But no widely accepted definition of consciousness includes, as a essential property of it, the property of having objective moral value (if it were the case, then most philosophers and scientists were believers in the objective existence of moral values, and many of them don't). In particular, no scientific definition of consciousness defines it as having moral properties, and this is why is widely claimed and accepted that science has not discoveried yet any moral property in the world (This is why Richard Dawkins claims: "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. Richard Dawkins in River Out Of Eden (p.155. Emphasis in blue added)"
At most, scientists accept that consciousness could include the property of having (or being capable of) moral beliefs, but here we're not talking about beliefs, but about the objective existence of moral value and its ontological foundation.
It could be suggested that consciousness, having the essential property of experiencing pleasure or pain, has essentially moral value. In support of this view, we can say that it is true that the moral status of a being is related (at least in part) to being conscious, specially to having the capacity of experiencing pleasure and pain.
The problem with this view is that it assumes an hedonistic view of morality, according to which what is good is what is pleasurable (and bad what causes pain). Why exactly is pleasure identical with the good and pain identical with the evil? (G.E. Moore called this identification the "naturalistic fallacy", because it was a purely arbitrary attempt by naturalistic ethicists of reducing a normative property like the good or bad, to a purely natural property, like the pleasure or pain. Naturalists simply defined, arbitrarily, that pleasure and good are the same in order to explain morality).
In any case, what is relevant here is to know that pleasure and pain are subjective properties of living organism, wholly related to evolution and survival. Perhaps in our crude, pre-theoretical view of morality, we identify what is good with pleasure, and many atheistic philosophers are sympathetic to this kind of hedonistic moral philosophy; but a little of reflection reveals that it is hardly true:
-Sadists have pleasure torturing other people. Does it make sadism morally good? (If pleasure = good, then we have to say that at least relative to sadists, inflincting pain to others is literally good).
-It could be replied that sadism is bad because the victim of torture doesn't feel pleasure but pain. But what if the victim is a masochist, who likes being tortured? Does it make the sadist's action morally good (since it causes pleasure both for him and for his victim)? (Note that if the hedonist replies YES, he's implicitly conceding that actions are not intrinsically nor objectively good or bad by themselves; they're only good or bad from the subjective and psychologically idyosincratic perspective of the person receiving the action, which confirms the subjectivity and relativity of this position. And if the hedonist replies NO, then he's denying the identity of good with pleasure, and hence undermining his own position).
-Also, even if the pleasure were identical to the good, the specific content of pleasures and pains is subject-dependent: since what causes pleasure and pain is largely subjective (e.g. an homosexual man has pleasure receiving anal intercourse, but it would be offensive to heterosexuals; or debunking parapsychology gives pleasure and hence is "good" for pseudoskeptics, but it is "bad" for truth-seekers interested in finding the truth about psi) in the sense that the same circunstance could be pleasurable to some people but not for others, then it implies a relativism and subjectivism regarding what is morally valuable. Calling this position "objectivist" is obviously misleading, and misrepresents what moral objectivism is all about.
It again confirms that, in the absence of an objective moral order grounded in a trascendent reality, no objectivity can be claimed for moral value. Moral value becomes a function of beliefs, subject-dependent pleasures and pains, convention, biological evolution, cultural indoctrination and so forth.
Now, if God exists, and we're (somehow) a product of his creation, then we have a reason to think that we're intrinsically valuable (we have been created by a moral agent in a moral universe in order to live individually and collectively a moral life consistent with God's plans for our spiritual evolution). We are not mere material objects void of any moral dimension, but spiritually created beings subject to an independently existent moral order which is an intrisic part of reality. Moreover, if God exists, then a transcendent being exists (in fact, God would be THE ultimate transcendent being) and a trascendent moral order could be grounded in such being (in which other being could they be plausibly grounded?).
This is why many reflective ethicists (most of the atheists) agree that, if objective moral values do exist, then it offers strong evidence for God's existence.
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