One of such implications, is the moral poverty of such worldview (that is, the inability of such worldview to account for objective moral values, and objective meaning and purposes in general).
I suggest you to read carefully Rosenberg's argument. Try to understand its premises, its coherence with the naturalistic-materialistic worldview and its implications. Rosenberg is one of the most respected philosophers of science and biology writing today. You'll realize that Rosenberg is right regarding the actual metaphysical naturalism's implications for morality and ethics. As a reflective naturalist, he's arrived to the same or similar conclusions that other naturalists like Richard Dawkins or Bertrand Russell have defended too.
According to professor Rosenberg: "If there is no purpose to life in general, biological or human for that matter, the question arises whether there is meaning in our individual lives, and if it is not there already, whether we can put it there. One source of meaning on which many have relied is the intrinsic value, in particular the moral value, of human life. People have also sought moral rules, codes, principles which are supposed to distinguish us from merely biological critters whose lives lack (as much) meaning or value (as ours). Besides morality as a source of meaning, value, or purpose, people have looked to consciousness, introspection, self-knowledge as a source of insight into what makes us more than the merely physical facts about us. Scientism must reject all of these straws that people have grasped, and it’s not hard to show why. Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality.
There is no room in a world where all the facts are fixed by physical facts for a set of free floating independently existing norms or values (or facts about them) that humans are uniquely equipped to discern and act upon. So, if scientism is to ground the core morality that every one (save some psychopaths and sociopaths) endorses, as the right morality, it’s going to face a serious explanatory problem. The only way all or most normal humans could have come to share a core morality is through selection on alternative moral codes or systems, a process that resulted in just one winning the evolutionary struggle and becoming “fixed” in the population. If our universally shared moral core were both the one selected for and also the right moral core, then the correlation of being right and being selected for couldn’t be a coincidence. Scientism doesn’t tolerate cosmic coincidences. Either our core morality is an adaptation because it is the right core morality or it’s the right core morality because it’s an adaptation, or it’s not right, but only feels right to us. It’s easy to show that neither of the first two alternatives is right. Just because there is strong selection for a moral norm is no reason to think it right. Think of the adaptational benefits of racist, xenophobic or patriarchal norms. You can’t justify morality by showing its Darwinian pedigree. That way lies the moral disaster of Social Spencerism (better but wrongly known as Social Darwinism). The other alternative—that our moral core was selected for because it was true, correct or right–is an equally far fetched idea. And in part for the same reasons. The process of natural selection is not in general good at filtering for true beliefs, only for ones hitherto convenient for our lines of descent. Think of folk physics, folk biology, and most of all folk psychology. Since natural selection has no foresight, we have no idea whether the moral core we now endorse will hold up, be selected for, over the long-term future of our species, if any.
This nihilistic blow is cushioned by the realization that Darwinian processes operating on our forbearers in the main selected for niceness! The core morality of cooperation, reciprocity and even altruism that was selected for in the environment of hunter-gatherers and early agrarians, continues to dominate our lives and social institutions. We may hope the environment of modern humans has not become different enough eventually to select against niceness. But we can’t invest our moral core with more meaning than this: it was a convenience, not for us as individuals, but for our genes. There is no meaning to be found in that conclusion." (Emphasis in blue added).
One important epistemological aspect of Rosenberg's insights is that "The process of natural selection is not in general good at filtering for true beliefs, only for ones hitherto convenient for our lines of descent". Natural selection doesn't selection true beliefs in virtue of them being true, but only beliefs that are useful for survival and reproduction (even if such useful beliefs are false. In other words, according to naturalism and natural selection, our beliefs will be selected only if they're are useful for reproduction, regardless of whether they're true or false).
This is why, as Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga has argued, naturalism undercuts the warrant or justification of our beliefs, so naturalism is literally self-defeating. If naturalism is true, then our cognitive faculties hadn't been selected for their efficacy to produce true beliefs and discover the truth, but due to their efficacy in survival and reproduction.
Note that Plantinga is not saying that, given naturalism, our beliefs are false or fallible. What he's saying is that, given naturalism, we don't have any rational justification for thinking that our beliefs are true, even if they turn out to be true!. (This point is key, because atheistic naturalists consistently misrepresent and predictably misunderstand Plantinga's argument, which is more evidence that the cognitive faculties of hard-core atheists don't function properly. They're intellectually impaired to understand the argument properly. Rosenberg is an exception)
William Lane Craig summarizes Plantinga's argument in this short video:
But let's to forget Plantinga's argument for a while, and let's to assume (for the sake of charity) that naturalism is compatible with the rationality of our factual beliefs.
Even in such case, the intellectually devastating consequences of metaphysical naturalism are particularly obvious in the case of moral beliefs. As Rosenberg correctly notes: "There is no room in a world where all the facts are fixed by physical facts for a set of free floating independently existing norms or values (or facts about them) that humans are uniquely equipped to discern and act upon"
Given that moral values, propositions and norms are not physical, they cannot exist in a worldview which only accept physical realities. But even if, for the argument's sake, we accept the existence of such non-physical entities/properties in a naturalistic worldview, an obvious epistemological and ontological problem arises: How could our (physical) brain to discern and have knowledge such non-physical realm?
So a naturalist has a powerful ontological and epistemological reason to reject the existence of objective moral values, and embrace moral subjectivism... or, like in Rosenberg's case, to embrace nihilism regarding morality.
I personally think that, if naturalism were true, then moral subjectivism has to be true. This is the view that I'd openly defend if I were a naturalist.
As naturalist and atheist Keith Augustine has powerfully argued: "It is possible that moral laws have existed since the Big Bang, but that they could not manifest themselves until sentient beings arose. However, such a view implies that there is some element of purposefulness in the universe--that the universe was created with the evolution of sentient beings "in mind" (in the mind of a Creator?). To accept the existence of objective moral laws that have existed since the beginning of time is to believe that the evolution of sentient beings capable of moral reasoning (such as human beings) has somehow been predetermined or is inevitable, a belief that is contrary to naturalistic explanations of origins (such as evolution by natural selection) which maintain that sentient beings came into existence due to contingent, accidental circumstances... Ethics, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. The argument I am proposing is that there is no objective fact that genocide is morally wrong anymore than there is an objective fact that rock and roll is better than country music. Both statements, no matter how well agreed-upon by most people, merely express the opinion of the people who state them. They do not refer to some "state of the world", and that is exactly what an objectivist theory of ethics requires of ethical statements... given that moral subjectivism is just as logically viable as moral objectivism and that moral objectivism is implausible if a scientific naturalism is true, I think that there is a good case for the nonexistence of objective moral values."
I submit that the above Keith's argument is irrefutable... IF naturalism were true (so, if you accept naturalism, you're rationally forced to agree with Keith's conclusion). And I think that naturalists who try to avoid the above conclusions are being intentionally dishonest, ignorant or plainly stupid.
Likewise, if you have independent reasons to accept the objectivity of moral values, laws and duties (and consider, for example, that raping babies for fun is objectively wrong, not just a matter of opinion), then you have a powerful argument to reject metaphysical naturalism.
Think hard about it.
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