Lawrence Krauss: "It is not clear for me that incest is wrong". More evidence of the moral poverty of the atheistic naturalistic worldview

 

The contemporary scientific atheistic worldview, being radically impersonalistic (that is, rooted in the view that "persons" are not fundamental aspects of reality, but just secondary, contingent, later material phenomena which comes entirely from non-rational and non-mental entitites, forces and processes like atoms, fields of forces, natural laws, natural selection, law of entropy, quantum vaccum, etc.) doesn't have the metaphysical explanatory resources to ground objective moral values and duties (that is, moral values and duties which are intrinsic to the objective constitution of reality), because morality is a phenomena essentially related to rational persons (not simply to "sentient beings", which is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for morality, which requires in addition freedom of the will and rationality to identify and freely choose what's is right or wrong, and to be morally responsible and accountable for it). If you're not free, you cannot be moral (even if you're a sentient being), because you're not actually responsible nor accountable for your actions.

Many atheists have correctly realized this and accept its consequences. Look what Lawrence Krauss thinks about the morality of incest (in the context of a debate about God's existence with a Muslim):

 

In an impersonalistic worldview (materialistic, naturalistic or not), it is hard to see exactly where we can root or ground moral properties and other personal properties (like consciousness, rationality, free will, intentionality, meaning, purpose, and so forth). In such worldview, "persons" and their properties are anomalies, in the sense that they don't fit well, comfortably, nicely with such worldview.

In theism, since the ultimate reality is constituted by a perfect person with superlatives properties (God), and since everything that exists besides Himself is created by God, it is not surprising to find moral and other personal properties in the constitution of reality. In fact, not finding such personal properties would be strong evidence (almost a knock down proof) against theism (e.g. a world in which no persons exist, no evidence of teleology in biology or cosmology, no spiritual pheomenona, etc. just brute, mechanical, blind matter and forces operating by unguided and non-mental natural laws alone).

This insight (often misuderstood even by philosophers) underlies all the versions of the moral argument for God's existence.