How Morality Looks from a God’s-Eye Point of View

It has been said that Americans would sooner elect as president a Muslim than an atheist, on the grounds that an atheist, having no religion, has no basis for morality. Although much of my recent book, Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories (2016), is an argument against the assumption that religion is the necessary foundation for ethics, it’s less clear why it seems to obvious to so many people who should know better. My starting point is the assumption that ethical life does not necessarily require religious foundations. It follows that When people come to think that ethics does depend on religion, this is for historically specific reasons that we should find puzzling rather than obvious, and whose consequences we should examine.