The Objection Stated Fairly
The argument arrives in various formulations, but the core is always the same. Without God, the objection runs, human beings are nothing more than a particular arrangement of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, the products of blind evolutionary processes that selected for reproductive fitness and cared nothing for consciousness, dignity, or rights. If the universe is ultimately indifferent, if there is no cosmic author who wrote human worth into the fabric of things, then human worth is simply a story we tell ourselves, a pleasant fiction with no more objective grounding than the stories we tell about national glory or the divine right of kings. Rights become social conventions, dignity becomes etiquette, and the entire architecture of secular humanism collapses into sophisticated self-congratulation. This is the theist’s trump card, played with varying degrees of philosophical sophistication but with consistent confidence: secular ethics is a parasite on theological foundations, and once the host is removed, the parasite cannot survive.
It is a serious objection, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a dismissive one. The dismissive response, which amounts to pointing out that religious people have behaved badly throughout history, misses the logical point entirely. The theist is not claiming that religious people are morally superior; they are claiming that the concept of objective worth requires a transcendent grounding that only a creator God can supply. That is a philosophical argument about the foundations of ethics, and it should be engaged philosophically. This essay attempts to do exactly that, while also noting, in due course, that the theological alternative turns out to be considerably shakier than its proponents assume.
The answer is not that human beings are merely atoms in motion and that we should simply accept the nihilistic consequence. The answer is that the premise is false and the inference even falser. Human beings are not merely atoms in motion in any sense that matters for ethics; they are conscious, reasoning, feeling creatures capable of suffering and flourishing, of forming relationships, of reflecting on their own existence, and of caring about the suffering of others. These facts about human nature are not handed down from above; they are observable features of what we actually are. And they are sufficient, without any divine supplement, to ground a coherent and demanding account of human worth.
1. The “Atoms in Motion” Fallacy
The claim that atheism reduces human beings to mere atoms in motion is a category error dressed up as a philosophical argument. It confuses the level of physical description with the level of morally relevant description, and the confusion is so elementary that it is surprising to see it deployed with confidence by people who would otherwise resist crude reductionism.
Consider the parallel case of water. At the level of physics, water is a collection of hydrogen and oxygen atoms arranged in a particular molecular structure. This description is entirely accurate and enormously useful for chemistry. But it does not follow that the experience of drowning is nothing, or that the concept of thirst has no meaning, or that there is no morally relevant difference between giving a person water and denying it to them. The physical description and the experiential and ethical descriptions operate at different levels of analysis, and the truth of the physical description does not eliminate the reality of the others. What philosophers call the levels-of-description problem is precisely the error the “atoms in motion” objection commits. A description of the neural correlates of pain does not abolish pain; it explains its mechanism. The pain is still real, the suffering is still real, and the moral weight of causing unnecessary suffering remains entirely intact whether or not we understand the underlying chemistry.
The same logic applies to human consciousness, reasoning, and the capacity for both suffering and flourishing. Neuroscience is making genuine and extraordinary progress in understanding the physical processes that underlie conscious experience. None of that progress, at any point in its trajectory, has produced an argument that conscious experience is not occurring or that it carries no moral weight. The question of why there is subjective experience at all, the so-called hard problem of consciousness, remains genuinely open. But the existence of the hard problem is, if anything, an argument for taking consciousness seriously, not for dismissing it. Something is happening when a human being feels pain, joy, grief, or wonder. That something matters morally, and the fact that it has a physical substrate no more undermines its moral significance than the fact that music has a physical substrate, namely vibrating air molecules, undermines its beauty or meaning.
The theist who deploys the atoms-in-motion argument is, in effect, insisting that unless something is supernaturally ordained, it cannot be real in a morally relevant sense. But this is an assertion, not an argument. It requires the additional premise that only supernatural facts can ground moral facts, and that premise is precisely what is at issue in the debate about the foundations of ethics. To assume it in the course of the argument is to beg the question rather than to answer it. The argument, dressed in philosophical clothing as it often is, amounts to declaring victory before the contest has begun.
There is also a telling asymmetry in how the objection is applied. The theist does not typically say that the beauty of a sunset is illusory because sunsets are, at the physical level, nothing more than light scattered by atmospheric particles of a particular size. They do not say that love is meaningless because love has a neurochemical substrate involving oxytocin and dopamine. They accept, in these cases, that higher-level properties are real and significant even though they are grounded in lower-level physical processes. The selective application of reductionism only to the case of human moral worth reveals that the argument is not a principled philosophical position but a rhetorical manoeuvre aimed at a predetermined conclusion.
2. What Human Beings Actually Are
If we set aside the theist’s loaded framing and ask what human beings actually are, the answer that emerges from biology, neuroscience, and philosophy is considerably richer than “atoms in motion,” and that richness is morally consequential without requiring any theological supplement.
To begin with the most basic and incontestable fact: human beings are conscious. This is not a trivial or contested observation; it is the most immediately available datum of anyone’s experience. Whatever else one believes about the ultimate nature of that consciousness, its existence is beyond reasonable dispute. To be conscious is, among other things, to have a first-person perspective on the world, to experience events as happening to a self rather than simply occurring in the universe. That first-person perspective is the ground of suffering: pain hurts because it is experienced as bad by the entity undergoing it. Strip away consciousness and the question of suffering becomes incoherent. Preserve consciousness and the question of suffering becomes inescapable. Ethics begins, as Jeremy Bentham observed in a formulation that remains one of the most important sentences in the history of moral philosophy, not with rationality or language or divine image-bearing, but with the capacity to suffer.
Human beings are also reasoning creatures. We are capable of constructing arguments, evaluating evidence, identifying inconsistencies, and revising our beliefs in light of new information. This capacity for reason is itself morally significant. It means that human beings are not merely reactive organisms but agents: entities that can form intentions, deliberate about courses of action, and take responsibility for their choices. The concept of moral responsibility, which underlies both the attribution of blame and the attribution of praise, depends on this capacity for agency. An entity that cannot reason cannot be held responsible; an entity that can reason can be asked to justify its actions and held accountable when those justifications fail. This is not a supernatural property; it is a natural one, continuous in evolutionary terms with the less developed capacities of other social animals, but present in human beings to a degree that is, by any reasonable measure, remarkable.
Beyond consciousness and reason, human beings are deeply social creatures. We form attachments, sustain relationships, feel love and grief, and are capable of empathy: the recognition that other beings have inner lives as real and complex as our own. This capacity for empathy is what underlies the moral intuition that other people’s suffering matters, not merely as a social inconvenience but as something intrinsically bad. When we observe another person in pain, something happens in us that goes beyond intellectual recognition: we feel some approximation of their distress. That response is the biological and psychological foundation of compassion, and compassion is the emotional engine of ethics. None of this is speculation; it is confirmed by decades of research in developmental psychology, social neuroscience, and cross-cultural moral psychology.
None of these features of human nature require a theological explanation. They are products of evolutionary history, shaped by the pressures of social life over hundreds of thousands of years. The fact that they have an evolutionary explanation does not diminish them or render them illusory. It situates them in the natural world, which is precisely where they belong. Evolution did not give us consciousness, reason, and empathy by accident; it gave them to us because social cooperation, the recognition of other minds, and the capacity for emotional attunement were adaptive. But the origin of these capacities in natural selection no more undermines their moral significance than the origin of the eye in natural selection undermines the beauty of what it sees. The mechanism of origin and the significance of what has originated are entirely distinct questions, and conflating them is a persistent source of confusion in these debates.
3. Does Evolution Devalue Human Worth?
The tail end of the atoms-in-motion objection is the claim that evolution specifically, rather than materialism generally, strips human beings of special worth. If we are the products of the same blind, purposeless process that produced bacteria and beetles, then what makes us special? If natural selection is indifferent to dignity and rights, and if we are its products, then dignity and rights have no natural grounding. This argument is frequently made by religious apologists who present evolution not as a theory about the origin of species but as a nihilistic philosophy about the worth of persons.
The argument confuses the mechanism of origin with the properties of what has originated. Consider the analogy of a great painting. The Sistine Chapel ceiling emerged from a process that involved chemistry, physics, and the accidental availability of particular pigments. None of that process had beauty as its goal. Yet the painting is beautiful, and its beauty is real. The mechanism of its production does not determine the properties it possesses as a finished object. Similarly, the fact that human consciousness, reason, and capacity for suffering emerged from a process that had no goals at all does not mean that those properties are absent or morally irrelevant in the beings who possess them. The properties are what they are, regardless of how they came to be.
It is also worth examining the theist’s alternative account of human origins rather more critically than is usually done. If human beings were created by a God whose character is described by the Old Testament, then human worth is grounded in the valuation of a being who, on the scriptural record, ordered the slaughter of entire peoples, endorsed slavery, prescribed death for gathering sticks on the wrong day, and expressed consistent indifference to the suffering of those outside the covenant community. A worth grounded in the approval of such an entity is worth very little by any reasonable moral standard. The secular account, which grounds worth in the observable properties of beings who can suffer and reason, is more consistent with the moral intuitions that virtually everyone, theist and atheist alike, actually holds.
Furthermore, the evolutionary account of morality has genuine explanatory power that the theistic account conspicuously lacks. As Jerry Coyne has observed: “It doesn’t explain why slavery, torture, and disdain for women and strangers were considered proper behaviors not too long ago, but are now seen as immoral. For if anything is true, God-given morality should remain constant over time and space. In contrast, if morality reflects a malleable social veneer on an evolutionary base, it should change as society changes. And it has.” This is not a rhetorical jab; it is a serious point about the predictive and explanatory adequacy of competing accounts. The secular, evolutionary account of moral progress actually fits the historical record. The theistic account requires increasingly elaborate explanations for why God’s eternal moral law looks so much like the shifting prejudices of successive human cultures.
The evolutionary framework also makes a specific and accurate prediction that the theological framework does not: that moral concern will tend to expand over time as our understanding of the shared properties of different groups develops. And that is precisely what has happened. The expansion of moral consideration from immediate kin to wider tribe to nation to all of humanity, and in principle to all sentient creatures, follows the logic of the secular account perfectly. Once we understand that other groups of people possess exactly the same capacity for suffering and flourishing that grounds our concern for those closest to us, the extension of moral consideration follows. Theology has, on average, resisted each of these expansions and eventually accommodated them after the fact. The secular account generated them from its own internal logic.
4. How Secular Ethics Builds Rights from Nature
The secular grounding of human rights is not a matter of assertion or wishful thinking. It is a philosophical project with a long and rigorous history, and it proceeds from the observable facts about human nature described above to a set of moral principles that have real content and genuine binding force.
The foundational move is Bentham’s: the capacity to suffer is the relevant criterion for moral consideration. If an entity can suffer, its suffering matters morally. This is not a circular argument; it is the most basic moral intuition available to us, and it is one that virtually everyone, including committed theists, actually accepts in practice. No serious moral thinker, religious or secular, believes that causing unnecessary suffering to a sentient being is morally neutral. The disagreement is about where suffering ends as a criterion and other considerations begin, not about whether suffering matters at all. Secular ethics simply takes this shared intuition and builds on it consistently, without importing additional premises whose origins are either scriptural or entirely speculative.
From the premise that suffering matters, and from the related premise that flourishing, the positive counterpart to suffering, also matters, a substantial ethical framework follows. Human beings can suffer in a vast range of ways: physically, emotionally, psychologically, socially, and existentially. Human beings can flourish in an equally vast range of ways: through health, love, knowledge, creativity, autonomy, and connection. Ethics, on this account, is the systematic effort to understand which actions and institutions promote flourishing and reduce suffering across all the beings capable of experiencing either. Rights are the crystallised conclusions of that ongoing inquiry: they are the conditions without which human beings cannot pursue the life that their nature makes possible for them.
The right to life, for instance, is not an arbitrary social convention on the secular account. It follows from the fact that life is the necessary precondition of all other capacities that make human beings what they are. To kill a person is not merely to end a biological process; it is to extinguish a centre of conscious experience, a reasoning agent, a nexus of relationships and possibilities. The wrongness of murder is not a divine decree but a recognition of what murder actually destroys. The right to liberty follows from the fact that human beings are reasoning agents capable of forming their own judgements about what constitutes a good life, and that forcing persons to live according to conceptions of the good that they have not chosen and do not endorse is an assault on their nature as autonomous agents. The right to be free from torture follows from the fact that torture deliberately and systematically exploits the capacity for suffering in the most extreme way available, reducing a reasoning agent to an organism in agony. These derivations are not simple or uncontested, but they are genuine arguments that can be examined, challenged, and refined.
The history of moral progress, the abolition of slavery, the recognition of women’s equal moral standing, the extension of rights to people of different races and sexual orientations, has been driven almost entirely by secular moral reasoning rather than by theological revelation. In each of these cases, the argument for moral progress was that the group in question possessed exactly the same capacity for suffering and flourishing, exactly the same claim on our moral consideration, as the dominant group. In each of these cases, the opposition was mounted primarily by those who insisted on the authority of scriptural texts that explicitly sanctioned or tolerated the practice in question. This is not a minor historical footnote; it is a decisive piece of evidence about which ethical framework actually advances human welfare, and it deserves to be weighed accordingly.
5. The Fragility of God-Given Dignity
The theological account of human dignity deserves to be examined rather more critically than it usually is in these debates. The standard formulation is Genesis 1:26-27: human beings are made in the image of God, the imago dei, and this divine image-bearing is what grounds their unique and inviolable worth. On this account, human dignity is real, objective, and transcendent: it is grounded in God’s creative act and cannot be diminished or revoked by any human action or circumstance. This sounds like a strong foundation. On examination, it turns out to be considerably less stable than advertised.
The first problem is scriptural. If human beings have inherent, God-given dignity by virtue of being made in the divine image, this dignity should be reflected in the treatment God commands and endorses throughout the scriptural record. It is not. The Old Testament endorses slavery with detailed regulatory instructions, including provisions for passing enslaved people to one’s children as inheritable property (Leviticus 25:44-46). It commands the genocide of entire peoples, including women and children, in the conquest narratives of the Book of Joshua. It prescribes death for a remarkable range of behaviours including working on the Sabbath (Exodus 35:2), cursing one’s parents (Exodus 21:17), and practising another religion (Deuteronomy 17:12). The New Testament contains no explicit abolition of slavery and includes several passages in which slaves are instructed to obey their masters with sincere hearts. Whatever the image of God is supposed to confer on human beings, the God who confers it seems remarkably indifferent to its implications for a large proportion of the people he is supposed to have created.
Defenders of the biblical record typically respond to this problem in one of two ways. The first response is dispensationalism: the laws of the Old Testament applied only to a specific people in a specific historical context and are not binding on Christians today. This response concedes the moral objection while failing to address the theological problem it raises. If God’s commands regarding slavery and genocide reflected the values of a particular human culture rather than the eternal moral law of a perfect being, then the concept of divine moral authority is considerably more complicated than the “God-given dignity” argument assumes. The second response is allegorical: the texts should be read not as moral prescriptions but as cultural artefacts pointing toward deeper truths. This response is more intellectually honest but essentially concedes that the Bible requires interpretation through prior moral commitments, which means that those prior moral commitments, rather than the Bible, are doing the moral work. On either response, the scriptural grounding for divine dignity turns out to depend on prior secular moral judgements, which is precisely the reverse of the theological account’s stated logic.
The second problem is philosophical. The claim that human dignity is grounded in the imago dei faces a version of the Euthyphro dilemma that Plato identified more than two thousand years ago. Is human worth real because God confers it, or does God confer it because it is real? If the former, then human worth is entirely dependent on God’s continued endorsement, and there is nothing in the nature of human beings themselves that makes them worthy of respect; their worth could, in principle, be revoked by the same authority that granted it. If the latter, then there is some standard of worth that is independent of God’s will, and we might as well appeal to that standard directly without routing our moral reasoning through a theological detour that adds no information and introduces considerable additional uncertainty. Neither horn of the dilemma is comfortable for the theist who claims that God provides a uniquely secure grounding for human dignity.
This is not an academic puzzle. It has a direct bearing on the practical question of what grounds human rights in a pluralistic society. If worth is genuinely conferred by a specific deity, then the dignity of people who do not share that theological framework is theoretically problematic. The history of Christian Europe and Islamic governance provides ample illustration of what happens when the theological account of dignity is applied consistently: those who do not share the theology are assigned a diminished or conditional dignity, subject to discrimination, conversion demands, and in extreme cases, death. The secular account of dignity, grounded in the observable properties of human beings as such, does not have this problem. It applies to everyone who possesses those properties, regardless of their theological commitments, cultural background, or metaphysical beliefs.
The third problem is what might be called the dependency problem. Throughout the history of religious thought, the dignity and rights of various groups have been denied on explicitly theological grounds: women, people of other races, people of other faiths, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities have all had their worth qualified or denied by appeal to divine authority. The secular account, which grounds worth in the natural properties of consciousness, suffering, and reason, does not admit of these exemptions. Those properties are either present or absent in any given case, and where they are present, the moral conclusion follows regardless of the social, cultural, or theological framework of the observer. Robert Ingersoll stated the point with characteristic directness: “Morality does not come from the clouds; it is born of human want and human experience. We need no inspiration, no inspired work. The industrious man knows that the idle has no right to rob him of the product of his labor, and the idle man knows that he has no right to do it. It is not wrong because we find it in the Bible, but I presume it was put in the Bible because it is wrong.” The moral insight precedes the theological endorsement, not the reverse. Ingersoll understood more than a century ago what many contemporary apologists still resist: the direction of the moral inference runs from human experience to theological codification, not from divine command to human understanding.
6. The Divine Revocation Problem
The revocability of theologically grounded rights deserves a section of its own because it is perhaps the most important and least discussed asymmetry between the secular and theological accounts of human worth.
On the standard theological account, human dignity is a gift from God. This framing sounds generous and affirming, but it carries a logical structure that should be examined carefully. A gift is something that a giver bestows, and the giver is, in principle, sovereign over the terms of the gift. The history of theology is substantially a history of exactly this kind of sovereign modification. The dignity of enslaved people was diminished by theological argument for centuries. The dignity of women was systematically qualified by appeal to divine authority, from Paul’s letters through to twentieth-century Catholic social teaching. The dignity of gay people was, and in many traditions continues to be, denied or conditional on the renunciation of their own nature. In each of these cases, the argument was not that these people lacked consciousness, reason, or the capacity for suffering; it was that God had, for reasons of his own, assigned them a different and lesser standing. The theological framework generated the oppression just as naturally as it is now, in some quarters, generating a belated endorsement of dignity.
This is not a misuse of the theological framework; it follows directly from its internal logic. If worth is conferred by God, and if God’s commands are known through scripture and tradition, and if scripture and tradition assign different statuses to different categories of person, then the theological framework generates a hierarchical account of human worth rather than an egalitarian one. The egalitarian reading of the imago dei, the reading that says all human beings are equally made in God’s image and therefore equally worthy of dignity and rights, is a relatively modern theological development. Crucially, it arrived largely as a response to secular egalitarian pressure rather than as a conclusion derived independently from scripture. The theological account followed the secular insight; it did not precede it.
The secular account has a fundamentally different structure. On the secular view, worth is not conferred by any external authority; it is grounded in the natural properties of the beings who possess it. These properties are not subject to divine modification or withdrawal. A human being’s capacity for suffering does not depend on God’s continued endorsement of that capacity. A human being’s status as a reasoning agent is not conditional on theological approval. The worth that follows from these properties is therefore stable in a way that divinely conferred worth is not. It cannot be revoked by a new scriptural interpretation, a papal decree, or a theological consensus. It cannot be made conditional on membership in a particular community, acceptance of a particular creed, or conformity to a particular pattern of behaviour. It is present wherever the relevant natural properties are present, and absent only when those properties are absent.
This is, in the present author’s view, the most decisive argument in favour of the secular account of human dignity. The question to ask of any account of worth is: can it be used to exclude, diminish, or deny the humanity of any group of people? The theological account, as history abundantly demonstrates, can and has been so used. The secular account, properly applied, cannot. The attempt to use the secular account to diminish the worth of any group of people requires arguing that the members of that group lack consciousness, the capacity for suffering, or the ability to reason. Such arguments are empirically refutable. The attempt to use the theological account to diminish the worth of a group of people requires only a different reading of scripture or tradition, an exercise that produces no objective fact of the matter and is therefore immune to correction by evidence. That asymmetry is not incidental to the debate; it is the heart of it.
7. The Moral Realist Option: Worth as a Natural Fact
One possible response to the secular account is to grant that consciousness and suffering matter morally but to insist that this moral mattering is itself an objective fact that requires explanation. The sceptic might argue: you say suffering is bad, but why should suffering be considered objectively bad rather than merely bad for the person experiencing it? What makes the badness of suffering a fact about the universe rather than a preference held by the sufferer?
This is a genuine philosophical question and it deserves a genuine philosophical answer. The most compelling response is a version of moral realism grounded in human nature rather than in divine command. On this view, moral facts are facts about the conditions under which beings of certain kinds can flourish or suffer, and these facts are as objective as any other facts about the natural world. The claim that suffering is bad is not a preference or a social convention; it is a claim about the inner constitution of beings capable of suffering, a claim that is as true and as objective as the claim that water dissolves salt. We discover moral facts by paying careful attention to what beings like us actually are and what we actually need, just as we discover other natural facts by paying careful attention to the world.
This is not the place for a complete defence of moral realism, and it is important to acknowledge that the metaethical landscape is genuinely contested. There are sophisticated secular thinkers who are moral anti-realists, who think that moral claims are not objective in the way natural science claims are, and who nevertheless maintain robust commitments to human rights and dignity. The point is that the debate about the foundations of moral realism is a debate that secular ethics can engage on its own terms, without importing the unnecessary and historically dangerous premise that only divine authority can ground objective moral facts. As the atheism-and-nihilism debate makes clear, the inference from “no God” to “no moral facts” is a non sequitur, not a logical deduction. The secular tradition has rich philosophical resources for grounding moral seriousness without appealing to supernatural authority, and those resources have been developed and refined over centuries by thinkers far more sophisticated than the typical framing of this debate acknowledges.
Sam Harris has argued, in a different but related context, that the wellbeing of conscious creatures is a genuinely objective value: that there are facts about human flourishing just as there are facts about human health, and that these facts are in principle discoverable by careful inquiry rather than by divine revelation. Whether or not one accepts every detail of Harris’s account, the general direction of the argument is correct. The capacity for suffering and flourishing is not a merely subjective preference; it is a feature of what certain kinds of beings are. To deny that this feature has moral significance is not a philosophical insight but a kind of deliberate obtuseness, a refusal to take seriously what is most immediately and certainly known about the inner lives of persons. The theist who insists that secular ethics cannot explain why suffering matters has, in most cases, simply declined to look carefully at the secular account.
It is also instructive to note that the theistic account of moral realism faces its own serious objections on exactly the same front. If moral facts are grounded in God’s will, and if God’s will is known through scripture, then moral facts are ultimately facts about what a particular set of ancient texts says, interpreted by a particular tradition with its own interests and blind spots. This is not a more secure foundation for moral realism; it is a less secure one. The sceptic who doubts whether consciousness grounds objective moral facts is, at least, doubting something whose existence is confirmed by direct experience. The sceptic who doubts whether God’s will grounds objective moral facts is doubting something whose existence is not confirmed by any publicly verifiable evidence at all. The secular account of moral realism, whatever its difficulties, begins from a more honest epistemic position.
8. Humanism as a Complete and Demanding Ethics
Secular humanism is sometimes presented, particularly by its critics, as a thin and aspirational set of good feelings about human beings that lacks the substance to ground genuine moral obligations. On this caricature, the humanist says that humans are wonderful and worth respecting but provides no reason why this should be so and no mechanism for adjudicating hard cases where human interests conflict. This caricature is wrong in every particular, and it persists largely because those who deploy it have not read the relevant philosophical literature with any care.
Secular humanism is not thin. It is a demanding ethical framework that takes seriously the full complexity of human needs, interests, and relationships. It recognises that human beings are not merely individuals but social creatures whose wellbeing is inextricably bound up with the wellbeing of others. It acknowledges that human interests conflict and that adjudicating those conflicts requires the kind of careful, evidence-based moral reasoning that is the hallmark of good ethical philosophy. It does not offer the false comfort of a revealed code that settles every question in advance; instead, it demands the harder and more honest work of thinking through the consequences of different courses of action in the light of what we know about human nature and human flourishing.
The humanist tradition has produced some of the most rigorous and searching moral philosophy in the history of human thought. From Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which grounded ethics in the nature of human flourishing without any theological supplement, to Hume’s account of moral sentiment, to Mill’s utilitarianism, to Rawls’s theory of justice, to contemporary work in moral psychology and experimental philosophy, the secular tradition has consistently generated moral insights that are both intellectually serious and practically applicable. The suggestion that secular ethics lacks foundation is historically illiterate: secular moral philosophy predates Christian moral theology by several centuries and has been developing with increasing sophistication ever since. To dismiss this entire tradition as parasitic on theology requires an act of wilful historical ignorance.
The humanist account of human worth is also more honest about its own foundations than the theological account typically is. The humanist says: human beings possess worth because of what they are, and here is what they are, and here is why those properties matter morally. This is an argument that can be examined, challenged, and refined. The theological account says: human beings possess worth because God conferred it. This is a claim that depends on the existence of God, on the accuracy of a particular scriptural tradition, on the reliability of human interpretations of that tradition, and on the goodness of a being whose scriptural record is, to put the matter as charitably as possible, morally complicated. The secular account invites scrutiny; the theological account requires faith. In the domain of ethics, as in every other domain of inquiry, the account that can withstand scrutiny is the more reliable one.
The emotional and psychological depth of humanist ethics is not inferior to that of religious ethics, and the suggestion that it is deserves direct rebuttal. The love of a parent for a child, the grief of bereavement, the solidarity of friendship, the indignation at injustice, the satisfaction of meaningful work: these experiences are not impoverished by the absence of theological scaffolding. They are, if anything, more fully and honestly experienced when they are not subordinated to a cosmic narrative that demands they serve some larger divine purpose. The person who is kind because they genuinely care about the wellbeing of others has, in the secular account, a more straightforwardly moral motivation than the person who is kind because they fear divine punishment or seek divine reward. The secular humanist ethic is, in this sense, purer: it asks nothing of the moral agent beyond attention to the reality of other people’s suffering and flourishing.
9. The Historical Argument: Who Actually Advanced Human Dignity?
The theist’s claim that human dignity requires theological grounding faces a powerful historical objection that rarely receives the attention it deserves. If the theological account is correct, we should expect the greatest advances in human dignity to have been driven by theological insight. What we actually find in the historical record is almost precisely the reverse, and the pattern is consistent enough to constitute genuine evidence rather than mere anecdote.
The abolition of the Atlantic slave trade was achieved through a sustained political and moral campaign in which religious abolitionists played a significant role. This is often cited as evidence that religion advances human dignity, and the citation is not entirely without merit. But the other side of the ledger is never examined with equal care. The theological justification for slavery, drawn from the so-called Curse of Ham in Genesis 9 and from the explicit New Testament passages instructing slaves to obey their masters, was not a marginal opinion held by a few bad actors; it was the dominant theological position of European Christianity for more than a millennium. The abolitionists had to argue against the prevailing theological consensus, and they did so by appealing to broader moral principles whose ultimate grounding was the shared humanity of enslaved people: the same consciousness, the same capacity for suffering, the same claim on moral consideration that the secular account identifies as the foundation of worth. The theological framing was, in many cases, a persuasive vehicle for an essentially secular moral insight.
The same pattern repeats throughout the history of moral progress. The recognition of women’s equal moral standing was consistently opposed by theological argument and achieved by secular feminist reasoning. The recognition of the rights of people of different races was opposed in the American South by explicit appeal to biblical authority and achieved by appeal to the universal human capacity for suffering and dignity. The recognition of LGBTQ rights has been opposed almost entirely on theological grounds and achieved entirely on secular grounds, by demonstrating that the orientation in question is a natural feature of human variation that causes no harm to others and deserves no discrimination. In each of these cases, the theological framework provided the resistance to progress, and the secular framework provided the arguments that overcame it. The theological institutions eventually accommodated the change, but they did not originate it.
This is not to say that no religious person has ever acted for human dignity. Clearly many have, and some have done so with extraordinary courage and conviction. But in each case, the moral insight they were acting on was either independently available from secular reasoning or was derived from the most general and unspecific features of their religious commitments, the features that are most easily translated into secular terms, such as the claim that all people are equally loved by God, which functions in practice as an assertion of universal human worth that secular ethics can endorse on its own grounds. The specifically theological content, the particular doctrines, the specific scriptural commands, the institutional authority of the church, has been far more often a brake on moral progress than an engine of it. This is an uncomfortable truth but a historically well-documented one, and the discomfort it causes in religious communities does not diminish its evidential weight.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, is perhaps the most significant document in the history of the formal articulation of human dignity. It was drafted by a committee that included representatives of diverse religious and cultural traditions, and it was deliberately framed in secular terms precisely because its authors recognised that any specifically theological grounding would exclude those who did not share that theology. The rights it articulates are grounded in what its preamble calls “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.” The word “inherent” does real philosophical work here: it signals that the dignity is not conferred by any external authority, divine or political, but belongs to human beings by virtue of what they are. This is the secular account of human worth made explicit in the most influential human rights document in history, endorsed by nations representing every major religious tradition on earth. The practical consensus, if not always the theoretical agreement, was secular.
10. Responding to the Deepest Objection: Grounding Moral Obligation
The most philosophically sophisticated version of the theist’s argument is not about atoms or evolution; it is about the grounding of moral obligation. Even granting, the sophisticated theist might say, that human beings have consciousness and the capacity for suffering, and even granting that these properties are morally relevant, where does the obligation to respect them come from? Facts about human nature, on their own, do not generate obligations. A fact plus a value might generate an obligation, but the value has to come from somewhere. On the secular account, where does it come from?
This is David Hume’s is-ought problem applied to the foundations of ethics, and it is a genuine philosophical challenge that deserves a genuine philosophical response. The secular response has several forms, and the important point is that each of them is more intellectually honest than the theological response, which simply relocates the problem rather than solving it.
The first secular response is that the gap between is and ought is not as wide as Hume’s formulation suggests. If the capacity for suffering is genuinely what grounds moral consideration, and if this is not merely a preference but a feature of what suffering actually is, then the moral conclusion may be part of the concept itself rather than an additional value imported from outside. To understand what suffering is, to understand it from the inside as every conscious being does, is already to understand it as something to be avoided. The normativity is built into the concept rather than added to it from an external source. This is a contested philosophical position, but it is a serious one with distinguished defenders, and it is at minimum no less well-supported than the theological alternative.
The second secular response is that the theological account faces an exactly analogous problem and does not solve it. The theist says that the moral obligation to respect human dignity comes from God’s command. But why are God’s commands obligatory? Either because God is good and commands what is genuinely good, in which case there is a standard of goodness independent of God’s commands, and we are back to the secular problem with an additional theological layer that adds nothing. Or because God has the power to enforce his commands, in which case morality reduces to obedience to power, which is not morality at all but prudential calculation. The theological account does not escape the is-ought problem; it inherits it, disguises it, and then presents itself as having solved a problem it has merely renamed.
The third and perhaps most honest secular response is to acknowledge that the ultimate foundations of ethics may be irreducibly basic commitments that cannot be derived from anything more fundamental, and that this is no more troubling for secular ethics than it is for any other foundational enterprise, including mathematics and logic. Every ethical system, secular or theological, must at some point begin with a commitment that is not itself derived from a prior argument. The secular humanist’s foundational commitment is to the reality of suffering and flourishing as the appropriate concern of moral reasoning. The theist’s foundational commitment is to the authority of a particular deity and scriptural tradition. Neither of these commitments is self-evident to everyone, but the secular commitment has the advantage of being grounded in experience that is universally available and verifiable, while the theological commitment depends on claims that are not. This is a significant asymmetry. For more on how secular ethics builds a genuinely demanding moral framework from these foundations, the argument is developed further in the discussion of morality without God.
There is also a fourth response that is rarely made explicit but deserves to be. The is-ought gap, if it genuinely cannot be bridged by any philosophical argument, undermines the theological account of moral obligation just as thoroughly as it undermines the secular one. If “God commands it” does not bridge the gap between fact and obligation without the additional premise “God’s commands are obligatory,” and if that additional premise is itself not derivable from facts alone, then the theological account is in exactly the same position as the secular one. Both require a foundational commitment that is not derived from prior argument. The question then is which foundational commitment is better supported by evidence, more internally consistent, and less historically liable to abuse. On all three counts, the secular commitment wins without difficulty.
11. Dignity Without Transcendence: Why That Is Enough
There is a persistent intuition in these debates that unless something is transcendent, it is not quite real enough to carry the moral weight we need it to carry. Human worth, on this intuition, needs to be cosmic, eternal, and guaranteed by something beyond the human world, or else it is too fragile, too contingent, too much at the mercy of circumstances. This intuition is understandable as a psychological matter. The desire for certainty, for permanence, for a moral order that is immune to the vicissitudes of history and politics, is a deeply human desire. But understandable desires are not reliable guides to metaphysical truth, and this particular desire, if allowed to drive philosophical conclusions, leads to an account of human worth that is both historically dangerous and philosophically incoherent.
The fragility objection to secular ethics misunderstands what makes human worth real. Human worth is not made real by its cosmic certification; it is made real by the concrete reality of human consciousness, suffering, and flourishing. When a person is tortured, the wrong that is done is not made greater or smaller by theological considerations; it is grounded in the experience of the person undergoing it, in what is actually happening to an actual conscious being in an actual moment. When a child is denied education, the harm that is done is not a theological abstraction; it is a concrete limitation on the development of a reasoning and feeling human being whose possibilities are being foreclosed. These facts are as solid and as real as any facts about the physical world, and they do not require a supernatural guarantee to be morally significant. The guarantee is in the facts themselves.
The secular account of worth is not fragile; it is the theological account that is fragile. The theological account depends on the existence of a God for whom there is no compelling publicly verifiable evidence, on the accuracy of scriptures that are demonstrably historically contingent, and on the goodness of a deity whose scriptural record is morally troubling at best. Remove any one of these three supports and the entire architecture collapses. The secular account depends on the reality of consciousness, suffering, and the capacity for flourishing: facts that are directly available to experience and confirmed by everything we know about biology, neuroscience, and the social history of human beings. These supports are not going anywhere, and they do not depend on any metaphysical assumptions that are seriously in doubt.
The secular humanist does not need the universe to care about human beings in order to care about them. The universe’s indifference is a brute fact of cosmology, and it neither adds to nor subtracts from the moral significance of a person’s suffering or flourishing. What matters is that human beings care about each other, and they demonstrably and reliably do. That care, grounded in empathy and reason and the shared experience of vulnerability, is the foundation of ethics. It is not a pale substitute for divine love; it is the actual thing from which all real moral progress has ever been made. For a fuller treatment of how a secular life can be rich with meaning and moral seriousness, the related essay on meaning without a master develops this theme at greater length.
There is something almost perverse about the theological insistence that unless worth is guaranteed by an eternal, omnipotent being, it is not quite worth enough. A parent’s love for a child is not made more real or more valuable by divine endorsement; it is made real by the fact that it is actually experienced by actual people in actual relationships. The worth of a person who is suffering is not increased by the theological proposition that they were made in God’s image; it is grounded in the suffering itself, in what it is like to be that person at that moment. The theological framework adds a layer of metaphysical scaffolding to something that was already standing perfectly well without it. Once that scaffolding is removed, as it has been removed for a growing proportion of the world’s educated population, what is revealed is not a void but the original, unadorned fact: that persons matter because of what they are, and that this has always been enough.
12. The Burden of Proof and Where It Actually Lies
Throughout this discussion, the theist has been presenting their account of human dignity as the default, as the obvious and natural starting point from which secular accounts must justify their departures. This framing should be resisted. The claim that human worth requires a supernatural guarantor is a positive metaphysical claim, and positive metaphysical claims carry a burden of proof. The secular account does not need to refute the theological claim before it can stand on its own feet; it needs only to demonstrate that the observable facts about human beings are sufficient to ground the moral conclusions it draws, which this essay has attempted to do. The question of whether God additionally underwrites those conclusions is a separate question, and one whose answer requires evidence that has not been forthcoming.
The situation is analogous to a debate about the causes of a historical event. If one historian argues that the event was caused by specific economic and political pressures, and another argues that it was caused by divine intervention plus those same economic and political pressures, the first historian does not bear the burden of disproving divine intervention. They need only demonstrate that the economic and political pressures are sufficient to explain the event. The divine intervention hypothesis is an additional claim that requires additional evidence. The secular account of human worth is in exactly this position. The natural facts about human consciousness, suffering, and reason are sufficient to explain why human beings deserve moral consideration. The additional claim that God also endorses this conclusion is a theological supplement that neither adds to the sufficiency of the secular account nor diminishes it.
This matters because the framing of the debate shapes the standards of evidence that each side is expected to meet. If the theist succeeds in positioning their account as the default, then the secular humanist is cast as a defendant who must justify departures from an assumed theological baseline. This is intellectually dishonest, and it has had real consequences for public discourse about the foundations of ethics. The secular humanist is not departing from anything; they are starting from the observable facts about human beings and reasoning from those facts to moral conclusions. The theist is the one introducing an additional claim that requires justification.
Once the burden of proof is correctly assigned, the relative standing of the two accounts becomes clear. The secular account rests on facts about human nature that are confirmed by multiple independent lines of evidence and accepted by virtually everyone, regardless of theological commitments. The theological account rests on the existence of a God for whom no compelling publicly verifiable evidence has been produced, on the accuracy of scriptures whose historical reliability is seriously contested even among religious scholars, and on a version of divine goodness that is difficult to reconcile with the scriptural record. The secular account meets its evidential burden without difficulty. The theological account does not meet its evidential burden at all. This does not mean that theology is necessarily false; it means that the theological account of human dignity cannot claim the authority of a settled truth while the secular account is treated as an unexplained puzzle in need of resolution.
Conclusion: A More Honest Foundation
The claim that human beings need God to have worth mistakes the source of worth for its content. Human beings are worthy of moral consideration because of what they are: conscious, reasoning, feeling creatures capable of suffering and flourishing in ways that matter profoundly to them and that ought to matter to anyone who is genuinely paying attention. These properties are not conferred by divine decree; they are observable features of actual human beings, confirmed by experience, biology, neuroscience, and the long record of human history. They are sufficient, without any theological supplement, to ground a coherent, demanding, and historically vindicated account of human rights and dignity.
The theological alternative, far from providing a more secure foundation, provides a less secure one. A worth that depends on divine endorsement can be qualified, conditional, and revoked by the same authority that granted it, as the long history of theologically grounded oppression abundantly demonstrates. A worth grounded in the natural properties of conscious beings is not subject to this vulnerability. It holds wherever those properties are present, and no scriptural reinterpretation, no papal decree, and no theological consensus can dislodge it.
The secular account of human worth is not a consolation prize for people who have abandoned faith. It is not an imitation of theological ethics, stripped of its supernatural backing and therefore necessarily thinner and less compelling. It is an older, more honest, and more consistent account than the theological alternative, and it has been doing the actual work of moral progress throughout human history while the theological institutions that claimed ownership of human dignity were, in far too many cases, defending the hierarchies and exclusions that secular reasoning eventually dismantled. The worth of persons does not depend on the sky having a tenant. It depends on what persons are, which is observable, which is sufficient, and which has always been the real foundation of everything that deserves to be called a moral achievement.