Why Ethics Requires a God and Is Safer from Evolutionary Debunking Threats as a Result: A Reply to Sterba

Sterba has argued that ethics does not require God and that an atheistic objectivist ethics is compatible with an evolutionary account of our development. This paper argues that though ethics does not require God specifically, it does require a god of some sort, for all normative reasons require a god and moral reasons are simply a subset of normative reasons. Sterba’s criticisms of more orthodox divine command theories of ethics are shown to raise no challenge to my view. Furthermore, even if Sterba’s alternative atheistic objectivist ethics is coherent, it would leave moral norms vulnerable to a particular kind of evolutionary debunking threat in a way that my theistic alternative does not.