Professor Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science and an atheist at the University of Guelph, explains, The position of the modern evolutionist is that humans have an awareness of morality because such an awareness of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate when someone says, Love thy neighbor as thyself, they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation.
Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, . . .
Or consider the late J. L. Mackie, professor of philosophy at Oxford University and one of the most influential atheists of our time. Thus we have . But if that is the case, then objective ethics goes out the window along with theism. Then human beings would have no intrinsic moral value. For example, in India, women were expected to be burned alive on the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands.