1) I agree that notions of objectivity are still around. That was one of the crucial points of my piece, and it was what provoked me to write it. I was (and am) trying to understand why it was that things (like objectivity) which seem to me to have no place in an atheistic worldview are still around even though atheism is on the rise. It was (and is) curious to me that the 20th century skeptical and nihilist atheism has been replaced by an atheism which makes bold claims about truth and goodness and all sorts of normative things.

2) It seems to me that nihilism follows from atheism in this way: we possess certain intuitions and innate senses that, for example, rape is wrong. Now everyone can agree that merely because we possess these intuitions it does not follow that we ought to adhere to them. In other words, a descriptive account of our moral intuitions does not, of itself, produce any normative conclusions about how we should act in a given situation. So we need an explanation for these intuitions that also provides support for normativity. As far as I’m aware, three main accounts of our moral sense have been given. The first is that it arises merely from arbitrary cultural conditioning. This is the explanation often held to by relativists, and as such it fails to provide a grounding for normative claims about how we ought to behave. The second is to give an evolutionary account of morality i.e. we evolved our moral sense because it helped us to survive. But as an explanation (even if it is true), it leaves us no better off then we were to start with, for it too is merely a descriptive historical claim. We cannot infer from the fact that we evolved for purposes of survival the idea that murder is wrong the normative claim that we ought not to murder. The third way is to say that God implanted in us (perhaps through evolution, perhaps through some other means) our moral sense. This is the only explanation of the three that gets us normativity. Remove it and what grounding is there for normative moral claims? Without any such grounding, nihilism is just a short step away.

3) I was not arguing that atheists should apologize for overlapping moral principles. I am glad that there is so overlap and I would think that an apology would be much more needed if there weren’t any such overlap. The point I was trying to make is that a certain popular brand of atheism, because it has been produced by a culture deeply shaped by Christianity, has essentially borrowed certain principles from Christianity while at the same time trying to destroy Christianity as an active force in the world. This simply strikes me as cutting off the branch you are sitting on, and I think it tells against modern atheism. Much more consistent would be to tear down the tree root and branch and admit that it only existed there in the first place because of Christianity. This is the more coherent atheism of the 20th century, the abandonment of which I am still puzzling over.

I also disagree that an absence of theology can only imply nihilism. Whenever I hear this argument I always want a demonstration of it, because none is ever given. Maybe it’s a result of the aforementioned pessimism and skepticism, but I don’t see how one follows from the other.

I also disagree that atheists must apologize to Christianity for overlapping moral principals. After all, we know the golden rule (at least in a negative form) is seen over multiple belief systems. Which of these should atheists apologize to? All of them? And what of the moral discoveries post-Christianity some of which *depended* on a secular climate to develop? Should Christians apologize for employing them?