Opponents of naturalism often claim that God grounds values and gives life meaning. My previous post on God-given Value disputes this, and I still haven't heard any satisfactory response. What difference does God make? What makes doing God's bidding any more meaningful than doing your own, or someone else's? Why obey divine commands at all?
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My questions aren't rhetorical - I'd genuinely like to hear theists' answers, if they have any. We hear a lot about how God gives your lives meaning, but how is that? What meaning or value does God provide that we would otherwise lack? I just don't see it.
I can never tell what people are getting at when they talk about anything giving their lives meaning; when it means anything, it seems to vary considerably. And I don't tend to think of ethics in terms of values. My own theism I hold because I think it is rationally required both as a conclusion and as an element in a full explanation of things (as I've said before, I think God's existence has been demonstrated by e.g., Scotus's triple primacy argument, and even if it weren't, there are several other reasons to think that God exists). So, not being among the theists Richard is questioning, I don't quite know what they would say. But it strikes me that there's a fairly obvious way in which theism would make a difference; namely, given that God exists and given the plausible additional supposition that if God exists we have ethical obligations/responsibilities/whatever with regard to God, it follows that any naturalistic account of value will necessarily be incomplete (again, if God exists). Needless to say, the atheist will reject the antecedent; but it suggests one reason why theists tend to see the move from theism to atheism as an ethical downgrade. An additional reason is that theists necessarily take elements central to ethics (personality, intention, etc.) and make them more fundamental to their worldview than the atheist can.
Besides, the person who is perhaps the foremost atheistic philosopher of religion at present, Quentin Smith, draws a connection between moral nihilism and atheism: namely, that if moral nihilism is true, necessarily God does not exist; while if God does exist (theism is true), necessarily moral nihilism is false. Further, if Smith's argument is sound, I think we would have to allow that for an atheist who is a moral realist (which Richard, I think, is) and holds an 'aggregative value theory' (which Richard certainly does), the entailment would have to go the other way, as well. (I have no commitment as to whether the argument does have force; I'm fairly sure, for instance, that 'aggregative value theory' is false. I don't, for instance, think treating 'is more valuable than' as a qualitative relation requires treating it as an approximative quantitative relation, as Smith claims it does. Intension and remission of qualities can be treated as analogous to addition and subtraction of (approximate) quantities, but there's no reason to think the latter completely captures the former; and, indeed, there's plenty of reason to deny it. But I haven't had a chance to look closely enough at the issue.)
There are other ways one might go. For instance, if one holds that acting morally requires positing that God exists (as Kant argues), then some sort of moral nihilism follows from atheism by a kind of modus tollens. And this would be true even if (as is certainly true on Kant's view) moral principles are more obviously true than the claim that God exists.
But my point here, as noted above, is just to give some possible reasons why theists might say what Richard attributes them. If you have a better response, then mosey on over and leave a comment on Richard's post.
UPDATE: Corrected the Kant paragraph. Accurately summarizing Kant's "ethico-theology" in a single sentence is hard!
