Religious thinkers have a specific worry about secular morality, and it is worth taking seriously before we challenge it.
Their concern goes like this:
If there is no God, then morality is just personal opinion. Nothing more. If God never declared murder to be wrong, then "murder is wrong" is simply a preference, like preferring chocolate over vanilla. And if a majority of people decided tomorrow that killing a particular group was acceptable, a secular society would have no ultimate standard to appeal to in order to prove them wrong. Only God, as an absolute and eternal being standing outside of human history and human preference, can provide a moral standard that is genuinely binding on everyone.
It sounds like a serious philosophical problem. But it rests on two failures: a misreading of human nature, and a fantasy about what religious morality actually looks like in practice.
What Human Biology Actually Tells Us
The religious argument assumes that without divine instruction, human beings have no reliable basis for treating others well. But this assumption runs directly against what we know about how human beings are actually built.
When we see someone suffering, our brains respond in a specific and measurable way. The same neural regions that activate when we ourselves are in pain become active when we witness pain in others. This is not a cultural habit or a religious teaching. It is a biological fact, consistent across human populations regardless of their faith, culture, or geography.
This capacity for empathy is not an accident. It is the product of millions of years of evolution. The human groups that survived and flourished were not the most selfish ones. They were the ones that cooperated, shared resources, protected one another, and felt the suffering of their members as a shared concern. The groups that lacked these instincts tended not to survive long enough to pass their traits on. Our species is, in a very real sense, a product of empathy. It is what kept us alive.
Reason reinforced this further. What separates human beings from other animals is not just our emotional capacity but our ability to think, plan, and recognize consequences. And reason, working alongside our empathetic instincts, consistently favored cooperation over cruelty, because cooperation worked. It produced better outcomes for individuals and for groups alike. You do not need a divine commandment to figure out that a society built on mutual care functions better than one built on predation.
The Hypothetical World Religious Thinkers Are Actually Describing
The second problem with the religious argument is that it describes a world that has never existed.
Religious thinkers present secular morality as though it were perpetually on the verge of collapse, as though the only thing standing between civilization and chaos is the fear of divine punishment. Remove God from the picture, they imply, and people will start endorsing murder by next Tuesday.
But look at actual human history. Every society on record, whether organized around religion or not, has maintained some version of the same core moral prohibitions. No murder. No theft. No unprovoked violence against your own people. These norms appear consistently across ancient China, pre-Christian Rome, Buddhist Southeast Asia, indigenous societies with no concept of the Abrahamic God, and modern secular democracies alike.
There is not a single documented case in history where a secular society decided that murder was fine while a religious one kept insisting it was wrong. The pattern simply does not exist. And that absence is enormously telling, because it suggests that the basic moral instincts of human beings do not come from religion. They come from us. Religion, at its best, has sometimes helped organize and transmit those instincts. But it did not create them, and the removal of religion has never made them disappear.
If anything, the historical record cuts the other way. Some of the most humane and ethically sophisticated societies in human history operated outside the Abrahamic religious framework entirely. Confucian and Buddhist traditions, for instance, produced moral cultures that by many measures were considerably more compassionate than their religious counterparts in the medieval Christian and Islamic worlds.
The religious claim that godlessness leads to moral collapse is not a philosophical argument. It is a scare story. And history has already called its bluff.
What Happens When "Sacred Authority" Replaces Moral Reasoning
Theory aside, the most powerful argument against religious morality is not philosophical. It is historical. The question worth asking is not just whether morality can exist without God, but what morality actually looks like when it is handed over entirely to divine authority. When human empathy and reason are replaced by the command of a sacred figure, what are the results?
The historical record provides some clear answers.
Attacking Without Warning
A hadith recorded in both Sahih Bukhari (2541) and Sahih Muslim (1730a) describes the Prophet launching a surprise attack on the Banu al-Mustaliq tribe while they were completely unprepared, their livestock drinking at a water source. No warning was given, no invitation to negotiate or surrender. The men who could fight were killed. The women and children were taken as slaves.
Sahih Bukhari, 2541 and Sahih Muslim 1730a:
Ibn Awn says that he wrote to Nafi asking whether it is necessary to invite the disbelievers to Islam before attacking them. In response, Nafi replied that this was the practice in early Islam, but later the Messenger attacked Banu al-Mustaliq in a state of complete negligence (that is, no invitation was given) and their cattle were drinking water. Their fighting men were killed and all the women and children were taken prisoner (enslaved).
Now consider a basic principle that most people across most cultures would recognize without needing to be told: attacking people without warning or provocation is wrong. This is not a complicated moral insight. It follows directly from empathy. Imagine being on the receiving end, and the wrongness becomes immediately obvious.
But religious authority does not engage with that reasoning. It short-circuits it. The logic becomes: this was commanded or carried out by the Prophet, who is God's representative, therefore it is by definition moral. The question of whether it caused suffering to innocent people is simply removed from the equation.
This is the moment where morality stops being morality and becomes something else entirely. It becomes obedience. And obedience to authority, no matter how sacred that authority is claimed to be, is not the same thing as ethics.
The Collateral Damage Problem
Sahih Bukhari (3012) records an exchange in which the Prophet was asked about the women and children of polytheists who were killed during night raids on their homes. His response was: "They are from them," meaning their deaths were acceptable because of their association with the enemy.
قَالَ مَرَّ بِيَ النَّبِيُّ صلى الله عليه وسلم بِالأَبْوَاءِ ـ أَوْ بِوَدَّانَ ـ وَسُئِلَ عَنْ أَهْلِ الدَّارِ يُبَيَّتُونَ مِنَ الْمُشْرِكِينَ، فَيُصَابُ مِنْ نِسَائِهِمْ وَذَرَارِيِّهِمْ قَالَ " هُمْ مِنْهُمْ ". وَسَمِعْتُهُ يَقُولُ " لاَ حِمَى إِلاَّ لِلَّهِ وَلِرَسُولِهِ
Sa'b bin Jathama narrated that the Prophet passed by me at Abwa or Waddan, and he was asked about the polytheists whose children and women are killed in night raids. He said: They are from them. Then he said that "protected pastures (Arabic: hima حِمَى)" belong only to Allah and His Messenger.
This is, in plain terms, a justification for killing civilians based on collective guilt. The women and children bore responsibility, in this framework, simply by virtue of belonging to the wrong group.
Here is what makes this particularly revealing. When modern states kill civilians during military operations and call it collateral damage, religious communities are often among the loudest voices of condemnation. They appeal to the sanctity of innocent life, the moral prohibition against collective punishment, the basic human principle that the guilty and the innocent should not be treated as interchangeable.
These are good moral arguments. They are exactly right. But the people making them are often the same people who accept, without applying the same scrutiny, the logic of collective guilt when it appears in their own sacred texts. The standard shifts depending on who is doing the killing. When a foreign military kills civilians, it is a war crime. When the Prophet permitted the same, it is the wisdom of God.
This inconsistency does not reflect a principled moral framework. It reflects emotional loyalty dressed up as theology.
Sacred Sanction for Seizure and Plunder
The same hadith concludes with the Prophet declaring that protected pastures, known as hima حِمَى in Arabic, belong only to God and His Messenger. Some background is necessary to understand what this actually meant.
In ancient Arabian society, hima were protected territories. Grazing lands and water sources that a tribe controlled represented their economic survival. Control of these resources was the difference between a community that could feed itself and one that could not.
When these territories were seized and declared the exclusive property of God and His Prophet, the seizure was given a theological justification that placed it beyond argument. Plunder that would otherwise be recognized as exactly what it was, the taking of another community's livelihood by force, was reframed as divine right.
This is a pattern that repeats throughout religious history and across multiple traditions. The interests of the powerful are wrapped in sacred language. The people harmed by those interests are given no moral standing to object, because objecting would mean questioning God. The natural human response of empathy, the instinct that says "these people are suffering and that matters," is overridden by the instruction that obedience to divine authority supersedes everything else.
What These Examples Actually Prove
Taken together, these cases make three things clear.
The first is that the claim to absolute, divinely sourced morality does not protect against cruelty. In practice, it often provides cover for it. When any act can be justified by appealing to divine command, the moral brake that empathy and reason provide is removed. History shows us what happens next.
The second is that religious devotion, whatever its genuine spiritual dimensions, has a documented tendency to impair the very faculties we need for moral reasoning. When a person is in a state of deep reverence toward a figure they regard as perfect and sacred, the part of the brain responsible for critical evaluation becomes less active. The capacity to ask "but is this actually right?" is suppressed. This is not a character flaw. It is a neurological reality. But it means that moral authority built on devotion rather than reason is inherently vulnerable to being used in ways that cause serious harm.
The third is that genuine morality, the kind that actually functions to reduce suffering and protect human dignity, has to be grounded in something other than authority. It has to be grounded in the recognition of shared humanity, the capacity to feel what another person feels, and the willingness to ask hard questions even when the answers are uncomfortable.
A morality that cannot be questioned is not really a morality at all. It is a power structure with better marketing.
Hassan Radwan