| > Martin Luther King was a Christian, who believed in a moral order imposed externally by a Supreme being. A person doesn't have to be a theist to accept King's principle. A naturalist/materialist/physicalist metaphysics doesn't have room for such a principle. But theism and naturalism/materialism/physicalism do not exhaust the space of metaphysical options. A person might believe in the Scholastic doctrine of the convertibility of the transcendentals – that, at an ultimate level, Goodness, Beauty and Truth are identical to each other, even though at the non-ultimate level they are distinct. It is easy to see how a person who accepts such a doctrine might be attracted to King's principle as an expression of it. While the Scholastics themselves accepted that doctrine in a theistic context, and even saw theism as a necessary consequence of it (ultimately, Goodness and Beauty and Truth are identical to each other, because they are all identical to God), a person might accept that metaphysical doctrine yet find some rational reason to refuse its theistic implications. Also, I can't speak for King personally, but the idea that morality is "imposed" by God – in the sense that morality is something God freely chose to create, and could have chosen to create differently, as opposed to something inherent in God's inalterable necessary nature – is one many in the Christian tradition reject. Certainly it is traditionally rejected by Catholics and Orthodox, although Protestants are more mixed in their views. Among Muslims, that idea is accepted by the Asharite theological school, arguably the most influential in Sunnism, but rejected by the other major orthodox Sunni schools (Maturidi and Athari) and also by most Shi'a theologians. > If you purport to not believe in some sort of religion (loosely defined), how can your metaphysics allow for social norms to be judged by anything other than some sort of empirical fitness function? How loosely do we define "religion"? I think a person could accept King's doctrine without accepting King's theism, but maybe any such position is in some sense a form of "non-theistic religion"? It isn't clear how to answer that question. A person (even a non-theist) can believe in the metaphysical existence of objective ethics, yet reject any attempt to reduce ethics to "some sort of empirical fitness function" |