Christopher Hitchens on The moral argument
Hitchens argued that morality predates religion and that divine command makes ethics worse, not better.
Hitchens's treatment of the moral argument centred on what he called 'the most important question in the debate': is it conceivable that humanity had no moral sense before Moses received the Ten Commandments? He found the proposition laughable. Humans lived in social groups, cooperated, punished free riders, and cared for their young for hundreds of thousands of years before any scripture was written.
More devastatingly, Hitchens argued that tying morality to God's commands makes ethics worse, not better. Divine command theory means that genocide, slavery, and child sacrifice are not intrinsically wrong — they are wrong only if God says so, and the Bible records God commanding all three. A morality that can be overridden by divine fiat is no morality at all.
His 'Hitchens Challenge' — name a moral action a believer can take that a nonbeliever cannot — was designed to demonstrate the redundancy of God for ethics. No one ever successfully answered it to his satisfaction.
“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”
“Is it possible that we lived for tens of thousands of years without knowing that murder, theft, and perjury were wrong — until we got to Sinai? Of course not.”