I don’t think atheists who strive to argue in support of the existence of non-religious objective values, regardless of whether they are based on philosophy or science, have any idea how weak their case is from the atheist perspective:
“There are no such things as absolute values, independent of the subjective preferences of erring men. Judgments of values are the outcome of human arbitrariness. They reflect all the shortcomings and weaknesses of their authors.”
– Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy
It seemed strange to me why atheist arguments related to objective morality were always so crudely simple and vaguely familiar until I realized that this is because I had seen very similar arguments before in a different context. As it happens, the current atheist attempts to determine an objective basis for morality are following exactly the same path that economists of the 18th and 19th century trod in attempting to determine the objective basis of value. They are literally 200 years behind the best efforts of economists from Adam Smith and David Ricardo to Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen to find something that does not exist, and due to their general ignorance of economics – Michael Shermer excepted – they have no idea that their quest is destined for complete failure.
I can only conclude that sometime around the turn of the next century, the marginal utility of morality will become the dominant paradigm for a time prior to the whole quest being abandoned in response to a series of massive and inexplicable moral depressions.