Without a unified political climate of opinion, there is little or no political profit in doing the right thing.

I'm not saying that atheists can't act morally or have moral knowledge. But when I ascribe virtue to an atheist, it's as a theist who sees the atheist as conforming to objective moral values. The atheist, by contrast, has no such basis for morality. And yet all moral judgments require a basis for morality, some standard of right and wrong.

Wrong people are wrong not because of their faults but because of their presumed virtues.

As long as the wrong people hold power, how can the right political climate even arise?

Because government has tremendous power, it attracts people who are eager to game the system, obtaining by force of law what they could never achieve through consensus.

Natural selection certainly operates. It explains how bacteria will gain antibiotic resistance; it will explain how insects get insecticide resistance, but it doesn't explain how you get bacteria or insects in the first place.

Wrong people are wrong because they use their freedom to deny it to others.