I remember a YouTube clip that was going around a few years ago, probably posted to Reddit or something in the mid 2010s, that showed Steve Harvey on some goofy daytime talk show talking about "moral barometers." He meant moral compass but that's not the point.
His argument was that people who don't believe in God don't have a "moral barometer," ie., a consistent and unshakable set of moral guidelines laid down by a higher and wiser power. And Steve Harvey couldn't trust or befriend such people. It's a redactive and poorly thought through worldview that I think a lot of people unfortunately share.
I like to think about ethics and morals. What they are, where they come from, how they mean different things to different people according to time and place. I think it's fun to grapple with ethical riddles. But I understand a lot of people don't think about ethics in their daily lives and operate primarily on inertia and emotion. And for those people, having a set moral code handed over from somewhere else, in this case the Bible, can be extremely helpful and fulfilling. (The fact that the Bible can be interpreted a hundred different ways and used to justify a hundred wildly different worldviews is outside the scope of this little post.)
But to think that without a Bible, or some other external moral guideline, one cannot have a code of morality of their own belies that the holder of this opinion has probably never really thought about morals and ethics on their own. Has never come to their own conclusions, doesn't really understand their worldview or why they hold the convictions that they hold.
I'll quickly run through my own worldview and what motivates my own personal moral code as an example:
When our hominid ancestors first started developing larger brains, one of these creatures had a brilliant (for better or worse) flash of insight. A million-odd years ago, she or he got hit in the face with a rock, let's say, thrown by some other hominid. Instead of reacting with pure bodily instinct, she or he had a thought. The thought was something like that really hurt. I don't like this feeling. I'm a hominid. If I pick up the rock and throw it back into the face of the hominid that threw it at me, it would really hurt them. And they would not like that feeling. Because they're a hominid just like me.
Whether or not that bruised and bleeding hominid chose to turn the other cheek or to get their revenge isn't relevant, what's relevant is the realization of they're like me, they feel what I feel. The first one of our ancestors that had that thought was the first one to stumble across empathy, which is the basis for all morality. It could be as simple as I don't like it when people hit me with rocks, so I won't hit other people with rocks. Or something more complex, requiring bigger leaps of cognition. I won't throw a rock at a dog, because while I am not a dog, I can understand that it still feels pain like I do. Or I won't steal my neighbor's favorite chert knife. I don't have any chert knives of my own, but I understand what it feels like to be fond of an object and I wouldn't like the feeling of having that object stolen.
This simple line of reasoning is easily applied to moral issues today. Bodily autonomy is important to me. If someone else were to dictate what I was and was not allowed to do within my own body, I would not like it. Therefore, while I personally am not currently in need of an abortion, I can understand and support people who are. Or there are parts of my body that I do not like that I wish I could change. While my biological sex is not one of those things, I can somewhat understand how difficult it might be for a person to be born into a body they don't agree with. I can support and attempt to understand those people.
There are lots of people who would read that or something like that and think that I'm describing morality to a baby. And there are lots of people who would disagree and think my interpretation of morality is entirely off base, and it probably is! I don't think there's any one moral code that is free from scrutiny and inconsistencies. It's not about coming up with a perfect moral code, but coming up with one in the first place. There are so many people who honestly have never thought morality to any degree at all. Whose only understanding of morality is some foreign code of conduct passed down from previous generations, the origins of which are dubious at best and downright malicious at worst. Steve Harvey's comments seemed to be coming from that place.
While he comes to the conclusion that he can't be friends with people who don't believe in God, I'll come to the conclusion that people whose only encounter with ethics comes from a foreign code should trust themselves a little more, try to have a little more confidence, and come up with their own moral code. We're the only animal on the planet that can do that so why not take advantage of it?