Rand And Traditional View Of Ethics

On Page 14 and Page 15 of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, Rand notes that typical ethicists in history were unconcerned with the metaphysical cause or objective validation: "Most philosophers took the existence of ethics for granted, as the given, as a historical fact, and were not concerned with discovering a metaphysical cause or objective validation. Many of them attempted to break the traditional monopoly of mysticism in the field of ethics and allegedly, to define a rational, scientific, nonreligious morality. But their attempts consisted of trying to justify them on social grounds, merely substituting society for God." My response: Is there a metaphysical cause or objective validation that underlies ethical codes, and, if the former exist, should be they be identified. God is Creator of the universe, and De divided it into good and evil, and that is metaphysical cause enough for me. God enjoins us to love not hate, to do good not evil, and to love truth, not falsehoods. This divine command theory may well be mystical, but that is the nature of the world Can an ethical code be rational and scientific? Probably and ethical objectivism would be such an offering. Could there be a nonreligious ethical code for atheists. Probably, but that is not what I seek. Max Stirner, an atheist, and severe nominalist, noted that Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach, the German materialist, atheist and critic of Christianity, decreed that God was dead, but then worshiped society as an abstraction, the new god replacing the Christian God. It fascinates me that Rand would reach this same true conclusion about atheist intellectuals in the 19th century offering government, society, etc. as the new deity to be worshiped.