A couple of posts on moral realism and on how that model connects to the concept of a deity are in order, I think, to remind readers and myself why this blog is called "The Science God". 

First, why do I believe in moral realism, in 500 words? Let's look objectively at humans.  

All words are labels for sets of sense data or sets of sets of sense data. Words of greater and greater generality remain in a language over the long haul only if they name general patterns of phenomena that the speakers of that language have found are useful to recognize in their struggle to survive. Our most general words are the ones that have evolved in our language to name virtues like courage, wisdom, freedom, love, diligence, honesty, and so on.

We developed the terms “courage” and “wisdom”, for example, because they are useful. Generation after generation, we impressed these terms on our young because the patterns of behavior that the terms describe, when the two terms are used in tandem, guide people to respond to one of the most pervasive qualities of the physical universe itself, namely entropy. Courage drives us, wisdom steers.

In human terms, entropy simply means things are always driven by a tendency to fall apart. All life, to survive, must move against the entropy of reality all of the time. Other living things have qualities like courage and wisdom written into their dna. Humans are the only species that has discovered a more nimble modus operandi. Culture. Courage and wisdom, taught to the young in our culture, shape our behavior, socially then individually, over millennia, in ways that answer entropy.

The other matched pair of values that I have been able to discover to this point in my life is freedom-love. These two values steer us toward patterns of behavior that respond, again over the long haul, to quantum uncertainty. Life is not just hard, it’s sometimes crazy. In the giant social picture, freedom and brotherly love balance each other in a manner analogous to the way courage and wisdom balance each other. Used in tandem, freedom and love steer us to patterns of behavior that maximize our odds of survival because they give us a pluralistic nation, the only real way we can insure against the hazardous quality of reality. Freedom causes us to be varied individuals, love causes us to accept others even when they're very different from us. When disaster comes, a pluralistic society has higher odds of finding an answer to that unforeseen event than a more homogeneous society ever could.  

If we work hard enough to promulgate and explicate these values to all of humanity, they will guide us to a balance of love and freedom that works for our whole species. But in any case, values do work, and they have worked for a long time, because they connect us to physical reality. Used in tandem, freedom and love are the human answer to the pervasive uncertainty of reality.

The emotions that these terms sometimes stir and the blind loyalty they evoke are useful in survival terms, but they are no guide to truth. Only the evolutionary usefulness of the values is.

When the concepts called "moral values" are followed through their intermediate behavioral steps into reality, we see they work as parts of a cultural program for long term survival. Therefore, moral values are observable, testable, replicable, etc. Moral values are real in the exact empiricist sense of the term.