The Enlightenment Project

Beginning in Chapter 11 to the end of the book, Stokes sets out to challenge "The Enlightenment Project," an attempt starting during the Enlightenment to ground morality in something else than God. Stokes will argue "that given the very nature of morality, if God does not exist - that is, if naturalism is true - there can be no morality in the robust sense that we understand it. Morality, whatever else it turned out to be, would be grounded in nothing more than human preference." Princeton University ethicist Peter Singer agrees:

Without the notion of an independent moral reality to back them up, however, claims made on behalf of these moral rules or principles can be no more than expressions of personal preferences which, from the collective point of view, should receive no more weight than other preferences.

From all of this, Stokes will argue the following point: If naturalism is true - if God does not exist and everything arises from natural causes and laws - then there is no morality. By "no morality" Stokes means there is not objective morality, no morality that is independent of human beliefs and desires. And if this is the case, then morality wouldn't have the kind of authority we need. As the great atheist J.L. Mackie wrote:

We need morality to regulate interpersonal relations, to control some of the ways in which people behave towards one another, often in opposition to contrary inclinations. We therefore want our moral judgments to be authoritative for other agents as well as for ourselves: objective validity would give them the authority required.

Atheists, obviously, hold that there can be morality without God. Stokes - applying our grid of sober skepticism - will attempt to show that this position should - at minimal - be controversial, and is, more than likely, untenable.