Or should I say the dark? At any rate, he sees and accepts the hopelessness of the atheistic attempt to derive morality from the bare facts of physical existence. The thing that annoys me most about the loud spokesmen for shallow atheism–Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, et.al.–is their refusal even to admit that this problem exists. When challenged, they just start blustering that they don't need God to tell them what's right and wrong, because they just know. But their combination of vehemence, glibness, and smart-sounding English accent seems to keep most people from noticing the emptiness of the response.
This guy, though–Joel Marks, of the University of New Haven–is willing to take a good look at his own assumptions:
I had thought I was a secularist because I conceived of right and wrong as standing on their own two feet, without prop or crutch from God. We should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, period. But this was a God too. It was the Godless God of secular morality, which commanded without commander – whose ways were thus even more mysterious than the God I did not believe in, who at least had the intelligible motive of rewarding us for doing what He wanted.
And what is more, I had known this. At some level of my being there had been the awareness, but I had brushed it aside. I had therefore lived in a semi-conscious state of self-delusion – what Sartre might have called bad faith.
And absent this Godless God, there is only personal preference (as Nietzsche, the one great atheist, understood):
I now acknowledge that I cannot count on either God or morality to back up my personal preferences or clinch the case in any argument. I am simply no longer in the business of trying to derive an ought from an is. I must accept that other people sometimes have opposed preferences, even when we are agreed on all the relevant facts and are reasoning correctly.
Of course anyone who realizes that a certain number of people will always have "preferences" that are very unpleasant for everyone else, e.g. the preference for killing anyone who gets in their way, will see that the universal adoption of these beliefs would not leave the world in a very happy condition. And that the next step must be the declaration that all preferences are not equal, and the imposition of some preferences by force. Why anyone would think this is more reasonable and desirable than the idea of a universally applicable transcendent morality is beyond me.
You can read Marks's whole piece here.
Light On Dark Water 
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