Europe, 711 AD. The Muslim population is increasing. Islam is firmly rooted in North Africa, Tunisia and most of the Arabian Peninsula. As the religion’s sphere of influence widens, the leaders establish, by force, an Islamic State – a Caliphate. It stretches from Aleppo, Syria in the west, Turkey to the north and Iran in the east. It is ruled by the Righteous Caliph.
One of the commonest observations made by opponents of religion is that we don’t need God in order to have a coherent and integral morality. Atheists and agnostics are extremely sensitive to the charge that the rejection of God will conduce automatically to moral chaos. Consequently, they argue that a robust sense of ethics can be grounded in the consensus of the human community over time or in the intuitions and sensibilities of decent people, etc.