The Most Reliable Basis For Determining Morality Is Via Secular Means

It's precisely because we're imperfect and we don't know whether anything is going to turn out good or bad, that we should not presume we have all the moral answers. We might think we know some alternatives that are the WRONG answers - my method differs from Harvey Dent's because it's NOT statistically random - it's statistically variable. This misreading of my argument permeated pro's case.To win this debate, I needed to show two things. I'll explain how I've dealt with each of them in this final round.1. That secularism is amoralIn his closing remarks, pro argues moral authority should come from us, not God or coins. The problem is that we have zero moral authority, because that would require knowing moral values, which is impossible without knowing the future, which we don't. Pro is wrong again about God - a moral God does know moral values, so any claim that religious people are immoral is based only on pro's untrue conception of what is morally right and wrong, not the reality of the outcomes of those moral values. Perhaps Leipzig was correct in presuming this is the best of all possible worlds. I don't know, because like everybody else I've never seen any other possible worlds, and would have a lot of trouble objectively evaluating all their moral advantages and disadvantages even if I had. My attack on religious morality - that any such moral authority cannot be known for a certainty (much like secularism cannot know the future for a certainty) - was not substantively contested by pro and was much stronger.The problem with knowing morality for a certainty is that it especially applies to secularism. I always learnt that secularism focuses on the facts we know - evidence. To claim that it correctly can evaluate moral actions - a "crystal ball" as I've termed it, because that literally requires knowing the future - is just as untrue as the claim that prayer can reveal the future. Both are extrapolations based on things we think we know (be that science, or religious doctrine). Neither has any proven validity, any consistency pro has shown between modern secular thought and history I proved in round 4 to be based on historical revisionism. The evidence that secularism has from the future is none, and pro has not shown any. Without the evidence and without the facts, everything that goes into the crystal ball is assumption.Assumptions which, I might add, don't change until proven wrong, which they will because as I've said throughout and pro never gave a clear answer to, moral values are context-specific. This is especially problematic when secularism must deal with new situations it has no assumptions for - and every second of time is a new situation.Pro went further. He argued that secularism was democratic, vindicating the moral actions of any leader with widespread support (Hitler and Stalin come to mind). He then called morality an applied science, assuming that the scientific method can be applied to it, but science requires evidence, and pro has none. He claims that his morality is substantiated by "secular, humanistic, rationally based reasoning". I'd love to hear what this reasoning is. The only evidence pro has shown has been past evidence applied to a present context - not once has pro actually addressed the fact that all morality is about future outcomes. The first thing I told you in this debate was that the only way you can rationally reason something to be true is by excluding the alternative. Despite the amazing power of his crystal ball, pro could not provide any evidence outside of his own disbelief that alternatives to something as big as 9/11 were better (or worse for that matter). He argued that only secularism is reasonable, which he couldn't define, and couldn't exclude other alternatives from (since there are multiple "reasonable" answers with morality).This does more than show secular morality is not perfect. It proves it is completely unreliable. Pro wants to trust in a method that can only determine what was good or bad in light of our present understanding in the world, in the past, to tell him about the future. But you can't use the past as evidence for the future because the past has no evidence of the future - anything else is subjective extrapolation.I've also shown that non-individual moral systems are inherently poor because they rely on there even being a "wrong" and a "right" solution, when even past experience tells us that all moral actions have a range of different moral outcomes which will be evaluated differently by different people depending on their circumstance.2. That changing your morality makes you a better person.I will agree that morality needs revision - and the more frequently you switch to avoid bad alternatives the better your odds - but not that we can be the source of that revision. We know nothing about the future and we cannot knowingly control our fate. The human instinct is to go with what seems like the right alternative, and my opponent has been a perfect demonstration of this. The problem is that right since the beginning of the debate, I've proven that switching morality when the outcome is random will always improve people's odds.The only real objection to this that pro has raised is the claim that the world is not random. This is the difference in worldviews I outlined last round. The very fact that secularism has never been able to identify a moral standard that it's been able to stick to for a century without adding dozens of exceptions, I think, proves this point, since this would not be true of an absolutely consistent world. The truth is that the future is exactly as consistent as secularism is able to crystal ball it, which is why the weather forecast is sometimes astoundingly accurate and other times incredibly wrong. As for There is no single "moral answer" to a moral problem, it all depends. Perhaps by killing an innocent baby you stop the rise of the next Hitler. There might not be evidence for that, but that doesn't stop it from being true. The problem with all evidence-based systems, and the advantage that chance-based systems will always have, is that evidence based systems need evidence. By the time they have that evidence, however, it's too late because the future is there and, possibly something bad has happened. They might as well have excluded a few possible alternatives rather than pretend they knew the right answer all along.Most tellingly, my opponent agreed the most rational (and he tried to claim the most secular) group of people, and the ones who I proved to be the most accurate of all - are those people who don't pretend they know the right answer. Who are unsure of what is right and what is wrong. Who keep discussing the debating even when science thinks it is certain. Most importantly, they are the ones who change their minds. And that's what makes them better people.The only other thing pro disliked about my model comes from an imaginary Batman movie. Why he thinks reality would play out quite like that is beyond me, especially since as I've already explained, it isn't even analogous. There's nothing extraordinary about this at all - the question in this debate is one of well-established statistical theory.ConclusionSecularism is important, but pro has misunderstood its purpose. Secularism is about critically evaluating claims against evidence. There is no evidence from or for the future, and all that pro has proposed rely on another claim - that history repeats, that the past will play out the same next time. That's never been true, there's no evidence for it, and pro never supported it.This debate is about whether the future moral value of moral actions can be determined in a secular framework. I showed this requires a large number of assumptions. Even if only one of those assumptions is just an assumption, pro's model does not hold.I say that we can't reliably know the future, but we can improve our odds.The resolution is negated.