Objective morality requires the existence of a god.

Thanks to Con for the debate. == Pro Case == Note that Con does not contest my definition of objective morality. (1) The alternatives to physicalism are dualism and idealism, both of which involve the existence of a separate "mental substance" which is distinct from matter. Dualism posits that all of reality is made of matter except for human minds, which are composed of the mental substance. However, this view is self-refuting. In order for it to co-exist with the field of neurology, it must involve interaction between the 'substances' of mind and matter, yet because of their fundamentally different metaphysical natures, such interaction is impossible -- it would be like trying to get an alkaline metal to react with a noble gas, except that ontological differences are even "more impossible" to surmount than chemical differences. That leaves us with Idealism, which maintains that all of reality is mental. However, everything which is mental must have a mind behind it, and because we are talking about the entirety of reality, the mind in question would have to either exist independently of reality (in order to mentally project it) or *be* reality itself -- in other words, idealism is contingent on theism/pantheism. So via process of elimination, atheism does, in fact, necessitate physicalism, and therefore this argument stands -- atheism disallows the existence of a transcendental construct like morality. (2) Con is making the same mistake he made in his main argument. He's putting forth moral claims and expecting us to take them for granted, even though he still hasn't shown that morality exists independently of God. Why should we care if beings can experience suffering or engage in moral reasoning? Why does that grant them any moral significance? Under atheism, suffering, rationality, free will, emotions, etc. are all reduced to nothing more than a meaningless electrochemical reaction in the brain. All we have to work with in determining the parameters of objective morality is our agreed-upon definitions of it -- if you take a look at Con's definition (from Round 1), it specifically singles out human beings, so we can assume that moral constructs tend to revolve around them. Moreover, Con never contested my definition, which explicitly said that morality governs human actions. Thus, objective morality *does* imply that humans have a "special status" setting them apart from the rest of the inanimate & amoral universe. Theism accounts for that, whereas atheism cannot. (3) Con proposes that prescriptive facts can be "discovered" and therefore don't have to be communicated by an intelligent being. Obviously, Con misunderstood what I was saying. My justification for morality being rooted in an intelligent source had nothing to do with how we come to know about moral facts. .. it was about how the inherently prescriptive (i. e. communicative) nature of moral facts implies that they are contingent on the existence of an intelligent being. == Con Case == Con's defense of his argument just commits the same fallacy of circular reasoning again. He's assuming that his moral intuitions have objective moral significance in order to prove that objective moral significance can exist without God. This argument should be dismissed. - All three of my arguments in favor of the resolution remain standing, whereas Con's only argument has been debunked. The resolution is affirmed.