Without God there is no objective basis for morality.

I will now address my opponents points."In practice we accept that morality is part of a life strategy that can be defended and defined objectively"This is common practice amongst everyday people. I would argue that the merits of this strategy come from our natural gravitation towards people who have similar opinions to our own, and so we don't come into regular conflict with people with significantly different moral standards from our own. That the assumption is practical does nothing to assure me that it is true."Moral claims are defended based on their objective relative merit as a life strategy"My opponent appears to have claimed both objectivity and relativity for his morality. I will attempt to address this later. The best I can do for now is that we both accept that some moral claims are relative."Saying morality is not objective is the same as saying that moral claims are not objective."Indeed this is my opponent's contention. I would have argued that saying morality is objective is equivalent to the strictly weaker claim that some moral claims are not objective but I will accept my opponents definition in good faith and attempt to prove that all moral claims are objective since he does not appear willing to do as I have challenged him to and provide such an objective system."Morality exists independent of personal prejudice, emotions and cultural norms"The example my opponent provides asserts that a culture which universally accepts the beating of children (the action) as moral (the judgement), is fallacious in its moral reasoning. I.e. it has come to the incorrect moral conclusion that beating children is moral since it does not achieve the objective he has provided me with for this society (to discipline children). Since the strategy does not lead to the goal, the reasoning is fallacious. On the surface this appears reasonable.However, what is a goal but a cultural norm?If this society's intention was to discipline children then they would be incorrect, and I do not doubt this.However, they could just as easily have asserted a different intention.Let us presume that the intention is the following: To build the character of the strong and weed out the weak. Perhaps they have a survivalist mentality.Now on investigation of their actions, the society responds to why they beat their children with "Learning to deal with pain builds character, those who cannot deal with pain are weak and not worthy of our society" Their goal is to develop a tolerance for pain in their children or at the very least determine which children do have tolerance and which do not.In this sense, their moral decision is rational. It leads to their stated goal. Many people would agree that it is barbaric, but only because our goals are different from theirs.Any attempt to justify this judgement must use some other measure of morality beyond reasoning about a stated goal, we have to be able to demonstrate that their goal is wrong in some way.Taken to the extreme, an individual could claim any outcome as their stated goal. 'It is my goal to murder my wife' and as long as they rationally pursue this line of thought, they are behaving morally? This is not what we normally mean by morality."Morality in this respect in analogous to chess, there are many effective strategies."Moral strategies are fundamentally different from chess strategies in that there is no objectively defined victory condition. Again, if my opponent can provide me with an objective definition of 'victory' that could concievably apply to any conscious agent (not just humans) then I will yield to his position. Any such victory definition will be essentially arbitrary.I make the analogy to Galilean relativity.Imagine you are floating in space, and I am travelling towards you at 50km/h. You can reasonably assert that I am travelling at 50km/h if we make the assumption that all bare assertions are to be interpreted in the reference frame of the asserter at the time of assertion. I however, would disagree, stating that I am stationary and it is you who is moving at 50km/h. We can choose any particular reference frame as an objective reference, but this would only ever be an arbitrary system.Now, in this case there is a transformation that always guarantees that we agree on every relativistic question (under a suitable translation). However, the same does not necessarily apply to morality.We each have rather vague conceptions of what morality is. Perhaps we come up with two separate objective tools to discuss it. Someone then discovers a set of questions such that no matter what translation is used, one of us comes up with a different answer. If morality was objective, one of these objective tools (theories) must be wrong.I ask, how you would decide?We both started with similar intuitions, attempted to provide an explanation, and ended up with something with different results and no translation can make them the same. Who is right?