Objective Moral Values and Duties must be grounded in God

Thanks to you as well! You are the most courteous debate partner I have ever had - it has been a pleasure! The fundamental distinction between Humans and Man is, according to my opponent, "be[ing] able to reason... "Men" have "that quality... which allows access to the club of Man, reason... "something one should not do" becom[es] "something one should not do if one wishes to maintain that very same quality". It seems that for my opponent, the fundamental quality of being "Man" is being able to reason. Very well. But I must ask the question, who is to decide how to reason? People reason their way to different solutions to moral dilemmas. Sociopaths are very logical and reasonable. The Nazis were as well. These rational groups have come to very different moral conclusions. The ability to reason alone is not enough to get objective morality. This is the central point of my rebuttal, so I will emphasize it again: if rational agents come to opposing conclusions regarding which rational action to take, being a rational agent cannot, by definition, be a sufficient antecedent to objective morality. My opponent"s proposal for an objective morality without God thus fails, logically. My opponent says "[t]he so-called "morality" of those living in a world run by Nazis would not be morality at all. As my opponent pointed out, two "moralities" cannot coexist while both claim to be objective." This is misunderstanding my counterargument. While I agree that two contradictories cannot both be true, he is begging the question by saying the Nazis were not "moral". After all, they were rational! They operated according to strict logical precepts, and would thus have been included in "Man". Had they won WWII, we would all think that their morality and logic were correct, rather than ours. By saying the Nazis weren"t moral (= rational, logical), my opponent is simply begging the question. The Nazis epitomized rationality - a different rationality than ours! I say again: if rational agents (societies) come to opposing conclusions regarding which rational action to take, being a rational agent (society) cannot, by definition, be a sufficient antecedent to objective morality. The distinction I drew between conditional and unconditional oughts can be applied to this very scenario. If one wants to operate according to Nazi morality, one should exterminate certain ethnicities. If one does not want to operate according to Nazi morality, one should not. These are conditional oughts, because they vary according to which subjective viewpoint one adopts. As my opponent points out, killing might be considered a conditional ought: right in some circumstances, wrong in others. An unconditional ought would be, "Do X, always." A Christian might say that an unconditional ought is "love your God with all your heart, soul, and mind" - always. It is not subject to circumstance. My opponent"s next statement is puzzling. He say that "[t]hat "being" that would judge actions without a God would be reality." How can this be so? "Reality" so construed is just a bunch of particles spinning into each other, some of which create life, all of which is doomed to die in a short period of time. How can reality so-construed be properly said to judge anything? How can you derive an "ought" from that? If my opponent says that morality is constituted by the opinion of the moral majority, he opens himself to the points I made in my opening statement regarding moral reform, contradictory viewpoints across societies and time spans, etc. "One society cannot make claims that directly clash with reality while still being correct." Well, yes. But the difficulty in establishing which society"s moral claims are right and which are wrong is impossible to decide in my opponent"s moral system. The Nazis thought it was good and correct to kill Jews, the Allies didn"t - the two contradictory views have no means of arbitration between them. This is yet another instance of begging the question, assuming your morals are correct and their contradictories incorrect. Next: "If you wish to pursue this line of argumentation, it will end in us both coming to the conclusion that "we don't really know either way"". Agreed. I was trying to get you to see that this line of argumentation was doomed to failure, and thus refute the point you made in your initial statement. Objective, normative, moral properties like "moral wrongness" have an "ought" component to them. When you think about it, such objectively existing properties of "oughtness" are rather strange on atheism; they are invisible, nonphysical, causally inert, yet they exist somehow independently of our perception of them. Barring the supernatural, the presence or absence of objectively existing oughtness would not affect the physical world at all, and so it cannot be empirically detected. So why believe that such properties exist? I am not saying that my opponent is an atheist. But the viewpoint he defends is atheistic. Why, on atheism, think that such a strange non-physical thing as "objective morality" exist? Why shouldn"t the atheist reject the existence of these invisible nonphysical things that cannot be empirically detected, if the atheist is also to reject the existence of invisible nonphysical deities that have not been empirically detected? From the atheist"s perspective,Isn"t it likely that our evolved intuition of these invisible nonphysical properties is delusory, akin to humanity"s sociobiologically evolved belief in invisible nonphysical deities? I think the answer is yes. Given atheism, it is unlikely that objective morality exists and it is more likely that people"s belief in objective morality is a delusion brought about by evolution to get us to behave in certain ways and help our species survive. And what of judgement? On his view, there are just certain things you should do if you want to belong to the Club of Man. But what if you don"t want to belong to that club? What if you want to go around, stealing, raping, and pillaging? Who is to stop you? You might die, but, then again, we ALL die. If society shuns you, so what? Who is to say that society is right? There is nothing threatening about that. In short, there is no future reward/punishment for current good/bad behavior. You need an omnipotent God to make punishment/reward objective. And you need an omniscient/personal God to judge us according to our actions. Without those two qualities, morality is either meaningless, or pointless. In short, I don"t think my opponent has given good reason for us to believe that objective morality is possible in the absence of God. I think that I have provided ample justification for the premise that objective morality needs God to have a sound ontological foundation. My opponent has not yet seriously challenged my position. Nor has my opponent proposed a satisfactory alternative.