The Most Reliable Basis For Determining Morality Is Via Secular Means

At this point in our debate, I think we have established two things: if secular means can reliably determine anything moral, then pro's right, and secondly, that if secular morality can determine nothing moral, then a coin toss with exclusions is more reliable and I'm right. It might sound like a pretty big onus to prove secularism can tell us nothing about morality (it isn't, as will become clear in a moment), but I think this debate has exposed a far more interesting difference in worldviews.Mine is very simple - that we know nothing about the future, that cause-and-effect never plays out in reality except in hindsight, that it's just as probable that the atomic number of hydrogen will change tomorrow by the power of some as-yet-undiscovered scientific principle as it is that, in the immortal words of "Captain Obvious", in one year it will be the present, or even (don't kill me pro) that evolution is predictive (as opposed to having only been true until God intervened last Wednesday and nobody noticed). Pro by contrast believes that the future is influenced by the present/past (as opposed to vice versa), and that the chances are good it will conform to our present "reasonable" (implying that the future can be reasoned) expectations in the fantasy land of "all else being equal" (really it never is).The reason why pro's secular worldview is so appealing is because it adapts to conform to the one reality we know. Secularism is thus always consistent with the past, or at least what we know of it. When presently future events don't conform, as pro has himself said, it corrects itself, as it has done in the past. It is a fallacy to say, however, that because secular morality today is consistent with what many people consider reasonable, that secular morality was predictive at the time of any given moral decision, because secular morality has itself adapted to the outcomes of these decisions. It is not that secular thinking predicted the future, but that it was predicated on it. The only way secular morality holds any water is if those future experiences in some way conform to our past experiences - to put it another way, that history repeats.I wanted to stress this context in response to my opponent making a fallacy the secularists don't even have a name for yet - I call it "appeal to logic". The idea is that because something makes logical sense in context, it must be true. In fact, lots of things that make no sense are true, and lots of things that do make sense are false. You cannot say, for example, that because a road has a 1% crash rate over the last 20 years, people travelling on the road have a 1 in 100 chance of dying. It might be an inductive, logical conclusion, but 1000 people could well travel down that road after that and not die. There might not even be any explanation for it. It could be put down to dumb luck, or maybe people are travelling more carefully after the high crash rate was exposed - who knows? But there was nothing beforehand to suggest this would be the moral outcome of doing nothing. Note how pro cunningly uses the present tense when referring to past data in an attempt to appear credible, when in fact his conclusion is entirely about future data.Naturally those people don't know if the world would have been better or worse if it had been shut. Perhaps they would all unanimously agree it would be worse, like pro is assured a world with more murder or 9/11s is worse. But there's nothing reliable about that. They're making their own guesses that were no better than the logical guesses the secularists with their logic-based crystal balls did when they noticed the high crash rate.It's this kind of absolute answer - "killing is bad", "that road is dangerous" etc - that puts secular morality in trouble. The truth is that it might be bad NOW, but such a moral principle cannot be extrapolated into the FUTURE. This would be true no matter how much you qualify your objective statement (ie "killing is bad if" etc). Pro's only claim is that if something is true now, there's a very good chance it will still be true later. I will remind pro that almost nothing humans believed 2000 years ago is generally believed to be true today. If there is something that is certain, it is not what we know but what we don't know. Pro can call their crystal ball reasonable all they like, they can shove whatever evidence from the past in there, they can interpret that evidence and assign it their moral values forever, and it still won't necessarily correlate to their moral view of how any action will pan out for them. Then pro will whine "oh but I didn't know that ...", and before they could point out some pertinent fact they didn't know, or how their own moral values have changed, I will simply be asking "then why was your crystal ball so sure?"Pro has avoided the issue of morality having different impacts on different people by saying that we emphaise with others. In the western world, it's true that 9/11 generated a lot of sympathy for the victims. In other parts of the world, it generated a lot of respect for the attackers. The resulting decade-long war bears testimony to how different moral values can be placed on the same event. Oppertunists did use this as an excuse to get cheap oil, representing a third (not necessarily unsympathetic) moral position. And of course, let's not forget that many people around the world are morally agnostic about the event. Even if we could tell that 9/11 was "bad", that doesn't mean that not having 9/11 would be relatively better as calling 9/11 the less moral alternative implies. Unless you can prove both alternatives, the only secular judgement you can make comes from your own extrapolation of evidence. The fact that empathy is inborn does not make it moral.Unprecedented and unforseeable events pose an even bigger problem. For sure secular morality can adapt to them ONCE THEY KNOW HOW THEY ARE GOING TO PLAY OUT. Before that, all you can do is make guesses and parrells to other situations. I might add that secular evidence is itself often contradictory. In debates about, for example, nuclear power on this site, both sides are able to use very good sources for and against nuclear power. Nobody who builds such a plant intends for there to be a meltdown - meltdowns are therefore based on things we didn't know when we built them. Some evidence may have existed that meltdowns would be a danger of the site, but I'll bet the engineers had their evidence too.Finally, pro claims that what is "reasonable" is not subjective because those silly axioms I questioned last round must be true if they are true for people when "all else" is "equal". I have no idea what this actually means, but if I had to guess it's pro claiming that things like murder are not normal for people in most conditions. What we consider normal and moral is not necessarily correlated, however. It might be normal to not commit suicide, but that does not mean every suicide ever was bad. The truth is that we just don't know. The fact that secular people disagree on the morality of PAST actions proves that secularism doesn't dictate their morality, but only informs it (ie secularism may show deaths, but does not morally justify the assumptions people hold of whether particular deaths were good or bad).Of course I'd toss the coin of truth about 9/11. It gives a much better answer than pro's crystal ball, that's for sure. I don't care if the ends justify the means, because you don't know the justification unless you know the ends, and since we don't know the future, this whole attack makes no sense.This debate is about whether, to quote pro, "making predictions to the best of our ability" is the most reliable thing. I maintain that reality always surprises us with new moral perspectives, unforseen moral outcomes, variable moral consequences - and a complete lack of a moral standard to judge any action against, since we have no idea how things might have turned out.