Without God there is no objective basis for morality.

He wishes you to accept that morality exists and is objective based solely on the fact that some moral claims appear absolute and that the truth of moral statements appears to be influenced by objective facts about reality. I would begin by conceding that morality exists as a phenomena. The decisions that individuals make are influenced in a way that is best explained by the existence of some kind of internal judgement of what actions are good and what actions are bad. What is disputed, is that this internal decision making process can be explained in a way which is universal, and applies to all peoples in the same fashion. I draw your attention to my opponent's stated definition of objectivity, particularly the third part. I ignore the first because this is not really the sense in which the question was asked and as I have stated, I do not question the existence of a phenomenon called morality. The second part refers to both emotions and prejudices. I posit that for the purposes of this argument, personal prejudices are a subset of opinions, which is covered by the third part. Part 3 of the definition of objectivity is the following:Objective - Independent of individual opinion and cultural norms. This is the definition of objectivity that I intend to refute. I also adopt my opponent's second definition of morality. Morality - Normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons. The reason I choose this second part of the definition is that the first is descriptive in nature and thus could only be objective if every person agreed on every moral question, which is quite clearly not the case. Now, let us investigate this definition. I note firstly that it is ambiguous as to whether the 'specified conditions' make the code of conduct conditional, or if they merely assert that one must provide conditions for an action in order to make a moral judgement. i. e. is it saying that for a given moral theory X, moral theory X is valid given conditions Z, or moral theory X predicts action A is moral under condition Z. The first interpretation is unfavourable to my opponent's stated position since it automatically makes the validity of a given moral theory relative. I shall therefore take the second interpretation. That these conditions simply serve as the context in which we ask the moral question. We also need to restrict these conditions to be non-relative if we are to support my opponent's claim. This means that the conditions cannot include such statements as "I am a child" or "I am a philosopher", since otherwise we still have a mechanism by which relativism can creep in (I do not presume that there is any good reason for doing this, other than that it would not serve my opponent if we did not). I will now present an argument against the objectivity of this conception of morality. Definitions of words are either descriptive or normative in nature. The only word I need to draw your attention to here is 'rational'. We must take the normative definition of rational, for if we take the descriptive then clearly rational is not objectively defined and hence morality cannot be objectively defined (if we accept the proposed definition). What consequences does a normative definition of the word rational have? Recalling that the definition of objective requires the concept to be independent of cultural norms, then if the definition of rational is a cultural norm in and of itself, then how can morality be independent of cultural norms? My own definition, and the one that appears sensible given my opponent's arguments would beRational - Acting in such a way as could be reasonably assumed to lead to the stated goals or achieve the purpose of a thing. Since we are discussing actions it may be useful to consider the definition on wikipedia of one's actions conforming to one's reasons for action. I ask where these reasons/goals/purposes come from, and posit that perhaps an individual could have different reasons for action from another individual. If morality is the reason for action (do what is right) as appears to be required by the prior definition of morality then we reach a circular definition. To be rational is to do what is moral, to be moral is to do what is rational. If my opponent can demonstrate an objective measure of rationality, a criterion on which to judge if a person is rational that does not depend on their personal opinions on a subject, then I will yield this line of argument. As I am almost out of space, I ask my opponent to forgive me for leaving my rebuttals to the next round. . http://en.wikipedia.org...;