The prompt is moral foundations are impossible without religion. This is because while an atheist can behave in a way that others deem to be moral, and an atheist can believe in moral choices, without religion there is not an epistemic foundation to justify those beliefs. Without religion, morality is a subjective set of preferences, not a standard that one must meet. And in those subjective set of preferences, there's no way to arbitrate why one set is better than another that is not also itself arbitrary. Because if the universe is just one giant cosmic accident, murder is the equivalent of one amoeba swallowing another. It has the same moral quality as an asteroid slamming into a distant Moon. Every action is just an action, and they have no fundamental moral quality apart from what we arbitrarily ascribe to it. And that morality has no foundation. One may attempt to appeal to human flourishing or betterment as a standard for what makes an action moral or not, but even this is arbitrary because what makes human flourishing better than non-flourishing to a blind pitiless universe? It may matter to people's subjected opinions whether they prefer suffering to non-suffering but there is no objective reason to prefer it.

We agree that atheists can be moral and produce moral actions. The question is whether they have an epistemic rationale for doing so. Showing that there are those moral actions in atheists that nothing to demonstrate that they haven't epistemic foundation for doing it. What my opponent is implying that the foundation is there, but does not explain objective truly moral actions can exist in an atheistic worldview. Religion provides that foundation by appealing to a creator that has ordained a moral sense that we can discern and follow. My opponent has asserted that they can discern and follow that. Fine, but that is not the prompt. The prompt is about the foundation. And if the universe is a blind atheistic materialist universe, then non-material objective moral foundations are not derived from that. The fact that they produce stable moral norms only shows that a foundation exists not where the foundation comes from. My opponent says I refer to historical influence and that's actually not what I referred to, I referred to epistemic and logical foundation.

I would agree that goodness is prior to religion because goodness is God. God is also prior to religion. But religion is an attempted articulation of that epistemic foundation that God provides. The arbitrariness of goodness is only arbitrary in the sense that it's arbitrary that 2 + 2 = 4 rather than 5. If the nature of God is good, as most religion universally proclaims, then the morality is good and it is a meaningfully real good, rather than human interests harm and reciprocity, which are the truly arbitrary actions without foundation because they are completely subjective rather than tied to a foundational truth about the nature of reality. My opponent is claiming that because the end result is produced that the foundation is there. I assert that the foundation is in fact there because there is a God, and that's why they act in a world with meaning and as if morality matters, even though they don't believe it, because they are responding to the nature of reality, we're 2 + 2 = 4 and it never equals 5 even if they want it to be. My opponent says that secularism can be load bearing, but as I've already demonstrated, in a universe without God, every action is just an action, and the morality that is ascribed to something is a human value attached to it only, with no independent value of its own. That is what is meant by moral foundations, and those don't exist without God, only the preference to do what one perceives to be good or right. The result is not synonymous with the foundation. Having a reason, like self-interest or avoidance of harm, is not synonymous with the foundation. Having a reason to avoid harm of someone is not the same as it being a moral duty.