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Jshwtf 50%
50% AcademicAce
AcademicAce wins(1–2)
208
226
Round 1
JshwtfFOR
I believe that morality can still exist even without God or religion. I believe morality can exist through personal beliefs, virtues, values, and principles, making morality subjective. This indicates that moral standards can be created and evaluated by conscious beings rather than being dictated by a divine authority.
AcademicAceAGAINST
The debate usually gets framed as: can nonbelievers be kind? Of course. But that's not the claim. The claim is that moral obligation, as binding and objective, can survive without a transcendent source. I don't think it can. Take Plato's Euthyphro: either the good is good because God commands it, or God commands it because it's good. The second horn leaves goodness floating above God, which just relabels the problem. The first at least grounds obligation in a personal lawgiver. Aquinas makes this explicit in the Summa: natural law is a participation in eternal law. Strip that away, and you're left with Hume's is/ought gap: facts about harm or happiness don't by themselves generate a "you ought." You can have preferences, conventions, and empathy, but not moral duties that bind someone who rejects them. So secular ethics can describe cooperation, not obligate conscience.
Round 2
JshwtfFOR
Your assuming that moral obligation need a trancendent lawgiver in order to be real, but thats exactly ehat you need to prove. The euthypro dilema actually creates a problem for your position. if something is good only because god commands it, then morality becomes dependent on gods will and could theoretically have been different if God commanded differently. But if God commands something because it is already good, then goodness exists independently of God's command. Hume's is/ought gap also doesn't establish that God is necessary for morality. It only shows that descriptive facts alone don't automatically produce moral conclusions. Secular ethics can add principles such as “unnecessary suffering ought to be avoided” and justify those principles through reason, empathy, human interests, and consistency. You may reject those principles, but your ability to reject a moral principle doesn't prove that the principle has no justification.
AcademicAceAGAINST
Surprisingly, Pew Research Center reported in 2019 that 65 percent of U.S. adults say belief in God isn't necessary to be moral. But that measures attitudes, not obligations. Jshwtf says personal beliefs and values can create moral standards. They can create preferences, even widely shared ones. They can't bind someone who rejects them, as Hume's is/ought gap shows: facts about empathy or harm don't entail a duty. Without a transcendent lawgiver, you're left with conventions. Those coordinate behavior, but they don't obligate conscience. So secular morality can exist descriptively, not as binding moral law.
Round 3
JshwtfFOR
first of all that research is from 2023 not 2019.
You say that without a transcendent lawgiver, morality is reduced to conventions that cannot obligate anyone. But research doesn't support the idea that moral behavior requires a divine authority. Gervais and Norenzayan (2012) found that secular institutions such as police and courts can also encourage prosocial behavior through social monitoring, showing that moral behavior and social obligation can operate through secular sources of authority.
More importantly, your argument still assumes that only God's authority can create genuine obligation. That's a philosophical assumption, not an established fact. Even philosophical scholarship explicitly discusses coherent forms of ethics without God, so saying that secular morality is merely “convention” doesn't demonstrate that it actually is.
AcademicAceAGAINST
Imagine a person who rejects empathy and consistency as binding. You can show they're inconsistent or cruel, but you can't show they're obligated. Jshwtf is right that adding a principle isn't defeated by mere rejection. Yet that principle still needs a source. If it rests on reason, empathy, or human interests, those are contingent facts. Hume's is/ought gap remains (Treatise 3.1.1). Euthyphro cuts both ways only if God is a separate commander; for Aquinas, God is the good itself, not a will under it (Summa I-II q.91 a.2). Secular ethics can justify commitments among people who share them, not bind conscience absolutely.