When you say God, you are assuming that we all share an at least partially congruent idea of God. But there are many ways to view God, and regardless of which one (if any) holds any merit, my view of God is going to influence my stance in this debate, and your view of God is going to influence your stance.

If we say that God is simply an omnipotent but impartial power, like the force in Star Wars, then yes, morality can exist without God, because then God doesn't have anything to do with morality. However, if you say that God is the source of all things good, then morality is intrinsically tied to God. Anything that God is is good and right, and whatever God isn't is bad and wrong. My views lean towards the latter, although good is not the only characteristic I attribute to him.

The other important factor in this debate is the idea of objectivity. How objective can we, as beings composed of the universe, claim to be? What do we have to judge objectivity against? The shortcoming of our ability to understand ourselves and our universe (therefore our ability to differentiate between objectivity and subjectivity) is first apparent in quantum mechanics. The Uncertainty Principle states that we cannot know both the precise momentum and the precise position of any given article, because the methods of measuring one (which rely on particles colliding and bouncing) changes the other. At first this seems to apply only to a relatively new and obscure area of science. But when we think about it, we see it has greater implications. The reason behind our uncertainty is that we have no objective background against which to measure the momentum and position of the particle. We only have the universe, which is an entirely subjective place. Even the very basic question of "Where am I?" Is unanswerable by us in ojective terms, becuase we can only measure against the universe, which changes everytime we measure it.

Perhaps it seems that I am extrapolating the Uncertainty Principle out beyond it's bounds. After all, thinking "this is right" is not the same as trying to determine the mechanics of the universe. It is not that the Uncertainty Principal as stated in physics applies to all things, but the idea persists, and it follows, by means of the universe's subjectivity, that an Uncertainty Principle should exist in philosophy, religion, and ethics. If everything the universe can do will change it's reality, then nothing in or of the universe can be objective. Therefore, as part of the universe, we can not be expected to produce anything objective. Neither can we expect to find in the universe any objective means of measuring anything.

The purpose of this incredibly long-winded explanation is to show that if any objective morality exists, it can not exist in the universe. The basis for good and evil must transcend the universe, thereby literally being supernatural. I think that this qualifies as at least a basic form of God, and therefore, no. To have an objective morality, you must acknowledge the existence of some form of higher being, even if that "being" is nothing more than a standard for judging right from wrong.

You are confusing law with morality. Morality is basic understanding of "right"/"wrong" that all human beings are either born with, or learn immidiately. I like to use examples.

A small child (let's say a four year old) punches her friend in the stomach. Her friend cries. The girl feels upset that she made her friend cry, and learns that hitting people isn't "right". This is a moral value.

That same small child doesn't like clothes. There itchy, and scratchy, and they catch in all the wrong places. She decides to run around naked. Her mother sees her behavior and spanks her for it. The girl doesn't want to run around naked any more because she knows she will get in trouble for it. This is legal "wrongness".

The two are ccompletely different. The first is present in all human beings, be they atheist, christian, buddhist, hindu, muslim, druid, wiccan, ect. As such, it is obviously not dependent upon beleif in a "God." The latter is what forms goverments and communities, and is present anywhere there are groups of humans, and is also entirely unrelated to a "God."

I assume that reality is objective. My basis has to do with the feedback I get from attempting to cause reality to conform to my intentions. I find two things to be true. First, it doesn't conform to my wishes. Second, I must conform to what appear to be reliable, testable, repeatable rules about its function. For me, the successes of science contradict a subjective interpretation of reality.

If one man exists in isolation, all of his acts are moral or immoral based on his own evaluation of the results.

I believe that you would agree that systems of morals inhabit minds. Decision making actors. They only inhabit minds, they are by nature subjective. This does not mean that one cannot offer objective analysis of a system of morals.

There are two pieces to decision making at the individual level. First you have analysis and modelling of reality. Second, you have the act of preferring/rejecting.

For myself my ideal is to be as objective as possible in step one, unbiased value-free analysis of reality. And then to apply my valuation of actions secondly.

Thus I would say that one can in theory objectively analyze moral systems in a variety of ways.

Let me give an example. I tend to choose not lying over lying. It is part of my personal ethic. People overwhelmingly prefer true statements over lies, leaving the white lies aside.

My "value-free analysis" of lying goes like this. Humans use information to model reality for decision making purposes. We predict the future and act in order to choose preferred anticipated outcomes over less desirable anticipated outcomes. When I lie I feed bad data into another persons decision making process. If my bad information contributes to failure to achieve their goals, their own due diligence will trace back the bad data and identify me as a bad source of data. After a small set of such results, that person will avoid or discard and information I have to offer.

In effect, a person who lies becomes irrelevant to others decision-making processes. There are mitigating factors where others would still interact with you, for example possession of power, wealth, or other important qualities. But for information purposes, that person would be marginalized. There are lies one can tell which have little impact. For example, telling someone they look nice, when they may not, or that something didn't bother you when it did. For each person, what they use as the criteria for evaluating the tradeoffs of lying vs. not lying are an individual thing.

In conclusion, morality is not a simple subject, but one's moral criteria can be analyzed in a value-free way, this would be an objective type of analysis. However, once the use of that analysis is a subjective thing.

The results of using subjectively chosen moral positions are objective and will be dictated to you by reality. Thus in the end reality is the judge and jury for any system of morals.

We live in the 21st century, where morality has been, on the global scale (though certainly there are religious exceptions), brought to its most rational, logical, and Englightened level: The Bottom Line.

Where once morality was a matter of Biblical interpretation, it is now that which is most productive, generates the most profit. Its' irrational to think that there's a big invisible man in the sky; by contrast, it is rational to find morality in Keynesian economics.

The moralities of old were not quantifiable: you couldn't prove that praying made you healthier, nor could you justify that institutionalized racism, sexism, and homophobia were beneficial to the state. You can, however, demonstrate a strong stock portfolio, a well-off business, a wealthy society.

I am by no means a capitalist, but it has laid the groundwork for future economies by presenting us with the most rational and demonstrable form we've ever come up with: the belief that something that improves overall quality of life (though obviously this doesn't always happen in Western liberal capitalism) is morally true.

Judging things by using a law of evolution, i.e comparing morality to what is of benefit evolutionarily, causes a great standstill among society. Benevolence would be measured on who appropriates evolution’s wants and desires suffficiently, rather than any sort of internal clockwork, dogma or rationalisation. Already there is internal conflict as to why one should conform to other forms of set moralities, ie God’s morality, but eventually, one would have greater pressure to conform as it involves eternal reward, eternal value, and the element of the unknown. Hence, we have otherwise morality defficient people choosing to be moral for a specific cause. Evolution would not present such cause. We would either conform to its ways out of fear of being persecuted with finite value, or, we simply see no purpose in living, and cease our very selves, and potientally, the lives of those around us. If evolution is correct, hypothetically, it serves to keep those of us who nurture enquiry in check by creating phenomenal falsehood in the form of belief, and thus, our fear of the unknown, spurred on by belief, is what keeps us from halting our lineage of progression and succession and allowing evolution to continue. What I am trying to say, with little clarity, is that whether or not God exists, the ethical codes and dilemmas presented by such a belief serve to benefit evolution, as evolution, in its grand perfection, has created a subjective, conscious, phenomenally driven being that serves to keep itself (evolution) alive through the lies, falsehood and deceit of a controlling phenomenal mind.