God exists.

My opponent provides the classic trinity of natural theology: A teleological argument from fine tuning, an unorthodox cosmological argument from the existence of the mind, and an ontological argument from Plantinga. Unfortunately, these arguments are no stronger than they were in the days of Hume and Kant. The fine tuning argument my opponent uses is taken straight from William Lane Craig, although oddly Craig is not credited. [1] The argument is based on controversial bleeding edge science which may be refuted or refined in the future. On the other hand, this is not out of keeping with the tradition of Christian and Muslim apologetics, which is why most cosmological arguments prior to the early modern period assume that the planets are mounted on transparent crystalline spheres and rotate in circles. [2] My opponent invites us to weigh three options: necessity, chance, and design, suggesting that we will find design the most plausible after necessity and chance are allegedly eliminated. I have four objections to this argument. First, the argument does not establish the omnipotent, omniscience, or all goodness of the designer, so it is irrelevant to the current debate, strictly speaking (see the definition in round 1). Second, the only reason design looks even remotely plausible is that he considers necessity and chance first. Is it really more likely that a conscious architect set the constants as they are than that they are the result of some unknown physical law? All of the minds we have experience with require physical brains, which means that the universe has to exist for them to be conscious. Third, our basis for distinguishing between things that are designed and things that are not is that we have seen things being designed by humans, so we can compare other things to them to conclude that they were designed. We have never seen a universe being designed by a human, and the universe does not resemble anything made by a human, so we have no basis for concluding that it had a conscious designer. Fourth, the fine tuning argument is very anthropomorphic. What is the basis for concluding that a designer would want to create life? The only apparent basis is to assume that it would like the same things we like, and we like life, so the designer would like life. But this is just a projection of our desires onto reality, which is hardly reasonable. My opponent's second argument assumes that (1) qualia will never be accounted for in terms of matter, even with our most advanced neuroscience and physics millions of years in the future, and (2) property dualism is false. These are massive assumptions, he provides no sufficient argument for either of them, and one or the other would be rejected by most philosophers of mind today. He attempts to use the interaction argument to refute dualism, but it is clearly silly to argue that because we do not know how our minds interact with the physical world, there is no mind independent physical world. It is self evident that our minds can interact with matter. Every science starts with certain basic assumptions that are self evident from observation. We may not fully understand how our minds interact with matter, but they clearly do. My opponent's third argument is Plantinga's modal ontological argument. First of all, even Plantinga doesn't think this is a proof of theism - he thinks it makes it rationally permissible to be a theist. [3] Second, the premise that the MGB is possible is question begging, since it asserts that a necessary being exists in some possible world, which is the same thing as saying that it exists in every possible world. The premise is too close to the conclusion. Third, my opponent has not provided any observational evidence for the definition of God that the argument takes off from, so the entire argument is invalid. Definitions require evidence just like any other assertion. An argument that is not supported by observation at any point may be an interesting bit of poetry, but it is not a valid cognitive product. [1] William Lane Craig, "Reasonable Faith," third edition, p. 161 [2] For examples, see William Lane Craig, "The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz" [3] Plantinga, "The Nature of Necessity"