God exists.

You have seemed to have missed my point entirely and thereby the response you give is nothing but a straw man. 1a The implicit premise in your point here is that only physical entities can exert power; this is untrue. The notion of Santa Claus or a myth like the American Dream holds power in influence without possessing a physical reality. Assuming that a deity is physical or non-physical was not my point because I was describing god's essence as ineffable and inconceivable to the human understanding-- always confined by the laws of this universe. I was not using the term 'entity' as reference to a physical thing, a Cartesian res extensa, but as a thing that is in existence. Or as the dictionary defines, a 'being or existence,especially when considered as distinct, independent,or self-contained'. http://www.dictionary.com...1b My definition was predicated on the one given quality of god, that is an existence possessive of the power to cause the universe, to which more qualities cannot be ascribed. Your point I see as paralleled to arguing that one knows the qualities of someone living under the American Dream because one knows that they abide by the American Dream, namely that they are successful individuals. How god manifests as a particular being, an existence, is unknown. What is deemed 'successful' and 'individual' could have innumerable possibilities and how they arrived there is likewise vague. Predicates and qualities are two seperate labels. The second issue was precisely the one to which I was addressing. Why god (no capital 'G' required) instead of an impersonal reality preceding the universe which caused the universe? What you failed to address was why we cannot call the latter god and on what grounds there is a rational essence to the word 'god'. 2aYour reformulations of the cosmological argument on time here, I dispute only insofar as they again avoid the problem. Unless you dispute the Big Bang theory, the universe began. Nothing which begins doesn't have cause-- as set out by Leibniz's Law of Sufficient Reason. The tension I was arguing was of that between 'ex nihilo, nihil fit' and causality. You mention "the first point of time", it is just plain avoidance not to discuss how this point initiated. 2b Yeats, in the Vision, describes 'the universe a great egg that turns inside-out perpetually without braking its shell'; a universe expanding out and then crunching in, a perennial cycle of creation and destruction. I would agree with you, but unfortunately, science is currently not in total support of the Big Crunch theory after it was calculated that the expansion of the universe is accelerating rather than slowing down; that eventually all energy will be so spread out as to be a sort of nothingness. You cannot assume that the first instance of our universe ensued from all matter condensing down to a single point. Because you didn't respond to my source question, I will just cite an 'expert' opinion blog which I think explains my point quite well. https://www.quora.com...2cIn the comment section you agreed to engage in this debate by using a deist concept of god which I described as 'a supernatural, independent existence that started the universe and is completely impersonal to it.' I see little tension to why this conflicts with a pre-universal reality. I did offer you this little tension for you to use as an objection, which you did not take up. I would also like to mention the pantheists here, Einstein and Spinoza, who define god in completely naturalistic terms. I personally interpret Spinoza as calling god the totality of reality, ontology itself. From this, I would argue it reasonable that to dehumanise god is perfectly acceptable; though Abrahamic beliefs and popular religions have monopolised the definition of God as being a personal being, this is not essential to a rational concept of the word 'god'. Supernatural is defined as 'of,relating to,or being above or beyond what is natural;unexplainable by natural law or phenomena; abnormal' http://www.dictionary.com...Natural laws of this universe contain that of causation: that everything must be caused including the universe itself under the Big Bang theory. My contention was that for something to exist without being caused is in itself supernatural; it is beyond our natural laws and what we define as natural. Now, why I don't think that this is subject to the fallacy of composition is precisely because the universe in not an elastic band; it was caused... With the Big Crunch theory in decline, a pre-existing reality to the universe bringing it into being is the most plausible option available. This is essentially what I meant by arguing that whatever one's belief, it has to sacrifice some sort of logic. One has to permit some sort of eternity. Why not the deist god?Directly regarding the multiverse, I was referring to a reality external to our universe (a field) in which other universes (particulars) exist. I was A) attempting to reduce the question down to that of being: why does something exist rather than nothing? and B) argue that there are mechanisms external to the universe by which universes are created and reside whether this simply be a causal relation by which one universe causes another. Additionally, by focusing on the multiverse, a widely contested theory, I by no means 'win the debate'. This does not follow. I encourage you to re-read my first argument now that we should be on the same strand of thought. Your brief did not state when I had to present arguments, with premises and conclusions; currently, we are debating premises. If I come to the judgement that no such argument can be made (I'm not so hubristic as to think that I have a watertight argument for god's existence) I will say so as our debate progresses. PSYou identify the multiverse theory as 'atheist'; it is secular. One can believe the multiverse theory and be religious.And, because the Big Crunch theory is still possible but just not probable given current data, I defer to Ockham's Razor 'Ockham': the simplest and most probable is likely true. We will get nowhere debating this issue since it is contested.