The Universe's Existence is Explicable

To refocus the purpose of this debate, we need to note that the topic is "The Universe's Existence is Explicable" and is not "The Universe's Explanation is Expressible". The former is an ontological issue as it addresses "existence" which is a state of being. I also made it clear that this is not about what that explanation IS nor did I claim that "Everything in Existence is Explicable" as that is not the issue at hand. In sum, I had a strict focus on the plausibility of an ontological explanation for the existence of the universe. Ontology was thus not an arbitrary ad hoc invention as my opponent would have us think but has been intrinsic to this debate since the first round. By definition, something is explicable if it is capable of being explained and if you notice, I go further than this by establishing that it is plausible to think it has an explanation. To explain in this case is not to simply "make plain or clear" but in context clearly refers to offering "reasons for or a cause of". To dispute this, my opponent claims that explicability first requires expressibility but this is clearly false because it is possible that Y is objectively the cause of X apart from me being able to know or express that. Something can therefore be explicable without being directly knowable or expressible to us. This is what ontology is concerned with and not once did I suggest that ontology is being itself but rather, it is the subject in question. Furthermore, in order to have "knowledge" you need to be a being that is capable of knowing something. To express something, you must know what to express as a being with the capacity to express what it knows. This knowledge does not necessitate the truth of a belief but it does necessitate that you know that you believe something, otherwise you could not express a belief. The logical priority here is inescapable, but of course in practice we do need all three precisely because we are a being with these rational capacities. Unfortunately, my opponent accuses me of saying that I can do ontology without knowledge or language when just a sentence later I outrightly said that we use all three in practice. Logical priority is not the same as being actually prior. The former is equivalent to "a gun is logically prior to shooting a bullet" and the latter is equivalent to "a bullet is shot without a gun". Being logically prior does not mean that I can shoot a bullet without a gun but that I cannot shoot a bullet without a gun. Noticing the subtle difference between the two is essential here. In reality I need to exercise all three in order to have this debate but this does not remove their logical priority nor does it take from their subject matter. To see how this is true, let's look at logic. To make a meaningful statement I must implicitly use logic. However, this is not the same as talking about "logic" because I am merely using logic in order to make a statement about something else. The same holds true for ontology, epistemology and language. I may use language to talk about ontology but that does not mean that I am talking about language. While I have been called out for having a limited view of what language does, the definition my opponent provided only reinforced what I said and does nothing to refute the arguments here. The fact that language is a "formal system of symbols governed by grammatical rules combining signs with particular meanings" is just a detailed way of explaining how we express things. Later on he claims that he offered all of my definitions for the different kinds of explanations already but I see nothing of the sort other than a quote from the dictionary, which is fine but not the same as what I offered. The entire point of my formulation was to demonstrate that plausibility can only exist for explanations and not brute facts. This is because something is determined to be plausible precisely because it possesses explanatory power or reasons for why something is the case. Brute facts, on the other hand, by definition do not and cannot posses this feature as it does not explain anything but simply asserts that something is the case because that's just how it is. Strangely, my opponent responds by arguing that this is faulty because he only suggests that there are brute facts, not how any one brute fact is a brute fact. That makes no sense, I am not asking how a brute fact is plausibly a brute fact but only how it is true that a fact (namely the universe) is a brute fact. You cannot say that a brute fact is plausibly true, you need to show why it is impossible for there to be an explanation for the universe as my counter formulation demonstrated. How this entails that an explanation is more plausible than a brute fact even if an explanation is impossible is beyond me because I admitted that an explanation would NOT be plausible if it were shown to sometimes be impossible in principle. Of course this excludes attempting to explain square circles because such things cannot exist. Next, my opponent claims that premise one is merely an assertion. The very fact that he requests a reason for the first premise is to implicitly assume that a "proposition is plausible if it has explanatory power". If I said that the premise was a brute fact, he should rightly have a problem with that. This is exactly what I pointed out in the second round and my opponent said "Yes, it is necessary to explain why a proposition is inexplicable". Now he claims that I did "not prove this but only asserts this". More confusion arises when he claims that it is not enough to "say that there is an explanation there we just can't know it". This is not at all what I had said as I think it is possible to know exactly what that explanation is but that is simply not the subject of this debate. Not only that but he asserts that I totally ignored his appeal to "frame of reference" when I have addressed it since the start of my distinctions and on the last paragraph of my last response. I also see no equivalence to the statement that "X is beautiful because X has all the qualities necessary for objective beauty" with "X is beautiful because X is beautiful". Even if this is true, this just ignored the alternative explanation, namely a biological mechanism that I provided too. He then attempts to transform the claim that "the cause of A is B" into "Cause of B is B" which is nonsensical and two completely different statements. I could turn anything into a tautology with that kind of logic. Lastly, he attempts to distinguish between "the universe has an explanation" from "X is the explanation for the universe". He says the former is meaningful but the second one must be meaningless. Like I said before, I am affirming the former and not the latter. This is again not a debate about what that explanation is and whether it can be meaningfully expressed or not as "X" but about whether the universe can be plausibly thought to have an explanation at all. In response to my evolutionary analogy, he attempts to appeal to what I can only perceive as an artificial distinction. To say "I cannot express the reasons for the universe" is the same as saying that "the reasons for the universe are inexpressible" precisely because inexpressibility is a person's inability to express something. My opponent has claimed that "In fact I am sure that there is a cause of some kind" and has in the past admitted to the superiority of explanations while affirming the meaningfulness of statements like "the universe has an ontological explanation". All of this seems to suggest that we actually agree. In closing, I think I can safely conclude that my opponent has incorrectly appealed to expressibility as a condition, misunderstood the debate's objective, equivocated between terms and has failed to provide a compelling reason for the inexplicability of the universe. I'd like to thank my opponent for this opportunity. I hope that no offense will be taken here!