God exists.

I will admit that because of the character and round limits of this debate, I have basically been giving bare-bones arguments and summaries of arguments. Transcendental Arguments and Skepticism I am making a metaphysical argument. I am not saying that atheists (in practice) cannot know anything, or that they cannot know that they know. I am saying that they cannot do this in principle. In other words, atheists can know things and know that they know things, but only because theism is true. My opponent appeals to induction to give a naturalistic account of knowledge. He also rightly guesses that I will challenge this. He understands that there is a problem with justifying induction, namely that the naturalist must appeal to induction in order to argue for induction. So, he simply labels it as self-evident and moves on. I might agree that induction is self-evident. But that is because of my arguments about cognitive function. It is self-evident because of theism. It is self-evident because our cognitive faculties were designed to take it as self-evident since we cannot justify it apart from an omniscient knowledge about the uniformity of nature. I brought this up in Round 2. He then says that critiques given by people like Hume are self-refuting because they refer to induction. But my critique is not quite like Hume's. If TI is Induction given Theism, and NI is Induction given Naturalism, then I can construct a Hume-like critique using observations made with TI about how induction works in order to show that NI is unjustified. God's Cognitive Faculties My opponent equates knowledge arrived at apart from investigation as unvalidated knowledge. He has no reason to do this. I was arguing that God's self-contained knowledge does not require investigation, because God is the designer of the world and providentially controls it. In this way he has infallible omniscience, not fallible unreliable knowledge. Fallibility and Omniscience I will admit that the jigsaw puzzle is not a perfect analogy. But, it is not the argument itself, only an illustration. The idea behind it is that you have to inductively surmise relationships between the pieces to even understand the pieces themselves. You might think the pieces go together one way, only later to find a piece that shows you were wrong that those pieces even went together. My opponent wants to appeal to inductive inferences to say that the knowledge we have is reasonable. That's fine. But does that work in a naturalistic system? You would have no reason to think that your cognitive faculties were produced in such a way to produce true or reliable inferences. Nor would you have any reason to believe that the universe is a place conducive to inductive inferences. While I am appealing to a radical skepticism, my opponent hasn't answered this problem. My opponent appeals to knowledge that is intuitively right to show that it is reasonable. But we aren't debating what we can know. We are debating the preconditions for knowing. He says "it surely is not reasonable to doubt on the grounds that our senses might be systematically wrong." I agree. Part of my proof is that knowledge is possible? But what makes it possible? That our senses are systematically designed to bring about right answers. The combination of Naturalism and evolution give us the idea that our senses were not designed to bring about true belief, only survival long enough to reproduce. Given these conditions, it is reasonable to discuss the radical skepticism that might reasonably follow. The Moral Argument My opponent questions whether, if there were a transcendent basis for morality, that it would need to be a person. It seems to me that morality is ultimately personal, not impersonal. Moral obligations do not apply to impersonal objects or forces, they only apply to persons. I would take it as more likely that the basis of morality is personal - namely a person. My opponent argues that moral facts supervene on natural facts, ergo we should expect a natural explanation of moral facts, rather than a supernatural one. But this is basically to say that given physicalism we can expect naturalism. Utilitarianism My opponent defines this as: "morality is based on the greatest good for the greatest number." But what is the greatest "good" for any individual? The very idea either assumes some teleology or some way of determining "good" outside of utilitarianism itself. It also suffers from an inability to know that the consequences of any action will result in" the greatest good for the greatest number." Often our actions lead to consequences we did not foresee. This could be solved by my argument from omniscience, which would mean utilitarianism would fit better in a theistic system than a naturalistic one. The Trinity Argument My opponent gives no reason for why unity and plurality cannot be co-ultimate. He gives no reason why the Trinity would not provide this. And yet, he also does not claim that the doctrine of the Trinity contains a contradiction. He simply calls the argument a contradiction. In short, he gives you no real reason to doubt it. Conclusion He does say that even if my arguments were correct, we could not say that the various beings that are necessary given my arguments are the same being. I disagree. Each of them ultimately must be the creator of the universe. And it does no good to resort to polytheism. The God who is omniscient is omniscient because he created the universe, and by the omniscience argument must also be the one who created our cognitive faculties. The being from the moral argument has to be the creator of the universe and must be self-sufficient (a se) so that he does not answer to a good above and beyond himself. And the God in whom we find unity and plurality must be the basis of all being, and also the creator of the universe. Having multiple gods with different beings would make these arguments contradictory and we have no reason to think that they are. In addition, I would say that the doctrine of the Trinity is the only place we find the idea of unity and plurality being co-ultimate. But, we cannot know that a triune God exists outside of that triune God revealing himself. The only place such a thing has even claimed to happen is in the Bible. The Bible describes such a state of affairs that unifies the arguments and presents a God that satisfies the definition my opponent has given for this debate.