The Statement 'God Exists' is Rationally Justifiable.

Preface:I flatly disagree with Pro that I need to disprove all of his arguments to defeat the resolution; I only need to show the resolution is unsound. Pro defined God as: “Singular Non-Contingent Essential Existence Uncaused Efficient First Cause”He needs to demonstrate all of these elements to fulfil the resolution, simply demonstrating something singular exists, or some essential existence exists is insufficient to demonstrate that. As such disproving just one of these attributes is sufficient to negate.To make things worse for Pro, his entire argument is formed with the foundation of something that has essential existence, since all his subsequent arguments presuppose an essential existence. Thus just refuting this as a matter of factly causes his tower of cards to topple, as the foundations have been swept out. I will deal directly with Pro’s arguments this round.SemanticsI strongly object to Pro’s switch in definitions of ‘necessary’. Indeed a common notion of necessary means ‘could not be any other way’, and metaphysical necessity refers to ‘no world can exist otherwise’. Both Pro and myself make several instances of the use of this word throughout this debate clearly with my definition in hand.As a result I reject the notion that ‘if an entity has no cause it is necessary’. Since it’s not incoherent to posit possible worlds where things are different, yet not via. causality. Thus the world would be entirely contingent, yet uncaused.=Rebuttals=Argument 1“Existence is necessary to itself, otherwise it wouldn’t be. Therefore, an Essential (necessary) Existence is necessary.”I have re-read this about 30 times, and I have yet to see an argument. There simply isn’t an argument here, and this can be trivially shown by sticking Pro’s points in a syllogism:P1. ? ? ?P2. Existence is necessary to itselfC. Therefore an Essential existence is necessaryPro has yet to jump this sizable gap between his one premise and the conclusion. This entire debate literally hinges on this one argument for Pro. If he fails to uphold this his entire case fails.Moreover, premise 2 is just a bare assertion, as his only defence is ‘otherwise it would not be’, this is not an argument. I am a millionaire, otherwise I would not be. To make things worse still, Pro is treating the notion of existence itself like an existing ‘thing’, which even under Cartesian Essentialism (which I will address fully later) is absurd, as existence is simply the difference between an essence that is actual, and one that is not actual.Furthermore, Pro makes an enormous jump between something being the ‘Essential Existance’ and something being the ‘First Cause’. With no justification for this logical jump. If the universe for example is an essential existence, then the universe can just exist as-is necessarily, and causality would just be an emergent phenomena. There would be no ‘first cause’ any more than a triangle has a ‘first side’.Pro’s last argument, that Essential existence must exist necessarily is false IF the notion of an ‘essential existence’ is metaphysically incoherent.Argument 2I argued in my opening that eternalism is a potent and coherent ontology of time, and thus is at least logically possible. Moreover, eternalism is compatible with either a finite or infinite universe. Pro’s arguments against an eternal universe presuppose presentism, where there is a real progression from past to present, from which his absurdity arguments might hold some weight. However Pro has given absolutely no reason to believe Presentism is true.In eternalism, the entire universe exists at once, the past present and future all exist, there is nothing any more absurd about there being infinite changes than there is an infinite number of intergers. If all events past and present exist at once, then the present events would have already ‘happened’. Even under presentism however, Pro’s arguments presuppose there is an absolute ‘beginning’, or first moment in time, in an eternally changing universe this perfectly logical. Physical models such as eternal inflation (cf. multiverse) are built with similar notions, and are mathematically consistent.Argument 3Pro’s only argument here is that there needs to be a cause of existence of change between two independent essential existences. But gives no reason to believe that it even needs one, I could just assert they may be different just as a brute fact, remember that one essential existence just exists as a brute fact, so why not two that are explicitly different? To take this further, why not an infinite number of them? Also remember an essential existence is not subject to causation, thus to speak of the causation of these is absurd.Argument 4Pro gives no reason to believe that an essential existence, if coherent and true, has any causal power at all. Why it would indeed render the existence of the universe for example. Remember Pro explicitly defined causality to refer to ‘events’. This hits Pro since essentially anything that is not an ‘event’ (such as the universe as a whole in eternalism) is exempt. Thus I can just assert the universe exists contingently as a brute fact, and it would be logically consistent, and it would refute the notion that an essential existence is the first cause. Thus this ‘argument’ is unsound, even assuming it’s not a bare assertion.‘The statement ‘God Exists’ is Deductively True’“Existence is necessary to itself, because otherwise it would be contingent”We can reject this entire argument simply by virtue that existence is not a ‘thing’ or an ‘it’. Thus existence is neither contingent nor necessary. Pro needs to clarify what he actually means by ‘existence’ here, as the argument is unintelligible.=Negative Case=Essential Existance – Descartian EssentialismRejectionPro’s arguments for “essential existence” is founded upon Descartial Essentialism, which postulates that all objects have an undetectable property of ‘essence’, and an objects essence precedes its actualisation (essence precedes existence), or vice versa.First, Pro has given absolutely no reason to believe this philosophy of descartian essentialism is sound, which this literally underpins his entire case. Other philosophies such as existentialism or existential nihilism are mutually incompatible with it, and existential nihilism doesn’t make the extra claim of this undetectable property of ‘essence’. Moreover, essentialism is essentially untestable on every level, since it doesn’t make any physical claims, why not just reject the useless presuppositions and simply refer to objects as “concepts that exist”.A concept of an object is simply just a description of an object, and an object exists without the additional baggage of ‘essence’. Indeed, none of our physical laws cares about an object’s intended purpose, it’s history, and it’s future, they only describe the state it is in ‘now’. For example, this philosophy would argue that two physically identical lumps of gold are inherently different purely by virtue of their manufacture methods. If one lump of gold was simply a remelted natural gold nugget, and the other was chemically extracted, each nugget would have a different “essence”, yet this would no impact at all on a posterori experience of the lumps of gold. The lump of gold made one way ‘has’ something the other does not.IncoherenceEssentialism runs into serious problems when existence is treated like a property or predicate, as Pro is attempting to do with his arguments, and including that property within the essence of it. Fact is if we can do it for one thing, then we can predicate existence into virtually any description coherently. We could define something as “an Australia that orbits the moon that exists”. Clearly it’s not the case that such an object actually exists in reality, thus we can conclude that the description must be logically incoherent somehow. Given that ‘an Australia’ is easily coherently defined, heck we have an example of it on Earth at this very moment, and that an Australia that orbits the moon is a coherent concept, the problem must lie when we apply the ‘that exists’ portion of the definition.Thus, we would need to expect very good reasons why an ‘essential existence that is the first cause’ is metaphysically coherent, but ‘an essential existence that is Australia shaped and orbits the moon’ is not. Moreover, Pro would need to do this without committing the special pleading fallacy. To make the claim existence is a predicate is to also make the claim that existence adds to the essence of a being, but this is evidently false since by positing an essential existence and THEN stating ‘this thing exists’ we are simply making an incoherent statement “this thing that exists, exists”.Immanuel Kant notes that it is not incoherent to deny the existence of something that by exists essentially as contradictions only arise when with both the subject (God) and the predicate (existence) are both sustained, the non-existence would simply deny the predicate. Given we have no contradiction internally in denying the predicate, and externally is a matter of metaphysics, it no longer follows it exists necessarily. He argues that a concept is a conditional, thus for example if a triangle exists, then it necessarily has three sides. Similarly, if an essential existence exists, then it exists necessarily (all metaphysically possible worlds will contain it). However this makes no progress on the question on whether or not it actually exists.Moreover, such notions of essentialism are predicated on having a sound foundation of pre-ontology, which is the study of what we mean by ‘being’. While we have an approximation of what we mean by “to be” or “is”, the notion still escapes precise conceptual understanding. Thus to posit “something exists”, and the much more extreme jump in Pro’s case to say something has “essential existence” is a massive jump in ontology when we do not have an adequate foundation in pre-ontology to do so.