"Does God Exist," Redux - A-ThiestSocialist has failed to prove that God exists

Unfortunately, my opponent has still not addressed any of the serious shortcomings in his original arguments, and seems to be under a serious misunderstanding about what this debate is about in the first place - which may, in part, explain that failure. To address his last point first: "Also, just because he proved any of my arguments false, he still provided no proof against God's existence." Two serious problems here - I have proven ALL of his arguments false, not simply "any," and the point of the debate has clearly been missed. Note the topic - we are debating the merits of A-ThiestSocialist's so-called "proofs," and only that. I do not need to provide any "proof" against God's existence, since that's not what we are debating here. We are concerned solely with the validity of the arguments which have been presented by my opponent. And, unfortunately, he has failed to address any of the shortcomings in those arguments which I pointed out in the first round. Taking again the first "argument" first - the so-called "argument from absolutes," my opponent has now said: "The argument comes down to the fact that with the atheist world view of matter in motion, all things that are not tangible have to have been human created or influenced, however abstract absolutes are not human created or influenced, thus the only explanation for this and the only possible way they can exist is in the theist world view." Once again, a completely undefined phrase (the supposed "atheist world view of matter in motion," which remains as meaningless as it was before) is used, and a mere assertion is made, with no support whatsoever, that this "world view" supposedly requires "all things that are not tangible to have been human created or influenced." This is nonsense, and so constitutes a mere straw man. I know of no atheists, or no recognized "atheist world view," which believe or require this notion; the idea is quite clearly wrong, since there are obviously numerous intangibles which are not human-created. This is by no means evidence for the existence of a God, however, UNLESS someone makes the further assumption (as I pointed out originally) that such things MUST for some reason have a "creator," i.e., a conscious entity which deliberately brought them into existence. IF that were the case, then yes, the "theist world view" would be the most logical alternative, but that assumption itself suffers from the significant problem (which again I originally pointed out, and which my opponent apparently acknowledges) that it simply introduces a new "uncreated" entity (God) to get around the problem of another one. The remainder of the argument is similarly composed of unsupported assumptions and non sequiturs; it boils down to a simple assertion that God's the only way to explain X (where "X" could be practically any assertion) and "therefore" God exists. Nonsense. And again, despite my opponent's attempts to misdirect the debate into a different direction, it is not up to me to show what can or cannot exist in the supposed "atheist world view" - the issue at hand is the logical validity of my opponent's arguments, and I believe it has been amply demonstrated that they have none. On to the "transcendental" argument, my opponent now expresses concern that perhaps his claims were not sufficiently "self-explanatory." But it is not my failure to understand his claims that are the problem here - the claims ARE clear enough, it is simply that they make no logical sense. Again, we see numerous unsupported assertions and assumptions, and nothing in the way of a logical structure to tie them all together. "Logic is perfect and absolute" - what is this actually supposed to mean, and why should we accept it as a given? "Logic" is claimed to be another "abstract universal" (another interesting phrase), but if the first argument is invalid, that claim certainly doesn't help this second argument. If logic is supposed to be "perfect and absolute," then I am forced to ask my opponent to clarify exactly what this is supposed to mean in light of such things as Goedel's famous "Incompleteness Theorem." The basic premise, though is given as by my opponent as: "Furthermore, the premise is that to argue God's existence pressupposes God's existence." Really? If this were true, then to argue the existence of ANY entity would "presuppose" that entity's existence, and therefore "prove" it. You can. using this sort of "logic," prove the existence of God, Zeus, the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, among others. At least equally problematically, the inverse of the argument is equally valid in terms of logical structure - to argue an entity's NON-existence obviously would have to "presuppose" that entity's non-existence. If this is so, then I should simply be able to argue my opponent out of existence right now, and save us all the trouble of a third round. :-) Clearly, though, the argument is simply not logically valid, being based on unsupported (and unsupportable) assumptions, much as the proverbial "house built upon sand." The final argument, the so-called "argument on morals," remains on even shakier ground (if such a thing is even possible!). My opponent recaps it thus: "The argument consists of the idea that God's revelation of himself created morals and a moral code. With moral absolutes, this means that man could not have simply agreed upon a moral code, it instead points to something else. Without a God, there is no real way to say what is moral and what isn't without making morals conventional, but then absolute morals don't exist; however, absolute morals do exist, and thus the Christian worldview stands." As was pointed out in round 1, the notion that there are such things as "absolute morals" is hardly a given, and in fact is an assumption on the part of my opponent. My opponent has in no way proven that there are such things, and that in fact mankind has not simply evolved a fairly consistent moral code across the various human societies. The notion that a God is required to say "what is moral and what isn't" is again an unsupported assertion, and one which is easily shown incorrect by pointing to any of a number of counterexamples. Buddhist philosophy, for instance, which is most definitely NOT based on any notion of a Supreme Being (Buddhism in fact bein quite silent on the subject a a Deity or Deities), nonetheless has a very clear code of morality. And there are any number of examples of well-known atheist philosophers who, despite their lack of a belief in a God, not only have clear moral codes but can argue strongly and convincingly a rational basis for them. The final claim above - that it is specifically the CHRISTIAN worldview which stands - is again a complete non sequitur, since no evidence or reasoning been presented to show that Christianity has any special claim on this argument. As an aside, the notion of "absolute morals," if they do exist, is actually quite problematic for the basic Christian notion of God. I suspect that my opponent would answer the question "Is God always good?" in the affirmative. But then we are forced to ask "What defines 'good'?" If "good" is determined by God, then the meaning of "good" could clearly be changed at God's whim. But if "good" is a separate absolute, then an "always good" God winds up with no free will whatsoever; he is constrained to ALWAYS act per this external, absolute definition. We also would be faced with the problem of just where this "absolute" came from, if it were not created by God (and therefore changeable by God, and not truly absolute)? The typical response to this dilemna is that God established "good" in the first place, and THEN constrained himself to be "aways good" - but this again would remove God's free will, and presents a model of a God who willingly transforms himself into a mindless automaton.