The Kalam Cosmological Argument is Sound

In this round I will break with my previous line by line format and present an analysis of this debate as a whole. In R1 I established that the crux of this debate rests on the truth of Premise 1 and Premise 2 of the Kalam Cosmological argument. I additionally interpreted the BOP such that all I must do is prove that it is more likely that these premises are true than that they are false. It is therefore not necessary that I remove all doubt from the reader's mind that my position is correct, but only that my position is stronger than my opponents. These positions have gone uncontested and so remain as a fact in this debate. Additionally, I have repeatedly pointed out that my arguments rest on metaphysical claims while my opponent's on empirical claims and that this means a) The truth of Pro's arguments comes before Con's and b) Pro's arguments provide more certainty than Con's. This means that the very nature of my arguments puts me in better position to meet the BOP. Con has offered no substantive refutation of this analysis. PREMISE 1: I have maintained that this premise seems so apparently obvious from experience that Con is the one with more work to do in convincing the judge. What this means is that if the judge is "on the fence" about whether Pro or Con has won Premise 1, the judge should err on the side of Pro. There is no reason to be "on the fence," as Pro has won Premise 1. My opponent agrees with me in his R3 that "from nothing comes nothing. " To be clear that my opponent agrees with this statement: I made the claim that he agreed during my own R3, and my opponent did not object. Now, if you refer to my original R1 argument b) you will see that the entire argument hinges on the truth of this statement. As I have repeatedly explained: If "from nothing comes nothing," then "something cannot come from nothing" and then "something can only come from something. " Thus, if something began to exist, it must have come from something, or, equivalently, it must have had a cause. The moment my opponent concedes that "from nothing comes nothing" I have won Premise 1. The rest of my opponents P1 argument is just an obfuscation of the true issue. My opponent tries to claim that QM disproves causality, ignoring my explanation of how this is untrue and dismissing a statement from a Professor of Physics explicitly denying that QM disproves causality. He further confuses the issue by claiming that I argue for creation ex nihilo and that we have no evidence of matter being created. Of course my entire contention in Premise 1 is that all things must be caused, i. e. that matter must come from somewhere, and my entire contention in Premise 2 is that matter (or "the universe") did in fact come into being at some point in time. To say that I advocate for creation ex nihilo and that matter cannot be created is to misunderstand the entire purpose of the debate. Finally, the issue of the Informal fallacy has been thoroughly addressed in my previous rounds. The structure of my argument clearly leaves this fallacy inapplicable. PREMISE 2 My opponent has not once addressed my argument a) for the impossibility of a universe with an eternal past! I invite the reader to note how this oversight by Con was mentioned in both my R2 and R3 arguments and yet my opponent ignores it. This argument is distinct from my b) argument: argument a) argues that an eternal universe would mean the present is impossible, while argument b) argues from the impossibility of actual infinites. A fair judge will at this point affirm premise 2 on my argument a) alone. I have defended argument b) against my opponent's mischaracterizations. My opponent did not respond to my argument that mathematics may describe reality without manifesting itself as real objects nor did he counter my demonstration in R3 that subtracting from infinity leads to mathematical paradoxes and so is not allowed. My initial Hotel example then demonstrates that actual infinites cannot exist and so an universe of infinite time is not possible. Of course this entire argument is superfluous, as I have won premise 2 solely on my uncontested argument a). Finally, only Pro offers a coherent cosmology. Pro advocates the Friedmann model in which the universe began with the singularity of the big bang- in short, a universe that began. Con claims at one moment that the big bang did not create time and at another that time did not exist before the big bang. He claims time exists pre big bang in a "loosely defined" sense. Exactly how this should be understood is never made clear, despite an explicit request in my R3 that Con clearly lay out his advocacy. Furthermore, Pro has provided evidence from research physicists that the "loosely defined" time Con claims existed before the big bang is not meaningfully different from the time we are all used to. In this "loosely defined" time the universe changes and decays toward the singularity, demonstrating that the universe is not in fact eternal. Even if Con's cosmology did show that Premise 2 was false, Con provides no evidence that his cosmology is more probable than the cosmology advocated by Pro. Per the BOP, it is not enough for Con to throw out a possible cosmology that contradicts Premise 2, he must demonstrate it is more probable than a cosmology that affirms Premise 2. Con thus fails to meet the BOP and a comparison of cosmologies becomes moot, seeing as both cosmologies are equally likely (as far as this debate is concerned). In this case the only arguments concerned with Premise 2 are a) and b), both of which I have won. CONCLUSION Pro has demonstrated with Premise 1 that all things that begin have a cause. Pro has further demonstrated with Premise 2 that the universe cannot have eternally existed and must have began. It then follows that the universe has a cause.