God Does not Exist

Due to both the negative phrasing of the resolution and Pro's forfeit, it has been definitively established that BOP is on my opponent. This notwithstanding, I will give a brief overview of why Catholics believe their faith's tradition of Who God is is true, just to give people something to read should they find this debate..1. Reason alone can take us to the existence of God. Different "proofs" (in quotation marks because the word is used in a different sense than the scientific sense that is common today) of the existence of God have been in circulation for a while now. The most popular today (perhaps due to the influence of William Lane Craig [1]) is perhaps the Kalam Cosmological Argument, which is as follows: Everything that begins to exist had a cause The universe began to exist Therefore the universe has a cause The proponent of the Kalam Cosmological argument would then explain that this cause would have to be immaterial, timeless and unimaginably powerful. This is because there is no matter or space before the existence of the universe and if it had these characteristics it would not explain its own existence. The powerful thing because to be the cause of the universe you would have to have the power to create everything out of nothing. That's pretty darn powerful. You could take instead any of the five ways of Aquinas or the many, many other arguments for God's existence 2. The testimony of the apostles and their successors in Scripture is accurate Taken strictly as historical documents, the gospels, epistles and acts of the apostles are among the most heavily investigated and the most accurate of ancient historical documents. There is little cause to believe the sacred writers were lying, as they had no personal gain from what they said. Nor is it probable that they deluded themselves into believing what they testified to, as they had every reason to believe the contrary (Jewish tradition had nothing to lead them to believe in a suffering messiah, the resurrection, the trinity etc). The life and teachings of Jesus Christ, as described in these documents leads us to what is referred to as CS Lewis's Trilema. "I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to." (From Mere Christianity [2]) 3. The successors of the apostles had the teaching authority conferred by Christ. Particularly in the case of the successors of Peter in what we now call the papacy. "He who hears you, hears me; he who rejects your rejects me, he who rejects me, rejects Him who sent me" (Luke 10. 16). Therefore the Magisterium of the Church is the surest way to come to know the true God. (3) Sources(1) http://www.philosophyofreligion.info...(2) http://en.wikipedia.org...'s_trilem(3) http://www.ewtn.com... This being said I once again await the arguments from Pro to support the resolution.