God exists

I. Now to wrap this up. II. Omnipotence Con knows this as well as I do, but his BARBARA conversion is yet still a strawman. Note that he has changed the premises to attempts again to fit it into such, but it simply does not work. The two interchanged premises: P3) If the universe has a conscious fine tuner, it must be all-powerful P3*) Any universe that has a fine tuner has an all-powerful fine tuner These premises are simply not equivalent. P3 is a subset of P3*, but not equal. P3 is only conditional on this specific universe, and is made conditional of what we know about this specific universe. It doesn't have to assume anything about all universes, as it is unnecessary. It is valid to go from P3* to P3, but not vice versa. Any attacks on P3* are straw men as already affirmed. Pro seems to miss one critical point regarding his 'Power units' analogy for creation of the universe. Units of WHAT? Without the universe, any talk of power and energy etc are completely meaningless, since the very framework by which we determine something to be powerful, is simply did not exist before creation. That's exactly why God MUST be omnipotent, since he has created the framework by the very which we can have power in the first place. Therefore to say God could have been more/less powerful is a nonsensical statement (as affirmed in R3). Remember what power actually means in physics: Power = Energy/Time But, neither energy nor time exist without the universe, and hence any being which both creates and manipulates this framework/fundamental laws/constants is an excellent example of what an omnipotent one would be. In fact it's hard to imagine an omnipotent being without assuming it would create/manipulate the laws of nature. Therefore the point of Omnipotence is well affirmed and my opponent's objections simply miss the mark. III. The FTA I already affirmed in both my opening and subsequent rounds exactly what I meant by 'finely tuned', I'll leave the voters to go back and look to see if I have answered this objection or not. Moreover I never made the claim that life could not have come about in other ways, I haven't even made the claim about life in the first place, I only demonstrated that with what we do already know, if that the fundamental constants have exceptionally low tolerances for even the remotely interesting universe to occur. It is a bonus that this encapsulates life, but it argues for so much more, including stars galaxies, asymmetrical dust clouds or the fact the universe is not one big black hole or a cloud of diffuse hydrogen. Therefore Pro's continued attacks on my non-assertions regarding life are simply off the mark. Even leading atheist physicists accept that the universe is finely tuned: ". .. we can compare their actual configuration to all the possible configurations they could have been in. The answer is, our observed universe is highly non-generic, and in the past it was even more non-generic, or "finely tuned. " - Sean Carroll Con puts a false burden on me to demonstrate that this universe is the only way something interesting could have occurred. This is flatly false. All I had to do, and I have successfully done, is to show that the number of 'failed' universes vastly outnumber the number of successful universes for my arguments to work. And that is a fact that Con has not contended. There simply isn't much place for Pro to argue here, Pro hasn't even suggested where the science breaks downs and what possibilities could be missed, the situation is simple, the number of sterile universes (not just sterile for life) vastly outnumber the number of viable universes. It is like throwing a pack of cards in the air and ending up with a card-castle! We very much are in the position to see genuine examples of fine tuning, because we know by analogy what a failed house of cards looks like, it's spectacularly bad! It simply doesn't matter how many viable universes there are, what does matter is how many viable universes there are IN RELATION to failed universes. Therefore Pro's number analogy of 2 to 5 is futile if the search-space for winning numbers is between 1 and a million. IV. Kalam Cosmological Argument Pro once again reasserted that there could have been a naturalistic cause, but I have already eliminated this possibility by the fact that naturalistic causes are necessarily part of the universe, and the universe began with the Big Bang. Moreover we have zero evidence if any 'random impersonal immaterial substance', yet we have an abundance of evidence of minds with causal ability. As such it is substantially more sound to appeal to what we do know than to appeal to what we don't know. This appears to be another example of Con's appeal to ignorance, it's the same reasoning why we do not assume the cause of a house-fire is due to witchcraft, we simply have no examples and evidence of witches magically causing fires, yet we have abundant evidence of burnt-out candles doing so, for example. My objection to Pro's special pleading holds, as I have demonstrated empirically that our principles of causality hold as we look as simpler and simpler and increasingly more microscopic/abstract examples. Therefore by extension we have excellent reason to assume these principles hold. I cannot add arguments to support the PSR any further, but my objections sustained in the previous round simply have not been addressed by Con, and I believe they are sufficient to rule Con's rejection of the PSR to be nonsensical. I mean if things can just spontaneously pop into existence, then why not people, and bicycles. Heck why stop there, we should expect to see things disappearing from existence too! I mean after all the entire universe could she allegedly accomplished this according to Con, so these examples should be a synch! V. Time I would liek to inform voters that the Wheeler De-Witt equation is just one of a plethora of ways in which quantum mechanics and relativity have attempted to be reconciled. And this remains a significant extant problem today, and there is absolutely no consensus on which theory is even most likely to be true, let alone a well substantiated one. Therefore Pro's presentation of this equation is an extremely controversial one, much much more controversial than the denial of PSR! You can look uo a whole host of attempts to reconcile QM and relativity, loop quantum gravity, string theory, etc. Take your pick, there is absolutely no shortage of possible explanations at this moment in is mimed, therefore to advocate for any specific one is quite simply an argument ad ignorantum. My reasons for accepting A-series of time go much farther than prima facie plausibility, and I listed them in the previous round. The delayed choice quantum eraser experiment has a multitude of interpretations, and again is highly controversial as indicated by the Zelinger group. [1] VI. Sustaining Pro has only thrown up one objection in response to my sustaining arguments, and this was it was possible for God to create the universe out of itself and then separate the universe from itself. However Pro's analogy breaks down quite severely, and I only presented my own analogy to illustrate what an efficient and material cause would be. First, consider that consciousness is a fundamentally basic 'material', hence to suggest that such an entity could be separated/ split is nonsensical. If we consider material, contingent things then this objection would make sense, but we are limited to talking about one cause for the FTA and KCA arguments, and those causes cannot be material, space, or physically contingent, as they simply did not exist before the origin of the universe. Recall that both of these arguments argue for a conscious entity, now tell me, what does it mean to split the colour red? Or to split the number three? Or to separate your awareness of yourself. You will quickly see that such talk is nonsensical, as to talk of partitioning consciousness is to challenge that consciousness is a fundemental substance. It is true that consciousness can change, awareness will change, memories too, but it is impossible to separate a conscious substance to yield an unconscious one and a conscious one. As such, even if Pro's analogy held, then God would still be sustaining the universe, except there would be 'more of god' elsewhere. The material that the universe is constructed from would still remain conscious, would still be God, much like splitting a red puddle into two still yields two red puddles, and not one red puddle and one green puddle. VII. Conclusion I greatly thank Pro for putting up such stiff competition and wish him luck in the voting! ! VIII. References 1. . http://www.pnas.org...